ex walked past medical as he saw Tom and Doc Rios huddling in the other room. That only meant one thing for them. Neils was up. He turned the other way and headed to the lab, where Rachel was working on perfecting the aerosolization process for the cure. It was taking longer than she wanted and he knew she was frustrated by that.
"Neils is up," He said as he looked in.
She looked over to him, "Hmm?"
He noticed her deep in thought before, he should have said something to loosen her up and away from the intensity of her research. "Neils is up. Saw the Captain and the doc looking at him," He said as he stepped into the lab.
She took a deep breath and blew it out. "So I guess I should be ready for when the Captain comes to talk to me about him," She said, pushing her chair away from her desk.
He shrugged. "Honestly, you shouldn't have to do anything. But it might be helpful to be ready to hear what the Captain has to say." He hated Neils. And he hated how Neils creeped everyone out. Not the least of which was Rachel. She had told him in the few times that she communicated with Neils, he was suggestive and thought too much of himself.
When she had the cure on Ruskov's ship, he said all sorts of crazy things about not being allowed to present it without him. He claimed it was his research that made the cure possible. It wasn't. And they all knew that Rachel was the one who did all the work to make the cure, but still, Neils would take credit for whatever piece of it he could.
She gave him a kiss, "You were going to get get something to eat, you should still do that,"
"Will do," He nodded and left.
She went back to work. She would also have to eat eventually. Tex and Bacon would both see to it. But she still had some time till the Captain arrived and she should still be working when he arrived.
About an hour later, she heard the shuffling of feet, which meant other people were getting out of the way of someone important. That usually meant that the captain was on his way down and when she turned away from her computer, there he was in the hatch.
She came over to him, "I've heard. Neils is awake." She said, wanting to skip the pleasantries. He would surely wonder who had told her in such a short time, but he could probably guess. And if he wanted to do something to Tex, he'd have to get creative on his reasoning for doing so. Tex, while he went along with orders, was not Navy and was not beholden to them.
She thought about the damage that they had all seen with the Vyerni and how impossible it was that they should see anyone from it again, but especially Neils. "How the hell did he manage to survive Ruskov's ship?"
"He managed to grab a life raft," Tom said, simply no malice in his voice. "Washed up on the Florida coast where a group of American survivors took him in."
"I don't suppose he told them that he was contagious?"
"No," He said, "After that he moved from camp to camp, taking what he needed. It was either fate or bad luck that led him to the immunes,"
She didn't believe in fate. Bad luck seemed easier to swallow. Granted, maybe it was fate. At least with immunes, he couldn't infect so many people. They were using him to, though. It was all so very confusing in her head. She thought of something else. The labs. The immunes blew up the labs. Maybe he had something to do with that.
"And the labs? Did he lead the Ramseys to Dr. Hunter?" She asked, the edge of her voice getting sharper.
"He wouldn't say," Tom told her. "At least not to me."
Well, there was only so much that could be done on that front she guessed. They were never going to get all the intel. Dr. Hunter may as well have been a tragic accident. Of course, it wasn't, but they wouldn't ever know why he was killed in such a brutal manner as he was. And that was the accident.
She shook her head, trying to get out of her thoughts. "So what are you going to do with him?" Rachel asked.
"I haven't decided yet," Tom said. "And he only made one request. He wants to speak to you."
"No," She didn't even give it a second thought. And she wouldn't at this particular juncture. The man was a monster who killed the world. She would not be validating the monster by giving into requests like this. "It's not going to happen."
"You said you were having trouble nebulizing the vaccine,"
"Absolutely not," She scoffed.
"He started it," There it was. The anger finally starting to seep through. But she couldn't give in.
"The primordial started it,"
Tom tried a different tactic. "He perpetuated it, weaponized it."
She still couldn't do it. "I have his blood samples. Once I see what happens to the rats, I'll be able to find the stability sequence he used to bind his DNA to the virus. That will be the sum total of his usefulness" She couldn't believe that she was having to persuade him about the dangers of talking with Neils.
"You said that can take months," Tom gritted through his teeth.
"Captain-"
"He killed my wife. And I was able to talk to him. So unless you have a better idea,"
It wouldn't be any different than having to talk to her father all those years. He killed her mother and she hated him for it. She left as soon as she could. And she hadn't talked to him since. Hell, the idea that he might have died from this plague in such a bad way, it was untenable. He didn't take medication, didn't believe in it. Only believed in the power of God's healing. But that meant that he could have been in pain and for a second she ached for him. Tom had done that. He had looked into the man's eyes who killed his wife, the mother of his children and talked to him. What would it be to be inconvenienced by a narcissistic know it all?
"I know he's a snake, but if he can help, you have to talk to him," And that was true enough. There were things in Neils's mind that would make this easier. But it was so hard to think about that when all she thought about was the abuse she had taken from him after she didn't immediately fawn over him.
When he left, she breathed through it, and took off her lab coat and put it on its hook. She wished that other people could help with this, but unfortunately, it was just her that could get Neil's to talk. She went to Medical and saw Neils and wished she could run away again.
He looked over and smiled, "Dr. Scott,"
"You wanted to see me," Get to the point and get out.
"Yes," He said, excitedly and then he toned it down, "Well, I mean, it seems congratulations are in order. You found a cure,"
The nicety would only last for so long and she just wanted to get down to business, "Well, I'd be lying if I said that it was easy." She knew that she was doing this for the good of humanity. Good of humanity, she reminded herself. "And strictly, scientifically speaking, I found your work to be rather impressive. The way you fused your DNA to the virus, if nothing else, it was elegant."
"Thank you," Neils said. His voice was a little raspy. "It was never my intention to spread it. It's important that you know that."
Well, so many bad things come from good ideas she thought. You were just the very last in a long long across the history of the world.
"Neils, I've been working on this idea of nebulizing the cure and I'm having a little bit of trouble," She told him. Good of humanity. Good of humanity. Good of humanity. "So I was just wondering if, maybe you'd be at all curious to take a look at my research?" She asked him. And it felt like punching herself in the stomach, but she kept her face warm and invariable from the pain that she was feeling inside. None of that mattered if she could get this done faster. He was a prisoner on this ship and hopefully that remained the case. Hopefully if anything should happen, the crew would believe her over this maniac.
Tex found himself with Burk, Ravit, and Wolf playing poker. It was an interesting group. He loved playing with the new guys. Wolf and him had the same free roaming energy as each other. He wondered about Rachel, of course, she was working with Neils, but she didn't have much of a choice and she asked him to stay away. And he gave into her on that one. He had a feeling that if he was in the lab while they were working and Neils gave Rachel so much as an unkind look, he might have punched him in the face.
Wolf asked him to tell a little bit about himself and he grinned.
"So you wanna hear about the life of a gun for hire?" Tex asked as he sat down, ready to play the game.
"Yeah," Wolf said, "Capping oil wells in Kuwait. Babysitting third-world princes. I mean, do you even have a worst?"
Tex laughed, he had done all of those things. His life was like a rolling stone, finding trouble wherever it called.
Burke chimed in, "Well, he was at gitmo for eighteen months," That seemed to impress Wolf.
All Tex could do was think about his daughter and Rachel and how they were the two things that never gave him any trouble. He loved them more than the trouble, even willing to settle himself for at least a while after this whole thing to really build those relationships. He couldn't believe it about himself. That was a different person than had boarded this boat.
"Yeah," Tex said as he looked at his hand, "I got my stories and the scars to prove it,"
"Okay, give me some of that," Wolf goaded.
"I'd show you but there's a lady present," He looked and pointed to Ravit.
She wasn't amused, "Big talker,"
He looked over to her more thoroughly after that remark and grinned. "All right, sweetheart, what's the worst you ever seen?" He asked.
"You call me sweetheart again, I'll make you eat that pathetic pair of 9s you're holding," She told him. And she sounded serious about that.
He folded, "Guess you'll never know,"
"Answer his question, worst story ever," Burk insisted.
She sighed. "What makes one war worse than another, death is death,"
"I bet you're a riot at parties," Tex said, because damn that was a cold answer. It was a true answer, but damn was it cold.
Back in the lab, Rachel pulled up some images on her computer and they both leaned forward to look at them.
"What am I looking at here?" He asked.
"This is the vaccine compound before nebulization," She said, pointing to the left picture, "And here it is, after being sprayed into the air," She said, pointing to the right picture.
He nodded, "Yeah, it falls apart. Have you tried reducing the particle size?" He asked.
As if that wasn't the first thing she thought of. Reducing the particle size was the first thing she thought of. "I've considered it," She told him, "But then it wouldn't be heavy enough to drop into the lungs,"
He nodded along, taking it all in. "And you're sure the physics are sound?"
"Dr. Hunter worked it out," She said slyly, trying to figure out information about what he knew about the labs as well as getting him to look at her research. Maybe she could ferret this part out on her own. "Julius Hunter. You must have heard of him, from Palm Coast,"
He looked a little nervous, but said, "Um, only by, uh, reputation," Very suspicious, she thought. But she couldn't exactly tell Tom that Neils was acting suspicious. That would be like telling him that water is wet.
Again, she worked it over that this was not about working with Neils, so much as it was working him entirely. She was trying to get the information and if she had to be a little duplicitous to get it, so what? Neils killed over 5 billion people. Lying to him was not exactly a sin.
"I've thought about adding an extra component to the outer coat to prevent the vaccine from drying out," She told him, trying to get him to the same idea that she was running into.
The best way to lure the information that she wanted out of him was to convince him that he was the genius. She knew this. It still felt disgusting.
"Yeah, it would need to be," He started thinking out loud, "Particularly resilient." Something that she already knew. She had accounted for that.
"Precisely,"
"Well what about anthrax, you know?" He asked. And this is how she knew that she was smarter than Neils, because adding anthrax to a vaccine would kill the rest of the people that they were trying to save. And he just let any thought in his head out into the world. "It's strong enough to survive for decades in any environment." Which was true enough but he still wasn't thinking about the humans involved in this. Something he never seemed to consider.
"One epidemic at a time, Neils," She corrected him.
"Right right, probably best," He said, looking back to the computer and the pictures on it.
"What we need is an environment that's been untouched by the pandemic and yet severe enough to promote adaptive activity in bacteria," She suggested.
"How about water?"
"That's just what I was thinking," She said.
They went on for a bit longer, trying to figure out the right thing for the job, when they landed on mussels. Freshwater mussels. They were close enough and abundant enough that they would be pretty easy to find. And they had bacteria adapting in them all the time. It was the perfect thing. And she had known it from the start. But getting Neils on board was a good idea too.
When she left the lab, Neils was heavily guarded and taken back to his room. She, on the other hand, went to go talk to Tom and Mike about the new parts of the plan. Something that they asked she do when she had anything new.
"I need mussels," She said as she entered the room.
"Mussels?" Tom asked, with a hesitant curiosity. She knew him well enough that she would have to explain this strange request.
"Freshwater mussels, to be exact," She told him. "Mussels carry bacteria, and in order to survive in harsh environments, the bacteria adapts. To do this, it protects itself with a intracellular suspended animation chamber called spores." She told them. Mike was there too. And he seemed less bogged down by all the science talk. "Now if I could get my hand on some of those spores, I could add their proteins to the outer coat of the cure, making it hardy enough to survive the nebulization process,"
"This is Neil's bright idea right?" Mike asked.
"No," She said, "It's mine, actually. I led him to it, and he, well, he played ball," She told them. This was why Neils was in the lab in the first place. To see if they could get him to play ball with other bits of information. So far, she hadn't been terribly successful, but they were going to get there.
"So we find you a bunch of mussels, and you'll be able to aerosolize the cure?" Tom asked, the hesitancy more apparent in his voice than ever.
"Not quite," Rachel was disappointed in it too, but there was still one major issue, "I still need Neils's stability sequence,"
"Which he still hasn't given you?"
"I haven't asked him yet," This was very important. She needed to get to it when he was most willing to give it to her and they didn't have any success under their belt yet. It would be good to get just a little further into it before trying to get him to give it up.
"And if he doesn't give it up?" Mike, ever the practical man, asked.
"Well, then I'll have to do it the slow way," She explained, "By which time millions more people will be dead," She told them both. "But for right now, I really need those mussels,"
She went to the wardroom to eat, and there Tex was sitting with a second plate beside him and she grinned. "How the hell did you know I would be coming here?" She asked as she sat beside him.
He shrugged. "You've been in the lab all day. You needed to eat." He told her. "I know what working can do to you,"
They sat there and ate in a comfortable quietness, occasionally telling a funny joke or an interesting fact. It was an easy time for her. She didn't have to think about anything besides where she was in the moment. She loved that.
"I don't want you going on the trip out," She said as she took a bit of mashed potatoes.
He nodded. "Well, then I'll tell the captain, that I want to stay on the boat for as long as I can. But if he needs me, well, then…" He tapered off.
"I know, I shouldn't keep you from your job, but the last two times have been pretty scary," She told him.
That he knew. He wasn't sure that he was coming back from that bomb. He had made his peace with it, if it blew up in his hand. Thankfully, the son of bitch had just burned it. And it was back to fighting shape now. And then there had been capturing Neils and the president. That was not exactly easy stuff.
She set her head down on his shoulder and kept eating. She was glad he was willing to consider staying off the ship, only going if it was absolutely essential. It was nice to spend time with him alone on this very populated ship.
The meal was done and they both sat there in the quiet, trying not to think about their jobs. The cure was so uncertain. And making sure that people got it was equally unpredictable. They both had jobs in that field. It was never going to be easy. But this quiet, it was easy. And she liked that.
"I have to get back to the lab," She said as she looked up into his eyes. "More ferreting," She groaned. She hated working with Neils. It was the worst part of this. But for whatever reason Neils felt a connection and it was stupid not to work with it.
He smoothed her hair over and tucked her closer in. He didn't want to let her go. He knew he should. But getting down there with that creepy guy, it was something else. "Just a couple more minutes," He whispered.
She nodded. That was good with her.
Eventually, she made her way down to the lab and Neils was brought down to help. He was playing with everything in the lab. It positively annoyed her.
"I'd like to have a plan as to how to we'll engineer the spore protein into the vaccine, once the mussels arrive," She said. And he was still positively looking at every little thing in the lab, touching and moving things. She couldn't believe the display, still she carried on. "I was thinking, perhaps, a stabilizer, very much like the one that you used to bind your DNA to the virus,"
"Ah. The real reason I'm here."
It wasn't her best work. She admitted it. But with all the movement, she couldn't think. He didn't even seem to be that interested in working, just touching, just being out of confinement.
"You know that viruses don't like to be tinkered with," Rachel told him, trying to keep her cool, which at present was climbing to a level of difficulty, it hadn't reached since she had to convince Tom that it was a bad idea to just seek revenge. "They'll loop out any added foreign genes, and somehow Neils, you managed to sidestep the recombination process,"
"Yeah, well it was so long ago, you know, and I tried so many." He said as he looked at her rats. "I mean, honestly Rachel, who can remember these things?"
That was a definite, I remember it, but I'm not telling kind of sentence. That she knew. She had used that kind of tactic before.
"You know that I took samples of your blood while you were recovering" She told him, "You're not really going to make me truffle this out myself, are you?"
He looked behind her, "Someone special?" He asked.
She looked to it. It was the computer with Michael on it. She couldn't bear to change the picture. It was really the last thing she had left of him. He was dead, she knew it in her heart of hearts. And he'd been a love she couldn't shake. Tex understood that.
She hardened her heart. Neils did not need to know any of that. "No, not particularly," She told him. "It's an old computer. I never got around to changing the screensaver-"
"He's a handsome fellow, no?" Neils interrupted her before she could finish.
Just do the project. He can be here for the science. He does not get to be here for anything else. Get to the science.
She cleared her throat, "So what I'm mostly interested in is the chiralate-"
"Doesn't really seem like your type though," He said, talking over her. "Not much going on upstairs. I suspect that you tired of him quickly," He said and then he leaned in even further to her. "You see, I remember this about you, Dr. Rachel Scott - always the smartest person in the room, the unstoppable force in search of her immovable object,"
She couldn't believe that she had to stand here with this man, who was doing this to her. And she just had to make sure that his feelings weren't too hurt or else he would never give her what she needed. The stabilizer was the one thing that was the key to the vaccine working for more people in this moment.
And the way he talked about Michael. It was very clear that he thought that he would be an object of desire. As if she could ever think that the man who killed five billion people were attractive. He was a monster.
"Am I right?" He asked.
But she looked at the monster, and smiled a smile that said, just maybe she could learn to love the monster. She had to. She had to make him feel like he was the most important person in the world and then he would do what he always did, make a mistake and give her what she needed.
About an hour later, the sailor guarding the door, came in and said that her presence was requested in a conference room momentarily. She looked to Neils and gave him a don't touch anything look and left.
When she was out of earshot of the door, she ran into Tex who had a serious look on his face. She groaned. "You have to go out?" She asked him.
He nodded his head. "Apparently, they found a lot more than they were looking for when they got up to the Marina," He said. "So commodore and I are on the next boat out, thought I'd let you know," He said.
She deflated, her shoulders slouching and he came in and gave her a tight hug. He didn't want to go out on this thing either. It made him nervous that they had found some trouble at the marina. That type of trouble usually meant those damn immunes. And they had not been kind to him at all. He didn't want to get caught up in another one of their bullshit games. But he did not usually get what he wanted in these kinds of scenarios.
When he let her go, she perked up and he smiled, "Any luck?" He said nodding to the lab.
She shook her head and sighed, "I wish you could be in there with me, but it helps his ego when he's the only one around," She told him. "Speaking of, I should get back and you should get on that rhib,"
He sighed. He wished he could stay too. It sounded like Neils was being an absolute dirtbag and the thing that Tex really wanted to do was make sure that the dirtbag knew where his fucking place was. But she was right. She had to go back and see if she could get more out of Neils and he needed to get on the RHIB with Tom to make sure that things weren't totally fucked getting the mussels she needed.
"No bombs for me this time," He said holding up his hands. He gave her a wink, "Promise,"
She laughed and went back to the lab in a better mood than she had been in before.
The mussels were delivered to her by Danny, who nodded at her, "Ma'am" before departing again. He was in a rush, and she didn't even have time to say anything before he was gone.
Thankfully, she'd had the mussels' station cooked up before he even got there and she released them all, well all but a few into the water. The remaining few were opened and pricked in the meaty part to find their bacteria, where they would eventually find the spores.
It took awhile for the spectrometer to show them the spore sequence. To which Neils was all too happy to tell her about.
"Fascinating, isn't it? The way it's regulated - this bacteria, when it needs to turn into a spore, it uses DNA scissors," She asked him. It was truly amazing to see how the world adapting in all of its moving parts.
"DNA scissors, yeah I've heard of this," He said "This is like a CRISPR system,"
"Exactly,"
He stumbled onto the next idea, "So we use this to add the spore protein into the vaccine?"
That was mostly the case. "Of course, we'll still need something to hold it in place," She hoped that the idea that he could be helpful to the vaccine might be enough to lure the stabilizing sequence out of him.
But no cigar. "I don't remember the stability sequence," He insisted. "I don't. I told you. I wish I did. I don't."
Tex was setting up the zone to get the immunes who had set up this whole bounty with the rest of the out team. While the other guys had explosives, he backed off from that. He got a look from Danny.
"I'm not scared, I just told Rachel that I would lay off the explosives, okay?" He barked a little at his friend.
Danny grinned and chuckled. "Well, I'll make sure that Rachel knows you weren't into anymore bombs lately,"
He wanted to smack Danny up alongside the head, but what could he really do? It was just some good old fashioned ribbing. And they did it to each other. It wasn't like they weren't talking about it. Kara and Danny had moments, appropriate moments, but moments when they could. And Rachel and Tex, well they were about the only ones onboard who could do what they wanted freely and unaccounted for. But they still kept it mostly out of sight. In order to avoid untoward and resentful commentary.
He pushed a car with Ravit in the front alongside him, and Burk alongside. When it was in place, he knew that they had some way that they wanted to rig it up. So he tapped the hood and smiled to the both of them, "All yours," He said, before leaving to go meet up with Tom.
Tom still had the kid with him, who pointed to the road, "That's the only road in," He pointed to his next target, a watchtower, "There's a perch right there you can scout from. You'll see them long before they see you," He promised.
The kid looked between Tom and Tex, "Look these guys are packing some major firepower. They had guns I didn't know existed, and I play a lot of video games,"
Tex and Tom chuckled together. It was just like someone his age to think of guns as things you saw in video games. It wasn't like he had a whole squad of teenagers that held Burk up at gunpoint, but no video games.
"Well, we don't have to worry about that," Tom promised, "We're bringing a navy ship to a gunfight," He looked to Tex, "We need intel, which means we need prisoners,"
Tex got it. "Copy that,"
They all scouted their areas and got set up and ready to go. When Tex went to go grab a weapon and do the same, he was flagged down by a couple of the teenage boys. "Hey Tex, have you ever killed anyone?" They asked.
"Yeah, I have," He begrudgingly answered. He didn't want to know where this line of questioning went. So as little as possible.
"Cool,"
That is not where he expected it to go, he thought. And all he could think was that these kids were still just kids.
"No, it isn't squirt," He bristled at the two and went to grab the rest of his gear to try and get ready to scout like everyone else.
The two still wouldn't leave him alone, even when it was clear that he didn't want to be messed with right now. Honestly, he still couldn't believe that they were letting kids still be in the way with all that explosive material that they had over the place. But it wasn't his place to tell them to go one way or another. That would always be the Captain's job.
"Ask him, Jake,"
"Yeah, I got it, Cody,"
He looked at the two squirts for another round and one of them, Jake stepped up. "Hey we were wondering if, maybe, you could ask the captain if he'd let us stay and fight? He said yes to Ray."
At that he guffawed. "Not a chance,"
Back in the lab, she was finally allowed some time without Neils. This time Dr. Milowsky was with her. She looked at the rats. They were all injected with Neils's blood.
"It's been three whole days," She said in awe. They were all still alive. "Neils's blood has been coursing through their veins," Rachel knew this for a fact. She had injected each of them with it herself. "How are they still alive?"
"The virus has to be somewhere in his body," Milowsky suggested. It was a fact. "He was using it to poison those teddy bears,"
It was the only logical answer. And having someone else repeat it, she couldn't believe she'd been so stupid. "The virus must have adjusted inside of him," She thought out loud, "Migrated exclusively to his lungs,"
That's why he's so contagious," Milowsky was equally as mystified and thinking out loud. They were working it out together, and it was working, ""Probably happened months ago, at the beginning,"
She knew what this meant for them, unfortunately it wasn't good news. "Then it's hiding out in there, below the radar of his immune system, along with the stability sequence," They couldn't just get it from his regular blood, because technically in the idealized sense of the word, he was perfectly healthy. He was just a carrier making everyone else sick.
"Which he may not even remember,"
She wasn't taking that. From having observed Neils for days now. She knew he knew it. He just wasn't giving it up. No matter what she had tried. "Oh he remembers," She groaned. "It's his shining bloody achievement," And as she knew, new knowledge required new tactics.
She went to the stateroom that Neils was being kept in and Doc Rios and O'Connor were there, it was time to refill IV bags with medications. She smiled at them both, they both gave her a nod to signal everyone had seen each other, and then Rachel looked over to Neils. "How are you feeling?" She asked.
"Your doctor here thinks I need rest," He said, "But uh, I'm actually anxious to get back to work,"
She looked to the Doc, "Can we have a moment?"
Rachel waited till everyone filed out before she looked at Neils again. She used that time to pscyh herself for what she was about to do. It was a betrayal of everything she held dear, but it was as they said. Desperate times. Desperate measures.
"I've identified the conserved core sequence in your stabilizers," She said with a bit of a happy smile on her face.
"You have?" He asked as if it were hard.
She nodded. "I recognized the same twenty base pair on both sides of the virus," She told him. "The odds of that happening in nature, as we both know, are next to impossible," Rachel fidgeted with her hands in her pockets, under his watchful eye. "So I took that as your brilliant handiwork,"
When he laughed, she thought maybe it wouldn't work, but he looked up to her with a grin, "Well you've eliminated a few trillion possible combinations,"
She chuckled and gave him her best smile. Ones that she usually reserved for the private worlds of her intimate relationships. Tex. Michael. Hell even Tom on one or two occasions. "Can I ask you something?"
"Yeah,"
"I just think about what you went through, working to find the cure and fighting your own infection, while in a self-imposed quarantine on the Vyerni, literally isolated. With no human contact in this bubble. And, I guess what I'm asking is…" She walked to the other side of the room, her eyes filling with tears, "Do you ever get lonely?"
"Yeah,"
She looked down at the floor, "God, I know my situation isn't nearly as difficult, but," She sat down next to him, all the while he was still looking up at her like he was seeing God, maybe for the first time in his life. "There are sometimes on this ship when no one understands me and this unsolvable puzzle and now being so close to the very mind that created it…" She took his glasses off and tried to see him for who he really was. This made him look like a child. Or at least not a monster. "Perhaps you were right. Perhaps my immovable object is closer than I thought," She said to him, in the daintiest rasp of whisper she could muster up.
He leaned in as if to kiss her and she turned away. That she couldn't do. She picked herself up off the bed and moved toward the door. She couldn't believe that she almost let this monster kiss her.
"It's the three-prime end."
She didn't look back to him, "Pardon?" She asked.
"The conserve core element you found, it's the very end of the stabilizer sequence." She smiled and turned around little by littleas he was talking, "You just go upstream from there and the entire sequence is yours,"
She nodded and smiled. He was very good at acting. She reached for the door and crossed the threshold, with the knowledge that she had everything that she needed from him. Once she did, she felt the bile in her stomach rising and got to the female head as soon as she could, and it was damn close, because she was just barely over the bowl before she started vomiting.
Acting like she liked that monster had literally shredded all of her insides. But once her stomach freed itself of the feelings, she felt better. She washed her hands and face and went back to the lab to compile the much needed information.
A couple of hours later, the captain was at her door. "Found what you were looking for?" He asked.
"Hmm?" She asked.
"The mussels,"
"Oh," She said, reminding herself of what they had intended to do first. "Yes, they were a tremendous help. Thank you," She looked over to him, piping some stuff into smaller pipettes to use later, "I'm sorry to hear about the boy."
He moved right past the boy. He didn't want to talk about it. That was fair. "And what about Neils?"
"I think we're on the verge of a real breakthrough," She said to the Captain. It was easier that he didn't know.
"Well, then, don't let me slow you down," He said as he left.
She and Tex slept in their separate cabins for the night. She asked him too. She needed some time away from him with the way that her stomach felt with what she'd had to do with Neils. She took a small nap before she went back to the lab. She couldn't sleep. And Neils was on an odd schedule, so he rarely slept at night.
When she was in the lab, she changed his IV bag. "Feel better?" She asked him.
"Yes, my arm was really bruising," He told her.
She nodded. Yeah, sometimes those corpsman could be a little lackadaisical when it came to putting the IV in correctly. Doc Rios was a pro, but the one that she had just undone, was clearly not done by him.
"You know there were much times on the Vyerni when I thought about a moment like this," He confessed.
"Did you?" She asked him. She definitely thought that he was wrong about that as she tapped the little plastic piece on his IV bag, making sure that it was running smoothly. She didn't want there to be anything that made this IV run poorly.
"Well, I must admit, we're quite a team, you and I,"
"A team with cause for celebration," She told him. "We solved our nebulizing problem,"
"Yes," And then he immediately took it back, "Well, we still need to find a factory somewhere where we can mass produce the powder. And we need planes, lots of planes." He was always so good at thinking through the logistics of everything, she had to admit, "You know, I always wanted to get my pilot's license."
She looked at him and grinned. "Actually, we don't have need for any of that. No planes. No factories. No powder even." She told him as she moved one of the many rats that they had to another part of the lab.
"I don't understand," He said, "How do you want to spread the vaccine?"
"Well, if you think about it, you were able to kill five billion people simply by breathing," She started. And he started to protest, but she simply kept going, "So the key to transmission lies with you. If I could teach healthy lungs to hold and reproduce the cure the same way yours do with the virus, well then I could-"
"-Make the cure contagious," He finished.
"Of course, the trick would be understanding how your body does it," She said, looking at the rats. They were all poisoned with his blood, but not the virus. "To compare the DNA sequence change between yours and the primordial,"
"You have my blood samples,"
"I do," She conceded, "The problem is, is the virus resides exclusively in your lungs, as we both know. That's the reason why you're so contagious,"
"So what do we do? You wanna take a biopsy?"
She shook her head, "No. No. No No. No. See, that wouldn't work because it's likely in the deepest recesses of your lungs, mixed in with thousands of other innocuous viruses. So what I'm going to need to do is just flush out the poisonous one," She said as she looked over to him, putting yet another rat, back where they belonged.
"Flush it out? How?"
"Well, you remember those brilliant little DNA scissors?" She asked him, "Well, they're not only capable of adding a gene. They can also remove one. So I'm gonna undo what you did," She told him. "I'm going to separate your gene from the virus inside your body," She said as she pointed to him.
He laughed, "I'm sorry but that would never work,"
"Well, yes actually it will, if they have identical stability sequences on either side, and you gave me yours," She finished.
"That would kill me,"
"The gene would be liberated, and the virus would explode out of your lungs and into the rest of your body, and well, there's just so much of it," As she saw the symptoms starting to appear, she did not say a word about it. He likely started to feel the effects anyway.
"If you think I would just allow you to-I mean you are completely insane," He said, standing up and trying to make a fool out of her. But it wouldn't work. Not today.
"I've already done it Neils," She said in a plain voice. She no longer felt the need to put on the show anymore. She had put on so many for Neils and suffered for them, that she was grateful to just be herself in this moment. "The virus is doing its work as we speak,"
As Neils thrashed around the lab, due to the virus, she thought out loud, "The people on this ship will sleep better tonight, knowing that it died with you,"