Douglas Preston - Mount Dragon

“How’d you sleep?” he asked, giving Carson a friendly pat on the back.

“Not bad,” Carson said. “I’m anxious to get started.”

“Good. I want to introduce you to your assistant.” He looked around. “Where’s Susana?”

“She’s already inside,” said one of the technicians. “She had to go in early to check some cultures.”

“You’re in Lab C,” Singer said. “Rosalind showed you the way, right?”

“More or less,” Carson said, pulling the bluesuit out of his locker.

“Good. You’ll probably want to start by going over Frank Burt’s lab notes. Susana will see that you have everything you need.”

Completing the dressing procedure with Singer’s help, Carson followed the others into the chemical showers, then again entered the warren of narrow corridors and hatches of the Biosafety Level-5 lab. Once again, he found it difficult to get used to the constricting suit, the reliance on air tubes. After a few wrong turns he found himself in front of a metal door marked LABORATORY C.

Inside, a bulky, suited figure was bent over a bioprophylaxis table, sorting through a stack of petri dishes. Carson pressed one of the intercom buttons on his suit.

“Hi. Are you Susana?”

The figure straightened up.

“I’m Guy Carson,” he continued.

A small sharp voice crackled over the intercom. “Susana Cabeza de Vaca.”

They clumsily shook hands.

“These suits are a pain in the butt,” de Vaca said irritably. “So you’re Burt’s replacement.”

“That’s right,” said Carson.

She peered into his visor. “ Hispano ?” she asked.

“No, I’m an Anglo,” Carson replied, a little more hastily than he’d intended.

There was a pause. “Hmm,” de Vaca said, looking at him intently. “Well, you sure sound like you could be from around here, anyway.”

“I grew up in the Bootheel.”

“I knew it! Well, Guy, you and I are the only natives here.”

“You’re a New Mexican? When did you come?” Carson asked.

“I got here about two weeks ago, transferred from the Albuquerque plant. I was originally assigned to Medical, but now I’ll be replacing Dr. Burt’s assistant. She left a few days after he did.”

“Where’re you from?” Carson asked.

“A little mountain town called Truchas. About thirty miles north of Santa Fe.”

“Originally, I mean.”

There was another pause. “I was born in Truchas,” she said.

“Okay,” Carson said, surprised by her sharp tone.

“You meant, when did we swim the Rio Grande?”

“Well, no, of course not. I’ve always had a lot of respect for Mexicans—”

“Mexicans?”

“Yes. Some of the best hands on our ranch were Mexican, and growing up I had a lot of Mexican friends—”

“My family,” de Vaca interrupted frostily, “came to America with Don Juan de Oñate. In fact, Don Alonso Cabeza de Vaca and his wife almost died of thirst crossing this very desert. That was in 1598, which I’m sure was a lot earlier than when your redneck dustbowl family settled in the Bootheel. But I’m deeply touched you had Mexican friends growing up.”

She turned away and began sorting through petri dishes again, typing the numbers into a PowerBook computer.

Jesus , thought Carson, Singer wasn’t kidding when he said everyone here was stressed . “Ms. de Vaca,” he said, “I hope you understand I was just trying to be friendly.”

Carson waited. De Vaca continued to sort and type.

“Not that it matters, but I don’t come from some dustbowl family. My ancestor was Kit Carson, and my great-grandfather homesteaded the ranch I grew up on. The Carsons have been in New Mexico for almost two hundred years.”

“Colonel Christopher Carson? Well, whaddya know,” she said, not looking up. “I once wrote a college paper on Carson. Tell me, are you descended from his Spanish wife or his Indian wife?”

There was a silence.

“It’s got to be one or the other,” she continued, “because you sure don’t look like a white man to me.” She stacked the petri dishes and squared them away, sliding them into a stainless-steel slot in the wall.

“I don’t define myself by my racial makeup, Ms. de Vaca,” Carson said, trying to keep an even tone.

“It’s Cabeza de Vaca, not ‘de Vaca,’ ” she responded, beginning to sort another stack.

Carson jabbed angrily at his intercom switch. “I don’t care if it’s Cabeza or Kowalski. I’m not going to take this kind of rude shit from you or that walking chuck wagon Rosalind or anyone else.”

There was a momentary silence. Then de Vaca began to laugh. “Carson? Look at the two buttons on your intercom panel. One is for private conversation over a local channel, and one is for global broadcast. Don’t get them mixed up again, or everyone in the Fever Tank will hear what you’re saying.”

There came a hiss on the intercom. “Carson?” Brandon-Smith’s voice sounded. “I just want you to know I heard that, you bowlegged asswipe.”

De Vaca smirked.

“Ms. Cabeza de Vaca,” said Carson, fumbling with the intercom buttons. “I just want to get my job done. Got that? I’m not interested in petty squabbling or in sorting out your identity problem. So start acting like an assistant and show me how I can access Dr. Burt’s lab notes.”

There was an icy pause.

“Right,” de Vaca said at last, pointing to a gray laptop stored in a cubbyhole near the entry hatch. “That PowerBook was Burt’s. Now it’s yours. If you want to see his entries, the network jacks are in that receptacle by your left elbow. You know the rules about notes, don’t you?”

“You mean the pencil-and-paper directive?” Back in New Jersey, GeneDyne had a policy of discouraging the recording of any information except into company computers.

“They take it a step further here,” de Vaca said. “No hard copy of any kind. No pens, pencils, paper. All test results, all lab work, everything you do and think, has to be recorded in your PowerBook and uploaded to the mainframe at least once a day. Just leaving a note on someone’s desk is enough to get you fired.”

“What’s the big deal?”

De Vaca shrugged inside the confines of her suit. “Scopes likes to browse through our notes, see what we’re up to, offer suggestions. He roams company cyberspace all night long from Boston, poking and prying into everyone’s business; The guy never sleeps.”

Carson sensed a note of disrespect in her voice. Turning on the laptop and plugging the network cable into the wall jack, he logged on, then let de Vaca show him where Burt’s files were kept. He typed a few brief commands—annoyed at the pudgy clumsiness of his gloved fingers—and waited while the files were copied to the laptop’s hard disk. Then he loaded Burt’s notes into the laptop’s word processor.

February 18. First day at lab. Briefed by Singer on PurBlood with other new arrival , P. Brandon-Smith. Spent afternoon in library , studying precedents for encapsulating naked hemoglobin. The problem , as I see it , is essentially one of ...

“You don’t want that stuff,” de Vaca said. “That’s the last project, before I came. Page ahead until you get to X-FLU.”

Carson scrolled through three months’ worth of notes, at last locating where Burt had completed work on GeneDyne’s artificial blood and begun laying the groundwork for X-FLU. The story unfolded in terse, businesslike entries: a brilliant scientist, fresh from the triumph of one project, launching immediately into the next. Burt had used his own filtration process—a process that had made him a famous name within GeneDyne—to synthesize PurBlood, and his optimism and enthusiasm shone through clearly. After all, it had seemed a fairly simple task to neutralize the X-FLU virus and get on with human testing.