Douglas Preston - Mount Dragon

“We’ll need to erase our tracks coming off the lava,” he said.

De Vaca took the reins of both horses and, walking ahead, led them down off the lava and into the darkness. Carson followed her to the edge of the flow; then, turning around and removing his shirt, he got down on his hands and knees and began crawling backward on the sand. With each step he swept the sand before him clean with his shirt, obliterating both the hoofprints and his own marks. He worked slowly and carefully. He knew that nothing could completely erase marks in the sand. But this was pretty damn good. A Hummer would drive right past without seeing a thing.

He continued for over a hundred yards, just to make sure. Then he stood up, shook out his shirt, and buttoned it on. The job had taken ten minutes.

“So far so good,” he said, catching up with de Vaca and climbing into his saddle. “We’ll head due north from here. That’ll give us a three-mile berth around Mount Dragon.”

He looked into the sky, locating the North Star. He urged his horse into a slow, easy trot—the most efficient of gaits. Beside him, de Vaca did the same. They moved in silence through the velvety night. Carson glanced at his watch. It was one o’clock in the morning. They had four hours to dawn; that meant twenty-four miles, if they could keep up the pace. That would put them twenty-odd miles north of Mount Dragon, with close to another hundred still ahead of them. He smelled the air again, more carefully this time. There was a sharpness that indicated the possibility of a dew before dawn.

Traveling during the heat of the day was out of the question. That meant finding a low place to hide the horses, where they could move around and do a little grazing.

“You said your ancestors came through here in 1598,” Carson spoke into the darkness.

“That’s right. Twenty-two years before the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth Rock.”

Carson ignored that. “Didn’t you mention something about a spring?” he asked.

“The Ojo del Águila. They started across the Jornada and ran out of water. An Apache showed them this hidden spring.”

“Where was it?”

“I don’t know. The location was later lost. In a cave, I think, at the base of the Fra Cristóbal Mountains.”

“Jesus, the Fra Cristóbals are sixty miles long.”

“I wasn’t planning to make a land survey at the time I heard the story, all right? It was in a cave, I remember my abuelito saying, and the water flowed back into the cave and disappeared.”

Carson shook his head. The lava and the mountains were riddled with caves. They would never find a spring that didn’t surface to the light of day, where it would generate some form of green plant life.

They continued to trot, the only sounds the clink of the saddle rigging and the low creak of leather. Once again, Carson glanced up at the stars. It was a beautiful, moonless night. Under any other circumstances, he might have enjoyed this ride. He inhaled again. Yes, there would definitely be a dew. That was a stroke of good fortune. He mentally added ten miles to the distance they could travel without water.

Levine skimmed the last, incomplete page of Carson’s transmission, then quickly saved the data.

Mime, are you sure about this?he typed.

Yup, came the response. Scopes was very clever. Humblingly so. He discovered my access and grafted a transparent software relay onto it. The relay triggered an alarm when Carson attempted to access us.

Mime, speak English.

The wily bastard rigged a tripwire across my secret path, and Carson tripped over it, falling flat on his virtual face. However, his aborted data feed remained on the net. I was able to retrieve it.

Any chance you were discovered?Levine typed.

Discovered? Me?

? I don’t understand.

‘Rolling on floor, laughing.’ I am too well hidden. Any attempt would bog down in a maze of packet-switching. But Scopes does not appear to be trying to find me. Quite the opposite. He’s put a moat around GeneDyne.

What do you mean, a moat?Levine asked.

He’s physically cut off all network traffic out of GeneDyne headquarters. There’s no way to dial into the building by phone, fax, or computer. All remote sites have been cut off.

If this transmission is true, PurBlood is contaminated in some terrible way, and Scopes himself is a victim. Do you suppose he knows? Is that why he sealed off the access?

Not likely, came Mime’s response. See, when I realized Carson was trying to reach us, I entered GeneDyne cyberspace myself. A few moments later, I saw what had gone down. I realized our access had been discovered. I couldn’t log out without making my presence known. So I put my ear to the door, listening to all the unprotected net chatter. I learned some very interesting things before Scopes cut off all outside links.

Such as?

Such as Carson seems to have had the last laugh on Scopes. At least, that’s what I think. Fifteen minutes after Scopes terminated the data feed, there was a big ugly net crash and all communications from Mount Dragon ceased. A real patty melt.

Scopes shut down all communication with Mount Dragon?

Au contraire, professor-man. The head office tried frantically to reestablish communications. A facility such as Mount Dragon would have redundant emergency backups up the ying-yang. Whatever happened was so devastating it knocked out everything at once. Heap bad medicine. Once Scopes realized that he could not get through to Mount Dragon, he broke off the GeneDyne net.

But I _must_ communicate with Scopes, Levine typed. It’s vital that he stop the release of PurBlood. Nobody on the outside will believe me. It’s critical that I convince him.

You ain’t been listening, professor-man. Scopes has physically severed all links. Until he decides the emergency is over, there’s no way to call into the building. You can’t hack across clear air, professor. Except...

What?

Except that there is ONE channel out of GeneDyne Boston. I discovered its data signature as I was poking around the edges of the moat. It is a dish uplink from Scopes’s personal server to the TELINT-2 communications satellite.

Any chance you can use that satellite to get me in contact with Scopes?

No way. It’s a dedicated two-way link. Besides, whoever Scopes is chatting with is using a highly unusual encryption scheme. Some kind of end-to-end block cipher that stinks like military to me. Whatever it is, I wouldn’t go near it with anything short of a Cray-2. And if it’s a prime factorial code, all the CPU time in the universe wouldn’t crack the mother.

Is there traffic on the link?

A wee bit here and there. A few thousand bytes at irregular intervals.

Levine looked curiously at the words on the screen. Though the insolence still shone through, the prancing, boastful Mime he usually encountered was abnormally muted.

He sat back a moment, thinking. Could Scopes have shut everything down because of PurBlood? No, that didn’t make sense. What was happening at Mount Dragon? What of that other dangerous virus Carson had been working on?

There was no way around it: he had to speak to Scopes, warn him about PurBlood. Whatever else he might do, Scopes would never allow the intentional release of a dangerous medical product. It would destroy his company. And then, of course, if Scopes had been a beta-tester himself, he might need immediate medical treatment.