But Greaves has seen how these children behave. Aside from the hunger, they remind him of real people.
Turn the question on its head. If this child, when he was alive, had a partial immunity to some of the hungry pathogen’s effects, then what was the mechanism? There is nothing unusual in the cellular structures Greaves is seeing, except that they are still pristine, still viable, when they should be bombed-out shells.
He ponders. Form follows function, but it also dictates function. There is a reason why the hungries are called that, after all. Obviously the hunger reflex is the first thing that Cordyceps hijacks. More than anything else it needs its hosts to eat, carrying the infection with every bite. He saw the little girl go after that pigeon, and he saw her tribe feeding on dog-flesh in the streets of Invercrae. The children have that instinct, that drive, just as strongly as the regular hungries have it, however different they may be in other ways.
So what is happening here? Is this just a refinement of the pathogen’s normal onset and progression, or is it something completely new?
He needs to look at spinal tissue to see what Cordyceps is doing down there. But he can’t take a fresh biopsy with Rina in the lab, working right beside him.
Reluctantly, he dismounts his slides and samples and stows them in his personal area where they won’t be touched. Rina hasn’t looked up once in all this time. What she is doing shouldn’t be that absorbing, though. It’s a fairly basic mechanical procedure. She is neutralising sulphuric acid with magnesium carbonate, which is a quick and easy way to produce …
Oh.
Dr. Khan looks up at last and meets his stare. The guarded blankness of it confirms his guess.
Greaves has had to learn people the hard way, but chemistry is easy. He knows magnesium sulphate very well indeed: its molecular profile, its chemical properties and its bio-regulatory effect. Dr. Khan almost certainly intends to take it as a tocolytic, to suppress contractions in her birth canal. The baby is coming, or at least announcing its intentions.
“What?” she asks, not realising that her cover is blown.
Greaves has no idea what an adequate response might be from the point of view of emotion and its abstruse architecture. But again, he is confident about the chemistry.
“Nifedipine, Rina,” he tells her. “Nifedipine would be better, if you want to delay the birth. We’ve got some in the med cabinet, for hypertensive trauma.”
Rina looks stunned. She puts down the retort she’s been holding all this time, leans away from it a little as though she wants to disavow all knowledge. After a moment she laughs, and shakes her head. “Amazing, Holmes,” she says.
“What? Who is Holmes? Why is he amazing?”
“Never mind. Don’t say a word to anyone, Stephen. I don’t want to slow us down or make this stupid situation any worse than it is. Don’t say anything. Please?”
Greaves nods. He may not be able to lie, but he is a hundred per cent sure that nobody is going to ask him this particular question. And if anyone asks the more general question “Is something wrong with Dr. Khan?” he can probably keep from giving away the secret by saying she is taking medicine commonly prescribed for stress. So he is confident that he can keep his word.
He wishes he could defuse his discovery of her intentions by confiding in her about his own immense project. But this is not the time.
Soon. When he has findings rather than suppositions. When he has more to show her than a dead child.
A dead child, he strongly suspects, will only add to her troubles right now.
27
Dr. Fournier is still trying to coax a response out of the radio but he has long since resigned himself to failure. He’s only doing it now because he can think of nothing else to do that’s of any value. So when the voice of Brigadier Fry’s adjutant, Mullings, oozes weakly out of the radio in a viscous froth of static, he starts so violently that he cracks his right elbow on the engine cowling.
“Beacon. Please identify.”
“Get the brigadier,” the doctor snarls, doubled up around his injured arm. “It’s Fournier. Field report. Urgency one.”
“She’s conferring with her chiefs of staff, Dr. Fournier. You’ll have to—”
Another voice murmurs in the background. Fournier can’t hear the words, but Mullings’ robust “Yes, Brigadier!” is loud enough to make him clap his hand over the radio’s speaker and whisper a curse.
“Go ahead then,” Fry says. “Report, Dr. Fournier.”
He tries to:
“You—we—There hasn’t been a transmission through the main cockpit radio in two weeks, Brigadier. We didn’t know what was happening—”
“I’m well aware of that, Doctor. I asked you to report on your own status, if you please.”
“We had an incident. We lost a man—Private Lutes.” He tells her about Invercrae, in somewhat unnecessary detail, steering away from the substantive point for as long as he can. But finally he says it. “We’re heading home.”
“Are you now?” the brigadier asks mildly, after a momentary pause. “And whose decision was that?”
“All of us. It was … it was the group decision. We had hard evidence of junker activity, after all. It—it seemed—”
“You had a man down. That in itself isn’t evidence of anything. Frankly, I’d say the fact that Rosie herself was not attacked argues against any junker presence.”
So here they are. And of course Fournier is being required to bow his head and bear the blame. How very convenient a scapegoat is, especially in a situation where success is almost impossible. This time he fights back. “I made a judgement call based on the facts available to me. I also took into account the morale of the team, and the frictions—very considerable frictions!—between Colonel Carlisle and Lieutenant McQueen.”
Fry sweeps these arguments away. “What matters now,” she says, “is to manage the situation. The timing is very unwelcome. We’re in the middle of significant structural upheaval here, which is why there has been a hiatus in our communications to you. The colonel’s return at this point could be highly disruptive.”
Fournier is ready to dig in his heels and argue his case, but now he feels a stirring of unease. Structural upheaval! He imagines the bleak landscape lying under those anodyne words and he is unable to keep from lifting the blanket.
“When you say upheaval,” he ventures, “do you mean …?” He tries to think of a neutral way to phrase the question, discovers that there isn’t one. “Has the Muster taken charge of the Main Table?”