Chapter 12 : GREMEC

Irwin Canterbury II might have grown used to the trappings of power and success, but with his strong work ethic and dedication to the trade mission, he hardly seemed to notice that he and his two assistants, Daff and Hal, were confined in a small, plain office in the bowels of the habitat. He now had a secure communications link to Earth, and could lay the groundwork for what might be a milestone in medical technology as well as in diplomacy.

“We need to finalize our statement on the ecosystem issue”, Irwin said. “The number of vine beetles needed to extract 2 tonnes of VIBE antiviral serum, well it seems incredible. Are we in danger of driving them to extinction ? There would be a public relations issue there.”

Daff tried to pull together some figures from the Greenshoot archives.

Jack had ostensibly called in to Irwin’s office to discuss the biosecurity checks. He impressed on Irwin the need for 48 hours of preparation before any shuttle back to earth could be ready. One thing had really been on Jack’s mind though, and that was Crystal. He had gone to bed wondering if she was a whore, an agent of the SSS, and woken up feeling a fool for letting Irwin get inside his head and spoil his evening. He was now worried about Crystal in an altogether different way. Was she in danger, living outside the habitat, in a world so little explored or understood ? Or was Greenshoot as benign as it had superficially seemed, looking over its lush forests from the Beluga ? The authorities here might have reasons to keep any problems secret. Some in the space program, Jack felt, were driven by their sense of manifest destiny to explore and colonize, and might even accept a premature death on this remote frontier to make the mark on human history. If such people were ruling this colony then Crystal might be making a fatal mistake. Irwin would likely know the secrets of the Greenshoot project and Jack considered how best to probe him. He took Irwin aside, away from Hal and Daff, and spoke to him in a hushed voice.

“I have some concerns about contamination of the ship while it‘s docked. The sensors may have picked something up that we didn‘t expect here. Can you get me a list of pathogens that have been recorded on Greenshoot recently. I’m prepared to authorize those, given the high priority of the mission. Anything not on the list, that may trigger an alert and that could delay our flight.“

Irwin looked at Jack carefully and gave a barely perceptible nod. He produced a black memory card from his diplomatic bag, neatly embossed in gold letters.

Trade Mission Confidential : P36 biosecurity report

“I’ll need this back sometime today, Jack.”

Jack returned to his room. There was no sign of the ghoulish woman in the opposite cell who had troubled him before. His other neighbors looked happy enough through their picture windows, a pretty Chinese lounging in front of her television, a young couple fussing over a child that ran furiously in and out of the room. Jack felt a nervousness in his stomach, though, which surely presaged some entanglement with Crystal, and wondered if he should go back to the ship and stay there, in its safe, predictable confines, and forget about her. He paced about the room and out into the corridor, and seeing a sign to the roof garden which he had not noticed before, he followed it up a flight of stairs and through an unmarked door. He emerged onto a small patio facing the wooded hills that pressed up close to the habitat. As he stood there the sun came out. It was dazzling but he looked right at it, and saw the same hot yellow sun he had grown up with, and felt the same warmth on his face. For a moment it was as if the earth were beneath him.

He strolled back to his room in a more positive mood, fed the memory card into his bulky StarFleet-issue secure communicator and tried to digest the report. It's subject was contamination and disease, addressed to Irwin Canterbury from Dr Hoi, deputy surgeon general of Greenshoot. The fact that gravity here was as strong as the earth’s on a world barely half the size, gave a pretty good indication that Greenshoot would be rich in heavy metals, and according to the report zirconium and uranium and their compounds were everywhere - in airborne dust, fresh water, sea water, drifting in invisible pollen and spores. It was integrated into the biology of life here. Jack’s briefing for the mission at Fleet headquarters had made a lot of the uranium threat and issued everyone with iodine pills, but actually the levels were no more than he was used to, for the economics of space had long been drawing people to the deposits of rare elements. The incidence of disease, compared to the population of the earth, occupied many pages and seemed impressively thorough. Kidney failure was double the norm, degenerative brain disease eight times, and psychotic illness over twenty times. Frustratingly, Dr Hoi said nothing about the effect of living outside the habitat.

There was a section on the causes of psychosis that identified a link to claims of telepathic ability, and the presence of the recently identified GREMEC virus.

Virus	GREMEC
Full name	Greenshoot metal concentrating retro-virus
Sequence	375600 base pairs
Mortality	6.0% after 5 years
Pathology	uranium filaments in brain
Treatment	managed by VIBE antiviral
Prognosis	brain damage irreversible

Jack felt he was starting to see the big picture. GREMEC, or some variant of it, was almost certainly in circulation on Earth by now; the organisms on Greenshoot had been battling the virus for ages and had developed some natural antivirals; and Hugo would be assessing whether a synthetic version of the antiviral could be made. And if the molecular synthesizers were not up to the job, the serum extracted from billions of Greenshoot beetles would be worth a fortune.