Bios Read Free Page B

said. “Pay attention. Try not to talk. You may continue looking out the window if you like.”
    She ignored his sarcasm and did exactly that.
    Dawn had reached the scattered island chains of the Western Sea. A dark plume of ejecta, like soot, trailed from an active volcano. The Greater Continental Mass wheeled into view, dense with temperate and boreal forests. Sunlight glinted from an ancient blue crater lake here, glanced off a fringe of polar ice there. Cloudtops white as cut diamonds.
    And all of it as lethal as arsenic.
    Her new home.

    Two men and a woman shuffled into the room and occupied the conference table. Zoe continued to linger by the window. She didn’t need Degrandpre’s advice to keep quiet; she found crowded rooms intimidating.
    Kenyon Degrandpre introduced the new arrivals as Tam Hayes, Elam Mather, and Dieter Franklin, all from Yambuku Station, all up on the latest shuttle.
    Zoe recognized Hayes from photos. He was the Delta station manager and the Isis Project’s senior biologist—senior in status, not in age. Hayes was a relatively young man despite his five years on Isis rotation, handsome in a rough way. He needed a haircut, Zoe thought. His beard was like tangled copper. A typical disheveled Kuiper-born scientist, in other words. The other two weren’t much different.
    Hayes thrust his hand at her. “Zoe Fisher! We were hoping to meet you.”
    Zoe took his hand reluctantly. She didn’t like touching people. Hadn’t Hayes been briefed on that, or didn’t he care? Her hand disappeared into his meaty grip. “Dr. Hayes,” she murmured, concealing her uneasiness.
    â€œPlease, call me Tam. I gather we’ll be working together.”
    â€œYou can get to know each other later,” Degrandpre said. To Zoe: “Dr. Hayes and his people have been vetting proposed archival material for transmission to Earth.”
    Zoe followed the exchange between Hayes and Degrandpre closely, trying to sort out the conflicts. The particle-pair link to Earth was such a narrow pipeline, so severely bandwidth-limited, that project downloads were hotly contested and had to undergo a kind of information triage. Degrandpre was the final arbiter. So here was Hayes, the Yambuku project leader, delivering an impatient summary of his group’s packet data, and Degrandpre playing the infuriating role of ultimate Trust bureaucrat: aloof, bored, skeptical. He fiddled with his stylus and crossed his legs and periodically asked Hayes to clarify some point that had been perfectly obvious to begin with. Finally he said, “Show me the visuals.” Holographs and photos were particularly expensive to transmit, but they tookthe place of voucher specimens and were often popular in the press back home.
    A large central screeen unfurled from the ceiling.
    The images in the Yambuku packet were micrographs of viruses, bacteria, prions, and biologically active protein chains, all of them “ALC,” as Hayes put it: Awaiting Latin Cognomen. There was also a series of conventional photographs to illustrate a journal submission from one of his junior biologists. Degrandpre asked, “More exploding mice?”
    Zoe had never heard the expression.
    Judging by the look on his face, Hayes disliked it. “Live-animal exposures, yes.”
    â€œRamp them up, please, Dr. Hayes.”
    Hayes used a handheld scroll to order up the images from the IOS’s central memory. Zoe caught Degrandpre glancing at her curiously. Gauging her reaction? If so, why?
    Elam Mather, a thick-faced woman in lab grays, stood up to narrate the images. Her voice was strong and impatient.
    â€œThe concept here was to sort ambient Isian microorganisms through a series of micron filters in order to evaluate their lethality and mode of action. We took a sample of air from outside the station, near dusk on a calm, dry day. Meteorological notes are appended. Crude assay gave us a load of organic matter