plate with my omelet next to my discarded coffee cup.
“Good. Becks—”
“Come up with some believable outdoor footage.” She stood, picking up her plate. “I’ll set up out in the van.”
“Good. Alaric—”
“Ground-level analysis of the Oakland tragedy, short memorial piece on Dave.” He rose as he spoke, expression already far away. “I should be able to cobble something together fast enough to let me hit the forums and do some damage control after.”
“That’s excellent. Now what are we going to do about the Doc?”
“I thought you’d ask that,” said Alaric, looking briefly smug. He likes being efficient. “I checked Buffy’s stock of precoded IDs. Kelly looks enough like Buffy did that she can use most of them.”
“Any of them come with medical credentials?”
“No strict medical, but three scientific. I have an ichthyologist—a fish scientist,” Alaric added, seeing my look of blank incomprehension. “Also a theoretical physicist and a psychologist.”
“I minored in psychology,” said Kelly, sounding relieved to have something to contribute to the discussion. “I’ve never practiced, but I can fake it if I have to.”
“Great. Alaric, get the ID up and running, make sure it passes any surface checks people are likely to run, and go from there. You’re still a doc, Doc. We’re going to hire you to replace Dave as soon as we come back to civilization.” Kelly looked faintly alarmed. I grinned. “Don’t worry. Mahir will ghostwrite your articles, and we’ll just publish them under—what byline are we publishing these under, Alaric?”
“Barbara Tinney.”
“Great. We’ll publish them under the Barbara Tinney byline. It reinforces the impression that you’re legit—and we can just call you ‘Doc’ in public.”
“You’re crazy,” pronounced Becks.
“And you’re carrying eight guns,” I replied. “Now that we’ve covered what everybody knows, can we move on? When I post, I’ll say a few words about Dave and how honored we all are to have worked with him, bullshit, bullshit, blah, blah, blah.” I waved my free hand vaguely before cracking open the Coke and taking a deep drink. The acidic sweetness hit the back of my throat like a slap. I choked a little, getting my breath back, and finished: “I’ll hit the staff boards. Give everybody the edited version of the situation. Be done with your reports and ready to roll by ten.”
“Where are we going?” asked Kelly, looking like she couldn’t tell whether she should be relieved to be getting away from Maggie or worried about what was coming next.
“And why are we going
I couldn’t blame him for the question. He wasn’t there when we lost Buffy, or when we lost George. I took a deep breath, held it long enough to be sure I’d stay calm while I answered him, and said, “If we sit here until we feel ready to move, we’re never going to move again. We’re going to get comfortable, and we’re going to stay here until we die. We don’t want to run off half-cocked, either, but there’s a line between the two, and if we don’t find it, we’re fucked. As for where we’re going…” I turned a predatory smile on Kelly. “That’s what the Doc here is going to tell me.”
“Me?” she asked, sounding surprised.
“You. Come on. We’re using the living room terminal, and you’re going to explain what I’m not getting out of all those lovely notes you brought for us.” Picking up my omelet, I added, “You have your assignments, everybody. Two hours. Be ready.”
Kelly followed me to the living room and sat next to me at the desk. “Perk up. It’s not like you went out of the frying pan and into the fire. It’s more like out of the frying pan and into the industrial-strength toaster.”
“I don’t understand.” She shook her head, looking perplexed. “This is our chance to go to ground. Why aren’t we doing it?”
“And where would we go? Canada? We’re not going to get any answers there. I trust Maggie’s system to keep us off the grid, and whoever arranged to have Oakland deleted is going to have trouble sweeping it under the rug if they pull it a second time. I know my job, okay?” I tapped the side of my head, smile fading. “I’ve got a few brain cells still working up here.”
“I didn’t mean—”
“Don’t start. My mood stays better if you don’t start.” I turned to the keyboard. The terminal turned itself on as soon as its sensors “saw” me looking at it, and I typed my password to unlock the home network.
“Noted,” she said. She didn’t sound like she approved, but at the moment, that was at the bottom of my priority list.
“Good.” All Maggie’s computer equipment was top of the line. Having parents with money and Buffy Meissonier as your original technical consultant will do that. “I spent a few hours after the rest of you went to bed going through those files you brought us last night. Didn’t understand half of what I was reading, but George managed to explain some of it for me.”
Kelly’s expression went very still, like she was fighting an inner battle to keep herself from pointing out that George couldn’t explain anything, because, guess what, George was dead. I’ve seen that look a lot since the funeral. As long as she could keep herself from saying anything, I could keep myself from getting angry that she’d want to.
“Really,” she said finally, in a neutral tone that could have meant just about anything.
Good enough for me. “Really,” I confirmed. “What I’m curious about is the list of labs. How many of those are going to be safe for us to visit? Where can we go to get the fieldwork side of the equation?” Kelly’s files gave us numbers, but they didn’t give us the rest of the picture. If we were going to understand, we needed to talk to someone who could confirm or contest the data—and if the CDC had been steered away from researching the reservoir conditions for as long as Kelly said, the labs on our list might have pieces of the puzzle we didn’t even know existed yet.
“All the labs on list A are ones with head researchers a member of the team worked with directly at some point, either before or after they went into the private sector,” she said, sounding much more relaxed now that she was dealing with verified facts instead of crazy reporters. “List B contains the labs where someone had personal experience with the supporting researchers, but not the head of the lab, and list C is made up of the labs where we had only secondhand information on the people working there. Reputations, credentials, whether or not they bothered to check their sources…”
“What about list D?” My hands were moving as we spoke, spewing out line after line of borderline coherent claptrap. It was the day after a death. We’d be expected to update—nothing was going to get us out of that, not even actually dying; George’s blog may have changed names when she died, but her backlog of files meant she missed less than a week. That didn’t mean we were expected to be profound.
“Ah.” Kelly’s tone was disapproving enough that I actually glanced toward her. Her lips were pursed into a tight moue of distaste. “That would be the labs where the researchers have been confirmed as following less than ethical paths in their research.”
“What, vivisection? Human test subjects?” I pressed Post on my first entry of the day, switched from my own feed to the administrative, and started typing again as I asked, “Full-body cloning?”
“It’s different when the CDC does it,” she said sharply. “We have a dispensation.”
“So?” I shrugged, continuing to type. “That doesn’t make it right. Hsaid, soany of the labs on list D would have been on list A if you weren’t being judgmental?”
Kelly sighed. “Two, at most.”
“Okay. Either of them anywhere near here?”
There was a horrified pause as she realized what I was asking. “Shaun, you don’t understand! These people were blacklisted from reputable scientific circles for a lot of reasons, and not all of them were as petty as you seem to think! These are not the secret heroes of some underground resistance against the evil CDC—they’re bioterrorists and crazy people, and they’re
“And we could get killed if we stay here. I’m not seeing a difference in results.” I picked up George’s Coke and took another swig. “Your objections are noted. Can any of these people be trusted? At all? Or do I just pick one at random and hope they aren’t on the Frankenstein end of the ‘mad doctor’ scale?”
