Shiva, she thought. Yes, the most complex and interesting of the Hindu gods, by turns the Destroyer and the Restorer, who controlled poison meant to destroy mankind, and one of whose consorts was Kali, the goddess of death herself. Shiva. Perfect. The tech made the proper notations, including her recommended name for the organism. There would be one more test, one more technological hurdle to hop before all was ready for execution. Execution, she thought, a proper word for the project. On rather a grand scale.
For her next task, she took a sample of Shiva, sealed in a stainless-steel container, and walked out of her lab, an eighth of a mile down the corridor, and into another.
“Hi, Maggie,” the head of that lab said in greeting. “(Jot something for me?”
“Hey, Steve.” She handed the container over. “This is the one.”
“What are we calling it?” Steve took the container and set it on a countertop.
“Shiva, I think.”
“Sounds ominous,” Steve observed with a smile.
“Oh, it is,” Maggie promised him. Steve was another M.D., Ph.D., both of his degrees from Duke University, and the company’s best man on vaccines. For this project he’d been pulled off AIDS work that had begun to show some promise.
“So, the colon cancer genes worked like you predicted?”
“Ten hours in the open, it shows good UV tolerance. Not too sure about direct sunlight, though.”
“Two hours of that is all we need,” Steve reminded her. And really one hour was plenty, as they both knew. “What about the atomization system?”
“Still have to try it,” she admitted, “but it won’t be a problem.” Both knew that was the truth. The organism should easily tolerate passage through the spray nozzles for the fogging system-which would be checked in one of the big environmental chambers. Doing it outside would be better still, of course, but if Shiva was as robust as Maggie seemed to think, it was a risk better not run.
“Okay, then. Thanks, Maggie.” Steve turned his back, and inserted the container into one of the glove-boxes to open it, in order to begin his work on the vaccine. Much of the work was already done. The baseline agent here was well-known, and the government had funded his company’s vaccine work after the big scare the year before, and Steve was known far and wide as one of the best around for generating, capturing, and replicating antibodies to excite a person’s immune system. He vaguely regretted the termination of his AIDS work. Steve thought that he might have stumbled across a method of generating broad-spectrum antibodies to combat that agile little bastard-maybe a 20 percent change, he judged, plus the added benefit of leading down a new scientific pathway, the sort of thing to make a man famous . . . maybe even good enough for a flight to Stockholm in ten years or so. But in ten years, it wouldn’t matter, would it? Not hardly, the scientist told himself. He turned to look out the triple windows of his lab. A pretty sunset. Soon the night creatures would come out. Bats would chase insects. Owls would hunt mice and voles. Cats would leave their houses to prowl on their own missions of hunger. He had a set of night-vision goggles that he often used to observe the creatures doing work not so very different from his own. But for now he turned back to his worktable, pulled out his computer keyboard, and made some notations for his new project. Many used notebooks for this, but the Project allowed only computers for record-keeping, and all the notes were electronically encrypted. If it was good enough for Bill Gates, then it was good enough for him. The simple ways were not always best. That explained why he was here, part of the newly named Shiva Project, didn’t it?
They needed guys with guns, but they were hard to find at least the right ones, with the right attitudes-and the task was made more difficult by government activities with similar, but divergent aims. It helped them keep away from the more obvious kooks, though.
“Damn, it’s pretty out here,” Mark observed. His host snorted. “There’s a new house right the other side of that ridge line. On a calm day, I can see the smoke from their chimney.”
Mark had to laugh. “There goes the neighborhood. You and Dan’l Boone, eh?”
Foster adopted a somewhat sheepish look. “Yeah, well, it is a good five miles.”
“But you know, you’re right. Imagine what it looked like before the white man came here. No roads ‘cept for the riverbanks and deer trails, and the hunting must have been pretty spectacular.”
“Good enough you didn’t have to work that hard to eat, I imagine.” Foster gestured at the fireplace wall of his log cabin, covered with hunting trophies, not all of them legal, but here in Montana’s Bitterroot Mountains, there weren’t all that many cops, and Foster kept pretty much to himself.
“It’s our birthright.”
“Supposed to be,” Foster agreed. “Something worth fighting for.”
“How hard?” Mark asked, admiring the trophies. The grizzly bear rug was especially impressive – and probably illegal as hell.
Foster poured some more bourbon for his guest. “I don’t know what it’s like back East, but out here, if you fight you fight. All the way, boy. Put one right ‘tween the fining lights, generally calms your adversary down a mite.”
“But then you have to dispose of the body,” Mark said, ping his drink. The man bought only cheap whiskey. Well, he probably couldn’t afford the good stuff.
A laugh: “Ever hear of a backhoe? How ’bout a nice fire?”
It was believed by some in this part of the state that Foster had killed a fish-and-game cop. As a result, he was leery of local police-and the highway patrol people didn’t like him to go a mile over the limit. But though the car had been found-burned out, forty miles away-the body of the missing officer had not, and that was that. There weren’t many people around to be witnesses in this part of the state, even with a new house five miles away. Mark sipped his bourbon and leaned back in the leather chair. “Nice to be part of nature, isn’t it?”
“Yes, sir. It surely is. Sometimes I think I kinda understand the Indians, y’know?”
“Know any?”
‘Oh, sure. Charlie Grayson, he’s a Nez Perce, hunting guide, got my horse off o’him. I do that, too, to make some cash sometimes, mainly take a horse into the high country, really, meet people who get it. And the elk are pretty thick up there.”
“What about bear?”
“Enough,” Foster replied. “Mainly blacks, but some grizz’.”
“What do you use? Bow?”
A good-natured shake of the head. “No, I admire the Indians, but I ain’t one myself. Depends on what I’m hunting, and what country I’m doing it in. Bolt-action .300 Winchester Mag mainly, but in close country, a semi auto slug shotgun. Nothing like drillin’ three-quarter-inch holes when you gotta, y’know?”
“Handload?”
“Of course. It’s a lot more personal that way. Gotta show respect for the game, you know, keep the gods of the mountains happy.”
Foster smiled at the phrase, in just the right sleepy way, Mark saw. In every civilized man was a pagan waiting to come out, who really believed in the gods of the mountains, and in appeasing the spirits of the dead game. And so did he, really, despite his technical education.
“So, what do you do, Mark?”
“Molecular biochemistry, Ph.D., in fact.”
“What’s that mean?”
“Oh, figuring out how life happens. Like how does a bear smell so well,” he went on, lying. “It can be interesting, but my real life is coming out to places like this, hunting, meeting people who really understand the game better than I do. Guys like you,” Mark concluded, with a salute of his glass. “What about you?”
“Ah, well, retired now. I made some of my own. Would you believe geologist for an oil company?”
“Where’d you work?”
“All over the world. I had a good nose for it, and the oil companies paid me a lot for finding the right stuff, y’know? But I had to give it up. Got to the point-well, you fly a lot, right?”
“I get around,” Mark confirmed with a nod.
“The brown smudge,” Foster said next.
“Huh?”
“Come on, you see it all over the damned world. Up around thirty thousand feet, that brown smudge. Complex hydrocarbons, mainly from passenger jets. One day I was flying back from Paris – connecting flight from Brunei, I came the wrong way ’round ‘cuz I wanted to stop off in Europe and meet a friend. Anyway, there I was, in a fuckin’747, over the middle of the fucking Atlantic Ocean, like four hours from land, y’know? First-class window seat, sitting there drinking my drink, lookin’ out the window, and there it was, the smudge – that goddamned brown shit, and I realized that I was helpin’ make it happen, dirtyin’ up the whole fuckin’ atmosphere.