Read Online Arisen : Genesis by Michael Stephen Fuchs - Free Book Online

sit. In the bush of Somalia.”
    Baxter looked impressed. “Okay. Now I see why you’re fixated on this stuff. You already dodged one enormous bioweapons bullet.”
    “Exactly. And, by the way, with the relatively long incubation period, this one would have gone from the deminers to the garrison at camp. And then, via the global military transport network, it could have ended up anywhere. I don’t think these assholes thought about that, but then bioterrorists aren’t known for their long-range planning skills.”
    “So this new outbreak,” Baxter said. “Do you think it could actually be a bio-terror attack?”
    Zack blinked slowly. “That’s exactly it. There’s not necessarily any way to tell the difference. Particularly at first.”
    “So that’s why you worry every time.”
    “Pretty much.”
    “The chance that it might be bio-terror.”
    “Or bio-error. Like I said, these guys aren’t rocket surgeons. They’re not the kind of guys you’d trust to work with Group-4 infectious agents and not, you know, make some terrible containment error.”
    “I think I’m gonna have nightmares about that now.” Baxter cocked his head, as if trying to see something in memory. “What are the symptoms of smallpox, by the way?”
    “Incubation period five to ten days. Onset of symptoms includes high fever, vomiting, headache, and a strange stiffness. Within a week, small spots start to appear, a rash on the face, which develops into painful blisters, then scabs, which fall off, leaving scars. Serious strains have a mortality rate up to 35 percent. Blindness, from ulcers on the cornea, is an occasional after-effect.”
    “Jesus.”
    “Smallpox has arguably changed the course of history more than Jesus. It devastated eighteenth-century Europe, and blew away most of the indigenous population in North America. Just in time for the white man to move in.” Zack paused to consider whether that was fair. The hell with it, he was nearly as white as Baxter.
    “And the symptoms of myelin toxin?”
    “In humans? Never tried, as far as we know, thank God. But animal tests indicated it would be nervous system stuff – tremors, paralysis, radical mood changes. Heart palpitations and heart failure at the high end.”
    Baxter nodded, then pointed to his footlocker. “I really only came in to get my shaving kit.” He grabbed it and made his exit.
    Zack sighed and thought about getting up.
    But it was late now. And he was very tired.
    Instead, he lay where he was – and allowed himself to start getting worked up again.
    I mean, excuse me , he thought, as he had many times before, but what the fuck? Aside from the fact that the bioengineering of super-viruses was about the most evil and backward use of human effort and ingenuity imaginable… and since there was still every chance, in the view of this senior analyst, that it would be a virus that ended the story of humanity… it just struck him as particularly fucking stupid, even in a particularly stupid fucking species, to risk immanentizing the eschaton by intentionally creating something more virulent and hardy, something even worse , than the nightmare fuel already designed by natural selection – the most remorseless and efficient designer of biological predators ever known.
    Or call her Mother Nature, if you like…
    Zack’s light flickered out on that.

11/11
    Morning of the next day found Zack stirring on his rack.
    He’d had no night duty, so had just slept through. But he felt strangely unrefreshed. He’d had frantic, desperate dreams, though he couldn’t remember them. He felt like he had been running all night.
    He got himself settled back in the TOC, an enormous mug of steaming coffee by his mouse hand. He had a fair bit of routine crap to deal with first thing. When you were a far outpost of the Empire, you had to send regular reports. Whether they’re hilltop signal fires, or 256-bit AES encryption over a private satnet, the Senate must have news from the