Free Burn by Bill Ransom

initiators and assemblers of microtubule expressways and biological engines within the cells.
    This thing is set up to work fast, she thought. A multisystem assault on the whole body,
    Any human being who had been vaccinated for anything over the past ten years was infected; ViraVax had seen to that. The cascade effect of the AVAs had to be stopped early in the process, so she concentrated on the supply lines, the microtubules, and the basic initiator-type structures.
    Once I identify these triggers, she thought, we still have to manufacture and distribute the blocking mechanism,
    Marte heard her mother’s voice in the back of her head, urging her, “Don’t let what you cannot do stop you from doing what you can.”
    So she didn’t.

Chapter 9
    No servant is greater than his master, nor is one who is sent greater than he who sent him.
    —Jesus

    Commander David Noas of the Jesus Rangers dreamed of fishes. The edge of his awakebrain registered this image as portentous while his dreambrain sucked him down a tunnel of warm water, aswarm with red, blue and turquoise lacefins. His dream self held his breath so the dreamer would not drown.
    Silver, blue, yellow and green, stripes and calicos, these bright fishes drew David Noas relentlessly downward until their colors faded into shadowy reds and grays. Only luminescence flashed past him, now, and in the phantasmic glow he sensed the true hypnotic grotesqueries of the deep. The dreamself looked upward to where light and the surface were supposed to be, and the surface was gone. He knew, then, that he had been sucked into the maw of some leviathan, and if he could only outswim the current he might be spared.
    A shrill, pulsing alarm startled him into letting go his one good breath and Commander Noas woke instantly, his Air Galil a chill in his fist.
    “Speak!”
    He relaxed his aim on the console and caught his breath.
    “Sir! Special Ops Command meeting immediately at Sanhedrin Chambers, sir!”
    Commander Noas flicked a finger and his bedside Watchdog displayed the image of a pale, distraught young woman at Central Security and Communications. Every light on her control board pulsed in a red fury. The woman’s brown eyes stared, wide as a deer’s, at the video pickup just to the left of his own display. The commander snorted his disgust.
    Another missionary.
    She wore the blue-and-white shoulder patch of a first-year missionary on a customary two-year rotation. That was his indictment of the missionary system of staffing—personnel were either coming or going, so continuity and long-term projects became very nearly hopeless. The commander made sure his own visual was off before he stepped out of bed.
    “It’s the Sabbath,” he growled. “Who authorized a flipping meeting at cockcrow on the flipping Sabbath?”
    Probably her first flipping watch! Flipping amateurs!
    “Sergeant Tekel, sir.”
    Tekel. Tekel had been right about the Mormons and the Twin Falls Hot Bloods teaming up last fall. He was a pro, not likely to panic. The overzealous two-year wonders like the woman on his screen hallucinated Mormon infiltrators in the air-conditioning and Muslim frogmen in the hydroponics. This, thanks to the paranoia instilled in them by the weekend warriors who called themselves basic training instructors at Camp Calvary.
    Their parents probably never let them stay up after sunset
    The actual enemy was much more subtle: a strategic marriage, a political appointment, a handshake over hot turf. This was the kind of danger that required experience to spot. Experience, and good intelligence.
    Tekel was not one to cry wolf because he had breathed the wolf’s foul breath himself, in the courtroom and in the street. And, like the commander, Tekel was Night-School trained in black ops, a service that the DIA and the U.S. government no longer provided independent contractors since consolidation of the intelligence services fifteen years back. Sergeant Tekel’s office monitored the