Free Hospital Ship (The Rim Confederacy #5) by Jim Rudnick Page B

some nods from others at the table, and it made Tanner think that this was a known item.
    There was a woman from Juno, who'd been on a cruise ship that was visiting Neres City, and she had gone stark raving mad when she'd landed and she was determined the city was guilty of some kind of climate poisoning of her body, and Tanner thought that no one got that one.
    Another patient was from ITO and had been charged with some kind of union busting, which was odd, as Tanner knew there were no unions of miners over on ITO, and he thought it would be interesting to learn more.
    There were more introductions, and Tanner listened and filed away his group members past and wondered if any of them were being honest or even close to being honest in their initial introductions, and he knew he'd probably never know.
    Ninety days was enough time to do as a sentence. But not enough to find the truth ...
     
    ####
    The smash of the petri dish hitting the far wall in the Secure lab was sharp, and Toombs didn't pay it a bit of attention. He had thrown it in a fit of anger as it was perfectly unaffected by the insertion of the latest virus trials—D-23 was dead too.
    He stood by the tray in front of him and wondered if they'd ever find a successful growth strain, and then his training took over.
    Of course, we will—via trial after trial after trial.
    “That's what we do,” he said and sighed. He slid the tray back into the growth chamber and went to fetch the broom and dustpan to sweep up the broken shards of glass in the corner. Sweeping it up, he smiled since his fit of anger hadn't been seen by anyone else on the Ikarian virus team, which was a good thing. He slid a hand along the face of the wall there, and he could detect a few other teensy dents—each time a previous vaccine had failed, he'd thrown one of the telltale petri dishes at this same spot, and even when cleaned up, the tiny dents were noticeable. At least to him, and as the principal research scientist on the Ikarian virus team, it was a habit he was not proud of.
    But then failing at this research would be a career limiting move too, he thought and kept sweeping.
    Once the mess was cleaned up, he went back over to the administration desk in the opposite corner of the labs, sat, and keyed in his administrative access code to get to the virus database.
    "Stupid virus is what we should have called it," he said right out loud and grinned to himself. His red hair was something he had been ribbed about back when he'd been a grad student on his PhD campaign, but no one would ever say anything about red-headed anger to his face anymore. Perks of the big job , he thought, and he keyed in the final status of the D-23 vaccine as a FAIL. He saved the file and then clicked on D-24 to get the next set of vaccine items aligned and formulas planned.
    The simple fact was, he well knew, that the vaccine they were mandated to develop would cause the patient who took it to not age.
    The item that was the enemy in that simple equation was aging itself—a part of life for the known races populating the galaxy, and that was the issue. Any vaccine that was a biological preparation provided active acquired immunity to a disease—and in this case, the disease was age. The vaccines usually contained an agent that resembled the microorganisms that age was made from, and that was a large part of the issue, the identification of those microorganisms.
    It was helpful in one respect, as they were working on the virus that had infected the Ikarians who were their test subjects. The virus lay dormant within the child as the host which was a Godsend—that allowed them to identify, with a degree of certainty, what the child developed as puberty set up those microorganisms to do and to react. How they reacted was the point of the entire set of tests within the D category.
    Vaccines could be prophylactic which this one would need to be to prevent or ameliorate the effects of aging. A simple vaccination would