Free Catherine Kimbridge Chronicles 7: Renegades by Andrew Beery Page B

tell it was manufactured. In fact the only way we know for sure what actually happened was the accidental discovery of the exobiological amoeba sample collected by my team at Da’Lana Hiis. The DNA included sequences for proteins that lock up the virus in an inert state while in the amoeba. Those very same DNA sequences contain what the humans call copyright data.”
    “That is pretty damning proof that this was an engineered contagion,” the elder Hopper agreed.
    “Sir, it goes way beyond that. The DNA also contains encoded instructions for immunizing against the virus for both Hoppers and most GCP member races as of about a hundred cycles ago. We’ve had the cure all this time and never knew it.”
    Elder Trifano reached across the small table and grasped her hand. “We have the cure but we must be exceedingly careful. There are forces at work here that would go to great lengths to destroy this information.”
    Triska nodded. Her entire team had been killed by agents intent on squashing her discovery. “Sir, there is one more thing you should know.”
    Trifano raised an eye ridge.
    “Whoever encoded the cure was doing so in the hope that we would discover it. He or she did not want this weapon – and that is most certainly what thi s engineered contagion is – he or she did not want this weapon used. The encoded message includes a warning. There is a second virus ready to be released that works in conjunction with the first to make this pathogen deadly to the Hupenstanii as well. If we begin a public mass inoculation program the powers-that-be may very well release that second pathogen as a way to forestall our efforts.”
    ***
     
    Commander James “JD” Dickerson was bored. It seemed that was always the case these days. He didn’t know what his crime had been but in his mind he had drawn the worst posting in the history of the Galactic Coalition of Planets. His command, if he could truly call it that, was the Hupenstanii high orbital station officially designated “High Ground Station One.” Unofficially it was called Dead-Ender One or simply DE1 . No one that ever got posted here ever saw their career do more than die on the vine. A posting to DE1 was the fast-track to nowhere.
    JD had been here for ten years. In those ten years his most important decision was determining a maintenances schedule for the three hundred person station. The station was bristling with kinetic energy weapons commonly called rail guns. Their job was to dissuade, with extreme prejudice, anyone attempting to enter or leave planetary orbit. Three sister stations occupied geostationary orbits that established a rough tetrahedron around the Hupenstanii home world. They enjoyed overlapping fields of fire and completely dominated high orbital space around the world.
    Crews rotated between the four stations in an attempt to relieve boredom but it was an impossible task. Over the many decades that the stations had been in place everything that could be done to relieve the boredom had been done countless times. It would be different if the station personnel had the opportunity for shore leave but the Hupenstanii home world was strictly off limits to all but a small team of biohazard experts dressed in Mark-10 hazmat suits. Even that team, the BioOps, was isolated permanently from the rest of the station personnel.   
    He was just turning the last page of the third chapter of an antique paper novel, a science fiction by a long-dead author name Heinlein, called The Moon is a Harsh Mistress when the alert klaxon began to blare. It had been so long since he had heard it that it took him a moment to react.
    He dropped the book and cringed as the old and yellowed pages bent and threatened to rip. His hand reached across his desk and toggled the intercom.
    “Report!” He barked.
    “Commander, this is Lieutenant Colden. We have an unregistered NEO that’s just been detected. The object will pass within two hundred clicks of our position in