Antibodies 23

© Copyright BG Taff

Characters.
Verna Spiro Type one Virus
Nana Bev, Interplanetary prospector.
Jamie, Bev’s younger prospecting Partner.
Dennis Potter Freight manager and old friend of Beverly’s.
Jack Godfrey Yard foreman and walking boss.
Charlotte and Lucy - Jamie’s younger dancing & clubbing friends.
Rose and Violet. Cis-girl friends of Jamie.
Dr Williams Virologist
Jennifer Jamie’s girlfriend. (Sleeping partner.)
Shirley Jamie’s niece.
Dafydd Bev’s older brother.
Digger Beverly’s first ship.
Miner Beverly’s second, larger and newbuild ship.

With my perceived obligations to my family fulfilled, Jamie and I returned to our life interests of prospecting for useful materials throughout the solar system.

Our extended parental support system of Jamie’s family, our mutual LGBT., friends and, after some cautious experimentation with my own siblings: we evolved a functioning family structure.

They say it takes a village to nurture a child, well our extended family certainly seemed to sort Jamie and my twins. Jamie invariably tailored her space trips to the shorter journeys that mostly involved regular freight trips along the now familiar paths to the well-established bases and mineral mines. Indeed she oft-times took the twins and young Shirley with her.

The ‘shorter’ journeys to the Moon and Mars had literally become commuter journeys and deemed safe for all normal commercial activity.
Journeys to the asteroid belt and the ‘gas giants’ were however still deemed riskier and thus restricted to properly equipped spacecraft.

I for my part, had given up prospecting on remote moons and planets and slowly I had become involved in the long-term plans to ‘terraform’ Venus.

I knew of course, that I would never see Earths sister made ‘habitable’ in my lifetime but it pleased me to at least see some measurable progress and for this to happen, I at least could invest a substantial portion of my wealth in that effort. To this end, I contracted to build a huge spaceship that would never land on a planet but simply transport several cubic miles of toxic sulphur of Venus per voyage and ‘dump’ it amongst the asteroid belt.

There it could remain in a stable orbit around the sun unsullied until or unless future generations found some use for it.

The other two tasks were to enhance Venus’s magnetosphere to deflect the suns radiation and to later deposit water upon its surface after lifting the precious liquid from the moons of Saturn and Jupiter.
To enhance Venus’s magnetosphere, the plans to transport molten iron and solidified iron from Io were slowly coming to fruition.

Crashing a cubic mile of solid Iron tangentially into Venus at vastly accelerated speeds would incrementally increase the planet’s rotational speed. Additionally the iron meteorite would melt and percolate to Venus’s core thus adding to Venus’s modest liquid-iron core and increasing her protective magnetosphere.

There was sufficient iron in Io’s core both liquid and metal to eventually give Venus the essential magnetic field to deflect the deadly solar radiation. This process might indeed take hundreds if not a thousand years but it was do-able.

I for one had little else to fulfil my ambitions short of my family, so to me the effort was worthwhile. There were plenty of other philanthropical ‘explorer’ types prepared to join the effort and once a measurable result was detected others were persuaded of the feasibility. These results were however a long way into the future.

I return now to events closer to home and attempts by unscrupulous criminals who somehow hoped to better themselves by gaining control of the vaccine production.

ooo000ooo

After a somewhat extended journey well past the orbit of Pluto I was returning with a somewhat empty and disappointing sample collection in the hold of my ship ‘Miner.’

About once every fourth or fifth voyage, I had taken to venturing further out beyond the confirmed planets just to break up what was becoming a monotony of repeated voyages to familiar places. After this particular voyage I was returning to Earth and had just contacted Earth control to reserve my docking slot and landing location.

The latter was usually Dennis’s yard unless I had something special to declare. This one of those ‘hum-drum’ trips with little of interest to show for my efforts and I anticipated a pretty average landing with no customs checks. Instead, I was redirected to a larger, military landing station close to the historic Australian building yard where my great Grandfather Charlie Sage had established his great enterprise.

When I expressed my curiosity about the diversion I was asked to go to a closed, encrypted channel as per my annotated encryption log. After entering the dated code figures and letters I re-established a private contact channel.

Having ensured my privacy with the military and police, I contacted Dennis on an alternative channel and quoted a few pre-coded words that Dennis immediately confirmed. His voice confirmed by a pre-coded sentence that there was a big alert concerning the vaccine. Dennis then asked.

“Have you contacted Jamie during the last few weeks.”

“No; you know where I’ve been; beyond Pluto. Comms from out there are difficult but not impossible.”

“Then I suggest you speak again to the military at Woomera.”

Intrigued, I did just that and received news I had often dreaded. Jamie was okay but our twins had been kidnapped.

Jamie had immediately surrendered herself to a military base near Oxford, in England for her own security and to demonstrate to the kidnappers that she was not going to be a bargaining chip.

On the encrypted military channel I spoke at length with Jamie and established as much detail as I could about the kidnapping. The hardest part was learning that Shirley, our most trusted baby-sitter, had been left for dead during the brutal attack. She was still in a coma with a fractured skull.

Until she was conscious and hopefully cognoscente of events, the authorities were at a loss as to where to start. Shirley was the only person likely to have seen the kidnappers but she was unconscious at the bottom of the stairs when the police guards found her.

The trail was growing colder by the day while Shirley lay unconscious.

ooo000ooo

When I finally met Jamie, she was of course distraught and cursing herself for ever leaving our twins out of our sight. I offered her support because we had done every reasonable thing possible short of locking ourselves and our twins up in some sort of medieval fortress. The way forward was not through recrimination but forensics ,and patience.

I started by firstly visiting our home, - the crime scene – and quietly running my own experienced eye over the site.
Admittedly, the scene had been totally disturbed by the police and many artifacts removed for examination but my less troubled eye was calm enough to spot a few details that the forensics team had missed. Items from other parts of the house having been relocated or even stolen by somebody who must have been casing the home; inside and out; prior to the deed.

I mentioned them at length to the police who immediately returned with the forensics team to examine the extra locations and thus increase the evidential material.

The most important evidence being my determination where the kidnappers must have severally times entered and left our home before finally succeeding in their endeavour.

“They must have had a key,” the scene of crime officer opined, “no marks on the door lock and it’s a pretty substantial piece of work. They could not have forced it without damaging the door.”

After a couple of days of painstaking work, they concluded that the kidnappers had been using a vacant farmhouse several fields away across the valley to case our farm. They had set up a surveillance post in the bedroom window some half a mile across the valley to establish what sort of routine Shirley was using.

Finally, when they concluded that only Shirley and the twins were home alone, the kidnappers had struck when the guard had briefly gone to the farm gate to collect and check the mail. The guard had returned to find the children gone and Shirley with a fractured skull, lying at the bottom of the stairs.

The kidnapping had all the hallmarks of a very professional operation for the surveillance location in the farmhouse bedroom had been kept scrupulously clean. Additionally, it’s difficult to raid a remote house in the country and then kidnap somebody without leaving tell-tale tracks. The said tracks were duly found in the overgrown farmyard behind the farmhouse across the valley. Here their transport had been parked while they maintained their watches.
As I stood in the empty farmhouse with the scene of crime officer discussing the case, she presented me with a list of potential suspects who might have facilitated the undetectable means of entry into our home. The list gave me pause for thought. It was longer than I had determined and included people who were believed to have made contact with family members outside the farm and perhaps in the small village about three miles down the isolated narrow road that constituted the only way up the valley to our home.

Fortunately, the police had secured many hours of security video from the village garage and the village post-office - cum -grocery store. Our first decent leads were picked up by sifting through videos of any unusual callers or travellers who had passed by. All the local, regular users were quickly identified and eliminated from enquiries and we were finally left with about five potential, unidentified visitors.

These individual’s visits had clustered around the six days before the kidnap took place and warranted our particular attention. The next step was to find out if these five had had any contact with family who regularly visited out home.

Two days after my accompanied visit to the farmhouse the chief investigative officer returned to our home with news.

“We’ve got some good DNA samples from the faeces left by a couple of the idiots who did the surveillance.”

“Uuugh!” I retched, “that sounds disgusting.”

“Needs must,” he replied sounding somewhat satisfied with his work. “One of my keener forensic officers is not so sensitive as her colleagues and she literally waded through shit to identify some of the less degraded ‘jobbies’ to get some useful samples. One DNA sample is distantly related to you while another is of Arabian origin and a third appears to have Congolese connections. That was the hardest to identify, African DNA is much more diverse than Caucasian DNA. But that’s just biological history.”

“So how do you take it forward?” I Pressed.
“We’re on to it already. The really good news is that everybody who receives the vaccine; worldwide that is, and of course all the donors; have already supplied their DNA information so the DNA trail is very clearly marked.”

“Yes, I remember being a party to those discussions when Professor Williams first made the connection between Jamie and I with the immunity. She was adamant that DNA records should be kept for research reasons and medical forensics. I thought it smacked too much of ‘Big Brother’ but it seems she was right.”

“She was; very much so,” the investigative officer affirmed. “We’ve already connected the generational relation to your DNA. He’s a second cousin.”

“There’ll be a few of those then. Great Grandad Charlie had seven kids in later life and they all benefitted from his will.”

“The good news is that the Sage company records and your family tree are pretty complete. We’ve identified all your relatives but locating all of them is the difficulty. Your family has a penchant for diasporas.”

“Guilty as charged superintendent. I’m sure they all have their reasons for falling far from the tree.”

“Yeah, there are a couple who have gone a little bit further though,” the superintendent continued. “You know, illicit stuff.”

“And those will be the ones you’re interested in?” I surmised.

“Seems reasonable to me.” He finished,- and I was forced to agree.

“I presume you have not told anybody else in the family.” I checked.

“No. Only you because you and Jamie are the victims in this. Please don’t tell Jamie though; yet. The less who know the better.”

“Got that,” I reluctantly agreed.

I felt I was betraying Jamie but long experience with prospecting secrecy in the mining game had taught me that loose mouths and looser words invariably fell on unfriendly ears.

ooo000ooo

We decided to leave the search in the hands of superintendent’s capable team, because he’d already demonstrated that he was ‘on the ball.’ Jamie and I would be on immediate call and belay any space trips until our twins were recovered.

We did not have to wait long before the communique arrived with its demands that Jamie or I surrender ourselves into the kidnapper’s custody in exchange for our children’s safe return.

On the eve of its arrival we held an immediate tactical meeting and the police superintendent laid his cards on the table. We discussed several stratagems and finally concluded that the safest for the twins was to agree to their demand for an exchange, namely me for the twins.

“You at least will be able to act and react to any rescue endeavours and respond intelligently to any attempt by us to communicate. Your children are but babes in arms.”

For want of a better plan I reluctantly agreed. The first criterion was to get the twins safe, then examine the chances of my recovery.

ooo000ooo