The mobile lab inside the armored supply crawler was an inferno of wild, high-stakes medical chemistry.
The electric centrifuges were spinning at forty thousand turns a minute, emitting a high-pitched turbine scream that shook the glass distillation beakers on the rubber mats. everyone could feel the scent of boiling isopropyl alcohol, crushed cedar resin. The sharp, clean ozone discharged by Pip’s golden plumage.
Arthur Vance stood at the main smooth-flowing-flow hood, his right hand moving with lightning speed across a rack of twenty sterile heat-proof glass test tubes. At the same time, his injured left arm remained strapped securely across his chest.
Over his left eye, the Zeiss magnifying glass’s triple prisms were locked into high-zoom atom-deep projection mode. The glowing green sight aiming cross displayed the viral structure of the weaponized Blue Lung pathogen in three-space-folding sharp-angled detail. A twenty-sided icosahedral capsid locked behind a dense, iron-hard matrix of man-made disulfide bonds.
“The disulfide bonds are the armor,” Arthur explained rapidly, not looking up as he passed five drops of clear test chemical with a micropipette. “Standard proteases can’t hydrolyze the outer capsid because the sulfur bridges are steadied by negative void-aether charges. To break the capsid, we need an extreme heat rusting spark combined with a deep-sea spatiotemporal surfactant.”
