The sound of Sarah's breathing filled the infirmary cell.
It was a wet, rattling sound. Like air bubbling through sludge.
"The death rattle," Hemingway whispered from the doorway, holding a bottle of rum he didn't drink.
Jason knelt beside the cot. Sarah's face was pale, translucent. Her lips were blue—cyanosis. The mutated flu virus, H1N1 Prime, was liquefying her lungs.
"She has twelve hours," the Army medic said, checking her pulse. "Maybe less. The fluid buildup is drowning her."
"Drain it," Jason ordered. His voice was flat, devoid of emotion. He was in problem-solving mode because if he felt anything, he would shatter.
"We did," the medic said, gesturing to a bucket of bloody fluid. "It comes back faster than we can pump it. Her immune system is in a cytokine storm. It's attacking her own body."
Jason stood up. He walked to the metal table covered in medical supplies.
Aspirin. Morphine. Ether.
"Useless," Jason hissed, sweeping the bottles onto the floor. Glass shattered. "I own half the world's gold, and I can't buy a single antibiotic because Fleming hasn't discovered mold yet."
He grabbed Einstein by the collar of his tweed jacket.
"Think!" Jason shook the physicist. "You're the smartest man alive. Fix this!"
"Jason, please," Einstein stammered, his glasses askew. "I am a physicist. I study the stars and the atom. I do not know biology. I cannot cure a sneeze."
"We don't need to cure it," Jason said, his eyes wild. "We need to kill it."
He looked at Sarah. The virus was a living thing. A biological machine replicating inside her.
"Radiation," Jason whispered.
Oppenheimer looked up from his notebook. "What?"
"Radiation Therapy," Jason said, the idea forming rapidly. "In my time... they use it for cancer. To kill rapidly dividing cells. A virus replicates faster than anything."
"You want to irradiate her?" Oppenheimer asked, horrified. "You'll kill her bone marrow. She'll die of radiation sickness."
"Not if we target it," Jason said. "We need a tracer. A radiopharmaceutical isotope. Something that binds to the infected tissue and burns it out from the inside."
He racked his brain for the chemistry lessons of the future. What did they use in the early days? before chemotherapy?
"Phosphorus-32," Jason realized. "P-32. It binds to DNA and RNA synthesis. The virus uses phosphorus to replicate. If we inject radioactive phosphorus, the virus will eat it and burn itself to death."
"We don't have Phosphorus-32," Oppenheimer said. "It doesn't exist in nature."
"We have a nuclear reactor," Jason pointed to the yard. "We can make it."
"Make it?" Einstein asked.
"Transmutation," Jason said. "We bombard a sample of sulfur or... phosphorus-rich material with neutrons in the reactor core. We cook it."
"It's theoretically possible," Oppenheimer admitted. "But we need a source of phosphorus. High concentration."
"Where do we get pure phosphorus on a prison island?" Hemingway asked.
Jason looked at the bucket of bloody fluid. He looked at Sarah's frail arm.
"Bone," Jason said grimly. "Bone marrow is rich in phosphorus."
"We can't harvest her bone," the medic said. "She's too weak."
"Not hers," Jason said. He turned to Hemingway. "The dead Soviet in the yard. The one O'Malley shot."
Hemingway's eyes widened. "Jason... that's desecration."
"It's recycling," Jason said coldly. "Get me a saw."
The hangar deck of the Icarus was sweltering.
The cooling fans were dead, fried by the EMP blast. The air smelled of stale sweat and ozone.
Jason stood at a workbench, wearing a lead apron. In front of him lay a heavy femur bone.
He held a hacksaw.
His hands were shaking.
"Do it," Oppenheimer whispered, turning away. "I can't watch."
Jason gritted his teeth. He thought of Sarah's blue lips.
ZZZT-ZZZT.
The saw bit into the bone. It was a gruesome, wet sound.
He sawed through the dead soldier's leg bone, exposing the red marrow inside. He scooped the marrow into a lead canister.
"God forgive me," Jason muttered.
He sealed the canister.
"Core is open!" Hughes shouted from the catwalk. "Safety shielding is retracted! We have direct neutron flux!"
"It's going to be hot," Oppenheimer warned. "Without the electronic regulators, we're guessing the exposure time. Too little, and it's just soup. Too much, and it's liquid death."
"How long?" Jason asked.
"Calculations say... four minutes at high flux," Einstein said, scribbling on the wall with chalk.
Jason grabbed the canister with long-handled tongs.
He walked to the open access port of the reactor.
The heat hit him like a physical blow. The core glowed with a terrifying blue light—Cherenkov radiation. The air tasted metallic.
"Inserting sample," Jason yelled.
He shoved the canister into the heart of the reactor.
"Mark!"
Hughes started a stopwatch.
One minute. The ship groaned. The heat was rising.
Two minutes. Jason's lead apron felt heavy. Sweat poured down his face.
Three minutes. The Geiger counter on the wall—an old analog one that survived the EMP—was screaming. Click-click-click-SCREEEE.
"Radiation levels critical!" Oppenheimer yelled. "Jason, get back!"
"Not yet!" Jason stared at the stopwatch.
Three minutes, fifty seconds.
"Pull it!" Einstein shouted.
Jason grabbed the tongs. He hauled the canister out of the fire.
It was glowing. Not from heat. From ionization. The metal was humming.
He dropped it into a bucket of water.
HISSSSSS.
Steam exploded upward.
"We have the isotope," Jason panted, stripping off his gloves. "Now we need to separate it. We need a centrifuge to spin the marrow out."
He looked at the medical bench.
The centrifuge—a modern electric model looted from a hospital—was dark.
"Plug it in!" Jason yelled.
"I can't!" Hughes kicked the machine. "The motor is fried! The EMP killed the coils! It's a brick!"
Jason stared at the useless machine.
Without a centrifuge, he couldn't separate the P-32 from the bone sludge. He couldn't inject chunks of marrow into Sarah's veins. It would cause an embolism and kill her instantly.
"We need a manual one," Jason said. "Hand-cranked."
"We don't have one," the medic said. "That's 19th-century tech."
Jason looked out the hangar door.
The sun was rising over the bay.
In the distance, drifting listlessly in the current, lay the wreck of the Red October. The massive Soviet airship that had crashed into the water.
And further out, the gunboats.
"The Soviets," Jason realized. "Their field kits. They use rugged, low-tech gear. They have hand-cranked centrifuges for field blood transfusions."
"You want to ask the people we just blew up for a favor?" O'Malley asked, incredulous.
"I have something they want," Jason said, grabbing the glowing canister of isotope.
"What?"
"The cure," Jason said. "Trotsky's men are sick too. I saw the bodies. The flu doesn't care about the flag."
He grabbed a white pillowcase from a bunk. He tied it to a broom handle.
"Prepare the dinghy," Jason ordered. "I'm going to make a house call."