Maelstrom

Competing with conventional primary producers, Rowan had said. Meaning the conventional bugs might be dying off: do a spectral for elevated soil methane. Distribution potentially temperature-limited; infrared, crossed with albedo and windspeed. Restrict all searches to a polygon extending from the spine of the Cascades out to the coast, and from Cape Flattery down to the thirty-eighth parallel.

Draw the threads together. Squeeze the signal through the usual statistical gauntlet: path analysis, Boltzma

Desjardins played at his panel. Abstract shapes condensed from diffuse clouds of data, winked provocatively at the corner of his eye, vanished the moment he focused on them. Fuzzy white lines from a dozen directions interwove, colored, took on intricate fractal patterns—

But no. This mosaic had a P value greater than 0.25; that one violated assumptions of homoscedasticity. The little one in the corner drove the Hessians fucking crazy. One flawed thread, barely visible, and the whole carpet unraveled. Tear it down, bleach out the transforms, start from scratch—

Wait a minute.

Correlation coefficient of -0.873. What was that all about?

Temperature. Temperature went up when chlorophyll went down.

Why the hell didn't I see that before? Oh, there. A time-lag. What the…

What the…

A soft chime in his ear: "Hey Killjoy. I've got something really strange here."

"Me too," Desjardins replied.

Jovellanos's office was just down the hall; it still took her a few minutes to show up at his door. The caffeine spike clenched in her hand told him why.

"You should get more sleep," he remarked. "You won't need so many chemicals."

She raised an eyebrow. "This from the man with half his bloodstream registered in the patent office." Jovellanos hadn't had her shots yet. She didn't need them in her current position, but she was too good at her job to stay where she was much longer. Desjardins looked forward to the day when her righteous stance on the Sanctity of Free Will went head-to-head against the legal prerequisites for promotion. She'd probably take one look at the list of perks and the new salary, and cave.

He had, anyway.

He spun his chair back to the console and brought the correlation matrix up on the display. "Look at this. Chloroes go down, soil temperature goes up."

"Huge P-value," Jovellanos said.

"Small sample size. That's not the point: look at the time-lag."

She leaned forward. "Those are awfully big confidence limits."

"The lag's not consistent. Sometimes it takes a couple of days for the temp to rise, sometimes a few weeks."

"That's barely even a pattern, Killjoy. Anything-"

"Take a guess at the magnitude," he broke in.

"Loss of plant cover, right?" Jovellanos shrugged. "Assuming it is a real effect, say half a degree? Quarter?"

Desjardins showed her.

"Holy shit," she said. "This bug starts fires?"

"Something does, anyway. I sca

Jovellanos was at his elbow, her hands ru

"Oh, lots. Even keeping strictly within the search window, I found a good eight or nine that didn't correlate. A ties to B, but not vice versa."

"So maybe it's a fluke," she said hopefully. "Maybe it doesn't mean anything."

"Or maybe somebody else has a better track on this bug than we do."

Jovellanos didn't answer for a moment. Then: "Well, we might be able to improve our own track a bit."

Desjardins glanced up. "Yeah?"

"I've been working up that sample they gave us. They're not making it easy, they haven't left a single intact organelle as far as I can tell—"

He waved her on: "It all looks the same to a mass spec."

"Only if they left all the pieces behind after they mashed them."

"Of course they did. Otherwise you'd never get an accurate sig."

"Well, I can't find half the stuff that's supposed to be there. No phospholipids, even. Lots of nucleotides, but I can't get them to fit a DNA template. So your bug's probably RNA-based."

"Uh-huh." No surprises there—lots of microbes got along just fine without DNA.

"Also I've managed to reconstruct some simple enzymes, but they're a bit too stiff in the joints to work properly, you know? Oh, and this is kind of weird: I've found a couple of D-aminos."

"Ah." Desjardins nodded sagely. "That means what, exactly?"

"Right-handed. The asymmetric carbons stick off the wrong side of the molecule. Like your usual left-handed amino, only flipped."

A mirror image. "So?"

"So that makes 'em useless; all metabolic pathways have been geared for L-aminos and only L-aminos, for the past three billion years at least. There's a couple of bacteria that use R-aminos because they're useless—they stick them onto their cell walls to make 'em indigestible—but that's not what we're dealing with here."

Desjardins pushed back in his chair. "So someone built this thing completely from scratch, is that what you're saying? We've got another new bug on our hands."

Jovellanos shook her head, disgusted. "And that corpse didn't even tell you."

"Maybe she doesn't know."

Jovellanos pointed at the GIS overlay. Two dozen crimson pinpoints sparkled along the coast from Hongcouver to Newport. Two dozen tiny anomalies of soil and water chemistry. Two dozen visitations from an unknown microbe, each presaging a small fiery apocalypse.

"Somebody knows," Jovellanos said.