But as I began my research, I discovered that the Gobindi had done their own research before they vanished. They knew that the jungles below their city were festering with viruses, bacteria, and all manner of organisms.
But the Gobindi"s discoveries cost them their lives. They unearthed a virus on the planet"s surface that was too deadly for words. Even the Gobindi, with all their knowledge, had no way to destroy it!"
"So that"s how they disappeared," Tash whispered.
"They were wiped out!" Kavafi said. "In a last attempt to control the virus, the Gobindi identified all its original sources. Caves, stagnant lakes, and forest groves where the virus spread from plants to animals and back again, waiting for another host to come along and help spread the disease. Since they could not kill the virus, the Gobindi built huge tombs that-they hoped-would seal it away forever."
"These ziggurats," Tash whispered. "They were built to stop the virus from spreading?"
The man nodded. "When I realized this, I sent all the information to my superiors in the Empire, recommending that Gobindi be quarantined forever. The next thing I knew, a Star Destroyer arrived. I was thrown into a dungeon. Someone took control of all my experiments. But instead of stopping the research, they began to dig into the ziggurats, looking for the virus itself!" He shuddered. "I think they are using my virus research to create a galaxy- wide plague."
Tash looked at Kavafi"s clothes, his ratty hair, and his bloodshot, swollen eyes. He certainly looked like he"d been in a dungeon for weeks.
And his story was convincing. She asked, "But who would do something like that? Who could impersonate you so perfectly?"
Ten meters up the wall, a panel slid back to reveal an observation viewport. Someone was standing at the transparisteel window. "I could,"
the figure said.
It was Uncle Hoole.
CHAPTER 17.
Tash blinked.
No, it wasn"t Uncle Hoole. The face was too round and the body too squat. Plus, the figure grinned evilly. Hoole rarely even smiled. No, this wasn"t Hoole.
But he was a Shi"ido, a member of Hoole"s species. Which meant that he could change shape at will.
"That"s how he impersonated you," Tash realized. "That"s who I thought was Dr. Kavafi."
"A convincing act, I thought," the mysterious Shi"ido said, speaking through a comm unit. "It had to be, to trick Hoole. I even went to the trouble of actually healing your brother in a bacta tank, just to keep Hoole at ease."
"Where is Zak?" Tash yelled.
The mysterious Shi"ido grinned again. "At this moment I"d say he is lying on the floor of his cell, covered in the virus. In another few minutes, he should be just another-what did you call it, Tash? - a blob creature."
Tash"s knees felt weak. All this time she had suspected Hoole of doing something wrong. He was being fooled, just like she was. She could have talked to him at any time. Instead she had kept her worries to herself, and now they had all fallen into some sort of deadly trap.
"Do not feel bad, young lady," the Shi"ido said mockingly. "You are dealing with an intellect far greater than yours."
"Why are you doing this to us?" Tash yelled.
The Shi"ido"s face clouded in anger. "Because you deserve it. And far worse. Thanks to your meddling uncle, you and your brother have ruined two of my experiments so far."
"Your experiments?" Tash could hardly believe what she was hearing.
The Shi"ido continued. "I could have snuffed you out like an incense candle, but instead I watched and waited, giving you one last chance. And rather than give up your investigation, you headed straight here, to Gobindi."
"We came here because my brother was sick!" Tash argued. She was getting angry again, and the angrier she got, the hotter she felt. The skin around her bruised arm had started to itch. "We don"t even know who you are! It"s a coincidence."
"Coincidence?" the Shi"ido roared. "Was it coincidence that you showed up just in time to drive my living planet into a frenzy? Was it coincidence that you exposed Evazan just as he completed his resurrection serum? And was it coincidence that your very next stop was Gobindi, only three weeks after my virus experiments had begun?"
Tash opened her mouth to speak, then shut it. Who was this guy?
Dr. Kavafi spoke up and addressed the Shi"ido. "Whoever you are, you are playing with forces beyond your control. The virus inside this ziggurat was not meant to be disturbed. If it spreads, it could create a plague of galactic proportions!"
The Shi"ido yawned. "Actually, Dr. Kavafi, the virus you are so worried about was quite limited when I found it," he said through the comm unit. "Oh, it was deadly enough. It took over its host at an alarming rate. But it wasn"t very contagious. You cannot catch it by breathing the same air someone infected has breathed. It cannot live very long outside a hot environment. It dies quickly unless it finds a host."
The Shi"ido shrugged. "I"ve done some tinkering with the virus"s structure. My new version is far more effective because it can travel through the air. At least, I think it can. We are going to test it. Now."
In his observation booth the Shi"ido pulled a switch. Several vents in the walls and ceiling opened up, and Tash heard the whir of fans blowing air into the hot chamber.
The Shi"ido spoke again. "You have already seen the results of the virus. It doesn"t kill its host. It invades the body of the victim and wraps it in a coc.o.o.n of slime, then continues to feed off it. I"m not sure how long the victims live."
Tash shook her head. She could not believe how evil this being was.
"The people who disappeared. The people who"ve been arrested. You"ve been testing the virus on them! How could you?"
The Shi"ido laughed. "I"m going to do far worse than that. Once I"m sure the virus can infect people through the air, I"m going to test it on a much larger scale." He opened his arms wide. "I have turned this entire ziggurat into one enormous air vent, with the Infirmary as the cover.
Once the Infirmary is gone, I plan to blow billions upon billions of virus particles over the city of Mah Dala."
"You can"t!" Kavafi yelled.
"Why else do you think I have arranged to trap these people on the planet for so long? There are so many different species here. It is the perfect test to see which species are affected by the virus and which are not." The Shi"ido paused. "And that is the truly terrifying thing about a virus, don"t you think?" he said. "You cannot see it. You cannot smell it, you cannot taste it. But it is there. It is there in the room with you right now."
Tash and Kavafi looked around. The room looked no different than it had a moment before. But they knew it was different. It had been filled with a deadly plague.
"Actually you should be honored, Dr. Kavafi," the Shi"ido said.
"I"ve been saving you for this particular phase of my tests. And the Arranda girl, well, she"s been doomed since the moment she arrived on Gobindi."
The Shi"ido examined some instruments in the control booth.
"Excellent. It appears my virus dispersal unit is functioning according to plan. If you two will excuse me, I have to make plans to infect a city."
He closed his eyes, and his skin began to wrinkle and bubble. The next instant, the Shi"ido had been replaced by the perfect image of Dr.
Kavafi. The false doctor reached for a lever. "You will have to pardon the blast shield I"m about to close. I can"t let any of the virus escape just yet, can I?"
The blast shield slammed shut across the transparisteel viewport, and the Shi"ido was gone.
"What should we do?" Tash asked.
Kavafi shook his head. "There is nothing to do. We are trapped. You cannot avoid what you cannot see."
Tash suddenly remembered the electroscope. She had carried it with her from the Infirmary. "I can see them."
She checked the visor"s controls and reduced the magnification so that she could see both the virus particles and the room around her. She put the visor on.
Her heart froze.
The electroscope revealed clouds of tiny, wriggling red creatures all around her. Magnified a thousand times, they were still little more than specks in the air. Streams of them gushed from the air vents.
"Over there!" she yelled to Kavafi, pointing to one corner of the room as she ran to the other. Using the visor, she could see where the virus clouds were falling, and where the vents did not reach.
Kavafi ran where she pointed. But he was right under a virus cloud that slowly sank toward his head. "To your right! To your right!" she yelled.
He stepped to the right, and the virus wafted to the ground beside him.
Tash could see the tiny creatures, like eels with bulbous, jagged heads, swimming through the air, trying to get to her or Kavafi.
Tash turned in one direction, and then another, but the virus clouds had fallen like a curtain over her. She had nowhere to go.
"What is happening?" Kavafi yelled.
"I"m trapped," Tash said. It was true. The virus was all around her. Sooner or later, one of the particles would touch her skin, and she would be infected. She could only wait in terror as the invisible death settled over her.
Tash remembered the Rodian turning into a blob in his cell, and shivered uncontrollably.
"Is there any way to fight this virus? Isn"t there a cure?" she yelled.
Kavafi replied wearily, "No. All I can tell you is that it depends on body temperature and chemistry."
Tash watched the virus come closer. The urge to run was almost unbearable, but there was nowhere to go.
Kavafi went on. "Your body has a certain temperature, and usually it creates certain kinds of chemicals in your blood, your brain, and all the different parts of your body. But when your body changes-as when you are angry, or sad, or when you are sick-your body temperature changes, and your brain sends signals to produce different chemicals. Somehow this virus affects those signals and feeds off of them. But I don"t know how."
The blood-red virus clouds were billowing closer. The doctor was still surrounded by a safe pocket of clean air, but the area around Tash was filling up with the virus by the second.
A moment later the last of the uninfected air vanished. The virus clouds descended upon Tash. She could see "her skin crawling with millions of virus particles, searching for ways into her body. She gagged.
"What is it?" Kavafi called.
"The virus," she said. "It"s all over me!"
Tash stared at the millions upon millions of tiny red viruses landing lightly on her arms. She could not feel them. But with her enhanced vision she could see that her arms had become blood-red.
But a strange thing happened. None of the virus particles wriggled under her skin. The virus was on her, but it wasn"t getting inside.
It wasn"t infecting her!
She described what she saw to Kavafi. "It is possible," he said.
"Some species may be immune. But I thought all humans were affected."
Tash shrugged. She knew what she saw. She wasn"t getting infected!
Filled with sudden hope, she looked around the locked chamber. The blast shield made the control room unreachable. The ceiling vents were too high. But some of the wall vents looked low enough.
Tash plunged through a red wall of virus.
"What are you doing?" Kavafi yelled.
"Going for help!" Tash replied. She stretched and grabbed hold of the vent. Because it had been built into the old rock of the ziggurat, it came away easily in her hand.
She looked back at Kavafi. He was still safe in a little pocket of uninfected air. "Don"t move," she said. "I"ll be back as soon as I can."
Tash scrambled up the moss-covered stones and into the ventilator shaft.
It was like swimming through a sea of tiny sharks. The vents were still blowing the airborne virus, and wave after wave of the deadly creatures poured over her.
Not long after she"d begun her crawl, Tash heard a loud throbbing sound. She reached a point where the vent branched off in two directions.
One branch was open, and virus clouds poured out of it.
The other branch was blocked by a small energy screen, probably, Tash thought, to keep the virus from spreading into other areas of the ziggurat. The field was strong enough to hold back electroscopic creatures, but not nearly powerful enough to stop her. She pushed her way into the energy field, ignoring the tingling she felt as she pa.s.sed through it.
On the far side of the screen, the vent narrowed, and Tash had to squeeze her way through the tight s.p.a.ce. The throbbing noise grew louder.
Reaching the end of the shaft, Tash wriggled toward a durasteel grate. It popped off easily, and Tash dropped down into a new chamber.
She was in the pump room. Like the other chamber, this one was round. Most of the s.p.a.ce was occupied by an enormous mechanism made of gleaming durasteel. A pipe, twice as wide as Tash was tall, rose up from the machine, straight up through the thick stones of the ziggurat. This must be what the Shi"ido planned to use to pump the virus into the Gobindi atmosphere.
Still wearing the visor, Tash looked at her arms. The virus had stopped wriggling and had begun to drop off her skin. Both Dr. Kavafi and the evil Shi"ido had said the virus could only live a short time unless it found a host, and these seemed to have died.
Taking off the visor, Tash walked around the pump, looking for an exit. She spotted a plexiform cell similar to those she"d seen before, set into the wall of the chamber.
She recognized the figure inside.
"Uncle Hoole!"
The Shi"ido pounded on the thick plexiform and yelled, but Tash could not hear him. Hoole"s skin started to wrinkle, and Tash a.s.sumed he would change into something large, like a Wookiee or a gundark, and break down the transparent barrier. Instead, Hoole suddenly became a ratlike Ranat. Then a tiny crystal snake. Then he transformed into a large Gank, and then again into Hoole. Pausing only to take a deep breath, Hoole began another series of changes-so rapid that Tash could hardly tell what he looked like as the transformations became a blur. What was he doing?
Then Tash saw the vent in his cell wall. She put on her visor.
A virus stream poured into Hoole"s cell. The walls and floor were covered. Even Hoole"s skin was covered-Tash could see millions of the little wriggling organisms working their way along his skin, trying to work their way into his flesh.
But the minute Hoole changed shape, the virus lost its hold.
As long as Hoole kept changing shape, he was safe from the virus.