Hot As Ice. Merline Lovelace

hummed as Diana picked her way past stacked boxes and various pieces of gear. The hot air pumped through the double walls kept the temperature inside the station at a toasty sixty-five degrees, so the occupants didn’t have to pile on too many layers. Boots, snug leggings and a wool plaid shirt worn open over thermal silk long johns provided Diana with sufficient warmth and a measure of mobility.

      Before entering the storage shed where Major Stone lay suspended between life and death, she ducked into the cramped side room the recovery team had converted into a lab. She’d already checked the latest cell samples once this morning but wanted another look.

      Hooking a stool with her heel, she dragged it closer to the long, flat counter filled with racks of test tubes and culture dishes. As Dr. Goode had as much as admitted, they were down to their last hope. They’d tried every possible protein and nucleic acid combination within the range of Major Stone’s molecular sequencing. If this combination didn’t work, if the protein and nucleic acid didn’t bind…

      Flicking the switch on a laser scanning microscope, Diana slipped a slide with the latest sample under the lens. The air force had spared no cost to lease and ship in the powerful scope Dr. Goode had requested. It was one of only three in use anywhere in the world outside heavily funded and usually guarded research facilities. While Diana squinted at the hugely magnified cells, the microscope’s computers whirred through the two hundred thousand plus known protein sequences to verify the sample’s profile.

      Mere seconds later, the screen blinked a complex code. With a click of the mouse, Diana sent the code to the computer’s built-in chart function.

      “Damn!”

      The line charting this combination remained flat and straight. Major Stone’s protein profile hadn’t changed by so much as a gnome.

      Swallowing a sharp stab of disappointment, she removed the slide and started to push away from the counter. Only then did she notice the faint, almost indiscernible bluish tint at the edge of the sample.

      Her breath caught. Snapping the slide back under the lens, she refocused the dual eyepieces at the edge of the slide.

      There it was! A complex protein strand that had bonded with traces of nucleic acid! Unless the sample had become contaminated, the bonding was new. So why did the computer spit out the same, dead profile?

      Frowning, she reset the computer and ran the entire sequence again. When the identical code came up, she swore softly.

      “That can’t be right.”

      Her first instinct was to consult Dr. Goode. Her second, to jab down on the stem of the functional black chronometer strapped to her right wrist.

      Before Diana had left D.C., OMEGA’s chief of communications had outfitted her with a special transceiver designed to resist the extreme Arctic cold. The device looked like an ordinary twenty-dollar watch, the kind you could buy at any Wal-Mart. As Mackenzie Blair had demonstrated, however, this particular watch contained a hermetically sealed transciever that could send and receive signals from a highly classified defense satellite with bell-ringing clarity.

      One quick jab on the stem activated the system and established an instant link.

      “Control, this is Artemis. Do you read me?”

      Mackenzie’s cheerful reply came through a second later. “I’ve got you, Artemis. Go ahead.”

      “I need you to access the PIR-PSD through OMEGA’s computers.”

      “Repeat, please.”

      “The Protein Information Resource-Protein Sequence Database.”

      “Ooooh-kay.”

      “It’s the largest protein database in the world. Just type PIR-PSD into the computer and you’ll go right to it. Tell me when you pull up the home screen.”

      Chewing on her lower lip, Diana waited for OMEGA’s chief of communications to plug into the international information source.

      “I’m there,” Mackenzie announced a few seconds later.

      “I’m going to feed you a long string of numbers. Type them in exactly as I give them to you, then hit the button that says request profile.”

      “Fire when ready, Artemis.”

      With meticulous care, Diana read the long series of numbers from the current sample. Mackenzie repeated each digit as she entered it into the computer.

      While the PIR-PSD digested the information, Diana’s heart thumped painfully. Had the astronomically expensive electron microscope given erroneous readings? Would they have to start over, repeat the thousands of sequences within Major Stone’s profile range? Could they keep his organs functioning long enough to…

      “I’m getting some kind of a code here.”

      “Read it to me. Slowly!”

      Diana typed the code Mackenzie fed her into the microscope’s computer and switched to the chart function. Instantly, the flat line shot upward.

      “Ohmigod!”

      “Something wrong, Artemis?”

      “No! Something’s right! Very right!”

      Here they’d been within hours of pulling the plug on Major Charles Stone, and his protein had already begun to regenerate. If this chart was anywhere near correct, he’d almost reached sufficient levels to sustain life.

      Trembling with excitement, Diana advised Mackenzie she’d report back later and slid off the stool. She should notify Goode and Wozniak and the others, have them verify the anomaly. She would, as soon as she checked on the major.

      He lay stretched out on the metal table, atop a computer-controlled aqueous gel mattress to cushion his body and vary his position at timed intervals. He was still naked, although the team had draped a folded sheet over his midsection. Video cameras mounted on tripods observed him from four different angles. IVs snaked from his arm, heart monitor leads from his chest. Electrodes measured the almost imperceptible brain activity that had so excited the team at first. A whole wall of monitors recorded both visual and digital data.

      Her heart still pumping pure adrenaline from the chart reading, Diana stepped to the table. Major Stone lay supine, broad shouldered, superbly muscled. Fine brown hair arrowed down his chest, whorled around his navel, and disappeared beneath the folded sheet. The same tobacco brown hair lightly fuzzed his arms and legs. His buzz cut was a darker shade, and right out of the fifties.

      As a biologist, Diana appreciated beauty in all life forms. Stone wasn’t handsome in a classical sense, she decided. His features were too rugged, his jaw too square and blunt. She had to admit, though, his raw masculinity shot her scientific detachment all to hell. That, and the fact that she had absorbed so many details of his life by now that there was no way she could view him objectively.

      According to the extensive background dossier Mackenzie had compiled, Charlie Stone had lost his parents during the Depression and was raised by an aunt. He’d worked at a variety of odd jobs while in high school, but still managed to letter in baseball and football. From the many comments in his high school yearbook, he’d won as many cheerleaders’ hearts as he had games.

      When World War II broke out, he lied about his age to enlist in the Army Air Corps aviation cadets. He’d flown P-51 Mustangs in Europe, and F-86 Sabre jets six years later in Korea. He’d been engaged for a brief period to an army nurse, but the affair fizzled when she mustered out of the army and went home. Stone had then been selected for test pilot school and moved to Edwards Air Force Base, California, where he flew with the likes of Chuck Yeager and future astronaut Deke Slayton.

      He was from the old school. Tough. Tested. The kind of brash, fearless flier who pushed himself and the aircraft he tested to the edge of the envelope. He’d racked up hundreds of hours in various experimental airframes when the CIA had “requested” him from the air force to help shake out the bugs on the supersecret U-2. A little more than a year