New Eden- The New Eden series book#1 (#Wattys2016)

Chapter 16 "New Eden."

The man started talking.
His name was George Fink, and as our luck would have it, he was a virologist. Just the guy we needed to explain things. Hopefully.

"The quarantine? It got anything to do with the grass and giant insects?" Whickham asked.

Fink nodded and winced, still feeling the pain from his wounded leg. "It's got everything to do with the grass." He said. "I'm one of the scientists working on the New Eden project."

"New Eden?" Brandon echoed. "So what? Is this some kind of experiment gone wrong? Something the government cooked up?"

The biochemist shook his head. "No. You don't understand."

"Well you better explain it!" Whickham exclaimed.

Fink screwed his face and groaned. He looked over at Avre, a pleading expression on his face. The soldier just stared at him, obviously disappointed that the scientist would break from this minimal amount of torture.

"Can I get something? My leg, I mean..." Fink asked.

"We have some pain killers. You'll get some after you tell us everything. Only after." Whickham replied unsympathetically.

Fink gritted his teeth and went on. "It wasn't made. We found it-"

"Found what?!" This came from Leroy.

"IT!" The scientist said pointedly. "The thing that's causing all of this."

"What is it?" Nichola jumped in.

The man just shook his head. "I-I don't know,"

"What do you mean, you don't know!?" Luke shouted. He stepped forward, ready to shoot. "You're a scientist! You said you worked on this!"

"We found it, alright!" Fink yelled back. "In an ice core in the Arctic."

That bit of info caught all our attention.
Whatever thing thing was, it came from the Arctic? We all waited for Fink to continue.

"We were just searching for mineral samples, trying to date the ice, when we stumbled upon it. A plant...a seedling really."

"A plant? Growing on the Arctic ice?" Brandon interrupted. He asked the question with a slow sarcastic nod.

Y'see, Brandon was already thinking of the fact that everyone knew...well some of us, anyway. Nothing grew in the Arctic. Despite being made of ice, the continent was considered a desert, baron of all life.

"No, not on the ice." Fink corrected Brandon. "In the ice. Frozen. Two thousand feet below the surface."

Another impossible part of the scientists story. Although the movies always put across the idea that when something is frozen it could live after being thawed out. That was a lie.

Water changes its molecular structure when the surrounding temperatures dropped to freezing. The molecules move from free flowing and bouncing around to creating a crystalline structure. Ice. If the water happened to be in a cell body then the ice crystals pieced the cell, destroying it. This was true to all living things. Animals or plants.

"I know it sounds farfetched, but I'm telling the truth." Fink paused for a breath. "It was an amazing find, discovering plant life that could survive the freezing process. The applications of something like that could change the world!"

"Yeah. Change the world." Nichola muttered.

"At our labs, when we did further research, we realized that it wasn't the plant itself. Its what was inside the plant!"