Ocean Blue (Sea Lab Book 1)

CHAPTER 32

ATLANTIS RESEARCH VESSEL

Rachel Wilde eased over the microscope and allowed her lashes to brush against the round frame of the eyepiece. At first glance, nothing seemed abnormal with the sample of red blood cells extracted from the monster fish. To put it in layman's terms, they looked like a bowl of Cheerios tinted reddish-pink. The hole in the center wasn't really a hole but a depression.

Check that. Magnified a thousand times their actual size, the cells were normal in appearance except for the fact they were twice as large as an average cell of any fish or shark specimen she'd ever encountered. That raised several red flags in her mind. She was a marine biologist at heart, number one in her field research class.

Though Rachel was young, her lab work was spot on. She took the sharp end of a probe, jabbed it into a red blood cell, and dragged it to the side. The needle point serrated the cell like a knife slicing through steak. She set the instrument down, dialed in the focus two thousand times the magnification, and filled the entire view with the cell. It reminded her of a glazed doughnut cut open on one side.

Movement. Growth.

She pursed her lips and looked straight ahead. "That makes no sense."

She checked again, perplexed, as the living cell regenerated before her eyes. In mere seconds, the red blood cell transformed back to its original state. Perfect. This was unheard of. A hypothesis formed, but if her educated guess were true, that would mean...

Rachel rose from her chair and hurried over to a refrigerator, opened the door and withdrew a glass vial. A label identified the tube's contents as MRSA otherwise spelled Mersa, a bacterium resistant to most antibiotics. She donned a pair of latex gloves and was about to introduce a drop of the bacteria when she had an idea.

She paced over to a cabinet, removed a disposable syringe from its package, and used it to draw a blood sample from her arm. She pulled the needle from the vein in the crease of her elbow, applied a Band-Aid, and then emptied the contents of the plunger into another Petri dish. Rachel observed her sample under the microscope. As normal as normal could be. Miniature pink donuts huddled together. She used a liquid dropper to squeeze out a drop of the MRSA bacteria into the glass dish.

The reaction was slow, but expected. The infection invaded her cells and overwhelmed them, turning the tiny round blobs milky white. As she turned up the magnification on the mixture, bubble-like circles became visible and covered the cells like pebbles on a plate. Now it was time to test the bacteria on the sample from the giant fish.

Normal red blood cells from a living organism would develop an infection to MRSA, but not the sample taken from the barracuda-like specimen. The microscopic invaders hit a block wall, stopped dead in their tracks. The individual bacterium stuck to the outer fringes of the cells, but failed to penetrate further. Rachel's jaw dropped as she watched until the blood cells devoured every strand of bacteria.

She pulled away from the microscope, her face blank, eyes focused and jaw set hard with astonishment. How could this be? It took little for her skills of discernment to kick into overdrive. Something had given this beast an added survival advantage.

A squeak of oil deprived hinges shattered her concentration. She looked up and saw the determined countenance of Kevin Green. He strode over and slapped a stack of papers on the sterile surface of the tabletop.

"This confirms some of our suspicions," he said, his voice heavy with conviction.

Rachel snatched up the computer printouts and scoured the pages, running a finger down the side-by-side comparison of the monster specimen and a normal great barracuda.

When she got to the end of the five-page report, she stared at Kevin. "The DNA test reveals a ninety-seven percent match. So, in your educated opinion, our fish is a great barracuda."

"That's my conclusion," he said. "The three percent difference in sequencing contains the mutation or the enhancement, if you will, which explains the size of the fish and its increased healing rates." Kevin noticed the microscope and leaned over for a look, resting his casted wrist on the tabletop. "You made any progress?"

"One giant leap on the food chain." She showed him the Petri dishes with her red blood cells and the one containing the sample of their specimen. Then she went into detail about her experiment.

"Amazing. What's your verdict?"

"Well, earlier I did a test for toxins, and an analysis of the somatotropin cells in the pituitary gland, which control release of growth hormones." Rachel moved over to her laptop, selected the print function and tapped enter. Seconds later, she returned with her own set of reports, smacking the pages down in front of him. "See for yourself."

"No toxins. Cleaner than a set of cotton sheets," he said after a moment of rifling through the papers.

"Check out the last page."

Kevin skipped ahead and studied the conclusion of the analysis.

"Intriguing, isn't it?" Rachel said. "I drew the sample straight from the pituitary gland of the fish. Most fish have one the size of a pea, but our specimen has a gland as big as a golf ball."

He gazed at her long and hard, but she could tell his mind was a million miles away. "It would further explain the increase in growth and the exponential healing rates."

"I'll run more tests for the hormone and see if I get the same results." A trickle of glee seeped to the surface of Rachel's face.

"Do that and let me know when you're finished." Kevin's expression appeared dry of emotion as if he were deep in thought, pondering something, gravely serious. It seemed odd seeing the good news they discovered. Rachel wondered what he was tossing around in his head as he left the room.