NaBloPoMo - Day 6

Panthera : Death Spiral.    Chapter One - continued

  The cubs' blood samples showed they'd made thousands of antibodies. She asked the computer to identify the ones for Nereva, and came up with a blank.  "It could have been that," she said, and showed him the analyses.  "Show me the scan files."

  Cory obliged, and she homed in on the thymus glands of the cats.  "What the hell?  Check this out for me.  What do you think of this?"

  "I'd say all three glands look shrunken.  I don't think that can be the result of genetics."

    Ren nodded.  "I agree.  I've never seen a defect like this before."  She grimaced.  "Sorry, Cory, but we need better scans of their thymus glands.  You're going to have to pull them out of cryo."

  

  An hour later she and Cory sat down to look at the new scans. "Here goes," he said as he opened the first file.  "Huh!  It's massively atrophied.  He opened the other two files.  They were the same.

  "Zoom in there," Ren said, pointing her finger at a region of the gland on the boundary of the cortex and medulla.  Cory obliged and she studied the images.  "The boundary between the two sections is wrong.  There's a bunch of dead cells there, but it doesn't look like a tumour."  She traced a curved line on the screen.  "This looks like a scrape mark, as if someone's put in a pipette and removed cells.  I think whatever they did has damaged this region."

  "Why would anyone take those cells?" Cory asked.

  "I don't know.  But I do know these aren't natural deaths.  Someone's take away so much of their thymus glands they can't make new antibodies.  These cubs have been murdered."

Panthera : Death Spiral is available as an ebook and paperback from Amazon,