Civilian: It didn’t take long after the bombs dropped.
Maverick: Bombs? Well, this place is still standing… the airstrip’s in one piece… It doesn’t look like you’ve been touched.
Doctor: The attackers didn’t blow up anything, Colonel – they used bio-weapons.
Dekker: So, no offence, doc, but why are you still breathing?
Doctor: I’ve been asking myself the same question. What’s the pattern here? This is not random. The autopsies have been showing commonalities. Things like: percentage of body fat, bone brittleness, eyesight, sperm and egg count. Everything… genetically determined. What do you know about nano-technology? And bio-convergence?
Maverick: Bio-convergence? Well, it’s fairly new. That about covers what I know.
Doctor: Well, I think the attackers dispersed replicating nanobots into the atmosphere – billions of ’em.
Maverick: Nanobots?
Doctor: Yeah, think of them as computers – small as atoms. They get into your body and start a genome comparison of your DNA helix. If they don’t like what they find, they start attacking your RNA. Your cells… your cells stop replicating and then begin killing each other. Let me show you. Your body becomes a battleground, and in a matter of hours…
Maverick: <groans> So why aren’t we like… this?
Doctor: Thank your parents. The nanobots have been programmed to look for certain genetic characteristics: low body fat, good eyesight, and so on. My guess is they can be EPROMd to do anything. Any trigger in the DNA strand will do. You want to, er… you want to weed out the skinny folks in the world? People with iron-poor blood? You just tweak the code.
Civilian: They came out of nowhere – in unmarked ships. They dropped canisters like this.
Maverick: How many of your people were affected?
Doctor: I’d say 90%.
Dekker: This is a ghost planet now, boss. I’ve seen this a couple of times during the War. If the rest of these people don’t clear out soon, they’ll all be committing suicide in a year or so.
Maverick: Admiral Wilford will get a full report: I’m sure he will act appropriately.
Dekker: Hard to work out what appropriate even means, after you see something like this. It’s a good thing the Kilrathi never worked out this stuff.