Ancestor

NOVEMBER 7: DREAM A LITTLE DREAM OF ME

STOP IT, HANDS.

Her fingers brushed long black hair out of her eyes. The hair fell back, slowly, almost floated into place, and she pushed it away again. Her small hands seemed to move of their own accord, grabbing, stitching, sewing.

Stop it, hands, she wanted to say, but she couldn’t speak. She could only watch.

It was wrong.

It was dangerous.

It was what she deserved, deserved for being bad. A dulled sense of dread filled her mind, a metallic-gray cloud of doom.

Her hands held a fuzzy, stuffed, black-and-white panda. But her favorite toy wasn’t exactly the way she remembered. It was the panda’s body, all right, but it had no arms, no legs, and no head.

The possessed hands reached down and came up with the orange-and-black arm of a stuffed tiger, fabric torn where it had once joined at the shoulder, white fluff hanging out in long strands. Liu Jian Dan’s hands began sewing. The needle flashed again and again. The tiger arm joined the body.

She felt a pinprick of pain.

Jian looked at the possessed hand. A rivulet of blood trailed down her tiny, chubby finger. The droplet pooled in the joint between her fingers, then fell onto the panda body, staining the fuzzy white fur.

Fear sent a wash of tingles over her skin, like a billion bites from a billion carnivorous bacteria. Her small body shivered.

Her hand reached down again. This time it brought up a long, dangly, gray-and-white leg from a sock monkey.

The needle flashed. More stings. Possessed hands fixed the leg to the panda body, now black and white marked with thin red streaks.

“Shou, ting xia lai,” she managed to say finally. Stop it, hands. But the hands ignored her.

Why had she spoken Mandarin? She used it so rarely now. But no, that wasn’t right, because she was five years old and it was the only language she had ever known.

A lion’s tawny leg.

More pain.

More blood.

A pinkish arm from a plastic baby doll.

More pain.

More blood.

“Shou, ting xia lai,” she said, tears filling her eyes. “Qing ting xia lai.”

Stop it, hands. Please, stop it.

The hands ignored her. They reached down again, but this time they didn’t find fake fur or plastic. This time they came up with something cold and solid.

A small, severed head. Greasy black fur streaked with wet blood. Wide mouth, dead black eyes. Nothing like this had ever lived, nor would it. Not unless someone created it.

Jian started to sob.

The hands kept sewing.

THE VID-PHONE LET out its unignorable, shrill blare: P. J. Colding jerked awake. He squinted at the glowing red clock set in the vid-phone’s base—6:14 A.M. The time was bad enough, but it also showed the date.

NOVEMBER 7.

Fuck. He had hoped to sleep most of this day away. He slowly reached out and clicked the connect button.

Gunther Jones’s tired, melancholy face appeared on the flat-panel display. The guy’s big lips and sleepy eyes always made him look high.

“She’s at it again,” Gunther said, his voice sounding only marginally more awake than Colding’s. “Fifty-two years old and she has nightmares like a little kid.”

“Nothing she can do about it, Gun. Cut the lady some slack. Give me the live feed to her room, maybe it’s not that bad this time.”

Gunther looked down, hands seeking buttons somewhere offscreen. He usually worked the night-shift watch. Ensconced in the security room, he monitored two dozen cameras that covered the barren area surrounding Genada’s Baffin Island facility, the oversized hangar that housed the cows and vehicles, and the main building’s hallways and labs. The main building’s eight apartments also had cameras, but those were deactivated on Colding’s orders. Jian’s room was the exception—her cameras were always on. Gunther spent most of his shift writing crazy vampire romance novels, but always kept a close eye on Jian. That was the man’s main shift responsibility, really, to make sure Jian didn’t try to kill herself.

The vid-phone picture changed from Gunther’s face to a high-angle, black-and-white image—an overweight woman tossing and turning on her bed, heavy black hair covering much of her face. Colding could see her lips moving, see her look of fear.

There would be no going back to sleep this time. “Okay, Gun. I’ll go take care of her.”

He hit the disconnect button and the screen went black. Colding slid out of bed, his bare feet hitting the frigid floor. No matter how high they turned up the temperature, the floor remained perpetually ice-cold. He stepped into his ratty flip-flops, pulled on a robe and slid a small earpiece onto his left ear. He tapped the earpiece once, turning it on.

“Gunther, radio check.”

“Got you, boss.”

“Okay, on my way. Holler if she comes out of it before I get there.”

Colding left his Beretta in the nightstand drawer. No need for the gun. He headed for Jian’s.

HER BLEEDING FINGERS had turned the panda from black and white to black and red. Panda body, tiger arm, sock monkey leg, lion leg, plastic baby-doll arm and the black head with a mouth full of pointy teeth. Her possessed hands held the strange creation, a misshapen, mismatched Dr. Seuss Frankenstein.

“Not again,” Jian’s little-girl voice whispered. “Please, not again.”

She begged, but like watching a familiar old rerun, she knew what would come next. She started screaming a moment too early, just before the black eyes fluttered open and looked right at her. Primitive, unfeeling, but clearly hungry.

Something shook her, shook her. The hodge-podge stuffed animal opened its mouth and seemed to smile. The devil’s smile. Mismatched arms—baby-doll plastic pink and tiger-stripe orange and black—reached up and out for her.

Just as the creature opened its mouth to bite, that something shook her even harder.

COLDING GENTLY SHOOK Jian one more time. She blinked awake, the expression of terror still fixed on her confused face. Sweat and tears matted her silky black hair against her skin.

“Jian, it’s okay.”

He’d watched this woman for two years, tried to help her both because it was his job and because she had become his good friend. For Jian, some days were better than others. The bad days hurt Colding, made him feel incompetent and powerless. He always reminded himself, however, that she was still alive, and that was really something. She’d tried to kill herself twice; he’d personally stopped both attempts.

Jian blinked once more, perhaps trying to see through the hair, then threw her arms around Colding in a crushing hug. He returned the hug, patting her fears away as if she were his daughter and not twenty years his senior.

“I have dream again, Mister Colding.”

“It’s okay,” Colding said. He felt her tears on his neck and shoulder. Jian called every man mister, although with her thick accent it always sounded like mee-sta. He’d never been able to convince her to call him by his first name.

“It’s okay, Jian. Why don’t you see if you can get back to sleep?”

She pulled away from him and wiped tears with the back of her hand. “No,” she said. “No sleep.”

“Jian, come on. Just try. I know you haven’t slept more than six hours in the past three days.”

“No.”

“Can’t you at least try?”

“No!” She turned and slid out from under the covers, surprisingly graceful for a woman who carried 250 pounds on a five-foot-six frame. Colding realized too late that she wasn’t wearing any pajama bottoms. He turned away, embarrassed, but Jian didn’t seem to notice.

“As long as I up, I get some work done,” she said. “We have another immune response test this morning.”

Colding rubbed his eyes, partially because it kept him from looking like he was trying not to look. He stared at the familiar chessboard sitting on her dresser. She’d beat him ninety-seven times in a row, but who was counting?

Her bottle of medication sat next to the chessboard. A clear strip running down the bottle’s side let him see how much fluid remained. Across the strip, written in neat black letters, were dates in descending order: Nov. 1 on top, Nov. 30 on the bottom. The fluid leveled out at Nov. 7.

“Yes, I am taking my meds,” Jian said. “I may be crazy, but I am not stupid.”

But was she taking them? Things had been getting worse, her nightmares growing in frequency and intensity. “Don’t say that about yourself, Jian. I don’t think you’re crazy.”

“You also do not think you are handsome,” Jian said. “This proves your judgment is questionable.”

The zip of a pants zipper told him it was okay to look her way once again. She was pulling on a Hawaiian shirt—lime-green with yellow azaleas—over her sweat-stained, white T-shirt. Heavy black hair still hung wetly in front of her face, but through that hair he could see the dark rings under her bloodshot, haunted eyes.

She walked to her bizarre computer desk, sat down and switched on the power. Seven flat-panel monitors flared, coating her in a whitish glare. The setup surrounded her in a semicircle of screens. Three down at desk level, the side monitors angled in. Four monitors in the row above that, slanted down and around her so she actually had to turn her head from left to right to see them all.

Colding put the medicine bottle back and walked over to the computer station. All seven screens showed flowing strings of the letters A, G, T and C. Sometimes the letters themselves were in different colors, sometimes bright hues lit up long strings, sometimes both. To Colding, it looked like multicolored digital puke.

The immune response was the hurdle that the scientific trinity of Genada’s geniuses—Claus Rhumkorrf, Erika Hoel and Jian—simply couldn’t surpass. It was the last big theoretical hurdle that stood between Genada and saving hundreds of thousands of lives every year. Now that Jian was awake, she’d prep for the test, or, more likely, prepare for yet another failure and the resultant wrath of Dr. Claus Rhumkorrf.

“You need anything?” Colding asked.

Jian shook her head, her attention already fixed on one of the big monitors. Colding knew from experience that she probably wouldn’t register another word he said. Without looking away from the scrolling letters, Jian opened a small dorm-room fridge that sat under her desk and pulled out a bottle of Dr Pepper. Her hand shook a little as she opened it and took a long drink.

“Well, I guess I’m off to bed,” Colding said. “Holler if you need anything, okay?”

Jian grunted, but Colding didn’t know if it was a reaction to him or to a piece of data.

He’d almost made it out of the room when she stopped him.

“Mister Colding?”

He turned. Jian pointed to one of the computer screens.

“I see the date is November seventh,” she said. “I am sorry. I wish I had known her.”

Tears welled up instantly. He swallowed against the knot in his throat, clenched his teeth against the pain in his chest.

“Thank you,” he said.

Jian nodded, then turned back to her multimonitor array. Colding left before she could see him cry.

Three years to the day since Clarissa had died. Sometimes it seemed like a tick of the clock, like he’d kissed her just yesterday. Other times he had trouble remembering what she looked like, as if he’d never really known her at all. At all times, though, every minute of every day, the ache of her absence hung on him like an anchor.

He pretended to cough, giving him an excuse to wipe at his eyes in case Gunther was watching him on the hall cams. Colding walked toward his room. The research facility still reminded him of a school building: cinder-block walls painted a neutral gray, speckled tile floor, fire extinguishers paired with fire axes in each hall. There were even little handles with the words PULL HERE mounted shoulder high, although those weren’t for the fire alarm—they would close the airlocks tight in case of any viral contamination.

Colding reached his room and shut himself inside. “All secure, Gun.”

“I like the part where she said she’s not stupid,” Gunther said. “The understatement of the century.”

“Tell me about it.”

“Get back to bed, boss. I’ll keep an eye on her.”

Colding nodded even though he was alone in his room. No way he’d get back to sleep. Not today. Besides, Jian’s dreams were getting worse. The last two times that had happened, she’d started hallucinating a few weeks later, then finally tried to kill herself. For her most recent attempt, she’d locked herself in a bathroom and filled it with nitrogen gas. Her assistant, Tim Feely, realized what she was doing and called for help. Colding had broken in far ahead of the proverbial “nick of time,” but how close she came to success wasn’t the point—the pattern was the thing. Nightmares, then hallucinations, then a suicide attempt. Doc Rhumkorrf had already adjusted Jian’s meds, but who knew if that would work?

Colding had to report this. Claus Rhumkorrf was brilliant, Erika Hoel was a legend, but without Liu Jian Dan, the project simply ceased to exist.

NOVEMBER 7: EVEN FUCKING COLDER

SHOULDERS SLUMPED, COLDING walked into the secure communications office and sat down at the desk. He’d put on his clothes for the day—jeans and snow pants, snow boots and a big, black down jacket embroidered with the red Genada G above the left breast. Wouldn’t do to talk to his boss while wearing a bathrobe.

This terminal was the facility’s only way to call in or out. It connected to a single location—Genada’s headquarters outside of Leaf Rapids, Manitoba. A Genada logo screensaver spun on the monitor. Colding hit the space bar. The computer was designed to do only one thing, so the logo vanished and the connection process began. Right now, Danté’s cell phone was ringing a special ring, telling him to get to his own secure terminal.

Colding waited patiently, wondering how to phrase his message. In just over two minutes, Danté’s smiling face appeared

“Good morning, P. J. How’s the weather?”

Colding forced a grin at the hackneyed joke. On Baffin Island, latitude sixty-five degrees, there were only two temperatures—Fucking Cold, and Even Fucking Colder.

“Not that bad, sir. Mind you, I don’t go outside much, but at least everything is working great in the facility.”

Danté nodded. Colding had learned long ago that his boss always liked to hear something positive, a process Colding referred to as “giving a little sugar.” He couldn’t blame Danté’s need; if Colding had spent nearly half a billion dollars on a project, he’d want to hear some good news as well.

Danté’s skin held the rich tan of a man who can afford a private spa even in the deepest, darkest isolation of Manitoba. His thick raven-black hair looked like he’d just stepped out of some Hollywood hairdresser’s chair, and his bright-white grin looked like it had put an orthodontist’s kids through college. The crazy-big jaw featured prominently in caricatures and political cartoons. This was the face of a billion-dollar biotech company, the face that kept investors pumped up and enthused.

“I was just about to call you,” Danté said. “We acquired some additional mammalian genomes. Valentine is flying them out as we speak. He should be landing at your facility in about thirty minutes. Make sure you’re ready for him, I need him back right away.”

“Consider it done,” Colding said.

Danté leaned toward the camera, only slightly, an expectant look on his face. “So since you called me, I’m assuming you have good news about the latest immune response test?”

“They’re starting it now,” Colding said. “We won’t know for a few hours.”

“It has to work this time. Has to. If not, I think it’s time to bring in more people, top-level people.”

Colding shook his head. “I still strongly recommend against that. We’re secure right now. You bring in more people, you open the door to a CIA plant.”

“But we have background checks—”

“Let it go, Danté,” Colding interrupted, not wanting to have this conversation yet again. “You hired me for this reason. We’re a lean operation. Four scientists, four security people and that’s all we need.”

“Clearly that’s not all we need!” Danté said, his face morphing into a narrow-eyed snarl.

“I know this team. I saved this project once, remember?”

Danté sat back, took in a big breath, then let it out. “Yes, P. J. You did save the project. Fine. So if you’re not calling me with good news, you must be calling me with bad.”

“It’s Jian. She’s… she’s having nightmares again. I wanted to let you know.”

“As bad as before?”

Colding shook his head. “No. At least, not yet.”

“What’s Rhumkorrf say?”

“He’s adjusting her meds. Doesn’t think it’s a major problem, and he’s sure we can control it.”

Danté nodded, the muscles of his big jaw twitching a little. “That old woman drives me crazy. No wonder the Chinese dished her off like that.”

What a prick. Dished her off? Danté had all but begged the Chinese for permission to add Jian to the Genada staff. “Come on, Danté, you know we got the better of that deal.”

“It’s only a good deal if she makes it happen and we turn a profit. And if she doesn’t, a lot of people are going to die miserable deaths.”

“I’m more than familiar with the consequences of failure, Danté.”

Danté’s scowl softened a little. “Of course, P. J. My apologies. But we can’t keep funding this bottomless pit forever. Our investor demands results. Call me if anything else comes up.”

“Yes sir,” Colding said, then broke the connection. The spinning Genada logo returned. Genada had many investors, but only one that actually worried Danté—the Chinese government. For Danté to snap like that, the Chinese had to be pushing for a return on their significant, if covert, investment.

And that meant time was running out.

NOVEMBER 7: TASMANIAN WOLVES

COLDING WALKED OUT of the main building’s airlock and into the morning cold. Even after many months, he couldn’t get used to these temperatures. He ran the awkward run of someone trying to stay tucked inside his coat, quickly covering the fifty yards to the hangar.

The hangar looked completely out of place on the snowy, barren landscape. Seven stories high at the peak, 150 yards long, 100 yards wide. Two huge sliding front doors allowed for a plane that would never really come, which was why the hangar doubled as the barn for the cows, and tripled as the garage for the facility’s two vehicles. At the base of the left-hand sliding door was a normal, man-sized entrance. Colding waddle-ran to it and slipped inside.

Inside, heat. Thank the powers that be. He walked to one of the heaters and pressed the higher button again and again, cranking it up to full. He heard natural gas hissing through the PVC pipe as he stripped off his gloves and held his hands in front of the grate. The security-room computer controlled this heater and the fifty or sixty just like it that were spaced along the ground and up on the ceiling, but the temporary override was like heaven.

“Oh, come on,” a high-pitched voice called out. “You’re turning up the heat? It’s frickin’ toasty in here.”

“That’s because you’re a mutant from Canada,” Colding called over his shoulder. “You were probably born in an igloo.” He jerked his hands back as the heat nearly burned him. There, that was better.

Colding put his gloves back on, trapping the heat radiating off his warm skin. He turned, saw the thick-bodied Brady Giovanni start up the diesel engine of the small tanker truck they used to refuel Bobby Valentine’s helicopter.

The hangar wasn’t exactly toasty, as Brady had said, but it was well above freezing. The seventy-thousand-square-foot building held fifty Holstein cows at the far end. They were over sixty yards away, a testament to the building’s size. The big black-and-white animals chewed on feed. Occasionally one of them let out a moo that echoed off the hangar’s sheet-metal roof some seven stories above.

On this end of the hangar sat the fuel truck and a Humvee. The Hummer saw very little use other than weekly eyeball checks of the off-site data backup, which sat at the end of the facility’s one-mile-long landing strip, and for taking Erika Hoel to weekly checkups of Baffin Island’s two backup herd facilities. Each facility was a miserable thirty miles away—a sixty-mile round-trip with Hoel was about as much fun as a barbed-wire enema.

Brady eased out of the fuel truck, leaving the engine to idle. “All set for Bobby,” he said. “I’ll start refueling his chopper as soon as he lands.”

“It’s cold as hell outside this morning,” Colding said. “After you open the doors, make sure you adjust the heat so the cows don’t get chilled.”

“Sure thing. I’ll crank the heat for them. You might say it will be a hot time in the old town… this morning.”

Brady laughed at his own joke, as usual, leaving Colding to smile and nod vaguely as he politely tried to grasp the humor. Brady’s laugh sounded much like his voice: high-pitched, more at home in the body of a fifteen-year-old girl than a six-foot-four, three-hundred-pound man. As a security guard, Brady cut an imposing figure. No one understood his jokes, not even Gunther or Andy Crosthwaite, who had both served with the man in the Canadian Special Forces.

Speaking of Andy… Colding checked his watch. A little past 10:30 A.M. Imagine that, Andy “The Asshole” Crosthwaite was late.

“Brady, you heard from Andy?”

Brady shook his head.

“Shit. Well, he’ll be out here soon to help you with the refueling. I’m gonna step outside for a second. Hold down the fort.”

Brady laughed his high-pitched laugh. “Hold down the fort. That’s good!”

Colding smiled, nodded. Hard enough not getting Brady’s jokes—now he apparently didn’t get his own.

He walked out of the hangar’s small personnel door and back into the subzero morning’s blazing white. His feet scrunched the facility’s packed snow as he walked away from the hangar, until they sank calf-deep into undisturbed drifts. He stood alone, staring out at the white expanse of Baffin Island. With his back to the lab, there wasn’t a building in sight.

Three years. Fuck sleeping, he should be drunk. Maybe he’d hang with Tim Feely after the morning’s experiment. Tim was always down for a drink and always seemed to have a bottle close at hand.

Three years.

“I just wish I had you back,” Colding muttered. But Clarissa couldn’t come back, no matter how bad he wished for it. He couldn’t blunt the pain permanently lodged in his chest. What he could do, though, was make this goddamn project work… and by doing so, spare hundreds of thousands of people from experiencing pain just like his.

He turned back to look at the compound, his home for almost two years. About fifty yards southwest of the hangar stood the compound’s other building. The square, cinder-block building only looked simple. Its two entry points were facility airlocks that maintained a slight negative pressure. It was a sobering thought—Colding’s home was a place designed to keep death in.

The building contained state-of-the-art labs for genetics, computers and veterinary medicine as well as a small cafeteria, rec room and nine 600-square-foot apartments. It was a good-sized facility, but after twenty isolated months even the Trump Tower would seem claustrophobic.

Between the hangar and the main facility stood a metal platform that supported a ten-foot satellite dish. The platform, the hangar and the facility were the sum total of civilization at Genada’s Baffin Island base.

A distant, rapid growl of rotor blades echoed off the landscape. Colding turned to see a dark speck on the horizon. The speck quickly grew into the familiar image of a Sikorski S-76C helicopter. Colding loved the sight of that machine. If you took a typical TV news chopper, removed all the logos and painted it flat black, you’d have a twin to Bobby’s Sikorski. With twelve seats and a range of over four hundred nautical miles, the Sikorski could get the entire staff to safety in case of an emergency.

The heli closed in, then swooped down to the mile-long landing strip like a noisy shadow, kicking up clouds of powdery snow. The landing gear extended. Bobby Valentine set her down gently.

After a short pause, a metallic rattling sound echoed across the snowy landscape. The hangar’s massive doors—240 feet wide and 70 feet high—split in the middle and slowly opened just enough for the fuel truck. Brady drove it out and stopped close to the Sikorski. Colding walked toward the helicopter, watching the hangar doors to see if they would close.

They stayed open. Which meant, obviously, that Andy Crosthwaite was not in the hangar to shut them.

The main building’s front airlock opened. Colding expected to see Andy, but instead Gunther Jones trotted out into the cold. At six-foot-two, Gunther stood eye to eye with Colding but was much skinnier, his black Genada jacket always drooping from his rail-thin frame like a loose shirt on a wire hanger.

“Gun, where the hell is The Asshole?”

“Asleep. I didn’t want to leave you guys shorthanded.” He handed Colding a walkie-talkie. “That’s punched in to Andy’s room vid-phone.”

Colding sighed and pressed the transmit button. “Andy, pick up.”

No answer.

“Andy, come in. I’ll keep squawking until you answer.”

The handset crackled back. “Do you mind? I’m trying to sleep.”

“Get your ass out here, Andy. Gunther’s supposed to be off-duty.”

“Is Gun there?”

“Yes, he came out to cover for your lazy ass.”

“Then it’s a reach-around happy ending for all. Leave me alone, Colding.”

“Dammit, Andy, come out here and do your job.”

“I’ll pass. My GAF level is pretty low right now.”

GAF? Colding looked at Gunther.

“His give a fuck level,” Gunther said.

Colding considered Andy only slightly more useful than a day-old dog turd. He’d served with Magnus, which was the only reason the dangerous little bastard had a job at all.

“Andy, I’m—”

“Uh-oh,” Andy said. “I think this thing is broken.”

A click, and with it, the conversation was over. Colding didn’t bother hitting the transmit button.

“Don’t sweat it,” Gunther said. “I don’t mind. Let me say hi to Bobby and I’ll close up the hangar, crank the heat. Cool?”

Colding nodded. The two men reached the Sikorski as the rotor blades started their slow spin-down and Bobby Valentine hopped out.

Bobby was the Pagliones’ private pilot and all-around errand boy. He pushed his heavy brownish-blond hair away from his eyes and flashed the smile that seemed to get him laid everywhere he went. He carried a lunchbox-sized metal case in his left hand. His right he offered to Colding, who shook it firmly.

“P. J., how are you?”

“I’m just fine, Bobby-V,” Colding said. “Okay flight?”

Bobby nodded. “It was fine, as the return trip will be if I get out of here before that low-pressure system comes in.” Bobby reached out to shake Gunther’s hand. “Gun, my man, how’s the writing coming?”

“Good, real good! I’m almost finished with the third book. Stephenie Meyer won’t know what hit her.”

“Go get ’em, tiger,” Bobby said.

Gunther nodded, then jogged to the hangar. He ran by Brady, who was dragging a fuel hose to the Sikorski.

Bobby gently lifted the metal case like it was a fragile heirloom and handed it to Colding. “Right there is a regular who’s who of extinction,” Bobby said. “Caribbean monk seal, Stellar’s sea cow, pig-footed bandicoot and a Tasmanian wolf.”

“A Tasmanian wolf? Those have been gone since the thirties.”

Bobby nodded. “We found a stuffed one in Auckland. Got some DNA out of the fur or something. Okay, package delivered, so let’s get me turned around and outta here.”

“That soon? Doc Rhumkorrf is dying to go flying with you.”

Bobby checked his watch. “Can Herr Dok-tor do it right now?”

“He’s in the middle of an embryonic immune reaction experiment.”

“Sorry, I can’t wait,” Bobby said. “Besides, Doc Rhumkorrf doesn’t really need any more lessons. I’ll take him out next time.”

Colding checked his watch: 10:50 A.M. Rhumkorrf & Co. had been at it for three hours now and would soon finish. Colding hurried inside, leaving Brady and Gunther to get Bobby turned around quickly.

Hopefully this time, unlike the last fifteen embryonic runs, Colding would be able to report to Danté with some good news.

NOVEMBER 7: SHE’S GOT BALLS

THE TINY, FLOATING ball of cells could not think, could not react. It could not feel. If it could, it would have felt only one thing…

Fear.

Fear at the monster floating close by. Amorphous, insidious, unrelenting, the monster reached out with flowing tendrils that touched the ball of cells, tasting the surface.

The floating ball vibrated a little each time one of its cells completed mitosis, splitting from one cell into two daughter cells. And that happened rapidly… more rapidly than in any other animal, any other life-form. Nothing divided this fast, this efficiently. So fast the living balls vibrated every three or four minutes, cells splitting, doubling their number over and over again.

The floating balls had begun as a cow’s single-celled egg. Now? Only the outer membrane could truly be called bovine. The interior contained a unique genome that was mostly something else.

The amorphous monster? A macrophage, a white blood cell, a hunter/killer taken from that same cow’s blood and dropped into a petri dish with the hybrid egg.

The monster’s tendrils reached out, boneless, shapeless, flowing like intelligent water. They caressed the rapidly dividing egg, sensing chemicals, tasting the egg for one purpose only:

To see if the egg was self.

It was not. The egg was other.

And anything other had to be destroyed.

JIAN KNEW, EVEN at this early stage, that failure had come calling once again.

She, Claus Rhumkorrf, Erika Hoel and Tim Feely watched the giant monitor that took up an entire wall of the equipment-packed genetics lab. The monitor’s upper-right-hand corner showed green numbers: 72/150. The rest of the huge screen showed a grid of squares, ten high, fifteen across. Over half of those squares were black. The remaining squares each showed a grainy-gray picture of a highly magnified embryo.

The “150” denoted the number of embryos alive when the experiment began. Fifty cows, three genetically modified eggs from each cow, each egg tricked into replicating without fertilization. As soon as a fertilized egg, called a zygote, split into two daughter cells it became an embryo, a growing organism. Each embryo sat in a petri dish filled with a nutrient-rich solution and immune system elements from the same cow: macrophages, natural killer cells and T-lymphocytes, elements that combined to work as the body’s own special-ops assassins targeted at viruses, bacteria and other harmful pathogens.

The “72” represented the number of embryos still alive, not yet destroyed by the voracious white blood cells.

Jian watched the counter change to 68/150.

Rhumkorrf seemed to vibrate with anger, the frequency of that vibration increasing ever so slightly each time the number dropped. He was only a hair taller than Jian, but she outweighed him by at least a hundred pounds. His eyes looked wide and buglike behind thick, black-framed glasses. The madder he became, the more he shook. The more he shook, the more his comb-over came apart, exposing his shiny balding pate.

65/150

“This is ridiculous,” Erika said, her cultured Dutch accent dripping with disgust. Jian glared at the demure woman. She hated Hoel, not only because she was a complete bitch, but also because she was so pretty and feminine, all the things that Jian was not. Hoel wore her silvery-gray hair in a tight bun that revealed a haughty face. She had the inevitable wrinkles due any forty-five-year-old woman, but nothing that even resembled a laugh line. Hoel looked so pale Jian often wondered if the woman had seen anything but the inside of a sunless lab for the last thirty years.

61/150

“Time?” Rhumkorrf asked.

Jian, Tim and Erika automatically looked at their watches, but the question was meant for Erika.

“Twenty-one minutes, ten seconds,” she said.

“Remove the failures from the screen,” Rhumkorrf said through clenched teeth. Tim Feely quietly typed in a few keystrokes. The black squares disappeared. Sixty-one squares, now much larger, remained.

Tim was Jian’s assistant, a biologist with impressive bioinformatics skills. He wasn’t on Jian’s level, of course, but his multidisciplinary approach bridged the gap between Jian’s computer skills and Erika’s biological expertise. He was bigger than Rhumkorrf, but not by much. Jian hated the fact that even though the project had two men and two women, she was always the largest person in the room.

Jian focused on one of the squares. The tiny embryo sat helpless, a gray, translucent cluster of cells defined by a whitish circle. At sixteen cells, the terminology changed from embryo to morula, Latin for mulberry, so named for its resemblance to the fruit. It normally took a mammalian embryo a few days to reach the morula stage—Jian’s creatures reached this stage in just twenty minutes.

Left alone, the morula would continue to divide until it became a hollow ball of cells known as a blastocyst. But to keep growing, a blastocyst had to embed itself into the lining of a mother’s uterus. And that could never happen as long as the cow’s immune system treated the embryo like a harmful foreign body.

54/150

Jian focused on a single square. From the morula’s left, a macrophage began oozing into view, moving like an amoeba, extending pseudopodia as it slid and reached.

All along the wall-sized monitor, the white squares steadily blinked their way to blackness.

48/150

“Dammit,” Rhumkorrf hissed, and Jian wondered how he could speak so clearly with his teeth pressed together like that.

The macrophage operated on chemicals, grabbing molecules from the environment and reacting to them. The morula’s outer membrane, the zona pellucida, was the same egg membrane taken from the cow. That meant it was 100 percent natural, native to the cow, something macrophages would almost never attack. But what lay inside that outer shell was something created by Jian… Jian and her God Machine.

34/150

“Clear them out again,” Rhumkorrf said.

Tim tapped the keys. The black squares again disappeared: the remaining grayish squares grew even larger.

Instantly, the larger squares started blinking to black.

24/150

“Fuck,” Erika said in a decidedly uncultured tone.

Inside the morula, a cell quivered. Its sides pinched in, the shape changing from a circle to an hourglass. Mitosis. A macrophage tendril reached the morula, touched it, almost caressing it.

14/150

The macrophage’s entire amorphous body slid into view, a grayish, shapeless mass.

9/150

The squares steadily blinked out, their blackness mocking Jian, reminding her of her lack of skill, her stupidity, her failure.

4/150

The macrophage moved closer to the morula. The dividing cell quivered once more, and the single cell became two. Growth, success, but it was too late.

1/150

The macrophage’s tendrils encircled the ball, then touched on the other side, surrounding it. The tendrils joined, engulfing the prey.

The square turned black, leaving only a white-lined grid and a green number.

0/150

“Well, that was just spectacular,” Rhumkorrf said. “Absolutely spectacular.”

“Oh, please,” Erika said. “I really don’t want to hear it.”

Rhumkorrf turned to face her. “You’re going to hear it. We have to produce results. For heaven’s sake, Erika, you’ve built your whole career on this process.”

“That was different. The quagga and the zebra are almost genetically identical. This thing we’re creating is artificial, Claus. If Jian can’t produce a proper genome, the experiment is flawed to begin with.”

Jian wanted to find a place to hide. Rhumkorrf and Erika had been lovers once, but no more. Now they fought like a divorced couple.

Erika jerked her thumb at Jian. “It’s her fault. All she can do is give me an embryo with a sixty-five percent success probability. I need at least ninety percent to have any chance.”

“You’re both responsible,” Rhumkorrf said. “We’re missing something here. Specific proteins are producing the signals that trigger the immune response. You have to figure out which genes are producing the offending proteins.”

“We’ve looked,” Erika said. “We’ve gone over it again and again. The computer keeps analyzing, we keep making changes, but the same thing happens every time.”

Rhumkorrf slowly ran a hand over his head, putting his comb-over mostly back in place. “We’re too close to it. We’ve got to change our way of thinking. I know the fatal flaw is staring us in the face, we just don’t recognize it.”

Tim stood up and stretched. He ran both hands through his short-but-thick blond locks, looking directly at Rhumkorrf when he did. Jian wondered if Tim did that on purpose, to mock Rhumkorrf’s thinning hair.

“We’ve been over this a hundred times,” Tim said. “I’m already reviewing all of Jian and Erika’s work on top of doing my own.”

Erika let out a huff. “As if you could even understand my work, you idiot.”

“You shut up!” Jian said. “You do not talk to Tim like that.”

Erika smirked, first at Jian, then at Tim. “Such a big man, Tim. You need a fat old woman to fight your battles for you?”

Tim’s body stayed perfectly still except for his right hand, which extended and flipped Erika the middle finger.

“That will be enough, Mister Feely,” Rhumkorrf said. “If you’re not smart enough to contribute to the work, the least you could do is shut your mouth and focus your worthless brain on running your little computer.”

Tim’s hands clenched into fists. Jian felt so bad for him. All his life, Tim Feely had probably been used to being the smartest person in the room. Here, he was the dumbest—something Claus never let him forget.

“I realize we’re all frustrated,” Rhumkorrf said, “but we have to find a way to think in new directions. We’re so close, can’t you all feel it?”

His bug-eyed glare swept around the room, eliciting delayed nods of agreement from all of them. They were close, maddeningly so. Jian just couldn’t find that missing piece. It almost made her long for the days before the medicine, when the ideas came freer, faster. But no, that wouldn’t do—she knew all too well where that led.

Rhumkorrf took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes. “I want you all to think about something.” He put the glasses back on. “It took us an hour to conduct this experiment. In that hour, at least four people died from organ failure. Four people who would have lived if they had a replacement. In twenty-four hours, almost a hundred people will die. Perhaps you should consider that before you start bickering again.”

Jian, Tim and even Erika stared at the floor.

“Whatever it takes,” Rhumkorrf said. “Whatever it takes, we will make this happen. We’ve just failed the immune response test for the sixteenth time. All of you, go work from your rooms. Maybe if we stop sniping at each other, we can find that last obstacle and eliminate it.”

Jian nodded, then walked out of the lab and headed back to her small apartment. Sixteen immune response tests, sixteen failures. She had to find a way to make number seventeen work, had to, because millions of lives depended on her and her alone.

NOVEMBER 8: GAME… OVER?

DANTÉ PAGLIONE SAT behind his massive white marble desk, watching, waiting. His brother, Magnus, sat on the other side of the desk, reclining in one of the two leather chairs, cell phone pressed to his left ear, eyes narrowed. Magnus’s nostrils flared open, shut. Open, shut. His thumb constantly spun the Grey Cup championship ring on his right hand. The office lights gleamed off of Magnus’s shaved head.

To anyone else in the world, Magnus looked perfectly calm. In truth he was. Always. At least on the surface. But Danté had known Magnus all of his life, and he could tell when something chewed at his little brother’s guts.

“Continue,” Magnus said into the phone.

Danté looked to his office wall, taking in the series of original Leonardo da Vinci sketches. Da Vinci’s work was the epitome of control, of calmness, methodical execution of perfection. Things that Danté strived for in all phases of his life.

“Elaborate,” Magnus said into the phone. His nose flared again, just a little. He sat up slowly until his back was perfectly straight. Separated by only a year and a half, Danté and Magnus looked extremely similar—both had violet eyes, a big jaw, both were tall and solid, but Magnus had spent far more time in the weight room and it showed.

Although the two were instantly recognizable as brothers, the youngest had another key differentiator—he just looked dangerous. The thin scar running from his left eyebrow down to his left cheek was a big part of that look. And when Magnus focused like he was focusing now, staring off into nothing, that cold brain processing all the information, the truth was that Danté’s kid brother looked creepy as fuck.

Magnus folded the phone, casually slid it into an inside pocket of his tailored sport coat, then sat back slowly and crossed his left leg over his right knee. “The Novozyme facility in Denmark blew up.”

“Blew up? The animal rights activists bombed it?”

“Somewhat bigger than that,” Magnus said. “Our little NSA hacker friend isn’t sure, but she thinks it was a fuel-air explosive.”

Danté let out a slow breath. He didn’t have to ask what that meant. There was only one reason to incinerate a billion-dollar facility: a virus had jumped species. “What about Matal and his staff?”

“Dead,” Magnus said. “He was in the facility. The entire main staff is gone.”

Danté nodded. Novozyme was Genada’s primary competitor. Matal had been their answer to Claus Rhumkorrf. You could always build new facilities, but you couldn’t replace talent like Rhumkorrf or Matal. In the gold rush for viable xenotransplantation, Novozyme was no longer a factor.

“This works for us,” Danté said. “Novozyme is out of the game.”

Magnus smiled, just a little. “I’m afraid the game is over. For everyone. The G8 are cooperating to shut all of us down. Farm Girl says Fischer is in charge, and he’s starting with us.”

Farm Girl. The code name for their NSA contact. She would never reveal her real name. Only Magnus spoke with her. Farm Girl’s information was always reliable, and she was right—if Fischer was coming their way, it meant major problems.

Anger, annoyance and anxiety all flared up in Danté’s chest. Fischer had come after Genada when Galina Poriskova tried to blow the whistle on the surrogate mother fetal experiments. Danté had hired P. J. Colding and Tim Feely to clean up the mess and get rid of any evidence. If those two hadn’t succeeded, Fischer would have shut the company down and probably sent Danté and Magnus to jail.

Magnus’s smile faded, his blank expression returned. “Kind of ironic, isn’t it?”

“What is?”

“That we get shut down over a virus jumping species, and yet our specific line of work ensures that can’t happen. If only you hadn’t kept that a secret, Danté, the G8 would leave us be.”

“We couldn’t announce our method. If we had, Novozyme and Monsanto and the others would have tried to copy it.”

Magnus shrugged and raised his eyebrows, a gesture that said oh well.

It was bad, but perhaps not that bad. Danté could find a way to make it work. “What if we tell them now? I can call Fischer. Or better yet, have Colding do it. They have a history.”

Magnus laughed. “They’re not exactly poker buddies. And anyway, it’s too late now. They won’t believe our methods are safe, not after Novozyme’s accident. It’s over.”

Danté took a deep breath. He let it out, slow and controlled. There was always a way. He hadn’t made Genada one of the world’s largest biotechs by sitting around waiting for something to happen. He succeeded because he always thought ahead.

“We knew it might come to this,” Danté said. “That’s why we have the plane.”

Magnus stared for several seconds. His right hand rubbed at his left forearm, the fabric hissing quietly in the silent room. His nostrils were flaring again.

“Danté, you can’t be serious about actually using that thing.”

“Of course I’m serious. You think we spent fifty million dollars on something so we don’t use it when we need it most? Rhumkorrf is close. They could have an embryo within a few weeks.”

“Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow,” Magnus said. “Funny how I’ve heard the phrase within a few weeks for the last six months.”

“Rhumkorrf produces results, Magnus. Venter’s artificial bacteria, bringing the quagga back from extinction… every project he touches ends in success. He’s been producing Nobel-quality work since he was ten years old.”

“Has he also been racking up billion-dollar debts since he was ten years old?”

“Screw the debt,” Danté said. “We’ve invested far too much money to abandon this.”

“Invested? Is that what you still call it? We’re broke. The well has run dry. Do you have any idea what it costs to actually fly that contraption?”

“I know.”

“And what about Sara Purinam and her crew? That makes four new noses deep in our business. The more people, the more chance for infiltration.”

“Now you sound like Colding.”

The small smile returned. “A rare occurrence, I assure you, but sometimes Colding is right. Every person we add is a risk, or did you already forget about Galina?”

Danté’s face felt hot. He didn’t like to talk about that girl, not with his brother. “No, I haven’t forgotten her. But we have to bring in Purinam and her crew. We just don’t have a choice.”

“Of course we have a choice. We had a choice with Galina.”

It wasn’t what Magnus said, but the way he said it. Danté blinked a few times. “That’s not funny.”

“Odd,” Magnus said. “I’m so well known for my sense of humor.”

Danté shook his head. Surely Magnus couldn’t seriously suggest such a thing. “This is different. These people are loyal to us, so don’t mention it again.”

“Are you sure? Colding and Feely, they’re both ex-USAMRIID, same department Fischer works for.”

“We wouldn’t even have a company if it wasn’t for Colding.”

Magnus shrugged. “And Feely? How do you know Fischer doesn’t have him on a string?”

Danté rubbed his temples. “What choice do we have? Colding tells me Feely is the only reason Jian and Erika can work together at all.”

“I think we should just end it.”

“And then what? Do you want to tell the Chinese that Jian is gone? That their money is gone?”

Magnus looked at the da Vinci sketches. “Speaking of money, the Chinese cut us off even before the Novozyme incident. No more spendy-spendy for you, round-eye. The whole company is in the red because of Rhumkorrf’s project, and now we’re adding costs with Purinam and the plane? How are we going to pay for this?”

“I have an investor presentation scheduled. Five extremely rich individuals. I just have to ask for more than I originally planned.”

Magnus turned back to look at Danté. Magnus rarely showed emotion, but Danté knew how to spot telltale signs of things like anger, frustration. Magnus had another tell, one he only seemed to express for Danté—the half-raised eyebrows of admiration.

“Five?” Magnus said. “Think you can get them all?”

“Does a bear shit in the woods?”

Magnus smiled again, a genuine one this time. Magnus possessed many skills Danté did not, but what Magnus couldn’t do was charm billionaires out of their precious money. Danté could. Every time.

“This project is too important to stop now,” Danté said. “We’re talking about hundreds of thousands of lives.”

“Hundreds of thousands? Being a little grandiose, don’t you think? Maybe you’re really talking about one life, in particular.”

Danté’s face flushed red. “That’s not what this is about,” he said, although he knew full well that when you got down to brass tacks, when you got down to the real nitty-gritty, that one life—his life—was exactly what it was all about. “We’re pushing forward, Magnus. This benefits all of humanity. I don’t care if we go into the red. This project puts Genada on top, that’s what Dad would have wanted.”

Magnus stared, but then his eyes softened, just a little, and he nodded.

“Magnus, these are trying times, but the hardest steel is forged in the hottest fires. Do you have my back, or not?”

Magnus drew a deep breath, then sighed and relaxed. “Of course I do. Always. You know you don’t have to ask. I’m just not going to rubber-stamp everything you say is all.”

“We wouldn’t be much of a team if you did. Please get Purinam and her crew ready, and you go with them. Load up one of the local backup herds before you take off. The move will be faster if we don’t have to load the Baffin Island cattle. When you’re thirty minutes out, call Colding and tell him to gather the staff for an emergency evac. Even if Fischer does pick off those signals, I don’t think he’ll have time to react.”

Magnus stood and walked out of the office. Danté would have to watch him. His brother got things done, no question about that, but in stressful times like these he could make bad decisions.

Like the one he’d made about Galina Poriskova.

NOVEMBER 8: RUNNING SUCKS

“I HATE RUNNING,” Harold Miller said between big breaths.

“Yeah,” said Matt “Cappy” Capistrano, “I fucking hate running.”

Sara Purinam shook her head, then wiped sweat out of her eyes. “Three more laps to go, let’s dig.”

Outside the hangar, winter winds swept across the snowy plains of Manitoba. Inside, however, she kept the temperature nice and warm. The huge plane took up most of the space, but she made sure all equipment was at least six feet away from the hangar walls. That left a nice running track all the way around. Civilians or not, her boys were going to stay in shape.

“Running sucks,” Harold said.

“Yeah,” Cappy said. “Running sucks.”

The Twins, as Harold and Cappy were known, had elevated looking pitiful to an art form. Both jogged along, heads lolling a little bit, hands swinging loosely more than pumping. They ran the same, wore the same facial expressions, and repeated each other like sycophant parrots. They might have actually passed for twins save for the fact that Cappy was as black as an old Al Jolson caricature and if Miller were any whiter, his skin would have been transparent.

Sara looked up at the far wall. Alonzo Barella, the last member of their crew, had a half-lap lead. “Come on, guys, let’s catch ’Zo.”

“You catch him,” Harold said as his already pathetic pace slowed to a walk.

“Yeah,” Cappy said. “You catch him and shit.”

It was one thing to piss and moan, another thing entirely to quit. Sara felt an automatic diatribe of discipline build up in her head, but she stopped it—they weren’t in the military anymore and she wasn’t their superior officer. They were all partners. Friends.

Instead of yelling, she doubled her pace, leaving the Twins behind. She reached the corner and turned left, keeping the hangar wall always on her right. Maybe this time, she would catch him.

Unlike the Twins, Alonzo Barella loved to run. The skinny man could go all day. Sara pushed her pace even more, cutting his lead in half, then slowed instantly as her cell phone rang. Not with the normal ring, but with Darth Vader’s theme from Star Wars—the special ringtone she’d set up for Magnus Paglione.

“’Zo! Hold up!”

Up ahead, Alonzo stopped and turned. Jogging in place. He wasn’t even sweating.

Sara answered. Within seconds she had her orders. After a year and a half of getting paid to do nothing but maintenance, it was time to bust out “Fred” and earn their keep.

And, she had to wonder, if she’d finally see that piece of shit P. J. Colding again.

NOVEMBER 8: NOT WIRED THAT WAY

INSIDE THE VETERINARY medicine lab, Erika Hoel cursed under her breath. Sixteen straight failures of the immune response test. Claus had been mad before, but this time his face had turned so red Erika wondered if her former lover might have a stroke.

Claus. That asshole. Erika hated the scientific failure, but couldn’t help feeling some satisfaction at seeing Claus so angry. So… frustrated.

She’d loved him once, back when they worked together on the quagga project. Claus wanted what he couldn’t have, and what he’d wanted was for Erika to love only him. But she wasn’t wired that way. She had needs, baseline drives and desires that couldn’t be ignored and didn’t need to be corrected. There was nothing wrong with her. She liked men. She also liked women. If Claus had been right for her, he would have understood that, accepted it. But no, for all his brilliance, for all his righteous ego and accomplishments, deep down inside he was a small-souled man who needed to control people. A man who needed to be the only one.

She still loved Claus.

She still loved Galina.

And she had neither. Heartbreak is bad enough by itself, but a double dose is exponential agony.

Galina had been a far better assistant than Tim Feely. Not that Tim was stupid, not at all, but some people just operate on a different level. Tim was competent enough, and he also served… other purposes, true, but Galina he was not.

Erika had already been in love with Claus when Danté hired Galina. A second love had followed. Erika should have told Claus, but she’d known full well what he would say. So she’d kept it secret, and it had ended as badly as it could: when Claus caught them in the act.

Claus forced Danté to kick Galina out of the project. And then Galina had asked Erika to leave as well, so they could be together. And what had Erika chosen? The project. At the time she told herself the project was far more important than romantic dalliances. Oh, that conversation with Galina, that last conversation—how it had shattered the young girl’s heart.

Galina hadn’t taken it lying down. She’d been willing to fight for Erika. Or so she’d said. Galina threatened to blow the whistle on Genada’s human line of experimentation, but after a few weeks, Danté and Magnus had bought the girl off. They gave her millions in hush money and sent her back to Russia. Love, it seems, like everything else, has a price.

I chose the project. That’s what Erika had told herself at the time. In the past year, however, she gradually realized the real reason she’d stayed. For Claus. To be near him. But he never forgave her. She had begged him for another chance. He would not cave. He never mentioned the incident, never changed the way he acted around Erika in the lab. In many ways that was even worse—now he treated her like a colleague, and a subordinate one at that, as if their hundreds of nights of passion had never existed at all.

She had chosen the project, and now the project was all she had.

Standard cloning projects had a fairly predictable pattern. First, select a cell from the animal you wanted to clone—usually a stem cell—and enucleate it by removing the single cell’s nucleus. Second, take an egg from the surrogate mother and enucleate that as well. Third, put the stem cell nucleus into the now-empty egg cell, provide an electrical shock to fuse the two, then wait for the single cell to start dividing in a process called mitosis. If that happened, insert the hybrid egg into the surrogate mother and let it develop normally.

The method had originated in the legendary cloning of Dolly, the Scottish sheep. Later came the avalanche of cloned species: fish, birds, goats, cattle, even dogs and cats. The process had become so formulated that elements were taught as early as high school.

The key to all cloning methods revolved around using the same or similar species for both the egg and the creature to be cloned. For the ancestor project, however, the last close relative died out some 260 million years earlier. Jian’s computer program, the thing they all called the “God Machine,” had provided a genome that actually produced a viable embryo, splitting on its own, undergoing several rounds of mitosis. In a petri dish, that part, the impossible part, had already been solved. But you couldn’t grow a whole animal in a petri dish—until they could trick the cow’s immune system to accept the embryo as self, the embryo could not grow into a fetus, and the project was at a standstill.

With the quagga, the answer had been comparatively easy. The animal was closely related to zebras. Once they had cultivated a quagga chromosome out of DNA recovered from hair and other remains, they injected it into the enucleated zebra egg, then put the egg back into a surrogate zebra mother.

It hadn’t worked at first. The zebra’s immune system rejected the embryo. Erika had found a way around the problem by isolating the gene sequence that produced the antigens—the offending proteins—then replaced the sequence with the corresponding segment from the zebra’s DNA. It had been a small section of DNA, and they still weren’t sure exactly what it coded for, but the method worked. With the offending antigenic proteins eliminated, the zebra’s body handled the pregnancy normally, resulting in the first baby quagga to set foot on the planet in more than a century.

But zebra and quagga DNA were over 99 percent identical. Now, however, they didn’t have a mother that was a close genetic match. They had a computer-designed genome and a cow.

Jian’s God Machine assigned a “viability rating” to estimate the chances of the hybrid egg passing the immune response test, then developing through surrogate pregnancy all the way to birth. It measured the products of known DNA sequences against those that were lesser known, or even unknown. So far, 65 percent was the highest rate they’d hit. Somewhere in that remaining 35 percent were the proteins that triggered the bovine immune system. That 35 percent amounted to billions of nucleotides, millions of sequences—far too many to eliminate by trial and error. No one knew exactly what genes coded for what traits. She and Jian kept changing these unknown sequences, but couldn’t say for sure what the changes would affect—they might be swapping out a protein that affected the color of the animal’s eyes, or a protein that was a critical component of brain development. And they couldn’t know until the animal grew beyond a ball of undifferentiated cells. For the immune system experiment to work, they’d have to reach an 80 percent viability rating, possibly higher.

When they’d started the project with mammal genomes available online, in the public domain, the viability rating had been low. The first thousand genomes generated an 11 percent rating. The thousand after that took them to 20 percent. After they had processed four thousand mammalian genomes, they’d cracked 45 percent viability. From there, Genada’s bottomless resources started sequencing uncommon mammals, even extinct species, and with each one the rating ticked a little bit higher.

Would Bobby Valentine’s four new specimens be enough to get over 80 percent? And if not, what could she change? Perhaps a new approach and the additional genomes together would get them over the hump. Part of Erika hoped for success, but a stronger part hoped for failure. The last thing she wanted to see was Dr. Claus Rhumkorrf rewarded for being a heartbreaking, small-minded prick.

NOVEMBER 8: EVERY PICTURE TELLS A STORY

MAGNUS FOLDED HIS cell phone and put it in his left jacket pocket. He took a sip from a glass of Yukon Jack. The ice cubes clinked a little. He set the drink down and put both hands on the desktop. He breathed slowly. In and out. In and out.

In contrast to his brother’s da Vinci sketches and priceless works of art, Magnus decorated his office with personal items: dozens of photos, and a single, wall-mounted display case.

Several of the photos showed a smiling, postmission Magnus in various uniforms, some tan and brown, some green, one in a thick wet suit. In all of those, he was posing with other dirty, smiling, dangerous-looking men. Four faces showed up repeatedly: Andy Crosthwaite, Gunther Jones, Brady Giovanni and Bobby Valentine. Those pictures came from Magnus’s years in Joint Task Force 2, the counterterrorist division of the Canadian Special Forces. He smiled a lot in those pictures. Things had made sense back then.

The largest photo was from Magnus’s days as a tight end for the Calgary Stampeders of the Canadian Football League—dressed in the red-and-white uniform, stretching high and long to catch a football just before landing in the end zone. A simpler time, a time between leaving the service and joining Danté at Genada.

The pictures weren’t all from the CFL or JTF2. One of them showed Magnus and Andy Crosthwaite holding hunting rifles, kneeling in front of an old well made of black stone, a bloody line of nine severed deer heads spread out before them. Danté kept asking him to take that picture down, said the office wasn’t the place for it, but Magnus liked it, so it stayed. There were also postcardish shots, of course: pictures of Magnus and Danté fly-fishing in Montana, at a business meeting in Brussels, together on a yacht in the south of France. Those photos with his brother were true treasures—nothing mattered more than family. Danté was the only family Magnus had left.

Danté had also asked Magnus to remove the wooden display case, but that simply wasn’t going to happen. On the left, the case showed Magnus’s unit insignia and rank pins. Stretching out to the right, a dozen Ka-Bar knives mounted point-down, sharp edge facing right. Each of the knives had a story. Five of the knives showed the blackened discolorations of metal heated in a fire. There was enough space for three or four more on the case’s right-hand side. Some tales are never finished.

Magnus took one last deep breath, focused, let it out slow, then turned to his computer and called up a spreadsheet.

A lot of red.

His brother was running Genada into the ground because of some altruistic vision. And for what? A replacement organ bought you what, ten years? Maybe twenty? The universe was at least thirteen billion years old—were there even enough decimal places to measure twenty years against that?

Everyone dies.

Some sooner than others.

Danté had smarts, cleverness, business instincts. That was why Dad had left the company to Danté, not to Magnus. A smart decision, the right decision. But one thing that Danté didn’t have was a real backbone. That was okay, though—that’s what brothers are for. When it came time for the hard decisions, Magnus would protect his brother.

Magnus would make sure things got done.

NOVEMBER 8: THE GAMES PEOPLE PLAY

COLDING KNOCKED ON the door to Tim Feely’s apartment.

“Enter,” Tim called from inside.

Colding tried the handle and found it locked. “It’s locked, dumb-ass.”

“You know the code.”

“I don’t know the code to your door, Tim.”

“You know my computer password? Same thing, chief.”

Colding sighed. He did know that password, as did everyone else. 6969. The high-security practices of their resident computer expert. Colding punched the numbers into the keypad mounted on the wall next to the door.

Tim sat on the couch of his tiny living room, laptop on the coffee table in front of him. Also on the coffee table, a half-empty bottle of Talisker scotch. Tim loved his scotch.

His apartment looked exactly like Jian’s, and every other apartment in the facility: about six hundred square feet of cozy space divided into a living room, a kitchenette, a bathroom and a bedroom.

“Come on, Tim. Why are you working in here instead of with Jian?”

“Because Tiny Overlord Rhumkorrf wants us to think differently.”

“Immune response test failed again?”

Tim nodded. Colding walked up to the couch and peeked at Tim’s laptop screen.

“Dude,” Colding said. “Is scotch and Tetris really part of thinking different?”

Tim shrugged. “Apparently my brain isn’t really worth anything. I might as well explore new territories, like a good buzz and a high score.”

“Oh come on. Your wallet should be embroidered with the words smart motherfucker. How did Rhumkorrf handle it?”

Tim paused the game, took a sip of his drink. “Rhumkorrf is a douchebag, man. A real douchebag.”

“I don’t see that,” Colding said. “He’s just an intense guy.”

“He’d sell you out in a heartbeat if it got him what he wanted. He’d sell any of us out.” Tim and Rhumkorrf had clashed from the beginning. Tim did a good job of pushing down his dislike and playing his role. Mostly. “Know what really burns my ass?”

“What?”

“That Jian is doing the real work. So is Erika. But Rhumkorrf is going to get the lion’s share of the credit.”

“You gotta let it go,” Colding said. “We’re here to save lives, change history. Not for glory.”

“Hah. I’m in it for the money.”

Colding felt a stab of anger, but he shoved it away. Maybe Tim was kidding, maybe not. Didn’t matter. As long as Tim helped make the project a success, he could have whatever motivation he liked.

“Should I check in on Rhumkorrf?”

Tim shrugged. “If you like being in the presence of a walking, talking asshole, that’s your business. He’ll be in the genetics lab, no doubt. But why do that when you can park your ass for a few and have a drink with me, brotha-man?”

“I should check in on everyone first. Maybe I’ll have one later tonight.”

Tim shook his head. “Naw, can’t do later. I’m… I’m kind of taking a break now, but in a few hours I’ll be locked down in here. Really getting into the research, you know? Tim needs his alone time. And before you ask, I checked on Jian and she’s fine. And also, before you ask, I’ll make sure she takes her meds in a little bit.”

“Gosh, it’s like you have ESP or something.”

“That or a basic short-term memory,” Tim said. “If you’re not going to get tanked with me, kindly move along so I can make Tetris my digital bitch.”

Colding gave a half-assed salute, then walked out of the apartment.

Just as Tim had predicted, Rhumkorrf stood alone in the genetics lab, staring at a wall-sized screen full of nothing but black squares.

“What’s up, Doc?”

Rhumkorrf turned, eyes tight with anger, but seemed to relax a little when he saw Colding. “I fear I am not in the mood for your cartoon references today, my friend.”

“Sufferin’ succotash,” Colding said. “That bad?”

“Yes, that bad. We’re at an impasse. I’m convinced we’re missing something relatively obvious.”

“Did you try turning it off, then turning it back on?”

Rhumkorrf glared, then laughed. “If only it were that simple. Is Bobby still here? I could use some flying time to forget all of this.”

“Sorry, he had to take off. If it’s any consolation, he left four new samples.”

The little man sighed. “Well, who knows. Maybe the answer is in one of those. Please ask Tim to process them right away.”

“Tim is very busy,” Colding said. “Said he had a puzzling issue.”

Rhumkorrf rolled his eyes. “You’re a horrible liar. Tetris again?”

Colding nodded.

Rhumkorrf rubbed his eyes. “Have Jian process the samples. The work is beneath her, but maybe she could use the change of pace.”

“Speaking of Jian, Doc, her nightmares are getting worse.”

“Oh? How often? More intense?”

Rhumkorrf’s words came out fast and clipped. He even sounded a little excited. Colding often wondered if the man saw Jian as a person or as a set of symptoms, just another scientific problem to be solved.

“Three nights in a row,” Colding said. “I can’t really say if they’re more intense.”

“Any hallucinations?”

“I don’t think so. Should you change her dosage again?”

Rhumkorrf shook his head. “No, we need to let the most recent change run its course, see if it corrects the situation before we introduce an additional variable.”

“But she’s sleeping less and less. I’m worried about her.”

“You worry about everyone and everything,” Rhumkorrf said. “Trust me, I’ll make adjustments before she becomes suicidal again. We can’t lose Jian, now can we?”

Colding chewed on his lower lip. Rhumkorrf was the doctor here, and he’d helped Jian before. Maybe the little man was right, maybe these things just took time.

“Okay,” Colding said. “I’ll give Jian the samples and have her process them. How about you? Can I get you anything?”

“Do you have a Nobel Prize in your pocket?”

“No, that’s not a Nobel Prize, I’m just really glad to see you.”

Rhumkorrf laughed again, then pushed Colding out of the lab.

NOVEMBER 8: OPPORTUNITY OF A LIFETIME

THE FIVE PEOPLE in Genada’s plush meeting room made for quite the Fortune 500 photo op. Two men and a woman from America, one playboy Brit entrepreneur and one Chinese shipping mogul. Both of the American men had made billions in technology—one in software, the other with a search engine—while the woman had turned her family’s small line of hotels into the world’s second-largest chain.

The shipping mogul was the biggest risk. If word got back to the Chinese State Council, Danté would have much to answer for. They expected to be the sole investor in this project. When it succeeded, the Chinese government would have a way to help its estimated 1.5 million citizens waiting for an organ transplant. With only about a hundred thousand potential donors annually, the People’s Republic was desperate to do something to help its populace. The situation was so bad that human rights organizations claimed prisoners were being killed to harvest their organs. China needed a solution. Rhumkorrf’s project was it.

Still, the shipping magnate hadn’t become one of the richest people on the planet by running his mouth about exclusive investment opportunities. He’d be fine. At least, Danté hoped he’d be fine.

Danté greeted the billionaires, gave his most charming smile, then got down to business. “Genada has a cash-flow issue with a critical project. We need capital and we need it now. That gives you a window of opportunity. You’ve all signed nondisclosure agreements, so I’ll just cut to the chase.”

He picked up a remote control and hit a button, turning on the large flat-panel monitor mounted on the wall. The screen displayed a chart with a rising, jagged red line.

“The red line represents the growing number of people in the United States with terminal illnesses who are waiting for an organ transplant. Over a hundred thousand right now, up from eighty thousand just five years ago, which was up from fifty-three thousand a decade ago. A new name is added to the list every ten minutes. Only about fifteen thousand organs will become available this year, roughly fifty-five percent from deceased donors, the rest from living donors. In the United States, the average wait for a kidney is over fourteen months. The discrepancy between those needing an organ and available organs increases by about twelve percent each year. Roughly fourteen thousand Americans will die, this year, while waiting for an organ that will never arrive.

“Those numbers are just the United States. Worldwide, some estimates range as high as 750,000 people who need a kidney transplant. That doesn’t take into account the need for hearts, lungs and livers.

“Genada estimates the average fee for a replacement organ will be around fifty thousand dollars. That means an annual market of over thirty-seven billion. And that is the current market. With improving living conditions and medical care in India, China, and elsewhere in the developing world, we expect the number of people needing an organ transplant to double in the next ten years. Do I have your attention thus far?”

The five investors’ heads nodded in unison.

“Several companies are trying to solve this shortfall by a process known as xenotransplantation—transplanting the organs or tissues of one species into another.”

“Animal parts,” said a small man with thick glasses and a mop haircut. He was one of the American software magnates, and by some standards, the richest man on Earth. “Baboon hearts, pig livers and the like.”

Danté nodded and smiled. “With current technology, a xenotransplant can keep someone alive for a few days, weeks at most, and only then if the patient stays in a hospital the whole time. The human immune system, you see, usually attacks the organ. Defeating that immune response is the goal of most companies, but solving that issue leads to a larger, far more significant hazard.

“Xenotransplantation opens up the possibility of a virus jumping species. When you introduce a foreign organ into a human body, you also introduce any viruses that are in that organ. Normally, these viruses die quickly, as they aren’t designed to attack a human host. But if those viruses adapt to infect human cells, we can get an infection against which humans have no natural antibodies.”

“The H1N1 virus,” the shipping magnate said. “Swine flu, SARS, bird flu. Those are species-jumping viruses.”

“Or like what just happened in Greenland,” said the lone woman. “This doesn’t sound like a valid investment to me. It sounds like a way to kill millions.”

The comment caught Danté by surprise. The four men looked at the woman—they obviously hadn’t heard about Greenland, but their confidence slipped nonetheless. Apparently Genada wasn’t the only company with contacts in high places. Danté briefly wondered if Farm Girl might be selling the same information to other parties.

“Genada has the solution,” he said. “We are perhaps the only valid investment in this area, because our process eliminates any possibility of a virus jumping from the donor species to humans.”

He clicked a button on the remote. The picture showed a small creature perched on a rotting log, surrounded by exotic vegetation of some long-gone jungle. The creature had somewhat of a teardrop shape—thick in the middle, narrowing to thin hips and ending in a short, pointed tail. The rear legs stuck out at forty-five-degree angles from those slight hips, resulting in knees and feet farther away from the body than those of a cat or a dog. The front legs also jutted away from the body, but at less of an angle. A sparse layer of silvery fur covered the lithe little body. Although it showed some characteristics of a modern animal, particularly the long whiskers protruding from its pointy nose, it looked unmistakably primitive.

“This is a Thrinaxodon, which lived some two hundred million years ago. It’s a member of a group of animals known as Synapsids, also called proto-mammals. Something like the Thrinaxodon gave rise to all mammals. That something is the ancestor of you, me, dogs, dolphins, every mammal species. That ancestor, my friends, is what Genada is re-creating, and it’s going to make all of you a great deal of money.”

The mop-haired man stood up, a big smile on his face, his eyes alight with excitement. “So let me get this straight—you’re creating this ancestor creature so you can put its organs into people and save lives, and at the same time, eliminate the possibility of these dangerous viruses?”

Danté nodded. “We will create an animal similar to the mammalian ancestor. Since the ancestor would be engineered from the DNA up, we can ensure the resulting animal will not carry any naturally occurring viruses that could adapt to infect people.

“Cataloging and working with this computerized biological data is a science called bioinformatics. The Human Genome Project and Celera Genomics sequenced the entire human genetic code, right down to every last nucleotide, but humans were only the start. Scientists have sequenced thousands of mammals, storing the digital analysis in public databases like Gen-Bank. These genomes, combined with animals we sequenced ourselves, give Genada the complete genetic code of almost every mammal on the planet.”

“I do not understand,” the shipping magnate said. “You have genomes of modern animals, but not of this ancestor?”

“Genetic mutation is the basis of evolution,” Danté said. “But not all genes mutate at the same rate. As species branch out from a common ancestor, some genes mutate faster, some don’t mutate at all. By using a molecular clock, so to speak, we can gauge which sequences have changed, and by comparing that gene to the same gene of another mammal, we can tell which sequence is older, closer to the original ancestor’s genetic code.”

The woman smiled. “I’ll be damned. That’s such a simple concept, just use the lowest common denominator. You take out everything that’s unique, and you’ll be left with everything that’s common.”

Danté nodded. They were getting it. The woman was the toughest sell. The software mogul was in, Danté could see that as plain as day, but if the woman invested the last three would follow.

“Our staff created an evolution lab inside the computer,” Danté said. “This program statistically analyzes genomes based on the probable function of each gene sequence. The computer works with our digitized ancestor genome, predicting final form and function, then makes changes, predicts again, and measures probability for desired traits. It’s just like evolution, only in reverse and a million times faster than nature. We create the creature in the computer, one nucleotide at a time. Since it is created from scratch, we know—for certain—that it’s free of any viral contamination.”

The Chinese man spoke. “But that animal on the screen, it is too small. You could not put its heart in me.”

“Correct,” Danté said. “But that animal on the screen was created only in silica, only on the computer, to give us a baseline. We’ve already done that. From there, the computer added specific virtual genes coding for size and human organ compatibility. Our first living generation won’t be perfect, but we can analyze the phenotype—the size of the animal and what it looks like—against the genotype—the actual DNA coding. Once we have that, we keep modifying the genome until the animal’s organs are ideally suited for human transplantation.”

The mop-haired man sat back down. “But if you have all this technology, why not just grow the organs individually?”

“Some companies are working on just that solution, but it’s not yet possible. And when it is possible, growing an individual organ will require an expensive lab or manufacturing center. Short answer, the cost per organ would be astronomical. Genada’s ancestors, on the other hand, will be herd animals. Most importantly, they will be able to breed. All we have to do is put them out to pasture and feed them. Organ demand grows? We simply raise more animals.”

“What about PETA,” the woman asked. “And what about the Animal Liberation Front? They’ve been targeting xenotransplantation research.”

“We think we have the competitive advantage there as well,” Danté said. “The ancestors do not occur in nature. We made them, down to the last strands of DNA. We will even use that fact to insist other companies abandon research on pigs and primates. If Genada has already solved the problem, there is no longer a need for that potentially dangerous research.”

The software magnate laughed. “You want a monopoly. A monopoly on human life.”

Danté nodded. “Lady and gentlemen, nothing sells like life itself. When we succeed, we will be the only vendor. We will be able to charge whatever the market will bear. For the millions of people not quite ready for death, the market would bear quite a lot.”

Within an hour, all five had left, and all five had given the same decision: yes. That gave Genada enough capital for at least one more year.

Magnus would be so pleased.

NOVEMBER 8: DOT-DOT-DOT…

THE WRIST WATCH BUZZED. It wasn’t an alarm buzz, because for alarms, the watch beeped. The buzz only meant one thing.

Contact.

The buzz was a five-minute warning, a notice to go somewhere, be alone before the full message came in. There was no one else in the room. The five minutes passed very slowly.

A tiny chip in the watch picked up certain heavily encrypted satellite signals. The chip decoded those signals, buzzing out the translated message in the simple dots and dashes of Morse code.

After all this time, the command to act. How odd, when the project was so close to completion, close to extending life for millions of people. No, not when… the correct word was if. There was no guarantee they would ever overcome the immune response.

And besides, who gave a fuck? Someone would figure this out eventually. As long as Rhumkorrf didn’t get the credit, it would all work itself out.

It would be dangerous, true, but the plan was already made and it wasn’t that difficult. Quietly take out the transportation and communication to completely isolate the project. Then, destroy the data, both the live set and the backup. After that? Play dumb and wait for Colonel Fischer and his goons to arrive.

At the computer, a few key taps brought up a private menu. Several prepared programs were ready to go, hidden inside a miles-long stream of archived genetic code. No way it was safe to hide the programs in a ready-to-use format, not with Jian on the island. That woman interacted with computers in a way that defied logic—if hacker programs were just sitting there, Jian would have found them somehow.

These programs would cause some damage. How much damage depended on whether Jian was awake or asleep. She was the only real variable, which meant something had to be done about her or the plan might not work.

Regardless, tonight it would all be over… one way or another.

NOVEMBER 8: A SHOT & A CHASER

A

G

C

T

OVER AND OVER again, the endless chains scrolled across the screen, some segments highlighted in yellow, some in green, some in red, other colors. The special language. The true language of life. A language that for some reason only she could really see, really understand.

Biological poetry.

“Jian?”

She blinked. The poetry changed back to scrolling letters. She was in the bioinformatics lab. She looked up to see Tim standing in front of her desk.

“Mister Feely,” she said, and as she did she realized that he’d been standing there for several seconds, quietly saying her name over and over. Part of her brain had heard him but hadn’t wanted to come out of that special place.

“You’re my boss,” he said. “Think maybe you can finally stop calling me mister?”

She shook her head. No, she could not do that. Sometimes she tried, tried to say P. J. or Tim or Claus, but it always came out Mister Colding or Mister Feely or Doctor Rhumkorrf.

Her seven-monitor computer array here was identical to the one in her room. Tim held up a bottle and a medicine cup, reached around the outside monitors to offer them to her. “You forget something?”

Her meds.

She looked at the bottle, then at her watch. She was two hours behind on her meds. “Ah. I am sorry.” She took the bottle and plastic cup.

He walked around the desk to stand next to her chair. “And what are you doing up? You should be in bed. How about you turn in?”

She shook her head, put the medicine bottle down and started reaching for the fridge under her desk.

“Got you covered,” Tim said. He pulled a can of Dr Pepper from his lab coat pocket. She smelled alcohol on his breath.

“Mister Feely, have you been drinking?”

“Just a shot or two,” he said. “And speaking of shots, the meds are yours, and this can is your chaser. So drink up!”

Tim made her laugh. He was a good assistant, although not as good as Galina had been. But where Galina had spent most of her time with Erika, Tim made sure Jian took her meds, slept, even ate. Sometimes Jian actually forgot to eat, in the times when the code took over and minutes turned to hours turned to days.

Jian poured the lithium citrate into the medicine cup, filling it to the five-milliliter line. She drank the medicine, then immediately drained the whole can of Dr Pepper. Carbonation bubbled up in her mouth, chasing away the lithium’s nasty taste. The bad taste was worth it, though, because it made her normal. Made her able to function without seeing… them. The medicine let her work.

She reached for the fridge again, but Tim produced a second can from his other pocket.

“Got you covered,” he said.

Jian blushed a little. Tim and P. J. took such good care of her. It almost made this place tolerable despite Rhumkorrf’s pressure and the constant mean comments from that evil bitch Erika.

“Jian, come on,” Tim said. “We’ve failed the immune test before. Give work a rest for a little bit. We’ll get back to it in the morning.”

“No, we must work. Did you come up with anything?”

“Yes,” Tim said. “A bitchin’ new high score in Tetris.”

“You must be very proud.”

“Not really. I reprogrammed it so I could win. Maybe you should try playing some video chess. Let your mind do something else for a little bit.”

She shrugged. She wasn’t about to lecture a grown man on the value of hard work.

“Come on, Jian. Go to bed.”

“I will,” she said. “Let me finish sequencing the four new samples first, then I will sleep.”

“Promise?”

She nodded.

“All right,” Tim said. “Then you’re on your own. I’m pooped. Cheating at Tetris will really take it out of you. Night.”

He turned and walked out of the room. She rubbed her eyes. She was tired. But it wouldn’t take that long to finish this process.

They’d long ago collected samples of every living mammal known to man. After that, Danté had started acquiring samples from extinct species. Each time they digitized one of those additional genomes, the God Machine’s viability rate went up. Would the four new samples Bobby had delivered take them over 80 percent?

The myriad forms of animals on Earth take many shapes, but every last one is made from a simple set of four nucleotides: adenine, guanine, cytosine and thymine. Those four basic nucleotides create the double helix structure that is deoxyribonucleic acid, or DNA. Some people didn’t understand double helix, but everyone got Jian’s favorite description—the twisting ladder.

Variety between the strands, across the rungs of the DNA ladder, is limited even further, to just two combinations: adenine can only bind with thymine, and guanine can only bond with cytosine. But the combinations along the sides of the ladder, the four letters A, G, T and C, combine in infinite ways.

Those infinite combinations were what Jian wanted to analyze, to digitize, so the God Machine could see the full genome of each animal and compare it with the master ancestor sequence.

First, she extracted the cellular DNA of the four extinct mammals and placed each in a vial. To each vial, she added her sequencing master mix. The mix consisted of a DNA polymerase, random primers and the four basic nucleotides. The mix also included dideoxynucleotides, which were nucleotides with a slightly different chemical structure that contained a fluorescent section critical to the final stage of the process.

She slid the vials into a polymerase chain reactor, a machine designed to produce billions of copies of the target DNA. First the PCR machine “unzipped” the DNA by heating it to ninety-five degrees Celsius, which broke the hydrogen bonds in the rungs. That split the double helix, leaving two single strands of DNA. The machine then cooled the mixture to fifty-five degrees Celsius. This brought the prefabricated random primers into play. A primer is to a strand of DNA what a foundation is to a brick wall: DNA strands can’t form at random, they have to begin with a primer. Lowering the temperature allowed the primers to lock in to complementary sections on the single DNA strand, so that a primer with the combination ACTGA would make rungs that created a combination of TGACT on the other side of the ladder. A binds with C, T binds with G, and click, a starting point locks down.

Then, more heat.

As the temperature rose to seventy-two Celsius, the DNA polymerase started at the random primers and moved down the open strand, locking free nucleotides onto the open-ended single DNA strands—just like a train engine building the track underneath it as it goes. The end result was two perfect copies of the original DNA strand. From there, the process quickly repeated over and over—two copies became four, then eight, then sixteen, an exponential increase that added up fast.

In years past, there had been more steps she had to follow, but now the entire process was automated. Her machine created millions of identical copies, peppered with the little fluorescent dideoxynucleotide chunks that marked segments. The computer used a laser to make those chunks fluoresce, then counted off the segments. End result? A nucleotide-by-nucleotide analysis of the animal’s DNA. The millions of copies provided an extremely high degree of accuracy.

The resultant data fed automatically into the supercomputer known as the God Machine. There, Jian’s programming would take over. She closed the lid on the PCR machines and set them to run automatically.

In just a few hours, the four new DNA sequences would join the thousands they had already sequenced. She called up the current genome database.

Over and over again the powerful God Machine processed trillions of combinations of DNA, looking for the magical set that would produce a viable embryo. They were close now. A few more samples, a few more mammalian species, perhaps, and they would have it.

She still had her secret experiment, the one she hadn’t revealed to Rhumkorrf. Colding had insisted on destroying all elements of the human surrogate mother program. Jian had saved just a little bit. A special little bit. She had an ancestor genome with 99.65 percent viability probability, one that would beat the immune response for sure.

Not a cow’s immune response… her immune response.

That had been her little secret through the human surrogate phase. She’d used her own DNA as the primary working template. The irony was that Colding’s insistence on eliminating the human surrogates had saved the company, but if they could use a human surrogate, they would have successful implantation on the first try. Jian had kept her own modified eggs, hiding them inside the waist-high tank of liquid nitrogen that also held the last sixteen rounds of God Machine genomes. They were her eggs, after all, and she couldn’t really bear to part with them.

Maybe, if the bovine experiments totally failed, she’d actually use them. Millions of lives hung in the balance. Rhumkorrf would probably even help. He was desperate to make it happen, desperate to make Jian stop being so stupid, such a failure.

So many people. People dying every day, dying because of her incompetence.

She needed to relax. Maybe Tim was right… maybe a little video game. Just for a few minutes. No one would know if she stopped working. Jian quietly turned to her left-lower monitor and called up the Chess Master program. So bad to play now! But she was stumped. Come on, Kasparov level, do your best.

She always beat the Kasparov level. At least the computer program was good enough to make her actually think about her moves, which was more than she could say of playing anyone else in the project. Poor P. J., always trying so hard to win, but he could only see five or six moves into the future. Jian saw entire games played out before the first pawn advanced.

She stared at the black-and-white pieces lined up neatly on the video chessboard. The computer waited for her to make the first move, but for some reason she could only stare at the pieces. The black pieces. The white pieces. Black and white.

Black and white.

Black and white.

They might be another color, and yet the game would still be the same. Blue and red, yellow and purple, and that wouldn’t make any difference because the board’s function didn’t change.

The board that lay underneath the black-and-white pieces. Black and white…

… like the fur on the cows.

“That’s it,” she whispered. “That’s it!”

She quit the chess program and called up the bovine genome, her fingers an unrecognizable blur on the keyboard. It was so obvious. Why hadn’t she thought of this before? If all that mattered was the internal organs, the underneath, she could eliminate hundreds of potentially problematic genes by swapping out what was on top—the integument.

The God Machine could process that change even while counting off the genomes of the four extinct mammals. Could all of it be enough to push the viability rating over 80 percent?

Her main terminal let out an alarm beep, demanding her attention. She called up the alarm window.

The off-site backup, the ten-petabyte data drive array that sat in a temperature-controlled brick building at the end of the runway… it had failed. That system hadn’t failed once in the fourteen months since they’d installed it. The array was designed to survive no matter what, to keep the experiment alive in the event of worst-case scenarios at the main facility. Computer crashes, fire, electromagnetic pulses… she’d been told it could even survive a really big explosive called a fuel-bomb, although she couldn’t imagine why someone would use such a destructive thing on a harmless research facility.

The timing couldn’t be worse. She had inspiration, the missing link that might let her solve the immune reaction problem. But she highly doubted the backup drive failure was an accident—someone was up to something. She’d just have to do two things at once: deal with the backup failure, and simultaneously type in the genetic code that had hit her like a blast of mountain wind. She isolated the computer lab from the rest of the network, then quickly called up a diagnostics program.

NOVEMBER 8: MRS. SANSOME

GUNTHER JONES SAT back and read his words. Not bad, if he did say so himself. Take a bite out of that, Stephenie Meyer. How hard could it be? Some handsome bloodsuckers, some romance, a little forbidden fruit that turns into hot sex, and boom—vampire novel.

The wee hours of the morning were usually his most creative. Tucked away in the security control room, no one bothered him, particularly at 3:00 A.M. Not that he didn’t do his job… there just wasn’t much job to do. Other than making sure Jian didn’t try to off herself, he ran through all scheduled procedures and checked that the alarm systems were online. If anything came up that required eyeballs, he woke Brady or Andy or Colding, depending on who was on call.

Closed-circuit cameras blanketed the facility’s interior, giving him a view of every possible angle. After almost two years here, he was adept at keeping the monitors in his peripheral vision—if something out there moved, he’d see it. Nothing ever did. That meant Gunther Jones basically got paid damn good money to sit and write for hours on end.

He’d completed two novels in the Hot Dusk series already: Hot Dusk and Hot Evening. As soon as he finished his current book, Hot Midnight, he’d have a kick-ass trilogy to push on agents.

The computer beeped, indicating an alert. Gunther reduced his novel (making sure to save it first, he wasn’t about to lose those amazing words), revealing a flashing alert message:

He called up the maintenance screen, hit the re-link button, then waited to see the link reconnect like it always did. Colding didn’t like losing that signal, although it happened from time to time for some interstellar communications reason they didn’t really understand. A new message appeared:

Huh. He’d never seen that before. He repeated the step and waited.

“Colding’s going to be pissed.” Gunther called up the diagnostics program and let it run.

HARDWARE FAILURE

He stared at the screen. Hardware failure? That had never happened before. There was only one thing left to do in the repair protocol—send out some eyeballs. He turned to the vid-phone and punched Brady’s room.

NOVEMBER 8: A HOT TIME IN THE OLD TOWN

BRADY GIOVANNI DIDN’T mind the cold, but that didn’t mean he was stupid about it. He had been one of those kids who always listened to his mother. Growing up in Saskatoon, listening to your mother meant dressing warm.

When on call, dressing warm meant wearing his thermal long johns and socks to bed, cutting down his response time. After Gunther’s call woke him, it took Brady only seconds to pull on the black Genada parka with matching snow pants, military-grade cold-weather gloves, a scarf and the thing that Andy “The Asshole” Crosthwaite teased him about to no end—a wool hat knitted by none other than Brady’s mother. The hat fit perfectly over his big head and the headset/mic combo in his ear.

He punched in his access code at the front interior airlock door. It opened and he stepped into the chamber. He closed the door and waited five seconds while the pressure equalized. A beep from the door let him know the cycle had finished.

“Gun, this is Brady, exiting now.”

“Roger that,” Gunther’s voice said in his ear.

Beretta in hand, Brady opened the heavy latch to the outside door and stepped out into the cold night air. The compound’s lights lit up the grounds. From the door, he could see the back of the satellite dish. Nothing moving. He double-timed it across the snow, the icy wind pulling at him as he ran. It could blow all it wanted, because Brady was prepared. Maybe a little more than just prepared, as proven by the sweat that already trickled down his armpits despite the subzero temperatures.

He kept a sharp watch as he cut a wide circle around the satellite dish. Nothing really happened at the isolated facility. Even something as trivial as this hardware failure brought welcome excitement, gave him a chance to practice good soldiering.

The fifteen-foot-wide satellite array pointed out to the stars, away from Brady. His circle brought him around to the front, where he could see the receiver held up by metal arms that pointed in and up from the concave dish. As he moved, he steadily swept his vision from left to right, then right to left.

Gunther’s voice piped into his headset. “You there yet?”

“I’m twenty feet away and you know that,” Brady said. “You’re watching on infrared, aren’t you?”

Gunther’s laugh sounded tinny through the small headset. “Yeah, I love this thing. Never get to use it. Nothing moving out there but you, big fella.”

Brady came around the front of the satellite dish. Seeing no movement, he closed in until he could examine the receiver. He stared at the gadget for a full three seconds, not really believing what he saw.

Baffin Island wasn’t boring anymore.

THE VID-PHONE AGAIN let out its shrill digital blare. Colding groaned and rolled over and looked at the phone—3:22 A.M. Jian again? Jesus, couldn’t a guy just get some fucking sleep around here? Colding clicked the connect button.

“What’s up, Gun?”

“We have a situation,” Gunther said in a rush. “The satellite array has been damaged.”

Colding instantly came fully awake. “Define damaged.”

“Let me patch in Brady,” Gunther said. “Brady, Colding’s on, tell him what you see.”

Gunther’s face stayed on the screen, but Brady’s girlish voice came from the speakers. “Someone whacked the fuck out of the satellite array. The dish is fine, but the receiver-transmitter unit has been smashed up pretty bad. Looks like marks from an axe.”

An axe. There were twelve fire axes spread through the small facility’s interior. Whoever sabotaged the satellite dish had come from inside the building.

“Gunther,” Colding said, “activate all the apartment cameras and give me a head count, right now.”

“No problem, boss.” Gunther’s eyes looked away from the screen, back to another unseen monitor.

“Let’s see… Jian is awake and in the bioinformatics lab, typing away. Rhumkorrf is in his bed, looks asleep. Andy disconnected his room camera, but I can hear him snoring over the vid-phone. Hoel is buried in her blankets. Brady is at the dish, I’m here, you’re there, and… hey… Tim’s not in his room.”

Colding stood up. “Not in his room? Where is he? Do an infrared body count of the whole building.”

Gunther’s droopy eyes narrowed in concentration. “Um… infrared confirms all visuals. Everyone accounted for except for Brady and Tim. And I just checked the access and egress logs. No one has coded in or out for the past two hours.”

“But I just went out,” Brady said. “Walked right out the front.”

“Not showing up,” Gunther said. “Someone shut off the tracking. And it looks like the hallway cameras are fixed on a loop. I… I can’t tell how long it’s been since they’ve shown live video.”

Colding started pulling on his clothes. “Call up access to the admin log. Whose code turned off those systems?”

“Uh…” Colding heard Gunther’s fingers tapping away. “I’m looking.”

“Move it, Gun! You’re supposed to know how to do this shit!”

“I know, I know! Hold on… here it is. Access code was 6969.”

Tim’s code. But why? Why would Tim do such a thing after all this time? Why… unless…

“Brady,” Colding said, “I want Tim found. He’s sabotaging us.”

“Yes sir.”

“And keep your eyes open. He’s got that axe at least, if not other weapons.”

“Yes sir,” Brady said. “Should I take him out?”

“No, for fuck’s sake, don’t kill anybody,” Colding said, shocked at how quickly Brady considered lethal force against a friend. But Brady was thinking like a soldier. Colding needed to think like that as well. If Tim really had taken a payoff from another biotech company, or far worse, he was working with Longworth’s special threats biotech task force, there was no telling what the guy might do.

“Protect yourself,” Colding said. “But do whatever you can to avoid shooting him, okay?”

“Yes sir,” Brady said, his voice crawling up another pitch in the excitement.

“Gunther,” Colding said, “get Andy up and tell him to guard the rear airlock. If Tim’s outside, I don’t want him getting back in. And get the internal cameras working.”

“Fuck, man, I don’t know how to do that.”

“You told me you’d studied up on the system, goddamit!”

“I know, I know! My bad, but I can’t fix it now. You want me to go outside and search as well?”

Colding punched his leg in frustration. Gunther was too busy writing his fucking vampire romance novels to do the homework that was expected of him. Colding’s own fault, really, for taking Gunther’s word for it instead of riding shotgun. “Just stay in the control room and get it fixed.”

“Yes sir.” Gunther’s face disappeared from the screen.

Colding jammed his feet into his boots, then reached into his nightstand, pulled out his Beretta and popped out the magazine—full. He made sure the safety was on before he shrugged on his parka. He quietly opened his door and cautiously checked the hallway. Seeing no movement, he headed for the main airlock.

THE ADMIN SCREEN listed five errors.

Jian’s fingers danced across the keyboard, calling up menu after menu, or trying to—most of them were blocked. Her access code had been erased. She had to move fast. Whoever was doing this wanted to wipe out the research. Something had taken out the satellite uplink, so she couldn’t even do an emergency data-dump to Genada headquarters in Manitoba. On top of that, the hacker had already erased the off-site backup drive. Erased it. The only remaining active data set was in the main drive, located right under her desk in the bioinformatics lab. Jian had caught the attack on that drive, intercepted it in midstream and countered it. If she had been sleeping they would have lost everything the God Machine had produced since Bobby Valentine brought the latest samples.

And that would have been disaster indeed… because it was finally working.

She split her focus between wiping out the last vestiges of the rampaging computer programs and watching the God Machine’s readout. She would handle the other problems as soon as she could. Fixing the cameras would be a snap, but she didn’t know what was causing the hangar temperature to drop. Someone had manually shut off the radiant heaters, but why?

The God Machine interrupted her thoughts with a cheerful chime that sounded horribly out of place considering the current situation. Jian looked at the upper-middle-left screen, the one that showed the new announcement.

Ninety-five percent. She had done it. Whatever it took, she had to protect this data set.

HE HUNG IN that space between conscious and unconscious. Bits and pieces came back… a sound, his name, the shitty taste in his mouth. Andy Crosthwaite just wanted to stay asleep.

But that rotten cocksucker Gunther would just not shut the fuck up.

“Andy, come on, wake up!”

The only light in the room came from the vid-phone, which was damn near blinding to Andy’s squinting, sleepy eyes. The phone’s screen showed that dickhead Gunther looking like he needed a bathroom pit stop pronto before he dropped the Hershey squirts in his pants.

“Gun, don’t you have a fag novel to write, or something?”

“Andy, I’m not kidding, get your ass up now.”

“Fuck off.”

“Get up! Tim’s sabotaging the place, you need to guard the back door!”

Andy reached out and put the vid-phone facedown. Then he put his spare pillow on top of it. It didn’t drown Gunther out completely, but Andy was a very sound sleeper and it would be enough.

“ANDY, YOU SHITHEAD, wake up!”

The feed from Andy’s vid-phone had gone black. Gunther started to scream again, louder this time, when motion on another monitor caught his eye.

The hangar.

“Brady! Brady, come in!”

“Easy, Gun! This headset is inside my ear, okay?”

“Right, sorry.” Gunther continued in a calm voice. “Infrared shows the cows in their stalls in the hangar, but there is a person moving by the vehicles.”

“Just one? You’re sure?”

Gunther looked again. The black-and-white monitor showed heat in white, cooler colors in gray shading to black. Aside from the cows and the mystery heat source, he saw only Brady, moving from the satellite dish toward the hangar’s front door. “Confirmed, just one target. Gotta be Tim.”

“Can you see what he’s doing? Where is he?”

“Looks like he’s in front of the Humvee. No, he’s moving to the back of the hangar. He’s going for the cattle! Move!”

Colding’s voice sounded on the same channel. “Brady, slow down. I’m on my way outside.”

Gunther saw Brady’s heat signal close on the hangar’s front door.

“Gotta take him now,” Brady said as he closed the last ten feet. “Can’t let Tim kill the cows.”

“No,” Colding said. “Brady, just wait!”

On the black-and-gray monitor’s picture, Gunther saw Tim’s white heat signature sprint away from the hangar’s back door. The signature stopped for just a second, then Gunther saw a tiny flicker of white moving back toward the hangar. Very small, not human-sized at all, and moving fast.

“Brady, be careful, I’ve got another heat source…”

BRADY BARELY HEARD Gunther’s words as he put his big shoulder into the hangar’s front door, slamming it open with a clang. He ran through, cut left, then knelt and leveled his Beretta in the direction of the Humvee and the fuel truck, the best spots for cover if there was a second enemy soldier.

But it wasn’t his eyes that detected danger.

It was his nose.

What he smelled in that last second of his life told him he had made a really, really bad mistake. The thick, rotten-egg scent of natural gas. In a fraction of a second, his eyes flicked to the radiant heater inside the door, to the shattered plastic gas pipe leading into it. Hacked open, he realized, with a fire axe.

Brady didn’t have time to see that all sixteen ground-level heaters had suffered identical damage. For thirty minutes, sixteen cracked one-inch PVC pipes had poured gas into the hangar’s closed environment, where it floated up to the ceiling, gathering in an invisible cloud.

A gasoline-soaked rope made a simple fuse. The saboteur had left one end inside the back door, then trailed the rope fifty feet outside. One flick of a lighter had done the rest. Just two seconds after Brady Giovanni’s muscled mass slammed through the front door, the rope’s flame danced into the hangar and kissed the gathered cloud of gas.

The fireball started at the back of the hangar and grew exponentially, lashing out at a pressure of twenty pounds per square inch, the equivalent of a gust of wind traveling at 470 miles per hour. The shock wave smashed into Brady, throwing the big man back. Had he gone through the door he might have lived, but he hit the hangar’s inside wall and was knocked cold. He didn’t feel the three-thousand-degree Fahrenheit fireball engulf him, didn’t see his clothes burst into flame, didn’t sense his skin bubble.

The cows fared no better. The shock wave knocked them about like little dogs, not the fifteen-hundred-pound creatures they were. Cows tumbled, burned and smashed into stalls. Some hit the hangar walls with a gong audible even over the explosion.

The hangar’s huge roof seemed to lift up, balanced on a growing cloud of flame, then crash down, smashing the Humvee and the fuel truck, punching through the truck’s tank and exposing aviation fuel to the still-roiling fireball. Dark orange flames shot up from the destroyed hangar, scorching metal and melting plastic.

BEFORE ANDY’S MOTHER had abandoned him to try her hand at whoring for Alberta loggers, she had always said he could sleep through a herd of buffalo stampeding through his room. That was before the military. While there were many things he could sleep through, such as Gunther’s annoying voice on the vid-phone, a ground-shaking explosion was not one of them. If Andy knew one thing in this world, it was how to wake up fast to avoid getting killed.

He was off the bed, crouched on the ground, Beretta in his hand before he even processed what he’d heard. Gunther had tried to get him up.

“Oops,” Andy said.

He started scrambling into his clothes.

IN ERIKA HOEL’S bed, Tim Feely rolled over, the covers falling away from his face. Who was making all that damn noise? And he was hot. Someone had tucked the covers all up over his head. Damn, the room still spun like crazy. One thing about those Dutch women, they sure could drink. Drink, and fuck like nobody’s business. He often wondered what Erika Hoel had been like in her twenties, and he often reminded himself he probably didn’t want to know—the woman was forty-five, and he barely lived through their lovemaking sessions.

He reached out for Erika only to find her side of the bed empty. She was probably taking a leak. The room spun again, and Tim Feely dropped back into a deep sleep.

WHAT AN EXPLOSION, what a rush. Erika Hoel couldn’t believe how well her plan had worked. Simpletons. And the back door wasn’t guarded. In her projected timeline, she’d figured Andy would be there by now. She checked her watch, and waited. Another few seconds before the final hacking program kicked in. When it did, she could slip back inside, make sure the bioinformatics lab’s petabyte drive was erased, then crawl into bed with Tim and just play stupid. If she ran into Colding along the way, she’d just say she was trying to get away from Tim, who’d suddenly started making threats and acting crazy. The ruse wouldn’t last long, of course, but Fischer and his gorillas would be here soon. When Fischer arrived, Erika would be safe—then she could rub it in Claus’s face and her former lover would know that she had destroyed all of his work.

She stared at her watch and counted down the seconds.

GUNTHER JONES GAVE up trying to reach Brady. The man wasn’t going to answer. The hangar fire made the exterior infrared cameras useless. The hallway monitors were still looping, but he had good coverage in all the rooms, and the normal exterior cameras worked fine.

At that moment, all of his monitors simultaneously filled with static. His computer terminal beeped a pointless alarm:

“No fucking shit,” Gunther said as he reached under the counter for the system manuals.

ERIKA POSITIONED THE axe under one arm and looked at her watch. Her program would have just launched and shut down the cameras. She had to go. Now or never. She peeked in the rear airlock’s small window—no one there. She punched 6969 into the keypad, then walked inside and shut the door behind her. The airlock pressure cycle took only five seconds, but it felt like five minutes—Gunther, Andy, Brady or Colding could be anywhere inside, or even following her from the outside. And they had guns.

The five-second cycle finished, the interior airlock door beeped and opened. Erika ran silently into the facility and headed for the bioinformatics lab. If her program had worked, it was over. If Jian had countered it, Erika would have to destroy the petabyte drive by hand.

COLDING OPENED THE front airlock to see flames billowing up from the shattered hangar. Thick smoke twisted in the night wind, blocking out the stars. Even fifty yards away, the heat was damn near blistering. He crouched behind a boulder off to the left, both to take cover in case Tim was out there and to shield himself from the fire’s radiating rage.

He still couldn’t quite grasp the fact that Tim had waited for two years, worked away on the project, really contributed to it, pushed for its success, only to suddenly do this. Colding had thought he knew the man.

“Gunther, where the fuck is Tim?” His earpiece let out a burst of static, followed by Gunther’s voice.

“All the cameras are out. I can’t see a thing. And Brady was in the hangar when that thing went off.”

Shit. “Brady, come in,” Colding said.

No one responded.

“Brady, if you can hear this, tap your earpiece twice. Anything to let us know you’re there.”

Colding waited for three slow breaths, but still no response. If Brady had entered the hangar, he was already dead.

And that made Tim Feely a murderer.

Colding had to protect the scientists. That meant neutralizing Tim first, searching for Brady second. A fucked-up prioritization, because if Brady was bleeding out somewhere, unable to respond, delaying a search might cause his death. But Brady Giovanni was paid to put his life at risk if need be—Rhumkorrf, Jian and Erika were not.

Colding scanned the area as calmly and as patiently as he could. He saw nothing.

The front airlock door opened. Colding turned, instantly leveling his Beretta, ready to fire at Tim if the man made one wrong move. Only he wasn’t pointing his gun at Tim… he was pointing it at Andy Crosthwaite.

Andy Crosthwaite, who was supposed to be guarding the back door.

“Motherfucker,” Colding said to himself as he took his aim off Andy and once again knelt behind the boulder.

Andy ran in a half-crouch, reached the boulder and knelt at Colding’s left. The smaller man swept his vision from straight out to his left, automatically counting on Colding to sweep from straight out to the right. Andy wasn’t panicking; he was calm and patient, doing everything right… except, of course, staying by the back door that he’d been ordered to guard.

“Andy, you keep your ass right here,” Colding said. “I’m going inside to round up the staff, and I’ll bring them back to the front airlock where you watch them. You don’t move until I call you. Do you understand?”

“Back off, dick-face,” Andy said. “I know what the fuck I’m doing.”

A rage grew inside Colding, but there was a time and place for every battle. “Just stay here,” Colding said, then scooted to the front airlock and slipped inside. Unless Gunther fixed the cameras, he’d have to check each room one by one.

ERIKA SLIPPED SILENTLY into the bioinformatics lab and saw the one thing she did not want to see—Liu Jian Dan, sitting at her multi-screened computer station, fat fingers click-clacking away.

Jian turned in her chair, heavy black hair falling over her face like a mask. Erika’s eyes automatically flicked to the upper-row monitor above Jian’s head.

“You did it,” Erika said. “I don’t believe it.”

“You…” Jian’s voice was a chilling whisper. “You put that down.”

Erika looked at her hands. She’d forgotten she was holding the fire axe. So close to pulling it off and getting back to her room undetected. But now Jian had seen her. Erika’s word against Tim’s was one thing, but Colding would automatically believe anything Jian said.

So now they would know it was her. So what? What were they going to do, fire her? There was nowhere for anyone to go, and Fischer’s men would be here soon.

All that mattered was the data.

Jian stood, reached under her desk, and in one smooth motion pulled out the foot-long petabyte backup cartridge.

The two women stood there, facing off, Jian holding the project’s future, Erika holding a fire axe.

“Jian, just give that to me.”

Jian stood, shook her head no, then stepped back.

Erika stepped forward.

GUNTHER’S FINGERS TRACED the printed pages of a three-ring binder. He had to figure out how to reboot the system. The support docs said that would clear out Fuck-You Feely’s damn loops and hacks.

Colding’s voice hissed in his earpiece. “Gun, come on, where is that bastard?”

“I’m trying.” Wait. There it was. Just call up the prompt window, enter that bit of code…

“Gun! Fix the friggin’ camera!”

“Hold on!” Fingers typed the code, then hit enter.

The monitors flickered, then all popped back to life. “Got it, hold on!” Once again he had a complete view of the facility’s security system. He flipped through the cameras, scanning for motion. Empty hall, Rhumkorrf crouched at the foot of his bed, empty hall, empty genetics lab, Erika’s room… the blankets thrown back but that wasn’t Erika… then the bioinformatics lab, that was Erika, holding an axe and moving toward Jian.

“Holy fuck, Colding! It’s not Tim, it’s Erika!”

“What?”

“Tim’s sacked out in Erika’s room. Get to bioinformatics, fast, Erika is going to kill Jian.”

A new beep joined the cacophony of security room alarms. Gunther knew that sound—the radar system.

“And we’ve got another problem. One aircraft inbound. ETA… five minutes.”

“GO AWAY,” JIAN said in a childlike voice.

Erika didn’t want to hurt anyone, but she was out of time.

Jian backed up until she hit the wall. Nowhere to go. Erika held out her left hand, beckoning for the cartridge. Jian threw herself facedown on the tile floor, her body covering the cartridge as she screamed at the top of her lungs. Erika ran to her, grabbed the bigger woman’s shoulder and yanked hard, trying to roll her over.

“Jian, give it to me!” She kept pulling without effect—the woman wouldn’t budge. The axe point would punch through the back of her skull like an eggshell, but Erika sure as hell wasn’t going to kill the woman.

She straddled Jian’s legs, then reached out with her right hand, grabbed a handful of thick black hair and yanked. Jian’s head snapped back and she howled in pain. Erika slid the axe head past Jian’s throat, then grabbed the handle with both hands and pulled cold wood against warm flesh.

Jian started to choke. She’d have to let go of the backup drive to grab at the axe, then Erika could smash the drive and end all this bullshit. Erika pulled harder, steadily increasing pressure on Jian’s fat neck, but the woman just wouldn’t let go. “Geef me die cartridge, gestoord wijf!”

Jian started thrashing from side to side, sputtering out hoarse choking noises, but held the drive tight.

COLDING SPRINTED INTO the bioinformatics lab to see a bizarre sight: a snarling, skinny, forty-five-year-old woman using a fire axe to choke a 250-pound Chinese lady wearing a Hawaiian shirt. Two middle-aged scientists going at it like a couple of prison inmates during a race riot.

He moved in fast, not slowing down, lowering the gun even as he closed the distance, a flash-thought of wondering where to put it because he didn’t have a holster and he wasn’t going to fire on an old woman and if he did the bullet might hit Jian. Erika looked up just as Colding grabbed her left shoulder and yanked. The move caught Erika off guard. Her left hand slid off the handle and she fell back, her right still clutching the axe halfway up the shaft. Jian let out a hissing, painful cough.

Colding held the Beretta awkwardly at his right side, more of a hindrance than a weapon. Erika rolled to her ass and saw the gun. Her eyes widened in instant recognition, instant panic, and she even shook her head a little as if to say no, no that’s not supposed to happen.

“Doctor Hoel! Drop that—”

But that was all he got out before she panicked and swung the axe one-handed with her right arm. The swing was slow, a little clumsy, but he hadn’t expected such a snap reaction. The blade’s top edge sliced through his down parka. Small white feathers flew into the air. A stinging pain streaked from his left shoulder to his sternum.

The axe’s weight and momentum actually turned Erika, still sitting on her ass, pulling her right arm around and stretching her forward like she was reaching out to pick something off the ground. The axe blade dug into the linoleum floor with a chonk.

Colding didn’t think, he just moved, taking one step forward and snap-kicking Erika Hoel in the ribs. He felt and heard something crack. She screamed a strange, sharp scream that cut off almost instantly. The kick’s momentum flipped her on her back. The axe remained embedded in the tile floor, handle sticking out at a forty-five-degree angle like some cheap prop from a horror flick.

Pain still stinging his chest, Colding stepped forward and swung the Beretta, aiming for the bridge of Erika’s nose. Sanity kicked in at the last second. He pulled back, fighting his own momentum until the top of the Beretta barrel touched Erika’s pain-scrunched face with all the force of a mother’s goodnight kiss.

Erika Hoel wasn’t going anywhere. She tried to move, but the obvious agony of broken ribs kept her fixed to the floor. Colding shook his head, shook away the rage. He already felt horrible about hurting her that bad, but the woman had hit him with an axe, for fuck’s sake. Damn, did this hurt. How bad was he cut?

A hoarse, guttural cough pulled his attention away from Erika.

“Jian, are you okay?”

She paused for a moment, then looked up, her eyes barely visible through the mop of black hair. She scrambled to her feet and threw her arms around his neck, almost knocking him over. She clutched him tight. Silent sobs suddenly racked her body.

“I’m… okay, Mister… Colding. She… she choked me so hard.”

Colding kept his left hand down and away from her. The pain seemed to radiate, oddly making his left elbow and right shoulder ache although neither had been touched. He felt his shirt clinging wetly to his skin. He patted Jian gently with his right hand, which was still holding the gun. “Just calm down. You need to let go now, I have to take care of this.”

Jian gave him one more squeeze, making his cut scream louder. She let him go and snatched up the thing she’d clutched tight even while Erika had choked her.

“What is that?”

“Petabyte drive,” Jian said, her voice a bit more calm. “We have succeeded.”

Colding didn’t have time to ask what she meant before his earpiece crackled with Gunther’s excited voice.

“Boss, great work, but that bogey is almost here.”

Who was it? Mercenaries hired by a competitor? No, his gut told him it had to be Longworth’s people. “How long till it lands?”

“Less than three minutes.”

“Okay, listen closely. That will probably be U.S. Special Forces, maybe Canadian, but either way armed to the teeth. Gather up Rhumkorrf and Tim and get them to the front airlock, leave them with Andy. Then you run the perimeter and see if you can find Brady. I want all of our people calm and visible, with weapons holstered, you got that?”

“Weapons holstered, understood.”

“Good. If this is an assault team, we cannot win, and I don’t want anyone else getting hurt.”

“Yes sir, I’m on it.”

Andy Crosthwaite entered the bioinformatics lab. The thick stench of burning fuel oozed off him, as did a smell Colding had prayed he’d never encounter again—the smell of burning human flesh.

Greasy streaks covered Andy’s face, hands and jacket sleeves. He took one look at the scene, then strode forward and leveled his sidearm at the prone Erika Hoel. “You’re dead, cunt.”

“Goddamit, Andy,” Colding said. “You left your post again?”

“Drop the left your post bullshit, Colding. This isn’t a fucking John Wayne movie. You going to finish this bitch or what?”

“We’re not going to finish anyone! It’s Erika, for God’s sake.”

“I know who she is. She’s a backstabbing twat that worked side by side with us for two fucking years, then just went ape-shit and killed Brady.”

Colding’s heart dropped. “Brady’s dead?”

Andy nodded. His upper lip snarled when he spoke. “I pulled his body out of the hangar. He burned alive.” Andy glared down at Erika. “So who’s paying you, whore? Monsanto? Genetron? How much did you get for killing a man that guarded your ass every day for two years?”

Erika’s eyes squinted shut, and not just from the pain. Colding could see the guilt wash over her. She’d never intended to kill anyone.

Andy cocked his Beretta, knelt down and put the end of it against Erika’s forehead. Her eyes squeezed tighter.

Colding raised his own Beretta.

The movement caught Andy’s eye. When he turned to look, he stared straight down a barrel.

“Andy, drop your weapon.”

Andy opened his mouth, then closed it. “Fuck a duck, man, what are you doing?”

“I said drop your weapon. Nobody else dies today.”

For the second time in as many minutes, Colding had moved before thinking, caught up in the situation’s express-lane pace. He’d never pointed a gun directly at anyone in his life, and now here he was with a dead man outside, a wounded woman on the floor, a chopper coming in and his pistol in the face of a special forces killer. If Andy got crazy, got mad, if he tried to aim his own weapon, then Colding would have only a split second to pull the trigger or probably be killed himself.

Moving slow, Andy simultaneously stood and pointed his gun to the ceiling. “Okay, okay, chief. I’m going.”

Colding raised the barrel as Andy stood, keeping it pointed right at the man’s face. “I told you to drop your weapon. Take Jian outside.”

“But we have incoming. You want me to go out there unarmed?”

Andy meant it as a rhetorical question, but that was exactly what Colding wanted.

“Andy, drop your goddamn weapon and get out front… now.”

Andy slowly squatted and lowered his gun to the ground. “You’re going to regret this shit. Wait till Magnus hears about this.” He grabbed Jian’s elbow and guided her to the door. She clutched the petabyte drive to her chest as if it were her only child.

When they left the lab, Colding sighed. No good could come of making Andy Crosthwaite an enemy. But no one else was going to die here, and that was that. He picked up Andy’s gun, flipped on the safety, then slipped it into the waist of his pants.

He knelt next to Erika. “Doctor Hoel, I’m sorry I had to do that to you.”

SO MUCH PAIN. She suspected it was just some broken ribs, but she’d never had a broken anything before. The agony consumed her. It felt like big sticks were jammed into her right side. Or maybe spikes. Jagged ones, made of glass.

“Doctor Hoel,” Colding said. “Talk to me. Can you hear me?”

She couldn’t even move. The tiniest shift sent waves of near-blackout pain through her chest. As much as her body screamed, it wasn’t enough to block out the horrid feeling that she’d killed a human being.

It hurt to talk, but she forced out the words. “Is Brady really… dead?”

Colding looked away, then looked back. He nodded. “If Andy was that mad, then yeah. Brady’s dead.”

What the hell had she been thinking? She was a middle-aged woman, not a commando. Was revenge on Claus really worth all this? Certainly not worth Brady’s life. Brady had been a nice kid, polite, respectful. Maybe twenty-eight? Twenty-nine? She couldn’t remember, and now it didn’t matter because the man would never see thirty.

“My God… Colding. I… I swear… I didn’t mean it.”

Colding nodded. He wasn’t gloating, he wasn’t angry. He looked sad, like someone who’d just seen a disaster and knew it was real but didn’t want to accept it.

“Listen, Doctor Hoel, I need to keep everyone else alive. Tell me what’s coming.”

She started to shrug, but that hurt even more than talking. “Don’t know… Fischer… will be here soon.”

Colding nodded again, as if she had just confirmed his suspicions. “Why is Fischer coming now? We’ve been here for two years.”

She shook her head. “Don’t know. Just wanted… wanted to ruin Claus. I didn’t mean it, I swear.”

“Okay,” Colding said. He reached out a hand and gently caressed her hair. It felt comforting. “Just stay still. I’ll come back as soon as I can with something for the pain.”

P. J. Colding stood up and ran out of the room, leaving Erika Hoel crying from shame, shock and sheer agony.

NOVEMBER 8: HITCHIN’ A RIDE

COLDING RAN TO a hallway bathroom and tore open a wall-mounted first-aid kit. He grabbed gauze, steripads and a bottle of Advil. Would the Advil help with Erika’s pain? He didn’t know, but he had to do something. He’d lost it, gone into some kind of rage and kicked that woman’s ribs as hard as he could. Like he was some kind of fucking animal. Like he’d been when he attacked Paul Fischer.

Don’t forget the axe, big guy. Erika’s axe almost killed you.

No, no excuses, he was in charge and that meant everything—Erika’s injury, Brady’s death, the explosion—was all his fault.

He pulled his parka open and looked in the bathroom mirror. Blood soaked the gray shirt underneath. He gently pulled at the cut fabric to see the gash in his skin. It was still bleeding in spots, but more of a deep scratch than a life-threatening injury. Bad enough to merit kicking a woman’s ribs? No, but he tried to check that thought—it was ridiculous to feel guilty for defending himself against that kind of attack.

He started to tear open the gauze pack when the sound of jet engines caught his attention. Erika’s pain, his own cut, those would have to wait. He shrugged the bloody jacket back on, puffing up a small cloud of downy white feathers. He ran to the front airlock. Seconds later, Colding stepped into the winter night. The hangar flames had died down considerably. A light wind drove falling snow at an angle, making the exterior lamps look like shimmering cones of light. The approaching jet engines screamed louder than he thought possible.

Fischer was almost here.

Fischer, the man who organized investigations of transgenic companies, who coordinated elements of the CDC, WHO, CIA and USAMRIID. Fischer, who apparently had the ability to reach out and manipulate brokenhearted, bitter women into saboteurs and inadvertent murderers.

Fischer—the man once in charge of the project that had killed Colding’s wife.

All of it made Colding long desperately for another round with him, to do far more than just fuck up the man’s knee. Colding’s rage had no place being directed against a forty-five-year-old woman, but against Colonel Paul Fischer? That was a different matter.

Out by the ruined satellite dish, Gunther and Andy stood with Rhumkorrf, Jian and Tim Feely. Gunther, God bless him, had his gun holstered. Colding walked up and joined them, Beretta in his right hand but down at his side. He kept Andy in sight. Tim looked so drunk he might fall over at any moment. Jian shook with huge sobs.

Twenty feet from the group, a green tarp covered an unrecognizable, smoldering lump. A lump about the size of Brady Giovanni. The night wind made the tarp’s edges snap loudly and carried away most of the oppressive stench. Most of it. The odors of burning flesh and burning fuel still hung in the air.

None of them looked at the body. Instead, they looked up into the night sky. The bogey Gunther had warned about was coming in for a landing, but it wasn’t a chopper—they saw a massive silhouette, running lightless, flat-black paint soaking up the firelight from the warehouse’s flickering flames.

“Mein gott,” Rhumkorrf said. “That thing is gigundous.”

Colding couldn’t believe his eyes. The plane’s headlamps flipped on, casting long cones of light onto the snow-covered landing strip. The plane was so big it looked as if it were barely moving. There was only one vehicle that had those massive dimensions…

A C-5 Galaxy.

“Sara,” Colding said quietly. But it couldn’t be. Erika’s attack had just happened. How could Danté have responded this quickly?

The C-5 had been Colding’s idea. A flying lab to keep the ancestor project mobile in case of something… well, in case of something exactly like what had just gone down. One of the world’s largest planes, the 247-foot C-5 ran almost from goal line to goal line on a football field. Its wings spread out like the arms of a giant, 222 feet from tip to tip, and the top of the tail towered six stories high. The cockpit looked like a small black Cyclops eye notched into the elongated, rounded triangle of a fuselage. A 450,000-pound monstrosity large enough to move an entire biotech lab—cows and all—to anywhere in the world.

Five sets of massive wheels, each set the size of a Volkswagen Beetle, extended to meet the snowy landing strip. The C-5 seemed to be moving in slow motion, but it was a jet coming in for a landing at around 120 miles per hour.

Gunther moved to stand at Colding’s shoulder. “What do you want us to do?”

If not for the burning hangar, the charred body on the ground and the woman in the bioinformatics lab with at least a couple of broken ribs, Colding might have laughed at the question.

“Do? Just get in. Our ride is here.”

NOVEMBER 8: WAR ZONE

THE C-5’S TAIL ramp slowly lowered. The wind picked up speed, whipping light snow across the landing strip and sending hands to shield squinting eyes. Lights blared from the plane’s twenty-foot opening, a glowing cave that made a hazy, shivering corona against the falling snow. It struck Colding as a giant mechanical monster, jaws agape, waiting to swallow the Rhumkorrf project whole.

As the ramp lowered past the halfway point, a single man walked down its length.

Magnus Paglione.

Andy let out a triumphant “Yeah!” He gave Colding a now you’re in for it dirty look, then ran to meet his friend. Magnus and Andy reminded Colding of a man and a pet terrier. Andy was hyper, perpetually angry, and worshipped his master. Magnus obviously enjoyed Andy’s company, but never hesitated to dish out discipline as needed.

A large black duffel bag hung from Magnus’s shoulder. The weight of the contents pulled the canvas straps into taut lines that folded up on themselves, but Magnus carried it with the casual ease of a man carrying a loaf of bread. He walked up to Colding, surveying the people and the damage.

His gaze landed on Brady’s corpse. Magnus stared at it for a few seconds.

“Is that Brady?”

Colding nodded.

Magnus looked up, his expression blank. “Who did it?”

Colding swallowed. His heart raced. Magnus’s face showed no emotion, but his whole demeanor had changed—he radiated danger.

“It was Doctor Hoel.”

“You’re kidding,” Magnus said. “An old woman did all of this? Why?”

Colding glanced at Rhumkorrf, thought of lying to keep things as calm as possible, but there was no point. “She wanted to get back at Claus for getting Galina kicked off the project.”

Claus blinked. Snow stuck to his black-rimmed glasses. He looked down at Brady’s corpse, then looked up, taking a subconscious step away from the smoking body as if to separate himself just a bit more.

“That’s ridiculous,” Claus said. “Erika Hoel is a woman of science. I don’t believe it.”

“Believe it,” Jian said in a hoarse rasp. “She took out the off-site backup and all the data.”

Claus’s face blanched and his chest puffed up in panic. It wasn’t lost on Colding that Claus instantly seemed far more concerned about his project than the dead body on the ground.

“The data? She destroyed our data? How could you let her do that?”

Jian held up the petabyte cartridge. She looked scared, hurt and sad all at the same time, but Colding would have bet a hundo that a part of her bitterly enjoyed the panic she’d just given Rhumkorrf.

“I have it all,” Jian said. “And we have done it. Ninety-five percent viability.”

Colding felt a surge of excitement, yet another emotion joining the tumult ripping through his head and soul. Had they done it after all?

“Ninety-five…” Rhumkorrf said, his face shifting from bluster and anger to shock and excitement. “That is fantastic!”

“Go team,” Magnus said. “All’s well that ends well, right? As long as we have the precious data, I guess it’s all good.”

Rhumkorrf actually started to agree, then realized that Magnus was being facetious. Rhumkorrf stared at the ground.

Magnus turned his glare back to Colding. “Where is Hoel?”

“In the bioinformatics lab. It’s under control.”

“If you call my dead friend and millions of dollars in damage under control, Bubbah, then you and I use a different dictionary.” Magnus loved to call Americans Bubbah. Especially Colding. He seemed to find either great humor or great insult in the name.

“I know, right?” Andy said. “Looks like an assault team came in. But no, just some old nympho. Sure glad Colding is in charge.”

“Andy, shut up,” Magnus said. “We’re in a bit of a hurry here. Let’s get everyone onboard, we’re bugging out.”

A fresh gust of wind made everyone duck their head, shield their eyes and take a half step for balance. Everyone but Magnus. He stood still as a stone and stared at Colding. Colding stared right back, his best poker face firmly in place, suspecting Magnus saw right through it.

“Time to move,” Magnus said. “Doctor Rhumkorrf, you have enucleated eggs for all the backup herds?”

“Of course. They are in storage in the main lab.”

“Get them,” Magnus said. “Duplicates of your equipment are on the plane, including the God Machine. You don’t have to wait until we land, you can run the immune response during flight.”

Jian handed Colding the petabyte drive. “I will get the eggs,” she said. She raised an arm over her eyes to block the wind, then ran for the front airlock.

Magnus again stared at the tarp-covered Brady Giovanni. He looked up and nodded, as if he’d accepted the situation. “Colding, get everyone on the plane. We need to move. I’ll stay and get a medevac in for Doctor Hoel.”

Andy stepped forward. “Are you shitting me, Mags?” The C-5’s lights cast strange shadows on Andy’s eyes, under his nose, under his chin. It made him look a little demonic. “That bitch killed Brady, man. And when I tried to take care of it Colding drew down on me and even took my gun. He’s still got my fucking gun, right? You can’t possibly tell me you’re going to leave him in charge, he has no idea—”

Magnus’s left hand shot out and grabbed Andy by the throat, interrupting the smaller guard’s rant. The grab was so controlled it looked almost delicate—one second Andy was talking, the next he was choking, his eyes bulging in surprise, a massive hand completely wrapped around his neck.

“Andy,” Magnus said. “I thought I told you to shut up.”

Andy’s hands shot up, tried to isolate a finger and bend it backward. Colding saw Magnus squeeze, just a little bit. Andy’s eyes grew even wider, then he held his hands up, palms out. Magnus let go and again looked at Colding, as if nothing had happened. Coughing hard, Andy bent at the waist, hands at his throat. He stayed calm, dealing with it, but it was clear that Magnus could have crushed his windpipe with just a touch more pressure.

“Fischer’s on the way,” Magnus said. “We have a very limited satellite window and have to go right now. We’ve been calling you for thirty minutes, but…”—he gestured to the broken satellite dish—“looks like your phone is out of service. Our intel says we have about forty minutes to get clear. I want the C-5 airborne in five. Give Andy his weapon.”

Colding pulled the Beretta from his belt and handed it back to Andy.

Magnus looked back to the C-5. “Let’s move!” He waved his hand. Beckoning someone inside to come down the ramp.

Sara Purinam.

She stood at least five-foot-ten, maybe just a bit taller if you counted her crop of tousled, short blond hair. Light blue eyes were little pinpoints of electric light embedded in her freckled complexion. Just like the last time, Colding didn’t see a trace of makeup. Anything covering that skin would only detract from her natural beauty. She looked the very picture of a surfer girl gone air force.

She walked down and stood right in front of Colding. She looked pissed. From the mission? Or from the way he had treated her? Probably both.

He felt an instant and powerful sexual attraction, the same one he’d felt the last time they’d met. He had acted on it and betrayed the memory of his barely cold wife. The thought of Clarissa dredged up a fresh scar of guilt. He had more important things to do than ogle this woman.

“Mister Colding,” Sara said in an even tone. “Fancy meeting you here.”

“Purinam,” Colding said, nodding.

Sara turned to Magnus. “So what the hell is going on? This looks like a war zone.”

Rhumkorrf stepped forward. “Yes, what happened? If Erika did want to hurt me, why now? Why is Colonel Fischer after us again?”

Magnus looked at everyone, one by one, seeming to weigh the value of spending more time on the ground. “Novozyme had a virus jump species. Seventy-five percent lethality.”

Rhumkorrf’s eyes widened. “Seventy-five percent? I always knew Matal’s method was flawed. That is horrible. Did the virus get out?”

“Contained,” Magnus said. “The Americans were on it fast. Fischer fuel-bombed the lab, then moved on to shutting down all transgenic projects. That includes us.”

Rhumkorrf shook his head. “No. No, not when we are so close. We have to keep going.”

“So get in the fucking plane,” Magnus said. “We’re taking the project underground. All your competitors will soon be offline. All of them. If you don’t get out of here before Fischer arrives, your Nobel Prize will be forever lost in the mail.”

Sara’s eyes narrowed. “Who the hell is Colonel Fischer? Are we talking U.S. military? And there’s a fucking dead body right there. We didn’t sign up for this shit.”

Magnus turned fast and took a step toward her, the motion bringing him toe-to-toe with Sara. She had to look straight up to meet Magnus’s eyes.

“You signed up to do whatever we tell you to do,” he said. “You’ve certainly cashed enough of our checks. Now, unless you want to lose your business, get your crew moving and load this plane. You’ve got four minutes.”

Sara held his gaze for just a second, then turned away and shouted in a voice that momentarily drowned out the idling jet engines. “Let’s move, boys! Wheels up in four minutes!”

Three men wearing black Genada parkas descended the loading ramp. Colding recognized the short, Hispanic Alonzo Barella. Behind him, Harold and Cappy, the black and white “twins.”

“Weapons,” Sara said. “The only people armed on my plane are me and my crew, so give your weapons to Harold.”

Harold stepped up, hands out. Colding ejected his magazine, checked the chamber, then handed the Beretta and magazine to Harold. Gunther quickly did the same.

Andy laughed at Sara, then grabbed his crotch and shook it. “I’ll keep my pistol and give you my gun, flygirl. How ’bout that?”

Sara shrugged. “Then you’re not getting on the plane. Stay here and fuck a cow or something.”

“Enough!” Magnus snapped. “Andy keeps his weapon. Get this damn process moving.” He stared at Sara. “That okay with you, Captain?”

Sara glared at Andy, who was still laughing, then she turned back to Magnus.

“Fine,” she said. “You’re the boss.”

Magnus checked his watch. “You all have two minutes to grab any personal effects.”

Andy and Gunther sprinted for the main building. Colding didn’t bother. Neither did Rhumkorrf.

Jian came out the front airlock, night winds rippling her clothes as she struggled to push a dolly loaded with a thick aluminum canister. Alonzo ran to help her. Cappy got under Tim Feely’s arm and helped the drunk, sleepy scientist up the ramp. Gunther and Andy soon came back out. Gunther hauled a duffel bag stuffed with books while Andy carried a beat-up brown paper bag. Great. The Asshole thought to save his porno mag collection. The two guards ran up the ramp and into the C-5.

That left Colding alone with Magnus. “So where are we going?”

“An island in Lake Superior called Black Manitou.”

“Lake Superior? How in the hell are we going to get that thing,” Colding jerked his thumb toward the C-5, “through the Canadian air defense grid and then U.S. air defense?”

Magnus looked away, as if the questions annoyed him. “We have a contact at the Iqaluit Airport and a flight plan that shows us as a 747 cargo plane going from Iqaluit to Thunder Bay Airport. We have another contact at Thunder Bay—they don’t pay air traffic controllers that much, it seems—and he’s going to log us as landing. Flight is about three hours, Bubbah. Once past Thunder Bay, Sara puts the C-5 into night mode: no lights, she flies below the radar deck. There’s nothing between Thunder Bay and Black Manitou. It’s twenty minutes of low-level flying.”

Colding nodded. That sounded like it could work. “Still, isn’t Black Manitou a little close to civilization for what we’re doing?”

Magnus laughed. “Close to civilization? We’ll see what you think when you get there.” He unzipped the black canvas duffel bag a quarter of the way, reached in and pulled out a manila folder. He zipped the bag before Colding could get a look inside.

“Here’s everything you need to know,” Magnus said, holding out the folder. “There’s only five people on the island and they all work for Genada. Clayton Detweiler runs the place for us. When you see his son, Gary, tell him to make sure my snowmobile is ready.”

Colding took the folder.

Magnus continued. “You’re off the grid as of now. No outside communication of any kind, other than a secure comm link to Manitoba. No wireless security gear, no Internet, no nothing. You guys don’t exist anymore.”

As disturbing as that sounded, Colding also knew it was the only way to keep the project alive. Hell, the C-5 had been his idea, a way to keep the project going if anyone tried to shut them down.

He thought about the way Magnus had looked at Brady’s corpse, and the deadly vibe he’d given off when he asked who did it. If Colding flew off, he’d leave Erika alone with this man.

“What about Doctor Hoel?”

“You mean the old woman who single-handedly fucked up your operation and killed my friend?”

Colding let out a breath that clouded in front of his face, then nodded slowly.

“Don’t worry. I’ll take care of her.”

“Magnus, she didn’t mean to hurt Brady. Fischer got to her, she just wanted to destroy Rhumkorrf’s work and—”

“You think I’m stupid,” Magnus said softly. “That’s it, isn’t it? You think you’re smarter than me?”

Colding shook his head, a little too quickly.

Magnus smiled. “Sure you do, Bubbah. You think I’m dumb enough to kill a woman who works for Fischer. This conversation is over. Now get on the plane, or stay here and have a chat with your old buddy Paul Fischer when he lands.”

Colding paused one more second, unable to shake a feeling of dread. What choice did he have? If he wanted the project to succeed, he had to trust Magnus. Colding turned and walked up the C-5’s loading ramp.

The ramp led into a large cargo bay. At twenty feet across, it was almost wide enough for a two-lane highway. He’d reviewed the engineer’s schematics, helped design them, in fact, but he’d never seen the finished product. Once inside, all he could do was stop and stare at the cows. The cows all stared back at him.

He could see all the way down the long fuselage to the front loading ramp, now folded up behind the closed nose cone. Along most of that length ran just over a hundred feet of cattle stalls, seven feet deep, twenty-five to a side with a five-foot aisle down the middle. Clear plastic walls separated each stall. Clear plastic doors completed each cage, with a bin inside the door to hold feed pellets that were dumped in by an automatic system. The outside of each door held a flat-panel control monitor that showed the cow’s heart rate, weight and several other factors Colding didn’t recognize right off the bat.

Big-eyed black-and-white Holstein cows occupied the stalls, each partially supported by a durable harness that hung from the ceiling. Hooves still touched the deck, but the harnesses carried most of the weight—couldn’t have fifteen-hundred-pound animals jostling around during flight. The occasional moos helped reinforce the surreal scene. An overwhelming smell of cows and cow shit permeated the place. A labeled plastic tag hung from each cow’s right ear—A-1, A-2, A-3 and so on.

The animals seemed perfectly calm and happy. Calm, but big, standing five feet tall at the shoulder. Colding could only imagine trying to control fifty of them inside the plane if something caused a panic.

Just inside the ramp to his right was the aft ladder that led to a second deck containing equipment, computers and lab space for Rhumkorrf and Jian. Up there they had almost all of their equipment from the Baffin facility, just a lot less space in which to work it.

Past the cow stalls and on the right-hand side of the center aisle sat twenty feet of veterinary lab space filled with computers, supply cabinets and a big metal table that ran along the aisle’s edge. On the aisle’s left side was an open space where a ten-foot-by-seven-foot elevator platform could lower down from the upper deck. Past that were twelve crash chairs arranged in three rows of four. Beyond the crash chairs, the folded-up front ramp and a metal ladder to the upper deck.

Miller and Cappy scurried about, checking readouts and testing the straps securing each cow. The men gave Colding several quick looks, as if they expected him to move forward, but the C-5’s interior held him awestruck. The two crewmen quickly walked over to him, both moving nearly in lockstep with the same quick gait.

“You need to get seated, sir,” Miller said.

“Yeah,” Cappy said. “You need to get seated.”

Colding nodded apologetically and walked deeper into the plane. “Sorry, guys, it’s just a bit… overwhelming. And don’t call me sir, call me P. J.”

“Okay, P. J.,” Miller said.

“Yeah, okay, P. J.,” Cappy said.

They led him to the crash chairs where Andy, Gunther, Rhumkorrf, Jian and Tim were already strapped in. Tim was asleep, a little drool trickling down from his lower lip.

The sound of heavy hydraulics whined through the C-5. The rear ramp slowly folded up on itself, tucking away for the upcoming flight. Two outer rear doors closed behind it, returning the plane to a smooth, aerodynamic profile. The C-5’s entire nose section could also lift up like a gaping mouth. With both front and rear ramps down, a fifty-seven-ton, twelve-foot-wide M1-Abrams tank could literally drive in one end of the plane and out the other.

Colding sat and reached for the restraints, wincing in pain as his sliced chest and shoulder burned with the new movement.

Sara dropped down the ladder from the upper deck. She turned and saw him fiddling with the restraints. “Let’s go, Colding. Buckle up, dammit, we’re taking off.”

“I, uh… I need some help.”

Sara walked up to him. In the C-5’s bright interior lights, she seemed to notice his torn jacket—and his blood—for the first time.

“That’s a mess,” she said. “Let’s see your wound.”

“It’s nothing. Can you just help me with the buckles?”

She ignored him, instead reaching out to open his coat and look inside. Sara took in a short hiss of breath when she saw the damage.

“What did that?”

“An axe,” Colding said.

Andy laughed his grating laugh. “An old lady with an axe, you mean. Better not let you meet my grandma, Colding, she might whip your ass for shits and giggles.”

“Andy,” Sara said, “shut the fuck up. Colding, I’ll take care of this once we’re in the air. For now, try not to bleed all over my plane.”

She reached down to both of his sides, grabbed the restraints, buckled him in and tightened him up. Once finished, Sara walked back to the fore ladder and ascended.

Seconds later, the C-5’s four giant TF39 turbofan engines hummed with raw power. Colding felt the massive plane start to inch forward. Steady thrust pushed him back into his seat. The plane rattled as it accelerated across the snowy airstrip, then much of the rattling dropped away as the wheels cleared the ground.

NOVEMBER 8: TAKE IT

THREE UH-60 BLACK Hawk helicopters came in low, just thirty feet above the night-darkened snow. The two lead choppers flew in a wide circle around the Baffin Island facility’s perimeter. The third Black Hawk hung back, stationary.

Inside that third helicopter, Colonel Paul Fischer looked through binoculars, surveying the damage below. The ruins of a large sheet-metal building lay crumpled like a giant, stomped Pepsi can. Dying flames propelled tendrils of black smoke through the torn metal. The place looked like a war zone. Good thing he was going in with twenty-four soldiers.

Paul wore a bulky, blue bodysuit. He felt ridiculous, but the Chemturion suit would protect him against any infectious agent. At least it would if he’d put on the helmet, which was now sitting at his feet in a tiny gesture of rebellion against strict orders based on ignorance, as issued by one Murray Longworth. Didn’t change the fact that Paul looked like a cross between a Smurf and the Stay Puft Marshmallow man.

The eight armed men seated with him in the Black Hawk looked far meaner in their full Mission-Oriented Protective Posture gear. MOPP suits consisted of a mask and a hood that hung down over the neck and shoulders, along with a charcoal-lined bodysuit and gloves. The whole rig provided significant protection against chemical, biological, radiological and even nuclear hazards. Not as much protection as Paul’s smurfy Chemturion suit, were it properly worn, but what the MOPP suits gave up in total protection they made up for in mobility. He had no doubt these men could move fast and efficiently use their weapons—mean-looking M249 squad automatic weapons and compact Fabrique National P90s.

Eight more MOPP-suited soldiers rode in each of the other two Black Hawks, sixteen men who would storm the facility and lock everything down. The eight with Paul were part backup, part babysitter. He, apparently, was the baby that needed sitting. He wasn’t part of the combat operation. When the men weren’t talking directly to him, they referred to him as “the package.”

All of this gear was overkill anyway. The odds of another lethal transgenic virus breaking out right now were about as high as a cell phone store full of monkeys testing out the complete works of Shakespeare in the next twenty-four hours. But Murray Longworth’s orders had been both obnoxious and clear—go in with all due precaution.

Colding had already evaded them once, made an entire research project vanish and eliminated any evidence of Genada wrongdoing. That was why Longworth wanted to go in fast, go in hard, make sure Colding couldn’t pull a repeat performance. Looking at the burning hangar, Paul had to wonder if they were already too late.

“Colonel Fischer,” the copilot called back. “The outbuilding is destroyed, but the main facility looks intact. The teams are ready to land.”

“Tell them to take it,” Paul said.

In the distance, the two Black Hawks broke out of their circle and closed in on the facility.

RADAR TRACKED THE distance of the approaching aircraft. One hundred and fifty meters and closing.

Erika Hoel cried. Duct tape held her to the security room chair, the same chair in which Gunther Jones had cranked out two full novels and most of a third. She couldn’t slide her hands out of the thick, silver tape, and each time she tried her ribs raged with their stabbing-glass pain.

…one hundred twenty-five meters…

More of that same roll of duct tape was wrapped around her shins, where it held a fist-sized ball of soft putty against her skin. Magnus had calmly explained the putty was Demex, a kind of plastic explosive. He had walked her through the process, told her exactly what would happen when the incoming aircraft closed to one hundred meters.

…one hundred fifteen meters…

A coiled wire ran from the Demex to a small router he’d connected to the radar system. That router showed ten red lights, one light for each of ten wires. The other nine wires led out of the security room door, spreading throughout the facility where they connected to much larger balls of Demex.

No one was going to save her. Her petty vindictiveness had killed Brady, and now it would result in her death as well. Cold acceptance finally settled in. She stopped crying. Erika made one final wish that Claus Rhumkorrf and Galina Poriskova would have long, happy lives.

At exactly one hundred meters, the radar system sent a signal to the router.

A COORDINATED EXPLOSION shattered the mostly cinder-block facility. Even though he was five hundred yards away, Fischer flinched back from the blossoming fireball that briefly lit up the night and reflected off the white snow. A solid building one second, a shattered, burning, smoking wreck the next.

“Get clear! Get clear!” he heard the pilot say. Fischer’s Black Hawk didn’t move, but the other two zipped away from the facility in case there were more explosions or hostiles on the ground that might take potshots.

Colding was a clever fucker, no question, but he wouldn’t have done that. Magnus Paglione. Had to be. Dammit.

“Just stay away from the main facility,” Paul shouted to the copilot. “Tell the other Black Hawks to circle wide, look for people on the ground, and use extreme caution—some of Genada’s staff have special forces training.”

Fischer knew the men would find nothing. No research, no evidence. Genada had slipped away again.

NOVEMBER 8: PEEJ

TWENTY MINUTES AFTER takeoff, Colding watched Sara descend the fore ladder. She smiled at her passengers and spoke with the mock hospitality of a flight attendant.

“Ladies and gentlemen, we’re under way. Please feel free to move about the cabin.”

Tim was still out cold, but Jian and Rhumkorrf unbuckled. Rhumkorrf stood and walked slowly past the cattle stalls to the aft ladder, where he climbed up to his second-deck lab. Jian followed him, the petabyte drive still clutched in her arms like a stuffed animal.

Gunther and Andy stood and stretched—for the rest of the flight, they wouldn’t have much to do.

“Fucking Brady,” Gunther said. “All the garbage we’ve survived and he dies on this job.”

“No shit,” Andy said, then grabbed Gunther’s shoulder in a rare display of camaraderie. “Remember that house outside Kabul?”

Gunther looked away, then down. “Yeah. Yeah, I remember it. I’d be dead if it wasn’t for Brady.”

“You and me both, brother,” Andy said.

Gunther looked up at Sara. Shadows of not-quite-suppressed memories clouded his eyes. “Hey, is there a workstation here or something with a word processor? Where I could plug in this?” He pulled a key ring out of his pocket. A silver flash drive with the red Genada label hung from the end.

Sara looked at the drive. “What’s that? Work stuff?”

“It’s his faggy novel,” Andy said. “That’s how Gun escapes memories of all the good times we used to have. Ain’t that right, Gun?”

Gunther shrugged and looked down again.

“We have a workstation,” Sara said quickly. “All of you, follow me. And Colding, I’m serious about you not getting blood on my plane. I’ll get you cleaned up. If any of you want to sleep, I’ll show you the bunk room.”

Andy leered at Sara. “You want to join me for a nap? Maybe confiscate my weapon the old-fashioned way?”

Sara rolled her eyes. “In your dreams, little man.”

Andy laughed, his mouth twisting into a half-smile, half-sneer. He didn’t seem that torn up by his best buddy’s death, but then again Colding had little combat experience. Maybe the ability to move on quickly was part of what made someone a professional soldier.

Instead of taking them up the fore or aft ladder, Sara pushed and held a button on the inside hull. Machinery whined as the ten-by-ten platform lowered via a telescoping hydraulic pole mounted at each corner.

“We use this for heavy stuff,” Sara said. “Or when someone is gimpy and needs to go up to the infirmary.”

They walked onto the platform’s metal-grate floor. Sara pushed and held a button mounted on one of the hydraulic poles and they rode up.

When the platform reached the top, Colding looked aft at the thousand square feet of second-deck lab space. A large flat-panel monitor, eight feet wide by five feet high, dominated the rear bulkhead. Soft fluorescent lights illuminated gleaming metal equipment, black lab tables, small computer screens and white cabinets, all packed perfectly into the C-5’s arcing hull.

Already lost in code, Jian sat in an exact copy of her seven-monitor computer station. Rhumkorrf moved from machine to machine, running his hands over the various surfaces, staring for a second, then nodding with satisfaction and moving on to the next. Colding felt a bloom of pride at seeing his design brought to life, and at seeing Jian and Rhumkorrf’s apparent approval.

“You packed this baby tight,” Sara said. “I don’t know what any of this shit is for, but it sure looks expensive.”

Colding nodded. “You have no idea.”

“Come on,” Sara said. “Bunk room is between the lab and the cockpit.” She walked through a narrow hallway and pointed out the C-5’s features: a tiny galley, an infirmary with two beds, a bunk room with three bunks, and a small room that had two couches and a flat-panel TV mounted on the wall. A video game console and a rack of games sat in a small entertainment center on the floor below the TV.

“Now we’re talking,” Andy said. He immediately sat down and fired up a game of Madden.

“Damn,” Gunther said. “This plane is huge.”

Colding nodded. “That’s why we picked it. With our payload it will do over thirty-five hundred miles without refueling. Gives us a massive range. And we’re encapsulated—we do all the work right onboard.”

Sara pointed to a laptop sitting on a wall-mounted table. “If you want to write, Gunther, there you go.”

“Actually, I’m beat,” he said. “Think I’ll get some sleep.”

Maybe Andy could quickly forget Brady’s death, but Gunther looked haunted. How long had he known Brady? Five years? Ten? Colding felt the loss like a fist in his chest, but he’d known the man not even two years and they had never been tight friends. Gunther had to be hurting bad.

“Gun,” Colding said. “I’m really sorry about Brady.”

Gun nodded a silent thanks. He shuffled off to the bunk room.

Sara gently grabbed the back of Colding’s right arm. “Come on.” She walked him the few feet to the small infirmary and pointed at one of the two metal beds. He sat. Without a word, she helped him out of his ruined parka. Bits of white down feathers escaped and floated in the air. She grabbed some surgical scissors and cut away his torn, bloody shirt.

She wore no perfume, but this close the scent of her skin filled his nose. She smelled just like she had two and a half years ago.

He craned his neck to get a good look at the wound. The edge of the axe blade had cut him from his left shoulder to his sternum. He’d been lucky. If the point had gone just a bit deeper, it would have sliced his pectoral in half. Sara cleaned the cut.

“Do I need stitches?”

Sara shook her head. “Basically a glorified scratch.”

Her hands moved delicately across his skin, wiping away the still-oozing blood. She picked bits of white down feathers out of the cut before gently smearing antibiotic ointment on the wound. It hurt, but the touch of her fingertips felt relaxing. She quickly finished the job, wrapping gauze across the wound and around his chest, then sealing it in place with surgical tape.

Despite her delicate touch, she radiated hostility. He had to talk to her, smooth things out. “Listen, Sara, I—”

“Don’t bother. You got what you wanted—me, and through me, a crew for this plane.”

Was that what she thought? That he’d just used her? “That’s not how it was.”

“Oh?” She stood straight and looked him in the eye. With his ass sitting on the table, her head was just a little above his. “That’s not how it was? Then how was it, Peej?”

Peej. That strange nickname she started calling him after they’d had sex. He’d thought the name cute then. Now he found it uncomfortable.

“Call me P. J., please.”

“Excuse me?”

“Uh… well, you know. The last time you called me Peej, we… uh…”

She tilted her head and smiled the way you’d smile at some loudmouth in a bar right before you smacked him in the nose.

“Tell you what,” she said. “I’ll give you a choice. I can call you Peej, or I can call you Mister Rotten Fucking Piece of Shit That Treated Me Like a Used-up Whore. How’s that?”

Colding just blinked. “Uh… that’s not… I mean… that’s not what it was.”

She crossed her arms. “Then what was it? Used your magic cock to get me to sign the contract?”

He felt his face get all hot. Clarissa had never talked like that.

“So,” Sara said. “Which name would you prefer?”

He just wanted to end this conversation, and right now. “Peej will be fine.”

“I thought so. Now go get some sleep. I’ll send someone to wake you when we get close to Black Manitou.”

Sara strode out of the infirmary and turned left, toward the cockpit. Colding watched her go, watched the only woman—besides his wife—he’d slept with in the last six years.

Maybe she was right. Maybe he deserved it. And then he remembered Brady’s dead body, remembered how he’d kicked in Erika Hoel’s ribs, remembered that Fischer would keep hunting for all of them. Those things were far more important than worrying about Sara Purinam’s feelings.

He hopped off the bed and walked to the bunk room. Gunther was already snoring. The noise didn’t keep Colding awake for long.

NOVEMBER 8: THE GANG’S ALL HERE

“STOP IT, HANDS.”

Jian’s bloody hands ignored her. They kept sewing. The needle pricks were worse this time, each one a piercing sting she felt clear down to the bone. Wet red dampened the panda body’s black-and-white fur.

“Stop it, hands.”

She finished sewing. Just like the time before, and the times before that, the mishmash creature’s big black eyes fluttered to life, blinking like a drunken man awakening to the noonday sun.

Evil.

Jian felt evil pouring off the thing like the acrid stench of a skunk. She wanted to move, to run, but her body obeyed no better than her possessed hands.

Evil enough to kill her. And wasn’t that what she truly deserved?

The creature looked at her. It opened its wide mouth.

Jian started to scream.

SARA AND ALONZO sat in the C-5 cockpit. The equipment-packed space smelled of artificial pine thanks to the green, tree-shaped car air freshener Alonzo had hung off the overhead systems panel.

Sara could feel the tension pouring off her copilot, and she’d had just about enough.

“Out with it, ’Zo,” she said. “You’ve been biting your tongue for hours. If you’ve got something to say, say it.”

He examined his instruments, making a show of looking very closely at everything in front of him. Sara let the silence hang. She just stared at him.

The cockpit door opened. Miller and Cappy came in. Normally, they didn’t come up to the cockpit during a flight.

“Well, well, well,” Sara said. “The gang’s all here. I bet you’re ready to talk now, hey ’Zo?”

Alonzo nodded. “You actually need us to say it?”

“Say what, exactly?”

Miller laughed a small laugh. “We’re sooooo reserved and mysterious. See if you can guess what we’re thinking.”

“Yeah,” Cappy said. “See if you can guess and shit.”

“Let’s see,” Sara said, rubbing her chin and looking up. “The spirits tell me… you’re concerned that we’re transporting a genetic experiment that we know nothing about?”

“Bzzzz,” Alonzo said. “Wrong, but thanks for playing.”

“Come on, guys, enough. Talk to me. Miller, sit your ass down and spill.”

Miller took the observer seat, which was right behind the copilot seat. “Sure, the genetics stuff freaks me out,” he said. “But I signed up for that. I knew what I was getting into.”

Cappy remained standing. He crossed his arms over his chest. “What we didn’t sign up for, chickee-poo, was flying Fred into a fucking combat zone, complete with burning buildings and dead bodies, then loading up casualties and flying out fast. A new Fred isn’t built for hot-zone operations like that, let alone a rebuilt one. You know this.”

Fred was a nickname for the entire C-5 line—it stood for Fucking Ridiculous Economic Disaster. The planes normally required around sixteen hours of maintenance for each hour of flight time. Their modified version was updated with state-of-the-art gear top to bottom, so it was easier to maintain, but Miller was still dead-on: this plane was not designed for combat operations. But what could they do about it now? Sara shrugged, wondering if she looked as nonchalant as she hoped.

Alonzo didn’t appreciate the attitude. “Sara, a man died back there. This is supposed to be a science experiment, not an action movie.”

It was Sara’s turn to look away, to overly examine the instruments. She and the boys had been together for seven years. They’d been in her C-5 crew during their days in the air force. When they all got out, they’d pooled their money and bought a 747 that had been converted for pure cargo hauling. There had been plenty of shipping offers from drug smugglers, but Sara and the boys never took those jobs. Most of their income came from FedEx and UPS, when those companies had an overflow of cargo that absolutely, positively had to be there overnight.

They owned their own company, controlled their own destiny, and that had been a thrilling feeling. Unfortunately, drops in shipping demands worldwide caught them unprepared. They quickly fell behind on payments and were in danger of losing everything.

Then P. J. Colding had come a’calling. Her knight in shining armor. If Sara and her crew agreed to help rebuild Genada’s Frankenstein C-5, the company would pay off the 747 completely and give each of them a six-figure salary just to be on retainer. All she and her three closest friends had to do was keep the C-5 in top condition and be ready to fly on a moment’s notice.

“We made a deal, guys,” Sara said. “We took Genada’s money. A lot of it. It’s not like the Paglione brothers can open the Yellow Pages and just go find another crew for this bird.”

“The Pagliones?” Alonzo said. “You sure you don’t mean Colding? We’re not blind, Sara. We’ve seen you hook up with guys before, but you had a major shine-on for that big geek.”

“Fuck you,” Sara said. “I screwed up once. No way I’m hitting that again, and even if I do, you know goddamn well that wouldn’t influence my decision. Bottom line is we can’t be replaced. If we quit, we’re leaving Genada in the lurch.”

“I know that, boss,” Miller said. “But people are willing to kill for this shit.”

“Yeah,” Cappy said. “Willing to kill. And the freakin’ U.S. government? Military, maybe? Who is this Colonel Fischer cat, anyway?”

“And how about that burning body?” Alonzo asked. “That kind of thing ain’t our business.”

She put her fingers on her temples and rubbed. Alonzo was right. They were all right, but they were also fresh out of options. “Guys, this situation sucks for us, but if we just stay cool and finish the job, we own our 747 free and clear. I’m willing to take risks to make that happen. If we bail, we lose everything we’ve struggled for. Me? To be blunt, I’d rather die first. But if you guys want out, say the word and we walk as soon as we land.”

She stared at each of them in turn. It had to be a group decision. She couldn’t coerce them one way or another, nor would she. These men were her family, the brothers she’d never had.

They all looked at the ground, the equipment, anywhere but at Sara. None of them wanted to work for someone else ever again. But how far were they willing to go for that?

She leaned out of her seat and stared hard at Alonzo. “Well? I can’t decide this for you. Make a decision.”

Alonzo seemed to shrink into his seat. He hated to be put on the spot. “I like being my own boss. But you have to promise us that if it gets crazy, that this whole burning body thing was anything other than a onetime fluke, then we’re out. Deal?”

Sara nodded.

“Well then, fuck it,” Alonzo said. “We all look out for each other. We finish the job. I’m in.”

Sara turned to stare at the Twins, but she already knew their answer.

“I agree with ’Zo,” Miller said. “Fuck it, I’m in.”

Cappy gave a thumbs-up. “Me too. I’ll even throw in a mandatory fuck it just so I can swear like all the cool kids.”

Sara laughed. “Okay, now that we have that cleared up, let’s do our jobs. I’m going to check on Jian and Rhumkorrf. ’Zo, you keep flying. Cappy and Miller, go check on that drunk-ass Tim Feely. If he’s still out, just leave him in the crash chair.”

Sara followed Cappy and Miller out of the cockpit. They descended the fore ladder to the lower deck while Sara walked to the upper-deck lab.

THE TIGER ARM and the baby arm simultaneously reached up, toward her face. Bent sewing needles sprouted from the finger/paw tips.

“No,” Jian whimpered. “No, please no…”

Needles sank into her shoulders. The wide mouth opened and leaned in toward her face.

Breath like a puppy’s.

Long teeth wet with saliva.

Jian lost her grip on the stuffed monstrosity. The creature fell to the grass. It landed on all fours and started to scramble toward her, hissing in anger, black eyes narrow with hatred and hunger.

Finally, all her pain and suffering would end…

SARA ENTERED THE lab to find Jian asleep on her computer desk, head and arms lying heavily to the left of a computer keyboard. Her glossy hair seemed to melt right into the desk’s black surface. She was asleep, but not motionless—the woman twitched and whimpered.

Rhumkorrf was sitting at a terminal across the lab, either ignoring Jian’s nightmare or oblivious to it.

“Doctor Rhumkorrf?” Sara said. “Is she okay?”

He looked up from his computer, then looked at Jian. He waved a hand dismissively. “She does that all the time.” He bent back to his work.

What an asshole. Sara gently shook Jian’s shoulders. The woman snapped up and awake, looked at Sara and flinched away as if Sara were some creature straight from the nightmare.

“Take it easy,” Sara said in a soothing voice. “It’s okay.”

Jian blinked, took a deep breath, held it, then let it out in a long, slow exhale. This chick was a total mess. Must have been a humdinger of a dream. Jian’s eyes suddenly darted to the right, to her multiple computer screens, then she twisted her body to look under the desk.

“Jian, what is it?”

“Did you see it?”

“See what?”

Jian looked around the lab quickly, eyes hunting. “I thought I saw one of them.”

“One of what, honey?”

The woman jammed her fists into her eyes and rubbed. “I thought I saw something. But nothing is there.”

Sara reached out and stroked Jian’s long black hair. “Just take a breath, kiddo. You had a nightmare, that’s all.”

Jian stared back with haunted, hollow eyes. “That all,” she said with a whisper, then laughed quietly. It was a high-pitched laugh. Had it been louder Sara might have mistaken it for a scream.

Jian turned to her computer, shoulders hunched, hair hanging in front of her face. She had the carriage of a woman who’d been beaten by her husband or boyfriend. And still, Rhumkorrf was oblivious. Total asshole.

“Miss Purinam, may I ask a question?”

“Don’t call me Miss,” Sara said, and smiled. “I work for a living. You call me Sara.”

Jian shook her head. “I use respectful terms only.”

“Okay, then, Sara it is.” Sara put a finger under Jian’s chin and gently lifted, tilting the woman’s head back. Bright red splotches dotted Jian’s neck, precursors to the already-forming dark bruises. “We need to get some ice on your neck.”

“I am fine, Miss Purinam.”

“Sara. And when I get the ice, you will put it on. Now, what’s your question?”

“Where did you get such a plane? This is a flying lab, everything we need. It is amazing.”

“It’s a C-5B that once upon a time crash-landed at Dover Air Force Base,” Sara said. “Most of the plane was sold for scrap, which Colding bought up through one of Genada’s dummy corporations. We got parts from two other crashes and new engines from a quiet contract with Boeing. Colding went to Baffin with you; my crew and I oversaw the reassembly project in Brazil. Pour in money, shake well, Genada has its own hot-rodded, big-ass flying lab.”

“You put pieces together to make a new whole,” Jian said, then nodded. “That is like what I do for Genada, but I do it inside the computer.”

“But you guys chop up cells and DNA, stuff like that,” Sara said. “You can’t do that on a computer, can you?”

Jian hopped up and waddled to a white machine. She looked relieved to have something to talk about, or maybe someone to talk to. She gestured at the machine like an auto-show model displaying a new concept car.

“This is our oligo synthesizer. When I make genomes in the computer, this machine creates DNA one nucleotide at a time, the same way you would build chain links, only on a much smaller scale.”

The device didn’t look that dramatic to Sara—waist high, mostly off-white plastic, bristling with orderly tubes and hoses and plastic jars. It didn’t look that sci-fi, but what Jian was saying… well, that was just beyond sci-fi.

“I don’t think I get it,” Sara said. “You’re telling me this is like a biological inkjet printer? It can make, I don’t know… hot-rodded DNA?”

Jian nodded. “This is the most advanced machine of its kind in the world. It can build full, custom chromosomes that we create and test inside the computer.”

“Holy shit. That’s amazing. Imagine the brain that came up with that one.”

“That brain is mine,” Jian said. She smiled proudly, an expression that seemed to crack a hidden reserve of beauty Sara hadn’t seen before. “I invented it. I call my computer the God Machine, so this oligo machine is like the hand of God. Isn’t that funny?”

No. It wasn’t funny. In fact, the name sent a chill down Sara’s spine. The God Machine. And right smack-dab in the middle of her plane.

Sara didn’t like it. Not one damn bit.

“Let me get some ice for your neck,” Sara said. “I’ll be right back.”

NOVEMBER 8: GOD MACHINES

SARA GENTLY WRAPPED gauze around Jian’s neck. The gauze held a small ice pack in place over darkening bruises. Jian tilted her head to accommodate, but she never stopped typing. Her eyes flicked across her half hemisphere of screens. Sara couldn’t understand what the woman was doing—the only thing on the screens was an endless list of four letters: C, G, T and A.

“I know you’re smart and all,” Sara said, “but doesn’t the computer handle that coding stuff?”

Jian shrugged. “Sometimes I see things that give me idea. I tweak genome here, tweak genome there. I am hoping I can reload our latest research from the drive I brought onboard.” As if to punctuate her point, Jian called up a new window, typed in a few lines of code, then returned to the endlessly scrolling list of A, G, T and C.

The computer gave off a loud, single beep. Jian took in a sharp breath and held it. She stared at the screen with a spooky intensity. Jian reminded Sara of a hard-core gambler waiting for the dice to stop tumbling.

Jian clicked the mouse, and Sara saw actual words appear on the screen.

Rhumkorrf’s head popped out from behind his terminal.

“Is it loaded?”

“Yes, Doctor Rhumkorrf,” Jian said.

He ran over. Scurried was a better word, because the fidgety man reminded Sara of a rat with glasses.

“Sara,” he said, “please go wake up Mister Feely. Tell him we need to prepare and run the immune response test, immediately.”

Sara saw Jian’s right hand move the mouse. On the screen, the pointer hovered over YES. Jian’s left hand stayed flat on the desktop—she actually crossed her fingers, then clicked the mouse.

A mechanical humming sound came from the oligo machine. The hand of God. Sara quickly left the lab, partly to wake up Feely, and partly because she didn’t want to be anywhere near that thing.

NOVEMBER 8: RHUMKORRF SAVES THE DAY

THE C-5’S INCESSANT in-flight hum filled the lab’s stillness, but Claus barely noticed it. All of his attention rested on the bulkhead monitor, as did that of Jian and Tim.

Once again, the grid of 150 squares. Black filled only nineteen of them.

131/150

They all kept checking watches, looking at the time counter on the monitor, even scanning for other clocks in the room. It had never gone this long—usually this far into the test, there were fewer than ten eggs left.

Another panel went black.

130/150

Three people held their breath, waiting for the inevitable cascade of black squares. A cascade that did not appear.

“Mister Feely,” Claus said. “Give me the time.” He could have gone by the clock on the screen, but he couldn’t let himself believe it. There had to be a mistake. Tim had the official time and that was what Claus wanted. Erika had kept the official time before, but she was no longer part of the project. Now her duties—all of them—fell to Tim.

“Twenty-four minutes, thirteen seconds,” Tim said.

Claus felt a flicker of hope. Maybe… maybe. He watched, waited. No more black squares appeared. The embryos vibrated as their cells split and split again, taking them well into the morula stage. In some of the squares, the lethal macrophages actually sat side by side with the morulas.

But no more attacks.

No one spoke. Claus suddenly noticed that the jet-engine hum was the only sound in the lab.

“Time?”

Tim started to talk, then gagged and covered his mouth. Erika had not only been the superior intellect, she also, apparently, could hold her liquor better.

“Twenty-eight minutes and thirty seconds,” Tim said, recovering. “Mark.”

In square thirty-eight, an egg quivered: another successful mitosis. The macrophages moved around aimlessly.

Claus had done it. He had beaten the immune response.

His strategy had been risky—shorting Jian’s meds brought on her manic/depressive symptoms, but it also freed up her mind. Her most creative solutions had always come when she was on the edge of madness. Soon, perhaps, he could get her to her normal medication level, but not now, not when he needed her at her best. The implantation process came next. If that brought more problems, they would need fast solutions. They were on the run from world governments, for God’s sake—speed was of the essence.

Besides, Jian’s nightmares were getting worse but her hallucinations had only started recently. He probably had a week or so before she got suicidal. Maybe less. But that was the kind of gamble you took when immortality was on the line.

He counted off sixty more seconds, just to be sure.

No more black squares.

“It is a success,” he said. “We need to prepare the eggs for implantation.”

He wished Erika could have been here for this. Despite her horrible actions, she was a brilliant scientist. Oh well, she’d just have to read about it in the journals. Maybe he’d even leave her name on some of the lesser research papers.

Jian, however, would get full secondary credit. She’d earned it. He saw her fingering the bandage around her neck, the bandage covering the bruises Erika had given her. Women. They were all crazy.

“Jian, what changed?” Claus said. “What did you do?”

“The four new samples helped, Doctor Rhumkorrf, but I also had an idea, very simple, that we had not thought. We want internal organs, and we’ve coded to make those compatible with humans. The rest of the body, we were going piecemeal, replacing small groups of proteins at a time, trying to find the missing piece of the compatibility puzzle. Mister Feely gave me an idea.”

“I did?” Feely said.

“Yes. I realized that there was one organ unnecessary to our needs. I told the computer to swap out all DNA for that organ, then perform a hundred thousand generations of test evolution. It seems the DNA associated with that organ was the final immune response trigger.”

“But which organ…” Claus said, his voice trailing off. No. It couldn’t be that simple. Could it? He had asked them to step back, think differently. Jian had done exactly that and found something they all should have seen months ago.

“Well?” Tim said. “What organ was it?”

“The largest organ,” Claus said, getting the words out before Jian could say them. “The integument. The skin.”

Tim looked from Claus to Jian. “Really?”

Jian nodded, even smiled a little. “The ancestors will have cow fur.”

“And that’s it?” Tim said. “Problem solved?”

Of course that didn’t solve the problem. The boy wasn’t even close to Erika’s brilliance. “Don’t be stupid, Mister Feely. All we did was defeat the immune response. That allows us to implant, monitor, measure and modify as we go. We will probably lose all the embryos within a few days of implantation. When we cloned the quagga, we implanted over twelve hundred blastocysts before one survived to birth. That part of the quagga project was Doctor Hoel’s, Mister Feely. Now it’s yours.”

Tim’s eyes widened. “But, but I’m Jian’s assistant. We have to get someone else in here to replace Erika.”

“There is no one else,” Claus said. “We are isolated, we have to stay hidden. Congratulations, Mister Feely… you’ve just been promoted.”

“But, but… I can’t… she brought back species from extinction, I can’t—”

“You can and you will,” Claus said. “Time to grow up, Mister Feely. Millions of avoidable deaths now rest squarely on your shoulders.”

Tim blinked again. He opened his mouth to speak, but gagged, ran to a trash can and threw up in it.