"Shit," Zoe muttered.
"How many are there?" Logan asked.
"We don't have an exact number. Between a hundred and a hundred and fifty at the CDC facility in Antarctica. Another hundred on standby at the shipyard. And they're printing more every day."
"Printing?" Zoe asked.
"That's how they make them. Biologic printers. They build them one layer of cells at a time."
It wasn't a surprise. If anything, Logan was surprised he hadn't come to that conclusion on his own. "Who are they working for?" he asked.
"We believe it's your former employer."
"Well, I guess that's one solution to their staffing problem," Logan said.
Zoe didn't seem amused by the comment.
"Know the first thing they tell you to buy when your company's worth surpasses ten billion dollars?" Holden said. "An army. A private military corporation. I've been advised to do that, by more than one person, on more than one occasion. But I've stayed away from that type of business."
"So keep staying out of it. Why start now?"
"I keep thinking that same thought, and I keep coming back to something a professor said one time: What's the one question that separates successful people from average people?"
Logan shrugged. He looked at Zoe. She didn't have an answer either.
Holden said, "Average people ask, 'Why me?' Successful people ask, 'Why not me?' That's what I'm asking right now: why not me? Why can't I be the one to put a stop to what's happening to the people of this city? Why can't I be the one to bring them a treatment?"
"What happens if we say no," Logan said. "If we refuse to go along with whatever it is you have planned."
Holden smiled. "Then I hand you over to your former employer. I figure you have to be worth something to them. I offer you up as a bargaining chip and I negotiate from there. I have people here who are good at that kind of thing."
There was a long moment of silence. The situation was so familiar to Logan, it was almost comfortable. It was the same deal they'd gotten from Barnes a month earlier.
"We need a few minutes alone," Logan said.
Holden stood and left. Logan and Zoe stayed in the office. They came to an agreement almost instantly.
CHAPTER 29
Donovan clawed at his own chest and twisted his neck against the pillow, trying to get the thing off of him, trying to keep it away from his face. Cold fingers pulled at his lips. Fingernails scraped his teeth.
He gasped, feeling his chest tighten like someone was standing on his ribs. And the thing was gone. He'd been dreaming. Again. About the arm.
He'd hidden it under his bed, back at The Farm, in the basement where he'd been kept prisoner. It was a rushed, poorly made thing. A quick print job made with a chunk of copied and pasted code when he knew he'd be alone for an hour. He'd only managed four bites before he'd given up, and he'd only managed to swallow two. He'd misjudged his own desperation.
And then he was rescued and the man in the suit brought him cookies and cereal and Donovan didn't have to worry about eating anymore.
He'd left the chewed limb with the other biological waste in the lab, marked for disposal. But the arm stuck around. In his mind. And several times a night it crawled out from under his bed and slithered up his legs, his abdomen, his chest, and tried to force itself into his mouth. Like it was offended he hadn't finished his meal.
Donovan took a deep breath and exhaled through his teeth. His legs were soaked in sweat, stuck to the sheets.
He stripped off the covers, stripped off his shorts, and went into the bathroom. He emptied his bladder and splashed cold water on his face. It was a full minute before he was able to look up at his own reflection.
He looked like a guy who hadn't had a decent night's sleep in a month. But if he was being honest, that was normal for him. He'd never seen the value in a good night's sleep. If he wasn't cooped up in a room or a lab working on something, he was playing video games or looking at porn or mindlessly surfing the internet.
But the people he was working for now were working him hard, and a solid night's rest would have helped.
He toweled off his face, turned on the shower, and put on a pot of coffee while the shower heated up. The coffee pot was on a long counter that was also home to his laptop and a stack of notebooks and manuals. A trunk on the floor held his clothes. The bed was queen-sized—he'd asked for a big bed, he'd needed one after sleeping on that half-broken cot. And that was it for furnishings and possessions. It was spartan, but there was plenty of floor space and there were huge windows, and someone came in to clean up after him each day.
He looked at himself in the mirror. You're alive, he told himself. That was all that mattered. And he was better than alive. He had a room with windows and a queen-size bed and he was making money hand over fist. And the things who had locked him in that basement? Who had beaten and starved him and held the glowing barrel of a flamethrower inches from his face? They were dead, so fuck them. Even if he had nightmares and was working eighteen hours a day, he was alive and he was going to take a long vacation after this.
The shower woke him up a bit. The coffee woke him up a bit more. He checked his phone. Three notifications. He read all three and prioritized.
He pulled on jeans, boots, and a heavy coat, and went out to take care of some things.
***
The shipyard was The Farm times ten. Instead of a single subterranean room, they had a whole factory. Instead of one printer, they had eight, with two more under construction, waiting for parts to come in.
One of the printers was the original, boxed up and brought here from The Farm. Donovan had spent his first day here putting it together, and then he'd assembled the second while the first body printed. He'd spent the second day putting together the third printer while the first two produced more bodies. By the end of the first week, there were five printers running around the clock. More employees arrived and Donovan trained them. They were machinists and technicians and bioengineers. Some were young, ink still drying on their diplomas. Others were older, probably recently laid off, happy to have a lucrative contract.
Donovan was now acting as a kind of foreman, overseeing production. The people working under him were smart, and printing a body wasn't that much different than printing anything else, but the machines could be finicky. So whenever someone had a question that didn't have an obvious answer, or something didn't work quite right, he was the one who had to troubleshoot it.
Which was why the print shop was his first priority.
One of the machines was down, the rail at the top jammed. Donovan supervised while the employee on duty took it apart and put it back together. It still didn't work. So he spent an hour staring at the programming, going line by line until he found the problem. A bug in one of the random variables. Each body had slight variations from the next—in facial structure, height, body hair, bone length—so they weren't identical, they just looked like a bunch of inbred siblings. There was a chance these things might need to blend into a crowd one day, and making each one look a little different would help.
Donovan fixed the error and pushed the change live. Every machine ran off the same server, so the change would go out to the other printers whenever the next update ran. He explained what had happened to the technician assigned to the printer, told him to flush the chamber and start over, and then logged everything he'd done.
He'd been there three hours by the time the printer was running again. He checked his phone, saw that there were two new notifications, bringing the total number of issues to four. He decided which one was priority, and moved on.
***
Once the bodies were printed, they had to be trained. Most of it was combat training. Weapons, hand-to-hand fighting, vehicles, battle tactics. Plus they had to learn to speak, read, count, and do normal things. They had to learn all of this in about a week, if they were ever going to be effective at it. Once they came out of
the printers, their brains were like wet plaster, elastic and malleable. Then their brains set. They could learn new things after that, but it would take a while. It would be like teaching something to a real person.
Donovan didn't touch the training. His knowledge of combat was limited to video games. But he had designed their brains, and because of that, the people doing the training had a lot of questions for him.
His next stop was the training facility. It reminded him of an indoor stadium. It had a firing range, an obstacle course, a pool.
One of the bodies they'd printed the day before wasn't working properly.
"It can only run forward. If it tries to move backward or sideways, it falls over," the instructor explained. The body was a female. Donovan watched as the instructor gave it a few commands. The thing ran forward. Then it tried to backpedal and landed on its ass. The same thing happened when it tried to move laterally.
"See," said the trainer. "No good,"
This wasn't uncommon. The bodies had a failure rate of about twenty percent. Two out of every ten didn't function properly. Some were useless the moment they came out of the printer. Others had more subtle defects that showed during the first day of training.
The defective female stood there with the wide-eyed look of a newborn. Donovan looked it up and down. It had a nice rack. Tits were one of the random variations, so they came out a little different each time.
The trainer handed him a tablet. A report had been typed up, detailing the defect. Donovan skimmed it. Then he compared the ID number on the report with the number tattooed on the back of the thing's neck. The numbers were a match.
They kept detailed records of everything they did. This report would become part of a larger report that Donovan was expected to compile at the end of each week. Then he'd weed out any bugs he could find. He was still getting used to this level of organization. Things had been a lot more laid back at The Farm.
He scrolled to the bottom of the page, checked a box, and signed his name.
The trainer thanked him. Any defective bodies were used in training. Some ended up on the firing range for target practice. Others were used in hand-to-hand combat drills, like prisoners in feudal Japan or a Russian gulag. They'd done this with the defects at The Farm too. It helped condition the functioning ones for violence. It was nasty business, something Donovan would never get used to and actively tried to avoid.
He took a last look at the female's tits. What a waste, he thought.
***
He'd been up for six hours and thought he was due for a break. He found a bathroom and then went to the mess hall, where one of the cooks on duty made him some eggs and french toast. When you worked around the clock, every meal was breakfast.
After he ate, he poured a cup of coffee and went outside for some fresh air. A rusted metal staircase led up the side of the building. He went up to the roof.
Donovan sipped his coffee and walked to the roof's edge. He looked out over the other buildings and the green mountains that surrounded everything and the point where the land ended in an iron-gray sea. He saw the cavernous building that housed the factory, and the training facility with its domed roof, and the building where they kept the squids. There were still only twelve squids, the ones they'd brought from The Farm. Soon there would be more. He'd given a presentation the week before, outlining how a squid got made. Someone was already looking for suitable candidates.
His phone buzzed inside his pocket. The number of things that needed his attention had gone from three to seven. It was like trying to battle a hydra—for every task he completed, three more appeared. He thought about hydras and wished he had an hour or two to play a video game, or click around and see what was going on in the world. He thought about the defective female and an old joke he'd heard: What do you call the useless skin around the vagina?
He never got to the punch line.
Something shot from the sky and slammed into the ground at the center of the shipyard. Donovan had just enough time to flinch and think the word missile before his body was blown apart at the molecular level.
CHAPTER 30
Zoe stared at the bank of monitors and watched the impact and the aftermath.
The monitor on her left was solid blue, a dead feed. That had been the camera fixed to the outside of the bomb. A few seconds ago this feed had shown the ground rushing into detail as the projectile sped toward the surface of the earth.
The monitor directly in front of her showed a bird’s eye view of the aftermath. The ground below was obscured by the dense, smoke-like consistency of the particle cloud, matter turned into nothing. The image rotated as the camera above it circled in the sky.
The monitor to her right showed the drone she’d used to drop the bomb. The camera was mounted on top of one of the wings. The aircraft was a sleek black blade, like a boomerang. It was different than the drones she’d piloted during her time in the army, which had been shaped like jet planes. The boomerang could reach an elevation of just over eighty kilometers, which meant it could technically drop a bomb from space. It could blast the crown off Mt. Everest if a high value target was hiding there.
Zoe’s hand trembled on the joystick. She let go and wiped her palm on her jeans. Her hand was damp with sweat. Joystick is a dumb word, she thought. It had always bothered her that the army didn’t have a better name for the control.
The drone was set to autopilot, and it continued to make slow circles around the obliterated target. The image on the screen continued to turn. The dense cloud became a thin veil, and she could see the ground below. Not that there were many details. Just an empty black space, half a mile wide, where the base had been.
She’d pulled the trigger herself, eschewing the voice command that she’d used during all those missions she'd piloted in the army. She told herself it was a more honest way to kill people. At least part of her believed that. Another part of her had chosen to physically pull the trigger because she thought it would minimize her chances of freezing up. There was less cognition at work in pulling a trigger than there was in speaking a phrase. If not less cognition, less personal history.
On the center monitor, the particle cloud continued to disperse. Zoe wondered how many people she’d just killed and reminded herself that this had been her idea, to drop an antimatter bomb and just level the entire operation.
When she'd done this for the military there was always someone else sitting next to her, and a third person watching the video feed from a different room. People to verify that the target had been eliminated, or order her to drop another bomb, just to be sure.
Here and now, there was no one else. She was alone in a giant empty office down the hall from Holden’s office. There were guards outside, but they were there to make sure she wasn’t disturbed, not to stop any escape attempts. You had to be a prisoner in order to escape, and she was no longer a prisoner. She and Logan had agreed to work for Holden.
For a few moments, Zoe wondered what to do next. She wasn’t used to this level of autonomy.
Then she typed a command, assigning new coordinates to bring the drone back to the airfield it had taken off from. The same airfield where Logan had spent the past week.
Logan would be long gone by the time it arrived.
CHAPTER 31
The pilot's voice announced over the intercom: "We're ninety minutes out."
Logan was alone in the cargo bay. He'd been dozing off, his body stocking up all the rest it could, while it could.
There was a call box mounted on the wall next to him. He pressed the button for the cockpit and said, "Thanks."
He unstrapped himself from his seat. His body was stiff from the hours spent inside the chair and the constant vibration of turbulence. He felt the vibration through his palms and boots as he lowered himself to the floor and stretched, thinking of all the empty space below the belly of the plane.
***
The robotic mules were different than the
one he'd had with him when he'd jumped onto the island. These were bigger, meant to handle rougher terrain, meant to carry more weight. There were three of them. They were strapped to the floor in the center of the cargo bay, their jointed legs folded underneath. Each had a metal box strapped to its back, roughly the size and shape of a dumpster. Each had a parachute programmed to deploy at a specific altitude.
When the time came, Logan would cut the straps holding the mules in place and send them down the cargo ramp, out of the plane, into the cold altitude and gravity.
Then the plane would circle back and it would be his turn.
***
Behind the mules, toward the front of the plane: a large storage bin filled with canvas bags and weapons cases. Logan had packed and repacked the contents in the hours before takeoff, checking everything five, six, seven times.
He pulled out a large duffle bag, unzipped it, and began to dress.
First there was a base layer, black tights that didn't feel all that different from the clothes he wore running during the winter.
Next came an exosuit, made up of several layers of different material serving different purposes: it was insulation, to trap any body heat that seeped through the base layer; it was covered in thin, flexible body armor, designed to stop bullets, shrapnel, and minimize blunt force trauma; and it was lined with synthetic muscle system—basically another layer of muscles on top of his own—that enhanced his speed and strength. The suit felt heavy when he lifted it out of its storage bag, much lighter once he was wearing it.
The final layer was a shell, designed to shield his body from the fifty-below-zero temperature waiting for him outside.
Then there were the weapons he was taking with him. Guns and ammunition and explosives designed to be used in extreme cold. And other gear too. Knives. Skis. Ice axes. Rope and ice-climbing equipment.
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