by James Axler
Mildred remained seated as the others rose and filed from the room. J.B. paused in the doorway. "Coming to bed, Millie?"
"I caught a nap on the boat, remember. I'll stay up for a while."
J.B. angled an eyebrow at her, and she chuckled. "Don't worry. I won't go into the lab area. I do want to check over the files in the office, though."
Nodding brusquely, J.B. went out into the hall. Mildred sat for a few moments, washing the taste of her meal out of her mouth with a cup of water. She walked out into the corridor.
Although bioengineering wasn't her field, her background in cryogenics had intersected with it from time to time. Some startling advances had been made before the nukecaust, but as far as she knew, the experiments had been devoted to increasing crop yields, curing birth defects and the like. A great hue and cry had been raised, once, when a life-form had been cloned. However, she had slowly realized that genetic research and biotechnology had played a large part in the mysterious Totality Concept.
In the years before the nukecaust, she had heard many whispers about secret scientific researches conducted by the government, though most of them had been relegated to the status of paranoid rumors, spawned by crackpots fearing a New World Order.
Now, after encountering surviving pockets of pre-dark genetic experiments—the Genesis Project, Ladrow Buford's cloning farm, Mark Tomwun's mutated dolphins, the Dwellers, not to mention what she had seen in the Anthill—Mildred had developed a provisional hypothesis. She hadn't discussed it with her friends, since they would no doubt find her theories irrelevant to the simple issue of survival. As far as they were concerned, the minds behind the Totality Concept were long dead, consumed by the same nuclear hell that had vaporized most of humanity. There was no way to learn the truth, and even if they somehow managed to, the truth wouldn't do them much good a hundred or so years after the fact.
Though Mildred shared her friends' priority for survival, she silently agreed that retroreasoning was irrelevant. But one theory she didn't voice—dared not voice—was the fear that the Totality Concept itself was linked to the nukecaust in a mysterious manner. She applied the iceberg principle, believing the redoubts and the scientific wonders they contained were merely the small, visible tips of a vast, terrifying mass hidden beneath the wreckage of the world.
Instinctively, she knew Overproject Excalibur was part of the iceberg hitherto hidden from her and the rest of humankind.
Inside the office suite, she devoted twenty minutes to methodically riffling through the contents of the file cabinets. Most of the paperwork meant very little—requisition forms, duty rosters, personnel records. Still, a vague picture of the purpose of the redoubt emerged. One name figured prominently in memo headings and signatures, a Dr. Connaught O'Brien.
Mildred frowned, turning the name over in her mind. A faint bell of recognition chimed in the recesses of her memory.
In one drawer, she found a square leather packet. It was imprinted with a symbol that was familiar, but slightly different from what she had seen before.
It was a red triangle with three vertical lines enclosed within it. She and her friends had encountered a similar symbol a few months before when they'd jumped into a subterranean installation in Dulce, New Mexico. There, however, the lines had been horizontal. These resembled stylized, round-topped daggers.
The packet's flap was sealed with a tiny combination lock. Rather than waste time in a trial-and-error process to find the proper sequence, she took a penknife from a pocket and sawed through the leather. She tugged out a sheaf of papers bound in booklet form and a multimedia compact disk in a slip-sleeve. The first page of the papers bore the heading: "Overproject Excalibur. Mission Invictus. Alpha Subject Circumscription. Final report prepared by Dr. C. O'Brien."
Most of the pages of the booklet were full of technical terms, schematics and diagrams. The last half held color video-scanned images. The photographs were of two dark-haired babies, about three months old, a boy and a girl. The boy looked unusually somber. The girl, on the other hand, grinned gummily and waved pudgy hands.
Mildred wanted to smile, but she couldn't quite bring it off. The children were certainly beautiful, but their big eyes possessed no pupils, irises or whites. Their eyes were a solid bloodred.
She flipped through the photo section, noting that after a certain point, there were no more pictures of the little girl. There were, however, many of the boy child, obviously encompassing a number of years. It was as if the photographer, whoever he or she had been, had devoted inestimable hours to capturing every month of the youth's life on film.
When the pictures depicted the boy in what appeared to be his teenage years, their quality subtly changed. Mildred found a series of head-and-shoulder shots. The youth's smooth forehead was unusually high, his nose aquiline. His mouth was long, with a full underlip. His raven's-wing black hair was straight and cut short, combed back from a pronounced widow's peak. His skin was deeply tanned. Only the crimson hue of his eyes marred the classical perfection of his face.
Several photos showed the boy striking poses, wearing only white briefs. He stood with his hands on his hips, or his arms raised to show off bulging biceps and swelling pectorals. The intent seemed almost pornographic.
When Mildred saw the last photograph, she amended that—it was pornographic. The boy looked to be about sixteen years old. He leaned against a blank wall, hands clasped casually behind his back, one leg slightly bent at the knee. He held his head tilted at an arrogant angle, and a slight, superior smile creased his lips. He was in a high state of sexual arousal, and his erection seemed as arrogant as the position of his head.
She slapped the booklet shut, wondering what possible scientific purpose the last few photographs had served and who had taken them—or worse, who had authorized them.
Picking up the CD, Mildred went from one comp console to the other, flipping their power switches. She tried three before a monitor screen lit up and flashed to flickering life. Sitting down before it, she inserted the disk into the drive port, and the red triangle symbol appeared. Beneath it a date appeared: 1/18/08. Absently, she noted the date as being almost exactly seven years to the day after the first mushroom cloud had swallowed Washington, D.C.
A colorless male voice spoke. "Mission Invictus update. Final report. Authorized personnel only. MJ-Ultra Clearance required."
The symbol vanished from the screen, replaced an instant later by the head and shoulders of a woman. Her dark red hair was tied back, and her leaf green eyes were covered by a pair of steel-rimmed spectacles. Despite her lack of cosmetics and the impersonal, clinical expression on her face, she was very pretty. She appeared to be in her late thirties or early forties. Behind the woman, Mildred could just make out black-topped lab tables laden with glassware.
Mildred recognized her. Dr. Connaught O'Brien had enjoyed her fifteen minutes of fame in the late 1990s. A biologist and an outspoken proponent of eugenics and selective breeding, she had made the lecture-and-talk-show circuit for a few months before vanishing from the public eye.
The woman's basic thesis was that technology had changed and improved every aspect of human society, yet the human race itself was trapped in an evolutionary corral. O'Brien had maintained that human development had to catch up to technical advances.
The media had pinned the catch-all label "techno-genics" as a buzzword to categorize her theories. It was one she had strenuously objected to, but the appellation stuck. As Mildred recalled, during the storm of negative publicity, O'Brien had been dismissed from her post at Johns Hopkins University, amid accusations that she was Josef Mengele in drag. Obviously, when she had vanished, it was to work for Overproject Excalibur.
In a clear voice, touched lightly by a hint of an Irish brogue, Connaught O'Brien stated, "The third revolution of human progress is well under way. It affects us so deeply that some people in high places would rather maintain an uneasy silence than see it through to its
fruition. Mission Invictus is the only true success in Overproject Excalibur, and yet that success is now threatened by the same powers that insisted upon its implementation in the first place."
A line of anger creased O'Brien's brow. "You who are seeing this and hearing my words know to whom I am referring. You say I have gone too far in developing a human organism that will survive in the postholocaust world. This is not a new accusation. I will not bore you with a recitation of my own personal injuries suffered by the small-minded attitude of the mainstream scientific community in the course of my work as a geneticist."
"I agreed to work for Overproject Excalibur to be free of those constraints, of those misunderstandings. My assignment was to create a superior life-form that exhibited the necessary adaptive traits for survival in the new world, including reproduction. Given the immutable fact that time did not permit breeding a superior race in terms of normal gestation periods and maturity cycles, I was forced to a single conclusion. Mutation."
O'Brien's voice vibrated with passion. "It wasn't just for money or to expand the fields of knowledge that I embarked on the course I followed. Certainly, money has no meaning now. It is a matter of conscience. You yourselves dictated that Mission Invictus was the only rational means to restore order and harmony to the world. I adhered to your schedules, built upon the findings of others in the field of pan-tropic science."
Mildred sighed. She should have known. Before skydark, pantropy was a primarily theoretical field to bioengineer a strain of humanity that could survive and thrive in new environments. She had seen living evidence that pantropy hadn't been restricted to a set of mere hypotheses, so she wasn't surprised by O'Brien's assertion.
"The Unisex Program and the Genesis Project were deemed failures," O'Brien's image continued. "Mission Invictus is not, however you may argue it. I will not explain how my biochemically synthesized gene mutations were utilized in the creation of the Alpha and Epsilon subjects. The fact that I succeeded where those others failed should provide the smallest hint of the magnitude of this miracle. The loss of Epsilon does not invalidate the miracle. No one regrets the accident more than I, but I am able to maintain my perspective while all about me, everyone has lost theirs. Now, on the dawn of a new age of human evolution, the same old primitive fear sets in again. The fear of the inferior man facing the superior man."
Mildred leaned back in the chair, listening and watching, almost afraid of what she might learn.
Chapter Five
It wasn't that Ryan found sleep elusive—he never caught so much as a fleeting glimpse of it.
He lay with Krysty on a narrow bed in one of the bunk rooms. The others had considerately allowed him and Krysty to occupy one room, in case they wanted privacy. Presumably, J.B. and Mildred shared another of the rooms while Doc, Jak and Dean bedded down in the third.
Their consideration, as much as he appreciated it, was wasted. Both he and Krysty slept fully clothed. She murmured and stirred fitfully in her sleep. Ryan knew she was totally drained by calling upon the Earth Mother. Even after all their time together, he still didn't understand how she tapped into the electromagnetic field of the planet itself. Shortly after they had met, Krysty had offered an unsatisfactory explanation: "It's sort of like focusing, a concentrating on how I feel. I call on the Earth Mother, and she comes to me."
Afterward, the strain placed on her metabolism could sometimes result in a slumber so deep it was almost a coma. And though she continued to sleep, she was restless, moving frequently, a thread of spittle at a corner of her mouth.
As tired as he was, he was sore and itchy. Not only did his muscles ache, but the salt residue of his ocean swim had dried upon and irritated his skin. He continued trying to capture sleep, but every time he closed his eye, the image of the grinning, flame-eyed skull bobbed to the surface of his mind like a malevolent cork.
Nightmares were, more often than not, part and parcel of mat-trans jumps. He had trained himself to always expect them and to be pleasantly surprised if he didn't experience them. Still, his instincts told him he hadn't had a typical gateway nightmare. There had been no other symptoms of jump sickness, only the overwhelming wave of terror and the sense of a malign intelligence hating him.
Krysty moaned faintly. Ryan turned toward her. In a low, distant voice, she whispered, "Not your queen…not your mother…"
Ryan started up, shaken by an eerie fear. He listened and when all he could hear was Krysty's slightly labored breathing, he got out of the bed. He stared down at her in the dim light and, when he realized he was scratching at his salt-stiff hair, he cursed and turned away.
Quietly, he left the room, went out into the hallway and entered the shower room. Peeling off his clothes, he placed them on a bench near the door. He chose the farthermost tiled enclosure and turned on the faucet. A spray of water jetted from the nozzle, and he adjusted it until it was a needlelike rain. When the water was hot enough, almost at the tolerance level, he stepped beneath the flow. He used a liquid-soap dispenser affixed to the wall to work a lather all over his bruised and scarred body.
The entire room filled quickly with billowing clouds of steam. As he washed, he thought back to the last time he and Krysty had made love. It had been quite some time ago, in a shower room very much like this one, and she had crept up behind him—
He snorted out a mouthful of water. A repetition of that night wasn't likely to happen now. Even if he felt up to it, Krysty was in a sleep so deep that nothing could rouse or arouse her. He contented himself with luxuriating beneath the driving jets of hot water, letting them soothe the muscle ache. A hand touched his back and he jumped, whirled, biting back a surprised curse.
Krysty materialized out of the rolling vapors like a wraith, her limbs glistening with droplets of water. She was naked and perfect, with her narrow waist, flaring hips, long legs, full, gem-crested breasts and the seductive scarlet triangle at the juncture of her rounded thighs. Her tumbles of crimson hair fell over her damp shoulders.
Her big, slightly tilted eyes gleamed with a brilliant emerald light. The expression in them was so intensely single-minded that Ryan was startled into speechlessness for a long moment. He had seen passion in those eyes countless times, but always they were misted by love. Now, the hard green glint was unsoftened by any emotion other than a raging desire, a consuming lust,
"Again in the shower?" he asked quietly, striving for a tone of humor he didn't feel. "Getting to be habit, lover."
Krysty didn't reply in words. Her long-fingered hands ran over his face, touching the cicatrix scar on the left cheek. They trailed across his chest, one sharp nail tracing the thin line of hair that stretched over his flat belly to thicken darkly below it. Ryan stared into her eyes, reading nothing there but an erotic urgency. He felt his muscles tighten under her touch, and swiftly his penis engorged and thickened, rising and hardening.
Leaning forward, Krysty tongued his chest as her hands went to his erection, petting and stroking it. She slowly lowered herself to her knees, dragging her tongue down his torso, leaving a trail of heat along his skin. Her scarlet tresses wove a soft, curling web around his hard shaft, caressing and tickling.
Ryan gasped at the indescribably pleasurable sensation. He rested his hands atop her head as his hips began an involuntary back-and-forth motion. Her tongue lapped out, a slow, hot swirl over the tip of his organ. Groaning, he thrust himself forward into Krysty's avid mouth, her fingers maintaining a sliding, circling grip on the base of his cock.
When he felt the slow rise of juices, he drew in a sharp breath and her hand gripped him tightly in a firm, almost painful grasp. Drawing back, she said breathlessly, "Not yet. Not yet."
Tugging at him, Krysty guided him down until he lay flat on his back on the warm, wet tiles. Holding his erection with one hand, she straddled his thighs, lifting herself up, then slowly sitting, impaled herself. She released him as she worked his rock-hard length into her. Her hips moved bac
k and forth. She bit her lower lip, her face a slit-eyed mask of concentration.
When he was fully embedded within her velvet, liquid heat, she voiced a keening cry and began to ride him roughly. Fingernails digging into his chest, she rocked back and forth, thrust up and down shallowly in a wild, abandoned rhythm. She gasped, whimpered, moaned and cried out.
Ryan was a little disturbed by her uninhibited sounds of passion. Because of the constant proximity of their companions, not to mention danger, neither of them was very vocal during their couplings. But Krysty grunted, yelped and moaned in an almost mindless fixation on her own pleasure.
He covered her bouncing breasts with his hands, pinching her bright pink nipples. Krysty paid no attention to the touch, her eyes wide but unseeing, clouded and glazed, her mouth open and wet.
Feeling the boiling approach of an orgasm, Ryan writhed beneath her, husking out, "Lover—"
Instantly, her wild pelvic motions ceased. With superb control, her internal muscles closed around his hard column, squeezing it like a determined fist, preventing the explosion. She whispered, "Not yet. Not yet. More to see."
When she was sure Ryan's climax had been averted, Krysty slowly lifted herself off the rod of flesh jutting up between his thighs. Her breath came in ragged pants, her full breasts rising and falling.
She went to all fours on the floor, back arched, head down and resting on her forearms, rear end curved sharply upward. Ryan rose to his knees behind her, hands grabbing her sleek, flaring hips. The sight of her beautiful buttocks fanned the flames of lust in him until he was completely unaware of anything else. He fingered the gleam of moisture shining between her legs and he leaned into her, placing the head of his member against her opening. She wriggled her backside to facilitate penetration, backing up against his cock. With one forward thrust, he glided full-length into her, the simmering heat of her snug, slippery sheath making him bite back an outcry.
