Collision: Book Four in the Secret World Chronicle - eARC

by Mercedes Lackey

  “This, ladies and gentlemen,” Marconi boomed over the top of them all, after the ones on the dais had let the cacophony continue for about ten minutes, “Is not your decision to make. It is ours. There may be billions of you, but you have no way of accessing our records without our cooperation. Each piece of information will be given to all, or none. That was our unilateral decision. As the Americans are so fond of saying, ‘take it, or leave it.’”

  Silence fell. Chang’s light came on again.

  “General Chang,” said Raymond.

  “It seems, Citizen, you have us over the proverbial barrel. As we Americans are so fond of saying.” That actually got a weak laugh; that was all Arthur seemed to need to break some of the tension in the room, however. He spread his hands. “You’re holding the cards and you are offering to share the pot, to use another Americanism. Shall we turn the discussion to what is exactly in that pot, then?” He straightened slightly. “I see this for what it is; an opportunity for global cooperation and enrichment on a level heretofore unknown. In fact, in my view, when this conference is over, we may well find ourselves with nothing to fight each other over, ever again. We’ve bested, with help, a tyrannical, aggressive military force bent on world domination. This is something that should unite us! We’ve survived against impossible odds, facing an enemy both old and new to the world. I think that gives us more to come together over, than to divide further.”

  Nat heaved a silent sigh of relief, glad that she had not been called on to speak.

  “I feel like a minnow at a shark convention,” Bella murmured covertly into her Overwatch mic.

  “I feel like a kid with fingerpaints watching Michelangelo,” Vickie put in. “Hell, watching Michelangelo taking my fingerpaints and recreating the Mona Lisa.”

  “I am being glad that this Art of War is with us. These piranha would tear each other apart for scraps, baubles and broken trinkets. He is keeping them from that…and maybe saving us all from ourselves. Not bad, for Amerikanski.” She appreciated the man all the more; one by one, she saw the delegates sway to his passionate rhetoric. She knew it would not be as simple as convincing one room of people to agree not to tear each others’ throats out, but it was an important step. It appeared that he was the right man to help them take that first step.

  As the silence reigned, Mabel and Raymond exchanged another look. Mabel looked sour, Raymond pleased. “In that case, perhaps you would care to take a small break in the debate to hear from our biology department? We will start at the last, a very recent discovery made possible by our fledgling relationship with ECHO. We trust the significance of our findings, and the vast potential it suggests for future endeavors, won’t be lost on you. Ladies and gentlemen, at long last we have confirmed the origin of meta powers.”

  This time, instead of an uproar, there were only gasps and unvoiced questions as the delegates of the world rose to their feet. Mabel and Raymond approached the center of the dais in silence, collected the cubes projecting the images of Tesla and Marconi, and brought them down to an ornate pedestal at the foot of the steps. The room hushed as the lights dimmed and at the center, the dias began to rise up from the ground. Beneath the rising platform a round, brightly-lit and glass-walled room came into view. It was bare, except for a tall, white-gowned man, who stood beside an open, stylized sarcophagus. Inside the ornate coffin, the body of a man who looked to be in his mid-thirties, with chiseled features, blond hair, and a build that could only be described as “heroic.” In fact, he looked like something out of a Nazi propaganda poster, or commemorative statue.

  “Good Lord!” Yankee Pride exclaimed, rising from his seat. “It’s Eisenfaust!”

  A tense murmur rose from the crowd, and was silenced as a voice boomed from unseen loud speakers, bringing the assembled delegates to a still.

  “Ladies and gentlemen!”

  Within the glass-lined room, the man in white held up his hand. He cast an arrogant look out into the crowd, his mouth bent in a perpetual sneer, and waited. Finally he let his hand drop, satisfied he had everyone’s undivided attention, and continued.

  “My name is Dr. Hermann Deimon Kestrel, and I suggest you remember it well, as I will be remembered as the man who has deciphered one of the greatest mysteries of our time. Since the appearance of the first meta-humans during the second World War, we have pondered the riddle behind meta-powered individuals. Many have hypothesized foolish notions of higher beings, claimed unfathomable machinations of magic, the common scapegoat in paranormal occurrences, while other enlightened, logical thinkers, such as myself, have delved deeper into the secrets contained within the physiology of such beings. My contemporaries sought answers in novel power sources, even going so far as to postulate the existence of minute gateways to alternate realities. They were fools. I present to you now, irrefutable evidence that meta-powers are, in fact, encoded in our very genes. Once you hear my evidence, even the most skeptical amongst you will, I trust, agree completely with my conclusions. Consider the natural evolution of our species. Only an imbecile would fail to grasp that our ever changing genome is the natural genesis to any advances in humanity as a whole…”

  “Oh God,” Bella muttered. “He’s one of those. He’s actually going to take one of the most amazing discoveries of all time and put us to sleep with it.”

  “Truly,” Bull agreed.

  “Is to be sounding like member of Rossíiskaya Akadémiya Núka,” Saviour muttered. “Hours talking of self, minutes to anything important. Head is to be pointed under that hair.” It was good to have the Overwatch system at all times, but at the moment…the fact that she could complain to the likeminded without the danger of being overheard was the only thing keeping her temper from snapping.

  Above them all, a hologram sprang into existence depicting a life-like animation of two men pointing at a large scale model of DNA. Kestrel gestured to the hologram as it zoomed into the model and panned out again as the point-of-view revealed a cellular nucleus, then an entire cell, a working heart, and finally a stylized recreation of da Vinci’s Vetruvian Man.

  “Watson and Crick revolutionized the study of genetics in 1953 with their discovery of the molecular structure of nucleic acids…” Kestrel began, and led his audience from the origins of molecular biology to the first sequenced genes in the seventies and the invention of PCR in the early eighties. By the time he reached the birth of the Human Genome Project, the assembly of delegates had begun to grumble, impatient to hear about the actual discovery and taken aback at the sheer magnitude of Kestrel’s condescending tone.

  “Please Doctor,” General Chang interrupted. “Most of us do have a passing familiarity with these great advances in our understanding of biology. In the interest of time, might we progress to the point where you might enlighten us on how you have come to the discovery of the metagene?”

  He was met with a low murmur of agreement from the crowd. Dr. Kestrel cast him a withering look, then waved in annoyance, signalling the projectionist to skip ahead in the presentation.

  “Fine,” Kestrel said. “If you’re so set on withholding the proper introduction that such an important discovery requires, no, deserves, to fully grasp the gravity of these findings, then I suppose I could ingratiate myself to you. I suppose I could modulate my vocabulary as well, so that the laymen in the room might better keep up with the material.”

  “That would be most gracious of you,” Arthur said, without a hint of a smile. Bella hid her own behind her hand, but not before Natalya saw it.

  “My work into discovering the metagene, as you call it, had met with many obstacles of late. While there was evidence it existed, it was all indirect, and could never be replicated. I kept encountering… let’s call them gene ghosts. One moment I believed I had properly isolated a gene, only to have it vanish upon retesting, failing to meet the scientific requirement of replicating results. It was frustrating, to say the least. This changed last year, when ECHO retrieved the body of the man known as Eisenfaust,”
—he motioned to the body in the sarcophagus—“and had the good sense to send it here to Metis. We wanted it, because he was what we called a Meta Prime—one of the first metahumans to have his powers triggered. As such, his body was invaluable. You will, of course, have noticed that we enclosed in it this sealed chamber. It is necessary. This specimen has proven vital to any recent advancements I have made, and so I must decline any requests to personally inspect the body until I am satisfied I have exhausted mine own efforts. It has undergone many complex but fragile preservation treatments, and I fear outside exposure may contaminate it.”

  He paused to monitor readings on a handheld unit, and continued.

  “My initial tests revealed an interesting observation. Someone, somewhere, had taken it upon themselves to perform repetitive invasive studies on this man. It seems I wasn’t the first to cut into him. Our inspections revealed numerous and minute scabs and scars across most of his vital organs, suggesting any number of biopsies and even multiple open-heart surgeries. Our theories were varied on why, until DNA analysis managed to finally isolate a promising chromosomal contig that yielded markers we had previously thought to be metagene-associated. What’s more, portions of the contig also contained very discrete markers identifying them as transposable elements, though somewhat muted in their activity.”

  Bella gasped.

  “What is it?” Bulwark asked.

  “I think he’s about to tell us our powers come from jumping genes,” Bella said. This time she wasn’t bothering to keep her voice low so that only Overwatch picked it up.

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “A jumping gene is one that actually moves around in the genome,” Bella explained, now painfully aware that the entire convocation had turned their attention to her. “Something Barbara McClintock discovered in corn in the early fifties, got her the Nobel Prize years later. Turns out a big chunk of the human genome is made up of transposable elements, but I haven’t heard of them actually doing anything except taking up space.”

  “Very good,” Kestrel nodded. “I couldn’t have put it more simply or less elegantly myself. Of course, Miss Parker’s rather crude explanation omits most of the complexities of dealing with transposable elements, but you get the general concept. Simply put, unlike other transposable elements, the fully evolved metagene does not seem to replicate itself, but physically leaves its location and moves to another.”

  “Why fully evolved?” Bella asked.

  “In the case of Eisenfaust, I believe his genetic code has been grossly tampered with,” Kestrel continued, his eyes flicking toward Bella in annoyance. “His metagene, or I should say metagenes—there can hardly be only one after all, with the diversity of metapowers that exist in our metahuman population—these metagenes appear to have been altered, the relocation activity of the transposable elements dulled. In their natural state they would have a rapid rate of relocation, but in their current and muted capacity I have able to ascertain that in the past they arose from a replicative type of jumping gene. I see I am confusing you. Simply put, earlier progenitors of the metagenes would have multiplied, making copies of themselves. Given the voracity of the typical rate of activity of modern day metagenes, such a process couldn’t be viable. Chromosomes would rapidly grow, overtake the confines of the cell nucleus, of the cell itself, and—”

  He made an explosive gesture with his hands.

  “So it makes sense that the fully evolved metagenes do not replicate, they simply reposition themselves in the genome. Not to say replication doesn’t happen on occasion. It would even be necessary in the early evolution of the gene, to account for the diversity we see now in metapowers. You see—”

  “I’m sorry,” Ramona interrupted. “Why was the jumping activity of Eisenfaust’s metagenes slowed down in the first place?”

  “Interruptions, interruptions, interruptions…” Kestrel seethed. “I do not have conclusive evidence on that, at this particular moment. It is one of the many projects I would be working on right now, including I might add finalizing the actual sequencing of these genes, if I wasn’t forced to present my initial findings to a gaggle of outsiders…”

  “Doctor, please,” Raymond said. “A little respect for our esteemed guests.”

  “Of course,” Kestrel said, and took a breath to calm himself. “My initial hypothesis was that the Thulians sought to understand the origin of metapowers, as we did, and devised a way to disrupt the function of all transposable elements in individuals such as Eisenfaust in order to study them in a consistent manner. However, upon closer inspection I determined their methods were far too precise and orchestrated, requiring an in-depth knowledge of their targets of study beforehand.”

  “You think the Kriegers already know all about these metagenes?” General Chang asked.

  “Assuming they were the ones to have altered him,” Kestrel said, “it would be more than mere hypothesis. It would be fact.”

  “Then what were they after?”

  “From the nature of their modifications, my first impression was that they were seeking a process to nullify metagenes, perhaps even eliminate their existence entirely. You must understand, after I delineated the existence of metagenes, I had to sift through their own modifications to Eisenfaust’s genome before resuming my own work. While they had stabilized the chromosomal localization of his metagenes, they had also grossly corrupted them. I learned from their mistakes, you might say. There was clear tampering, obvious markings of attempts at gene silencing. I was able to piece together an abridged story of their futile efforts to stem the acceleration of metagene proliferation.”

  “So, just to summarize for us non-Metisans,” Ramona said as the doctor paused a half-second for air. “You figured all of this out thanks to the dead meta-supremacist on the slab. You’ve realized that they don’t normally stay in one place, which makes them harder to pin down, even in the same person. And what’s more, the Kriegers knew all about these metagenes before you did. That about right?”

  The doctor managed to contort his mouth into an even more offended sneer at Ramona’s short summary of his verbal dissertation. “A blunt and incomplete abstract, yes, but—”

  “So if they could stop these genes from moving, could isolate them, why didn’t the Kriegers take it further?” Ramona let the question fall heavy in the center of the conversation. “In terms of technology, we were clearly outgunned during the Invasion. The only thing that stood in their way was the number of metahumans across the world. You said it looked like they were working on obliterating the metagenes, obliterating metapowers…”

  Ramona paused.

  “Were they close?” she asked. “Were they ever close to decimating the metahuman population?”

  “Young lady,” Kestrel said, “if you would allow me to finish, you would learn that it is now my hypothesis that the Thulians were not, in fact, attempting to silence metagenes.”

  Kestrel paused for effect.

  “They were seeking answers on empowering them.”

  “But you said they were shutting them down,” Ramona said.

  “That was my initial thought, yes,” Kestrel admitted. “But the deeper I probed, the clearer it became that I was mistaken, and they were looking for the opposite—”

  He was interrupted by a truly ghastly, bubbling laugh.

  The eyes of the corpse in the “sarcophagus” didn’t open. But the laugh was coming from Eisenfaust.

  “Idiot,” the thing said, in a thick, gluey voice. There was a hair-raising buzzing when it spoke. And it wasn’t speaking in just English; it seemed as if it were speaking in dozens of languages, all at once. “You are all idiots. But thank you so much for taking down all of your defenses. We thought we would never be able to get past them to find out where you were without taking drastic and fatiguing measures.”

  The thing shoved the lid of its enclosure aside—eyes still closed all the while. “Did you really think you were done with us? We have only been playing with you until now.�
�� Kestrel stared in paralyzed horror as the body of Eisenfaust—puppeted by God only knew what!—turned its sightless face towards him. “You’ve become inconvenient, you little insects, in your secret city. Now the time has come to swat you.”

  The corpse, in two jerky but too-quick movements, simultaneously smashed the sarcophagus and grabbed Kestrel by the shoulder. The hand squeezed, and everyone was able to hear the sound of the man’s collarbone snapping over the intercom.

  “Get it off! Get it off get it off getitooooff!” Kestrel’s voice spiraled up into the soprano range as the pain hit him. The corpse paid no heed as it pulled him closer; with the hand that had smashed the sarcophagus, it retrieved a wicked looking shard of glass. With deliberate slowness, it plunged the shard into the scientist’s chest and twisted. Kestrel’s scream no longer had words, just a single animalistic howl. The entire room exploded into activity; several of those attending the scientists in the examination room attempted to flee, jamming together at the door and pounding their fists against it uselessly. A handful tried to free Kestrel from the corpse of Eisenfaust. On the delegate-side of the glass, there were screams and shouts, everyone either trying to be heard or watching in frozen horror.

  Natalya marched forward, pushing through the teeming crowd. Her eyes were fixed on the corpse. It had started vibrating; subtly at first, but more and more pronounced. It wasn’t until it was shaking violently that anyone else noticed.

  “What in God’s name is it doing now?” “Fuck, someone get IN there already!” “Why isn’t it dead?”

  Then she noticed that the body was changing. The skin was peeling and blackening in patches, splitting. It started to actually smoke…and then light was spilling from its mouth. Like it’s burning, from the inside out. The light grew brighter, now coming from the ragged tears in the corpse’s skin. The thought came to her like a lightning bolt; it wasn’t just immolating itself, it was ramping up, gathering power for—

  “Bulwark! Dead man is to be exploding!” She shoved her way through the crowd more violently this time, trying to find the American. “Bulwark!”