by John Shirley
Unless you were the enemy.
The animal lab was freaking Portman out.
Monkeys, rats, dogs in cages, some of them alive. All of them staring at Portman and Goat as they passed. Some whimpering, some growling, some cringing in terror. Patches of bare, inflamed skin on some of the animals where the fur had been shaved off for operations, for wire inserts; stitches across skulls and bellies. Nasty. Poor little fuckers.
And there—a series of shelves with dissected animals suspended in big jars of viscous liquid: gels and solutions glowing livid yellow, blue, red. Some of these creatures were still alive, intubated and sprouting electrodes. Visible hearts beating.
Just to ease the tension, Portman considered making a joke about how maybe they’d find a goat in here with the lab animals, and it’d be one of Goat’s relatives. Goat—goat, get it? But he glanced at Goat’s grim face and thought better of it. Goat had even less sense of humor than Sarge.
Flatscreen monitors on the deserted lab’s consoles streamed anatomical and genetic monitoring diagrams, MRI images, X-rays, 3-D constructs, as if ghostly technicians were there to study them. Some of the MRIs showed what you’d expect—familiar mammalian organs.
But some of them looked completely unfamiliar. Unnatural. What the hell was that thing? A severed head, all tubed up and twitching, it was mostly jaws, clusters of eyes. Where’d they find that? And was he imagining those eyes following him as he walked by?
He got the strange notion that he could hear it thinking. Kill you, it was thinking. Want to kill you. Please. Let me. Kill you.
Seemed you got crazy notions, in a place like this…
“Pinky, you getting this?” Goat asked, turning his guncam to take in the lab animals.
“There’s another chamber to the north,” Pinky prompted them.
Goat jabbed his gun that way, and Portman nodded. They headed north, going through a door into what looked like the surgery: there was a ventilator, EKG, bloodied cutting equipment, a gurney with the heaviest restraints Portman had ever seen. Something about that gurney, those suggestive restraints made Portman want to turn, run the way they’d come back to the air lock.
Get a grip, chickenshit, he told himself. He needed to get his game on. Sometimes it helped to listen to speed-metal, to something that really rocked—it seemed to throw a switch in his nervous system, turned him around so that he went from defensive to ready for action. He found his earphones, plugged them in, hit the PLAY button. Pounding music: Sado-Nation’s vocalist singing:
There’s a truth you can’t avoid
Listen to Johnny Paranoid
Your life will end in the burning void,
Shaking shaking shaking like a rock ’n’ roll chord…
He grimaced. Maybe not the best selection to listen to right now. He pulled the headphones off.
Above the gurney there was a railing in the ceiling, a winch system. They followed it the length of the room, to another, bigger chamber…
They stepped out into the echoing, circular room. And almost stumbled into a pit.
Looked to be twenty-some feet down to the bottom of the perfectly round pit. Blood splashed the floor down there. The pit’s walls were lined with stainless steel.
Goat shined his gunlight into the pit, swept it back and forth. Gouges marked the steel, almost to the upper edges. The gouges couldn’t be what they looked like—not in steel.
They couldn’t really be claw marks…
“What the hell is that?” Portman asked.
“You never did time, Portman?”
“What?”
“This is a holding cell,” Goat said at last.
“Bullshit.” Portman didn’t want to believe that—if it was a holding cell, that might mean the claw marks were, well, claw marks. The pit could be for storage of some kind. “What makes you think that?” Portman asked as he knelt by the edge, reaching out to touch the slick steel surface of the pit’s walls.
A fat blue spark of electricity bit his hand, the current snapping his whole body like a whip, throwing him back against the outer wall of the surgery.
“Because the walls are electrified,” Goat said, Xing the upper wall of the room with his fluorescent powder.
Okay, Portman thought, numbly, trying to sit up and just managing it. Maybe Goat does have some sense of humor. In a weird kind of way.
He blew on his singed, stinging hand. “Goddammit!”
Goat gave him a hard look. He’d taken the Lord’s name in vain.
In the Weapons Lab, Sarge and Duke looked curiously at the workbenches with high-tech tool-and-die equipage, the deserted computer workstations—and they stopped, almost licking their lips, at the racks of neatly labeled, stacked weapons. Mostly familiar ones, in this rack.
Sarge was looking at a secure door at the far end of the room. He crossed to it, swiped his UAC ID badge in the slot.
“So what’s the deal with the sister?” Duke asked, carefully replacing the plasma cannon.
A small wall panel opened to reveal a palm print reader. “Reaper’s parents led the first team of archaeologists to Olduvai,” Sarge said distractedly. “They bought it in some accident up here when he was a kid. She followed in their footsteps, he didn’t.”
Reaper’s parents had been killed on Mars, when he was young—killed by archaeology? Duke shook his head. Archaeologists usually died of old age—or malaria. Weird.
So Reaper had been just a kid when they died. Maybe that’s why he’d gone into being a soldier. A way to deal with the predatory chaos of the world…
But aloud, Duke maintained his veneer of not caring about anything but partying. “Yeah, yeah, whatever, Sarge, what I meant was, Is she single?”
Sarge turned from frowning at the palm print reader to glare at Duke.
Then the panel spoke up, in a tinny computer-generated voice:
“Please provide DNA verification.”
So this one didn’t read palm prints after all—it wanted your hand so it could suck up a speck of flesh, get a DNA read.
Experimentally, Sarge put his hand into the reader. The device thought about it for a moment. Then:
“Advanced Weapons personnel palm print ID only. Access denied.”
Sarge shook his head, annoyed. Both he and Duke wanted to know what was in that room. The term Advanced Weapons made the two oldtime warriors nearly salivate…
Duke found a portable plasma cannon on the outside gun rack; he slung his automag on its strap and hefted the advanced killing machine. “Jeez. They leave this shit lying around, I’d hate to see what they lock up…”
Gunfire.
Three bursts of small-arms fire, the distinctive deep-throated rattling echoing to them down the corridors.
“What the…” Duke said. Surprised that there was contact so soon.
Sarge barked an order into his headset comm: “All units report contact.”
Destroyer slapped the Kid’s gun muzzle down. He broke off firing—having shot a bundle of ventilation hoses in the unevenly lit corridor.
The Kid looked at Destroyer sheepishly.
Destroyer spoke into his comm. “Misdirected fire, Sarge. Wasting ghosts.” And he shoved the Kid forward, back into the patrol route.
“It looked like it was moving,” the Kid said.
“There’s a lot of stuff looks like it’s moving down here. Including me.”
The Kid knew what Destroyer meant. That kind of jumpiness got soldiers killed. And a man killed by friendly fire died for nothing.
“I thought you were supposed to be a crack shot,” Destroyer grumbled.
“I hit it, didn’t I?”
Feeling pretty low, the Kid walked on ahead. Destroyer started after him—then stopped at the ventilation hoses the Kid had perforated, looking up into the ceiling gap they dangled from.
Destroyer noticed something on the floor, directly under the ceiling gap. He picked it up, held it up into the light.
A lab coat—with the left sleeve ripped
away. Spots of fresh blood. Maybe, after all, the Kid had shot something besides dangling ventilation hoses.
“Sarge,” Duke asked, as they moved down the corridor, “remember when you said, ‘Any questions?’ and we all pretended like we didn’t have any questions?”
“Yep.”
“Uh—did you get any kind of briefing you haven’t shared yet on what we’re looking for here?”
“Nope. But I don’t need a briefing. I got a clue what the problem is here.”
“Yeah? What clue?”
“You notice the blood on the walls?”
“Yeah.”
Sarge looked at him deadpan. “That don’t give you a clue? The problem is something here is killing people. They get killed, here. It’s a problem. They’re supposed to die of old age, not get killed.”
“Thanks, Sarge.”
“I’m not done. We find what’s killing them. We kill that thing. Clear?”
“Uh…but if we knew what it was…”
“You’d be better equipped to fight it, Duke?”
“Yeah.”
“Bullshit. That’s not why you wanta know. You wanta know because something about this place makes you feel like you might shit yourself.”
See, this was why it wasn’t good to try to start a conversation with Sarge. He said things like that to you. Duke held on to his temper. “Sarge—you ever see me show the yellow feather?”
“No. But you never been here before.”
“I just want a handle on it, Sarge.”
They got to a corner, Sarge looked around it, gestured for him to follow. “Okay. A handle on it. You remember the talk about quarantine?”
“Yeah.”
“You notice this is Mars…an alien planet?”
“Yeah. You’re saying the enemy is aliens?”
“Something along those lines. Related to the damn aliens. Whoever they fucking were. Maybe. Or maybe not. Maybe it’s people. Some kind of brain-fever virus. Maybe we’ll get it, and I’ll be killing your ass dead because it’s fucking me up. Maybe that’ll happen in about ten minutes. Or maybe I won’t wait that long because I’m fucking sick of your mouth.”
“Thanks for helping me with this, Sarge. Now I feel better.”
Sarge ignored the sarcasm. “To review, we don’t know what the fuck it is, except…”
“Except it kills people.”
“Yeah. You clear now?”
“No.”
“Good. Then you’ll stay alert, won’t you. Now shut the fuck up, Duke, before I knock your teeth down your throat.”
When Samantha Grimm turned on the lights of the archaeological spectrographic lab, it looked to Reaper like the place had been in use moments before: everything was left out, seemingly still in process. Computers were turned on, showing images from archaeological digs—carvings, bits of ancient bone, broken pieces of sculpture, intricately worked metal from unfamiliar machinery—rocks and fossils on workbenches, tools lying atop them. Brushes, chisels, specialized scrapers, dust blowers. Reaper looked curiously at the streaming shots of damaged sculpture, remembering some of it from his brief stay here with his parents as a child. Despite the unbreathable surface, the Olduvaians of Mars had been humanoid, judging from the sculpture.
What had happened to his parents had been explained away as some kind of accident in one of the lower, innermost digs. They’d broken into a hidden chamber and a trapped gas had affected them…sickness, psychosis, death…anyway, that was the story he’d been given.
But there had been questions, hushed up when the Grimms’ son and daughter were around…
He pushed all that from his mind. Focus on the job, Reaper.
Sam was at her workstation, inserting MICDIs into the computer intake.
“How much time you gonna need?” Reaper asked her.
“Thirty minutes, tops.”
She tapped the keyboard, starting the downloading process as he set about moving some file cabinets, other equipment to block the entrance. There was something down here killing people, and he didn’t want it jumping in at them—at least he could try to slow it down a little, whatever it was, while they were in here.
Sam was concentrating on the computer, but she said, without looking up: “So, ‘Reaper’? As in ‘Grimm’?”
“They’re Marines, Sam. They ain’t poets. Who’s this Carmack guy?”
Click-clickety on the keyboards. “Dr. Carmack…” Clackity-click. “…is a genius. His research program will save tens of millions of lives. He’s the single finest scientific brain I’ve ever encountered.”
“Yeah.” He pointed at a display of fossils—specifically at a preserved humanoid skeleton curled protectively around the skeleton of a child. “What the fuck is that?”
“That’s Lucy.” She turned to the fossil and pretended to introduce Reaper. “Lucy, this is my brother, John, someone else from the long-lost past.”
He pretended to ignore this, but the shot went home anyway. He had been deliberately out of touch with her for years, partly because of the Olduvai thing. Partly because she had strongly disapproved of his career direction. “A sad waste of talent,” was the nicest thing she’d said about it.
He thought about Lucy. “They found human remains?” They hadn’t when he’d been here as a kid…
“Humanoid. Close to us. ‘Lucy’ and her child were our first find. We’re bringing out more every day.”
He looked at her. “You’ve reopened the dig?” He’d thought they were just looking at artifacts taken from the dig a long time in the past.
“Look, maybe I should have told you,” she replied, looking at him evenly, “but it’s not the sort of thing you jot on a yearly birthday card. Besides, it’s been stabilized…”
He wasn’t going to let her off the hook that easily. “Stabilized—what does that mean? You’re saying it’s safe now?”
“I’m saying the procedures we employ are second to—”
He held a hand up, as he interrupted. “Hold it, hold it—are you saying it’s safe, Sam? Jesus. How naïve are you?”
She gave a soft, incredulous laugh. “You want to talk about safe? Like you took a desk job. Like you’re not out there doing God knows what for God knows why. I’m a forensic archaeologist with a specialty in genetics. I go where the work is.”
“That the only reason you’re up here?”
“You want to know why I’m up here?” She turned back to the console, punched some keys. A readout appeared showing a massive grid and the words THERMAL IONIZATION MASS SPECTROGRAPHY.
“This,” she continued, tapping the screen, “is a radioscopic map of the ground around us. These are outlines of building foundations. Looks like a city, right? It’s not. It’s a hundred times as deep and wide and high as any city we’ve ever known. Population of ninety, a hundred million. A megalopolis. And can you imagine the physics necessary to build the Ark? We’re centuries away from this kind of quantum technology, John.”
He turned to look again at the sad fossil: the bones of a mother curled in pathetic futility around the bones of a child. So what happened to them all? Reaper wondered.
He wondered if they were about to find out the answer—millennia later, on a reawakened Olduvai…
Her computer chimed to announce that the first download was complete. Sam pulled out the MICDI, inserted another. “Come here,” she said.
He moved closer to the hominid display, looking at it from another angle.
Sam hit another keyboard combo, and chromosome maps appeared, strata of black and white in translucent tubes. “This is Lucy’s chromosome profile. Notice anything?” He shrugged, and she added: “We both know you smoked me in biology. It’s the first thing Dad taught us to look for.”
His answer was as dry as the bones on the worktables. “My molecular genetics is a little rusty.”
“She has twenty-four chromosomes. Humans only have twenty-three.”
He nodded, counting the chromosome groups on the display. “You don’
t say. So what’s the extra chromosome do? I mean, what’s the difference between me and her, under the hood?”
“You’re human—she’s superhuman. The twenty-fourth pair made her superstrong, superfit, superintelligent. Her cells divide fifty times faster, so she heals almost instantly. The fossil record indicates they’d conquered disease. No genetic disorders, no viruses, no cancers.”
“So she’s just naturally superior…”
“Not naturally. The earliest remains we found had twenty-three pairs of chromosomes. We suspect this extra chromosome may be synthetic.”
Reaper raised his eyebrows. “Bioengineered?”
She smiled thinly. “Long word for a Marine. As I’m sure you also don’t know, only ninety percent of the human genome has been mapped. There’s plenty of room in the helix to insert stealth DNA if you could figure out a way to manufacture it.”
He shook his head. “Sorry. You lost me.”
She snorted. “Sure I have.” Another, different kind of hesitation. Should she go there? “Does it bother you, you could’ve spent your life looking in a microscope—instead of a sniperscope?”
“And work up here for UAC? Sorry. I value my life too much.”
It was true, he thought. Those splashes of blood. The level of quarantine. The tapes.
There were indications that this base for pure science would be far more dangerous than the firefights he’d been in on Earth. Maybe the strongest indication was simple hunch—the instinct of a long-time warrior:
