Hell's Teeth (Phoebe Harkness Book 1)

by James Fahy

  Each of the team has been vetted thoroughly, each is the top of his respective field, and each of us have signed the Official Secrets Act, plus at least eight other military documents which bind us to secrecy. Our work here at the base is classified to an unprecedented level. We have signed our lives over to the project.

  Trevelyan suffers the most from the isolation here. He has a wife and baby daughter, down in Mayfair I believe. He misses them terribly. We are allowed to write but everything is checked, double checked and triple checked before it is allowed to leave the base. We cannot really say much other than that we are fine and well, and working hard to make the world a better place.

  Harkness works hard, but I know he misses his fiancée too. Five years here, until the Sentinel Project is complete. It’s a long haul.

  Scott is a genius. He is bad tempered and aloof, the eldest of our team, but his breakthrough work on the embryonic stages of the Sentinels has been astonishing.

  Coleman, I cannot help but think of as a child. We plucked him from Oxford. He’s still a student technically but he has some inspired theories, and his experimental approach is bringing the project along awfully well.

  So far, the Sentinels are still embryonic. Fifty of them are held in deep storage in our underground facility. The man-sized test tubes lining the walls down there are a magnificent sight to behold.

  They are still cryostasis adolescents. We find the gene-manipulation takes hold more effectively during the mutable stages of physical growth. Our rejection rate of new tissue is down to 38% now, and the bonding of the major macromolecules – the DNA, the RNA, and the enhanced and revised proteins – are taking well.

  On a side note, one unusual result of the engineering has shown in several extreme mutations on a cellular level. In samples taken from the embryonic Sentinels, we have observed triple-stranded helices containing three long biopolymers of nucleotides, not the usual two. Coleman believes he can stabilise this.

  Log 899:

  Coleman’s hunch was correct. We have introduced recombinant DNA, constructed by Drs Harkness and Trevelyan. After transforming these into basic organic plasmids and utilising a viral vector, we have reduced rejection rate of manipulated cells to 2%. This is truly a phenomenal breakthrough. We can now purify the DNA for true manipulation, restriction digests and polymerase chain reaction. We have begun profiling.

  Log 902:

  Batch One of the Sentinels will be activated tomorrow morning. The team are insisting on celebrating the birthday of the Sentinels. I don’t approve.

  Scott refers to the fifty as our ‘wondrous children’ while Harkness terms them the Nephylim. Coleman simply calls them the Pale Soldiers.

  We will have to work on cosmetics once motor functions and other primal instincts have been successfully programmed. The Sentinels will be the world’s new peacekeeping force but mankind at large will only accept them if they do not seem threatening. We are developing them to protect us, after all.

  Their albino appearance, a form of severe achromatosis, does give them an unsettling otherworldly appearance, I must admit. Of course, such a congenital disorder – the absence of pigment in the skin, hair and eyes – is common throughout all vertebrates. Recessive gene alleles result in defective tyrosinase, the copper rich enzyme which produces melanin. It is curious that this affects every one of the fifty Sentinels. They all share the same human DNA gene pool, however. Our very own chromosomes were used to bioengineer them – all five of us.

  I suppose in a way Scott is therefore correct. We are all their fathers, the five members of the Development Team. Our mixed DNA provides the building blocks for us to engineer the Sentinels. But the other samples, those DNA slices we are given to play with from Subject One, I wish I knew more about them. Their complexity is fascinating.

  Harkness tells me he believes that the mysterious Subject One is actually right here in the Norfolk base with us on one of the deeper, secured levels.

  This may well be the case.

  None of us know where the bio-samples come from; the other half of our DNA recipe.

  Log 927:

  It has been three weeks since the activation, or birth, of the Batch One Sentinels. Of the fifty originals, seven remain functional, the others are retired.

  Seven are still alive, the rest are dead.

  Trevelyan says we should have anticipated the violence levels. We have engineered them to this level of aggression ourselves, after all. But in our foolishness, we had thought there would be more control. They slaughtered one another – immediately after we woke them from stasis.

  It was particularly brutal in the holding pen. We extracted seven who were merely unconscious. Better to do that than have to start afresh again with our DNA in Petri dishes and lose all our work so far. The military torched the dead ones. It still smells of burning fat down on this level. We have been promised relocation to a deeper subsection, but who knows when that will happen.

  Harkness, Scott and Coleman work on extracting what useful material we can from the surviving Sentinels, while Trevelyan and I work on tweaking the primal chromosomal restraint levels to be inserted into batch two. The seven survivors of batch one will then be torched.

  Log 934:

  More samples from Subject One arrived today. We are still marvelling at the cellular structure it comprises. Coleman is convinced we are the British Area 51 and that the military have a captured alien down there somewhere beneath our feet. Where else could this DNA come from, he argues.

  Log 1135:

  Batch Eight. Our magnum opus at last. It has been two years since Batch One, and finally we have living, breathing, and above all else, compliant Sentinels.

  Scott has now taken to calling them Übermensch, after Nietzsche’s theoretical supermen. I admit they are a dazzling and vital breed: stronger than humans, faster, denser, molecularly speaking, far more complex. Superior in almost every way, except of course that they are far more compliant than any human has ever been. I should hope so too. We made them to obey us.

  Log 1256:

  They have been active for seven months. So far from testing they have astounding levels of physical strength, endurance, and regenerative tissue capabilities. We cannot make them speak. All are mute but they fully understand and comply with our orders.

  The one flaw we cannot seem to fix is the alopecia. Hair loss occurs shortly after full maturity on a full body scale. Again, with the albino condition, this does make for a startling appearance, but our government and military masters seem more than pleased with the results.

  Harkness was granted shore leave last month. The only one of us to leave the base since the project began. He was heavily guarded, of course, for security’s sake. Imagine our surprise when he returned with the ring on his finger. He has married his girl, the young rascal. Good times are ahead, he says. Scott firmly believes our good work here will make us all rich beyond our wildest dreams.

  Coleman and myself I feel are more idealistic than the others. We seem to want only to be remembered for bringing a tool of peace to our troubled world. Imagine an end to all war. A golden age of mankind is approaching, where our civilisation can finally flourish in perpetual peace. We will never again fear the uprising of a nuclear armed nation, never hear of a London bus exploding or a gas attack in Tokyo, because everywhere our Sentinels will be there. Our guardian angels, they are the strongest of us, the fiercest.

  The ultimate deterrent.

  Log 1384:

  The military bosses came to oversee the handover today. Batch Eight is ready to be passed into higher hands than ours. They have been perfected, ready for mass production.

  Bio-labs have already been prepared nationwide in Britain, with similar facilities worldwide in our allied countries. A proud moment for any father, I suppose, watching your children go forth into the world to multiply. This will be our legacy, Trevelyan told us. Our DNA, the five of us with help from the mysterious yet miraculous Subject One, cloned and living on forever
to serve the people of the world.

  I feel Harkness has spent too much time interacting with the Sentinels. It is in all our natures to be fascinated with what we have achieved here, of course, but he seems at times unsettled by them. They are placid enough, unless instructed otherwise, but he says he does not like their silence, and the way they watch us. It’s though they are all speaking to each other without words, he says.

  We have wondered if some extreme instinctual bond has formed between them, a kind of latent, low-level telepathy resulting of their shared genetic heritage. But these are not tests for us to consider any longer. We have made a huge leap forwards, and soon everyone in it will know about them. I think it’s best for us to get back out there and live our lives, our children watching over us.

  Log 1389:

  This will be my final entry. Our team has been disbanded and there is little more for me to log or record other than my findings on our final night at the Norfolk base. Even now I am unsure what to make of it.

  I record it here in the hope that whoever these reports are eventually filed with will make more sense of it. I assume those working in other levels of the base are required to make similar logs. I hope the records of whoever presides over Level Thirteen will shed more light on my discovery.

  It was Coleman who came to us with the pass code. All through our long project here, it has been a constant source of speculation as to the origin of the samples from Subject One. Their DNA structure was so complex and so unlike our own models, our human contribution to the engineering of the Sentinels, or the Pales as we have all seemed to settle on calling our silent white super soldiers.

  Coleman would not say where he had obtained the access codes to Level Thirteen. We all knew he had strokes of computing genius in him, but we did not know that in his hunger to know more, he had been steadily hacking every firewall and security code in the base. It was all under the radar, of course, covering his tracks.

  I realise that by naming him here I am exposing him to dire consequences. It was, I suppose, treason, this breaking of high level military security, but if he is to be damned by his transgression then I must take the fall with him – for I admit that, despite my reservations, I was overcome with curiosity myself.

  Please understand: we had to know what we had been working with these last five years. We are scientists, each of us.

  Harkness, Trevelyan and Scott wanted nothing to do with our proposed breach. Let the record state that they cautioned us against it, even tried to talk us out of it. They would not accompany us. It is, in fact, testament to the strong fraternal bond which has by necessity grown between us over this five year project that they did not report us.

  The base is sparsely manned now, being taken apart piece by piece. Most of the military personnel have already moved out. The Sentinels have been shipped out for cloning worldwide. Soon the world will be full of them.

  We made our cautious way, Coleman and I, using the security elevator and the hacked codes my colleague had obtained.

  What I found on Level Thirteen has raised more questions for me than it answered. There is a single laboratory on this deep level and one holding pen with the highest level security. We could not gain access to the pen itself but there was a viewing gallery, looking down to the pen itself.

  What I saw is still hard to describe. It seemed a corpse, a single withered husk of a man laid out on the medical slab. The vast array of tubes and electrodes connected to its carcass made it difficult to discern much specifically, and from almost every angle the view was blocked by the many machines which surrounded it – their purposes I can only guess.

  It reminded me of an old anatomy lesson from when I was studying medicine in my youth, and corpses were opened for our observation. The figure’s legs were gone, removed mid-thigh, one of its arms the same. Its chest was held open, peeled back in the manner of a post mortem, the skirts of flesh pinned back like butterfly wings. Wires and tubes fed into the cavity. It had no jaw, and one eye had been removed clinically.

  It dawned on me slowly, and must have to Coleman too, that this was Subject One. The thing which had so generously supplied our missing link, the genetic data which added to our own, and had made the Sentinels possible.

  Was it even human? I could not say. But I almost dropped on the spot when I saw, even from this distance, its remaining bloodshot eye move slowly in its socket, roaming the room until it settled finally on us.

  The thing was alive. Even in this lamentable condition, they were keeping this wasted abomination alive. Is this how they had supplied us with our samples? How it was still living, I had no idea. It was nightmarish to behold and in the piercing stare with which it fixed me and Coleman, I swear I detected such agony, such fierce and un-relenting pain, that it took my breath away.

  Beneath that pain, though, I saw anger; a fury which seemed to somehow roll across the holding pens and break over us like a wave. How long had this thing been down here, this mystery medical breakthrough which had made our world-saving work possible? Surely not the entire five years while we worked blithely above? Perhaps longer, much longer, before our Development Team was selected and put to work here. In that stare was something terrible, and neither of us could remain a moment longer.

  We did not speak of what we had seen to Trevelyan, Scott or Harkness. We told them the lab had been empty. There had been nothing down there.

  Perhaps it is better to think that. I do not wish to tarnish our good work. Surely whatever individual sacrifices are made, the greater good outweighs them in the long stretch of history.

  This was last night and we leave tomorrow, after we are debriefed. I do not know if the man, if it was a man, remains down there or if it will be moved as well.

  On a final, perhaps unscientific note, I must add the unsettling dream I had, here on our final night. I dreamed I was once again in the lab on the thirteenth subfloor but there was a man there this time, standing in the holding pen. Not a monster, only somehow not a man either. Something else.

  In my dream he spoke to me and told me that we had changed the world together, he and I, and that his children would tear down his enemies.

  Dreams are such odd things. I know, of course, that this was nothing more than an anxiety dream brought on by the stress of our macabre discovery. It was in other ways ludicrous. Only in the madness of a dream would my addled mind replace a burned out mutilated corpse with a stern man’s bright, fierce countenance, and then give him of all things an Italian accent.

  I will sign off now. In a way I will miss these logs. Trevelyan made all of us pose for a photograph today, our final day together. He says he is going to frame it for his daughter even though she will never know of our work here. None of our families will, even when the Sentinels go public, but he is still proud. We all are. Harkness had obtained champagne. We had a jolly time.

  I will still be glad to see the back of the Norfolk base, however. It will be good to get back out into the shining future we have made possible and to live again.

  On behalf of the Sentinel Development Team, this is Doctor Alistair Rutheridge signing off.

  32

  My hands were numb, holding the datapad there in the darkness of the alley. The words on the page dictated long ago, before the wars had started, before Tassoni had turned the Pale on mankind, blurred before my eyes.

  I looked up to find Cloves and Allesandro both watching me silently. They were almost lost in the darkness. Cloves’ expression was hard to read. I knew she had already read these files herself. She had made the links. She understood.

  “This is why they want us,” I said, forcing my voice to sound as normal as I could. “Whatever the Bonewalker is planning to do, whatever ‘magic’ the Black Sacrament are hoping will bring Tassoni back, they need the original DNA.”

  I looked up at them both.

  “They need the Development Team, the ones who made the Pale. My father, Trevelyan’s, Coleman’s, the others; they all gave their own genes t
o the project and mixed it with Tassoni’s.”

  “The original message which came with Trevelyan’s teeth makes a little more sense, that’s for sure,” Cloves said darkly. “There will be payment, an eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth. Five sinners, five will pay.”

  “They need us, somehow, to bring him back,” I said mostly to myself, still clutching the datapad. “They couldn’t get Coleman. He killed himself years ago. Trevelyan, he’s also dead from cancer. My own father died in the wars. So they took their children instead: Vyvienne Trevelyan, Jennifer Coleman, and me. The only member of the Development Team we know is still living is Marlin Scott. They tried for him, of course, but found him toothless. Now they have his son, Oscar.”

  “And the sins of the fathers…” Allesandro said softly.

  Cloves had obviously filled him in while I was reading the files.

  I was still in shock. How could my father have never mentioned this to me? I was born after the collapse of the old world, the wars already raging. My mother dead, he was the only family I’d ever had. In the new world order he had found a new role in our society as a field medic. I had never known that the armies of the Pale against which he fought were partly his own creation, that they all on some level shared his DNA.

  Shared my DNA…

  A hideous memory resurfaced. Gio hadn’t been kidding when he had thrown me into the pit with the feral Pale under Carfax and instructed me to enjoy some family time. He knew so much. Who was involved, who to harvest. He didn’t have access to these files. What information was on them that they didn’t already know?

  I wondered if this was this the reason the Epsilon serum had bonded with me successfully, because the genetic virus the Pale carried was partly me anyway. The same genetic footprint?