Genesis Rising

by Eliza Green

  GENESIS RISING

  The Genesis Series, Book 8

  Eliza Green

  Copyright © 2021 Eliza Green

  Kobo Edition

  All rights reserved. This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Kobo.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  Copy Editor: Sara Litchfield

  Cover Design: Deranged Doctor Design

  This book is also available in print.

  www.elizagreenbooks.com

  1

  Bill stared at the open door to the cell made of glass that Marcus Murphy had been kept prisoner in. There was no way that lowlife had escaped on his own. Harvey had to be behind it.

  ‘Where did he go?’ said Laura.

  ‘I don’t know, but that turd has been gunning for Ben ever since I brought the teen in to see him.’

  Her eyes widened in surprise. ‘When did that happen?’

  Bill strode outside without answering her, following the path back to the hospital and the parked car. Beyond the high fence surrounding this military stronghold, he saw the equally tall perimeter walls of New London. They’d left their apartment in such a hurry to get here he hadn’t thought to check if the power problem was citywide.

  Laura caught up to him. She gripped his shoulder, stopping him. ‘We don’t know what happened here. Let’s think about this for a minute.’

  He faced her, happy she was safe with him and not living in District Three. They’d overcome a rocky patch in their marriage and would fix this new problem together. But action was needed now, not talk.

  ‘That’s all I’ve been doing—thinking. Giving Harvey a break, letting him work on the cure for the Indigenes, ignoring my gut that things could never work out where he’s concerned.’

  Laura flicked her gaze away for a second. ‘Okay, say Harvey did this and helped Marcus to escape. And let’s assume the pair grabbed Ben and took him somewhere. For what reason?’

  He could only think of one. ‘To use the kid as leverage and break the ITF apart. What else could Harvey want but more power? He’s been playing me all along, pretending to be interested in helping the Indigenes, pretending to care about what happens on this planet.’ He paused as new guilt hit him. ‘I even fell for his sob story of wanting more clinics to turn his life around.’

  She touched his arm. ‘He took a sample of my DNA, Bill. The clinics must factor into that in some way.’

  She’d only told him about the theft in bed an hour ago, but Bill couldn’t see why Harvey would need it. The recent plan to test people for the virus at the clinic had been carried out under the guise of a new anti-ageing treatment. It had drawn a large sample of men and women, eager to turn back time. But the faux treatment offered was one that would neutralise identity and individuality. It would erase every line and every natural contour of the face, turning people into walking clones of each other. In contrast, Laura’s DNA would encourage change, not suppress it. And being different on Exilon 5 was a bad thing. Bill only had to look at the Indigenes and Conditioned—marginalised in society—to see that.

  ‘Okay, but I can’t see a connection between his demand for more clinics and the loss of power in the city.’

  Laura sighed. ‘Neither can I. So we’re back to it being about a power struggle.’

  ‘It’s always been about that for him. He wasn’t Deighton’s personal doctor for nothing. He probably learned how to be devious from working with him.’ Bill had no idea how Harvey had gotten his start as a geneticist, but he imagined the experience had taught him a few tricks.

  Bill eyed the military hospital’s plain exterior. He couldn’t tell if the power had been affected here too.

  The hospital: built for convenience by Charles Deighton. Its real purpose? To hide the existence of the underground lab and the secret tunnel with multiple branch routes leading back to the city and elsewhere.

  Escape routes, he presumed.

  He’d ordered the main entrance of the lab to be blocked and flooded with anti-gravity some time ago. But he couldn’t assume anything right now.

  ‘We need to check the lab.’

  He marched to the double doors. Laura was by his side when he crashed through them. A glow of red light illuminated his skin and clothes. Frazzled doctors and their assistants rushed around, tending to terrified-looking patients. The public examination area had an eerie look to it.

  One out-of-breath doctor met him in the middle of the room. ‘Oh good, you’re here. The power just went out. We’re running things off the backup supply, but who the hell knows how long that will last? Any idea how long before things are back up?’

  Bill shook his head. ‘Sit tight and manage with what you’ve got. Patch up any non-emergency cases and send them home.’

  The doctor gave a tight laugh. ‘That’s the problem. None of the cases are non emergency.’

  Bill clapped the man on the arm. ‘Then do your best. I’ll let you know as soon as I know something.’ He nodded to the lift. ‘Anyone come out from below?’

  The doctor shook his head. ‘Nobody in or out.’

  That’s what worried him.

  He strode to the back of the room, and entered the corridor leading to the area with the lift. He tried to activate it, but with only the backup supply operational, all non-essential equipment appeared to be offline. ‘Shit.’ He looked around. ‘We’ll have to take the stairs.’

  He retreated back the way he’d come and stopped at a door near the entrance to the corridor. The way down. He tried the handle. The door was locked.

  Bill returned to the main room, calling over his shoulder to Laura, ‘We need to find something to pry it open.’ He began his search, but stopped when he heard a splitting sound behind him. Bill turned to see Laura pulling on the handle he had just tried.

  She smiled through laboured breaths. ‘My Indigene strength has to be good for something, no?’

  After a few more attempts, she’d bent the steel frame enough to loosen the locked door it held, exposing a wide gap and a set of stairs beyond it.

  ‘Let’s go,’ she said.

  He shook his head in surprise and followed her. They took the stairs down one level to a new door. Also locked. She opened that one in the same way. It brought them into the same area as the lift and a set of double doors. This place he knew.

  He walked on, but paused outside the doors.

  ‘Wait a minute,’ he whispered. ‘I don’t know what we’ll find.’

  Bill cracked the door open, expecting to see Harvey or his men pointing a gun at his head. He used his limited view of the interior to do a sweep of the room. Not seeing anyone, he released a quiet breath and opened the door wider.

  The lab was without personnel. He saw nothing out of place, no sign that either Harvey or Dr Jameson had left in a hurry. Yet, the lights were still active down here.

  ‘The lab must be running off a separate supply,’ he said. For a second, he considered sending the doctors and their patients down here. But he wanted this place secure, not open to foot traffic.

  Laura looked around. ‘Did you expect Harvey or Jameson to still be here? It’s too obvious a place to look.’

  ‘No, but I was hoping they’d be stupid or cocky enough to wait for me to turn up.’

  ‘What about the secret t
unnel? Could they have used it?’

  He walked over to the collection of monitoring screens that Jameson and the assistants had used often, hoping at least one was active. All the screens, including the feed from the camera inside the start of the tunnel, were blank.

  Laura wandered over to the containment room that had recently held the Elite and their Conditioned hosts. It stood empty now, following Jameson’s successful extraction of the Elite’s minds from their Conditioned hosts. The Conditioned had returned to their caves, taking their immobile and almost-dead Elite with them. Seven, the first to have had his host removed, had said the Elite would die with dignity.

  What happened to the Elite no longer concerned Bill.

  He joined Laura at the window for a moment before entering the space. He headed for the back wall, where Tanya’s unit had been positioned. With her unit empty and pushed to one side, he could easily access the wall panel behind it. Bill clicked it open and checked inside Deighton’s old access tunnel, wide enough for two people to stand inside. Before him was the transparent seal covering the way inside that he’d ordered here and at the exit points—one inside London and several exiting outside of the city walls. He assumed Deighton had planned for more buildings to cover those outside exits, but had died before it had happened.

  Laura pressed her fingers to the other panels, looking around. ‘Is this where you were keeping Tanya?’

  ‘And the other Elite.’

  She faced him. ‘Do you think Jameson or Harvey will try coming back here?’

  Bill’s gaze grazed every inch of the lab. It had lights but no screen activity, no Elite or Conditioned, and no reason to return.

  ‘I honestly don’t know.’

  2

  The automated car drove Bill and Laura back to New London. Their next stop was the ITF offices.

  They passed by groups of confused business owners and residents standing outside their premises, scratching their heads at the power problem. Going by what he saw, Bill guessed the outage could be citywide. If he were in Harvey’s shoes and had hit the power stations, he wouldn’t have settled for partial control. How far the issue spread, though—that was yet to be determined.

  The car pulled up outside the ITF offices, a steel-and-glass building with six floors nestled between replica nineteenth-century buildings. All was quiet, but Bill expected chaos inside. He and Laura hopped out and jogged to the entrance. With the power down, the ITF would be vulnerable. But he sensed Harvey was after something other than control of these offices.

  They broke through the doors Bill had told Julie to lock and entered the lobby. It was unusually quiet, as well as dark.

  Laura glanced behind her. ‘Should we relock the doors or something?’

  Bill shrugged. ‘Not much point. They already have what they want.’

  ‘Which is?’

  ‘Us scrambling to get control of the situation.’

  They passed through the offline security scanner and took the stairs to the first floor. Bill arrived first and found a frantic Julie organising the team.

  She looked up and saw Bill. She walked over to him, blowing out a breath. ‘Thank God you’re here. I was just about to call you again—’

  Laura must have entered because Julie froze, like a deer caught in headlights. Bill found himself frozen to the spot too. He hadn’t planned for his wife and the woman he’d kissed recently to be in the same room so soon.

  What had he been thinking heading straight for this floor? Why not the sixth?

  One of the men called Julie over. She excused herself and went over to him.

  Laura’s hand on his back surprised him, enough that he broke free of his statue-like stance.

  ‘It’s okay, I had to see her at some point,’ she said. Her eyes were fixed on Julie.

  He wondered if he should tell Laura what Julie had said about letting the Indigenes die. After their kiss, when it had looked like the virus was affecting Indigenes and not the humans, Julie had questioned why they were trying to fix the problem. Her shocking words had turned their amicable connection frosty.

  What use would it be to upset his wife, or to make an enemy out of Julie? With the power outage he needed all hands on deck.

  Bill shook the memory from his mind just as Julie rejoined them. Laura walked away to check on her team’s progress.

  Lifting his chin, he treated Julie like the employee she was. ‘What’s the report?’

  ‘Frank at the power station says the power’s out citywide—and possibly not just here. The interstellar wave is offline, except for the private channels, which we still control. Jeff on the fifth floor says the AI has been working to get control back up for this place since it happened.’

  She glanced back at her team, who were scrambling between monitors, trying to make sense of this mess.

  ‘What did happen, Bill?’ Julie frowned at him. ‘Is it the Elite and Conditioned again? Have they taken control of the power grid for their machine?’

  ‘We think it was Harvey Buchanan.’

  Julie let out a gasp. ‘So he got access to the system when you took it offline?’

  Laura, standing at a nearby monitor, clenched her fists. ‘He did what he had to do, Julie.’

  ‘I didn’t mean—I just meant...’

  Laura returned to them. ‘I know what you meant. That this is Bill’s fault. It’s not his fault. There’s only one person to blame for this mess. Harvey.’

  Laura slipped off her coat and draped it over one arm.

  Julie’s eyes widened. ‘Are you back?’

  ‘Yeah, is that a problem?’

  Julie attempted a smile. ‘Not at all. We could do with the help.’

  As both women continued to assert their authority, the tension refused to leave Bill’s body. He folded his arms, keen to stay on topic and off a different, more intimate subject.

  ‘If the grid is offline, how is the sentient program on the fifth floor still running?’ he asked.

  Julie said, ‘It runs off a different power supply.’

  That made sense... and lifted some of the stress off him. ‘And what will happen the second we fire up the systems?’

  ‘Our systems will be back up,’ said Julie.

  ‘But who will be in control of them?’ said Laura.

  That was his thought too. ‘If we restore power here, we could be handing our security codes to the renegades and Harvey.’

  ‘Are you saying we should leave everything offline?’ said Julie.

  ‘For now. I don’t think the ITF building is their primary target.’

  ‘Then what is?’

  He wished he knew. ‘I’m not sure, but we saw lots of confused faces out there. It won’t be long before the residents come here asking questions.’

  Julie nodded. ‘We should mobilise the military, help to keep things calm. I know that’s your team’s job, Bill, but I’d like to help out more. The Wave is down at the moment. There’s not much for my—I mean, Laura’s—team to do.’

  ‘Military mobilisation will be done by the sixth floor, Julie, but I need you to take lead on it as well as manage things here. This floor should continue to monitor the Wave for any secret attempts to communicate through backdoor channels.’

  ‘Agreed,’ said Laura.

  Julie hesitated. ‘What’s the purpose of taking the power offline if not to attack this place?’

  Laura frowned as if she were running all possibilities through her mind. ‘All power is down. That means light, heat, the replicator machines.’ She looked up. ‘Maybe he’s trying to starve us?’

  Bill shook his head. ‘They would have more control over us with the power active. Think about it; as soon as the power comes back online, Harvey and his renegades could control the apartments, this building, the interstellar wave...’

  Julie’s eyes widened. ‘But if they get control of this place and our security codes...’

  Laura finished her thought. �
�They will gain control of the ships and the spacecraft on board.’ The latter would allow those travelling to reach the docking stations. ‘You think they’re planning on bringing people here from Earth?’

  Bill didn’t see how that would benefit Harvey. ‘Earth is no longer theirs to take. The criminals have been ousted.’

  ‘There are more valuable people there than the criminals to recruit,’ said Laura. ‘You kept a lot of people safe from the regime. Harvey could be after their expertise.’

  Julie said, ‘But if their goal is the power here, why haven’t they re-enabled it yet?’

  ‘Something must be preventing the system from rebooting.’

  Bill hoped that was the case. ‘We need to figure this mess out before that happens.’

  ‘What do we do?’ said Laura.

  ‘We use the resources at hand.’ Bill pointed. ‘Julie, liaise with my team on the sixth and get boots on the ground. I want the residents calm and all exits and entrances to this city blocked. Nobody in or out.’

  She nodded. ‘On it.’

  ‘What about the underground operatives?’ asked Laura as soon as Julie walked to the exit.

  He nodded at her glass-walled office at the back of the room. ‘Let’s talk in private.’

  Laura entered the room slowly, sniffing the air and looking around the office that she hadn’t been in for a while.

  She frowned suddenly. ‘Did someone redecorate in here?’

  Not that he’d noticed.

  ‘Julie has been using this office as her own.’

  Laura’s lips thinned as she sniffed the air again. She released a breath.

  ‘You okay, love?’

  She nodded. ‘Get in touch with Gunnar. He’ll know what to do.’

  Bill removed his DPad from his bag and sat down to call the head of his operative team.

  The Swedish military man Bill had promoted because of his ability to keep his cool under pressure answered. Gunnar had the whitest blond hair and a set of pale-blue eyes that seemed to look right through him. He appeared to be in a dark room or cave.