by Greg Cox
Roberta whistled appreciatively at the sheer number of superchildren residing in the underground installation. Even working together, she and Seven would never have been able to transport so many children directly from the Chrysalis—there was a limit to how much you could accomplish with just a servo or two—but such a massive operation was well within the capabilities of the Beta 5. Thank goodness for good old-fashioned alien know-how, she thought, attitude or no attitude.
Staring at the hijacked images on the monitor, she gulped as a view of the Developmentally Deviant kids cycled onto the screen. “Computer, maintain surveillance of this site,” she instructed quickly, feeling an urgent need to take a closer look at this particular dormitory. Even now, a few of the “imperfect” children appeared oblivious of the crisis going on around them; Roberta saw the little counting boy, his cheek twitching like crazy, calmly enumerating his toes, while most of his fellow misfits reacted fearfully to the commotion. Tears streamed down the cheeks of those children who were aware enough of their surroundings to be frightened. One scared child pulled all her sheets over her head in a desperate attempt to escape from the alarms, while the boy whose face resembled a lion’s shredded his pillow with what looked like claws, adding a blizzard of feathers to the chaotic scene.
Disturbed once more by the DDU kids’ varied afflictions, Roberta looked away from the screen. “Continue cycle of images,” she told the Beta 5, feeling a lump in her throat. The view on the screen shifted to another location, and Roberta’s gaze, returning to the monitor, [229] promptly zeroed in on another familiar face, the one belonging to her little friend Noon. Dr. Kaur’s remarkable offspring was, no surprise, coping with the crisis much more stoically than you’d expect of a child his age. Barefoot and in pajamas, he stood quietly on the carpeted floor between matching rows of bunks, with an alert yet pensive expression on his deceptively childlike face. He looked more intrigued than distressed by the unusual goings-on, and curious about what was going to happen next. A shudder ran through Roberta’s spine as the small Indian boy stared directly at the security camera in the ceiling; for a heartbeat, she felt like his striking black eyes were looking right back at her.
Don’t be silly, she scolded herself. He’s probably just wondering what his caretakers are up to. Despite Noon’s unnatural grace under pressure, Roberta was nevertheless appalled that Sarina Kaur was not there to comfort or care for him in this emergency. He’s her own son, Roberta thought indignantly Where the heck is she?
“Transporter matrix locked in,” the Beta 5 reminded her pointedly. “Please specify destination of selected life-forms.”
Tearing her gaze away from the eightfold images of confused and panicky children, Roberta hurriedly keyed in the coordinates for their associate’s safe house in Puyallup. Even though she knew that what she was doing was necessary, especially with Seven intent on Chrysalis’s utter destruction, she couldn’t help feeling like a kidnapper. “Engage transporter,” she ordered the computer.
Indicator lights blinked on and off upon the polished black face of the Beta 5. Above the monitor, the cosmic radiation gauge glowed like the aurora borealis.
Isis squawked rudely from the desktop nearby.
“Yeah, yeah,” Roberta replied, knowing exactly what the gosh-darned cat was nagging her about. “Don’t worry I won’t forget the tiger.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
CHRYSALIS BASE
INDIA
“ATTENTION. TWENTY-FIVE MINUTES to atomic sterilization.”
The automated warning echoed through every level of Chrysalis, spurring Maggie Erickson onward as she dashed for the children’s dormitories. I can’t believe this is happening, she thought fearfully, her heart pounding in her chest as she ran down the hall, passing equally desperate men and women rushing about on their own urgent missions. She gaped in amazement at the frenzied activity and distraught expressions she saw all around her. How? she wondered in disbelief. How had the well-ordered, scientifically structured routine of Chrysalis been transformed into this mad, unscheduled exodus?
It had all happened so quickly. She had been in one of the staff cafeterias, having coffee with her colleague and fiancé, Dr. Everett Walsh, when, all of sudden, that bizarre and terrifying announcement had come over the PA system. Some stranger, informing them that Chrysalis was doomed, and that they had less than half an hour to evacuate the entire complex. It’s completely insane! she thought.
Yet here she was, racing to see to her students, while the automated countdown provided a chilling confirmation of the intruder’s ghastly prediction. Everett ran beside her, looking just as stunned and bewildered as everyone else.
Granted, they had all planned and drilled for just such an [231] emergency situation, but Maggie had never really expected to ever have to actually evacuate Chrysalis. Not after all the precautions they’d taken to keep the very existence of the project concealed from the world.
The two instructors arrived at Children’s Dormitory #5 within minutes. The swing-shift caretaker, Jessica McGivney, had already started getting the pajama-clad toddlers ready to leave, rousing them from bed and helping them into slippers and robes. Maggie offered a silent prayer of thanks to the gods of smaller class sizes, grateful that she was only personally responsible for the safety of Lot Epsilon, a grouping of no more than fifteen students. Twenty-five minutes, she thought. That should be just enough time to herd all the children to the nearest emergency exit.
“All right,” she said loudly, clapping her hands together to get the children’s attention. “Everyone be quiet and listen closely.” She paused long enough for the chatter and general hubbub to die down, except for some mild sobs and sniffles, which Jessica and Everett attended to as best they could. “Everything is going to be okay,” Maggie assured her underage audience, “but you need to do exactly as we practiced. Please line up by the door, quickly but calmly. Remember, no pushing.”
To her relief, the children complied readily, with only minimal jostling and disarray. As usual, Noon was first in line, a position uncontested by any of the other toddlers. He has a natural talent for leadership, she noted, just like his mother. Noon’s presence in Lot Epsilon only added to Maggie’s acute sense of responsibility. The director would never forgive me if anything happened to her boy.
The very thought sent a shudder down her spine.
“Very good,” she praised the class, forcing that nightmarish scenario out of her mind. Pride brought a small smile to her face as she watched the toddlers follow her directions to the letter; she doubted if any ordinary four-year-olds, conceived via a random shuffling of genes and chromosomes, could have coped even half so well with an emergency of this nature. “Now then,” she instructed, opening the door to the corridor outside, “I want you to follow me as quickly as you can.” She looked over the children’s mussed and uncombed heads [232] to her fellow caretakers. “Jessica, Everett, watch the rear of the line to make sure we don’t lose any stragglers.”
Before she could step through the door, however, something bizarre happened. From out of nowhere, a strange blue fog filled the dormitory, glowing like radioactive waste. For a few heart-stopping seconds, Maggie felt sure that the self-destructing reactor below them had released its blazing atomic venom prematurely. Time’s up, she thought despairingly. We’re dead.
But when the luminous mist did not scald the flesh from her bones, she realized that instant incineration was not in the offing. Nor did the strange fog assault her lungs, the way an enemy gas attack would. She was alive, she could breathe, she was still conscious; she just didn’t know what was happening. All she felt was a peculiar tingling sensation all over her body, like static electricity. What is this? she worried, cringing instinctively from the touch of the mist. I don’t understand.
The blue fog spread rapidly, growing thicker and more opaque by the second. Within moments, the mist completely hid the children and the other adults from view. “Maggie?” Everett called from deep within the swirli
ng, incandescent fog, his voice almost lost amid the frightened cries and questions of the confused and disoriented children. She heard dozens of tiny slippers stampede upon the carpet as the neatly ordered line of toddlers broke apart into utter bedlam. “Maggie!” Everett shouted again. “Where are you?”
“Over here!” she yelled back. Desperate to save at least one of her precious charges, she reached into the fog and grabbed on to Noon. Thankfully, her prize student had not yet scattered like his classmates. How brave! she thought. How superior! She clutched Noon tightly against her waist, almost smothering him. “Don’t be scared!” she exclaimed fervently. “I have you.”
“I am not afraid,” the boy insisted, his pride wounded. His diminutive frame maintained a tense, ready posture, neither pulling away nor yielding to Maggie’s embrace. “But we should leave here. Now.”
Yes! Maggie thought. Of course! She could come back for the other children later, or Everett and Jessica could take care of them. First, she had to get Noon to safety, and away from this insane, unnatural fog.
[233] Then, just as she reached her decision, she felt Noon literally dissolving within her grasp. His very flesh and bones seemed to melt away, becoming as insubstantial as the mist surrounding them. “No!” she shrieked in anguish, trying to hold on to him with all her might, but the evaporating child slipped like vapor through her fingers, leaving her empty-handed and alone. “Noon!” she screamed, so hard it left her throat raw, but it was too late. The little boy was gone.
The mysterious fog departed with him, dispersing as swiftly and inexplicably as it had come, leaving the three adults standing, baffled and aghast, in an empty dormitory. It was not only Noon who had disappeared into the mist, Maggie saw. All the children were missing. “Where are they?” Jessica asked stridently, her hands clutching her skull in horror. Her shocked face was white as the chalk they sometimes used in class. “Where have they gone? Where?”
Maggie knew just how the other woman felt. Panic and hysteria clawed at her sanity. How could a roomful of children just vanish like that? It was like magic—black magic—but Maggie had never believed in magic. I’m a psychologist, dammit, she thought, trying hard not to fall apart. This was like something out of some horrible fairy tale. The Pied Piper maybe, spiriting away the beloved children of Hamelin. ...
“Twenty minutes to atomic sterilization.”
So dumbfounded was Maggie by the children’s miraculous disappearance that it took a few seconds for the full urgency of the automated warning to sink in. Sterilization—hah! she thought bitterly. She knew that was just a feeble euphemism for a full-scale nuclear explosion. And why not? With the children gone, what is there left to save?
Everett tugged on her arm. “Maggie, we need to hurry.” Jessica fled the abandoned dormitory as Everett pleaded with his fiancée. “There’s no choice, Maggie. We have to go.”
“But the children ...” she murmured. Her eyes searched the corners of the bunk-filled chamber, not yet accepting that so many toddlers could just vanish like that. Only empty beds met her hopeless gaze. “Lot Epsilon?”
“They’re gone, Maggie. I don’t how, but they’re gone.” He glanced [234] anxiously at the clock over the door, counting down the moments to Chrysalis’s thermonuclear demise. “Please, we have to hurry!”
Reluctantly, Maggie looked away from the vacant dormitory, letting the other teacher drag her out of the children’s quarters and into the hallway, where they joined a pell-mell rush to safety. Everett was right, she realized; there was nothing else to do. Chrysalis had become Hamelin, and the glorious future they had worked so hard to bring about had somehow been snatched away by forces unknown. She could only hope that, wherever Noon and his classmates had gone, they were someplace very far from the radioactive inferno Chrysalis was about to become.
I should have killed that smug American bastard when I had the chance! Donald Archibald Williams raged as he keyed his security code into the electronic lock guarding the top-secret germ-warfare labs on Level Four. His ruddy face was flushed and sweating, and his frantic sprint from his quarters, where he had been enjoying a much-needed snooze, had left him panting and short of breath. The blaring emergency sirens wreaked havoc with his migraine, sending agonizing pulsations through his temples with every clangorous repetition of the alarm. I knew he was trouble the minute I saw him.
He cursed Sarina Kaur as well, for dragging him into this bloody project in the first place. Not that he’d had much choice in the matter; having uncovered his own legally dubious efforts at human cloning, along with its unfortunate casualties, Kaur had all too easily blackmailed him into joining Chrysalis. Now, with the entire insane enterprise seemingly crashing down all around him, he couldn’t help wondering if he wouldn’t have been better off facing the music in the first place.
A loud hiss escaped from inside the lab as the airtight metal door unsealed itself. Only three individuals in Chrysalis had access to the facilities on Level Four: Kaur, Lozinak, and himself. Now, with his future suddenly thrown into uncertainty, Williams intended to take advantage of that privileged status to secure a crucial bit of insurance to help him weather whatever storms might lie ahead. Nothing like a [235] unique, new bioweapon to use as a bargaining chip, he thought, formulating desperate new plans on the run. The Russians are bound to be interested in Kaur’s pet bacteria, and may be the Americans as well. ...
“Attention. Twenty-two minutes to atomic sterilization,” the PA system announced, continuing its inexorable countdown. Acutely aware that time was rapidly ticking away, Williams ignored the protective biohazard suits hanging inside the entrance to Level Four, hurrying on to the inner chambers of the laboratory. Empty steel vats, waiting for the vast quantities of peptone that had just arrived from America, rested between aisles of sterile white tiles and plastic tubing. Williams glanced nervously over his shoulder, half-expecting to be surprised by either Seven or Sarina Kaur, arriving just in time to catch him in the act. He wasn’t sure who he was most afraid of confronting. Kaur, most likely; as far as he knew, Seven had never ordered the cold-blooded execution of any of his subordinates.
Another set of airlocks stood between him and the object of his impromptu shopping expedition. Sweaty fingers pounded a frustratingly long numerical sequence into a mounted keypad, and he waited impatiently for the lock to verify his security clearance. He yanked hard on the gleaming chrome door handle the minute he heard the welcome hiss of escaping air, and hurriedly entered the earthquake-proof chamber beyond.
Strictly off-limits to all but Kaur and her most trusted associates, the cool, air-conditioned metal vault contained only a locked filing cabinet and a refrigerator hooked up to its own emergency generator. Williams attacked the filing cabinet first, hastily unlocking the top drawer and rifling through an assortment of tightly packed hanging folders. An adhesive label reading “Carn-Strep—gen.18.7” identified the specific file he required. Yes! he thought avidly. Just what I was looking for.
Enclosed was the exact genetic sequence for the latest generation of Sarina Kaur’s carnivorous streptococcus. With this recipe, he knew, and the proper facilities, anyone with sufficient know-how and desire would be able to re-create the fearsome flesh-eating bacteria, and perhaps even improve on it. For himself, Williams only wanted to use the [236] formula to buy himself a comfortable retirement somewhere far from the reach of anyone who might come looking for him. The West Indies, maybe, or South America.
He glanced quickly at the nearby refrigerator, containing actual samples of the modified Strep A bacteria. He briefly considered snatching a carefully sealed specimen of the vicious microorganism, for added insurance, but promptly decided against it. Transporting a living sample of the bug, even in an unbreakable plastic container, would be just too nerve-racking, particularly given the uncertain exodus ahead.
“No need to get greedy,” he muttered. The formula for the disease was more than enough. He pocketed a folded piece of paper bearing the relevant genetic sequence,
then looked toward the exit. His head throbbed miserably.
“Attention. Twenty-one minutes to atomic sterilization.”
Time to go, he realized. In a moment of perverse defiance, he tugged open the door of the refrigeration unit, exposing the vulnerable bacteria inside to room temperature, not to mention the coming nuclear holocaust. Take that, you blackmailing witch, he thought. Let your microscopic little monsters go up inflames with the rest of this wretched place!
Carrying a stolen recipe for a biological nightmare, along with half-cooked plans for the future, Williams rushed out of Level Four in search of safety—and whatever else fate had in store for him.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
00:19:51
LESS THAN TWENTY MINUTES TO GO, Seven noted from his seat at the control panel. He studied the various gauges on display, carefully monitoring the self-destructive process unfolding within the concrete reactor silo. According to the instrumentation, temperatures within the reactor core were rapidly approaching two thousand degrees Celsius, while the chain reaction building inside the silo would soon pass the point of no return, as the uranium fuel rods melted into a single critical mass. Seven intended to stay at the reactor controls until the very last minute, just in case Sarina Kaur and her followers attempted to abort the coming explosion.
As he familiarized himself with Chrysalis’s primary source of energy, he had to admire, in a perverse fashion, the manner in which the reactor had been expressly designed to provide a spectacular funeral pyre for the project, had circumstances so required. Ordinarily, the breakdown of this sort of primitive pressurized-water reactor would only result in a catastrophic meltdown, not a full-scale nuclear explosion, but the Chrysalis reactor was different; as far as he could tell from the schematics on display in the control room, the processed uranium at this reactor’s core had deliberately been arranged in precisely the right quantity and configuration to guarantee an atomic explosion deep beneath the desolate sands of the Great Thar Desert.