by Alex Scarrow
‘Appear to be?’ Shelby shook his head. ‘Don’t act as if this is the first time you’ve seen them.’
‘Hey, dude…seriously…there was no help from me. This is all from her own warped mind. Trust me.’
Scorpions? Ellie knew what one of those those was. She’d seen one tattooed on an old farmer’s arm once. The tattooed creature had two large claws that snapped shut and opened as he flexed his tendons and the senso-ink reacted to his nerve impulses.
All of a sudden she had visions of those ten distant beasts effortlessly chomping through her fabricants, snapping her poor creatures in half like corn dollies.
Her army was now assembled in three groups. She saw Max standing in front of his batch looking up at her. She waved her arms, instructing him to split them up as agreed.
She saw him flapping his stubby arms, relaying her command, and the clawed creatures split into two roughly even groups of a couple of hundred each. They scampered off towards the edges of the world, one group to the left, the other to the right and after a couple of minutes they arrived where she’d wanted them placed; one group at three o’clock, one at nine o’clock. The prized peach was bang in the middle of the clock face.
‘Ahh… now that looks like your classic flanking manoeuvre. Very clever. I presume that was, like, all her idea was it Shelbs? No coaching, huh?’
‘Of course, I gave her some basic instruction on battlefield tactics.’
‘Well, I’m not sure how much good that’s going to do her. Cutesy teddies going toe-to-toe with giant scorpions? You know, man, this’ll be an interesting game!’
‘Oh, they’re not just cutesy teddies, Graham. Trust me…’
On the far side of the battlefield, Ellie could see Jez’s scorpions beginning to move. They looked like they were mirroring her movements, splitting into two groups, five heading to the right, five to the left. She watched them moving, very slowly and very clumsily.
She’s made their legs far too spindly. Their bodies are too heavy for them.
Ellie grinned as a strategy began to form in her head. I’ll just wear those giant bugs out. That's all I need to do. Her bears were easily nimble enough to outpace them. She looked at the remaining pack of black dots just outside Jez’s castle and wondered what they were, though. There looked to be no more than fifty or so of them. Perhaps they'd been an afterthought - Jez using up what was left of her biomass budget.
She decided to make the first move. While the scorpions wore themselves out making their way toward Max’s creatures, she might as well set Jonny and his peach-rollers to work. She looked down, saw him, craning his neck, waiting for her instructions. She gestured at the peach.
'Go get the ball!'
Jonny nodded, then yelped the order and the two hundred bears scrambled down the slope towards the peach in the middle. She just had to hope it wasn’t going to be too damned heavy for them to push uphill.
‘Looks like Ellie Quin is making the first big move for the flag, sports fans!’ boomed Gray’s voice.
Ellie cursed. She'd been hoping to speedily resolve this game with a quick bloodless win. But Gray was deliberately drawing Jez’s attention to the whole point of the game. Jez, she could imagine had probably been jumping up and down and yipping with blood-curdling glee at the prospect of her monster scorpions tearing Ellie’s creatures to pieces…and had completely forgotten about the peach in the middle.
Thanks, Gray.
The gap between Max’s bears and the giant scorpions was slowly narrowing on either side of the field. She wasn’t entirely sure which side Max had gone with, she'd lost sight of him as they'd split and scampered off. Whichever side he was, she hoped he was looking her way. She raised her hand and swung it in a big, slow, deliberate circle….the retreat signal. All they needed to do was keep their distance and keep the scorpions plodding, exhausting themselves.
She was going to assume that Jez hadn’t thought about discussing hand signals with her creatures. She suspected Jez would be more of the point-them-in-the-right-direction-and-let-‘em-loose school of tactics. The scorpions presumably would go trundling on after her bears and she wouldn't be able to order them to stop. Meanwhile Jonny’s rollers could be working that peach up the hill towards her.
She could see movement.
The group of her soldier-bears on the left was beginning to move away. She guessed Max was with them and had spotted her retreat signal. The others on the right, however, were stoically rooted to the spot, staring at the approaching monster scorpions bearing down on them. She realised she should have appointed a third ‘officer’ to keep an eye open for her commands over there.
Her first big mistake.
‘Uh-oh…looks like we’re heading for a teddy bear massacre on the right flank, folks!’ boomed Gray.
In the middle of the battlefield, Jonny’s creatures had gathered around the giant peach and, to her relief, with their combined weight thrown behind it and a chorus of grunting and straining, the peach was beginning to roll her way.
On the right, the scorpions and teddy bears finally closed in on each other. She watched with horror as a giant jagged-edged pincer snapped shut around the waist of the nearest bear and effortlessly sheared it two. From where she was standing on the wall, she could hear the faint sound of the creature’s pitiful scream as it was tossed through the air trailing an arc of bloody offal behind it.
Seeing that, it hit her hard and suddenly, like a slap across the face. The guilty little thrill of 'command' she'd allowed herself to feel earlier, suddenly became a wave of nausea. All of a sudden she felt sick to her stomach, any notion that this was some kind of a game was a grotesque thought.
How the hell is this supposed to be fun?
She shot a glance up at the floating platform, at Shelby and Gray’s faces in the sky, grinning like a pair of idiots.
How the fregg is watching things die….fun?
She just wanted this over with, as quickly as possible. With as little bloodshed as possible. She turned from the wall, hurried down the ramp into the courtyard and out through the open gates of the castle.
She waved her hands above her head and cried to get their attention from the platform near the apex of the domed sky. ‘Stop this! I want to stop playing!!!’
But her cry wasn’t being heard.
‘Woah! Looks like it’s first blood to the blue team!’ boomed Gray’s voice. ‘We’re talking teddy bear burger meat here, sports fans!’
She turned to watch her bears bravely fighting on, slashing their claws ferociously at the hard carapace shells of the scorpions. From this distance it was impossible to see if they were inflicting any damage at all. But it was clear the scorpions were. More ragged carcasses were being tossed into the air, their faint death wails chilling her to the bone.
She decided the only way to bring this bloodbath to a conclusion was to get that peach up here as quickly as possible. She hurried down the hill towards Jonny and his bears.
She swerved round a small rock formation, then around a copse of the tall melon-headed plants. The nearest of them stirred to life as she passed by, it’s giant bulb beginning to pulsate and flex.
Finally, gasping for breath she joined the pack of bears. Jonny was cajoling them to push harder, their high pitched voices were chorused in effort as the peach slowly rolled up the gentle hill.
‘Make a space. I’m helping!’ she shouted.
‘Thank you, General,’ replied Jonny. ‘This ‘peach’ is very heavy.’
She put her shoulder against it’s furry skin, braced her legs and shoved along with the others. With her weight thrown behind it too, it rolled just a little more quickly up the slope.
CHAPTER 11
‘You…you do understand, it’s a wholly unpredictable process?’ said Dr Takao-Jones. That took some effort for him to say with a steady voice.
He was acutely aware that he was sharing this small cabin with one of the most powerful people in Human Space. He couldn't meet her unflinchin
g steely-eyed gaze, and he certainly didn't want her thinking he was looking at the smooth tanned skin of her legs, so, he was left staring at the hands in his lap.
'I can make no guarantee of creating a viable growth.'
The other person in the small cabin was just as intimidating; a smartly dressed and well-groomed man who’d introduced himself simply as ‘Deacon’.
He knew exactly 'what' Deacon was, though. On Liberty they called the likes of him ‘fingermen’, a clandestine ‘fixer’ of 'problems'. The type of freelancer used by the Administration to do their dirtiest work. The fact that he was here, along with Councillor Hayden meant that he was backed into a corner. If he politely declined the request, (and he was tempted, because he was almost certain they'd end up with a stillborn monstrosity), he'd be a security risk…and this Deacon would undoubtedly have to take him somewhere quiet on that planet below to ‘fix’ him.
‘You have given me DNA samples of the person in question, and the person’s parents. But you say the person’s DNA has an ‘encrypted’ sequence?’
‘That’s correct,’ replied Deacon. ‘As the Councillor said, we want you to do an accelerated growth cycle to see what that encrypted sequence will do to the…candidate.’
‘Yes, but you see…accelerating the process is where the problem lies. It will produce unpredictable results. Mutations. Even normal-speed growth cycles these days are prone to-’
‘Dr Takao-Jones,’ said Councillor Hayden. ‘We don't use that word any more do we?'
He stopped. His mouth closed with a clup. She was extending a small kindness with that, a gentle warning. She was steering him away from saying the unsayable. Among his fellow geneticists back at the Department of Genetical Analysis, the ‘M’ word was used cautiously. Never used in written reports and only muttered informally between trusted colleagues. Mutations weren’t called that any more, not for decades. There were a range of acceptable terms they could use in place of that word; ‘process-wastage’, ‘statistically-anticipated fail rates’, ‘unviable candidates’.
Councillor Hayden spared his discomfort by changing the subject. ‘The lab facilities aboard this battlecruiser are more than adequate for you, Doctor?’
He nodded. ‘Yes…yes, I have what I need here.’
She nodded. ‘Good.’ She uncrossed her legs and leant forward. ‘I do understand that this is a tricky business. You’re going to be growing something in a tube that has a packet of genes that are a complete mystery. But, it will be completely contained. If the growth candidate turns out to be…shall we say, hazardous, in any way, then there’s always the option to incinerate the whole thing, right?’
‘Yes, Councillor. But, forgive me for, uh…for asking…it would help the process if I may know some details about the growth candidate.’
‘Such as?’
‘For example, gender? Has the candidate been edited for any extreme-environment conditions? What approximate growth-age should the candidate be accelerated to?’
She looked to Deacon. He shrugged in response. ‘I think Dr Takeo-Jones should be made aware of those things, Councillor. I believe the precise mix of proteins, steroids and hormones in the growth solution will vary depending on those factors. He will need to know if he’s growing a boy or a girl, the skin colour, the body frame….simply to know if the candidate is growing correctly.’
‘I understand.’ She turned back to the geneticist. ‘It’s a girl. She has a gene-neutral frame, she was developed for the planet below us, Harpers Reach. To all intents and purposes a very normal looking female.’
‘And the target age, councillor?’
‘Well…’ she looked at Deacon, ‘let’s start by saying late teens, early twenties?’
Dr Takao-Jones nodded.
‘How quickly can you develop the candidate to that age?’ asked Deacon.
‘That is a sliding variable, uh…sir. The faster it is done, the greater the chance of…failure.’
‘Then what’s a reasonably reliable amount of time?’
Dr Takao-Jones pulled a pained expression at having to give an answer to that question. They were asking him to throw a wet finger in the air and test the wind direction. He could put the DNA into a female foetus, crank up the steroids, poke the stem-cells into action with targeted stimulants and have an adult body inside, say, a week. But, even with a perfectly stable, completely readable genome that might, no, almost certainly would produce a horrifically deformed aberration of a human being.
‘Three or four months,’ he replied.
Councillor Hayden sat back in the cabin and crossed her arms. ‘That’s far too slow.’ She looked at Deacon. ‘We need to know what she’s capable of…now.’
Deacon shrugged. ‘It could be nothing. You know, she might just be perfectly normal.’
‘Why would Mason go to all that trouble to produce a normal human being? No, he’s hiding something inside her. We need to know what we’re dealing with and what those terrorists intend to do with her.’
Dr Takeo-Jones noticed Deacon cock a brow and shot a glance his way. She, quickly pressed her lips firmly together. He suspected she’d blurted out more than she’d intended to.
Which, of course, now, made it even more dangerous for him to politely decline their request.
She turned back to him. ‘Dr Takao-Jones…what about a month?’
A month? What was he meant to say? That’s fine? Super, no problem? He estimated the fail rate was going to be high. Even if he didn’t produce some disfigured monster, the growth candidate might simply just die in the tube.
‘May I recommend something, Councillor?’
‘Of course, Deacon.’
‘We’re asking a lot. Asking this technician to rush the process may end up giving us a corpse in a vat and whole lot of useless information. But, we can ‘multi-thread’ this process. That way we’ll have more information to work on in the same time period.’
Dr Takeo-Jones nodded, he understood what Deacon was saying. ‘Exactly. That is what I was about to suggest, Councillor.’
‘What?’ She looked from one man to the other.
‘We grow a number of candidates at the same time.’
Her eyes rounded at the prospect.
‘It’s no more a hazard than having one of her,’ added Deacon. ‘They’d all be contained and all very flushable should something unexpected develop.’
'Yes, that's true…multiple redundancy.' She nodded slowly. ‘And…that would give us more data to work from.’
‘Precisely.’
She carried on nodding, her arms still folded, the toe of one foot tapping the plast-mat floor of Dr Takao-Jones small cabin. ‘The irony here is that we’re making more copies of the Trojan horse Mason has created.’
‘But, as I said, all of them perfectly contained and destroyable.’
‘What if…’ she pressed her lips together thoughtfully. ‘What if Mason created something with…psionic abilities?’
‘A reader? You mean like a boojam?’
‘Yes. Or worse.’
Deacon shrugged. ‘Boojam’s can read minds. They can’t control minds. They can’t move objects. They can’t-’
‘I’d rather you didn’t patronise me.’ She looked at him coolly. ‘I’ve been around long enough not to be treated like some dumb blonde intern.’
‘My apologies, Councillor.’
‘I just want to be sure that if we create something potentially dangerous…that we can damn well un-create it.’ She turned back to Dr Takao-Jones. ‘How many candidates could you grow at the same time?’
He’d visited the lab aboard this ship earlier today. The equipment had been hastily appropriated from the DGA and some of it was still crated-up and yet to be assembled. He’d logged about half a dozen growth tubes.
‘Perhaps six.’
‘Six?’ She pursed her lips thoughtfully. ‘Well then, let’s make six Ellie Quins.’
CHAPTER 12
Ellie shot a glance to her left; her creatures we
re being massacred. It looked like half of their number had already been pincered in two. However, she could see one of the scorpions had collapsed, either from the exhaustion of carrying around its heavily armoured body, or, her little soldiers had managed to inflict some kind of damage on it.
There was consolation in that…at least it was possible to take them down.
To her right, Max and his band of soldier-bears were still luring the other five scorpions after them. The giant lumbering beasts now seemed to be struggling from the exertion of the pursuit, their spindly legs every now and then faltering and stumbling on the uneven ground.
She had a vague hope forming that maybe she’d let the chase continue until those things all started dropping from exhaustion, then she’d give Max the sign to turn on them and finish them off.
She looked down at Jonny. ‘Can you see how much further to the castle?’
Jonny stepped out of the pack of grunting and straining midgets and peaked around the side of the giant peach. ‘We are approximately half way up the hill, General!’
And the hill was going to get steeper near the top….and their progress, much slower.
She wished she had more bears down here pushing this stupid thing.
‘Well, well well! Seems like General Jez’s killer giant scorpions are kicking ass over there on the right? Have you seen how bloody messy it’s getting down there, buddy? What’s your take on the game so far, Shelbs?’
‘Hmm…yes, I do believe they are struggling. But then I do believe that’s Ellie’s strategy. She has deliberately sacrificed her troops on the flanks to distract Jez’s heavy armour. Meanwhile, focusing her un-weaponised units on retrieving the tactical object. Which, I do believe, is the point of the game.’
Ellie looked up at their grinning faces projected across the sky, gurning at each other like presenters at a HardBall match. She cursed both of them for making light of the slaughter going on down here.
Game? A game?! You sick fregging creeps!
‘Ellie clearly has come into the game with a strategy, Graham. Unlike her opponent who seems to have just unleashed-’