“Talk to me.”
“North Sentinel Island.”
“Never heard of it.”
“Not a lot of people have. It belongs to India, but it’s off the coast of Myanmar. It’s actually mostly administered by the natives, except for one tiny resort they tolerate in exchange for certain things they can’t get themselves. Metal knives and such. It only opened a couple of months ago… but the agreement seems to be holding so far.”
“Wait. Tolerate? Holding so far? I get the sense that these natives aren’t exactly welcoming of outsiders.”
“Full marks. They’ve been totally isolated from the world and never allowed any outside contact until this resort. They even killed a bunch of missionaries a few years ago. You might have read about it.”
“If I did, I don’t remember.”
“Anyway, it’s perfect. No one will ever, in a million years, look for a pair of rogue hackers there. Hell, it doesn’t even have an internet connection.”
“Sounds like heaven.”
“Does a bullet in the head sound better?” the Buddha asked.
“No.”
“Then let me talk to the Captain.”
Chapter 2
The video showed dinosaurs attacking a group of Eastern-European-looking farm buildings, knocking the inhabitants—presumably the farmers by the looks of them—around and feeding on their bodies. The shots were amateurish, jerky, cellphone footage.
A sudden jump cut showed another set of creatures advancing on a man with a gun who’d taken cover behind a low rocky wall. They flushed him out and a second shooter, unseen in the image, shot him. His head exploded in a spray of red mist.
Then came the important part. The three dinosaurs sniffed at the body, grabbed a couple of quick bites and then kept moving in formation towards… the video didn’t show it, but Jermaine Jakes assumed it was another target. He stopped the projection with an angry stab at his remote.
“The Russians,” he growled into the darkened boardroom, “are so far ahead of us it isn’t even funny. Not only do they have large carnivores that can function well on land, but they’ve also somehow got the creatures’ mental functions developed to the point where they can coordinate with human troops and,” he pounded on the extremely solid and expensive wooden table for emphasis, “ignore edible flesh lying right in front of them. How long until you can get me something like that?”
He slid his finger across the screen of his phone, which had the effect of raising the level of illumination in the room. Then he glared at his C-suite, the top people in the company he’d create. “This tech is marketable, effective. How much longer until we have something like this?”
Sabrina Williams, the woman in charge of ZooDef’s labs cringed in her seat. “Two years,” she replied.
“Two fucking years? The market will be gone by then. Fucking gone. Do you understand what that would mean? We’re all out of jobs and with zero possibility of ever getting a new one. We’d be radioactive in the industry, and any of our names on a prospectus would send the venture capitalists running for the hills. Why are we so far behind?”
Williams straightened. She wasn’t really a whiner; the emergency meeting—and its contents—had caught her by surprise and now that she’d had a second to gather her thoughts, she responded: “We weren’t behind. Not until just this instant. We’re moving as fast as possible. And we’ve been faster than anyone else so far.”
“Evidently, we weren’t faster. We were slower and didn’t even know it.”
“My team has kept up on the bleeding edge of published science in the gene edition and custom animal field. We’re fifteen years ahead of the bozos trying to de-extinct the heath hen. We worked back from a chicken genome to get to what we have now, beating every crazy timeline you threw at us.”
“Someone has obviously been working on the quiet.”
“That,” she responded coldly, “is not my responsibility.”
The words earned her a glare from Dieter Ratzenberger, who she’d just thrown under the bus.
Jermaine wasn’t feeling generous. He hadn’t reached his current position by being generous to those who failed.
“Dieter, care to illuminate us?”
“I’d need to analyze the footage. Where did this come from? Is it related to that tabloid story a couple of days ago?”
“You’d better believe it. But this didn’t come from some two-bit journo from a fashion magazine. This came to me through the bank.”
Everyone knew what that meant. Jermaine was ZooDef’s CEO because of his position at LichtenBank, the company footing the bills. The first black man on the board of the three-hundred-year-old finance powerhouse… and therefore the one who got all the messages that came through Africa.
Of course, this one had come directly from Russia, but neither his C-suite at ZooDef or any of the Bank directors would be informed of that… he wanted them to think his niche was very limited. His ambitions demanded it; there were advantages to catching everyone by surprise.
But if ZooDef failed, that was all moot.
“Then it’s real?”
“Utterly so. You need to step it up.” Dieter was the best at what he did, at least in the private sector. Unfortunately, what he did was to gather information on stuff buried deep in the most secret levels of government programs, which meant that the very best of all were not available on the open market. Defense and Intelligence were the only two areas where the best of the best actually did work for certain governments. The only place where he couldn’t buy the talent he needed. It was frustrating, but a good manager had to work with what he could get.
“Unavoidable,” Dieter snapped back. “Not even the Russians know what most of their secret projects are up to. Russia’s a mess.”
“A mess that directly affects the future of this company. I need to know who, what, where, and how, and I need it yesterday.”
Dieter stood. “I’ll get right on it.”
“Wait. I suspect you may get another assignment before we’re done here.”
Dieter raised an eyebrow but sat.
“Sabrina,” he said, turning back to his head of research. “I need to catch up to these bastards, and I need to pass them. We need to be ahead in a short amount of time. If I know how Russian programs work in this new capitalist era, they’ll keep the best of their research to themselves, but they’ll sell the second-tier stuff to the highest bidder. Pretty soon, every two-bit African warlord and wannabe terrorist is going to have their own pet toothosaurus and we’ll be out of the market.” He paused and looked around the room. “And that would be the end of the company, so I’m giving you carte blanche. What do you need to catch up in the next three months?”
“I…” she swallowed and gathered her thoughts. “I can have the Compsognathus ready to sell in two months, if you let me test them. Our specimens are locked in the sub-basement of the Tucson Campus. I can’t develop them if I can’t see what they’re doing. I need to see them working under real conditions.”
“Your Compsognathus are tiny,” Jermaine replied. “I don’t want something the average citizen can kick into the next county. I want something the size of your Giant Mosasaurus, but I want it to work on land.”
“Well, you’re not getting that in three months,” Sabrina replied. “What we may be able to get is a slightly larger version of the Compsognathus. The reason we went with those is that they showed a tendency to hunt in packs. I can have a batch of bigger ones ready in a week. Twenty of those working together could truly ruin someone’s day, especially if they need to get through human-sized openings. It’s not perfect, but it could be marketable. But to test it out, I need to see them in action. Outdoors, hunting real prey. Smart prey.”
“You want us to do field testing. Kill humans?”
“Do it somewhere out of the way, but yeah, that’s the only chance we have to study their dynamics. And while we’re at it, I want to test the Mosasaurs, too. They’re not worth anything stuck in tho
se tanks. I’m pretty sure anyone who wants to wreak havoc at sea will want one.”
“We’ve had this discussion before. Land attack is where the market is at.”
“Let me test. We can jump the market, maybe. What do we have to lose at this point?”
Jermaine took a deep breath. He wanted to slap her down, but she was right. They were at the point where his preferences no longer mattered. Any chance to get a marketable product out there before the market disappeared needed to be explored.
“All right. Dieter, find us a good place. Land and sea. I want ten candidates on my desk in an hour. I’ll choose the right one.”
He left the meeting, letting his senior-most people find their own way back.
***
Sabrina gazed into the tank. It was dark down here, fourteen floors below ground level, and the tank was only illuminated by weak floodlights from above, to simulate the inky depths of the ocean.
She couldn’t really see what was inside, but she could sense the movement, the play of shadows inside the green water.
No one who didn’t know what the tank held would have believed there was anything in there… unless they thought, looking at those same shadows that it might be a submarine, or something equally large.
Sabrina knew better. She’d built a whale-sized predator that, if released into the ocean, would rule the seas by the simple expedient of might making right. A blue whale with proportional teeth. Something that would eat sharks for snacks.
Though not actually dinosaurs but reptiles, Mosasaurs were as varied as any species of dinosaur, with forty different subspecies recorded in the fossil record. But these were special Mosasaurs.
They were really, really big ones.
Bigger than the biggest on record, and as big as the genes permitted her to go. If she tried to expand these monsters any further, she was going to need to bend too many parameters away from the Mosasaur base code and twist it into something even more exotic.
She’d planned that for Phase II.
Unfortunately, her well-paced plan, built to be challenging while delivering wonderful results, had just been thrown out the window by some cowboys in Yekaterinburg. Now they were in full emergency mode, trying to get to market without worrying about product development.
But… silver linings.
“Hey there, babies.” She often spoke to the beasts in the darkness. “You’re going to be let out. You know that? I don’t know where yet, but you’ll likely have to wear your collars.” They’d been experimenting with using shock collars to keep the monsters in the right area of their tanks, as a rudimentary guidance system. “But that’s okay, isn’t it? It will be worth it. Real sea to swim in, real fishies to eat. You’ll like that, won’t you?”
She believed the creatures could hear the vibrations from her voice even down there in the huge tank. The sides of their heads had enormous membranes which she suspected were ears, but much more sensitive than anything in the sea today, attuned to catch vibrations from hundreds of miles away.
Of course, she hadn’t been allowed to research it more fully. Jermaine wanted answers for land warfare problems, not long-distance underwater communications questions.
One of the shapes brushed against the thick plexiglass, a shadow darker than the water around it. She imagined being in the water with something that size, and her mind recoiled from the image. Just being safely behind the specially designed partition, rated for three times the force one of these creatures could theoretically exert against it, was enough to make her feel like a tiny prey animal in a world that belonged to this monster.
But the feeling passed. She wasn’t prey. She was mother.
She watched with love and pride until a persistent vibration in her jacket made her fumble for her phone. She scowled when she saw it was a message from Dieter and, after reading, growled. “Where the hell is North Sentinel Island? Sounds like something cold as hell in the Antarctic Circle.”
She googled quickly and smiled. Not bad. Not bad at all. Dieter was still a jackass who’d dropped the ball in the worst possible way, but at least he had decent taste in tropical paradises.
Sabrina turned back to the tank and purred. “Fancy someplace warm, my babies?”
***
“Stop!” Tim Ruggers yelled at the idiot driving the truck.
Well, driving might be a bit of an overstatement, as the term appeared to imply that he might actually have sufficient control of his vehicle to avoid an obstacle on occasion.
“What?” the guy yelled back.
“You’re about to destroy a wall. Have you done this before?”
“Fuck off,” the driver replied. “You want to try? What kind of asshole builds a loading dock in a maze?”
“We’re nearly there,” Tim replied. The man might not be the next Andretti, but he did have a point. The tortuous nature of the underground logistics area was legendary even among the good drivers. He pointed to a closed loading door. “That’s the dock you want. Number seventeen.”
“Finally,” the trucker said.
As soon as the trailer was stationary, Tim jumped onto the dock and hit the code on the door, which lifted slowly. When it was waist-high, he slipped through the opening.
The containment units were right where he expected them. Unlike the truckers, who had been hired from a supplier, his own logistics team was 100% professional: they got things into place on time.
This load was going to San Diego, where it would board a ship to somewhere in the middle of the Indian Ocean off the coast of the Nicobar Islands, and to await further instructions once they arrived. It was a strange assignment, but he was used to that. He’d hardly blinked when Jermaine had ordered him to hire a ship with the capacity to unload her own containers, including oversized and overweight ones… and given him a blank check with which to do it, then told that if it wasn’t available in two days, he would need to start printing resumes.
Only luck had kept him employed. The owners of the Stern Liberia had agreed to screw over other paying customers and delay their shipments for a couple of months in exchange for a metric crapton of cash.
Tim had delivered the crapton. After all, it wasn’t his money.
The storage units he was loading now weren’t oversized. In fact, they were the size of twenty-foot containers. Unlike standard cargo carriers, however, these were worth about a hundred thousand dollars each. Inside each one, contained in a honeycomb pattern that made efficient use of the space while leaving room for pipes and wiring, were two dozen cage-like enclosures for the little dinosaurs Sabrina’s team had been building. Each creature was kept in a state of semi-torpor by some kind of sleeping gas that circulated through the container. They were the size and weight of a large turkey.
His job was to get them aboard the ship, get them halfway across the world and then unload them at some unknown point without killing any of them or letting them drop into the sea. Just about the only baby-sitting duty he didn’t have to perform was to feed them, as Sabrina was sending people along to do that bit.
This was the last load. He signaled to the man driving the forklift to advance into the truck… slowly. Then he’d guide the driver out again.
He didn’t actually have to guide the truckers himself. He could have delegated that menial task to any one of the several lower-ranked people present, but he wanted to think for a while before he got back to his bigger headache.
Moving the dinosaur would be a logistical challenge, but it was nothing compared to those shark-lizard things with huge teeth in the tanks. Those were the size of whales and weren’t built to be moved around.
Except that Jermaine wanted them on the ship with the lizards.
And if Tim told him no, then Jermaine would just fire him and find someone willing to do the job.
So he was thinking about it in the loading bay, waiting for the eighth construction crane to get into position before they started the sling lift. While each creature could be lifted relatively easily, you ne
eded to make certain it didn’t crush itself under its own weight on the way up, and that meant multiple points of suspension. And getting all that working and then landing the thing into the specially constructed transport tank… was the stuff that logistics managers’ nightmares were made of.
And then the extra wide load had to cross the two hundred miles between Tucson and San Diego.
Yeah, guiding a trucker with no depth perception was a five-star holiday compared to that.
***
The salt sea breeze caressed his skin and Dieter snarled at it. This wasn’t his habitat. He didn’t want to be there. He hated the outdoors in general and the ocean in particular.
But this time, he had little choice in the matter. Jermaine was pissed beyond even the usual hard-edged corporate impatience he usually displayed, and when the boss was in that kind of mood, heads rolled.
To keep that particular fate at bay, he’d joined the expedition taking the specimens to North Sentinel Island, even though he had other work to do—he needed to continue to unravel the knot that hid the Russian agency in charge of developing the creatures from the videos—and despite the fact that the putative leader of the mission was that unbearable obsessive Sabrina Williams.
That Sabrina didn’t like him was not a worry. Sabrina didn’t like anybody and most people didn’t like Dieter. But the fact that she was utterly focused on her animals could be a problem. There were important questions that would need to be decided on the way, and not all of them would be solved by increasing the glucose drip on cage seventy-four.
At least the logistics side of things would work out. Ruggers was good at what he did, even if he was terrible at hiding just how amusing he found the power dynamic between Dieter and Sabrina. He seemed to be in a constant state of snigger.
An alert on his phone brought Dieter back from his reverie. Someone had dug something up and sent a series of data files.
He read the summary and groaned. It was even worse than he’d expected. The Russians had been working with a North Korean geneticist who’d defected for the money.
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