by John Shirley
SUBJECT: STAHL, CURTIS. 003 HRS
“Vitals normal,” came Carmack’s voice, over the image. “Elevated heart rate, attributable to subject anxiety…”
Reaper shook his head. How did researchers working on human beings stay so detached? How could they talk about a man like they were talking about a lab rat? Maybe that was really what had gone wrong here—treating people as something less than human made it easier to turn them into something…less than human. But it seemed to Reaper that the inhumanity started within the scientist.
On the screen, Carmack’s hand came into the video shot, carrying a syringe. He drew something from a bottle marked C-24, coolly injected it into the clearly terrified man’s IV tube.
“C-24 successfully grafted to subject’s marker cells at 00:09…”
“What’s C-24?” Sarge asked.
Sam tilted her head, as if she wondered herself. She looked at the bottle on the video, then turned to the equipment on the bench next to the VDU. On a solute spinner was an identical bottle—marked C-24.
She picked it up, looking at it with something resembling awe. “Carmack must have managed to synthesize a stable solution of the synthetic chromosome…”
When she thought the others weren’t looking, she slipped the bottle into her pocket. But Reaper saw her do it.
On the grainy video, the experimental subject, Stahl, was lifted on a winch, gurney and all, across the room…and then lowered into the pit. Down into the very holding pit Destroyer had died in.
Reaper was just guessing when he murmured: “He reconstructed chromosome mutation in human subjects…”
“Subject moved to protected observation area,” Carmack was saying, on the video, “at 00:17…”
“What the hell are we looking at?” Sarge demanded.
“Genesis, chapter one,” Reaper muttered. And he thought: Mary Shelley would’ve liked this—Carmack playing God.
Various angles on that grainy video—finally showing Stahl looking from side to side, in a kind of sublime panic, trying to think of some way out of this. He was trapped on a gurney, in unbreakable restraints, in a pit twenty feet deep, in a locked-down research facility, surrounded by coldhearted men who thought no more of him than of a gerbil, men who would not hear him—who would mentally edit it out—if he begged them to let him go. They’d already injected him with some nightmarish agent; he could feel it taking hold inside him.
Still, driven by instinct, Stahl looked this way and that, straining against the restraints, hoping for a way out.
“Who was he?” Reaper asked.
Sam went back to the console, typed in a search: experimental subject Stahl background. Text flickered by. The scrolling stopped on the experiment’s biographical records.
Stahl, Curtis
She pursed her lips, scanned the data, encapsulated it for them. “Curtis Stahl. He was condemned to be executed. He’s a paranoid schizophrenic with convictions for multiple murders and pedophilia.”
A hard guy to feel sorry for, Reaper reflected. But watching him lowered into that pit, seeing the terror in his eyes, his mouth quivering like a two-year-old’s, like a child lost in a big city crowd at night, you felt sorry for him anyway.
Sam pointed at the computer screen—as the video jumped to 004 hrs.
The arm and torso began to swell—was that swelling…or growing? Their horror grew, too, as they watched. “Oh my God…” Sam muttered.
The video record jumped ahead, from stage to stage, like an animation without enough frames per second, showing Stahl’s transformation. At 005 hrs Stahl was writhing—and metamorphosing. His skin was growing lumpy, red, his flesh thickening, then forming the exoskeleton, a scaly hardness. His eyes were sinking away, his nose seeming to melt, lips peeling back, melding with the growing skull, teeth baring, extending; his fingers were merging one into the next, bone projecting out—he screamed in agony at this, as bone burst from the flesh to become claws…like the talons that had scythed Mac’s head from his shoulders. Maybe the very same ones. And Stahl’s noseless face, once the transformation was done, seemed strangely familiar to Reaper. Then it hit him…
It was the same monstrous face he’d seen staring at him from the shadows, when he was a kid, that day in Dig Twenty-three.
Ghost? Maybe. Precognition? Could well have been. It didn’t matter.
Sam was muttering something about laws of conservation of matter, probable quantum induction…And genetic demons…A “Hell Knight,” according to a subtitle on the video.
But all Reaper could think about was how it must’ve felt, at that moment, to be Curtis Stahl. Getting bigger and bigger—a true Hell Knight, all right. He reached out and switched off the video. They could see where it was going.
Reaper felt the fury rising in him. What they’d seen on the computer—that was Olduvai. The soul of Olduvai was in that steel-walled holding pit. Just as he’d sensed it as a boy.
He looked hard at his sister. Did she finally understand? “They sent you in here”—he gestured at the lab around them—“to save this? They wanted to protect this?”
“It doesn’t make any sense…”
“You trusted them, and they used you. They lied to you, Doctor.”
Sam’s eyes were narrowing as she worked out a scientific problem in her mind. “If he perfected xenogenesis, he would have also had to—”
“Jesus Christ!” Reaper interrupted. “Don’t you see what this place is? It’s hell. It always was. This shit ends here. Gimme those drives.”
He snatched them up.
“What are you doing?” Sarge asked, his voice and eyes modulated to a deadly chill.
He closed his fist over the disks. “We have to destroy them.”
He shook his head. “That’s UAC property.”
“The fuck are you talking about, Sarge?” Reaper felt mad enough to take Sarge on right this second if he had to. Where had Sarge’s leadership got them so far? Mac. Portman. Destroyer. Goat. All dead. “We got the chance to end this…”
“We take the data back.”
Reaper waved the disks at him. “You want this to survive? Jesus Christ, did you even see what I just saw?”
Sarge locked eyes with Reaper. You could feel it like a physical shock when Sarge fixed you with both beams. “I didn’t see shit. I ain’t paid to see shit. I got my orders. And so do you.”
He walked over to Reaper and stood eyeball to eyeball with him. Reaper could feel the heat of Sarge’s body, up that close.
He felt Sarge take the disks from his hand. Without breaking eye contact, Sarge said, “Is this everything?” Talking to Sam—but looking at Reaper.
“I…”
“I said is this everything?” Sarge bellowed, still facing off with Reaper.
All the time Reaper wondering how to take Sarge out if he had to. And if Duke would back him up. Probably not. Duke was all Marines all the time…and that meant complete loyalty to his NCO.
“I have one more to download.”
“Then do it,” Sarge said flatly.
Reaper decided to wait. If he decided to challenge Sarge head-on, there’d be a better time than this.
He nodded, just slightly, and turned away.
Sam went to the computer.
The Kid had never been this scared.
Not that anything was jumping at him right now, as he walked through the mudroom to the surface air lock. Nothing moved here. There was nothing at all but pottery, and crusty old artifacts, and tools. And somewhere in the room were a couple of dead guys—he was supposed to shoot their bodies in the head, when he found them.
He hoped to God they were still dead.
No, nothing moved, nothing threatened him, not out front. But you could feel them watching you. He knew those things were here somewhere, just out of his line of sight.
And every time one of the squadron had gone off alone—Mac, Portman, Destroyer—they’d ended up KIA.
Guess what, the Kid thought. You’re on your own r
ight now just like Destroyer. You more likely to survive than those vets? I don’t think so…
This was seriously fucked up. What was Sarge doing, sending him out alone? Trying to get rid of him? Let the predators get the weak one out of the way?
You’re getting paranoid. Just remember who the enemy is…
But he was still buzzing on the shit that Portman had given him—though dope fatigue was starting to set in, that feeling of dirt in the gears of your nervous system—and the stuff, instead of helping him, had just made his nerves vibrate till he was teetering on the top of the greased slide of paranoia.
So it was hard to be sure who the enemy was—maybe it was everyone here.
Cut it out. Think back to when you decided to join the Privines…Think about the corps spirit you saw that day…
He’d been stationed on a ship anchored just off a bombed-out raggedy-ass town on the edges of a sun-washed sea, two thousand miles from his hometown. That day he was on the docks, supervising a bunch of seamen carrying supplies from the boats to the trucks pulled up to where the pier met the breakwater of jagged rocks—the engineers had tumbled broken boulders along the interior shoreline of the harbor, an attempt to protect it against the rising seas of global warming. He’d been warned, before the last three supply runs, that there might be a raid of the local religious fanatics on the supplies. The rebels wanting to keep the provisions from getting to the base on the other side of what remained of the town. But it hadn’t happened yet, and there were rumors like that all the time. Still, the Privatized Marines had been assigned by the civilian supply company to protect the materiel. The Kid hadn’t taken the “Privines” squadron seriously. He was just thinking about getting this materiel mission over with, getting back to the ship, watching the comedy DVD that was up that night in the rec center: Hotties in Orbit. It was supposed to have some good shots of big-titted chicks in free fall. All that sweetly floating flesh…
He’d noticed the Privines lolling about on the crates in the shade—guys he would someday come to know as Duke, Reaper, Goat, and Destroyer—watching as he and his Navy boys muscled supplies up from the boats to the half-broken robot freight mover on the dock. Stupid robot couldn’t pick up anything itself anymore, you had to load it and tell it where to carry the shit.
Remembered thinking, What a bunch of lazy Privine pricks. They could help us and they just sit in the shade, weapons on their laps, chewing gum and spitting tobacco and grinning as we sweat this bullshit in the hot sun.
That’s when the attack came. Starting with an explosion.
No, that was wrong, he decided, as he revisited the memory. It really started with a noise, a shuh-shuh-shuh-shuh, and Reaper had popped up like a jack-in-the-box, the lolling Privine vanished, all fighting Marine now, on hearing that noise—shouting, “Get down, incoming!”
And that’d saved the Kid’s crew. They dived for cover, and the surface-to-surface missile struck the robot freight mover, the machine turning to screaming flak and hissing shrapnel, flames licking up, the massive device half-falling through the hole the explosion busted through the dock.
The Kid’s mouth had gone all cottony, and he had trouble being loud enough yelling at his men to move back to the boat, get under the dock, as the insurgents’ stolen truck came roaring toward them from the shore, a dark face at the wheel, a man with shades and white teeth bared, barreling it at them. That was the real attack, the missile was just a preliminary to shake them up, disorient them, kill a few. That’s the way the rebels liked to hit you.
The truck could be a suicide machine itself, totally wired—but Destroyer and Reaper were running toward it, when anybody in their right mind would be running away; their weapons blazed, tearing the truck’s engine apart, and the radiator was the only thing on it that exploded. Then it veered, out of control, smashed into a piling and overturned with a thump that shook the whole dock. The rebels got out of the back anyway, yelling their war-cry gabble, something about calling their God to give them strength to smite evil, charging with those cheap rebuilt assault rifles spitting rounds, bullets chewing up the pier, sending splinters and ricochets off metal bolts whipping past Reaper and Destroyer.
Duke and Goat had moved off to the other side of the dock and were doing what they could to flank the rebels in the narrow space, firing their weapons.
The Kid had finally managed to get the safety turned off on his own assault rifle, clicked a round into the chamber, fired at the rebels—running after the Privines as he fired past them at the enemy.
It’d been just thirty, maybe forty-five seconds of firefight, but it’d seemed a lot longer. The Kid watched in wonder as Duke ran at two rebels, screaming his own war cry. One of them was firing back—Duke staggering, but not falling, running through his clip, blowing the head off one of the guerillas and slamming into the other, knocking him flat, smashing down with his boot, crushing the guy’s throat. Another one was coming at him from the side and the Kid was trying to get a bead on that rebel—but there was Goat, jumping over a crate, coming down firing, hitting the guy between the eyes.
The Kid was awestruck by the squadron’s tautness in action, their unity, their sheer nerve: Duke turning to cover Goat’s six, shooting a rebel who was coming at him from behind; Destroyer getting Reaper’s back, Reaper turning to cover Destroyer, giving a hand signal the Kid didn’t know and suddenly they were running in a phalanx, all four of them, into the remaining six rebels, who were trying to aim but were too panicked to hit anything. Another second and the squadron was among them, cutting them to pieces. The squadron fired astonishingly fast, moving from target to target with split-second exactitude, as fast as a rock drummer pounding unerringly through his drum set.
The Kid was firing, too, when he could get a shot, but he didn’t think he had hit any of the enemy, and by the time he got close enough to do it for sure, the rebels were already dead. Shot to pieces.
Reaper had taken a couple of rounds in the chest, but he was still standing—his Kevlar had stopped them. Goat had lost a chunk of his hip, and Duke had taken a round in his right shoulder…
But the bodies of dead guerillas were lying about like a crashed load of mannequins strewn over the dock. The Privines had made every round count—and most of the enemy had died from head shots. Instead of panicking, the squadron had worked like a well-oiled machine.
That’s what the Privines were about. Readiness. Readiness in unity.
Afterward, the Kid had walked up to them. Watched as they patched one another up. Cleared his throat.
“What?” Destroyer had asked.
“Just wanted to say…”
“You’re welcome. Now fuck off.” He looked down at Duke’s wound.
Reaper glanced up at the Kid. “You call a med-chopper?” Reaper had asked.
“On their way.”
Destroyer had gone back to bandaging Duke, Reaper to taking care of Goat. Then Destroyer looked up, feeling the Kid watching.
“What?”
“You guys…did a great job.”
“So? We’re supposed to.”
“I guess—we were sort of bad-mouthing you…”
“You wanted to say sorry?” Duke had said. “We don’t need it. We only take sorry from people we respect.”
“Actually,” Destroyer pointed out, as he squeezed some pain-stopper into Duke, “I turned around, the Kid was coming up with us, firing at the enemy. The only one of that bunch that did. Shows…I don’t know. Shows something I guess.”
The Kid fairly glowed inside at that.
“So, Kid—” Duke said. “You want a medal? Go get us something to drink, if you want to be useful.”
“Sure,” the Kid said. “I mean—something to drink. Some water. I’ll get it…the water I mean.” The Kid turned away. Then turned back. “Uh…how do I…?”
Destroyer looked balefully at him. “How do you get water? You get a canteen and you shake it. If it goes gurgle, gurgle, there’s water in it. Then you bring it here to m
e first—not to these other jar-heads.”
“Hey fuck you, Destroyer,” Duke said, “who you calling a jarhead, jarhead? Kid, don’t listen to him. Bring me the water first.”
“But—how do I…”
“What?”
He finally just blurted it: “I want in.” He licked his lips. “Be…you know…one of you.”
Duke snorted. Destroyer shook his head. “Hard to jump from your service to ours. Special deals got to be made. Besides—the training alone’d kill you. Now, Big Balls, how about that water?”
“I’ll get you water. But…I want in.”
“What, we don’t get water unless we say you can join?”
“No, I’m not saying that…”
“Then fuck off.”
“Huh? Look—I want in.”
“Heard you before.”
Confused, the Kid opted for simplicity and ran for the canteen, ran puffing back, handed it over. But as they passed the water around, he said, insistently, “I want in. Or…uh…I don’t get you in to see Hotties in Orbit tonight.”
“Hotties in Orbit?” Duke had said, sitting up, suddenly interested. “You can get us in to that?”
“Come on, Duke…” Reaper muttered.
“Hey, I wanta see that thing. Yeah…and the kid was good. Boy howdy he was good. You see how good he was, backing us up like that, Reaper? I heard they got that blond with the tattoos on her ladyplaces in that thing, man…that genius actress with the humongous…”
“Oh Christ,” Reaper said, laughing, “are you going to saddle us with a…”
He had almost changed his mind about joining, though, when he’d seen Goat using that big knife to take “trophies” from the dead rebels.
The Kid laughed softly to himself now, thinking about it.
He had gotten them in to see the weightless hotties, but that wasn’t really why they’d helped him get in their squadron. They’d done it partly because he’d done his best to back them up in the firefight, firing at the enemy, charging the rebels when the other sailors had gone to ground…
And partly because Destroyer had said he’d take the responsibility. Destroyer had stepped up and taken the Kid under his wing. A minor politician, the Kid’s own father had been absentee most of the time—one day a pushy reporter had burst into his office to find him boffing an intern, the two of them standing up at his desk, her underwear down around her ankles. It made a nice photo in the tabloids. Mom divorced Pops faster than an MP chucks a shit-faced soldier in the tank, and that’s fast, and after that the Kid saw his father once a year—the old man was just a distracted, irritable presence when he was around, nothing more. No big brothers; teachers all hated the Kid’s smart mouth, same with the officers on the ship. He’d barely made bosun. Giving the authority types crap and all the time looking for someone to tell him what the hell to do with his life. Then along comes Destroyer…