Spinneretta couldn’t shake the chill that clung to her neck and spine. “Wait, you’re telling me that . . . ” Half human and half spider. “This Original, or whatever, is . . . ” She choked, and her mind filled in the blank for her. The Yellow King.
A small, proud smile came to Harold’s lips. “It is the source of everything we’ve done here. And its miraculous properties led to such perfect results as you, and such abominations as those robed things.”
Still shuddering from the revelation, she couldn’t stop herself from breathing the unspoken word. “Vant’therax.” She recalled the picture in the Repton Scriptures, which showed a completely different creature given the same name. Vant’therax, Children of Raxxinoth.
“Ahh, yes. That is the name they prefer.”
She had a thousand questions, each darker and more unthinkable than the last. But one now stood supreme among them, even more so than the questions relating to her own origins. “What are they? The Vant’therax, I mean.” Were they also born of this so-called Original?
Harold stumbled to his feet. “Here,” he said. “I’ll just show you. Faster than trying to explain it.” He walked over to the other internal door—the one that Cinnamon had shown no interest in—and groped at the lanyard around his neck with his bound hands. He pulled the ID card at the end free and slid it in front of a panel beside the door. The red light shining on the panel turned green, and the door slid open. He gestured for Spinneretta to follow as he entered, the chain rattling across the floor behind him. The room was little more than a cramped closet, filled on three sides by instrument-laden walls. Knobs, buttons, and switchboards of all colors and dimensions cluttered the panels, and the upper parts of the walls were covered in a number of dormant screens and monitors.
“Let’s see here,” Harold said, hovering over a keyboard embedded in one of the panels. He tapped one of the keys. A moment later, the main screen buzzed and began to glow a deep gray. A wall of white text peeled its way across the screen. Harold began to type. Spinneretta watched with a mix of curiosity and confusion as a few lines of text flew across the command prompt. “Where’s that damn video? Ahh, here.” After a few more keystrokes, all the remaining monitors on the walls buzzed to life. A single line of text was present across the center of the screens. The text read: Subject 0-198.
Spinneretta’s spider legs tingled nervously. “What is this?”
“The first successful use of the Original’s genetic material. God, when was it? Seventy-seven, seventy-eight, I believe? Long before your time. This is what the research of sixteen Stradivari of biology created, aided by technology that even now we do not fully understand. This is the fatal inevitability we created with our own hands.” He bashed the Enter key, and the video began to play.
When the initial static cleared, each screen showed the same figure from a different angle. The subject was a young boy, no older than eight, who stood with his arms and legs chained in place between two metallic pillars at his sides. Cruel-looking machinery surrounded him, including several robotic arms ending in long, threaded drill bits. When Spinneretta saw them, her heart began to pound. She swallowed hard.
“Project Zero, subject one-nine-eight,” a voice said from the tin-can speaker system. “Stand by for first trial.”
There came a high-pitched whirring sound, and two sets of the drill bits began to spin. Spinneretta shook her head in despair, unable to look away as two of the robotic arms unhinged from their sheer casing.
“First trial. Target locus: one-nine-eight right and left femur, depth seven-point-zero-zero. Initiate first trial.”
The whirring grew louder and more grating. The arms moved, and Spinneretta could do nothing more than stare, transfixed, and mouth the word no over and over. When the tips of the whirling drills pierced the boy’s thighs, the most terrible sound Spinneretta had ever heard greeted her ears. She threw her gaze down to the floor, clutching her stomach with her spider legs and covering her ears with her hands. She stumbled away from the largest monitor. She glimpsed a screen showing an enlarged X-ray image of the target loci. Though she only saw it for a moment, the image of white bone matter fracturing as the drill bits bored through was more than she could handle. She fell to the ground, screams ringing in her ears. She had to throw up, but nothing came out except a dry squelching that was deadened by the boy’s tortured cries.
A few moments later, the grinding sound of the drills ceased, and the boy was artificially muted on the feed. The same voice from before once again spoke. “First trial completed in zero-point-zero-ten.” There was a momentary pause. “Presence of N-Acetylglucosamine detected. Stand by.” A longer pause. “Formation of chitin verified. Repeat: early formation of chitin is verified.”
“This subject was the first to use the material of the Original,” Harold said. “He was a looking glass into its potential, and into the potential of the gene-manipulation technology recovered by the founders. He provided the body of research that led to the others. Under the guidance of Clearwater, we kept pushing his limits. In the end, his body became more than eighty percent sclerotin. Only his internal organs remained human; even his endoskeleton was taken over by the infection.”
“Subject’s heart rate approaching dangerous levels. Begin morphine injection.”
“Shortly thereafter, Clearwater ordered fifty-six specimens completed. Not only were they to maintain the reactive sclerotin generation, but they were to be born with their mental limiters disabled.” He licked his lips. “As you must know, our brains evolved to conserve our true potential. The nervous system is thus arbitrarily limited. Estimates vary, but normally we can use only twenty, thirty percent of our true strength without an adrenal response to absolve the limitation. Without that inhibition, our muscles would destroy themselves. But these creatures’ muscles could never have been destroyed. They would simply regrow the damaged tissue, fortified with sclerotin filaments. The Rosetta stone of the Original made that possible.
“In the end, we succeeded in creating what Clearwater saw as, what, a super soldier?” He gave a hollow chuckle. “They were invincible. Any damage their body sustained would be near-instantaneously healed over with chitin tougher than Kevlar. They were four, five, perhaps ten times stronger than an average human. Not only that, but without the brain’s natural preprogrammed limits, the creatures that survived the trials learned to use powers we can only dream of. I’m certain it sounds laughable coming from a biologist, but what we observed challenged the very tenets of science. They could communicate telepathically. They acquired an immunity to pain itself. They could teleport. God help me, what we created were in no way human. We created demons.”
Though she heard his rambling words, Spinneretta could not answer him. She was paralyzed by nausea.
“It was at such a point that we realized we had become accomplices to grotesque experiments that even Nazi scientists would have found repulsive. Those of us still under the illusion that we were working for science defended the projects with a manic fervor. But there was no doubt that we were creating things that should not have existed. Monsters. Some of us attempted to terminate our contracts with the firm. Clearwater’s men shot three of us dead that day. That’s when I knew. We weren’t employees. We weren’t even scientists. We were prisoners. Slaves.”
“Patient’s heart rate stabilizing. Prepare for second trial. Target locus: four-one-zero-six, right and left inferior orbital fissure.”
“Turn it off!” Spinneretta said. “Turn it off right now!”
The high-pitched whirring started once again before Harold halted the video and froze the screens. Getting back to her feet, Spinneretta gulped the stale air to calm the reaction in her gut. Sweat clung to her forehead and neck.
Harold fiddled with the keyboard, and all the monitors went black again. “All projects, in one way or another, stemmed from this research. That, and the things that the founders brought back from that other world. The world of the Original.” There was a glint of selfi
sh pride in the man’s eye—a pride he must have known was a sin. “Do you want to see the latest project?”
Spinneretta paused, uncertain. The morbidity of the trial of Subject 0-198 almost made her shake her head in refusal, but ultimately the curiosity about her own origins and the extent of NIDUS’s role in it—to say nothing of their ambitions—won out. Slowly, she nodded. The man gave a pained sigh, as though second-guessing himself. Without another word, he led her back out to the cramped metal connecting room, where Kara and the Leng kitten were waiting.
“What’s going on?” Kara asked, looking up from the juvenile monster that was still scratching at the metal door.
“This won’t take long, I hope,” Spinneretta said, uncertain to whom she was speaking.
“It will not,” Harold answered. He groped again for his identification lanyard and swiped the card in front of another sensor. Just like before, the light on the panel turned green.
The door to the lab hissed open, and Cinnamon scuttled inside as soon as the gap was wide enough for her body. Harold pushed inside, and Spinneretta followed with Kara right behind her. The deep and disturbing throbbing in her brain was now imminent. It felt as though she were directly above it, though by how far she could not say. Every beat of that enigma rang in her teeth and through her temples.
The laboratory behind the door was wide and deep, massive compared to the entry chamber. Like the computer room, the walls were packed with instruments and monitors. Dominating the floor space were four huge glass tubes evenly spaced through four imaginary quadrants. The tubes extended from metallic, instrument-laden bases all the way to the ceiling. Three of them were empty, but one on the far side was filled with a pale blue liquid, within which was suspended a dark shape. At first, Spinneretta was unable to make out any details of that shape—but then it moved. Torn by conflicting curiosity and revulsion, she studied the odd form. Slowly, more details revealed themselves to her. The thing in the tube—as far as she was able to tell—was a pale-skinned humanoid. Its overall figure and the presence of breasts proved its gender, though further details were obscured by the murky solution.
Taking a cautious step toward the far row of tanks, Spinneretta stared at the creature. The thing—the woman—shifted its position in response to the intruders. Cinnamon scampered right up to the tube and began to claw at the glass with its legs, clinking and clacking. As if in reply, the thing in the tube pressed its face up against the glass, and Spinneretta shrieked as she caught sight of its features for the first time.
The creature was hairless with a long sloping skull. It had not two but six eyes, four of which were set further back on the sides of its head. Its front-facing eyes were normal, while the two superfluous sets were a dark, reddish color and reflected the ambient light of the lab. There was no nose to be found on this creature’s face; there were instead two deep, horizontal slits that ran below its human eyes. The creature had no lower jaw at all. Its upper jaw, however, was filled with long fangs, between which a heavy plastic tube fed into its mouth.
“She’s only six years old,” Harold said in a distant tone, “but she aged to maturity in four. There’s still work to be done. Not being able to survive outside yet is the primary obstacle now.”
Spinneretta could not even force herself to blink, lest the impossible sight before her vanish. “What is this . . . ?”
“This is the Eleventh Project. We combined the Original’s genetic material with that of a more distant cousin, one that should still have given the . . . desired traits. In this case, we used the genes of the Qul’therax-ma, the so-called quolls.” He let his gaze drift to Cinnamon. “As I said, I don’t know where you found that one there, but it was probably drawn here by her. We had a small population of these spider-wolves for a while, but we had to put them down after they were drawn to the labs in Sector Three. We lost half of the Eleventh’s stock in the chaos that followed. As a result, we had to downsize to a more manageable facility with fewer environmental hazards. Luckily, I don’t think a pup her size will be able to do any damage.”
Drawn here by her? Was this where Cinnamon was so intent on leading them? But why? Spinneretta looked down at the Leng cat, who was scratching at the glass with four of her legs.
Kara followed Cinnamon to the tank. As she neared, the creature inside retreated from the glass, vanishing behind a foaming veil of bubbles. Wide-eyed, Kara leaned in close, gazing into the cloudy fluid. “Oh my God,” she breathed.
“We started with twelve,” Harold said. “Three died early on. Several more were killed by the quolls. One even punctured her air tube with her fangs and drowned herself. Now, Isabella here is the only survivor of the Eleventh Project.” He chuckled. “We’re alike, in a way. The last of our kind.”
Spinneretta’s mind began to drift, mesmerized by the flowing clouds within the tube. “This is . . . This is what NIDUS has been working toward?”
Harold nodded. “If NIDUS is another name for Stonefield Genetics, then the answer is yes. Now, if you don’t mind, I’ve told you everything I know.” He raised his chained hands toward her. “Would you please let me go now?”
Feeling numb and distracted, Spinneretta’s spider legs gravitated toward the coiled length of chain wrapped around his wrists. She took hold of it and then paused. “Before I do, I have one more thing I want to ask.”
Harold sighed and gave a half-hearted shrug. “What now? What?”
“What’s the point?” she asked. “What’s the point of all this research? What’s the point of making these hybrids?”
His gaze drifted to the floor. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I can’t tell you that.” For a moment, the only sound was the scraping of Cinnamon’s legs on the glass of the containment tank. Harold took a deep breath. “If I told you, I would never make it out of here alive.”
Spinneretta scoffed. “Don’t tell me you really think not telling me is going to get you off the hook. If the Vant’therax catch you escaping, I think you’re screwed either way.”
Harold looked at her with a pained expression which startled her. His reply reverberated to the very core of the Instinct. “I’m not afraid of them killing me.”
Chapter 39
Isabella
Goddammit, Spinneretta thought. She kicked at the limp chain, sending it clattering a few feet away from her. No sooner had she let Harold free than she wished she hadn’t. She should’ve pressed him for the purpose of their existence. Once again, she had let slip a chance to finally answer it. If you really want to know, he’d said as he turned to leave, ask the computer. She bit her lip, gaze drawn back to the abomination floating in the tank.
Kara, losing her patience, scooped Cinnamon into her spider legs and looked up at Spinneretta. “Well, did you learn anything from all this?”
Spinneretta shook her head. A numbness was setting in. “I don’t know.”
“Well, this was creepy as heck. We should get out of here.” Kara started toward the door to the lab, and one of her legs caught the thread of silk she’d left behind them. “Let’s go.”
Spinneretta didn’t budge from where she stood. Her eyes fixated on the blue-tinted face of the creature hiding behind the swirling clouds of bubbles. Her shoulders shook with a ghastly realization, and her spider legs began to trace the imagined contours of its body. Isabella, she thought. Hideous though the thing was, Spinneretta felt nothing but pity when she looked upon its hybrid form. Harold’s words came back to her, and this time she heard the tone of despair that had rung out from the tale of perverse development.
We started with twelve. I don’t know where you found that one there, but it was probably drawn here by her. One even punctured her air tube with her fangs and drowned herself.
She approached the tube and leaned in close. After a moment, Isabella’s face emerged again from the murky fluid and pressed itself up against the glass. Their eyes met. Spinneretta’s heart began to race, and her breathing accelerated. The air suddenly tasted stale, toxic. She lai
d her hand against the surface of the tube, and to her surprise the creature inside copied the gesture, placing her own hand against the convex glass.
“What are you doing?” Kara asked from the doorway.
Spinneretta ignored her. She took a step back from the tank, and her nervous shaking intensified. It had to have been her imagination; the look of pleading in the thing’s eyes couldn’t have really been there, right? And yet she’d seen the light of intelligence. No. She was projecting, that was all. But a helpless despair drilled into her. What solitude must this creature have felt? Spinneretta began to breathe heavily, fantastic thoughts and manias entering her mind and then vanishing. Discarding all question of motivation, she made a decision. With a sharp cry, she lunged forward and slammed her spider legs into the glass.
Kara jumped in shock. “What the heck are you doing!?”
Spinneretta’s mind was too far gone to answer. Her legs smashed against the curved glass again, and the creature recoiled in terror as the tank quivered from the force. Spinneretta clamped her jaw and sent her legs against the wall of glass once more. There was a cracking sound. A web of hairline fractures grew from the site of impact. Rearing back, Spinneretta summoned all the force that coursed through her, through the Instinct, and drove the tips of her legs into the blooming center of those cracks like a wall of spears. Her attack smashed a hole through the containment chamber.
A flood of teal brine inundated the lab. The torrent washed loose chunks of tissue and fragments of glass out and into the air. The icy flow drenched Spinneretta’s jeans and shirt. A thick and acrid chemical stench assaulted her nostrils and spiracles, growing stronger with each gallon of fluid that poured free from the prison. Within, the female creature flailed limply at the opening. Before the flow of the chemical bath ceased, Isabella threw her weight against the side of the tube. More glass shattered, breaking the remnants into sharp, uneven claws. Crashing again into the glass wall, Isabella struggled against the standing shards. At last, her weight pulled her free, and she fell into the inch-deep pool of chemicals and glass shards on the floor.
Helixweaver (The Warren Brood Book 2) Page 47