A shadow slipped past Max. He could barely discern Scathach’s lithe form closing upon the malakhim. Above the fiends, Cooper slipped a flask from his belt and silently unscrewed the cap. To Max’s surprise, Cooper let the cap fall to the floor. In unison, the malakhim looked down at the rattling cap. When they looked up, Cooper splashed the flask’s contents in their faces.
The demons staggered back from the door, clutching their masks as red smoke billowed through the eye and nose slits. Cooper dropped to the ground, ducking as the malakhim swung their swords in wild, lethal arcs. Before they could swing again, Scathach impaled one with her spear just as Cooper thrust his kris through another’s mask. The third, which had received the bulk of the flask’s contents, dropped its sword and dissolved into a pool of smoldering red liquid.
Max and the others joined them by the door as Scathach shifted out of shadow form. Her lip curled as she gazed at the malakhim she’d slain. Its robes were collapsing, its mask bubbling like melting wax. “Unclean things,” she muttered, wiping her spear upon its robes.
Rasmussen stared at the dead engineer and then at Cooper.
“What was in that flask?”
“Blood petals,” said Cooper, kicking the cooling door. “Open up. It’s safe.”
“Who are you?” asked a frightened voice from beyond the door.
Rasmussen tore his eyes away from the body of the dead engineer. “Juergen, it’s Jesper Rasmussen. Open the door.”
A pause. “Yes … yes, we see you on the monitor. Are you part of this revolt?”
Rasmussen looked to be somewhat at a loss. “No, I’m not involved with Kim’s people. Open the door, Juergen.”
Moments later, an electromagnetic lock released and a thin, stricken-looking man peered out the door at them. His shaking hand held a pistol.
“Put that away,” said Cooper, brushing past the man as the rest filed in after him. The room was square, perhaps twenty feet to a side with glowing blue instrument panels and surveillance screens lining three of the walls. Aside from Juergen, there were two other engineers—a thirtyish woman with protruding eyes and her long brown hair in a ponytail and a spare young man with brown skin and a shaved head. They were seated at two of the six available workstations and clutching tranquilizer guns. The woman’s was pointed at Rasmussen.
“If this is a trick, Jesper …”
Rasmussen almost collapsed into an empty chair. “No trick, Olga. I feel as frightened and helpless as you do.”
“What do you want?” asked Juergen.
Cooper rounded on him. “Where’s Prusias?”
“I … I don’t know,” said the man, quailing under the Agent’s gaze. Over his shoulder, a yellow light started flashing on a control panel.
Cooper’s eyes darted to it. “What does that mean?”
“Nothing,” said Olga. “A train has arrived in the terminal.”
Rasmussen cleared his throat. “Agent Cooper, if I don’t know the location of Prusias’s bunker, it’s unlikely these people will. Dr. Tressel is the person you want.”
Juergen looked mortified. “I think she was in the armory when Kim’s people revolted. Lots of casualties there.”
“Is there a way to know if she’s alive?” asked Cooper.
“Her file will have biometric data,” said the young male engineer.
“What’s your name?” asked Cooper.
“Dr. Rios, sir.”
“Pull up her file.”
Dr. Rios typed quickly and the face of a woman in her early fifties appeared onscreen, along with a slew of data, such as her rank, sector, serial number, and recent work assignments. Dr. Rios pointed glumly at a flashing indicator.
“Deceased.”
Cooper frowned. “Rios, who’s the most senior person that reports to Dr. Tressel?”
The man scrolled to another screen. “George Whitner, materials specialist. Dr. Whitner invented the—”
Cooper cut him off. “Is Dr. Whitner alive?”
More keystrokes brought up the image of an intense-looking man with glasses, short gray hair, and piercing blue eyes. “Yes, sir,” said Dr. Rios. “Dr. Whitner is alive, has a steady heart rate, and is located on Level Sixteen.”
“That’s the man I want,” said Cooper, squinting at the screen and then inputting some data into his handheld device.
“Where did you get that?” asked an incredulous Juergen.
“Been sneaking ’round here for months,” muttered Cooper, now studying a map. “Your toys are right handy.” Pocketing the device, he turned to his companions. “I’m going to find this Dr. Whitner and see if I can get the bunker’s location from him. You stay here and see what you can find using surveillance cameras. If you come across malakhim or areas where cameras are disabled, they could mean Prusias is close. I’m sure our new friends will be happy to help you.”
“How long should we give you?” asked Max.
Cooper looked sharply at him. “An hour. If I’m not back, send Scathach or Peter after me. Not you. Save your energy for Prusias when we find him.”
Hazel loudly cleared her throat.
“And not you,” said Cooper. “Scathach and Peter are Agents and neither is six months pregnant. Besides, there’s no guarantee Dr. Whitner will know where Prusias is. I’d rather you focus on using the resources in here. You might locate him before I do. Lock the door—it looks like malakhim are seeking out control rooms.”
Giving his unsmiling spouse a peck on the cheek, Cooper slipped out the door. When the door’s lock sealed, Hazel stood and clasped her hands behind her back. Max almost pitied the engineers.
“You heard him,” she said tartly. “Juergen, you and Dr. Rios are going to initiate a systematic scan of the Workshop, starting with the sublevels. Any sign of Prusias, imps, malakhim, or disabled cameras, I want to know. Olga?”
“Dr. Medved,” said the woman stiffly.
Hazel inclined her head. “Dr. Medved, I want a report on all personnel assigned to Dr. Tressel in the last six months. If she can’t help us, I want to know who else might be able to.”
A tremor shook the control room, showering them with bits of rubble and debris. Several instrument lights flashed and one of the screens went dark.
“A blown energy converter,” muttered Juergen, pulling up a holographic map of the Workshop pyramid and zooming in on a flashing red dot. “That’s bad.”
Hazel snapped her fingers. “Then you had better hurry!”
Sheathing the gae bolga, Max leaned it against a wall and sat at one of the empty workstations. He felt like he was being shunted to the side until the pivotal moment. He understood the logic of it, but he also found it irritating. His eyes flicked to Dr. Medved, who was glancing frequently in his direction. Max glowered.
“What?”
“I’m sorry,” she said. “It’s just … you’re him.”
She swiveled in her chair to stare at him with unabashed curiosity. There was nothing lurid in her gaze; it was one of remote admiration. Her tone was reverent.
“You’re the Original. I almost feel like I know you. You’ve grown up so much!”
“What are you talking about?” snapped Max.
The scientist beamed. “I worked on your project. My team tried to duplicate your DNA. You gave us more than a few headaches.”
“Dr. Medved, that’s enough,” barked Rasmussen.
“No,” said Max. “I want to hear. You worked on the clones?”
“Alpha, mostly,” said Dr. Medved proudly. “He was my baby. I nearly cried when we sold him. We all knew Omega had to go—too wild—but I really hoped Alpha would work out. He was magnificent.”
Rasmussen squirmed. “This is not the time or place, Dr. Medved. Do you have the reports on Dr. Tressel’s subordinates?”
“Just sent them to Juergen,” she answered. While Juergen and Dr. Rios were busy scanning surveillance feeds to eliminate or highlight possible bunker locations on the hologram, Dr. Medved’s attention remained riveted on Ma
x. “How tall are you?” she asked.
“Six-five.”
She gave a satisfied smile. “Just as we predicted. What beautiful genes. Human perfection right in our hands but its deepest mysteries eluded us. How I’d love another go.” The woman’s tone was wistful.
Scathach’s knuckles whitened around her spear. “So you’re responsible for those animals.”
The scientist almost seemed oblivious to Scathach’s tone. “Omega was an animal,” she conceded readily. “But that was by design. Not Alpha. Up until the chip, we really thought we’d done it.”
“What chip?” asked Max.
Thus far Peter Varga had been sitting quietly, his cane resting across his knees. He now tapped it gently on Max’s chair leg. “I think you should leave this for now,” he said. “It is upsetting you.”
Max glared at him. “These clones work for the Atropos. Every minute of every day, they’re trying to end my life. This woman is going to tell me everything she knows. Isn’t that right, Dr. Medved?”
The scientist smiled. “You’re the Original. I can do better than tell you. I can show you.”
“Max,” said Hazel. “We have another task at hand.”
“Am I interfering with it?” he replied. “My orders were to sit here.”
Pursing her lips, Hazel turned back to study the changing feeds from surveillance cameras. Whenever a screen came up black, Dr. Rios entered the camera’s position on a three-dimensional map of the Workshop.
Max pulled his chair next to Dr. Medved as she accessed a different database. The screen went black before three simple words appeared:
Deus ex Machina
“ ‘God from a Machine,’ ” she translated, before entering a password and placing her thumb on a sensor. “A little joke for the project name. But that was our goal, after all—to create a god in the lab. And we got so close!”
Menus and files appeared on the screen. Dr. Medved selected one and Max found himself staring at three human embryos. The scientist tapped the screen from left to right. “Alpha, Zeta, and Omega.”
“The three clones,” breathed Max.
“Technically speaking, they’re not clones,” Dr. Medved corrected. “We could not replicate you, not entirely. Some of your sequences could not be duplicated. Nevertheless, they share over ninety-nine percent of your genetic material. To complete the sequence, we used alternate sources of DNA. Alpha’s was synthetic. Zeta’s was from superior human stock. Omega’s came from more primitive samples. Zeta was the most like you.”
“Zeta was Myrmidon,” said Max, recalling his final match in Prusias’s Arena. He would never forget his feelings of grief and horror when he’d removed his opponent’s helmet only to discover a younger version of himself.
“Correct,” said Dr. Medved. “Prusias demanded proof of concept and so we accelerated Zeta ahead of the others. Myrmidon performed most admirably in the Arena until he met you. A pity he died, but there are lessons in every failure. We applied them to Alpha and Omega.”
She tapped a key and the embryos were replaced with two newborns floating in separate tanks filled with a gelatinous substance. One was noticeably larger and fast asleep. The other was emaciated and shivering, its tiny hands tugging in vain with tubes that protruded from its arms, head, and chest. A sequence of lights flashed from a nearby machine. The sickly child promptly stiffened and began bawling. Immediately, a nurse arrived to stroke and feed its larger neighbor. No one comforted the baby that was screaming; the cameras simply kept recording.
Max felt sick. “Why doesn’t someone help him?”
Dr. Medved merely shrugged. “It wasn’t part of his protocol.”
“But you’re feeding the other one.”
“Of course,” she replied. “Alpha was rewarded whenever his brother suffered. It reinforced his sense of superiority. When Omega was shocked, Alpha was caressed. When Omega was starved, Alpha was fed. One received only negative feedback, the other only positive. The outcomes were remarkable.”
With a few clicks, she played many clips on several screens. Max watched in silent horror as the clones were aged in accelerant tanks, subjected to unconscionable experiments, and plugged into combat simulations. They grew before his eyes. Alpha became a larger version of Max, while Omega was neglected and tormented until he was as sly and feral as a jackal.
Scenes from the clones’ combat scenarios flickered like pages from a flipbook. Hundreds of scenes, thousands of scenes. Alpha was a juggernaut who dominated his opponents with brute strength and relentless, overpowering offensives. Omega was craftier. He darted in, feinting and retreating, always seeking attacks of opportunity. Whereas Alpha favored sword and spear, Omega preferred knives and teeth.
“Study their patterns,” said Scathach, touching Max’s shoulder. He nodded. Although the clones were exceedingly skilled and made few mistakes, some tendencies were inevitable. Even Omega betrayed some.
Max watched in morbid fascination as Workshop surgeons injected a pubescent Alpha with nanocompounds to enhance his musculature. When a captive witch carved wards and spells into Omega’s flesh, the youth did not flinch or cry out. He merely stared up at the camera, his eyes as dead as a doll’s.
What the hell did they do to you? Max had asked this of Omega the first time they’d met. The reply chilled him to this day. Everything, everything, EVERYTHING!
Max stared at the floor. They certainly had.
He wanted to be angry, to be shocked and outraged by what he’d seen. Instead, he felt a profound and puzzling sorrow. He turned to Dr. Rasmussen, who’d been stealing covert glances throughout Dr. Medved’s explanations. “How could you let this happen?” Max asked him quietly. “What was the point?”
Dr. Rasmussen opened his mouth to answer but could not find the words. His colleague spoke up instead.
“We wanted perfection,” said Dr. Medved impassively. “But we wanted perfection that we could control. We needed to ensure the clones would obey and that’s where we encountered problems.”
Rasmussen rubbed his temples. “Please, Olga. Enough.”
Max swiveled back to her. “What went wrong?”
The scientist’s eyes wandered over his face with an abstracted expression that reminded Max of David. “You did. Your DNA is wildly unstable. All DNA can mutate and cause changes in an organism, but yours does so more radically and spontaneously than anything we’ve ever seen. This is confined largely to the sequence we couldn’t replicate, but the change is dramatic. It’s like you become a different order of being. The closest comparison is daemonic koukerros, but the triggers of koukerros are well known. We could never predict how or when your DNA might change. The clones also have this trait, although it’s not as pronounced.”
“So the clones … mutated?”
Olga nodded grimly. “Simultaneously. Since we’d only observed mutations in the DNA sequence we could not replicate, we did not think the clones were capable of spontaneous change. As it turned out, we were mistaken.”
She clicked a file. On the screen, Max saw Alpha and Omega lying on a pair of operating tables while a team of surgeons finished cutting a small, circular hole in their skulls. A number of Workshop officials were in attendance, observing from an elevated gallery. Max saw Dr. Rasmussen among them, grinning at something his colleague whispered, while surgeons implanted what looked like small microchips into the clones’ brains. Once these were installed, the surgeons repaired the skulls and sewed their scalps into place.
“As they got older, Alpha and Omega were becoming too willful, too independent,” explained Dr. Medved. “Dr. Wagner developed these chips to moderate the functions of their frontal lobes and make them more compliant. However, when we tried to override their brain functions, the clones mutated as some sort of defense mechanism. We lost control entirely.”
The recording now showed one of the surgeons, presumably Dr. Wagner, addressing the gallery. When they applauded, he nodded to a technician sitting at a nearby computer. The man press
ed a button.
The clones awoke instantly. In a blink, Omega sprang from his table onto the technician, snapping the man’s neck and smashing his computer. Meanwhile, Alpha seized hold of Dr. Wagner. The scientist struggled in vain as the muscular clone eased off the table. While his colleagues fled, Dr. Wagner was pinned, kicking and screaming, onto his own operating table. When Omega handed Alpha a trepanning saw, Olga stopped the video.
“You get the idea,” she sighed. “We had to secure and gas the room. The sedatives required would have killed ten elephants. The tests we ran revealed a dramatic change in their physiology and capabilities. Alpha was twice as strong as before, Omega twice as quick. We removed the microchips hoping they would somehow revert to their previous state, but they did not and were deemed too dangerous to keep. Given how expensive the program had been, we sought to recoup our losses rather than terminate them.”
“So you sold them,” Max muttered. “To the Atropos.”
The scientist was unapologetic. “Of course. They offered more than anyone else, even the wealthier braymas.”
“If you couldn’t control them, how do the Atropos?” asked Scathach.
“I can’t say precisely,” replied the scientist. “We taped the transfer, but the recording was corrupted somehow. Our technicians believe it was due to some trick or devilry by the guild’s representative. Portions are legible, but the audio is useless.”
“Let me see it,” said Max.
“As you wish,” said Dr. Medved, clicking a file.
The footage came from a mounted camera positioned in the corner of a spartan holding cell. Opposite the cell’s reinforced door, Alpha and Omega sat impassively in anchored steel chairs with computerized restraints about their necks, wrists, and ankles. As soon as the door opened, the picture scrambled momentarily and a high-pitched buzzing began. As the image steadied, Max could just make out a dark figure entering the room. It wore hooded robes and bowed low to the clones before.
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