Second Nature

Chapter 64

64 

A few miles beyond the vanished labs, the bald eagle landed in the desert. The Abundance would remain active for about fourteen more hours, and Gen had a distance of fifteen hundred miles to cover. The eagle couldn't make it back to Cool Bay in the time remaining. 

She needed a faster vehicle. 

At quantum computer speed, the Abundance scanned sets of genetic codes, and found dozens of blueprints for pterosaurs, including the 35-foot wingspan Quetzalcoatlus northropi. But it did not turn up any flying creature that could travel fifteen hundred miles within the shrinking frame of time. 

The bald eagle ruffled its feathers. Come on. After escaping an H-bomb and putting an end to Redstone Labs, she was not going to let a transportation problem defeat her.  

It occurred to her that the search she'd directed the Abundance to perform had been limited to the genetic codes of Earth creatures. It had ignored sets of genetic essences from innumerable other planets-a mind-boggling menagerie of living forms to choose from. 

She closed her eyes. The Abundance now scanned the blueprints of flying and floating creatures of a gas giant world, in the heart of the Andromeda galaxy. She tasted the characteristics of many beings, thousands of species at a time, until she found the ultimate sky traveler. It took seconds to transform, leaving behind in the sand a red hot, glowing crater. 

Gen had become a flying wing. Simple and elegant, made almost entirely of silica, like a crescent-shaped blade of blown glass. Electricity-generating organs streamed ions from nozzles along the trailing edge of the wing, propelling the bird at supersonic speeds. A number of spherical eyes floated inside its clear body, seeing in every direction, which took some getting used to.  

The flying wing was big-bigger than the Jumbo Jet she sped past over New Orleans. When Gen saw the startled look on the pilots' faces, she strobed colored lights across her wingspan and blared a mating call that sounded like a thousand pipe organs hitting all the black keys at once. Then she banked sharply and zoomed away with a burst of acceleration that sliced the moist air into vapor trails.  

An hour's flight from the desert, the Gulf of Mexico appeared. Then the west coast of Florida. In mid-air, Gen deconstructed the alien bird, creating a rainfall of powdered glass that bent the sunlight over the sea into a double rainbow. Now in the form of a Great Blue Heron, she flew onward with Coolahatchee Bay in view. 

* * * 

Cade stepped out of the portable quarantine building onto the dark beach. Lana and Haven, Jimi and Newpod, had been kept in separate quarantine units. Nighttime now, twenty-four hours had passed, and they were free to go. Hank Townsend and the people from Taylor's Wharf community had been released a few hours earlier, and had gone home. 

The soldiers had catalogued the sound equipment confiscated from the speedboat: laptop computer, synthesizer, underwater speaker, and assorted cables. The gear was waiting in tagged cartons outside Jimi's quarantine unit when Jimi and Newpod stepped out. The golden retriever barked and ran to Cade. Jimi presented a receipt to a soldier and signed for his belongings, without even checking to be sure it all was there.  

He joined Cade, and they waited a moment for Lana and Haven. Then Cade shouldered the heavy speaker, and the group trudged up the hill toward the inn.  

Behind Cade, the twin turbines on the Skycranes began to whine. He and his family did not look back. The whine became a jet engine scream. The group never glanced up as the big helicopters lifted off the beach. They disappeared into the night, and the noise faded like rolling thunder.