Second Nature

Chapter 63

Gen's heart cried out for the creatures. She remembered how she used to shiver with dread every time she heard Air Lock One hiss open. If it turned out not to be the colonel, her whole body would sigh with relief; but whenever she saw Eberhard striding toward her in his blue spacesuit, she, too, had felt like scrambling to the corner of her glass cage to hide. 

The painful memories tapped an anger in her that lay buried beneath strata of fear and humiliation. She had never let herself feel the heat of her rage, because she had been helpless before to do anything about her imprisonment and Eberhard's experiments. But now she felt anger seething in her soul like magma bubbling deep inside a volcano.  

How dare you! Eberhard, and all the rest of you! 

She stopped at the eye scan unit in front of Air Lock Three, placed her chin in the chin rest, and removed her sunglasses. A camera read the unique pattern of cilia muscles in the clone's right iris, and a computer matched the configuration with Eberhard's. The red light winked green and she entered the air lock door. 

Air Lock Three opened into the staging room. It startled her to see on a TV monitor that none of the workers in the isolation suite were wearing blue biohazard suits. Then she noticed dozens of deep-freeze biohazard containers lying on a worktable, and realized that all her tissue samples had been allowed to thaw, and the mitobots had deactivated. Technicians appeared to be dismantling equipment and packing everything for moving. Gen-Eberhard passed through air locks Two and One, into the isolation suite. 

Then the odor hit her. The acrid stink of Envirochem liquid disinfectant. The trace of ozone from electron microscopes. She even smelled, or remembered, the oily reek of jellied gasoline mixed with smoldering flesh, and tasted blood in her mouth, like an iron nail. In dizzying flashbacks, she relived not just her own horrors, but the sufferings of the piteous rabbits Eberhard had brutalized right outside her chamber, while she buried her head under pillows, to drown out their shrieks. It had been an unending chain of atrocities.  

Now she was here to put an end to it. This torture chamber was not going to be loaded on trucks and reestablished elsewhere. 

She had planned only to disassemble the place; break everything down to molecules. But bad memories made her sweat profusely; she felt the volcano inside her about to explode. And at that moment, she came face to face with Col. Jack Eberhard himself. 

Workers stopped what they were doing to gawk at the twins. 

"Who...?" Eberhard said, and glanced at the name EBERHARD over the pocket of the uniform his double wore. "Who the fuck are you?"  

Gen tossed the sunglasses to the floor. 

Eberhard's eyes grew huge. He lurched backward, knocking a centrifuge off a table with a loud clatter. "Security!" he screamed at a video camera that monitored the area. "Weapons teams. Now!" 

Others in the room moaned with panic. A technician backed into a large rack of test tubes; they crashed to the floor in a sparkling explosion.  

"How?" Eberhard said. "How is it possible? I killed you, you bitch. I vaporized you." 

The anger at the core of Gen detonated. The cloned Eberhard-body wasn't big enough to express her gigantic rage; she needed to be huge.  

"Ex ungue draconis!" she yelled, and leaned against the thick plate glass of the isolation vault. Clouds of mitobots billowed from her flesh, fogging the room like a steam bath, consuming tons of matter to build her new form.  

"From the dragon's claw," Gen croaked in a deep, guttural voice, "you will know the dragon!" 

The metamorphosis took only seconds. The dinosaur's body erupted from the ripping uniform like a reptilian mountain. Where the colonel's double had stood, a gigantosaurus hunched low, ducking its massive-jawed head to fit under the room's twenty-foot ceiling. Gen filled her mighty lungs like huge bellows and roared. The air in the room quaked and the glass rattled. It felt so good. She gave the scurrying little humans another ear-splitting roar, and another.