63
Gen spread her two-foot wingspan, circling high above the twenty-acre complex of Redstone Military Laboratories. A birdwatcher would have found it odd to spot an osprey, a fish hawk that belongs along coasts and inland waters, flying above the desert. But none of the soldiers and technicians below bothered to look up as they shuttled between the lab and the loading ramps of three Army trucks.
Gen's sharp vision roamed the compound. She saw Col. Eberhard exit a small adobe bungalow and stride toward the main lab building. So that's where he lives. Gen tucked her wings and dove toward the bungalow's rear window, smashing right through the glass and tumbling across the wooden floor. The impact broke the osprey's neck; it healed in seconds. Gen hopped on talons into the bathroom and found what she needed: a hairbrush, with silver hairs caught in the bristles. Gen touched a single hair from Jack Eberhard and read his genetic blueprint.
Mitobots disassembled and absorbed most of an antique cast-iron tub to gain two hundred pounds of mass needed to create Eberhard's clone. Seconds later, Gen stood naked in human male form: Eberhard's genetic double. In the bedroom, she put on the dress uniform of a U.S. Army colonel. Then she turned before a full-length mirror, working to make her copy more exact.
Eberhard looked older than the clone Gen had created. She aged the cells, silvering the hair and deepening the wrinkles; then added the pale scar that ran across his square jaw. Now she looked much more like Eberhard, except for the anomalous purple eyes.
But in spite of the fact that her very cell structure duplicated Eberhard's, her version of the colonel still didn't look convincing. Gen-Eberhard looked like she could be Eberhard's identical twin, but she didn't look completely like the man himself.
Then she realized her copy was missing the colonel's attitude. Gen-Eberhard tried on a demeanor of arrogance. Puff out the chest. More. Add a furrow of perpetual anger to the brows. Good. A subtle sneer. Better. Now tweak the expression with an overlay of stress. Wow. She shuddered to recognize her nemesis.
Gen-Eberhard grabbed a pair of dark sunglasses off the dresser to hide her purple eyes. Then she exited the bungalow and strode toward the lab with an air of personal power. Her plan was to enter the isolation suite and release dissemblers to destroy the lab and all records of Project Second Nature.
Two guards snapped to attention and saluted Gen-Eberhard as she entered the lab's main area. The colonel paused and gave the men a hard look-over. "Standard security procedures," Gen-Eberhard said, "A quiz: Who gets notified during a laboratory emergency?"
"You do, sir," one guard said. "Immediately."
"Yes, of course, but I mean a catastrophic accident," Gen-Eberhard said. "Suppose the entire laboratory is consumed in flames. Who gets notified then?"
"Hollomon Air Base, sir," the second guard said. "Capt. George Hughes, security chief for White Sands Missile Range."
The other guard nodded and licked dry lips. Gen-Eberhard glanced at a wall clock. "Contact Capt. Hughes now, and relay to him my orders to execute an emergency response to Redstone Labs at eleven-hundred hours."
"Which drill, sir? The fire scenario?"
"Tell him men are wandering in the desert, bewildered. They don't even remember what happened to them."
The guard frowned. "Sir...?"
"Just follow my orders."
"Yes sir. Right away, sir."
She turned and headed toward the Biohazard Level Four isolation suite. In front of her, a technician in a white lab coat walked through an aisle lined with aluminum pens, and the rabbits inside paid little attention. But as Gen-Eberhard passed the same rows, the sight of the colonel made the animals go berserk with fear, scrabbling into corners, trembling so hard their pens rattled.
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.
Workers scrambled into far corners, trying to claw their way out of the sealed room. But there was only a single airlock exit, blocked by a bellowing dragon out of a medieval knight's worst nightmare.
Gen raked her scythe-like talons and whipped her heavy tail, splintering tables, crushing equipment, smashing holes in the walls, sending up showers of electric sparks as she ripped through wiring conduits.
Eberhard screamed and pissed his pants. A couple technicians raced to a ladder on the far wall that reached up to a maintenance hatch in the air filtration ducts. Eberhard saw their escape plan and dashed to the ladder, yanked one man away from its base by the back of his collar, then scrabbled up over the back of a second man who had already started climbing.
Gen roared and kicked a microscope workstation, shearing off its floor bolts; she kicked it again and it went airborne like a half-ton soccer ball and embedded in the far wall, just above Eberhard's head. The impact jolted Eberhard and the other men off the ladder and they thudded on the floor in a squirming heap. Gen chomped on the ladder with ten-inch fangs, ripped it off the wall and flung it sideways, knocking down a dozen men like bowling pins.
The ceiling was too cramped for the rampaging gigantosaurus, so Gen lay down on her side and kicked with all her strength and fury. Her first kick caved in the wall by Air Lock One, and she kicked and kicked at the air lock itself until the unit tore loose from its concrete foundation. Then she punted the air lock like a tumbling automobile, through the heavy glass walls of her old isolation chamber. The thick glass pulverized with a white noise like a booming waterfall. Gen roared thunderously and a final, wobbling glass panel crashed to the floor in the blast of sound from her lungs.
Then the gigantosaurus scrabbled back to its clawed feet and stood, shoving with immense leg muscles to burst through the ceiling and bite and tear out some headroom, shredding aluminum air ducts like strips of tinsel. Now Gen stood at her full height, showered by cascades of electric sparks that spit and snapped from tangles of torn wiring. She could feel the triumph blazing in her purple eyes, and she trumpeted explosively.
Then she sent forth a swarm of trillions of dissemblers, and the scales of the multi-ton reptile smoked with fog and sizzled loudly, like water on a red hot skillet. The deconstruction mitobots spread everywhere as a self-propagating cloud.
Security forces leaped out of Air Lock Two and glanced around, thunderstruck, at the gaping hole where Air Lock Three had stood, and at the ruin that had been the isolation unit, and at the two-story tall monster that glared down at them.
Five soldiers crouched with automatic rifles and began blasting away at the dinosaur. Gen squealed like colliding trains-one man dropped his weapon and clapped hands over his ears from the deafening volume-the gigantosaur's version of laughter. Seconds later, the security team's rifles had dissolved, along with helmets and boots and combat clothing, leaving five naked men huddling in terror.
Then the room and all its inorganic objects shimmered and began to vanish. Concrete and steel walls puffed to the floor as ultra-fine, soft powder. Floors opened to the raw earth beneath. Ceilings gaped to the blue sky. Mitobots disassembled everything in their path. Furniture, lab equipment, computers and monitors, video cameras, telephones, and all records of Project Second Nature broke down to atomic smithereens.
No longer trapped by walls, the naked technicians and soldiers ran screaming from the avenging dragon and the rectangular dirt field where the laboratory buildings had stood. Rabbits escaped into the rugged hills in every direction.
A fog smothered the three cargo trucks packed with lab equipment for transportation to a new bioweapons lab site. The trucks collapsed to the ground like talcum powder. The fog spread through the compound with a speed that generated its own breeze, leaving dust piles puffing up in soft clouds behind it. When it had disassembled the outer, razor-wire capped fence, the fog settled to the bald ground like a blanket. Slowly, the blanket faded and grew tattered as the fog dissipated to nothing.
The men's memories of the last half-hour also paled to nothing, as mitobots erased the short-term neural traces. Naked men moaned and sobbed, then grew quiet-too dazed to remember what they had been sobbing about. They ran, walked or hobbled beyond the perimeter of the obliterated military compound and kept going.
Only Col. Eberhard remained behind, trapped inside a cage of glass that had crystallized around him in the bare dirt.
He cried out from the scorching heat as the gigantosaurus shed tons of extra mass and reverted to human Gen. The jelly-like mountain of excess matter deconstructed itself to dust.
Gen stepped toward Eberhard, dressed in a sparkling robe of woven diamond threads. Eberhard hunkered naked in the cage. She touched the glass and it poofed into glittering powder.
Eberhard ducked his head and whimpered. "Don't hurt me. Don't kill me."
"Not like you killed my mother."
"I...no...your mother was mad. She went crazy. She committed-"
"That's a lie. I met her. She's a wonderful, beautiful person. She's immortal now."
"Yes, she's in a better place, no more suffering. She's with God."
"Something like that." Gen took another step toward him.
He cringed, unable to look at her. "What are you going to do to me? I can't hurt you. You're invincible. I'm no threat to you."
"Maybe I'll share my mitobots with you. Then you'll be invincible, too, even if I tear off your head." She frowned. "At least I think so. You never tried that experiment. Let's do it-fill you up with mitobots and rip off your head, see if it grows back."
He held up trembling hands, still staring at the ground. "No, please...please. Why are you tormenting me?"
"Is that what it's called? I thought it was military science."
"All the information is lost. I can never repeat the project. Why can't you just let me go?"
"I'm thinking about it."
He looked up at her for the first time. Tears of fright wet his cheeks.
"But first I've got to devise a way to keep the world safe from you," she said.
He licked his lips. "Listen, we can work that out, Gen." His eyes darted back and forth. "I...I promise to...resign. Okay? I'll retire. I won't design weapons anymore."
"You still would be a dangerous man. At least to defenseless creatures. You don't know how it feels to be little and powerless."
"I can learn. Okay? Give me a chance to learn."
She half-smiled. "That's not a bad idea." She reached out her hands and billows of shiny fog puffed from her palms and fingertips and streamed into his pores.
The whites of Eberhard's eyes bulged and he opened his mouth to scream. It came out a high-pitched squeal as he rapidly morphed, shedding extra matter in a steaming, wet blob.
In seconds, on the ground at Gen's feet, hunched a white rabbit with pink eyes.
Gen gazed out over tuffs of brushwood and sunburnt grass mottling the rugged hills. "Not exactly fluffy bunny territory. But the local jackrabbits can show you how to survive."
The rabbit stared up at her with shock and confusion in its beady eyes.
"I know you understand what I'm saying, Colonel. Your mind is in a new body now. You'll figure it out. So off with you. Scoot, little bunny. Or some devil might catch you and use you for lab experiments."
The rabbit backed up, then spun and dashed off, scampering as fast as its blurring legs would carry it, until it disappeared into a mesquite thicket.
Gen heard the warbling drone of helicopters approaching from the mountains. She transformed herself into a golden eagle, beat her dark brown wings and leaped into the sky.
She soared eastward, toward home.