“Thanks for helping me with this, Sarge. Now I feel better.”
Sarge ignored the sarcasm. “To review, we don’t know what the fuck it is, except…”
“Except it kills people.”
“Yeah. You clear now?”
“No.”
“Good. Then you’ll stay alert, won’t you. Now shut the fuck up, Duke, before I knock your teeth down your throat.”
When Samantha Grimm turned on the lights of the archaeological spectrographic lab, it looked to Reaper like the place had been in use moments before: everything was left out, seemingly still in process. Computers were turned on, showing images from archaeological digs — carvings, bits of ancient bone, broken pieces of sculpture, intricately worked metal from unfamiliar machinery — rocks and fossils on workbenches, tools lying atop them. Brushes, chisels, specialized scrapers, dust blowers. Reaper looked curiously at the streaming shots of damaged sculpture, remembering some of it from his brief stay here with his parents as a child. Despite the unbreathable surface, the Olduvaians of Mars had been humanoid, judging from the sculpture.
What had happened to his parents had been explained away as some kind of accident in one of the lower, innermost digs. They’d broken into a hidden chamber and a trapped gas had affected them…sickness, psychosis, death…anyway, that was the story he’d been given.
But there had been questions, hushed up when the Grimms’ son and daughter were around…
He pushed all that from his mind. Focus on the job, Reaper.
Sam was at her workstation, inserting MICDIs into the computer intake.
“How much time you gonna need?” Reaper asked her.
“Thirty minutes, tops.”
She tapped the keyboard, starting the downloading process as he set about moving some file cabinets, other equipment to block the entrance. There was something down here killing people, and he didn’t want it jumping in at them — at least he could try to slow it down a little, whatever it was, while they were in here.
Sam was concentrating on the computer, but she said, without looking up: “So, ‘Reaper’? As in ‘Grimm’?”
“They’re Marines, Sam. They ain’t poets. Who’s this Carmack guy?”
Click-clickety on the keyboards. “Dr. Carmack…” Clackity-click. “…is a genius. His research program will save tens of millions of lives. He’s the single finest scientific brain I’ve ever encountered.”
“Yeah.” He pointed at a display of fossils — specifically at a preserved humanoid skeleton curled protectively around the skeleton of a child. “What the fuck is that?”
“That’s Lucy.” She turned to the fossil and pretended to introduce Reaper. “Lucy, this is my brother, John, someone else from the long-lost past.”
He pretended to ignore this, but the shot went home anyway. He had been deliberately out of touch with her for years, partly because of the Olduvai thing. Partly because she had strongly disapproved of his career direction. “A sad waste of talent,” was the nicest thing she’d said about it.
He thought about Lucy. “They found human remains?” They hadn’t when he’d been here as a kid…
“Humanoid. Close to us. ‘Lucy’ and her child were our first find. We’re bringing out more every day.”
He looked at her. “You’ve reopened the dig?” He’d thought they were just looking at artifacts taken from the dig a long time in the past.
“Look, maybe I should have told you,” she replied, looking at him evenly, “but it’s not the sort of thing you jot on a yearly birthday card. Besides, it’s been stabilized…”
He wasn’t going to let her off the hook that easily. “Stabilized — what does that mean? You’re saying it’s safe now?”
“I’m saying the procedures we employ are second to —”
He held a hand up, as he interrupted. “Hold it, hold it — are you saying it’s safe, Sam? Jesus. How naïve are you?”
She gave a soft, incredulous laugh. “You want to talk about safe? Like you took a desk job. Like you’re not out there doing God knows what for God knows why. I’m a forensic archaeologist with a specialty in genetics. I go where the work is.”
“That the only reason you’re up here?”
“You want to know why I’m up here?” She turned back to the console, punched some keys. A readout appeared showing a massive grid and the words THERMAL IONIZATION MASS SPECTROGRAPHY.
“This,” she continued, tapping the screen, “is a radioscopic map of the ground around us. These are outlines of building foundations. Looks like a city, right? It’s not. It’s a hundred times as deep and wide and high as any city we’ve ever known. Population of ninety, a hundred million. A megalopolis. And can you imagine the physics necessary to build the Ark? We’re centuries away from this kind of quantum technology, John.”
He turned to look again at the sad fossiclass="underline" the bones of a mother curled in pathetic futility around the bones of a child. So what happened to them all? Reaper wondered.
He wondered if they were about to find out the answer — millennia later, on a reawakened Olduvai…
Her computer chimed to announce that the first download was complete. Sam pulled out the MICDI, inserted another. “Come here,” she said.
He moved closer to the hominid display, looking at it from another angle.
Sam hit another keyboard combo, and chromosome maps appeared, strata of black and white in translucent tubes. “This is Lucy’s chromosome profile. Notice anything?” He shrugged, and she added: “We both know you smoked me in biology. It’s the first thing Dad taught us to look for.”
His answer was as dry as the bones on the worktables. “My molecular genetics is a little rusty.”
“She has twenty-four chromosomes. Humans only have twenty-three.”
He nodded, counting the chromosome groups on the display. “You don’t say. So what’s the extra chromosome do? I mean, what’s the difference between me and her, under the hood?”
“You’re human — she’s superhuman. The twenty-fourth pair made her superstrong, superfit, superintelligent. Her cells divide fifty times faster, so she heals almost instantly. The fossil record indicates they’d conquered disease. No genetic disorders, no viruses, no cancers.”
“So she’s just naturally superior…”
“Not naturally. The earliest remains we found had twenty-three pairs of chromosomes. We suspect this extra chromosome may be synthetic.”
Reaper raised his eyebrows. “Bioengineered?”
She smiled thinly. “Long word for a Marine. As I’m sure you also don’t know, only ninety percent of the human genome has been mapped. There’s plenty of room in the helix to insert stealth DNA if you could figure out a way to manufacture it.”
He shook his head. “Sorry. You lost me.”
She snorted. “Sure I have.” Another, different kind of hesitation. Should she go there? “Does it bother you, you could’ve spent your life looking in a microscope — instead of a sniperscope?”
“And work up here for UAC? Sorry. I value my life too much.”
It was true, he thought. Those splashes of blood. The level of quarantine. The tapes.
There were indications that this base for pure science would be far more dangerous than the firefights he’d been in on Earth. Maybe the strongest indication was simple hunch — the instinct of a long-time warrior:
There was death waiting in those corridors.
“Right,” Sam was saying. “Like we don’t all work for UAC.”
He knew what she meant. The corporations had subsumed the government — except in the most cosmetic way. But he insisted, “I’m RRTS, Sam. I serve my country.”