They weren’t going to let her off the hook. Sarge gestured toward the thing that had been Carmack. “What the hell is that?”
Sam sighed. “It must be a genetic mutation. Maybe caused by something environmental or viral. I just need time to figure it out, see if there’s a way to stop it, reverse the condition…”
Sarge shook his head, looking at the other imp struggling in the nanowall. “Carmack’s condition is irreversible.”
Reaper looked at him. There was a particular flatness in Sarge’s eyes. Reaper had seen it in him before. Sarge had made up his mind. When Sarge got like that, the shit came down hard.
Sarge stepped closer to the imp.
“It’s not necessarily irreversible,” Sam said, watching Sarge closely, “he’s still alive. Perhaps we could replicate hyperplasia, create antioncogenes…”
“It’s irreversible,” Sarge repeated, with icy conviction. And he drew a pistol, shoved it under the imp’s chin…
“No!” Sam said.
The imp’s eyes opened, one after the other, three and four and five and six eyes looking at him — then Sarge pulled the trigger.
Blew its brains out. Black blood and gray matter fountained, slopping onto the nanowall, instantly running off — none of it clinging — to puddle on the floor.
Sarge hadn’t only killed an “it” Reaper knew — he’d killed Dr. Carmack, too. Whatever was left of Carmack had been trapped in that thing’s skull. But Sarge was doing the man a favor, Reaper decided. There just wasn’t going to be time to “reverse the process.”
“…Because,” Sarge continued, his voice even and casual, “Carmack’s condition is that he’s dead.”
Sam stared, stunned by the summary execution.
“Kid,” Sarge said, methodically checking the load on his pistol and turning to what remained of the squadron, “go back to the dig and make sure those other dead scientists are really dead.”
The Kid looked at Sarge, at the dead imp, swallowed, then went in a hurry to follow orders.
“I’ve lost four soldiers,” Sarge said, turning to Sam, advancing on her. “What are you people experimenting with up here?”
Sam merely stood there in stunned silence.
“I’m not going to ask you again,” Sarge threatened.
“I told you, this is an archaeological research center.”
Reaper watched them closely. Was Sarge going to harm his sister? Wasn’t that implied, somehow? If that’s what Sarge had in mind, he had figured John Grimm’s loyalties all wrong.
“You think I’m lying to you?” she said, looking at Sarge, her face white with shock, her eyes hot with anger, her voice sharp. “You think I’m hiding something. I’m telling the truth.” She turned to Reaper. “I’m telling the truth, John.”
Reaper was pretty sure she hadn’t lied — not exactly. But had she held something back? He looked at her uneasily. “What’s on the hard drives?” he asked, at last.
She blinked. “What?”
“What’s on the MICDIs, Sam? What were you downloading? What were you sent in to protect?”
She chewed her lower lip. “It’s just research data.”
Reaper glanced at the imp. What remained of it was slumped like a question mark in the nanowall. “Research into what?” he asked.
Exploitation of Mineral Wealth, Water,
Oil, Oxygen, Plant Life, Coal —
The words appeared on the computer screen in Carmack’s lab as Reaper and Sam — with Sarge and Duke watching — fast-forwarded through MICDIs.
— Agriculture, Livestock, and other animal assets…
Reaper looked at the door to the bathroom — the room Sarge had cratered with the BFG. He had hard-core misgivings about being back in Carmack’s lab, especially with Sam along. They shouldn’t be here. A few steps away, Portman had been smashed to pieces. And a few yards more was the pit where Destroyer had been killed. The imps, whatever else was scuttling around the facility — the things might be anywhere. But right close to here seemed a good bet…
Duke kept an eye on the main door to the corridor; Reaper and Sarge tried to keep a watch on the rest of the room, between checking the computer — but how did you stand sentry against things that could pop out of the ceilings and floors?
He looked at the console as he heard Carmack’s voice: “— test rats have evidenced increased musculature, endurance, ability to —”
Sam shook her head and Reaper reached over, hit EJECT, scanned for something more recent. There was an image of Carmack, looking a bit older — or more worn-out. Like a guy who hadn’t been sleeping for days.
“— skeletal development, stimulation of the rhesus’s metabolic systems…”
Nope. Reaper ejected the MICDI, they popped in another.
” — subject was injected with study agent at 00.03. DS solution used with 10 micrograms IV bolus —”
“Here we go,” Reaper muttered.
The digital video cut to a new image, poorly framed from a fixed camera mount above, maybe on a ceiling. Some poor sap on a gurney. Most prominent in the image was a naked arm, bar code tattooed on the forearm, and part of the man’s torso. The video — about as clinically cheap as you could get — was stamped:
SUBJECT: STAHL, CURTIS. 003 HRS
“Vitals normal,” came Carmack’s voice, over the image. “Elevated heart rate, attributable to subject anxiety…”
Reaper shook his head. How did researchers working on human beings stay so detached? How could they talk about a man like they were talking about a lab rat? Maybe that was really what had gone wrong here — treating people as something less than human made it easier to turn them into something…less than human. But it seemed to Reaper that the inhumanity started within the scientist.
On the screen, Carmack’s hand came into the video shot, carrying a syringe. He drew something from a bottle marked C-24, coolly injected it into the clearly terrified man’s IV tube.
“C-24 successfully grafted to subject’s marker cells at 00:09…”
“What’s C-24?” Sarge asked.
Sam tilted her head, as if she wondered herself. She looked at the bottle on the video, then turned to the equipment on the bench next to the VDU. On a solute spinner was an identical bottle — marked C-24.
She picked it up, looking at it with something resembling awe. “Carmack must have managed to synthesize a stable solution of the synthetic chromosome…”
When she thought the others weren’t looking, she slipped the bottle into her pocket. But Reaper saw her do it.
On the grainy video, the experimental subject, Stahl, was lifted on a winch, gurney and all, across the room…and then lowered into the pit. Down into the very holding pit Destroyer had died in.
Reaper was just guessing when he murmured: “He reconstructed chromosome mutation in human subjects…”
“Subject moved to protected observation area,” Carmack was saying, on the video, “at 00:17…”
“What the hell are we looking at?” Sarge demanded.
“Genesis, chapter one,” Reaper muttered. And he thought: Mary Shelley would’ve liked this — Carmack playing God.
Various angles on that grainy video — finally showing Stahl looking from side to side, in a kind of sublime panic, trying to think of some way out of this. He was trapped on a gurney, in unbreakable restraints, in a pit twenty feet deep, in a locked-down research facility, surrounded by coldhearted men who thought no more of him than of a gerbil, men who would not hear him — who would mentally edit it out — if he begged them to let him go. They’d already injected him with some nightmarish agent; he could feel it taking hold inside him.