Still, driven by instinct, Stahl looked this way and that, straining against the restraints, hoping for a way out.
“Who was he?” Reaper asked.
Sam went back to the console, typed in a search: experimental subject Stahl background. Text flickered by. The scrolling stopped on the experiment’s biographical records.
Stahl, Curtis
She pursed her lips, scanned the data, encapsulated it for them. “Curtis Stahl. He was condemned to be executed. He’s a paranoid schizophrenic with convictions for multiple murders and pedophilia.”
A hard guy to feel sorry for, Reaper reflected. But watching him lowered into that pit, seeing the terror in his eyes, his mouth quivering like a two-year-old’s, like a child lost in a big city crowd at night, you felt sorry for him anyway.
Sam pointed at the computer screen — as the video jumped to 004 hrs.
The arm and torso began to swell — was that swelling…or growing? Their horror grew, too, as they watched. “Oh my God…” Sam muttered.
The video record jumped ahead, from stage to stage, like an animation without enough frames per second, showing Stahl’s transformation. At 005 hrs Stahl was writhing — and metamorphosing. His skin was growing lumpy, red, his flesh thickening, then forming the exoskeleton, a scaly hardness. His eyes were sinking away, his nose seeming to melt, lips peeling back, melding with the growing skull, teeth baring, extending; his fingers were merging one into the next, bone projecting out — he screamed in agony at this, as bone burst from the flesh to become claws…like the talons that had scythed Mac’s head from his shoulders. Maybe the very same ones. And Stahl’s noseless face, once the transformation was done, seemed strangely familiar to Reaper. Then it hit him…
It was the same monstrous face he’d seen staring at him from the shadows, when he was a kid, that day in Dig Twenty-three.
Ghost? Maybe. Precognition? Could well have been. It didn’t matter.
Sam was muttering something about laws of conservation of matter, probable quantum induction…And genetic demons…A “Hell Knight,” according to a subtitle on the video.
But all Reaper could think about was how it must’ve felt, at that moment, to be Curtis Stahl. Getting bigger and bigger — a true Hell Knight, all right. He reached out and switched off the video. They could see where it was going.
Reaper felt the fury rising in him. What they’d seen on the computer — that was Olduvai. The soul of Olduvai was in that steel-walled holding pit. Just as he’d sensed it as a boy.
He looked hard at his sister. Did she finally understand? “They sent you in here” — he gestured at the lab around them — “to save this? They wanted to protect this?”
“It doesn’t make any sense…”
“You trusted them, and they used you. They lied to you, Doctor.”
Sam’s eyes were narrowing as she worked out a scientific problem in her mind. “If he perfected xenogenesis, he would have also had to —”
“Jesus Christ!” Reaper interrupted. “Don’t you see what this place is? It’s hell. It always was. This shit ends here. Gimme those drives.”
He snatched them up.
“What are you doing?” Sarge asked, his voice and eyes modulated to a deadly chill.
He closed his fist over the disks. “We have to destroy them.”
He shook his head. “That’s UAC property.”
“The fuck are you talking about, Sarge?” Reaper felt mad enough to take Sarge on right this second if he had to. Where had Sarge’s leadership got them so far? Mac. Portman. Destroyer. Goat. All dead. “We got the chance to end this…”
“We take the data back.”
Reaper waved the disks at him. “You want this to survive? Jesus Christ, did you even see what I just saw?”
Sarge locked eyes with Reaper. You could feel it like a physical shock when Sarge fixed you with both beams. “I didn’t see shit. I ain’t paid to see shit. I got my orders. And so do you.”
He walked over to Reaper and stood eyeball to eyeball with him. Reaper could feel the heat of Sarge’s body, up that close.
He felt Sarge take the disks from his hand. Without breaking eye contact, Sarge said, “Is this everything?” Talking to Sam — but looking at Reaper.
“I…”
“I said is this everything?” Sarge bellowed, still facing off with Reaper.
All the time Reaper wondering how to take Sarge out if he had to. And if Duke would back him up. Probably not. Duke was all Marines all the time…and that meant complete loyalty to his NCO.
“I have one more to download.”
“Then do it,” Sarge said flatly.
Reaper decided to wait. If he decided to challenge Sarge head-on, there’d be a better time than this.
He nodded, just slightly, and turned away.
Sam went to the computer.
The Kid had never been this scared.
Not that anything was jumping at him right now, as he walked through the mudroom to the surface air lock. Nothing moved here. There was nothing at all but pottery, and crusty old artifacts, and tools. And somewhere in the room were a couple of dead guys — he was supposed to shoot their bodies in the head, when he found them.
He hoped to God they were still dead.
No, nothing moved, nothing threatened him, not out front. But you could feel them watching you. He knew those things were here somewhere, just out of his line of sight.
And every time one of the squadron had gone off alone — Mac, Portman, Destroyer — they’d ended up KIA.
Guess what, the Kid thought. You’re on your own right now just like Destroyer. You more likely to survive than those vets? I don’t think so…
This was seriously fucked up. What was Sarge doing, sending him out alone? Trying to get rid of him? Let the predators get the weak one out of the way?
You’re getting paranoid. Just remember who the enemy is…
But he was still buzzing on the shit that Portman had given him — though dope fatigue was starting to set in, that feeling of dirt in the gears of your nervous system — and the stuff, instead of helping him, had just made his nerves vibrate till he was teetering on the top of the greased slide of paranoia.
So it was hard to be sure who the enemy was — maybe it was everyone here.
Cut it out. Think back to when you decided to join the Privines…Think about the corps spirit you saw that day…
He’d been stationed on a ship anchored just off a bombed-out raggedy-ass town on the edges of a sun-washed sea, two thousand miles from his hometown. That day he was on the docks, supervising a bunch of seamen carrying supplies from the boats to the trucks pulled up to where the pier met the breakwater of jagged rocks — the engineers had tumbled broken boulders along the interior shoreline of the harbor, an attempt to protect it against the rising seas of global warming. He’d been warned, before the last three supply runs, that there might be a raid of the local religious fanatics on the supplies. The rebels wanting to keep the provisions from getting to the base on the other side of what remained of the town. But it hadn’t happened yet, and there were rumors like that all the time. Still, the Privatized Marines had been assigned by the civilian supply company to protect the materiel. The Kid hadn’t taken the “Privines” squadron seriously. He was just thinking about getting this materiel mission over with, getting back to the ship, watching the comedy DVD that was up that night in the rec center: Hotties in Orbit. It was supposed to have some good shots of big-titted chicks in free fall. All that sweetly floating flesh…