“Sam!” he shouted, running into Carmack’s genetics laboratory, gasping for breath. He skidded to a stop, again expecting an attack as he swept the room with his gunlight, ready to fire — aware that he was on edge and hair-trigger right now, and if he wasn’t careful, he’d shoot his sister, thinking it was one of them, in the dimness. No attack came — and no Sam, either.
He searched the room, sweat stinging his eyes, even looking in the wrecked bathroom.
She was nowhere to be found. Not her and not her body.
They might have gotten her — dragged her up into the crawl spaces, chewing on her as they went. Tearing her to pieces.
No. He had a strong feeling Sam was still alive. But where?
The seconds were passing. Think…
If she’d finished here in the lab, where would she have gone?
Of course! The infirmary. Finish the research there. Should have gone there first, he was wasting precious time…
“I’m an idiot,” he muttered, turning to run back the way he’d come.
He ran back through the corridor, into the air lock, racing across the atrium…down the hall, pressed through the nanowall…there were several corpses and pieces of corpses on tables and gurneys. And Sam…
She was there, bending over a cadaver. Sam’s face was rapt with concentration, her hands operating a scanner as she ran it slowly over the battered chest.
That was Destroyer’s body, some part of his mind noted, and veered immediately away — he didn’t want to deal with Destroyer’s death yet. He had to put all grieving off till the mission was over. His pain over losing his buddies was like a child weeping in a detention cell — it wasn’t time for that child to be let out yet.
“What the fuck are you doing, Sam?” he rasped, between gasps for air, as he stalked up to her. “Didn’t you hear me over the radio?”
The question didn’t register. She kept frowning into that scanner — and asked a question of her own. “Why did they take Goat but not Destroyer? Why Carmack but not Dr. Thurman?”
He slapped the butt of his machine gun with impatience. “Sam — you’ve got to come with me. Now! We got, like, a minute to evacuate —”
She was still caught up in her stream of thought — seemed about to be swept over some inward verge. “Lucy had the twenty-fourth chromosome…but she wasn’t a monster — she died protecting her child, not devouring it. Why did the same chromosome that made her superhuman turn Stahl into a monster? Just give me one minute to show —”
He glanced at the door. Were the others already going through the Ark? He had to be with them when they went through. They could be facing the enemy instantly, on getting home. He couldn’t let the squadron down — they’d need all the help they could get. The whole world would need it.
She bit at the tip of her tongue, looking again at Destroyer, that detached scientist’s state of mind, narrowing her eyes again. “John — give me just one minute to show you…”
“We don’t have one minute!”
“Then give me ten seconds!”
He looked at her. There was something in her expression.
It was as if she were saying, You didn’t trust me when our parents died. You wouldn’t talk to me. To anyone. And you sealed yourself off, inside, from people. This time…trust me.
He looked away — a kind of acquiescence.
But he turned back to watch as she snatched up a biopsy needle, sank it into the base of Destroyer’s skull — sucked out the gray matter with a practiced motion of her thumb.
Reaper grimaced and looked away again.
She moved to a table where — he hadn’t noticed it before — Portman’s head, still in its helmet, lay in a grisly lump.
He found himself watching her again — and regretted watching her when she found a swab, collected matter from the head by the simple expedient of sticking the swab through a hole in the skull, dipping it into the brain like a candymaker stirring caramel in a pot.
She leaned over the remains of Carmack’s torso, separated the lungs, revealing another strange organ where none should be.
“This is its tongue…”
A tongue inside a chest? But that long, long tongue had to start somewhere.
She held the swab up and looked at it critically — it was lathered with brain matter from Portman, looking like moldy cottage cheese. Then she held it over the tongue hidden in the Carmack imp’s chest.
The tongue suddenly churned and wriggled, spattering them both with black blood.
“Brain matter from Portman…” she said, as if thinking aloud.
Then she took the biopsy needle, squeezed some of the red-gray sludge onto a swab.
“This is from Destroyer…”
She held the sample from Destroyer’s brain over the tongue — and the tongue just lay there. It didn’t react.
She passed Portman’s brain matter over it again — and the tongue jerked in instant reaction.
Reaper stared. Worried about the Ark but fascinated despite himself.
Sam ran through her impromptu theory as she worked. “There are genetic markers for aggression, violent behavior. The marker could be a specific neurotransmitter it’s picking up on, a ganglion. It’s choosing, John. It’s choosing who it infects.”
He shrugged helplessly. “Choosing? Choosing how?”
She considered. “Latching on to numbers in the DNA code linked to…”
“Sam…”
He looked at her skeptically. She was getting fanciful. “Linked to what, Sam? To ’evil’?”
It’d been well over the ten seconds she’d asked. But he intuitively felt this could matter — if the creatures had gotten to the other side, knowing how the things decided to do what they did could help stop them.
She spoke rapid-fire. “Ten percent of the human genome is still unmapped. Some think it’s the genetic blueprint for the soul. Maybe C-24 is what destroyed the Olduvaians. It would be why some of them had to build the Ark — to escape to a new beginning. It made some superhuman. Others — monsters.”
It felt right to Reaper. He looked at the imp. “Goat was right. Said we are all angels or devils…we become one or the other.”
They looked at each other. Which are you?
Then an implication hit him. “Oh my God…”
“What?”
He started toward the door. “The people quarantined on the other side of the Ark —”
“What about them?”
Reaper hadn’t heard what’d happened to the people who’d been evacuated — but it made sense there’d be a quarantine, for a time, back home; they’d be contained in the compound where they couldn’t spread any of this genetic infection…contained where they’d also be sitting ducks.
“He’s going to kill them!” Reaper went on. “But they won’t all be infected!”
Fourteen
THREE MINUTES HAD been used up seven minutes ago.
Sarge was done waiting for Reaper and Sam. As far as Sarge was concerned, Corporal John Grimm was AWOL.
The Marines were stripping off everything they didn’t need and loading up with all the extra ammo they could carry from the crates of munitions that’d been stacked in the wormhole chamber during evacuation.
As he took off his extraneous equipment, Sarge decided he’d made a mistake: he shouldn’t have let Reaper go after his sister. Only reason he’d done it at all was he figured the girl might’ve found out something handy — something they could use against the enemy. She could’ve been a resource.
But, of course, she was either dead, by now — or she was one of the enemy. Same probably went for Reaper. Too bad. Reaper was a good soldier.