"You address me as anything other than General Keasling and I shit you not, I will have you bunking with the green recruits and on latrine duty for the rest of your damn life. Now sit your ass down."
The give and take between the two usually helped lighten the team's mood and often signified the start of a briefing, but today, King failed to see the humor. He rolled his neck with a sigh. "What did you find?" he said, leveling his gaze at Aleman.
"One moment." Aleman sat at the head of the table while Keasling stood to the side, hands behind his back. He pushed down on the table in front of him. A seventeen-inch square of tabletop depressed and then popped up revealing a computer screen and keyboard. He took the same thumb drive King recovered in the jungle from his pocket and inserted it in the tabletop PC's USB port. After tapping a few commands into the computer, a massive digital TV screen appeared, like an apparition, in the wall behind him, its beige surface fading as a minute electric charge shifted the color crystals in the screen, which could mimic any color or pattern including the most complex plaid. The screen blinked to life, matching the display of the small screen built into the table. A larger folder opened, revealing two more. They were named REGEN and CLIENTS.
Aleman double clicked the REGEN file and then opened several documents within. As images, videos, and text documents appeared on the screen, he organized them so all could be seen. "I've uploaded all this to your units if you want to browse on your own or double-check something."
"Just break it down for me, Ale," King said. "Short and sweet."
"Short and sweet." Aleman rubbed his stubble-covered chin. He stopped, sat forward, and said, "We're dealing with some real bastards. You've already experienced their advanced technology — weapons, field equipment, and genetics. Previous to your encounter I wouldn't have believed a single corporation could achieve as much."
"You sound envious," King said.
"You're not?"
King's only response was a slight purse of his lips. He was envious. They all were. As Delta operators they were accustomed to outgunning and out-teching their enemies. Being on the other side of the coin made them all uncomfortable.
Aleman continued. "The company behind all your trouble is Manifold." A logo appeared on the screen — a stylized DNA strand surrounded by a circle of five red blocks, all connected at the corners. "They're a genetics company with, we believe, five main locations. Best guess, the facility you found burned down in Peru was one of them. Given the way you described what burned — just the facility and not the surrounding jungle — tells us this was a controlled burn purposely set to erase all traces of the facility's owners, while at the same time keeping the ruins hidden beneath the canopy.
"This," he said, bringing up a black-and-white photo, "is Richard Ridley. He started the company after receiving a large inheritance from his father, who killed himself on Ridley's twenty-first birthday. Shotgun. Real messy. Police report says that Ridley found him. Most of what they do is off the grid, probably illegal in most first-world countries, but given their burgeoning bank accounts, they're no worse for wear."
Here was the man responsible for Pierce's kidnapping. King made a mental note of Ridley's face. He wouldn't forget it. "Can we skip the rest of the who, for now, and move on to the why?"
"Will do," Aleman said, then shifted the open files on-screen. "This is where things get strange. Manifold is working on human regeneration. They're taking what nature has given to species like salamanders and transferring the ability to humans, with staggering yet limited success. Picture a soldier stepping on a mine and losing his legs. Typically he…" Aleman looked at Queen, who'd been watching silently with her arms crossed, "or she, would die or be bound to a wheelchair. But these guys. What they're doing is, well, the legs wouldn't just grow back over time, they would start growing back before the soldier's body hit the ground."
"We've seen it," Knight said. "I put a softball-sized hole in the side of a capybara and the thing started healing on the spot."
"But they went nutty," Rook said. "Their minds were gone."
"And that's where Manifold is stuck. With each injury and healing, their subjects go progressively more mad. Look at this." Aleman hit a button and a video on the screen began playing. The date showed June 17, 2009, only two weeks previous. A woman lay strapped to a table by her ankles and wrists. She wore only a paper gown over her dark skin. A male voice spoke, "Subject has been injected with serum D-twenty-four. All preexisting health conditions including a tumor and diabetes have been tested for. She's now clean. Heart rate and blood pressure are normal, well, normal for a super human." The camera shook as the man chuckled.
"I am now going to make an incision across her throat, severing the jugular." The man's hand reached out, a scalpel at the ready. He paused as the blade hovered over the woman's throat. "At the first sign of duress, clear the room," he said to someone unseen.
"I know the drill," the man off-camera replied.
The blade slid across the woman's throat, cutting deep. As blood spat from the fresh wound, it stopped just as quickly. The man withdrew the blood-soaked blade, but the wound had disappeared. "C'mon, lady," he said, looking at the vitals displayed on several beeping and blinking monitors. The heartbeat pulsed hard. Then again. And again.
"She's going… "
"Better clear out, Doc."
The camera shook as it spun, catching a blurry view of the other man in the room. They exited, closed and locked a thick metal door. When the camera came into focus again, it was shooting through a thick glass window. The woman's back arched high and then slammed back down on the table. Her eyes opened wide and she screamed, pulling at her bonds. Unable to free her hands and feet, she flew into a frenzy, pulling and yanking her wrists. Blood splattered against the window. A slick, blood-covered hand shot free from the tight leather manacle, but the second was stuck firmly in place. The woman looked at her bound hand and launched at it, biting with every pound of pressure her adrenaline-powered jaw could deliver. Bones snapped. Flesh flew. The woman roared as the hand tore free and blood pulsed from her wrist. But even as she held the bloody stump up, the hand began to grow back.
The shot turned away from the woman and filmed a split second of a long hallway before cutting off. The glimpse was short, but they all saw the hallway lined with thick windows, some covered in blood, others containing unconscious people on gurneys and still others receiving blow after mad blow from the crazed people inside.
"Kind of makes me glad they burned the place down," Rook said.
Aleman closed the video. "We've identified the woman as Salwa Batori, a native Peruvian woman. Her husband reported her missing three weeks ago. She had three children. We've also identified one of the men in the video."
"I didn't see any faces," King said.
A photo appeared on the screen. The man looked young, but strong, and had a military-style crew cut. "We were able to compress the motion blur details into a static image. It's not perfect, but with his face already in the system, he was an easy match." "Who is he?" King asked.
"Ex-Navy SEAL," Keasling said. "Oliver Reinhart. Dishonorably discharged after his first mission. Went on to form a private security force called Gen-Y. They hire straight out of the military, mostly other dischargees who have less scruples, but some are good soldiers drawn by the high pay and higher tech they get to use. And these guys are seriously high tech." He looked at King. "Metal Storm weapons are only the tip of the technological iceberg with these guys. Hell, they knew who you were. That kind of intel is, well, let's just say some security heads are rolling. In some ways their hardware technology is beyond ours because they're willing to use weapons and equipment we won't touch until they've been tested for years. The one big advantage we have over them is experience."