A few rows away, Dalloway stopped and put a hand into an open tank. He jerked it out and waved it in front of him while a rainbow oil slick of mutating viruses and counterviruses battled across it. ‹I’m melting! I’m melting!›
‹Knock it off, Dalloway.›
Then one of the newbies screamed.
A short scream; Shanna clapped a hard hand over his mouth before it really got started. But when Li saw what the two of them were looking at, she couldn’t blame the kid.
The tank had a body in it. All the tanks at that end of the lab had bodies in them. They were women. Or, more precisely, one woman: smallish, recognizably Korean—a rarity in and of itself in this fourth century of the human diaspora—and brown-skinned despite the artificial pallor induced by water and lab lights.
‹They can’t run a crèche in a nongovernment facility,› Dalloway said uncertainly. ‹Aren’t there laws about that?›
‹It’s not a crèche,› Li said. ‹They’re just wetware hosts.›
But this was no approved wetware she’d ever seen.
She looked into the tank in front of her. Took in the bar codes stamped on the sallow flesh, the atrophied limbs, the silver glint of ceramsteel filament twining through exposed nerve cells. At first glance the wetware being grown here was no different from the AI-supported wire job every soldier in the squad was equipped with, or even from the civilian VR rigs rich teenagers used to surf streamspace. But this wetware was growing in adult bodies, not viral matrix. And the pale, submerged faces were too identical, too regular, too inhumanly perfect to be anything but genetic constructs.
Li stared at the bodies, caught by an echo, a wisp of memory that skittered away like a spooked horse every time she tried to lay hands on it. Was this a geneline she’d seen before? On Gilead? Were they culturing wetware for Syndicate soldiers? And why? Who would be crazy enough to risk it?
‹Can you run some of those samples?› she asked Shanna.
‹Sure. But what do we do if it’s… what it looks like?›
Li checked their time. Seven minutes, twelve seconds. ‹We call Soza. Cohen, we’re going to need a line to HQ.›
‹No you’re not.›
‹We have a situation here.›
‹Irrelevant. Take the samples and forget about it.›
‹Have you seen what we’re looking at?›
‹Yes,› Cohen answered, this time on a private link. ‹But you’re not going to get Soza on the line no matter how many times you call. And if you miss your retrieval, illegal construct breeding is going to be the least of your worries.›
Li made sense of Cohen’s words just as Shanna pulled up the first DNA read.
“They’re constructs, all right,” Shanna said.
Catrall cursed. “Those bastards dropped us in a Syndicate facility without even telling us? What kind of shi—”
“Stow it,” Li told him. “What Syndicate?” she asked Shanna. “What series?”
Shanna hesitated. “They’re… not. I don’t think they’re Syndicate genesets at all. This is obsolete tech. Prebreakaway corporate product. These things are fucking dinosaurs.”
And suddenly Li knew with sickening certainty what she was looking at. She remembered that face not because it was the face of her old enemy, but because it was her own face.
These constructs were her twins, their genesets spliced and assayed and patented to survive the man-made hell of the Bose-Einstein mines on Compson’s World. And they were here despite the fact that it had been illegal to tank a genetic construct anywhere in UN space for over twenty years.
She turned away, feeling sick and dizzy, hoping that the eerie resemblance was only visible to her eyes.
“Let’s finish up and get the hell out of here,” she said. “And keep your heads screwed on. We need to make that retrieval, or we’re going to be on the receiving end of a hot package. Seven minutes and counting.”
She flicked open her VR window and found Cohen still scanning datafiles.
‹6:51 to retrieval,› she sent. ‹How long have you known about the artillery?›
‹Just remembered it.›
‹You expect me to believe that?›
‹Believe what you want. Just be quiet and let me work.›
She gave him a full minute. ‹5:51,› she told him. ‹You’ve got a minute and twenty.›
‹I need more.›
‹We don’t have more.›
She toggled her realspace feed. The squad was hovering, eyeballing her nervously.
‹Secure the corridor,› she told Dalloway.
Back on-line. Cohen was running twenty-odd parallel searches now, working so fast she could only track him as a vast icy sweep of light cutting through the lab comp’s numbers.
‹Status?› she queried.
No answer.
‹Talk to me, Cohen.›
‹Got it!› he said.
The link wavered. “Shit!” Kolodny said, shaking her head and blinking. Then she was gone, and the link was back up before Li even had time to feel the vertigo hit.
‹What the hell was that, Cohen?›
‹I can’t—there’s something screwy with the interface. Just give me a minute.›
‹We haven’t got one.›
But a minute later he was still jacked in, and Li was still waiting.
‹Do I have to jack you out myself?› she asked, turning to stare at him.
That was when she saw the blood on Kolodny’s face.
She jerked Kolodny away from the comp station and yanked the jack from her head, knowing even as she did it that she was too late. She was still standing there with the wire in her hands when the first shots whined down the corridor.
‹Man down!› Dalloway broadcast.
Li flipped to VR, picked up Dalloway’s feed. Catrall lay in a twisted heap at the foot of the stairs. Four guards rattled into view, the last one down stopping to turn Catrall over with a booted foot and take his rifle.
“We’re leaving,” she told Cohen.
The only answer she got was the clatter of Kolodny’s carbine hitting the floor.
Kolodny was bleeding out. Fluid dripped from her nostrils, leaving watery pink splatters on the white tiles. She moved jerkily; the muscles of her back and legs were going into spasm. Li had seen wet bugs at work before. Cohen didn’t have to tell her Kolodny was only minutes away from being unable to walk at all. Or that she was slipping down a slope that would only end in one thing unless they got her out: flatlining.
‹Can she walk?› Li asked.
‹For now.›
‹What if you drop off-shunt?›
Cohen’s laugh flickered across the numbers like brushfire. ‹I’m the only thing holding her together.›
She heard gunfire in the corridor—and this time it wasn’t the muffled whine of discharging pulse rifles but the crack of real bullets hitting concrete and ceramsteel. She toggled Dalloway’s channel and saw that he was pinned down at the far end of the corridor, and Shanna and the others were too far out of position even to give him covering fire.
The lab seemed three times longer than it had on the way in. By the time they’d covered half its length, Kolodny’s vitals were jagging and skipping, status alarms exploding behind Li’s eyes like rescue flares.
“Wait!” Cohen gasped, jerking out of her grip to turn back toward the comp station. Li followed his gaze to Kolodny’s empty hand—and she remembered the carbine jangling, unnoticed, unretrieved, onto the tiles.
“Too far,” she said—and handed him her own pulse rifle.
“No,” he said. “Keep it. You’re going to be covering me anyway. And the Viper’s useless in this. You shouldn’t be using it.”
“No one’s using the Viper,” Li said, reaching down to ease the Beretta out of its ankle holster.
She saw Cohen’s look of shock even through the mess Kolodny’s face had become. “Catherine, if you shoot someone with that—”