February 2009
The phone was ringing.
The sound penetrated the odd dream Adriana was having. Suddenly she was transported out of the outdoor supermarket that was also her high school and into the on-call room on the Neurology floor at Johns Hopkins. On call? She opens one eye. Was the ringing part of the dream, or wasn't it?
It wasn't. It wasn't the phone on the bedside table. It was the mobile phone, which was nowhere within arm's reach. That number was supposed to be for emergencies. But Adriana wasn't handling emergencies these days. She'd spent every waking moment of the past few months on the X7 project, that and finally pulling together the huge masses of data that had come out of the osteoregeneration study. Even at Manticore there's no such thing as a data-analysis emergency. It had to be Renfro again, calling from Seattle in another power move to demonstrate how many people she had at her beck and call. Watch this, Congressman. I'll say "frog" in the middle of the night – now look at them jump!
The ringing stopped. Voice mail had picked it up. Good, thought Adriana. Buys me time for a cup of coffee before I call her back. She groped for her glasses. They were in her bed, on top of the current issue of Human Molecular Genetics. She'd been reading when she fell asleep. Maybe more than every waking moment. The journal, which did not belong to her, was now creased down the middle where she'd rolled over on it. The ringing started again.
Evidently voice mail wasn' t good enough for Renfro, or whoever else would call at … three-oh-God in the morning. She blinked wearily. Where was the phone anyway? Jacket pocket, maybe? It can't be downstairs; the ringing is too loud for that. There was a pile of work stuff on the dresser – ID, passcard, three different digital doodads for getting through secure doors. The phone wasn't with them. Finally she tracked the sound to the pocket of the wool slacks she'd worn yesterday.
She fumbled it open. "This is Dr. Vertes," she yawned.
"Adriana?" It wasn't Renfro. It was Deck. At three in the morning, it's got to be personal, and he's got to be drunk. Dammit. She'd rather have Renfro and a data-analysis emergency.
This was his command voice, though, stern and clear, and it snapped her awake like strong coffee. "You need to get in here now. There's been an are casualties, and the project… I'll brief you when you get here. Which is ASAP. Understand?"
"I'm coming," she started to say, but he'd already hung up.
She was halfway dressed before she even put down the phone. Yesterday's slacks, yesterday's blouse, and the first shoes she could find. She filled her pockets – phone, car keys, the tangled lanyard of ID and dangling security bits.
Her coat should have been on the hook in the hall, but it wasn't. Crick, Watson, and Franklin had pulled it down to sleep on. She picked it up. As soon as the cats tumbled off, they started meowing. Of course. If Adriana was up, it was time for breakfast. She poured a pile of cat food in the general direction of their dish. She paused. Middle-of-the-night incidents could last for days. She kept pouring until the dish overflowed and the bag was empty.
Outside the night was bitter cold, and it was snowing. Miraculously, her third-hand SUV started almost at once.
Incident. Casualties. The Project. She considered the road, weighed speed against ice, and stepped on the gas.
Three of the X5s had been wounded and recaptured.
She knew their resilience was astonishing. Under controlled experimental conditions, out of eight subjects who sustained gunshot wounds to the extremities, seven maintained operational effectiveness (as determined by study criteria) of ≥80% throughout the following 120 minutes.
That was why Deck's men had aimed for the center of mass. Nothing less would have stopped X5s.
Out of three nine-year-old children wounded as they ran for the fence, two had been ripped open by automatic rifle fire. Thoracic cavity, abdominal cavity, spinal column – all reduced to a nearly indistinguishable tangle of shattered bone and shredded meat.
And yet they would probably recover.
The surgery had taken more than fourteen hours.
Until she scrubbed out, Adriana hadn't realized the depth of her exhaustion. The muscles in her neck and shoulders burned. Her tongue was fuzzy with thirst. Her hands had only a few minutes of supple steadiness left in them before the cramps and the aches began.
Werner was just as tired and there was still one more wounded X5.
They looked at the films together. Transverse diaphysial fracture of the tibia and fibula. It was a simple fracture; X5 bones snapped but rarely splintered. She'd worked on that design. "It's a skeletal injury," Werner said unnecessarily. Bones are your department.
Adriana's eyes slid heavily shut in a long, long blink.
"For your study," said Werner. "It could be valuable."
Setting a fracture would be less work than arguing with Werner. Besides, he might be right. Another data point. "Fine," she said. "I'll do it."
Two of Deck's men, and one of the instructors, guarded the boy who lay on the gurney in restraints – not padded hospital straps, but the heavy shackles they used in the basement. Steel rings and chains and cables covered him like a net. From the metal guard over his mouth, she assumed he'd bitten someone. Under each bit of steel there was a darkening bruise, like a shadow. He'd fought hard. His right leg, swollen and dark, bent between the knee and ankle the same awkward angle she'd seen on the films. There was a shackle around that ankle too.
The guards unlocked it, and the boy winced silently in pain.
"It's a simple fracture, she said. "In an X5, that's a fairly minor injury. We'll start an IV so we can medicate him, then I'll be able to reduce the fracture and get a cast on. He'll be fit for duty in a week or two."
The instructor scowled.
"Physically, I mean. Neuropsych isn't my department."
"And the medication?"
"We'll need to sedate him. It's going to be a painful procedure."
"It's going to be a learning experience. Besides, we can't risk interactions. He's going straight to PsyOps from here."
"I'd rather have him sedated and keep him in the infirmary overnight," she said. The instructor glared at her. X5s were resilient; the pain would probably be minimal. "But he's your responsibility. I understand."
When she set the bones the boy clenched his fists and made no sound. She applied the cast with the ease of long practice; she worked quickly – you had to with fiberglass bandages – but it still seemed to take forever. She couldn't help yawning.
Finally the cast was on and the boy's leg was propped on a pillow on the gurney. The guards started adjusting the ankle shackle so that they could fasten it over the cast. "Don't do that," she told them. "Give it twenty minutes to dry." She'd be happier if they'd let him rest before taking him to PsyOps.
She'd get her way if she pushed, but pushing took energy and this was no time to interfere in the X5 program. After tonight, the X5s were a problem, a horrible problem. Right now they were someone else's horrible problem, and the smart thing to do was to stay as far away as possible.
She'd still feel better if they got some pain meds into him.
She blinked again. It took half an hour. She heard the guards leave with their gurney and their prisoner but when she opened her eyes again, there were still two little boys waiting in the infirmary.Oh, damn. It can't be time for sick call yet, can it? No, it was night. Maybe an hour till lights-out in the barracks. Maybe less.
"X5-598 and X6-599 reporting as ordered, ma'am," said the older one.
The little one barely reached the X5's shoulder. He stood at attention and tried to conceal a yawn. The solemnity of his sleepy, serious face was paradoxically funny. Adriana tried not to smile.
"At ease," she told them. "Tell me about your orders, X5-598."
"Director Renfro ordered us to report to Dr. Stultzman, ma'am."
Renfro was in town; these two were Werner's patients. Oh, crap, and thank God, respectively. She'd go wake up Werner, and then at last she could shower and nap and eat with a clean conscience.
Five minutes under the shower in the locker room. Fifteen minutes with her head down on the table. Peanut-butter crackers from the vending machine. No drink machine on this floor, but in the fridge were four cans of Mountain Dew marked with someone else's initials. Adriana took them all and replaced them with an anonymous, illegible apology scrawled on a five-dollar bill. Three packages of crackers, then one can after another until her stomach stopped growling and her eyes stayed open. She'd sit with the two X5s in recovery until the meeting started.
The architects of Manticore had never anticipated a top-secret meeting involving thirty-two people. They were using the biggest conference room in the high-security area; even so, only the highest-ranking and the earliest arrivals had any chance at a chair.
Lydecker had one at the far end of the table. Even though his attention seemed focused on the papers in front of him, Adriana turned slightly aside to avoid his gaze.
The people who couldn't find chairs stood, if they were military. The civilian researchers mostly perched on the wide benchlike radiator. Oh, there was Leopold, near the corner. He moved over to make room for her. His breath smelled like coffee, like everyone's; like everyone's, his face was hollow and gray.
"How've you been?" she asked quietly.
He answered just as quietly. "Eight evaluation-and-reindoctrination sessions. You?"
"Fourteen hours in trauma surgery," she said. "So they brought you in from Seattle?"
He nodded toward the table. "I flew in with Renfro this morning."
Adriana hadn't even realized Renfro was in the room. She looked again at the people who sat around the table. The woman next to Lydecker was Renfro, all right, almost unrecognizeable with limp hair and no makeup and a sweatshirt that she must have borrowed from military supply. So now even the director was exhausted and without armor. Her bare face was like a signal flag: the situation had moved from incident through emergency to catastrophe.
Renfro knocked on the table. "All right," she snapped. "Let's talk about the current status."
Everyone looked at Lydecker. He cleared his throat twice. "Of the 25 X5s in unit two, 24 were involved in the … incident. Of those, nine have been recovered. Seven had minimal or minor injuries; two were seriously wounded. Three are dead." He stumbled over the words. From his voice Adriana couldn't tell tell whether he was drunk or just exhausted.
"The recaptured X5s are scheduled with the highest possible priority for immediate debriefing and reindoctrination in PsyOps. The X5 who remained in the barracks during the incident has been transferred to Isolation."
Renfro made a show of counting on her fingers. "And so we've lost…?"
Lydecker took a long drink of something from his steel mug. Whatever was in there wasn't coffee, not the way he gulped it. It's already a catastrophe. It's his catastrophe. And now he's drunk. What's beyond catastrophe?
Deck's voice had thickened perceptibly; he was almost mumbling. "Twelve."
"Twelve." Renfro repeated. Throughout the room people winced, sighed, rubbed the bridge of their noses. Some people muttered. Adriana didn't recognize the uniformed Army captain who was silently mouthing the words holy living shit.
"So the first priority is still the recovery effort," Renfro said. Her face was pale and lined, but the chilling insincere smile was as intimidating as ever. "After that, let's be sure none of the others follow those twelve over the fence. Neuropsych?"
Leopold stood up. He had index cards. "Director, Seattle PsyOps has run the Response-to-Indoctrination evaluation on eight prototypes who share the genome of the Gillette escapees. Since some of the genesets involved were iterated into the X6 series, we evaluated both X5 and X6 subjects. We interpreted the X6 results conservatively; the RtI evaluation was developed for subjects greater than five years of age, while the X6s we examined ranged in age from 39 to 51 months. Even with conservative interpretation, the evaluations of all subjects did confirm internalization of Manticore directives within currently acceptable limits."
Adriana realized she'd been holding her breath. She let it out now. Everyone from Genetics and Physiology did. If the siblings test acceptably, that's evidence that it's not genetic. Either that, or the tests don't work. That second possibility didn't seem to bother Leo; his expression was one of utter relief.
"Physiology?"
Adriana looked at Werner. Werner looked back at her with a stolid stubborn expression. Relief doesn't last long in one of these meetings, she thought, and she stood up.
"At the present time our response has been focused on trauma care to preserve the effectiveness of the wounded prototypes returned by perimeter security. Dr. Stutzman and I treated the two major trauma cases; both are currently in stable but serious condition. The remaining seven injured prototypes were treated and released to the Operations branch."
She wasn't sure about Werner's last two patients; routine clearance for PsyOps, probably. Unrelated, like that X4 with food poisoning that someone had hauled into the middle of the tense bloody emergency mess. There was something to be said there about triage and priority and staffing and dietary hygiene. In her fatigue Adriana started to say some of it before she realized what she was doing, cut herself off in mid-sentence, and sat down. Leo had been smart to bring index cards.
"Questions?" said Renfro.
A woman in a lab coat raised her hand. Adriana didn't recogize her face, but she knew the voice from ndless conference calls – she was the leader of the Genetics team in Seattle. "Have any decisions been made about the implications of this… this incident…for the X7 program? Given that the data we have seems to point to an environmental cause – "
A man in black fatigues interrupted. He had a heavy gauze dressing over his right ear. "Data? What data? You don't have data. You have eight PsyOps reports, and Dr. Pacen just said that some of them –what, half? Half of them might not even be accurate. And on the strength of that data you're going to go ahead and knock up a batch of surrogates with the clones of those evil little fu – excuse me, Director – those flawed prototypes – who killed eleven people on their way out of here?"
An astonishgly young scientist in a Cal Tech T-shirt was up on her feet in an instant. "And how many of those flawed prototypes came out of Unit One? Zero. They all started out in the same place ten years ago, and now twenty-two Unit One prototypes are asleep in their barracks and twelve Unit Two prototypes are halfway to Montana. Occam's Razor. It's environment."
"You bet it's environment," shouted someone else. "It's a training problem. It was obvious. It's been obvious since last year, when they were climbing all over the goddamn roof. Those are the PsyOps reports we ought to be looking at. That and the disciplinary report, if you can get it before Don Lydecker buries it in a drawer somewhere."
In the middle of the shouting, Deck's voice was a low and dangerous growl. "Don't you dare accuse me of…"
"Enough." Renfro slammed her hand down on the table. "Enough. The X7 schedule – where are we?"
The Seattle genetics woman answered. "Scheduled to move the first ten embryos to in vivo gestation by the 14th, Director."
"How many of those embryos are further iterations of any of the genotypes we're discussing?"
"Two." She fumbled with her papers. "That would be … X7-452 and X7-471."
"What's the impact of waiting – say, two, three months?"
The genetics lead looked up and off to the left, as if staring at calculations on an invisible blackboard. "Time… we'd end up behind schedule by… six months. No more than seven. Budget – hard to tell. Rough, rough guess, maybe eleven million."
"Then continue on schedule," said Renfro. "We're done. We'll regroup tomorrow morning, six-thirty. For now, go get some rest, get some food, get whatever will keep you from resorting to violence in the middle of a staff meeting. Oh… Deck? I'd like to talk to you for a minute…"
Werner caught Adriana in the hall. "Were you going to do any of the post-mortem?"
"The three X5s they brought back? I don't know." It might be valuable. She had more than enough data already. She had to get some rest. She shouldn't waste the opportunity. "Maybe." At the very least she'd go down and talk to pathology.
Pathology was busy; the tech on duty had looked at Adriana's badge and waved her into the pale gray room with the steel tables. She'd expected three little bodies, not six.
She recognized the three that Deck's men had brought back. On the next table, though, there was another; this one was female. Adriana knew what had happened in the Unit Two barracks, but somehow she hadn't expected to see the little girl who had seized the gun and started it all. From the eyebrows down her face was perfect. Peaceful, Adriana wanted to think, but it wasn't. It was fierce. Adriana thought of the silent little boy with the bruises under his chains. This one had fought hard too. She'd died angry. That seemed right for an X5, somehow.
There were two more. Adriana's stomach knotted. She hoped the larger one wasn't the X5 with the broken leg. Or the X4 she'd thrown out of the infirmary; she told him to go vomit elsewhere because they needed the space. He hadn't seemed that sick.
It wasn't. It was X5-598. Not a mark on him, except the IV needle still taped to the back of his hand. The other was the X6, a copy in miniature in every detail. Adriana was ashamed that she'd ever laughed at his solemn, serious eyes. Their faces had none of the girl's rage, just stillness. Of course. They'd come just before lights-out. They'd been tired. They would have been happy to rest on the clean white cot with the soft pillow to give blood samples or be vaccinated or whatever they'd been told they were doing.
She had no intention of dissecting either of them. Any of them.
Instead she had every intention of leaving. She had to do it now.
Otherwise, she'd never be able to make it through the meeting in the morning.
