His strategy was working. Or at least she thought it must be. The security program tracked each new virus, broke its code, sent antidotes shooting off to its entire UN-wide customer base. But this was a game the defense lost before the first whistle. The virus mutated constantly, generating new code faster than the system broke the old code, causing the system’s outgoing mail to increase exponentially. And each new antidote-paired copy of the virus contained an embedded packet of active code that attacked the receiving system and sent yet another help request shooting back to the virus zoo.
In twelve seconds the off-site provider’s network exceeded capacity, locked up, and went down. The target was cut out of the flock, and Cohen was ready to go to work in earnest.
Li maxed her realspace feed. Her squad was still sampling tank contents. They moved systematically down the rows of tanks, scanning and logging their contents. No search and destroy on this mission, just information-gathering.
‹Retrieval minus 8:10,› she told them. ‹Keep it lively.› She went back on-line just in time to watch Cohen fish a series of clearance codes out of the lab’s personnel files and drop into the database as a system administrator. ‹All clear?› she queried.
‹Nothing left to do but sniff out the bone.›
‹Well, sniff faster. 7:41 to retrieval.›
And back to realspace.
They were running late. Li sent Shanna and the two new recruits over to the far end of the lab, signaling that she’d cover the middle rows herself. They were flirting dangerously with missing their retrieval, and she didn’t want to contemplate the possibility of a delayed pickup in the dust storm that was still raging above ground. Nor did she want to find out the hard way that Soza hadn’t arranged backup retrieval.
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.
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