Scott Sigler: Ancestor

Danté nodded, the muscles of his big jaw twitching a little. “That old woman drives me crazy. No wonder the Chinese dished her off like that.”

What a prick. Dished her off? Danté had all but begged the Chinese for permission to add Jian to the Genada staff. “Come on, Danté, you know we got the better of that deal.”

“It’s only a good deal if she makes it happen and we turn a profit. And if she doesn’t, a lot of people are going to die miserable deaths.”

“I’m more than familiar with the consequences of failure, Danté.”

Danté’s scowl softened a little. “Of course, P. J. My apologies. But we can’t keep funding this bottomless pit forever. Our investor demands results. Call me if anything else comes up.”

“Yes sir,” Colding said, then broke the connection. The spinning Genada logo returned. Genada had many investors, but only one that actually worried Danté—the Chinese government. For Danté to snap like that, the Chinese had to be pushing for a return on their significant, if covert, investment.

And that meant time was running out.

COLDING WALKED OUT of the main building’s airlock and into the morning cold. Even after many months, he couldn’t get used to these temperatures. He ran the awkward run of someone trying to stay tucked inside his coat, quickly covering the fifty yards to the hangar.

The hangar looked completely out of place on the snowy, barren landscape. Seven stories high at the peak, 150 yards long, 100 yards wide. Two huge sliding front doors allowed for a plane that would never really come, which was why the hangar doubled as the barn for the cows, and tripled as the garage for the facility’s two vehicles. At the base of the left-hand sliding door was a normal, man-sized entrance. Colding waddle-ran to it and slipped inside.

Inside, heat . Thank the powers that be. He walked to one of the heaters and pressed the higher button again and again, cranking it up to full. He heard natural gas hissing through the PVC pipe as he stripped off his gloves and held his hands in front of the grate. The security-room computer controlled this heater and the fifty or sixty just like it that were spaced along the ground and up on the ceiling, but the temporary override was like heaven.

“Oh, come on,” a high-pitched voice called out. “You’re turning up the heat? It’s frickin’ toasty in here.”

“That’s because you’re a mutant from Canada,” Colding called over his shoulder. “You were probably born in an igloo.” He jerked his hands back as the heat nearly burned him. There, that was better.

Colding put his gloves back on, trapping the heat radiating off his warm skin. He turned, saw the thick-bodied Brady Giovanni start up the diesel engine of the small tanker truck they used to refuel Bobby Valentine’s helicopter.

The hangar wasn’t exactly toasty , as Brady had said, but it was well above freezing. The seventy-thousand-square-foot building held fifty Holstein cows at the far end. They were over sixty yards away, a testament to the building’s size. The big black-and-white animals chewed on feed. Occasionally one of them let out a moo that echoed off the hangar’s sheet-metal roof some seven stories above.

On this end of the hangar sat the fuel truck and a Humvee. The Hummer saw very little use other than weekly eyeball checks of the off-site data backup, which sat at the end of the facility’s one-mile-long landing strip, and for taking Erika Hoel to weekly checkups of Baffin Island’s two backup herd facilities. Each facility was a miserable thirty miles away—a sixty-mile round-trip with Hoel was about as much fun as a barbed-wire enema.

Brady eased out of the fuel truck, leaving the engine to idle. “All set for Bobby,” he said. “I’ll start refueling his chopper as soon as he lands.”

“It’s cold as hell outside this morning,” Colding said. “After you open the doors, make sure you adjust the heat so the cows don’t get chilled.”

“Sure thing. I’ll crank the heat for them. You might say it will be a hot time in the old town… this morning.”

Brady laughed at his own joke, as usual, leaving Colding to smile and nod vaguely as he politely tried to grasp the humor. Brady’s laugh sounded much like his voice: high-pitched, more at home in the body of a fifteen-year-old girl than a six-foot-four, three-hundred-pound man. As a security guard, Brady cut an imposing figure. No one understood his jokes, not even Gunther or Andy Crosthwaite, who had both served with the man in the Canadian Special Forces.

Speaking of Andy… Colding checked his watch. A little past 10:30 A.M. Imagine that, Andy “The Asshole” Crosthwaite was late.

“Brady, you heard from Andy?”

Brady shook his head.

“Shit. Well, he’ll be out here soon to help you with the refueling. I’m gonna step outside for a second. Hold down the fort.”

Brady laughed his high-pitched laugh. “Hold down the fort . That’s good!”

Colding smiled, nodded. Hard enough not getting Brady’s jokes—now he apparently didn’t get his own.

He walked out of the hangar’s small personnel door and back into the subzero morning’s blazing white. His feet scrunched the facility’s packed snow as he walked away from the hangar, until they sank calf-deep into undisturbed drifts. He stood alone, staring out at the white expanse of Baffin Island. With his back to the lab, there wasn’t a building in sight.

Three years. Fuck sleeping, he should be drunk . Maybe he’d hang with Tim Feely after the morning’s experiment. Tim was always down for a drink and always seemed to have a bottle close at hand.

Three years .

“I just wish I had you back,” Colding muttered. But Clarissa couldn’t come back, no matter how bad he wished for it. He couldn’t blunt the pain permanently lodged in his chest. What he could do, though, was make this goddamn project work… and by doing so, spare hundreds of thousands of people from experiencing pain just like his.

He turned back to look at the compound, his home for almost two years. About fifty yards southwest of the hangar stood the compound’s other building. The square, cinder-block building only looked simple. Its two entry points were facility airlocks that maintained a slight negative pressure. It was a sobering thought—Colding’s home was a place designed to keep death in.

The building contained state-of-the-art labs for genetics, computers and veterinary medicine as well as a small cafeteria, rec room and nine 600-square-foot apartments. It was a good-sized facility, but after twenty isolated months even the Trump Tower would seem claustrophobic.

Between the hangar and the main facility stood a metal platform that supported a ten-foot satellite dish. The platform, the hangar and the facility were the sum total of civilization at Genada’s Baffin Island base.

A distant, rapid growl of rotor blades echoed off the landscape. Colding turned to see a dark speck on the horizon. The speck quickly grew into the familiar image of a Sikorski S-76C helicopter. Colding loved the sight of that machine. If you took a typical TV news chopper, removed all the logos and painted it flat black, you’d have a twin to Bobby’s Sikorski. With twelve seats and a range of over four hundred nautical miles, the Sikorski could get the entire staff to safety in case of an emergency.

The heli closed in, then swooped down to the mile-long landing strip like a noisy shadow, kicking up clouds of powdery snow. The landing gear extended. Bobby Valentine set her down gently.

After a short pause, a metallic rattling sound echoed across the snowy landscape. The hangar’s massive doors—240 feet wide and 70 feet high—split in the middle and slowly opened just enough for the fuel truck. Brady drove it out and stopped close to the Sikorski. Colding walked toward the helicopter, watching the hangar doors to see if they would close.