Scott Sigler: Ancestor

They stayed open. Which meant, obviously, that Andy Crosthwaite was not in the hangar to shut them.

The main building’s front airlock opened. Colding expected to see Andy, but instead Gunther Jones trotted out into the cold. At six-foot-two, Gunther stood eye to eye with Colding but was much skinnier, his black Genada jacket always drooping from his rail-thin frame like a loose shirt on a wire hanger.

“Gun, where the hell is The Asshole?”

“Asleep. I didn’t want to leave you guys shorthanded.” He handed Colding a walkie-talkie. “That’s punched in to Andy’s room vid-phone.”

Colding sighed and pressed the transmit button. “Andy, pick up.”

No answer.

“Andy, come in. I’ll keep squawking until you answer.”

The handset crackled back. “Do you mind? I’m trying to sleep.”

“Get your ass out here, Andy. Gunther’s supposed to be off-duty.”

“Is Gun there?”

“Yes, he came out to cover for your lazy ass.”

“Then it’s a reach-around happy ending for all. Leave me alone, Colding.”

“Dammit, Andy, come out here and do your job.”

“I’ll pass. My GAF level is pretty low right now.”

GAF? Colding looked at Gunther.

“His give a fuck level,” Gunther said.

Colding considered Andy only slightly more useful than a day-old dog turd. He’d served with Magnus, which was the only reason the dangerous little bastard had a job at all.

“Andy, I’m—”

“Uh-oh,” Andy said. “I think this thing is broken.”

A click, and with it, the conversation was over. Colding didn’t bother hitting the transmit button.

“Don’t sweat it,” Gunther said. “I don’t mind. Let me say hi to Bobby and I’ll close up the hangar, crank the heat. Cool?”

Colding nodded. The two men reached the Sikorski as the rotor blades started their slow spin-down and Bobby Valentine hopped out.

Bobby was the Pagliones’ private pilot and all-around errand boy. He pushed his heavy brownish-blond hair away from his eyes and flashed the smile that seemed to get him laid everywhere he went. He carried a lunchbox-sized metal case in his left hand. His right he offered to Colding, who shook it firmly.

“P. J., how are you?”

“I’m just fine, Bobby-V,” Colding said. “Okay flight?”

Bobby nodded. “It was fine, as the return trip will be if I get out of here before that low-pressure system comes in.” Bobby reached out to shake Gunther’s hand. “Gun, my man, how’s the writing coming?”

“Good, real good! I’m almost finished with the third book. Stephenie Meyer won’t know what hit her.”

“Go get ’em, tiger,” Bobby said.

Gunther nodded, then jogged to the hangar. He ran by Brady, who was dragging a fuel hose to the Sikorski.

Bobby gently lifted the metal case like it was a fragile heirloom and handed it to Colding. “Right there is a regular who’s who of extinction,” Bobby said. “Caribbean monk seal, Stellar’s sea cow, pig-footed bandicoot and a Tasmanian wolf.”

“A Tasmanian wolf? Those have been gone since the thirties.”

Bobby nodded. “We found a stuffed one in Auckland. Got some DNA out of the fur or something. Okay, package delivered, so let’s get me turned around and outta here.”

“That soon? Doc Rhumkorrf is dying to go flying with you.”

Bobby checked his watch. “Can Herr Dok-tor do it right now?”

“He’s in the middle of an embryonic immune reaction experiment.”

“Sorry, I can’t wait,” Bobby said. “Besides, Doc Rhumkorrf doesn’t really need any more lessons. I’ll take him out next time.”

Colding checked his watch: 10:50 A.M. Rhumkorrf & Co. had been at it for three hours now and would soon finish. Colding hurried inside, leaving Brady and Gunther to get Bobby turned around quickly.

Hopefully this time, unlike the last fifteen embryonic runs, Colding would be able to report to Danté with some good news.

THE TINY, FLOATING ball of cells could not think, could not react. It could not feel. If it could, it would have felt only one thing…

Fear.

Fear at the monster floating close by. Amorphous, insidious, unrelenting, the monster reached out with flowing tendrils that touched the ball of cells, tasting the surface.

The floating ball vibrated a little each time one of its cells completed mitosis, splitting from one cell into two daughter cells. And that happened rapidly… more rapidly than in any other animal, any other life-form. Nothing divided this fast, this efficiently. So fast the living balls vibrated every three or four minutes, cells splitting, doubling their number over and over again.

The floating balls had begun as a cow’s single-celled egg. Now? Only the outer membrane could truly be called bovine . The interior contained a unique genome that was mostly something else.

The amorphous monster? A macrophage, a white blood cell, a hunter/killer taken from that same cow’s blood and dropped into a petri dish with the hybrid egg.

The monster’s tendrils reached out, boneless, shapeless, flowing like intelligent water. They caressed the rapidly dividing egg, sensing chemicals, tasting the egg for one purpose only:

To see if the egg was self .

It was not. The egg was other .

And anything other had to be destroyed.

JIAN KNEW, EVEN at this early stage, that failure had come calling once again.

She, Claus Rhumkorrf, Erika Hoel and Tim Feely watched the giant monitor that took up an entire wall of the equipment-packed genetics lab. The monitor’s upper-right-hand corner showed green numbers: 72/150. The rest of the huge screen showed a grid of squares, ten high, fifteen across. Over half of those squares were black. The remaining squares each showed a grainy-gray picture of a highly magnified embryo.

The “150” denoted the number of embryos alive when the experiment began. Fifty cows, three genetically modified eggs from each cow, each egg tricked into replicating without fertilization. As soon as a fertilized egg, called a zygote , split into two daughter cells it became an embryo, a growing organism. Each embryo sat in a petri dish filled with a nutrient-rich solution and immune system elements from the same cow: macrophages, natural killer cells and T-lymphocytes, elements that combined to work as the body’s own special-ops assassins targeted at viruses, bacteria and other harmful pathogens.

The “72” represented the number of embryos still alive, not yet destroyed by the voracious white blood cells.

Jian watched the counter change to 68/150.

Rhumkorrf seemed to vibrate with anger, the frequency of that vibration increasing ever so slightly each time the number dropped. He was only a hair taller than Jian, but she outweighed him by at least a hundred pounds. His eyes looked wide and buglike behind thick, black-framed glasses. The madder he became, the more he shook. The more he shook, the more his comb-over came apart, exposing his shiny balding pate.

65/150

“This is ridiculous,” Erika said, her cultured Dutch accent dripping with disgust. Jian glared at the demure woman. She hated Hoel, not only because she was a complete bitch, but also because she was so pretty and feminine, all the things that Jian was not. Hoel wore her silvery-gray hair in a tight bun that revealed a haughty face. She had the inevitable wrinkles due any forty-five-year-old woman, but nothing that even resembled a laugh line. Hoel looked so pale Jian often wondered if the woman had seen anything but the inside of a sunless lab for the last thirty years.

61/150

“Time?” Rhumkorrf asked.