Doom

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

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Doom, the movie novel © 2005 by Universal Studios Licensing LLLP.

Doom, the movie © 2005 by Universal Studios.

Doom, the game © 2005 by id Software, Inc.

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For all those brilliant guys at id

My nerves are made of steel, my nerves are made of steel, my nerves are made of steel, my nerves are made of steel, my nerves are made of steel, my nerves are made of steel…

— Monster Magnet, “The Right Stuff”

Thanks to: Ed Schlesinger

The producers, director, designers, and writers of Doom, the movie

One

A DARK CORRIDOR, deep underground. A single shriek, quickly cut off. The sound of running feet, coming closer…

Pounding down the corridor, Dr. Todd Carmack couldn’t see his pursuers, couldn’t hear them, couldn’t smell them, not here — but he knew they were behind him, gaining ground on him and the other five scientists.

Oh yeah: the things were solid enough, loud and reeking enough, and murderous enough — one of them had stood over him, as he lay on his back in the lab, dripping drool on him, gnashing its teeth in anticipation, a lab technician’s raggedly severed arm still clutched in its talons. Carmack had pulled the limp, semiconscious Dr. Norris onto him, putting Norris between him and that thing — it had to go through Norris’s body first, and that had given Dr. Carmack a moment to scramble away and start the headlong flight down this corridor. But Norris’s sobbing screams still echoed around Carmack’s skull — they seemed to echo down the corridor and up through level on level of the labs; despairing screams shivering over the archaeological digs, reverberating across the poisoned surface of the planet Olduvai.

Legs and arms pumping, sweat streaming down his face, Carmack figured he was going to die of a heart attack before he got to that heavy door. He was sixty fucking years old, for God’s sake. His thudding heart was trying to climb out of his chest; and every breath slashed his lungs like the scalpels he’d used on the subjects in the lab.

He seemed to see the terrified eyes of the lab animals, now, coming out of the darkness ahead…

Ten more strides ahead, a fluctuating pool of light waited, threatening to cut out with the flickering of the fluorescent bulb illuminating the door: the door to safety. If there was any safety on this goddamned planet.

He risked a look over his shoulder, saw the other scientists running in and out of the intermittent shadow; a middle-aged woman in a white lab coat, Dr. Tallman, was several strides behind Carmack.

His assistant, Dexter, a spindly awkward man, face contorted with terror — was taking up the rear, slowing down now, hobbling, clutching his left leg. A cramp. And then something swept blurrily from the shadows to one side, a dark, strangely rippling arm encircled Dexter’s waist and jerked him screaming into the darkness. A blink, and he was simply gone…

Carmack stumbled, facing front and just managing not to fall headlong, knowing he’d be weeping with fear if he had the wind to do it with. He flung himself against the door, just as the light overhead started sparking, hissing…about to go out.

“Get it open!” Tallman screamed, running down the hall toward him. Looking absurd sprinting in her white lab coat, as they all did. “For God’s sake, Carmack, get it open!”

Gasping for breath, chest heaving, pulse hammering in his ears, Carmack punched at the small keyboard on the door’s control panel, but his sight was blurry with sweat, and he had to hit CLEAR and the number combination again…the door, dented and marked by claw marks, clattered within itself, struggling to respond…

Glancing down the corridor, Carmack glimpsed a hulking black silhouette closing its claws around the throat of the last scientist in the terrified, sprinting procession, Willits — and though Willits was the biggest of them, almost three hundred pounds, he was snatched into the shadows as if he’d been a rabbit caught up by a French chef.

There was a wet crunch, audible fifty feet away — but the door was at last shuddering open, just as Dr. Tallman huffed up to Carmack.

The door stuck, only partway open.

Carmack turned sideways and forced himself through the opening, into the lab, immediately punching at the interior control panel. He jabbed the EMERGENCY CLOSE AND LOCK button.

“Dr. Carmack!” Tallman yelled — and shoved her arm through to stop the door closing — it slammed shut on her upper limb with a sickening crunch. Tallman gave out a piteous squeal, her trapped arm twitching.

One of the others shrilled, “— for God’s sake, Carmack!”

It was a matter of triage, Carmack thought, floundering inwardly for justification. There was no way they could all make it.

Tallman shrieked, her twitching arm going blue — then it was dragged upward as something smashed her body about, flew ceilingward in the space left by the partly open door, smacked hard into the top of the frame with shattering force, only to immediately whip downward again, slapping the floor like the dead meat it had become. Something was wrenching Dr. Tallman’s body; something else was at the others. Carmack could hear them sobbing, could hear enormous jaws gnashing, flesh wetly rending.

Tallman’s arm again flapped up and down in the slot of the door, splashing blood, as if the door itself was eating it…and finally it severed, the crudely amputated limb falling onto the floor of the lab, the door closing most of the way.

It wasn’t over. Tallman was still alive, out there, her screams alternating with begging…and bubbling sounds…

But Carmack felt a little relief, seeing the steel door finish closing — maybe he was safe now! — until something began pounding on it with jackhammer force. The door shuddered, creaking, and dust drifted from the ceiling.

Carmack recoiled, stumbled to the video-comm panel, forced himself to concentrate on tapping the keyboard, setting up a transmission to home — light-years away.

The light went green, signifying open channel, and he began, “This is Dr. Carmack —” He had to raise his voice to be heard over the screaming from the corridor. “— at Classified Research, Olduvai! ID 6627! We’ve had a level-five breach, implement quarantine procedures immediately —”

A final sobbing cry from beyond the door…the sound of tearing. Crunching bone. A sound — what was it? Was it the sound of flesh being gobbled down?

“— I repeat! Implement level-five quarantine procedures now!”

He hit the SEND button. The screen read out,

TRANSMISSION SENT.

TIME UNTIL RECEPTION:

2:56:18…17….16…

Christ, he thought, almost three hours before they’d even get the message…The pounding at the door redoubled. Almost methodical now. Thud. Thud. Thud.

He turned to see that the metal door was denting inward. This room was supposed to be supremely reinforced, ultrahigh security. And he wasn’t safe even here.

He turned desperately back to the comm screen.

2:56:11…10…9…

And a feeling washed over Carmack as he watched the hopeless countdown. A feeling that was also a realization of his fate.

So this is it, he thought.

This is what doom feels like.

Two

REAPER IS ON point, that hot, wet dusk on the edge of the methane fields, five miles north of the fuel-processing center. Reaper is buzz cut, clean-shaven, with sharp features, two dark slashes for eyebrows, and dark eyes as grim as his name. His real name is John Grimm; the other guys in the “Privines” — slang for Privatized Marines — called him Reaper, and by now he answers to it. Monikers are a tradition in their unit.

So the Japanese guy coming through the Amazonian rain forest after Reaper is just Mac; and after him, part of their single-file patrol, is a bulky, implacable black man, who goes by Destroyer — which’d be a nickname to induce eye-rolling if he hadn’t earned it thirty or forty times; then, tall and wiry, comes Duke.

After Duke is Jumper — a red-haired soldier twitchy with nervous energy, perpetual loopy grin, and a humorous squint to his green eyes, always spoiling for a fight. His real last name is Cable — he’s been there for Reaper since boot camp.

Then there’s Goat. Long face and tuft of beard that goes with the name, mutters under his breath — you can never make out what he’s saying — and his hands shake when he’s not in a firefight. Brutally efficient when he is.

Bringing up the rear, sunken-eyed and sullen, is plain old Portman — he hasn’t been with them long and hasn’t earned a combat name.

Each man wears helmets with headsets, lightly armored cammies, RRTS insignia on one shoulder, United Aerospace Corporation patches on the other: UAC Special Assignment. Each carries an M-100 combination assault rifle and grenade launcher — they’ve been specially assigned for the mission…

Maybe not the right weapons, Reaper is thinking. Their usual arsenal is what they’d trained with…

Somewhere far away, John Grimm shuddered under Plexiglas. He was lying on a cushioned table, with electrodes taped to his temples, the sensors slowly rotating over his cranium scanning his brain, the military therapist having insisted…

“I must insist, John,” she’d said. “I must insist…”

“They insisted on these fucking M-100s,” Reaper is muttering, as Duke draws up beside him, on the edge of the clearing. Reaper slings his rifle over his shoulder, raises his right hand to signal a halt, the other hand wiping sweat from his head as he scans the tree line. Interlocked umbrella-shaped trees, branchless for a hundred feet up, make a canopy over most of the rain forest. The path leads through the clearing to the methane fields, but there is no way Reaper is going to take his men into that clearing, an ideal spot for an ambush, without checking it out first. Intel has anti-UAC guerillas heading for the general area of the methane fields, probably bent on sabotage. Maybe they’ll hit this one — or maybe not.

“These rifles — I think we’re in a goddamn test drive…” Reaper adds, swinging the rifle back into readiness again.

“We’re testing these weapons?” Duke asks softly, looking down at his weapon. “You mean all they did was, like, fire at some targets somewhere?”

“That’s what I mean. M-100 hasn’t been significantly field-tested. Meaning not tested for reaction to humidity, for starters.”

“And goddamn if it ain’t humid here,” says Duke, wiping his forehead with the back of his hand.

“We should’ve brought our regular ordnance, left these in the…Hold on, you see something move, over about three o’clock, under that tree there?”

“That tree? That’s like pointing out a snowflake in a blizzard.”

“That yellowish one that’s leaning, Duke — look, right there, two frog’s hairs to the left —”

“I make the tree, but I don’t see any — wait. Yeah. There’s someone there…I see a weapon! Let’s hit cover, John.”

Reaper nods and signals the others. The patrol melts back into the underbrush — but they’ve been spotted and some anxious guerilla opens fire. A flock of something red and feathery takes to the air, startled by the rattling submachine gun…Twigs and leaves shower down close to the patrol as the SMG rounds cut through the brush.

“Anybody hit?”

“No.”

“Negative…How many are there?”

“No telling. Portman, Duke, you head northeast, see if you can flank them, you other guys with me…But not you, Jumper…”

Reaper tensed under the glass, fitfully opening his eyes, but seeing only that day in the rain…Seeing…

“Yes, sir?”

“Jumper, I’m just a corporal, and you don’t have to call me sir, goddammit…”

“Hey — I like calling you sir, you’re such a macho hot pants of a swingin’ dick.”

“And you’re a talented comic. Now lay some fire down over at three o’clock, do not expose yourself…” Knowing that was contradictory directions. Firing at the enemy would itself expose Jumper.

“Deploying…sir!” Jumper grins and, hunching down, slips off into the brush as another probing strafe of SMG fire chips across a tree trunk, just over their heads.

“Permission to return fire, sir,” Destroyer says.

“Nah, not yet, bro,” Reaper answers. “You and Portman watch my six, I’m gonna push their lines, see how far I can get before they push back…”

“Roger that.”

Hunched over, Reaper leads Destroyer and Goat around to the right, skirting the edge of the clearing. It’s getting darker: shadows lengthening, air seeming to thicken to transparent blue gel as the sun eases into the horizon. He hears stuttering gunfire from Jumper, jabbing at the guerillas’ flank, hears the guerillas returning fire.

Reaper hurries, trying to take advantage of the decoy fire, and finds himself in a narrow opening in the leaf-carpeted, underbrush —

And suddenly there’s a young guerilla, SMG in his hands, popping up from behind a lichen-coated fallen tree, his face drawn in fear as he fires sloppily at them — firing in sheer hysteria.

Reaper fires back, and the guerilla goes spinning backward, seeming to fall in slow motion…

Reaper writhed under the electrodes, wanting out, feeling trapped in the dimly sensed glass coffin — and trapped in the past. A voice from somewhere was saying, “I think he’s fighting the therapy, maybe we’d better…”

“No,” a woman’s voice said, “if he doesn’t relive this now, he’ll relive it as repression stress, he’ll snap in combat…”

Goat vaults the log, comes down beside the kid, gun butt at ready to smash his head in if he’s still got any fight in him…Hesitates. Stares.

The young guerilla — not more than fifteen years old, Reaper guesses — has been torn open just under the rib cage by the close-range burst from Reaper, and he’s lying on his back twisting like a salted slug. Whimpering.

In the glass coffin, Reaper twisted his body exactly as the kid had…

The boy is moaning something in his own language. Reaper touches the insta-translator switch on his headset. “I’m sorry,” the translator voice says, as the kid repeats himself. “Sorry I let them know we were there…I made up for it, Uncle, didn’t I? I made them come to me…”

It hits Reaper that they are the ones who’ve been decoyed.

He puts a bullet in the boy’s forehead, avoiding looking into his eyes as he does this, and heads for the clearing, touching the headset’s transmission node. “Jumper — they’re flanking you, we were decoyed over here, they’re —”

“I’ve got ’em, Reaper, I can hold ’em till you get here —”

Gunfire racketing from the jungle.

“— I can hold ’em if…dammit it quit on me again…” His voice in the headset lost in crackle for a moment.

“What? What quit on you?”

“This fucking M-100, John, it’s jamming, it’s — I can’t get the grenade launcher to work either — oh fuck here they come…where’s Duke? Duke! Portman!”

“Reaper — don’t go out there!”

Ignoring Destroyer’s warnings, Reaper breaks from cover, sprints across the grassy clearing, risking both mines and small-arms fire — as bullets make blades of grass, just behind him, fly like cuttings from a mower.

“Duke!” Reaper shouts into the headset, “can you guys get Jumper’s back?”

“Negative, we’re pinned down! My rifle’s only working every third round!”

Reaper tries his autorifle’s grenade launcher, and he’s in luck: he fires a grenade into the jungle, just where the muzzle flash had been. Sees the blast, hears a scream.

Then he reaches the line of trees, punches through like brush like a linebacker through defense, swearing, shouting for Jumper…

Finds him sitting up against a tree, with the upper half of his head shot almost evenly away.

Nothing left but some nose, a gaping, blood-drooling mouth.

The guerilla who did for Jumper turns, seeing Reaper running at him — and that’s when Reaper’s gun jams. But it doesn’t matter, because he’s using the butt, roaring as he smashes the man’s forehead in, throws the rifle at another guerilla, draws his sidearm, snaps off three pistol shots in two faces. Those two go down, but more are coming — then Goat and Destroyer are there, firing from the hip, their own weapons choosing to work.

Reaper screams and fires and screams and…

“John Grimm? Are you with us?” The lady psych tech’s face — a pretty girl, really, if a bit pudgy — smiling down at him. “We lost track of the memory. Stress levels too high — but I do think we made some progress. How do you feel?”

He thought: Like I’d like to kill you and everyone in here.

But aloud he said, “I want to go back to my unit. Take all this fucking gear off me.”

Reaper was packing his bag, almost cheerful for the first time since they’d gotten back from their tour on the methane fields. How long had it been, six weeks? Seemed like a year.

This part of battle-stress therapy he liked: going on furlough. R&R.

He snorted, as he put a T-shirt in the bag, thinking: “battle stress.” Pretty term for how you felt when you blew a fifteen-year-old kid in half, then found you’d let the closest thing you had to a friend get his head shot off because you’d misread the situation…

And because I agreed to use untested rifles.

The humidity had made the M-100s lock up — they all knew that could happen with cheap ordnance. And UAC was cutting corners on the weaponry. Give me a good chaingun anytime…

Sarge had trusted him with that patrol — and it’d gone south; it was his cluster-fuck, no one else’s. And that kid…probably had been a guerilla for about an hour and a half.

Reaper turned to look at the others, wondering if they thought he was some kind of liability, being ordered to memory therapy.

But they were just chilling in the barracks here in Twentynine Palms, California. Duke, on his bunk with his feet up on a packed kit bag, wearing only a wifebeater and his cammie pants, was squinting against smoke from the cigarette wedged in his lips as he played Space Invaders on a laptop. That was normal enough for Duke.

The others were getting ready for leave, too, or already packed. Portman was checking his kit for the third time to see if he’d remembered his condoms. Goat kneeling at his bunk, praying. That’s what he’d been doing for a lot of the last six weeks. Praying.

Against orders, Goat had piled up a pretty good collection of human scalps, souvenirs from firefights — but he’d thrown those out, first thing, on coming back. He’d changed, after the methane fields. Something about the guerilla kid being from the same ethnicity as Goat — all too much like a cousin.

Goat had been muttering about God and praying ever since; there was a silver crucifix dangling on his chest.

The new kid — Kid, they called him, imaginatively enough — wasn’t going on leave. He’d just gotten here: Jumper’s replacement. A gangly nineteen-year-old, the Kid was sweeping the floor with an old-fashioned broom — they made him use the broom, although maintenance had sonic sweepers. He looked lost and miserable.

Mac was pitching oranges the length of the room to Destroyer, who was “up to bat,” teeth bared.

Reaper thought about complaining about the mess they were making as Destroyer swung the bat, making the orange into a juicy, disintegrating ground ball spattering down the aisle between the bunks…but Reaper didn’t feel like a hard-ass today. Let Sarge deal with it.

Behind Destroyer was a cardboard cutout of a naked girl wearing a catcher’s mask. She caught the next orange on her right breast, as Destroyer whiffed one. Juice ran down her exquisitely taut tummy.

The barracks normally smelled of sweat, leather, and boot-black — but they were getting ready for R&R, so tonight it smelled of aftershave and hair gel.

“I don’t fucking believe this shit,” Portman said, banging his watch on the end of his metal-frame bunk. He glared at the watch, then at the clock on the wall, comparing. “Six months without a weekend, and the fuckin’ transporter’s five minutes late. That’s five minutes of R&R I’ll never get back.”

“Relax, baby,” Duke said, not looking up from his game. “You’re on vacation.”

Portman stuck his hands in his pockets, scowling, came to look over Duke’s shoulders. “Why do you play those fuckin’ stupid old games?”

Duke shot down another video invader with a practiced snap of his index finger. “You ever play chess, Portman? Some games will never die.”

Portman walked away, snorting. Duke shook his head sadly at Portman’s ingrained philistinism. “This game was layered, man.”

Mac tossed an orange up, caught it, tested its weight in the palm of his hand as he looked for a pitch opening. “So where are you going, ’Stroyer?”

Destroyer did a couple of near-light-speed practice swings with the bat, grinning as he thought about his leave. “Grover Island. Surfin’. I’m telling you man, their weather is crazy. Thirty-foot breakers.”

Destroyer put his finger meditatively to his mouth, licked orange juice. “How about you, Portman?” he asked. Every so often one of them remembered to try to “include” Portman.

“I’m goin’ go down to El Honto,” Portman said, a dreamy look coming into his eyes, just as if he was going to talk about sitting on the porch with his dear old granny, “lock myself in a motel with a bottle of tequila and three she-boys.”

Destroyer made a face at that but said nothing.

Mac pitched his citrus baseball — Destroyer swung, hit the orange dead on. It angled like a meteor across the barracks and smacked wetly into the wall just above Duke’s head. Fingers dancing over keyboard and mouse, Duke didn’t even flinch.

Another orange whooshed by, just missing Goat’s left ear. Maybe Mac did that on purpose — being a practical joker, he probably did.

“Where you going, Kid?” Duke asked, still not looking up.

The Kid paused in his brooming. Everyone looked at him. He cleared his throat. “Me? Oh…I gotta stay here.”

Portman made a bogus sound of sympathy. “Oh. Oh that’s tragic. Grunt’s been here, like, ninety seconds. He ain’t never been in rotation.”

Destroyer reached into his bag of oranges. “Sorry, Kid, you don’t get R&R till you’ve at least been shot at…”

Head ducked low, Portman shot the Kid a glare. “My heart fuckin’ bleeds for you. Sweep up, you fuckin’ pussy.”

Duke clucked his tongue in disapproval of Portman’s tone. “Hey, this kid was the best marksman in his entire division. Don’t listen to ’em, Kid. We’re all glad to have you here.” After a moment he added, “Now sweep up, you fuckin’ pussy.”

Everyone laughed at that, even the Kid. Okay, so not everyone, after all: Reaper hadn’t laughed since the last assignment. Right now, the Kid saw, as he swept his broom into an alcove off the main room, Reaper was sitting at a table, assembling and disassembling a heavy, gunmetal black light machine gun so fast his fingers blurred. The Kid whistled in admiration at Reaper’s skill.

“How fast, sir?” he asked.

“Not fast enough,” Reaper said.

Reaper assembled the weapon again. His fingers, picking up components and snapping them into place, seem to have a life of their own.

“Looks damn fast to me, sir,” the Kid said.

Reaper looked at him. “Call me John, Kid. I work for a living, just like you.”

The Kid smiled. But the uncertainty must’ve been there in his face anyway, because Reaper added, “Give it time, Kid. You’ll get it.”

“What about you, Reaper?” Destroyer asked, raising his voice so Reaper could hear, in his alcove, tossing an orange from hand to hand. “Where you going?”

Reaper didn’t answer.

They all turned to look — they knew about the psych-tech. They’d picked up on his mood, anyway, you couldn’t miss it.

You felt the burn of his bad mood like a tanning light on sunburn, Destroyer thought.

“Yeah what’s it gonna be, Reaps?” Duke asked — actually glancing up from the game this time. “An armed conflict someplace quiet.”

“Little relaxing jungle warfare?” Portman chimed in.

Duke grinned. “Or you gonna stay here cleanin’ your piece, doing push-ups?”

Reaper winked at the Kid, picked up his rifle. “Well you know, Duke, I thought maybe I’d drop by your mom’s house, wait in line.”

The others laughed. Duke didn’t. Reaper just stared him down.

Reaper didn’t feel like letting them know that for once he was looking forward to R&R. He figured maybe some vacation would get him into another frame of mind. Anything so he could stop thinking about Jumper. That day in the jungle.

He put the gun aside, and went to pack his duffel.

But he was wasting his time, packing for R&R. He didn’t know it yet, but he wasn’t going on furlough.

He was going to Hell.

In the dimly lit, spartan NCO quarters down the hall, sat the NCO himself, the guy whose men just called him Sarge. He sat on his bunk, shirtless, staring at a blank wall. Big guy. About as muscular as you can be without being pussy enough to resort to steroids. Head shaved, dark skin reflecting his indeterminate racial mix. But you could see the tattoos — he’s a living canvas for tattoos muraling his massive shoulders, down his arms, across his chest: each one a souvenir of a campaign, or an invasion — an invasion of a whorehouse, in some cases.

Anybody just walking in might’ve thought he was talking to himself, till they noticed the headset.

“Go ahead…” He listened. Nodded to himself. “Access level of threat,” he said. “Code black. Containment or quarantine…”

He was repeating what someone was saying to him, verifying, confirming it to memory.

“…Extreme prejudice…Search and destroy…Orders received and understood.”

Sarge stood up and shrugged into a cammie T-shirt, already on his way out the door, down the hall, his big boots ringing on the steps down to the barracks.

At the bottom of the stairs he took one step out into the barracks, and the laughter in the room ceased. Everyone looked at him with a mixture of dread and anticipation.

“Ah, shit,” Portman muttered.

Something in Sarge’s face, his whole manner clued them in to what was coming.

“Listen up,” Sarge said. A voice like an electric bass on its lowest note. The Marshall amp’s volume knob was on three but it could go up to ten. “Leave is canceled.”

The men looked at one another. Amazement. Disgust. Wry resignation. No one with the nerve to complain, though it was obvious from Portman’s expression that he’d like to. Finally, looking at those expressions, Duke had to laugh out loud.

“You got a problem, Duke?” Sarge asked.

“Me, Sarge? Hell, no. I love my job.” Duke smiled sunnily. Mac grinned.

Sarge just looked back at him, his dark, deeply etched face almost expressionless.

It was time to ask the obvious question. They waited. Finally, Destroyer asked it. “Whassup, Sarge?”

“We got us a game.” He looked at the Kid. “Kid — you’re up.”

The Kid leaned his broom against a locker. Reaper could tell he didn’t know what to do with himself after that. Just sort of stood there in the middle of the floor.

“You’re in the RRTS now, boy,” Sarge went on. “And what do we do in the RRTS?”

Everyone responded to that one at once: “Pray for war!”

Except for Goat, who only shook his head. He’d been praying along different lines.

Reaper was thinking maybe it was better this way. In some part of his mind he’d been afraid he might be a loose cannon in the civilian community. The way he’d been feeling, it might be dangerous if he got drunk.

He didn’t want to spend any time in prison. Not even a civilian one.

“Fall in,” Sarge told them, his eyes on Reaper as he spoke.

Portman growled deep in his throat but fell in with the others to file out of the room, heading upstairs.

“Great vacation,” Duke muttered to Destroyer, as they went. “They go so quick, don’t they?”

“Almost like we’ve never been away.”

Reaper started to go with them — but Sarge stopped him with a hand on his shoulder.

“Not this time, Reaper.”

“What?” Reaper was genuinely surprised.

“Take the furlough. We can handle this one.”

“We got a game, Sarge.” The term in this unit’s argot meant it was going to be tough — balls-out, hard-core tough. Yeah: maybe that was just what he needed. Something so demanding there’d be no time to think. That was another problem with R&R: you had too much time to think. “We got a game, I’m ready.”

And Reaper started obstinately for the stairs.

“It’s Olduvai,” Sarge said, simply.

Reaper stopped in his tracks. A shiver went through him. A feeling like superstitious dread. “Olduvai?”

“Just take the leave.”

“Is that an order?”

“It’s a recommendation.”

Reaper had been stopped for a moment by the thought of Olduvai. The personal ramifications of it. But those connections were exactly why he had to go…

Still. It’d be hard to be objective.

Sarge looked at him — then turned and climbed the stairs, leaving him alone to think.

But thinking was something Reaper was trying to avoid, lately.

RRTS Six, without Reaper, was crossing the tarmac in the predawn grayness. They were headed to the big, armored transport chopper, already warming up, its rotors lazily turning. It showed their squadron’s insignia: a gun and knife crossed, twined by a fanged serpent.

They clambered into the large troop bay of the chopper, went immediately to their spots along the face-to-face wall-mounted jump seats.

Each one grabbed a weapon from the overhead rack — the one they specialized in, or, in the case of the Kid, the ones they were cleared for.

Destroyer grabbed an enormous chaingun — an ordinary man would have trouble even lifting it, let alone shooting the thing. Almost tubular in overall shape, with its primary handle up top, designed to be wedged against the hip while fired, it was fed with long, long chains of 10mm armor-piercing bullets.

“Any idea where we’re going?” the Kid asked, getting his own ordnance down from the rack.

“Yeah,” Destroyer said, slinging an extra ammo chain over his shoulder. “Wherever they send us.”

The weapon itself spoke up, then — its computerized identity lock system said, in a monotone:

“RRTS Special Ops clearance verified. Handle ID: Destroyer.”

Goat stood a moment, looking at the small worn Bible in his hand — then he put it in his coat pocket, so he could have both hands free to heft the double-barreled, multiround shotgun…

“RRTS Special Ops clearance verified. Handle ID: Goat.”

Portman grabbed the plasma rifle. It was made of light, artificially hardened maxiplastics, its design bulky, jutting with attachments. When properly charged it had the power to fire ionized plasma capable of breaking down the bonds of the target’s molecules. Though it looked as primitive as a triceratops, it was sophisticated, if anything this murderous could be called sophisticated. Portman chuckled, hefting the plasma rifle. It made him feel like his balls had just doubled in size.

And the weapon spoke up: “RRTS Special Ops clearance verified. Handle ID: Portman.”

The Kid started for a chaingun, but Destroyer shook his head at him. He hadn’t been cleared for the weapon yet. The Kid sighed and took the two handheld semiautomatics.

And the automatics, speaking in chorus, confirmed it: “RRTS Special Ops clearance verified. Handle ID: The Kid.”

The Kid winced. “‘The Kid’?”

The Kid was looking forward to getting a new nickname. Once he’d said as much to Duke, hinting that maybe he could earn a handle a little ballsier than the Kid. Duke had said, “Your handle’s too small for you to get a bigger handle.”

“He couldn’t handle it,” Portman had chimed in, thinking he was pretty cute.

“If he handles it, it better be in private. I don’t want to see that in the barracks.”

The Kid had kept his mouth shut about it after that.

Katshuhiko “Mac” Takaashi took the massive Combo ATS Grenade Launcher and Elephant Gun off the rack. He made a low growling Mmmm sound as he hefted it, like a man who’s just bitten into a perfect cut of steak. This was so much better than the M-100.

“RRTS Special Ops clearance verified, Handle ID: Mac.”

Gregory “Duke” McGreevy lit a cigarette with one hand, grabbed his automag with the other: light, similar to a Mack 10, but chockablock with lethal rounds, it had decent long-range accuracy.

He twirled the automag, as its ID chip said, almost companionably: “RRTS Special Ops clearance verified. Handle ID: Duke.”

“Oh yeah,” Duke said. “Say my name, baby.”

A huge hand reached into the overhead rack, in one scoop — in that one hand — taking both a sniper rifle and a big 65mm pistol. He took the rifle in one hand —

“RRTS Special ops clearance verified. Handle ID: Sarge.”

— and stuck the pistol in his holster. “All set?” Sarge asked.

He turned to shout the liftoff order to the chopper pilot up forward…

“Hold it!” came a deep voice from the tarmac — someone just outside the chopper passenger hatch.

They all turned as one to see John “Reaper” Grimm entering, dressed for combat, complete with helmet.

“You sure about this?” Sarge asked, his voice soft, as discreet as he could manage in the circs.

For answer, Reaper selected his handheld machine gun: lighter than the chaingun but lethal close in, good accuracy for longer ranges — six hundred rounds max, sixty-round clips. Reliable — no matter the humidity.

“RRTS Special Ops clearance verified. Handle ID: Reaper.”

Reaper turned and met Sarge’s eyes. Gave out a tiny smile.

Sarge nodded. “Take us up!”

Three

THE CHOPPER LIFTED off, carrying the squadron to the Ark Facility in Papoose Lake, Nevada.

Strapped into his harness, Reaper noticed the Kid watching him and Destroyer; modeling himself on them, Reaper figured.

Jumper had sort of looked up to Reaper, too…Where had it gotten him?

Portman noticed the Kid watching Reaper. He grinned. “You know, Kid, it’s funny. Couple days ago I tell Sarge I could use a little pussy. Next day, he brings you onto the team.”

Annoyed at Portman’s constant ragging on the Kid, Reaper said, “Don’t give me an excuse, Portman. No one here will miss you.”

But the Kid was distracted by Goat — who was pulling a knife.

Goat’s shirt was open, his scarred chest exposed. He ran a thumb along the edge of the combat knife, locking eyes with the Kid — then turned the blade against himself, digging the point into the skin. He looked down at himself, concentrating on his handiwork as he carved a cross into his skin — amongst all the other crosses scarring his chest. The chopper gave a sudden shudder, making Goat’s hand jog, so the bottom of the cross came out a bit crooked. He had to start another one, to get it right. Then the chopper lurched again…Goat frowned. And started another cross.

The Kid stared. Had to shout over the noise of the chopper. “Fuck is he doing, man?”

Portman chuckled. “Mission log. Goat used to collect human scalps. But he’s all straightened out now, aintcha, Goat?”

Goat’s dark eyes flickered over Portman, then drilled the Kid. The Kid swallowed and paled.

The chopper’s engine roared; the blades beat a drumroll against the sky.

Sarge glanced out the window. They were far enough away from base to get into the classified briefing. “Look in!” he shouted.

He slapped a disc into the briefing console on the bulkhead. “This is what we got from Simcom,” Sarge told them. He turned the volume all the way up so they could hear over the racket of the chopper.

The VDU screen flashed, and they watched as a fuzzy image of Dr. Carmack appeared.

There was Carmack’s terrified face, looking down at the minicam node on the comm-sole he’d used for that transmission. The image fluttered, resolved. Carmack’s voice came across only a little less fuzzy than the picture.

“…is Dr. Carmack at Classified Research, Olduvai! ID6627. We’ve had a level-five breach, implement quarantine procedures now!” The sound of a distant pounding. “I repeat, implement level-five breach quarantine procedures now!”

You’d think that a face couldn’t show any more terror than his did. But as he looked up at something off camera, his face contorted into something more primeval than mere terror. Like something a small animal’s feeling as it’s about to be torn apart by a hawk.

And then the image dissolved into snowy static.

The men in the chopper looked at one another.

“We got a quarantine situation on Olduvai,” Sarge said. “They sent that message before the research team stopped responding to communications.”

“Olduvai…?” Portman said.

Sarge nodded. “Three-and-a-half hours ago. UAC has shut down the lab. We go up there, locate the team, eliminate the threat, and secure the facility.”

“What threat?” the Kid asked.

“Goes like this, see,” Duke said. “If it’s trying to kill you, it’s a threat.”

They hung in their harnesses, absorbing the briefing — and each one came to a stop on the name Olduvai. They were going to that mysterious region on the planet Mars. And that meant…

The Kid leaned over to whisper to Duke. “We’re going through the Ark?”

“Don’t worry, Kid,” Duke said. “You’re gonna love it.”

The ironic smiles on the faces of the other men, at that, didn’t make the Kid feel any better. The Ark was some kind of wormhole to another world — and maybe the scariest thing was, it was an alien technology. The compound’s end of the Ark had been retroengineered from something found in the digs on Olduvai, Mars. An alien doorway to an alien world.

A long trip, mostly through darkness. They were flying over the sprawling, intricate city: all that remained between them and their first destination; they flew between shimmering towers, past gracefully sweeping buildings of synthetic steel and intelligent glass glimmering with the soft light impregnated into their very girders; over interlacing freeways, chains of glowing computer-guided vehicles. There were no brake lights, no headlights, just interior lights because the cars drove themselves. They never jammed, never crashed.

It was coming up to dawn, and the chopper was almost to the Nevada teleport facility when Sarge unbuckled himself from his harness, went over to sit by Reaper.

“How long’s it been?” Sarge asked, leaning close to Reaper.

Reaper reluctantly answered, “Ten years.”

“You sure she’s even still there?” Sarge persisted.

Reaper looked at him coldly. “You gotta face your demons sometime.”

Sarge wasn’t ready to drop it. Sarge had no comprehension of small talk at all. He never spoke unnecessarily — but when he did speak, he dropped a subject exactly when he was done with it, not a second before. “This better not spoil my day.”

He slapped Reaper on the shoulder, stood, and moved carefully to the front — sometimes, when the chopper shifted in the sky, he looked like a man walking a tightrope. He turned to address the whole team.

“I want this spit and polish, no bullshit!” he told them. He spotted Portman listening to something on headphones. Might be music, might be soundporn. “Portman, get that crap out of your ears. LZ approaching…” Sarge braced himself, looking at the altitude indicator as the chopper eased down to a landing. “T-minus fifteen. Fourteen…”

The Kid looked out the window — they were approaching a great swatch of shadow on the far side of the town they’d just passed. The sky was graying with first light, but the ground down there was still dark. It looked like they were going to crash into that bleak opacity — but then lights flicked on, outlining the landing pad, and the chopper settled onto it.

The doors opened. Cold air gushed in; their breath steamed as they grabbed their gear and jumped out into the icy prop wash.

Nothing out there but the landing lights, and the distant sparkle of the city’s skyline.

“Double-time!” Sarge shouted. “We’re on the move!”

They ran across grass now, jogging over the otherwise-empty field in formation, leaving the landing pad and the chopper behind.

Where, the Kid wondered, are we double-timing to? There’s nothing out here. We’re just running into the goddamned darkness…

Suddenly the ground began to elevate itself, in front of them: an illuminated block of stainless steel rose up, humming, out of a subterranean shaft, in the midst of what a moment ago had been an empty, grassy field. The Kid lost his double-time rhythm in his surprise, slowing to stare, blurting, “Holy shit…”

Passing the Kid, Portman slammed a shoulder into him — theoretically a reminder to stay in formation but really it was about Portman getting off on slamming the Kid.

The Kid was the last one to hustle onto the elevator that would take them down — down, only to be projected upward into the sky, when the moment came.

Seeing the Kid come into the elevator at the last possible second, Sarge told him: “You hesitate, people die.”

The doors irised shut…and the elevator dropped like stone released into a mining shaft.

Fourteen levels down…

Like so many other nightmares, it really started with a slick, corporate lobby. They could’ve been waiting to audition for a viddy commercial, Reaper thought, as they stepped out of the elevator and looked around.

United Aerospace Corporation logos were arranged symmetrically with wall-mounted plasma screens; the screens played UAC infomercials maundering on about the company’s globe-spanning services.

A slender man dresssed as slick as the lobby was striding toward them, extending his hand. His face was frozen in a public-relations mask of friendliness, only his eyes showing how intimidated he was by the big, heavily armed men in the strike squadron.

Here comes the suit, Reaper thought.

“Sandford Crosby, UAC public relations,” said the suit. “On behalf of UAC, welcome to the facility. If you could follow me, please.”

He turned on his heel, almost spinning in place, and led the way, in a hurry. The squadron exchanged glances, shrugged, and followed.

“Has anyone passed through the Ark since the emergency?” Sarge asked.

Sandford glanced back at Sarge. “Oh, no no, Sergeant.” He indulged in a carefully measured laugh. “This isn’t an emergency. I believe what we have on Olduvai is officially a situation.”

Sarge snorted but said nothing.

“Should the ‘situation’ deteriorate,” Reaper asked, as they almost trotted down a corridor, “has a plan been drawn up to evacuate the civilians?”

He was as concerned about getting them out of his hair as much as getting them to safety. Civilians pretty much just got in the way of getting a job done. And then there was that certain civilian…

Sandford seemed to pick up speed, gesturing for them to hurry along close behind him. “The guys at corporate feel that won’t be necessary. What you’re doing for us here is really a ‘fact-finding mission.’”

“Through here, please,” Sandford added, gesturing toward the door with a limp hand.

“How many people up there?” Reaper asked.

“UAC employs eighty-five permanent research staff on Olduvai,” Sandford replied, crisply.

They passed through the door into the Ark Chamber Prep Room. Sandford frowned, noticing that Duke, as usual, was smoking. “Please extinguish the cigarette. The Ark is an ultrahigh-frequency fusion reactor. One spark and —”

“Gettin’ so you can’t smoke anywhere anymore.” Duke stubbed it out in the callused, blackened palm of his hand — making Sandford blanch.

Sandford guided the squadron to the base of a mirrored cylinder protected by armed UAC Security Personnel. The armed guards here were more than security guards, but less than the level of soldier represented by the squadron, and they knew it. They gave Sarge and his men flat looks that seemed to say, I could take you. Only, they couldn’t, and they knew that, too.

The Kid stared at the Ark Containment Cylinder. From there, they would be individually projected through a wormhole, across space, and onto the surface of the region of Mars known as Olduvai.

A translucent plaque hung in the air above them, containing twenty names etched into a scroll graphic.

Maybe stalling, the Kid asked Sandford, “What’re all those names?”

Sandford glanced up. Clearly not liking the subject. “Oh that. That’s a UAC-funded memorial to the early pioneers of the Ark, who in the pursuit of perfecting this groundbreaking and unique technology, made the ultimate sacrifice…”

Reaper looked at Sandford, wondering if he were serious, coming out with this PR palaver. “This groundbreaking and unique technology?”

A different part of the speech stuck with Portman. “Ultimate sacrifice?”

Sandford went on, reassuringly. “This was long, long ago, before they perfected the crystalline structure.”

The Kid looked at the shiny cylinder awaiting him. Then at Goat and Destroyer, close beside him. He swallowed. “You…done this before?”

Goat surprised him by answering a direct question. “Once. Training mission.” Three words. It was something.

Reaper had gone through it as a kid — but he’d been sedated. Not this time…

Duke slapped the kid on the back, making him stagger, and grinned. “Hope you had a big dinner!”

Sandford took a remote controller from his pocket, tapped a code, and the cylinder slid open.

They stepped through, and the curved wall closed behind them, leaving them inside a shiny metal vertical tube, with just enough room for them and a drop of mercurial liquid floating, weightless, in the center of the chamber. The light seemed to warp across its surface; the rippling interior of the drop seemed to enfold infinity. If you looked at the edge of the drop, it became the center; and the center became the edge, around and around…

“That’s it?” the Kid said, blinking. “I thought the Ark was, like — a spaceship. Not…”

“…A metaphor?” Reaper said.

The squad stared at the hovering droplet.

Reaper found himself wondering: How big is it? One moment the floating quicksilver droplet at the heart of the Ark seemed like something you could fit into your hand. The next moment it was bushelsized, and getting bigger. It seemed all of those sizes. Then it seemed, impossibly, as big as a whale though it was in a room a whale couldn’t fit into. A manifestation of the quantum-uncertainty realm, it was constantly shifting within itself. Interesting…

He smiled at himself. The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.

Reaper came from a family of scientists — he was clearly a black sheep, but the interest simmered in him nonetheless, and he followed science when he wasn’t on assignment. He didn’t let the rest of the squadron know it though…as far as they knew he was a stone-cold jarhead and nothing more.

Sarge gave Sandford an order then, just as if he were a new recruit. “Soon as we’re through, lock down the surface elevator here for a six-hour standard quarantine.”

Sandford hesitated half a second, as if not sure he should be taking direction from Sarge, then nodded. He turned to the others. “Please form two lines. In the unlikely event something goes wrong, there are exits behind me here, here —” He pointed. “And here.” He paused, glanced at them — and Reaper could see Sandford wanted to get out of there. “Any questions?”

Duke held up his big-assed weapon. Asked straight-faced, “Does this classify as ‘carry-on’?”

Sandford managed a thin smile at that.

Sarge cocked his weapon and walked over to the Ark. He stepped within its range of sensitivity…

It expanded to envelop his body in a glistening, faintly wobbling globular shell.

Until, in a flash of blue light, it condensed backed to its original size — as if it had swallowed Sarge and digested him.

Sarge was gone.

Shaken, the Kid took a step back, sucking in his breath. Reaper grabbed his elbow. Locked eyes with him. The look said it all. The Kid swallowed, and nodded, held his ground.

Reaper clapped the kid on the shoulder, then turned and walked to the quicksilver droplet…

He felt himself enter its field of sensitivity — it felt like immersing himself in cold water that was instantly warm water, then icy again…

Suddenly the quivering droplet seemed to leap at his eyes — and there was a wall of living silver, all around him. A series of anomolous smells. The smell of a campfire; the smell of ozone; the smell of roses; the smell of death. A flash of light…blue — then shifting to blue-white, incandescent white…

Reaper felt himself dissolving, his body turning to liquid, his flesh like sugar diffused in living water, bones becoming a skeleton of ice melting down in a second — splash — then a riot of sounds: roaring and singing and piercing screams and gibbered words and thundering bits of half-forgotten symphonies; his consciousness spun in a vortex of sickening black light, striated by colors that were all wrong, just wrong; those colors don’t exist anywhere. Reaper thought he saw his father fly past him, translucent and ghostly, mouthing something, trying to warn him; then the light and color shrank away, replaced by blackness rich with feeling, tactile sensations from some forgotten corner of his brain: a woman’s soft hair brushing against his naked shoulder, a spiderweb breaking on his cheek, moss under bare boyhood feet, the surprisingly soft flesh of his enemy’s throat that time in the desert when his gun had jammed and he’d had to leap on the guy and strangle him, the feeling of blood running across his wrists, a jawbone cracking against his fist, a bullet crashing into his shoulder, shattering pain —

The cryptic opacity was split by shimmering light, and he could feel himself solid and whole again — but he was falling, falling up; no, falling down; no, he was being pulled sideways, he was nauseatingly spinning, he was falling through a flash of frozen blue light…

Into the wormhole chamber on Olduvai, Mars.

Four

REAPER MANAGED TO stay on his feet as he emerged from the Ark at the UAC Research Facility on Olduvai, Mars, though the room was shifting, his head throbbed and his stomach was trying to crawl out of his body.

He turned as Destroyer came through — staggering. Destroyer gave him a sickly grin.

That shit is fucked up, the grin said.

The others were coming through, gulping, pale, looking like they badly wanted to throw up.

But only the Kid actually did: he took three steps, bent over, and puked. Then it was Portman’s turn.

Reaper smiled at that — though his gut still convulsed inside him — because Portman was always coming on like he was so much tougher than the Kid.

Portman straightened, wiping his mouth. “Why we gotta come all this way? Why can’t the UAC rent-a-cops fix this bullshit?”

The metal cylinder whirred open, and they were all stepping unsteadily down off the platform.

“Jesus,” the Kid muttered, holding his middle. “Is it always that rough?”

“Believe me,” someone coming into the room said, “it used to be rougher…”

Reaper turned to see a man who’d been grafted into a kind of sleek wheelchair — a cyberchair, a module that enclosed everything below his sternum. The cyberchair seemed to merge seamlessly with his upper half. He drifted effortlessly forward, the wheelchair apparently responding to his nervous system, and extended a hand. The wheelchair graft seemed to call for an older man, but this guy had a boyish face, curly hair, an impish glitter in his eye. “Time was,” he went on, “Ark travel was susceptible to patches of, let’s say, major turbulence.”

“What’s he mean?” the Kid whispered to Reaper.

“He means he went to one galaxy and his ass went to another.”

“Call it a scientific miscalculation,” the man in the cyberchair went on. “Unbelievable as it may seem, UAC does make the odd tiny mistake.” There was a moment when they were all blinking at him, obviously thinking, Who the hell are you? He smiled and answered the unasked question. “Marcus Pinzerowski. Call me Pinky.”

A gaunt man in uniform came toward them — some of the gauntness might’ve been the worry etched on his face. Reaper had never seen the uniform before. A lieutenant of some kind.

The lieutenant only glanced at the puke on the floor. “Lieutenant Hunegs, UAC Security Officer. Welcome to Olduvai. Pinky is your acting Comms officer.”

Portman whispered it, but it was loud enough for Pinzerowski to hear: “The sparko’s a gimp?” Pinky pretended not to hear.

Reaper sighed. He wanted to smack Portman — not the first time he’d wanted to do that.

Wiping his mouth, the Kid was gaping around at the wormhole chamber. A little seamier, darker than the one they’d just left. Looked like he was thinking: So this is another world? Doesn’t look like it.

Sarge shook the officer’s hand. “Sergeant Mahonin, RRTS.”

Pinky handed Sarge a fistful of access cards on chains, to wear around their necks. “Access chips for the security doors.” He led them into the next room — a much bigger room dominated by computer monitors, comm consoles.

Sarge — always ready to get on with it — gestured toward a console to one side. “Put us up, Pinky.”

Pinky whirred over to a console, tapped touch-responsive spots on the screen. “Activating remote personal surveillance.”

On the screen over the console, images appeared from the viewpoint of the digicams — fiber-optic microcameras on their chest armor. The idea was to transmit their point of view to the communications center so everyone there could see what the squadron was seeing. Most of the time, the squadron had kept the digicams turned off. You didn’t always want what you did in the field on record.

Pinky stared into the screen. One of the little thumbnails was just a blank outline. “Who’s Dantalian?” he asked.

The squadron looked at the Kid. Mac shook his head, reached over and slapped the switch on the Kid’s chest-mounted CDM. It blinked green — and his thumbnail on the comm screen lit up with an image of Mac chuckling at him.

The digicams were up, but there was a second-line of point-of-view connect. “Circle up!” Sarge ordered.

All the squadron — except the Kid — suddenly pointed their guns at other members of the team. The Kid started at this — it was a little lacuna in his training.

But on Pinky’s screen, another set of images showed. “Killcams up and running,” Pinky said. There were fiber-optic cameras on the guns, too, just below the barrel, so people monitoring the squadron could see what was being shot.

“People,” Sarge rumbled, “this room is code red. No one gets in without our permission.” He let that sink in, then went on, “Mac — stay here, secure the door. Squad, on me. Let’s move it out…”

Mac scowled. He didn’t like hanging back from the action. He came from a culture that emphasized self-sacrifice, even suicidal risk in the service of the team. But there was no questioning Sarge.

Pinky hit a tab, and hydraulic locking pins clashed, a big metal door rolled aside.

The squadron stepped into an atrium room, a vault of cobwebbed marble archways and high, shadowy ceilings. Under the arches, along with the ubiquitous UAC logos, the infomercials chattered to themselves, dialed low volume, like lunatics who babbled on no matter what happened.

Reaper noticed rubble in the corners — loose pipes, cracks in the walls, dust. The place wasn’t being maintained. One of the screens flickered like it was about to go out.

“Nice,” Duke said. “Cozy. Where the fuck are we?”

“Couple million miles from breakfast,” Goat rumbled, looking disdainfully at a clutch of UAC employees passing through, carrying digital clipboards and giving them frowning looks.

Leading them across the room to another computer console, Hunegs asked, “When can I start evacuating my people out through the Ark, Sargeant?”

Sarge shook his head. “We’re at level-five quarantine. So nobody’s going anywhere.”

Reaper started to ask about the quarantine — there had to be some protocol to get these people out if it came time — then noticed the woman standing at the computer console.

Samantha. Samantha Grimm. Reaper’s own sister.

It was an uncomfortable moment. He’d been expecting to see her here of course — just not so soon.

Portman was hitting on a couple of minor female technicians — with nice legs. “Hey, uh — we’re up here on vacation, we were wondering what you ladies were doing later?” They looked at each other, amused — and not at all tempted. “We —” He broke off, seeing Samantha Grimm. Who was in a whole different league from the techs. Flat-out gorgeous — and with the absolute minimum makeup. “Hold that thought,” Portman mumbled to the techs. Turning instead to Samantha as she walked toward them. “Excuse me, we’re up here on vacation, we wondered…”

She walked past him as if he didn’t exist, stepped up to Reaper and Sarge. And waited with a kind of quiet authority.

“Sergeant,” Hunegs said, “this is Dr. Samantha Grimm, the UAC science officer assigned to retrieve data from the lab.”

“Sergeant,” she said.

“Dr. Grimm,” Sarge rumbled. Managing not to react to her beauty — mostly. But his eyes flicked over her body, just once.

She had light eyes, strawberry blond hair, the suggestion of a dimple in her chin. But her expression was all business. She was just twenty-six but, Reaper knew, she was a brilliant scientist — she’d graduated from high school at the age of thirteen. She’d always had an interest in the past, in forgotten worlds. So she’d gotten her doctorate in “archaeological genetics” — almost following in their parents’ footsteps, but finding her own path. She’d always looked for her own way to do things.

Her eyes met her brother’s — just a flicker of reaction. Some warmth, not much. Reaper had to hand it to her — she was unflappable. They had a troubled history, and there was no room in the unraveling situation on Olduvai for family sentimentality.

“Hello, John,” Sam said. She looked at the light machine gun he carried. Just the suggestion of contempt in that look. She’d never gotten over it…

“Hello, Samantha.”

Duke took off his shades. “Hel-lo Samantha!” He waggled his eyebrows at her.

She rolled her eyes and looked at a printout she held in her hands, as if it were infinitely more interesting than Duke. He kept smiling at her.

Reaper gathered that Samantha was being introduced to them for reasons other than politeness. Assigned to retrieve data? Were they thinking that she was going along with the squadron? Olduvai he could deal with. But his sister, breathing down his neck? Uh-uh. Besides…Sam would be at serious risk, judging from the hints they’d had from the transmissions.

“Sarge,” Reaper said firmly, “this mission is code black. We can’t take passengers.”

Sam turned back to him, those pretty eyes narrowing, going icy. “Excuse me, Corporal, but I have orders to retrieve data from the physical anthropology, forensic archaeology — and molecular genetics servers —”

“With respect, Doctor,” Reaper interrupted, not very respectfully, “our orders are to locate and neutralize a present threat. It’s not to retrieve some” — he smiled dismissively — “science homework.”

She crossed her arms. “That science homework is the core study of a nine-billion-dollar research program. You got the nine bil, fine, cough it up, pal, I’m sure UAC’ll call it quits.”

“Give me the address,” Reaper said blandly, matching her glare for glare, “I’ll send a check.”

They exchanged scowls for a moment. Then she went on, “I’ve got an idea, why don’t you ask your CO what your orders are?”

Everyone looked at Sarge, a noncom but the closest thing to their CO.

Sarge thought for a moment, then recited, “Contain and neutralize the threat, protect civilians…and retrieve UAC property.” That contradicted what the suit had said — which was no surprise.

“We finally done here?” Sam said. “’Cause I’ve got a job to do.”

Reaper winced. She’d checkmated him again. She always had beat him unmercifully at chess.

Sam knew what he was thinking — every little thing between them had some kind of nagging family-history resonance to it — and she gave him a chilly look of triumph. Then she turned on her heel and strode off, heading for another computer, giving Reaper’s shoulder a push, as if he were rudely in her way, as she went. Reaper watched her go, thinking maybe he should go after her, have everything out. Including the pecking order here.

Sarge took Reaper aside, spoke in undertones. “You chose this, Reaper,” Sarge reminded him. “Is this gonna spoil my day?”

“There’s gotta be someone else —”

“Is this gonna spoil my day?”

Reaper let out a long slow breath. “No, sir.”

Sarge nodded — as if to say: That’s right, it won’t. Then he went off to talk to Hunegs.

Duke and Destroyer ambled over, Duke nudging Reaper. “Tell me you didn’t let a fine-lookin’ piece of ass like that get away from you, Reaper…”

Evidently Duke thought Sam having the same surname as Reaper meant “ex-wife.”

Sighing, Reaper prudently decided against punching Duke in the nose. “She’s my sister.”

Duke blinked in surprise. “Really? No shit…”

Destroyer shook his head at Duke as Reaper walked away. “Don’t do this again, man.”

Duke feigned innocence. “Do what?”

“There are three sections to the labs?” Sarge was asking, as he walked beside Sam to the air lock. Hunegs was close behind her, with the squadron.

She nodded. “Archaeology, Genetics, and Weapons Research…”

“You test weapons up here?” Portman asked. Articulating everyone’s puzzlement over the weapons lab. Not what you expected to go with archaeology and genetics.

Sam shrugged. “Mars is a dead planet. You want that stuff tested up here where it’s safe — or in your own backyard?”

They were following her down a corridor. A sign on the wall said, TO AIR LOCK. “This is primarily an archaeological facility. The genetics labs are only here studying the structures of various forms of fossil life. Weapons research is in its own separate area. It has nothing to do with Dr. Carmack’s work.”

Reaper wasn’t sure he bought that. Could be they’d found something that needed…special weapons. If they hadn’t — why bring the squadron here?

“How many inside when shutdown occurred?” Sarge asked.

Sam considered. “Only Dr. Carmack’s team. After he maydayed, we tried all the internal comm systems and the data lines, but there was zero response.”

She’s acts like she’s really on top of things, Reaper thought, annoyed. Hell, she probably is, knowing her.

Though Reaper still thought of her as his little sister, he knew better than to underestimate her.

They reached the outer door to the Research Labs division. Two UAC security guards stood at the high-security door — they just managed to drop their looks of excruciating boredom as Sam walked up to the door.

Turning to the others at the door, she went on, “…except in one of the carbon-dating labs there was an internal phone left off the hook. The line was live to an admin station upstairs.”

“Give you any information?” Reaper asked.

She looked at him with a kind of blank disbelief, as if it was just penetrating to her that here was her brother, in full combat regalia, right in the midst of her crisis.

Then she turned abruptly to the UAC security officer. “Hunegs. Play him the tape.”

Hunegs took a small handheld tape recorder from his coat pocket, hit REWIND, then PLAY.

Static, as Reaper bent nearer to hear. Then a woman’s voice. “Jesus please help me…oh God…Mother!” She whimpered — then shrieked. Screaming. “Keep away! Get away!” A piercing cry that made Reaper draw back a few inches, wincing. Then another order of sound entirely — the sound of something being torn apart. A gurgling…

Static.

Hunegs pressed STOP. Sarge grunted to himself, then turned to his men. “Any questions?”

They had lots of questions. But they knew there weren’t any answers yet. A few minutes earlier, on the way in here, Hunegs had said: “We’re not sure what the threat is. We need you to find out.”

So the squadron cocked their weapons and tried to look like they were all balls and no nerves. They almost managed it, except for the Kid who was chewing his lower lip.

“Open the door,” Sarge said.

Sam pushed the green button, the pneumatic bolts hissed and gnashed, the door opened.

Sarge pushed past her and headed into the air lock. The others followed — except Hunegs.

The surface atmosphere of Mars was thin, unbreathable. The labs were supposed to have breathable air but the integrity of their interface with the planetary surface could be breached, hence the air lock.

It was a small stainless-steel cubical room, just big enough for the squadron and Sam. Once the door to the Ark and command facility had sealed behind them, Goat and Portman both pulled handheld particulate scanners from their belt clasps, squinted into them.

“Magnesium, chromium, lead. Normal,” Portman announced.

The LAPT in Goat’s hand blinked, and chimed; he glanced at its little screen. “All clear.”

Sarge motioned, and they opened the door into the corridor.

It was pitch-black out there. Their gun-mounted flashlight beams swept the darkness of the corridor beyond the air lock, scarcely seeming to penetrate it.

And Reaper took the lead, stepping out into the shifting darkness.

Five

THE CORRIDOR WAS cold and dark, and there were disturbing, undefined smells in it. Like something you smell as a small child on your first trip to a zoo.

Reaper could smell something reassuringly human, too: his sister’s perfume — could feel the warmth of her body close to his right elbow. She’d never admit it, but she was sticking close to him in here. He wished once more he’d found a way to keep her from coming along. She wasn’t even armed…

“Pinky,” Sarge was saying, into his headset, “get us some juice down here, damn it.”

There was a response from Pinky, but it was crackly, distorted. Reaper wasn’t sure if he’d said yes or no can do.

Sarge didn’t wait for more light; he moved down the corridor, leading the way, the narrow flashlight beam from his gun probing ahead. Their gunlights swept over bare walls — not quite bare, there were brown stains, in places: big splashes of dried blood. Wires hung from gaps in the ceiling; the occasional pipe. In the narrow beams of light the dangling wires looked like filaments of living tissue. And the darkness itself seemed to squirm, hinting at shapes just beyond classification.

When Portman spoke, he sounded like he was trying to convince himself: “Five bucks all this shit is a disgruntled employee with a gun…”

Sparks spat from a broken power line then, announcing the return of the juice. Reaper spotted a light switch, hit it, and an overhead fluorescent tube came on. But there wasn’t much reassurance in the grim, echoing, bloodstained corridor made visible.

Reaper noticed the corridor branching left and right up, ahead…which way to go?

“Pinky,” Sarge said into his comm, “you get us a schematic?”

There was a pause as Pinky shot them the layout from the mainframe. “Uploading to you now.”

Sarge held the flashpoint uplink in his hand, angled downward; it projected a schematic of the lab on the blood-scuffed floor. They all stared at it but it seemed mostly a jumble of interlocked squares. After a moment they made out patterns — and labels: GENETICS, LAB OFFICE, WEAPONS.

“Goat, Portman…” Sarge ordered, “…Genetics. Destroyer, Kid: the office where Carmack sent the mayday…” He pointed with his free hand to indicate the place. “Reaper, keep Dr. Grimm safe on her salvage op. Duke and I will take the Weapons Lab, make sure the hardware’s secure.” He looked at each subteam as he gave them their assignment, a hard look emphasizing the inflexibility of the orders. And added, “Fluorescent powder marking as rooms are cleared.”

The squadron nodded as one and after a final glance at the schematic to get their bearings set off.

In the wormhole chamber, Pinky watched a monitor displaying a layout of the labs, tracking the squadron with GTS blips tailed by their names. The guncams showed in thumbnail images across the top of the screen.

Pinky found himself wondering for the tenth time that day if they were doing the right thing. Complete and instant evacuation would’ve been wiser. They could return later with a larger force and get the data then. But the way things had been going, the whole base, labs and all, could be destroyed in their absence. And they had to seal off the Ark. Something might get through, otherwise…

Still, they might simply be wasting more lives, sending the men in — and Sam. He felt a twinge, thinking about her going in there. He should’ve tried to talk her out of it. But he knew that’d be like trying to talk the moon out of rising.

He glanced at Mac, leaning against the wall near the door, gun cradled in his arms. Mac was looking at the monitor, frowning, trying to decode the floor plans and blips.

“They’re on the move,” Pinky told him. After a moment, looking Mac over — Mac was obviously Oriental — he added, “You don ’t look like a ‘Mac.’”

Mac looked at him expressionlessly. Then recited his full name. “Katshuhiko Kumanosuke Takaashi.”

Pinky nodded. “So…Mac!”

Sarge and Duke moved down their divergent corridor, toward the Weapons Lab. Wall signs confirmed they were going the right way.

Duke wondered just what kind of weapons were squirreled away down here. How much had they been tested? The M-100 in the jungle was still a fresh memory — a bad memory. If they tried out one of these weapons — and how could a weapons expert like Sarge resist? — they might find out why the damned things were locked away up here…

It never occurred to him to try to talk this over with Sarge. Someone else maybe, not Sarge.

Duke wished he’d been assigned to go with Reaper. Someone to talk to. One thing Sarge wasn’t, was someone to talk to.

They kept on, in silence, through passages where the lights flickered; past cross corridors that led into restless shadow, where things moved — intuited more than seen. Things that snuffled and chuckled and clicked their teeth together.

Both Sarge and Duke felt the things out there. And neither one of them said a word about it.

Destroyer and the Kid swept the back hallway and storage rooms, marking with the fluorescent powder as they went.

“Clear,” the Kid said into his headset, as they passed through another nondescript room. Trying to keep the nervousness out of his voice.

The Kid had come to the squadron right from secondary training, just a week before. But in the short time he’d been with Unit Six he’d come to look up to Destroyer. Didn’t want him to know how scared he was. Destroyer was tough, all right: he could go from smiling to flinty in a heartbeat. But — despite some ribbing — he’d spent a long time showing the Kid how to field strip his weapons, in the days before this assignment. He’d given him a couple of lessons in hand-to-hand fighting, hardly hurting him at all — if he’d wanted to, he could have broken the Kid’s neck — and he’d listened to the Kid talk about his family without once making fun of him for it the way Portman had. Destroyer had shown the Kid a holo-cube of his wife; had smiled at the Kid’s cell-images of his girlfriend Millie. Hard-nosed moniker or not, the Kid suspected that Destroyer had a soft heart.

Unless you were the enemy.

The animal lab was freaking Portman out.

Monkeys, rats, dogs in cages, some of them alive. All of them staring at Portman and Goat as they passed. Some whimpering, some growling, some cringing in terror. Patches of bare, inflamed skin on some of the animals where the fur had been shaved off for operations, for wire inserts; stitches across skulls and bellies. Nasty. Poor little fuckers.

And there — a series of shelves with dissected animals suspended in big jars of viscous liquid: gels and solutions glowing livid yellow, blue, red. Some of these creatures were still alive, intubated and sprouting electrodes. Visible hearts beating.

Just to ease the tension, Portman considered making a joke about how maybe they’d find a goat in here with the lab animals, and it’d be one of Goat’s relatives. Goat — goat, get it? But he glanced at Goat’s grim face and thought better of it. Goat had even less sense of humor than Sarge.

Flatscreen monitors on the deserted lab’s consoles streamed anatomical and genetic monitoring diagrams, MRI images, X-rays, 3-D constructs, as if ghostly technicians were there to study them. Some of the MRIs showed what you’d expect — familiar mammalian organs.

But some of them looked completely unfamiliar. Unnatural. What the hell was that thing? A severed head, all tubed up and twitching, it was mostly jaws, clusters of eyes. Where’d they find that? And was he imagining those eyes following him as he walked by?

He got the strange notion that he could hear it thinking. Kill you, it was thinking. Want to kill you. Please. Let me. Kill you.

Seemed you got crazy notions, in a place like this…

“Pinky, you getting this?” Goat asked, turning his guncam to take in the lab animals.

“There’s another chamber to the north,” Pinky prompted them.

Goat jabbed his gun that way, and Portman nodded. They headed north, going through a door into what looked like the surgery: there was a ventilator, EKG, bloodied cutting equipment, a gurney with the heaviest restraints Portman had ever seen. Something about that gurney, those suggestive restraints made Portman want to turn, run the way they’d come back to the air lock.

Get a grip, chickenshit, he told himself. He needed to get his game on. Sometimes it helped to listen to speed-metal, to something that really rocked — it seemed to throw a switch in his nervous system, turned him around so that he went from defensive to ready for action. He found his earphones, plugged them in, hit the PLAY button. Pounding music: Sado-Nation’s vocalist singing:

There’s a truth you can’t avoid

Listen to Johnny Paranoid

Your life will end in the burning void,

Shaking shaking shaking like a rock ’n’ roll chord…

He grimaced. Maybe not the best selection to listen to right now. He pulled the headphones off.

Above the gurney there was a railing in the ceiling, a winch system. They followed it the length of the room, to another, bigger chamber…

They stepped out into the echoing, circular room. And almost stumbled into a pit.

Looked to be twenty-some feet down to the bottom of the perfectly round pit. Blood splashed the floor down there. The pit’s walls were lined with stainless steel.

Goat shined his gunlight into the pit, swept it back and forth. Gouges marked the steel, almost to the upper edges. The gouges couldn’t be what they looked like — not in steel.

They couldn’t really be claw marks…

“What the hell is that?” Portman asked.

“You never did time, Portman?”

“What?”

“This is a holding cell,” Goat said at last.

“Bullshit.” Portman didn’t want to believe that — if it was a holding cell, that might mean the claw marks were, well, claw marks. The pit could be for storage of some kind. “What makes you think that?” Portman asked as he knelt by the edge, reaching out to touch the slick steel surface of the pit’s walls.

A fat blue spark of electricity bit his hand, the current snapping his whole body like a whip, throwing him back against the outer wall of the surgery.

“Because the walls are electrified,” Goat said, Xing the upper wall of the room with his fluorescent powder.

Okay, Portman thought, numbly, trying to sit up and just managing it. Maybe Goat does have some sense of humor. In a weird kind of way.

He blew on his singed, stinging hand. “Goddammit!”

Goat gave him a hard look. He’d taken the Lord’s name in vain.

In the Weapons Lab, Sarge and Duke looked curiously at the workbenches with high-tech tool-and-die equipage, the deserted computer workstations — and they stopped, almost licking their lips, at the racks of neatly labeled, stacked weapons. Mostly familiar ones, in this rack.

Sarge was looking at a secure door at the far end of the room. He crossed to it, swiped his UAC ID badge in the slot.

“So what’s the deal with the sister?” Duke asked, carefully replacing the plasma cannon.

A small wall panel opened to reveal a palm print reader. “Reaper’s parents led the first team of archaeologists to Olduvai,” Sarge said distractedly. “They bought it in some accident up here when he was a kid. She followed in their footsteps, he didn’t.”

Reaper’s parents had been killed on Mars, when he was young — killed by archaeology? Duke shook his head. Archaeologists usually died of old age — or malaria. Weird.

So Reaper had been just a kid when they died. Maybe that’s why he’d gone into being a soldier. A way to deal with the predatory chaos of the world…

But aloud, Duke maintained his veneer of not caring about anything but partying. “Yeah, yeah, whatever, Sarge, what I meant was, Is she single?”

Sarge turned from frowning at the palm print reader to glare at Duke.

Then the panel spoke up, in a tinny computer-generated voice:

“Please provide DNA verification.”

So this one didn’t read palm prints after all — it wanted your hand so it could suck up a speck of flesh, get a DNA read.

Experimentally, Sarge put his hand into the reader. The device thought about it for a moment. Then:

“Advanced Weapons personnel palm print ID only. Access denied.”

Sarge shook his head, annoyed. Both he and Duke wanted to know what was in that room. The term Advanced Weapons made the two oldtime warriors nearly salivate…

Duke found a portable plasma cannon on the outside gun rack; he slung his automag on its strap and hefted the advanced killing machine. “Jeez. They leave this shit lying around, I’d hate to see what they lock up…”

Gunfire.

Three bursts of small-arms fire, the distinctive deep-throated rattling echoing to them down the corridors.

“What the…” Duke said. Surprised that there was contact so soon.

Sarge barked an order into his headset comm: “All units report contact.”

Destroyer slapped the Kid’s gun muzzle down. He broke off firing — having shot a bundle of ventilation hoses in the unevenly lit corridor.

The Kid looked at Destroyer sheepishly.

Destroyer spoke into his comm. “Misdirected fire, Sarge. Wasting ghosts.” And he shoved the Kid forward, back into the patrol route.

“It looked like it was moving,” the Kid said.

“There’s a lot of stuff looks like it’s moving down here. Including me.”

The Kid knew what Destroyer meant. That kind of jumpiness got soldiers killed. And a man killed by friendly fire died for nothing.

“I thought you were supposed to be a crack shot,” Destroyer grumbled.

“I hit it, didn’t I?”

Feeling pretty low, the Kid walked on ahead. Destroyer started after him — then stopped at the ventilation hoses the Kid had perforated, looking up into the ceiling gap they dangled from.

Destroyer noticed something on the floor, directly under the ceiling gap. He picked it up, held it up into the light.

A lab coat — with the left sleeve ripped away. Spots of fresh blood. Maybe, after all, the Kid had shot something besides dangling ventilation hoses.

“Sarge,” Duke asked, as they moved down the corridor, “remember when you said, ‘Any questions?’ and we all pretended like we didn’t have any questions?”

“Yep.”

“Uh — did you get any kind of briefing you haven’t shared yet on what we’re looking for here?”

“Nope. But I don’t need a briefing. I got a clue what the problem is here.”

“Yeah? What clue?”

“You notice the blood on the walls?”

“Yeah.”

Sarge looked at him deadpan. “That don’t give you a clue? The problem is something here is killing people. They get killed, here. It’s a problem. They’re supposed to die of old age, not get killed.”

“Thanks, Sarge.”

“I’m not done. We find what’s killing them. We kill that thing. Clear?”

“Uh…but if we knew what it was…”

“You’d be better equipped to fight it, Duke?”

“Yeah.”

“Bullshit. That’s not why you wanta know. You wanta know because something about this place makes you feel like you might shit yourself.”

See, this was why it wasn’t good to try to start a conversation with Sarge. He said things like that to you. Duke held on to his temper. “Sarge — you ever see me show the yellow feather?”

“No. But you never been here before.”

“I just want a handle on it, Sarge.”

They got to a corner, Sarge looked around it, gestured for him to follow. “Okay. A handle on it. You remember the talk about quarantine?”

“Yeah.”

“You notice this is Mars…an alien planet?”

“Yeah. You’re saying the enemy is aliens?”

“Something along those lines. Related to the damn aliens. Whoever they fucking were. Maybe. Or maybe not. Maybe it’s people. Some kind of brain-fever virus. Maybe we’ll get it, and I’ll be killing your ass dead because it’s fucking me up. Maybe that’ll happen in about ten minutes. Or maybe I won’t wait that long because I’m fucking sick of your mouth.”

“Thanks for helping me with this, Sarge. Now I feel better.”

Sarge ignored the sarcasm. “To review, we don’t know what the fuck it is, except…”

“Except it kills people.”

“Yeah. You clear now?”

“No.”

“Good. Then you’ll stay alert, won’t you. Now shut the fuck up, Duke, before I knock your teeth down your throat.”

When Samantha Grimm turned on the lights of the archaeological spectrographic lab, it looked to Reaper like the place had been in use moments before: everything was left out, seemingly still in process. Computers were turned on, showing images from archaeological digs — carvings, bits of ancient bone, broken pieces of sculpture, intricately worked metal from unfamiliar machinery — rocks and fossils on workbenches, tools lying atop them. Brushes, chisels, specialized scrapers, dust blowers. Reaper looked curiously at the streaming shots of damaged sculpture, remembering some of it from his brief stay here with his parents as a child. Despite the unbreathable surface, the Olduvaians of Mars had been humanoid, judging from the sculpture.

What had happened to his parents had been explained away as some kind of accident in one of the lower, innermost digs. They’d broken into a hidden chamber and a trapped gas had affected them…sickness, psychosis, death…anyway, that was the story he’d been given.

But there had been questions, hushed up when the Grimms’ son and daughter were around…

He pushed all that from his mind. Focus on the job, Reaper.

Sam was at her workstation, inserting MICDIs into the computer intake.

“How much time you gonna need?” Reaper asked her.

“Thirty minutes, tops.”

She tapped the keyboard, starting the downloading process as he set about moving some file cabinets, other equipment to block the entrance. There was something down here killing people, and he didn’t want it jumping in at them — at least he could try to slow it down a little, whatever it was, while they were in here.

Sam was concentrating on the computer, but she said, without looking up: “So, ‘Reaper’? As in ‘Grimm’?”

“They’re Marines, Sam. They ain’t poets. Who’s this Carmack guy?”

Click-clickety on the keyboards. “Dr. Carmack…” Clackity-click. “…is a genius. His research program will save tens of millions of lives. He’s the single finest scientific brain I’ve ever encountered.”

“Yeah.” He pointed at a display of fossils — specifically at a preserved humanoid skeleton curled protectively around the skeleton of a child. “What the fuck is that?”

“That’s Lucy.” She turned to the fossil and pretended to introduce Reaper. “Lucy, this is my brother, John, someone else from the long-lost past.”

He pretended to ignore this, but the shot went home anyway. He had been deliberately out of touch with her for years, partly because of the Olduvai thing. Partly because she had strongly disapproved of his career direction. “A sad waste of talent,” was the nicest thing she’d said about it.

He thought about Lucy. “They found human remains?” They hadn’t when he’d been here as a kid…

“Humanoid. Close to us. ‘Lucy’ and her child were our first find. We’re bringing out more every day.”

He looked at her. “You’ve reopened the dig?” He’d thought they were just looking at artifacts taken from the dig a long time in the past.

“Look, maybe I should have told you,” she replied, looking at him evenly, “but it’s not the sort of thing you jot on a yearly birthday card. Besides, it’s been stabilized…”

He wasn’t going to let her off the hook that easily. “Stabilized — what does that mean? You’re saying it’s safe now?”

“I’m saying the procedures we employ are second to —”

He held a hand up, as he interrupted. “Hold it, hold it — are you saying it’s safe, Sam? Jesus. How naïve are you?”

She gave a soft, incredulous laugh. “You want to talk about safe? Like you took a desk job. Like you’re not out there doing God knows what for God knows why. I’m a forensic archaeologist with a specialty in genetics. I go where the work is.”

“That the only reason you’re up here?”

“You want to know why I’m up here?” She turned back to the console, punched some keys. A readout appeared showing a massive grid and the words THERMAL IONIZATION MASS SPECTROGRAPHY.

“This,” she continued, tapping the screen, “is a radioscopic map of the ground around us. These are outlines of building foundations. Looks like a city, right? It’s not. It’s a hundred times as deep and wide and high as any city we’ve ever known. Population of ninety, a hundred million. A megalopolis. And can you imagine the physics necessary to build the Ark? We’re centuries away from this kind of quantum technology, John.”

He turned to look again at the sad fossil: the bones of a mother curled in pathetic futility around the bones of a child. So what happened to them all? Reaper wondered.

He wondered if they were about to find out the answer — millennia later, on a reawakened Olduvai…

Her computer chimed to announce that the first download was complete. Sam pulled out the MICDI, inserted another. “Come here,” she said.

He moved closer to the hominid display, looking at it from another angle.

Sam hit another keyboard combo, and chromosome maps appeared, strata of black and white in translucent tubes. “This is Lucy’s chromosome profile. Notice anything?” He shrugged, and she added: “We both know you smoked me in biology. It’s the first thing Dad taught us to look for.”

His answer was as dry as the bones on the worktables. “My molecular genetics is a little rusty.”

“She has twenty-four chromosomes. Humans only have twenty-three.”

He nodded, counting the chromosome groups on the display. “You don’t say. So what’s the extra chromosome do? I mean, what’s the difference between me and her, under the hood?”

“You’re human — she’s superhuman. The twenty-fourth pair made her superstrong, superfit, superintelligent. Her cells divide fifty times faster, so she heals almost instantly. The fossil record indicates they’d conquered disease. No genetic disorders, no viruses, no cancers.”

“So she’s just naturally superior…”

“Not naturally. The earliest remains we found had twenty-three pairs of chromosomes. We suspect this extra chromosome may be synthetic.”

Reaper raised his eyebrows. “Bioengineered?”

She smiled thinly. “Long word for a Marine. As I’m sure you also don’t know, only ninety percent of the human genome has been mapped. There’s plenty of room in the helix to insert stealth DNA if you could figure out a way to manufacture it.”

He shook his head. “Sorry. You lost me.”

She snorted. “Sure I have.” Another, different kind of hesitation. Should she go there? “Does it bother you, you could’ve spent your life looking in a microscope — instead of a sniperscope?”

“And work up here for UAC? Sorry. I value my life too much.”

It was true, he thought. Those splashes of blood. The level of quarantine. The tapes.

There were indications that this base for pure science would be far more dangerous than the firefights he’d been in on Earth. Maybe the strongest indication was simple hunch — the instinct of a long-time warrior:

There was death waiting in those corridors.

“Right,” Sam was saying. “Like we don’t all work for UAC.”

He knew what she meant. The corporations had subsumed the government — except in the most cosmetic way. But he insisted, “I’m RRTS, Sam. I serve my country.”

“Really. Now who’s being naïve?”

Reaper shrugged. “So if they were so smart — how come they died out?”

Voices crackled in Reaper’s comm. “We got something,” Goat said.

A dark corridor, deep underground. A single shriek, quickly cut off. The sound of running feet, coming closer…

It was the same corridor. The one in which Dr. Carmack had achieved his feat of sexagenarian sprinting. Where Jorgenson and several others had been torn to pieces.

Goat and Portman were moving down it now, treading slowly, approaching that same door.

“We got movement in Dr. Carmack’s office,” Goat said, into the comm. His voice had the hush of a man on the hunt, not wanting to scare off his quarry.

The door had been ripped open — pried, then torn back like tinfoil.

The walls and floor here in the hall, near the door, could almost have been painted uniformly red-brown, with all the dried blood. Where, Portman wondered, was the rest of the body…or bodies?

They eased up to the ravaged entrance — they’d seen something go through that door.

And they could hear it moving around inside the lab…making a sound that was almost words.

Scraping in there; rattling. Breathing. Muttering.

Weapons ready, fingers on triggers, they edged cautiously, slowly, through the torn-open door — Goat, then Portman. Their probing gunlights showed the room had been trashed, ransacked. There was still some furniture standing.

And something leapt, thumped down onto a desk, to their right. A dark shape. They swung their weapons, and opened fire. The shape leapt over their gunlight beams, past the two soldiers — and out the door as Portman yelled in wordless reaction. Had he hit the thing?

“Contact!” Goat shouted, into the comm. “Contact. Moving east from the gene lab — fast!”

It was heading Sarge’s way…

In the corridor near the Weapons Lab, Sarge saw the dark shape whip past at an intersection of hallways, just thirty feet from him. He fired at it — nowhere near hitting it, it had gone by way too quickly — as Duke caught up with him.

“Certify contact,” Sarge said into his comm, “closing fast from the south corridor. Pinky, get a visual.”

“What is it?” Duke asked.

Sarge shook his head. No clue.

The Kid saw it next — glimpsed it, anyway, racing around a dark corner.

Younger and more agile, he sprinted ahead of Destroyer, hunting lust pumping in him, and opened fire, snapping off a half dozen rounds at the thing. Thing — or person. It was human-shaped, so far as he could tell from the glimpse he’d had — but its movements were inhuman.

“Hold your fire!” Reaper yelled, coming around a corner behind the Kid.

The Kid held back, gritting his teeth, waiting for orders. Reaper pushed past him, pushing the boy’s gun down as he went. Saw the thing — maybe a man — run around another corner…

Reaper ran around the same corner and stopped short, finding himself in a dead end. No lights here. Dark.

Something was breathing in the darkness.

He threw his light on it — a face he’d seen on a video. Sarge caught up with Reaper and stared.

“Dr. Carmack?”

Six

DR. TODD CARMACK was half-naked, shivering, babbling, anorexic — and cradling someone else’s rotting arm. He held a woman’s severed limb clutched against his chest. The dead hand’s manicured, painted fingernails were touching his face. Unconsciously, Carmack began to nibble one of the red-painted fingernails on the stiff blue-white hand. Not like a cannibal, but like someone nervously chewing their nails.

“If you have a weapon, drop it!” Reaper yelled, aware of the Kid and Destroyer coming up behind him. Reaper felt kind of foolish making the demand — probably the only “weapon” Carmack had was that detached limb.

Carmack only muttered gibberish in response, blinking in the gunlights, as Goat and Portman arrived, adding theirs. A fresh cut bled copiously from Carmack’s lower neck. He looked at the decaying, severed arm. A wedding ring on one of the fingers. And let it fall to the floor.

Sam came rushing up, beside Reaper. “Oh my God. Dr. Carmack…?”

“Sam,” Reaper said tersely, “get back!”

“He knows me!” she pointed out. “Dr. Carmack — it’s me, Samantha…I’m not going to hurt you…”

She started toward him — startled, he shrieked and shied backward, into the corner, one hand reaching up to rip his own ear from his head. He flung it at them, reminding Reaper of a monkey flinging offal. Sam stared at the torn-off ear, oozing blood on the floor at her feet. She seemed on the verge of throwing up — but Reaper could see her swallow, get a grip on herself.

Tough kid, he thought admiringly. My sister.

“Jesus Christ,” Portman muttered.

“Anyone got a field medical pouch?” Sam demanded. “Gimme quickclot!” Reaper tossed her his medikit.

Carmack whimpered, cringing, but let her get closer. She dug in the pouch, found the quickclot packet, tore it open with her teeth and poured it on his wounds. “Where are the others, Doctor?” she asked, her voice soothing.

Carmack twitched but said nothing.

“Steve — Hillary…?” She prompted. “Dr. Olsen? Dr. Thurman, Dr. Norris — Dr. Clay?”

Carmack only rolled his eyes, again and again, shaking fingers exploring the wound where his ear had been, mouth crumpling, as if he was confused as to who’d done it to him…

Sarge pushed Portman and the Kid out of the way. “Duke, get him out to the infirmary with Dr.Grimm. Reaper and Goat, clear the genetics labs, work back this way, LOE junction with the west corridor…” As he spoke to the squadron, Sarge never took his eyes, or his gun, off Carmack. “Destroyer and I’ll swing around from here to meet you. Portman, Kid, you two dig in at the air lock, anybody trying to run away from us will get driven to you.”

Sarge shouldered his weapon. Nudged the severed arm on the floor with the tip of his boot. “Let’s see if we can find the body that goes with this.”

Sam emerged from the lab air lock, into the atrium area. Duke was close behind her, carrying Carmack in his arms. The scientist was still babbling, almost seeming to take comfort at being carried; he veered between an infantile state and an atavistic madness.

Base personnel gaped at them as they came, murmuring Carmack’s name, exchanging looks of horror, fear.

“Dr. Willits!” Sam called.

Jenny Willits, brisk and crisp and bespectacled, hurried up to examine Carmack, still in Duke’s arms. “Oh my God. What’s happening in there?”

Duke wondered, too. What had happened to Carmack — and what were his own buddies facing while he was babysitting this lunatic?

Hunegs saw the panicked look on the faces of the base personnel. “There is no cause for alarm — UAC has assured me that the situation is entirely under control…”

They absorbed this remark, then looked at Carmack. Their faces registered a familiar cynicism. They were used to the disconnect between UAC’s public reality…and reality.

It was quiet. The only sound was water dripping somewhere.

Moving with Goat down the corridor between the animal experimentation room and the genetics lab, slipping carefully from pool of shadow to pool of light and back into shadow, Reaper felt a strange disquiet flutter its leathery wings at the back of his mind.

Nothing surprising in Reaper feeling worried, right now. He was on an alien planet where his parents had died; there were unknown antagonists making cool, rational scientists crazed enough to rip off their own ears and throw them, and that severed arm hadn’t been terribly reassuring.

But he was used to risk, uncertainty. Unseen killers hunting him.

It took him a while to figure out what that particular odd nagging at the back of his head was…then it hit him:

He was worried about Sam. Carmack was dangerous — hell, this whole place was dangerous. He wasn’t there to protect her. For years, he’d blocked all thought of her well-being from his mind…

But now that he’d seen her again, it was hard to go off on a mission and just assume that his sister was going to be safe here.

Stay professional, he warned himself. She’ll be okay. Duke’s with her. He’s a good man. Better behave himself though, or I’ll…

Goat was moving along the opposite wall, both of them probing ahead with the lights on their guns. Couldn’t see what was around that dark corner up ahead. Looked like a flight of stairs going downward.

They inched up to the corner, hesitated — Goat took a step…

Bang, clatter, his foot knocked something down the stairs, the sudden noise making them both jump.

“Goddammit,” Goat swore.

The object kept bouncing down the steps, clattered onto the hard floor below, rolled into a pool of light. It was just a small cylindrical container, a can of some kind. Trash.

Reaper waited to see if the noise prompted anyone — or anything — to investigate.

Nothing, just a deeper quiet now.

He turned to Goat — and winced to see him pulling a hunting knife. Knowing what that was about. Goat cut into the skin of his arm, cut a deep cross adding to the numerous scars, like crosses in a military cemetery.

Goat noticed Reaper watching. “I took His name in vain.”

Beads of sweat stood out on Goat’s forehead as he made his penance, pushing the knife in deeper. “In the name of the Father…and of the Son…and of the Holy Spirit….”

Waiting a short distance beyond the air lock, the Kid heard a footfall behind him. Flicked his pistols off safety, spun on his heel — and nearly pulled the trigger. Second time that day he’d almost shot a friendly.

If you could call Portman a friendly. But he seemed not to have noticed that the Kid had almost shot him. “It’s messed up, right?” Portman said, swinging the medical pouch almost jauntily. “A guy like Carmack, trained to put logic before emotion, so freaked he rips off his own ear?” He shook his head. “I tell ya, shit like that…gets under your skin.”

The Kid nodded — felt his hands twitch on his gun. They were starting to shake. He needed a booster. Shouldn’t have gotten started. The first dose, this morning, had been small. But once you started, you kept going so you didn’t have to face the crash…

“Do you…” He licked his lips, lowered his voice. “Do you have any?”

Portman flashed a grin that would make a serial killer shudder. “Do I have any what?”

The Kid grimaced. He hated it when Portman made him beg like this. “You…you know. I’m just a little shook up. I need something to get my focus, y’know. My game face.”

Portman smirked as he fished in a cargo pocket. Brought out a bottle of pills, waved them teasingly. “Whattya say?”

“Please…”

“Please and what?” He waited. The Kid blinked at him in confusion. “Please and what, skirt?”

“Thank you?”

Portman handed over the pills. The Kid had the top off and a pill popped in under two seconds. He chewed it up, handed the bottle back — and lifted his head, sniffing.

The Kid was noticing something else. “What’s that smell?”

Portman sniffed. Frowned. Sniffed again. “Uh…Smells like…smells like barbecue.”

They followed their noses and the faintly visible curtain of smoke hanging in the air. It led to a lab they hadn’t checked yet. The Kid kicked the door in.

Guns ready, they burst through the entrance, tracking the room with the muzzles, looking for a target. Portman found a working light switch and flicked it on. The place was wreathed in smoke.

“Whoa,” Portman began, “someone burned the —”

But then he saw the woman’s charred body — and he had to break off, retching, just to keep his breakfast down.

“Holy fuck,” the Kid said softly. “She fried herself.”

They were staring at the body, dead but kneeling, at the back of the room: the blackened corpse of a woman, missing an arm. Still twitching — maybe she’d been twitching like that for a long time — the hand of her remaining outstretched arm was gripping a lab tool, shoved in a humming, sparking power outlet.

Her hair had burned away. Her charred clothes clung to her, a garment of ash, flaking away bit by bit with her twitching. The fluid from her eyeballs, mostly cooked away, was still bubbling in their sockets.

Portman closed his eyes. Forced himself to report. “Sarge…we found the body that goes with that arm.”

In the corridor to the control-area infirmary, Sam and Dr. Willits and Duke — still carrying Carmack — had just reached a plain gray wall of dull metal. Plain except for the control panel, into which Sam punched a code.

The wall sighed and softened, suddenly looking like it was made of gray clay.

“Oh no no no,” Duke said, shuddering. “I don’t do nanowalls.” Walking through a wall always gave him the creeps. It was like something from a dream — and most of his dreams were bad.

“Quickly,” Sam said impatiently. “He may be dying.” Sam pushed through the wall, Dr. Willits right after her.

Okay, Duke thought. I can’t be too pussy to do it, now she’s done it.

He took a deep breath, muttering “Fuck this shit,” closed his eyes — and stepped through the wall. You had to push, a little, it resisted, flowing around you with a sensation like static electricity and warm mud.

But then he was through, opening his eyes, carrying Carmack to the gurney. Apart from the gurney, the room was all stainless steel and clucking, humming monitors, instruments Duke couldn’t identify.

And that nanowall — a high-security device. What went on in here? Duke wondered.

Carmack stared at the ceiling with dilated eyes as the doctor began her examination. Sam and Dr. Willits put on some gloves.

“Did they find the others?” Dr. Willits asked, looking into Carmack’s pupils with an instrument that looked to Duke more like it was for poking eyes out than examining them.

Sam tried to keep her voice even and confident. “Not yet. I’m sure Steve’s fine.”

“I told him they needed to get some rest,” Dr. Willits murmured worriedly, as she looked at Carmack. “But he said they were close to a breakthrough. And Dr. Carmack wanted to keep going…”

Sam tied a rubber tube around Carmack’s biceps, jacking the scientist’s arm like a pump handle to get a blood pressure reading. Carmack lay there passively as she took the reading…

Until he suddenly sat bolt upright, dug his fingers into Sam’s hair, pulling her close.

“Oh God,” Carmack moaned. “I can feel it!”

“Whoa!” Duke burst out, coming at Carmack — but she’d pulled back somewhat on her own and waved Duke away. She judged this was her chance to get the story out of Carmack.

“It’s okay — I’m okay. Dr. Carmack? What happened in there? It’s me, Dr. Grimm…Samantha Grimm…”

“Shut it down!” Jerking her face up to his, spraying spittle as he shouted, nose to nose.

He let her go, sinking back into the cot. His lips were moving, but they couldn’t make out what he was saying. Sam leaned closer…making Duke nervous. The guy might go psychotic on them again any second.

“It’s inside…” Carmack whispered. Barely audible.

And then his eyes glazed over.

“Looks like we missed the party,” Reaper remarked.

“What happened to all the animals?” Goat asked.

He and Reaper were in the animal experimentation lab, staring at the broken cages. The cages were all opened — the test subjects gone. Some of the cage doors had been bent back, ripped away.

Gurgling and giggling came from near one bank of cages.

Goat and Reaper nodded to each other. Weapons ready, they eased around the pens, poised to shoot — and found a scientist in a white coat, hunkered down, half-turned away over a fallen, open cage.

“Sir?” Reaper asked. “RRTS, we’re here to help. You all right?” No telling if this was an enemy or someone he should save, yet. They didn’t know who or what the enemy was. He went with friendly until he knew differently. “We’re here to help you.”

The scientist turned toward them — his eyes were wide, his skin the color and consistency of dough. Blood rimmed his mouth and ran from a wound on his neck. “Sir, are you injured?” Reaper persisted.

Still gaping at them, registering nothing, the scientist thrust both his hands into the cage, pulled something white and squirming out. And shoved two white rats into his mouth at once. Bit down…they squealed and writhed, tails lashing.

Goat and Reaper took a step back, shocked. Goat touching the cross at his neck, murmuring a prayer.

“Sir,” Reaper said, thinking he should just blow the guy’s head off instead, “whatever’s happened to you we can get you hel —”

Spitting bits of dead rodents, the man seized a cruel-looking knife from the table and charged them, howling as he came — a rat’s head spinning out of his mouth with the last long ululation. He was nearly against the muzzles of their guns before they opened fire, the bullets slamming him backward to crash into the cages, knocking them into a clattering wreckage.

The scientist twitched, moaned, and went limp. His lab coat was on fire from the close proximity of the gun muzzles; smoke wisped from him like his escaping soul.

“Contact report!” came Sarge’s voice, on comm.

Reaper cleared his throat. Went to look at the name tag he’d glimpsed on the scientist’s coat. “Found one of our missing scientists. Olsen, I guess. He rushed us. Crazy. Just like Carmack.”

Reaper wondered if it was just like Carmack — who was with his sister now. Suppose he should go off the deep end, like Olsen had? He had shown incredible bursts of speed. Unnatural agility, preternatural energy. He might get at Sam before Duke could stop him…

In a corridor on the other side of the lab division, Sarge was talking on the comm to Reaper, with Destroyer just behind him, watching his six.

“He dead?” Sarge asked.

“Yeah, very…” Reaper said, his voice almost lost in the comm’s hiss.

Destroyer was feeling extra nervous. This place made him nervous anyway: it wasn’t like the jungle or the desert or some urban-warfare scenario — he knew what to do in those locales. This place seemed to be operating according to rules he didn’t quite understand.

But now he felt like something was watching him. He didn’t know where it was. He didn’t know what it was. But he could feel it watching him.

And then he heard it. Creaking noises from that big ventilator duct that ran along flush with the wall, overhead…something deforming the metal with its weight.

“Sarge?” Destroyer pointed his gun at the duct.

Sarge looked, saw the duct was shaking, just slightly, as something moved through it. He nodded and swung his weapon toward the grating high in the wall.

Destroyer went to the grate, reached up, quietly removed the grate, pulled himself up…gun in one hand, pulling himself along by his elbows, into the duct. Turning up ahead. He got to the turning, peered around in time to see something rush at him, teeth bared, squealing with hatred as it came — big eyes, muzzle, fangs, fur —

He scrambled backward — firing the gun spasmodically, the muzzle flashes making a strobe light that chopped up his visuals so he didn’t know if he hit the thing. He fell backward, out of the duct into the hall, firing the gun as he fell, puncturing the metal of the vent, the chaingun doing a demolition job on the duct, the ceiling.

Found himself sitting on his ass with the chaingun smoking in his hand.

“What the hell was it?” Sarge asked.

“A…monkey. Some kind of monkey.” Realizing it was probably just an escaped lab animal. Gone a little nuts in here.

But then maybe the animals could’ve been affected by whatever had affected Carmack…presumably the experiments had started with them.

Blood was dripping from the bullet holes in the duct. Sarge went to it — put out his hand. Blood dripped on it. Not ordinary blood. Not the right color.

It was the same as the blood Dr. Willits was just then drawing from Carmack, in the infirmary.

Jet-black.

In the animal experimentation lab, Reaper and Goat were still puzzling over the dead scientist. And the rats on the floor he’d bitten in half.

Reaper shook his head. He wanted to move on. Get to the bottom of this — and get the hell out of the room. He called Sarge on the comm, wondering what they should do, if anything, with Olsen’s body. “Sarge — should we bag him and tag him?”

Goat was looking at something different on the floor now. A shadow, lengthening, twisting. Cast by something behind…

“Negative,” Sarge was saying. “Continue your search.”

But Reaper wasn’t listening anymore. The low, wet rasping sound from behind him had his full attention. He caught Goat’s eye, who nodded; their fingers tensed on the triggers of their weapons —

And they spun, firing at something just glimpsed in the dim farther reaches of the cluttered room. It roared in fury, wounded, and retreated, around a row of cages.

Reaper just made out something bigger than a man, rippling with muscles. Dark scaly skin — and a leg iron, its chain broken, locked around its ankle — and then it was gone from their line of sight.

They advanced on the row of cages it’d vanished behind.

“Shoot-pause-enter,” Reaper said. A standard tactic. Goat nodded.

They jumped around the corner, firing — nothing. It’d moved on, through the open door into the corridor. They shoved fresh clips into their guns, and Reaper led the way into the hallway — empty. Nothing. Except black blood on the floor.

“Reaper,” said Sarge on the comm, “what’ve you got?”

“We’re chasing something,” Reaper replied. It seemed as if every second light was out in this corridor. The long hall was paced by pools of shadow that were darker than they should naturally be.

“What do you mean, ‘something’?” Sarge asked, on the comm.

“Something big! Not human!”

“Godammit, give me a confirmation on what you see!” Sarge hollered over the comm. “Reaper!…Pinky, you get a look at it?”

“Roger that. Enhancing now.”

At the comm center, Pinky was rewinding Reaper’s guncam, from the digital record. Mac was watching over his shoulder, a hulking presence that made Pinky nervous. But he didn’t know how volatile the Japanese Privine might be, so he didn’t tell him to back off.

There — something in that dim image. Pinky froze the frame, rewound a little, put the cursor on a silhouette seen down the corridor. He pressed the keyboard combination for enhance and render. The computer hummed and something began to appear, almost seeming to materialize out of the digital murk. Whatever it was had its back to the camera.

It was bigger than a man, mostly nude — shreds of clothing left around its groin suggesting it had been smaller and had grown, ripping the clothing. Human clothing — had it originally been human-sized?

Its huge head, growing neckless from its hunched, muscle-rippling shoulders, turned just enough so that Pinky could make out small tusks in a wide, snarling, bestial mouth. It seemed eyeless, apparently perceiving from membranes at the front of its head. The whole creature was the color and texture of skin with a second-degree burn. Difficult to see its feet clearly in this cloudy image — but that foot, lifted to take a step. Was that…a hoof?

The enhanced figure in the image was most definitely inhuman — and looked like it was designed by nature to be a living kill-machine.

Staring over Pinky’s shoulder at the screen, Mac whistled softly to himself.

“Hey, guys,” Pinky said, staring at the image. “It ain’t a disgruntled employee.” Pinky hit a few more keys, distantly aware that his fingers were trembling. “Uploading the image to you now, Sarge…”

In his own end of the facility, Sarge projected the uploaded image onto the floor. He stared. “What in the…”

Reaper and Goat heard the thing thumping around a corner. They sprinted, fingers wrapping triggers, around the turn…and found themselves in yet another dead end. Who’d designed this warren of corridors, Reaper wondered, the people who designed mazes for rats?

The thing they’d been chasing was gone. Where the hell did it go to? The only door here had a big chained padlock on it. The thing was too big to just vanish…

“…Reaper,” Goat said.

Reaper looked at him — Goat was looking down at a big manhole grate in the floor, half-open. “Sarge,” Reapter reported, into the comm. “It’s in the sewer…” They knelt, Reaper pointed his gunlight into the gap. The facility’s sewage system and wastewater outflow looked alike. He saw a dead rhesus monkey floating by on a stygian stream.

He heard Sarge requesting data from Pinky. “Talk to me, Pinky.”

“An outflow tunnel,” Pinky said. “It connects that section of the sewer to the main facility’s system.”

An inhuman growl resounded from somewhere down in the sewer.

Goat then looked at Reaper, slightly wide-eyed, pointing his weapon at the manhole grate. “So…you wanna go first?” he said, shrugging nervously, cracking a hint of a smile.

Reaper couldn’t really tell whether or not Goat was kidding.

“All units, all units” Reaper said into the comm, “request assistance at the southeast corridor, med lab!”

Sarge’s voice boomed over the comm in response. “Copy that, Reaper. Stay put until we get there! All units — converge on Reaper’s position. Southeast corridor, med lab. Move!”

Seven

THE RRTS SQUADRON was dropping into the sewer.

“And I thought ‘in the shit’ was a figure of speech,” Portman groused.

“Get in the goddamn hole, Portman,” Sarge growled.

Weapon slung over his shoulder, Portman descended the metal ladder to step into the thigh-high sewage runoff. Most of it was just water, but spotlit in the shaft of light from above, Portman could see human wastes swirling by, including bits of toilet paper, and small dead animals from the labs. Animals — or parts of them. A string of entrails twined around Portman’s leg as he bent over to fit into the tunnel, but he made himself slosh forward to join the others, choking with the smell as he went. His gagging echoed in the tunnel along with drippings, footfalls, and creaking sounds from unknown sources.

Probably annoyed by Portman’s griping, Sarge gestured for him to take point. Still gagging, pointing his gunlight down the low, echoing tunnel, Portman splashed onward.

“Hey, Portman,” the Kid said, his voice quavering, “when you were young y’ever picture yourself doing this?”

“No,” Portman said immediately, “I pictured myself getting laid.”

Goat came just behind him, murmuring verses from the Bible : “Be sober, be vigilant, because your adversary the devil…walketh about seeking whom he may devour.”

“That’s real comforting, Goat,” Portman grumbled. “I mean that’s not freaking me out at all!” Goat glared at Portman — and as if the look was a biblical curse, as Portman said, “Why don’t you shut the —” he vanished midstep, plummeting out of sight into the water.

“Portman!” Goat burst out.

Their gunlights shone in a convergence of beams on the water where he’d been. Bubbles and offal floated by. Nothing else visible.

“Portman!” Reaper yelled, easing up to the spot.

No response.

Reaper bent, almost kneeling in the tunnel, wrinkling his nose as his face got all too close to the malodorous stream. “I got his hand. Damn he’s heavy. He’s too deep.” He reached into the sewage, found a hand flailing up under the water.

Reaper grabbed Portman’s hand and pulled, grunting. But Portman was stuck. Desperation communicated through his tightening grip. Reaper leaned back, using his weight — something popped loose down below, and he dragged Portman thrashing up into sight.

“Dammit!” Portman gasped. “Shit!”

“Congratulations, Portman, that’s your first bath in months,” Reaper said.

As Portman swore and muttered, trying to wipe himself off, Reaper felt around for the hole with his toe. Found it, around a big wheel-shaped valve of some kind. Not a passage. The thing they were chasing couldn’t have gone down that way — but the valve recess was deep enough for Portman to stumble into.

“Up ahead,” Sarge said, pointing with his gunlight.

The beam laid an oval of light over a pale object, reminiscent of a human torso, floating along the tunnel toward them. Sarge fished it out — it was a lacerated and bloody lab coat with a name on it.

DR. STEVE WILLITS was stitched in cursive over the breast pocket.

“We got Willits’s lab coat,” Sarge said, into his headset. “John, Kid — on point.” He looked at Portman’s disgusted face, and added, “Watch your step.”

They moved on around a curve in the tunnel — everyone stepping carefully around the hole Portman had fallen into — and found it split off into several directions. Sarge gave his orders, punctuating each by pointing at the tunnel he was sending them into. “Goat, straight. We’ll go left.” Meaning him, Destroyer, and Portman. “John, Kid, on the right. Destroyer, you’re on point.”

As Reaper passed the Kid, to move into point just ahead of him in the right-hand tunnel, he noticed the Kid was wearing his night-vision goggles in the dark tunnel. And the Kid noticed Reaper wasn’t.

“How come you don’t wear night-vision?” the Kid asked.

“Don’t like NVGs,” Reaper replied, sweeping the tunnel ahead with his gunlight. “They limit your peripheral vision.”

“Yeah, plus you can’t see shit to either side,” the Kid said.

Reaper was trying to decide if the Kid was joking when a loud splash came from behind. The Kid spun around, splashing Reaper with the sudden motion, autopistols taut in his hands — but it was a noise of the others moving in the adjacent tunnels.

The Kid was panting with fear. He turned back to face the darkness of the tunnel ahead, bubbling over with nerves. Jabbering.

“Portman told me some stuff about you,” the Kid chattered. “Said you lost your parents when you were a kid, right? Small. I lost my parents, too.”

“Every time you open your mouth you’re giving away our position,” Reaper told him.

“Yeah. See, I woke up one morning, everything was gone. Only thing left was me. They wanted the TV more than they wanted me.”

The tunnel must be getting to the Kid — connecting him to the primal fear he’d felt, waking up to find his parents had abandoned him. Back in that other dark childhood tunnel, in a way.

Anyhow, it was better that the Kid cowboyed up, and stopped being so personal. This was the time to be professional and nothing but.

And Reaper didn’t want to hear about the Kid’s parents vanishing on him. His own parents hadn’t exactly abandoned him. But one day they were just…gone. Dead.

The Kid stared owlishly back at him, mouth moving soundlessly, his eyes…

Reaper found a small flashlight in his belt pack, pointed the red-tinted light at the kid’s face. “Your pupils,” Reaper burst out, furious. “They’re dilated, Kid! Are you fuckin’ high?”

The Kid looked away. Tried out a lie. “I got this condition, Reaper…”

“Who’s supplying you?” Reaper demanded. “Portman?”

The Kid didn’t answer. Which was answer enough.

Great. The Kid and Portman were high on some trashy neurostimmer. In Reaper’s experience, guns times drugs equaled fuckups. Stoned people always fucked up big-time, in a tense situation. Meaning somebody would die, as a result…and not necessarily the enemy.

“You take any more of that shit, Kid,” Reaper said, deliberately making his voice loud enough for Portman and Sarge to hear, too, “and I’ll blow holes in you and Portman.”

“Oh sure, Reaper,” the Kid snorted. “Like you’re gonna shoot me.”

Reaper pointed his gun at the Kid’s head. Settled in like he was about to follow through on his threat.

The Kid swallowed. “Hey — look — I was just kidding.”

There was something moving, something big and bulky, in the side tunnel just beyond the Kid.

“I won’t do it again, okay?” the Kid was saying. “I’m sorry.”

“Get down,” Reaper said.

Something was coming closer…

“What?”

“Get down!”

The Kid crouched low into the water. “What is it?”

It slipped past them — swimming now, but unmistakably a bipedal shape, a large, living creature…then he lost sight of it.

But as he pressed back against the curved wall, the Kid now against the wall opposite him, Reaper saw a V-shaped ripple moving along the surface of the water, its motion purposeful, sliding between them. Heading back down the tunnel…

Heading for the squadron like a submerged alligator.

Reaper followed, came to the place the tunnel divided, saw it turn into Goat’s tunnel.

“Goat,” Reaper said into the comm, “something’s behind you! It’s under the surface! It’s coming toward you!”

“Oh fuck!” Portman hissed, hearing the report on the comm, pointing his gun at the water. Not sure where to shoot. He might blow someone’s kneecap apart before he hit the thing swimming under the water.

“It’s under the water!” Reaper repeated, on the comm.

Portman fired a nervous burst into the water — the rounds sent up little geysers of sewage, ricocheted down the tunnel.

“Hold your fire!” Sarge ordered. “It’s not in this tunnel!”

In the center tunnel, Goat had turned, was swinging his light from side to side, trying to spot the thing Reaper said was coming for him. Seeing nothing at all but floating crap.

“I don’t see it!” Goat reported.

“It’s there!” came Reaper’s voice, crackling in the headset.

But he still saw nothing but water and spiraling waste. Worse, his light was going out. Getting weaker and weaker…

Wait — was there something under the water, over there? It was hard to tell in the weak gunlight. Should have brought an extra flash or a flare or something, but he liked to carry as little as possible. Stay sleek. So he had no other light on him. No night goggles. Not even a match.

And as Goat peered, eyes aching, into the dimness — his light went out completely.

Total darkness snapped down around him. Perhaps this was a message from God. He remembered a line from the Bible, Matthew 6:23, If then the light in you is darkness, how great is the darkness!

God was showing him the darkness of his own soul…

But the soldier in him struggled to stay in control . Don’t give in — fight! Let the others know.

“This is not happening,” he muttered into the comm. “My light is down. Think my battery’s out. Pinky…you see it?”

But the cameras he bore were in darkness, too. “No, nothing,” came Pinky’s voice on the headset.

Then he heard a splashing sound, and a kind of reptilian chuckle. He remembered the coat they’d found floating down the tunnel.

“Dr. Willits?” he whispered.

Something rose up from the water, quite near him; he could hear liquid dropping from its body, could hear it breathing — close beside him, on his right…

Less than a foot away.

He swallowed…and turned, could just make out a shape that was a deeper darkness than the background gloom — a misshapen head.

The dark shape opened its eyes. Two luminous eyes…

Then the rest of its eyes opened.

A whole cluster of them — glowing against the backdrop of darkness. Goat stumbled backward —

A light flashed on them from down the tunnel: Reaper’s gunlight. But he was too far away to shoot the thing without hitting Goat.

There was a flash of spiky teeth, a flicker of something rocketing from its maw — a sickly pink tongue stabbing like a stinger but coming like the tongue of a frog zapping an insect, flying harpoonlike into Goat’s throat — and he felt the impact on his neck, stabbing and pumping to gush a fluid into him, a venom or worse.

Goat shrieked and fell, thrashing. Hot pain spread rippling out from his neck, washed over him — and then a terrifying numbness. Not the numbness of blessed relief, but a malevolent dullness. Paralysis started in his lower body, making it go rigid and he slid down into the water. His hands flailed at the barbed tongue embedded in his neck…

The creature that’d injected Goat stepped back — and as it did, its tongue unspooled from its throat. It reeled out, out…longer and longer, an absurd connection of flesh between its drooling maw and Goat’s jolting form…

Then, as it was supposed to, the tongue snapped free, detaching itself, shortening, becoming about two feet long; pumping its fluid sack furiously into Goat as it writhed around his body, finishing its work. Goat tried to pull the tongue off, but it was no use, he was losing control of his upper body…

The creature moved away from its detached tongue. The tongue would follow a homing instinct back to it, in time to be ready for the next anointing.

But then it turned, startled by a flash of light — Reaper was there, splashing up the tunnel toward it. It ducked down in the water.

“Man down!” Reaper shouted, seeing Goat twitching in the water.

He’d seen the thing shoot its tongue into Goat — but where had it gotten to?

There was an eruption from the foul water just two yards from him, then the creature was transfixed for a strobic moment by his gunlight beam: sheathed in sliding water, its semihuman head lifted; a cluster of eyes like a spider’s, no nose to speak of, most of its head taken up by vast jaws bristling with teeth, its skin raw-looking, its hands ending in talons, its body rippling in muscle.

And then it charged.

Reaper fired, and the creature let out a long, high-pitched sirening screech as the bullets struck it — black blood fountaining as it clawed at the wounds, dancing in the ripping impact of a whole clip from the light machine gun: a hellstorm of gunfire into the darkness, lighting up the tunnel with flashing chaos, the bullets zipping and ricocheting around the tunnel where the creature had gone, scoring the walls, smashing through pipes, chipping metal. Cloaked in shadow, the thing shrieked as it was hit, the sound otherworldly, quavering, echoing on and on.

Reaper finally ran out of bullets — only the bullets had kept it from falling, the last few rounds: it flopped down with a splash into the muck.

The rest of the team came up from behind. Stopped to stare at the thing floating, slowly turning, faceup, twitching in death.

They gaped at it…and saw its tongue detaching from Goat to swim off down the tunnel like a sea snake seeking its den.

Then Reaper splashed over to Goat — only the top half of his head was sticking out the polluted water. His eyes open, unblinking, staring.

Reaper looked at him for a moment, then picked him up in his arms. Sarge led the way back to the ladder.

Sarge and Reaper carried Goat together, almost double-timing it through the atrium; Duke and Destroyer followed, dragging something behind them; the Kid and Portman brought up the rear…

Mac grinned when he saw them come in, and ran over to join them — but his smile fell away when he saw Goat. He gave Portman a questioning look. Short explanations were mumbled at him, but the explanations only baffled Mac more.

Hunegs came hurrying up, giving them a look of white-faced inquiry.

“We gotta move the quarantine zone,” Sarge told him. “Evacuate the entire facility. Get all personnel to the Ark immediately.”

Hunegs chewed the inside of his cheek as if wondering whether Sarge had the authority to issue that order to the whole facility.

Reaper decided there was no time to play “who’s higher on the chain of command.”

“Get those people out of here now! Move! Move!”

“What’s going on out there?” Hunegs demanded.

Sarge tried keeping it simple. “Everybody through the Ark!”

Hunegs pursed his lips — then nodded, started barking orders to the security men staring at the reeking squadron and their disturbing burdens.

“Move! Everybody out!”

That was it — the milling became running, panic set in, and people, voices high-pitched as they told one another to get out of the way, ran for the Ark.

Though there was pandemonium in the atrium, it was still quiet in the infirmary; the only sounds were the occasional low moan from Dr. Carmack and the humming of the biomonitoring equipment. But Sam was at least as tense as the people running to the Ark, as she dropped samples of Carmack’s blood into a spectrographic analyzer.

“Attention!” Lieutenant Hunegs’s voice, coming tinnily over the public address system. “All personnel, please report to the Ark chamber for immediate evacuation. Attention — all personnel…”

“Dr. Willits,” Sam said, as she frowned over the readout, “listen, his condition is stable. You should go.”

“I want to stay.” She shined a light into Carmack’s eyes. She wasn’t about to get too close to Carmack, though he was now in restraints.

“Steve’ll be okay,” Sam said. “The guys looking for him are the best….”

Dr. Willits looked at Sam — and Sam could tell she didn’t trust the squadron to find her husband, Steve.

Sam herself doubted that Dr. Willits’s husband — one of the genetics researchers in the labs — would be found alive. But you had to reassure people, didn’t you? Why obvious lies were supposed to be reassuring was another mystery.

“Jenny — go…please.”

Dr. Willits looked at Carmack, twitching in the restraints. She wouldn’t be sorry to leave — she didn’t feel safe with Carmack, whatever she’d pretended.

At last she nodded. “I’ll be back as soon as I can.” She gathered up a few things, waved good-bye to Sam, and left the infirmary, the nanowall melting back into place behind her, once more going flat and gray and permanent-looking, as if someone hadn’t just walked right through it.

Sam turned back to the spectrograph. She squinted at it, trying to comprehend what it was telling her about Carmack’s blood. Five words blinked up at her, in luminous green LCD letters.

BLOOD GROUP CANNOT BE IDENTIFIED

“What the hell?” she muttered aloud. As she puzzled over the spectrographic reading, some part of her mind registered an odd noise from the gurney, behind her — a creaking sound.

“Blood group cannot be identified?” Black the blood might be — perhaps from a dysfunctional liver — but it was some kind of human blood. Wasn’t it?

Duke came back in and looked over her shoulder. Read the same message from the spectrograph. “No blood match? That can’t be good, right?”

Sam shook her head. It simply didn’t make sense.

She went to a glass-doored cabinet, found another blood draw kit. She’d just have to test him again…she turned back to Carmack…

He was gone. Nothing remained on the gurney but broken restraints and a dark, bloody smear across the sheet.

The squadron went down a corridor and through the nanowall, on into the infirmary. Looking up from the spectrograph, Samantha Grimm recoiled a little at the lingering smell of the sewer they brought with them, then stared at the lumpy poncho that Duke and Destroyer dragged after them into the room, the plastic folded over a hump. Something hard to identify was sticking out in back. Legs? Not human, if legs they were.

They laid Goat on a gurney — and Sam held back a moment before approaching him. He looked dead — but things weren’t always the way they looked, anymore.

It had looked like Carmack couldn’t have gotten off that gurney, too…

“What happened?” Sam asked, looking at the wound on Goat’s neck. She’d never seen one like it.

Reaper shook his head. He tried to think of a way to describe what’d happened. Well, this thing shot its ten-foot-long tongue into him, then the tongue scrolled out, then it unlatched, then the tongue…

Right. He ended up saying nothing. The whole team lifted Goat on the table to work on him, their training kicking in. Duke cut open Goat’s uniform. Experienced in battlefield medical dressing, Reaper set up an IV — all the makings were to hand on the infirmary shelves — and the Kid held a bloody bandage pressed against Goat’s neck.

They were all helping except for Portman. He was simply staring at Goat in shock.

“He was talking about devils…” Portman mumbled.

Sam looked at him, eyebrows raised. “Devils?”

Portman flapped a hand at Goat. “…all his Bible shit…angels, good and evil, the devil among us…” Mouth slack, he kept staring at Goat.

Reaper glanced at Portman, decided he needed to be kept busy. “Portman, get a second line in here. I need to hit him with some adrenaline.”

Portman snapped out of his fog and started moving around, looking for another IV line and the adrenaline.

“Attention all personnel!” came Hunegs’s voice, booming over the PA system. “Please report to the Ark for immediate evacuation! All personnel, please report for immediate evacuation…”

“Like to hit that exit myself,” Portman murmured.

Reaper watched his sister work on Goat. She moved intelligently, efficiently, her hands in rubber gloves but otherwise showing no concern for the blood and gore she was getting on herself. As for Goat…

“He’s not breathing,” Reaper observed. “Fuck.”

Sarge was looking around, frowning. “Where’s the hell’s Carmack?”

“He disappeared,” Sam said, stanching the wound on Goat’s neck with a compress.

“He what?”

“I said he’s gone! He disappeared!”

Duke was looking at the heart monitor. “Lost the pulse!”

Reaper grabbed a couple of defibrillators off a console, slapped them on Goat’s chest. “Clear!”

The others stepped back, and he thumbed a switch. Goat’s body jerked, and fell back. No response. He tried it again.

“Shit…”

Tried it again…nothing.

Goat flopped again and the air smelled of burnt skin and ozone — and he still registered a flat line. Goat was staring at the ceiling…or past it, Reaper imagined. Through the ceiling, through the roof, through the toxic atmosphere of Mars, into the starry heavens. Like a guy watching for a bus — he was waiting for his ride to show up…

The men looked on, helpless, trying to think of some way to help. Goat wasn’t the most popular guy in the squadron, but he was still their brother in arms.

There was nothing to be done. You could see that the life had gone out of that body.

So Reaper closed Goat’s eyelids. Then he reached under Goat’s Kevlar vest, drew out his old Bible, now splattered with blood. He handed it to Portman. Who looked down at it uneasily.

Sarge let out a long slow breath, then turned to Sam. “All right. We need answers. What the fuck is going on up here?”

Sam was taken aback by his bluntness — and maybe the generality of his question. “What do you mean?”

“What do I mean? Come here!” Sarge commanded.

He nodded to Destroyer, who threw back the poncho, revealing what they’d dragged in here.

Sam took a quick step back, seeing the creature on the floor.

It was dead, already decaying, and a hellish waft rose as they exposed it, overwhelming the fetor of sewage. The thing was much bigger than a man, with a thick black exoskeleton and a cluster of eight eyes. The head was spiky, mostly jaws.

A kind of hideous imp, Sam thought. Something from Hell.

She was afraid to get any closer.

Stop being childish, she told herself. Her brother was here, watching. Was she going to show she was scared in front of him? This was a new species, that was all. She should be excited about the scientific possibilities. She shouldn’t be reacting with this visceral repugnance…

Sam walked up to the creature — which she fervently hoped was as dead as it looked — and looked it over, trying to understand what it might be, where it had come from. And failed.

“Have you people found anything like this on your archaeological dig?” Sarge asked.

“No,” she said.

“Is there any way this thing came from outside, from the surface?”

She shook her head. “The planet is completely dead.”

“It came from somewhere, lady!” Portman put in.

“Portman,” Sarge said, “shut up!”

“The atmosphere on the surface can’t support life,” Sam went on. She was about to explain just how toxic the atmosphere of Mars was when Portman interrupted her.

“You just said you don’t know what the fuck it is.” He waved his hands in the air. Looking a little crazy, to her — possibly stoned. “Maybe it doesn’t need air! It could be from another planet or something!”

“An alien?”

“Look at that thing!”

“Portman,” Sarge roared, “shut the fuck up!”

“That’s not what we saw,” Reaper said, looking at the creature. They all turned toward him, every face showing confusion, and he had to explain: “This isn’t exactly what Goat and I shot at in the genetics lab. This is something different.”

Portman looked at him in shock. “You’re telling me there could be more of these fucking things?”

Sarge turned slowly to Sam. “Where are the surface entry points?”

She shrugged. “There’s a pressure door at the end of the north corridor…”

“Portman, Destroyer, Kid,” Sarge barked, “you’ll get there on the double, gimme a sit-rep.”

“Yes, sir,” Destroyer said, for all of them. Seeing Sarge’s mood, seemed like a good time for a yes sir.

“Whatever this thing is,” Sarge went on, “we can’t let it get back through the Ark. Mac, give Pinky a sidearm and some STs, seal the Ark door, and rendezvous at the atrium — now!”

Mac nodded and stalked off through the nanowall.

“There’s another door,” Sam said, realizing it even as she said it.

“Where?” Sarge asked.

Sam hesitated — and Sarge seemed about to slap her with his impatience.

Reaper knew he’d never allow anybody to raise a hand to his sister, whatever issues he might have with her. But a potential fight with Sarge would probably end badly for Reaper.

John Grimm was good. But Sarge was a killing machine.

Anyway, Reaper had the answer to Sarge’s question.

“…The entrance to the archaeological dig,” Reaper said, after a moment.

In the wormhole chamber, the last few scared evacuees were filing through the huge steel chamber door toward the Ark, shepherded by Hunegs. There were flashes at regular intervals as they went through.

“This is the last of them,” Hunegs called to Mac, as he came in. Just a few more technicians…

Mac nodded, went to Pinky who was sitting at a workstation, puzzling over the digital file of Carmack’s research journal.

As Mac walked over to him, Pinky read the second-to-last entry again:

Twined, twined they are, into the DNA sequence. The fingerprints of the satanic, the darkest of darknesses within us. I dare not call it the supernatural, though it also cannot be called part of the natural world as we understand it. But something inhuman and other-dimensional hid the keys to the gates of Hell in our DNA…what is its agenda? Who has left this cunning lure for us?

Pinky just shook his head. Carmack had to have been out of his mind.

Mac dropped a gun and three ST grenades on Pinky’s console.

Pinky raised his eyebrows. “What’s that?”

“ST grenade. Pop the top, hit the button, throw. Don’t forget the last part,” Mac said.

As if that said it all, he turned and headed for the exit.

“What? Whoa!” Pinky called after him. “What are you doing?”

“I’m going to work.”

Mac went through the doorway, pressed the release, and the enormous steel door rolled into place.

“Wait!” Pinky yelled, starting after him. “Wait up! You can’t!”

But Mac was locked away on the other side of the door. His voice came cracklingly over the intercom:

“Ark secure.”

Heavy bolts clanged into place. Pinky was sealed in.

“Shit,” he said.

Behind him, Hunegs and the last evacuee went through. The last tech to pass through was pale, sweating, stumbling as he went through the metal doors into the Ark chamber.

Hunegs helped him up; helped him go through. Never looking at him closely — busily thinking about his own chance to escape.

So Hunegs didn’t see the mark on the man’s neck; didn’t see the wound just visible, low, under his bloody collar.

Eight

THEY WERE ALL there but Duke, who’d been assigned to stay with Samantha. Seemed like Duke hadn’t minded that assignment much, Reaper reflected.

The squad stood nervously in the atrium, waiting for orders.

Portman wanted to make up his own orders. “We’re not calling in backup?” Acting shocked, amazed.

Sarge shot him a cold look. “The Ark is sealed. Nothing crosses back here until everything on this planet is dead.” He examined his own weapon, adding, “Weapons check. We’re going in hot.” As if to say that settled the issue.

Portman just stood there, his weapon on the floor beside him, staring at Sarge in disbelief. “You’re serious?”

Reaper looked at him. Was this guy really ignoring an order? “Pick up your weapon, Portman.”

Destroyer slapped a belt of ammo into his chaingun. “Come on, Portman — move out.”

Portman didn’t move anywhere. “Didn’t you see the way that thing greased Goat?” His voice was getting shrill. “We don’t know what we’re dealing with!”

Sarge chambered a round, slammed the breach.

“It’s SOP,” Portman continued, insistently, almost whining, “to call in reinforcements when a situation —”

“We are the reinforcements!” Sarge interrupted, his voice like an ax chopping. “Now shoulder your fucking weapon, soldier!”

Portman swallowed — and looked at Reaper for support.

Reaper only slammed a fresh clip into his light machine gun. He looked at Sarge, and said, “Pray for war.”

“Pray for war!” the others chimed in.

Most of them. This time it was Portman who didn’t say it. Sarge’s look bored a hole right through him. Finally, Portman picked up his weapon, and said, “Pray for fucking war.”

They broke up into two teams, and started out, Destroyer half dragging Portman with him and the Kid.

Sarge, Reaper, and Mac headed toward a tunnel marked D4.

Reaper thought about trying to brief Mac on what they’d seen in tunnel — but you couldn’t brief someone about something you didn’t understand yourself.

Sam pried open the “imp’s” jaws and shined a light in past razored teeth.

Duke stood back — looking at the monster, then at Sam, his eyes lingering on Sam. Nice view of her from behind. Much preferable to looking at that horror on the examining table.

Sam’s hand twitched as a particularly noxious smell wafted out of the thing’s gullet, and she dropped her penlight down its throat. The light shone from down there like a flashlight from a scarlet, slimy cave.

“Shit,” she said. She turned to Duke, “Hold this open.”

He hesitated. Didn’t want to get near that thing — even dead.

“Don’t be a wuss, Duke.”

That tore it. A girl calling him a wuss. He had to do it.

He stepped in, gripped the thing’s jaws, careful to keep his hands away from the sharpest teeth — a scratch from those, and who knew what unspeakable interworld infections you’d get. He held them open as she reached into the creature’s mouth, pushing in half her arm.

“Little tension between you and the Reaper?” Duke asked. Get a girl to confide in you about her problems. Sometimes it worked.

“Why does a talented student throw it all away and join RRTS? Turn himself into a killing machine?” she asked, fishing around. Her arm made squelching sounds in its throat.

“I guess most of us are running from something.” Try to sound sensitive with the ladies. That works sometimes, too.

“What about you, Duke?” she asked, still fishing around, grimacing. Making fun of him, probably, as she went on, “What are you running away from?”

“Today,” Duke said earnestly, “it’s mostly been big ugly-ass demons…”

She couldn’t help but smile at that. She drew her hand out, clutching the penlight and, relieved, he let go of the monster’s jaws.

“What was he like before?” Duke asked.

“As a boy?” What had her brother been like? She thought about it a moment. “Empathetic. Sensitive.”

Duke looked at her in surprise. “Hard to think of Reaper as sensitive.”

“Well, I knew him before all the drop-down-gimme-fifty woo-ha stuff.” She resumed her examination of the imp, peering at its chest now.

Duke laughed. “It’s hoo-ah.”

She tapped its chest. “You have a family?”

“I have Destroyer — grew up together.”

“He seems like a good guy.”

Duke nodded — a little embarrassed.

She stared at the horror on the table, decided she needed to cut it wide open to see how it ticked.

“You know…” She tapped the other side of the imp’s broad chest, over its heart. “I bet secretly you’ve got a big heart, Duke.”

Yeah, she was definitely making fun of him. “It ain’t the only big secret thing I got,” he said. What the hell, a shot in the dark.

She looked at him, raising her eyebrows. “Little rusty, huh?”

Duke sighed. “Lady, you got no idea. I been bunked up with a buncha Marines, none of whom I find remotely attractive, for like, ever. Right now, having sex with me is practically your civic duty.”

She was careful not to smile at that. Though she wanted to.

She picked up a scalpel, began a Y-incision on the exoskeleton over the chest. And the scalpel snapped in half.

She tapped the broken handle against the imp’s thick skin. “I need a power bone saw. There’s one in the procedure room.”

“Power bone saw? Lady I been waitin’ for you my whole life…”

Who are you?

I’m you. I always have been. The animal in you. The hungry animal.

No. I’m not you. I…I am Carmack. I’m a scientist. An award-winning researcher. I’m not an animal.

You amuse me, giving yourself airs. All embodied beings are animals.

We become more than animals when we become rational.

Your rationality is like the thin coat a man wears when he’s expecting a light rain. And then comes a blizzard and he freezes to death.

No! Reason built our civilization. Reason is power. It builds weapons to destroy such as you. I know who you are — you’re a part of my mind altered by the infection!

What of it? Can you destroy me, Carmack, without destroying yourself? We are becoming indistinguishable.

Oh it’s dark here, it’s so dark. You — you’re just a nasty little voice in the dark. At least tell me — where am I?

In a safe place. As for the darkness — you are blinded with the rigors of transformation. Hiding from them while your body completes its revolution. That which has so long been hidden away in you will now come to light. The façade of civilization will tear away — underneath is the face of the beast. That is who you really are: me. The hidden part of you released by the genetic infection.

So dark…so dark here…I hurt, my limbs burn…what is happening to me? I feel as if I am pregnant with a child, bursting with new life, but I am male — I feel like that insect that is injected with offspring by its mate, so that when they hatch out they eat their own father from within. I feel like my legs are wriggling with a life of their own, breaking free of the body; I feel like my heart and liver and guts are writhing inside me, fighting one another for space, tearing their way from my skin…Oh God the pain…

We are growing, changing…

Liar! We are not one thing! You’re just some psychological fracture of my own mind. You’re the result of the pressure, the horror of what I’ve gone through…

What you’ve gone through? You mean when you locked the door on your friends and colleagues? When you shut the door on that poor woman’s arm, cut it off so you could be safe? When you let them all die so the important Dr. Carmack could live? What is your ordeal to theirs?

I had to do it — so that I could survive, and warn the others! I had to warn the world!

How you justify your negligent homicide, Professor Carmack! It is most amusing!

You’re a figment of psychological pressure — you’re not real enough to be amused. You’re a nothing — just a nothing that can talk! Go away and leave me in the darkness with my companion: my pain…

But I am that darkness; I am your pain. That is exactly what I am. Who do you think you have been conversing with?

No!

Oh yes. Your eyes are blinded with the substance of my being; your nerves sing with the vitality of my growing life. I am growing within you. I am taking you over. The phenomenon you experimented with so cheerfully is infectious — didn’t you know that?

It can be stopped. It can be…

It cannot be stopped. You are proof.

No. Not me.

Don’t you remember what happened, in that lab, after you called for help — after you summoned fresh meat for us?

I can’t remember…It’s all so dark…I don’t want to remember…

You have been infected. I am that infection — and the infection is even now becoming you. You are in a conversation with that which is slowly eating you! I eat you. I eat you! I steadily eat you even as I speak to you. I am eating you and digesting you and making you into me. Whatever is in you that I have no use for — like your rationality — will become my waste product.

No, I will break free! I will break out! I will…

You will…?

I will…I am…

No: I am…

I am…darkness and pain.

Yes. I am darkness and pain. And I will spread it to all that lives.

I am darkness and pain.

“Mac, secure our line of retreat,” Sarge told him. Mac used the RRTS hand signal for assent and took up a post just outside the door of the “mudroom” — the prep room on the edge of the Olduvaian archaeological dig.

Sarge and Reaper made their way, very warily, into the mudroom. Tinted the color of rust by the strange sky outside, light angled through an observation window looking out on the windswept surface of Mars. Most of the place was taken up by worktables.

It had the look of having been abandoned in miduse, like the labs. There were tables crowded with hand tools: big power drills, small shovels and trowels, a hundred kinds of fine-work digging implements. And on one table lay a long row of heavy-duty chain saws.

Reaper thought: In a pinch, if a guy ran out of ammo, those chain saws could be used as weapons. A strange thought, bringing with it a chill of recognition.

On a debris-removal table was a clutter of half-cleaned artifacts, each surrounded by a ring of scraped-away soil. Some of the artifacts were clearly vases, bowls, small metal cabinets; others were unidentifiable: cryptic, but teetering right on the edge of familiarity…

My parents were here, working at these tables, once, then my sister, Reaper thought. I was supposed to be working here, too…

His own memory of his childhood on Olduvai was dim, an uneasy fog shot through with red lights, flickering with half-seen faces. He had worked hard since, trying to forget this place.

But one memory came back to him vividly — the day, with his father, he had visited Dig Twenty-three. Young John Grimm had seen something watching him from the shadows. A monstrous face, with a vast toothy mouth. Only it wasn’t quite there physically. It blinked in and out of existence…

Your imagination, his father reassured him. This is a spooky-looking place. Your mind is finding patterns in the chaos.

But after that young John had refused to visit the digs. He’d just wanted to leave Olduvai.

Not long afterward, his parents had died — in that same part of the digs. Number Twenty-three. Just an accident…

Reaper noticed his sister looking at him from the walls.

He walked over to the photos taped up there. Here was his sister, smiling from a photo taken in a dig. And there were his parents, in a group photo. Their names underneath: Prof. A. Grimm; Prof. D. Grimm.

Reaper felt a twisting wrench of loss inside — and he turned away from the photos, going hurriedly to the observation window, wanting to look beyond the claustrophobic confines of the facility.

Once, millennia ago, Reaper knew, there had been plants, trees, animals, lakes, and rivers here. The archaeological and paleontological record indicated as much. But now it was a desert with poisonous air: the stony landscape inhabited only by the shadows of lowering, lividly colored clouds. Dusk lay thickly on bouldered hills, misshapen buttes, and, nearer, the digs themselves — terraces cut into soil and rock; crumbling archways and doors into darkness. Heavy mining equipment, abandoned midjob, was lit up by standing arc lights.

This was the foreign landscape in which his parents had given their lives, where they’d been sacrificial lambs to the meaningless pursuit of knowledge. Or so Reaper felt in his worst moments.

“That where it happened?” Sarge asked.

Reaper didn’t answer. But he thought: Dig Twenty-three…

“You find the door?” Reaper asked, after a moment.

Sarge moved away. Reaper stared through the window at the starkly shadowed, terraced dig, till Sarge called, “John…”

He found Sarge standing by the air lock hatch. The locked exit glistened with a fairly fresh spatter of blood. On the floor under the hatch were two bodies in overalls and lab coats. One face down, and the other was facedown, but his head was turned 180 degrees around, faceup.

Sarge bent down and read off the name tags. “Thurman and Clay. Look at ’em. They weren’t trying to stop something from getting in. Something stopped them getting out.”

Destroyer’s voice crackled over the comm. “Sarge — we reached the north air lock. It’s secure.”

Reaper grunted to himself. Things pop out of the ceiling and run off into the floor here. How could anything be secure?

He shook his head. No reason to say it aloud. The team was spooked enough.

He hunkered to look at the two bodies in front of the air lock. Seeing they had no respirators, he said, “What could make you want to escape into…nothing?”

“Sarge,” came Destroyer’s voice on the headset. “Reached the north air lock.”

Mac stopped pacing, cocked his head to listen, as Destroyer went on, “It’s secure. Console indicates nothing’s come in or out for twenty-six hours.”

Mac nodded to himself. Maybe there weren’t a whole swarm of those things out there after all. Destroyer would’ve seen something, for sure.

Mac was fingering his weapon and watching the corridor leading to the “mudroom”; thinking about home, Tokyo; thinking about how his uncle had asked him to come into the synthetic saki factory. Wondering what natural saki had been made out of him. Rice, wasn’t it? Or was it water chestnuts? Should have gone into business with Uncle. Anything could happen here…

His uncle, though, kept trying to get him to marry that second cousin of his, Inki. Pain in the ass, that girl. Following him around, looking at him moon-eyed, her hands clasped in front of her. Geisha complex. Not many of those left. Most of the girls from his own neighborhood had been in the Yakuza Lady’s Auxiliary. Not the geisha type.

But then there was something touching about Inki, too. Maybe he should’ve given her a whirl. Be comforting to come home to an old-fashioned girl. Get a massage. Back rub. Never tell you she’s got a headache that day…and after all —

Something move down there, in the dark end of the corridor?

The lights were only on in half of the corridor; the farther end was pitch-black. Something big shifting down there? No. Nerves, Mac.

He scratched his nuts and turned, prompted by a noise behind, and a sudden strange vinegary smell, and…

He had half a second to see the great reddish thing that hulked over him, snarling, before it slashed out with its scythelike talons.

And with one razoring slice, it cut Mac’s head off his shoulders.

He’d always wondered if a human head remained conscious, for a few seconds maybe, after being severed from the body.

Now he knew.

Because from where his head lay on the floor he was able to watch his own headless, blood-spouting body stagger and fall…into the swelling sea of shadows.

Nine

SOMETHING INHUMAN ROARED in triumph, from back where they’d left Mac.

Sarge and Reaper looked at one another and ran back toward the corridor. “Mac!” Reaper called. “Mac?” No answer,

They dodged between tables, to the corridor — and saw Mac’s body, headless, in a growing pool of blood.

Whatever had killed him was retreating into the shadow at the far end of the hallway. There was just a glimpse…

“What was that?” Reaper asked. Not really expecting an answer. They were left standing in the open, under the corridor light, with the body of their long-time buddy gushing blood at their feet. His severed head was near Reaper’s boots; Mac’s face, going blue, staring in wonder at nothing.

Instinctively, Sarge and Reaper went back-to-back, half-crouching. Both of them felt it: more than one thing was watching them from the shadows. Whatever had killed Mac was just out of sight — and was very aware of them.

“What you got?” Reaper asked, hoping Sarge had a fix on a definite, solid target…he almost ached for it.

“Nothing. You?”

“Nothing,” Reaper said hoarsely. He glanced again at Mac’s decapitated body. “Shit.” It had to have happened in the space of a second. The body was so fresh — still pouring blood, the puddle spreading out around their feet.

“Still glad you came?” Sarge asked.

Reaper didn’t answer.

Something was moving down there, in the darkness at the end of the corridor. A flash of yellow eyes.

“I got something,” Reaper said. “In the shadows — on my three.”

“Ten degrees cross fire on either side,” Sarge said softly. “Sweep through the shadow.”

“I’ll take the left side.”

“I’ve got the right.”

Then they turned and opened up, Sarge firing thud-thud-thud-thud with his big autorifle, Reaper thundering with his light machine gun, the weapon jumping in his hands till his fingers ached from keeping it leveled.

Sarge yelled into the comm: “We’re in pursuit! Everyone meet at the air lock!”

Reaper’s machine gun hit it: the thing shrieked and rushed into view for a moment, chewed by bullets, spewing black blood before it stampeded howling down a side corridor.

Reaper and Sarge, grateful for something definite to shoot at, sprinted after it.

“So like which one of you’s the oldest?” Duke called to Sam, casting about for sane conversation as he returned with the bone saw.

“Me,” Sam replied, not looking up from her work. “By two minutes.”

He was coming down the corridor toward the nanowall — she’d directed it to remain open for him, knowing he hated pushing his body through its glutinous-metal mass, and he could see her in the infirmary, looking at the creature on the table through an instrument he’d never seen before.

“You two are…twins? Shit. Nonidentical, right? Because that would be weird.”

“What would be weird?” she asked innocently. Pretending she didn’t know he meant having sex with Reaper’s identical twin would be too much like having sex with Reaper.

“Nothing,” Duke said, clearing his throat as he hesitated outside the door. Was this nanowall going to close on him as he was going through it?

Maybe that wasn’t the only reason he was hesitating out here. Sure, Sam was a fine-looking woman; her smarts and poise were attractive, too, maybe even more than her looks. But still…

He wondered why he felt so drawn to her.

Oh come on, man, you’ve been a long time without a woman. You’d be drawn to a hundred-year-old grandmother buying incontinence diapers, about now.

It wasn’t that, though. Since he’d lost Janet — since she’d blown him off for a guy she could count on being there at night, a guy with a square job who would probably die in bed and not in some jungle clearing half a world away — he’d made up his mind it was going to be all work and party, all the time. Just the job, and the party afterward. No attachments. From here on, he’d told himself, it’d be whores or women who might as well have been whores. The kind of airheads who went on viddy shows gassing about trying to get a rich bachelor to marry them. Slick sluts.

My star guide said I was going to meet someone hot tonight but I thought he’d be, like, someone into stock-breaking — is that what you call it, when you, like, buy and sell stocks? — and not a Marine but, whatever, because I’ve always been into muscles? Even when I was a little girl I liked to look at those Mr. Bodybig shows, and, I’m all, whoa, a Marine, oh wow do you have, like, a Humvee we could ride around in and maybe cruise my homegirls, because, I’m, like, all into a guy who’s got a big ride, with, like, big wheels, and…

Verbatim from his last date.

And here he was drawn to a scientist. A woman with a clinical glint in her eyes; a woman who was eagerly looking forward to using a bone saw, for God’s sake.

But there was something about her — behind that shell of complete independence, skepticism, there was a smart woman who needed someone to make the world mean something again.

Oh, get over yourself, he thought. She’ll never go for you. She…

Something was growling, on the other side of that table, in the shadowy farther reaches of the infirmary.

Sam turned to Duke — she hadn’t noticed the sound, but something about the way he’d just froze there at the door, listening, had drawn her attention.

“What?” she asked.

A beast not much higher than his knee was stepping into view. He stared. Was that a dog? A large, snarling, drooling, red-eyed dog — coming around the corner of that cabinet?

It was. One of the escaped lab animals, probably. It lowered its head, muzzle wrinkling, baring teeth as it prepared to lunge toward him — its eyes crazed with fear — and Duke raised his automag, ready to shoot it down.

Sam, seeing the dog, opened her mouth to speak, probably to tell him not to shoot it, which was going to be a problem because this animal was ready to kill — though he didn’t blame it, considering what it’d probably been through —

But she never had a chance to say it. Because just then he realized that the dog wasn’t growling at him at all, but at something behind him. The dog backed away…

Duke spun, but it was too late, the creature in the corridor behind him slashed out, its talons ripping into his arm. Duke floundered away from it, fell onto his back.

“Duke —!” Sam called, running for the nanowall.

The imp loomed over him — a lean thing with clusters of eyes, its skin looking raw; drooling, almost sneering down at him now, a sound like a rattlesnake’s warning issuing from deep inside it.

He fired — the gun was set on semiauto, and he squeezed off three rounds, stitching the thing across the middle, making it stagger back screaming.

He got his feet under him, was aware of Sam poised at the opening nanowall, waiting for him.

“Sam — get back inside!”

The imp turned to glare at Sam — Duke backed away from it and fired again, so it’d come at him and not her — it came slashing the air, a few steps from ripping him into chunks.

“Come on!” Sam yelled, ready to close the nanowall. “Come on!”

Duke turned, lunged for the doorway, the imp close behind him. Duke shouting as he passed through, “Now — do it now!”

He leapt — and the imp came after him. Duke kept going —

Sam hit the nanowall’s manual controls and the gray wall solidified around the imp, head and torso caught partway through. It shrieked, and Duke could hear its bones cracking.

Its tongue shot out of its mouth — unspooling, stabbing out to its full length — just shy of Duke’s neck.

The tongue reeled back into its mouth and it shuddered — and fell limp, jaws clacking and spewing black blood…

Reaper and Sarge tracked their wounded quarry down corridor after corridor — all the way back to the D4 tunnel, through it and up into the atrium, then to the air lock that led into the corridors outside Carmack’s lab.

The creature was big, but they’d practically shot it to pieces — hadn’t they? How did the damn thing keep going?

“Nothing could have survived that!” Reaper insisted — trying to convince himself more than Sarge, as they rushed out of the atrium.

They were following a trail of blood that led from the atrium, across the floor, and right through the air lock.

Reaper shook his head in wonder. The thing knew how to open an air lock? What exactly did that imply?

They passed through the air lock, not bothering with a reseal. That horse was out of the barn. The things could get into the atrium another way. The air lock was set to seal automatically if there was a break in the facility’s walls or windows interfacing the planet’s surface.

Reaper and Sarge now stood in the corridors a short distance from Carmack’s lab.

“It’s back in the lab,” Sarge muttered.

Do these things have an agenda? Reaper wondered. Are they after something in the lab? Are they intelligent enough to use the equipment? They managed to get the airlock open…what else can they use?

Or do they move about randomly, driven by the afflatus of rage or fear or hunger? That seems more likely.

Reaper and Sarge moved on, searching through light and shadow, getting closer and closer to the lab.

“Clear,” Reaper said, as they reached the end of the corridor. Redundant to say it, since it was obviously clear, but they stuck with procedure. That was the RRTS way.

“Clear,” Sarge confirmed. “Damn it’s fast.”

Running footsteps drummed a short way behind them. Something was coming at them from down the corridor — Reaper turned, finger tightening on the trigger, and came a hairbreadth from blowing the Kid’s head off his shoulders.

The Kid, Portman, and Destroyer were rushing up to them, weapons at ready, panting. “Did you get it?” the Kid asked, looking around, his mouth hanging open, eyes more dilated than ever.

Reaper shrugged. Useless to brief the Kid. The young soldier’s brain was frying on drugs, he’d lose anything you tried to tell him.

Sarge called Pinky on the comm. “Pinky, anything comes through that door, use an ST grenade.”

Pinky replied with a nervous affirmative. Sounding like he wanted to say a lot more and was afraid to come out with it.

Portman shook his head, gaping at Sarge. “He uses an ST in there, he’ll blow the Ark!”

Sarge acted like he hadn’t heard. “Reaper, Kid — pairs, cover formation, sweep the corridors.”

Reaper nodded and led the Kid to the next cross hallway. It was dark down there. He switched on his gunlight and plunged into the corridor leading away from the squadron. Knowing what he was leaving behind.

He was going away from back-up. Away from the Ark — the only means of getting off the planet. Away from his sister.

Away from hope.

Outside Carmack’s lab, Sarge was still giving orders. “Destroyer, you and Portman maintain a perimeter here.”

“He blows the Ark,” Portman pointed out again, “how the hell we supposed to get the fuck home?”

Sarge didn’t answer him directly. But he made himself clear: “Destroyer, that prick” — meaning Portman — “gives you any trouble, shoot him in the knee, we’ll leave him here to starve.”

“Roger that,” Destroyer said, calmly. Both of them ignoring the look of shock on Portman’s face. “Where you going?”

“Armory,” Sarge said. “I think we’re going to need something with a little extra kick.”

Sarge jogged down the corridor, rifle ready, finger poised near the trigger — not quite on it. He passed blood blotches on the walls, wires leaking sparks, swaying ends of hoses like mechanical boas, finally skidded to a stop near the darkened dead end he’d been looking for. Panting, he pointed his gunlight into the gloom. Was he lost? He searched the floor…the damn thing was here somewhere…

There it was. The woman’s severed, rotting arm, oozing yellow stuff onto the floor tiles.

This was a weird assignment all right: he was feeling good that he’d found a woman’s severed rotting arm on the floor. Hot damn.

But he needed it to get through the door.

He picked it up, wincing a little as some of the skin sloughed off under his fingers. He set off again, wishing he’d brought along some gloves as he carried the severed limb — holding it awkwardly, to keep it from falling apart in his hands — off down the corridor. Not liking the feeling or the smell of the thing in his hands. But there was no getting away from stench on Olduvai — it seemed like this job was all about being up to your neck in decay. It was always that way — the closer you got to the UAC’s secrets, the more rot you found. He’d long ago stopped caring. He’d learned to isolate all feelings of empathy; compassion. They got in the way of the job.

Probably it was that time on the island. Beautiful, gemlike little place, just far enough north of the equator it didn’t get too hot. No big problem with insects, no sea wasps concealed in the coral. White sand beaches, emerald trees, women the color of honey. Should’ve been paradise.

But the local people hadn’t liked the UAC transmitter base on the island. The base gathered energy from solar receptors and transmitted it in microwave beams into orbit, where it was soaked up to power the UAC’s orbital labs and missile platforms. Only, the thing leaked microwaves, so that people around the transmitter — even passing too close — had a tendency to get brain tumors; children were born with birth defects.

Sarge, shipped to the island to help keep order, had seen all those children with missing jaws; with shriveled limbs.

Some of the local men had formed a militia, surrounded the transmitter base, demanded it be shut down. To keep peace, UAC had temporarily complied — just until the arrival of UAC’s Special Implementation Squadron, led by Lieutenant Brevary and Sarge.

Don’t call it a death squad. Sarge didn’t like that term. Just because they were sent out to locate the leaders of the militia and march them off for execution, sent to shoot anyone who tried to escape into the rain forest, sent to set rebel villages on fire…did that make them a death squad? No. They were trained professionals. They got the mission done, that was all. In short order, the native militia was disbanded — most of it, actually, was buried — and the UAC transmitter was back online. Peace again. And UAC provided free pain meds and euthanasia to the sick inhabitants of that lovely little island. Most of them eventually took the euthanasia. On a routine return to the island, they found hardly anyone still living there. But walking past the mass grave on the south side, Sarge had smelled all those bodies, the militia he’d helped execute, all at once, shallowly buried under the pretty white sand. Animals had dug some of the corpses out. Gulls were getting at them, snipping off pieces of rotting flesh, tossing their heads back to gulp it down.

That’s what a UAC project was like. Pristine on the outside. Even glamorous. Just don’t get too close. Or you’d find out where the bodies were buried…

Maybe even end up carrying a woman’s severed arm down a corridor on Olduvai.

He went through another series of hallways…thinking that this woman’d had no idea a part of her was going to end up being carried by a soldier as just another field tool.

Was this the turn? Yeah. He was starting to get to know this hellhole. There was the sign:

SPECIAL WEAPONS LABORATORY

He went to the door panel, opened the hand print pressure pad.

“Please provide DNA verification.” A friendly woman’s voice, robotic but sounding like a real person anyway. One more in a stacked deck of ironies.

Sarge slapped the hand of the mangled limb against the pressure pad.

No response. Maybe the tissue was too decayed to provide an accurate DNA reading.

But then the invisible nonlady chirped her welcome: “DNA verification confirmed.”

The security door to the weapons lab slid open, and Sarge dropped the decaying limb, wiped his hand on his pants, and went in to find some of that seriously scary balls-out ordnance. He smiled and his fingers twitched; he could almost feel that kill power in his hands already.

He went into the innermost chamber.

Some religions had their holy of holies. This was Sarge’s.

The gun was hanging in a luminous high-intensity electromagnetic cushion, floating in midair — rotating there, as part of the display. A bioforce gun. He’d heard a rumor about the new weapons being developed out here, based on technology discovered on Olduvai — some gabby lab tech returning from this hell planet had shot off his mouth about them. And if the size of that gun was any indication, it was more than enough bioforce to kill an elephant.

That thing could kill a small herd of them.

The question was — would it kill Sarge, too?

Portman and Destroyer were standing guard outside Carmack’s lab. Portman was wondering just what the hell they were guarding. Sometimes Sarge gave them arbitrary assignments just to keep them busy. Maybe that was for morale. But Portman’s own morale was in the dumpster, right about now.

“This is bullshit,” he told Destroyer. “I enlisted to serve my country, not to protect some corporation’s goddamn science project.”

Destroyer ignored him. As per orders.

Portman fidgeted, thinking that if they didn’t get some backup out here, they were all going to die. He’d heard chatter on the comm about what had become of Mac. His head gone, swish, just like that. One second he’s there, thinking about pussy no doubt, next moment he’s a bowling ball. And Mac had been the closest thing Portman had had to a real buddy in this group. Hell he knew these bastards didn’t like him. He tried to prove himself, tried plenty, but that only seemed to make it worse.

Mac had invited him along to chase tail on furlough, one time. They’d ended up alone in a saki bar, only Mac’s .45 keeping the bartender from closing, but it was okay, they were drunk enough they didn’t care — Mac teaching him drinking songs from the homeland. Mac was okay. Now the only guy who’d been anything like friendly was smoked — and his team was pretending it didn’t matter.

Not me, Portman thought. I’m not gonna be the next one to die — and be forgotten in the time it takes to take a short piss. Uh-uh.

Portman made up his mind. But he needed some way to get off by himself…

“I gotta take a dump,” he announced.

Destroyer looked at him. His eyes like chips of flint. “Now?”

“Unless you want me shitting in my pants right here.”

Destroyer snorted and nodded toward the lab door. They’d seen a bathroom off Carmack’s main lab room.

Portman stepped into the lab, pointing his gunlight into the dark corners. Nasty things in here…

But nothing was moving now. Could be, though, that something was waiting in that bathroom.

Come on, he told himself. This is your shot. You won’t get another…Sarge’ll be watching you too close…

He took a deep breath and hurried across the room to the bathroom door. Licked his lips — then stepped through, swinging his gun this way and that, half-expecting an attack. Nothing. Seemed empty.

He kicked open a stall, gun ready — nothing to shoot in there but the toilet.

He went in, closed the booth door, sat down. He put his gun on the tiled floor.

“Portman,” came Pinky’s voice, crackling out almost immediately on the comm. “I got floor and wall on your vid…”

“Gimme thirty goddamn seconds,” Portman snarled back, “I’m taking a shit!” Though he wasn’t.

Pinky started to say something else, but Portman twiddled the frequency knobs on his comm and chestcam, cutting him off. He pulled out the little input, keyed in a code. Then spoke quietly into the comm:

“This is Subcorporal Dean Portman with RRTS 6 Special Ops on Olduvai, 0310 hours. We have encountered hostile activity, require immediate RRTS reinforcements…”

Ten

DESTROYER WAS GETTING tired of waiting for Portman. But he didn’t feel like going in there and inhaling the gaseous residue of Portman’s meals, either. Portman was a fuckup — but he had a point. This mission had the feel of being a one-way ticket.

Not that Destroyer was going to tell him that.

He hoped the Kid would get out of it all right. Portman was screwing the youngster over by giving him dope — another thing the asshole had to answer for.

Destroyer had come to feel a kind of responsibility for the Kid — he’d taken on the young soldier’s secondary field training himself. The Kid wasn’t particularly good, but he was eager to please. Making Destroyer think of himself at age seventeen…

He was an up-and-coming gangster in the East Side ghetto, sure of himself, feeling immortal, invulnerable — which was of course when he got shot by the cops while robbing a liquor store.

Superficial wound, but it had put him out of the fight, then a grinning white cop had busted his head with a nightstick.

He’d awakened in a hospital, to find himself staring up at a RRTS Field Recruitment Agent standing with arms crossed, at the foot of his bed. This Privatized Marine was all spit and polish, standing there, looking flatly down at the boy known on the street, then, as Steppin’ Razor. The agent was a man blacker than Destroyer, about forty-five. His broad shoulders straining at the material of his dress blues.

“So they call you Razor?” the guy was asking. His nameplate said CANNER.

“Steppin’ Razor,” the teen had corrected him. “Who the fuck are you, and what the fuck you want?”

“I’m here to offer you a choice. Jail or RRTS Field Recruitment. We’ve got a deal with the courts, boy. Word is you’re good with weapons. Got nerve. But you’re using it all wrong.” Canner’s eyes had glinted; other than for that, no expression. Just…waiting. Watching and waiting. Never taking his eyes off the boy — who would someday be a man called Destroyer.

“That right? Fuck you.”

“That’s it — that’s the all-wrong part. That ‘fuck you’ bullshit. Man doesn’t get far that way. Serve your country, you serve yourself.”

“My country? You motherfuckers, what I heard, serve UAC more than the country. You’re Privatized. You ain’t no real soldiers for the country.”

“Country uses us and UAC does, too — UAC’s interests are the same as the country’s. You want to go to jail?”

“I ain’t afraid of jail.”

“I didn’t ask you if you were afraid. I know you ain’t. That’s why we want you. I asked you if you wanted to go there, dumb-ass.”

“Fuck no. ’Course I don’t want to go.”

“Then get up out of bed. You sign these papers I got with me” — he waved a manila folder — “and you’re in my custody. We can tell that cop outside the door to go to hell. Then me and the MPs escort you to Training Center Thirty-two. Sign the paper, ‘Steppin’, and get up — you don’t let a little wound like that slow you down. Then you join my cadre.”

“Training center. Cadre. Yeah right. You mean boot camp. Pure hell, that’s what I heard.”

“You can’t take a little hell? No, that’s wrong — it’s a lotta hell. So what? It’s a challenge, boy.”

The challenge was there, in Canner’s eyes. But there was something more…

Understanding. This guy had grown up without a father, too — “Steppin’ Razor” knew it intuitively.

But he didn’t trust easily. “Why’s your ‘gang’ better than mine, man? ’Cause it’s all gangs. Some are big, and they got uniforms made in a factory. Some are small and they make their own uniforms. But it’s all gang soldiers. We call our country the ’hood, that’s all. I can be a ‘general’ in this army, man. I’d never make no general in yours. And I get myself killed in yours as easily as in mine — maybe more easy. Why I want to do that? For medals? I’d rather have a hot car. And bitches.”

He had the satisfaction of seeing some surprise in Canner’s eyes, then. Most of his recruits probably didn’t think much.

Finally Canner nodded. “Something in what you say. But there’s…levels of being a warrior, son. I can give you a kind of training you’ll never get down here. Achievement of a kind you’ll never get anywhere else. And I’ll be there for you. I’ll make it hell for you in boot camp — but afterward, we’ll go on a training mission together. I’ll be there, too. Anytime you want advice — you come to me. And that’s a guarantee, son.”

Ten long seconds. Then the young man who would one day become “Destroyer” said, “You got a pen?”

“A pen?”

“How else I going to sign?”

That was a long time ago…

He wondered where Canner was now. And what he’d think of this mission. Of Olduvai. Probably he’d shake his head, and say, “That’s a UAC mission for you. Just do it and get your black ass home.”

Only, home is a long way from here, Destroyer thought bitterly.

Destroyer looked at his watch, then at the door to the lab. Where the hell was Portman? He waited a few moments longer, then yelled into the semidarkness of the lab: “Portman!”

No response. He sighed, went into the lab, scanning the room as best he could with limited visibility. Found the bathroom door and knocked. Hammering on the door with his fist, shouting:

“Portman, how long does it take for a goddamn —”

He broke off, aware of a smell like rancid vinegar and something coming at him — he didn’t have time to level his gun before being jerked off his feet, yanked him violently into the darkness.