F Paul Wilson - Sims 05 (13 page)

 
          
SUFFOLK COUNTY
,
NY

 
          
“Even
though it’s only Christmas Eve, we’ll call this our Christmas dinner,” Zero
said as he opened the lids of the pizza boxes on his dining room table.
“Because who knows where we’ll be tomorrow? No turkey for our sim Christmas,
I’m afraid.
Just two large pies—a plain and a sausage.”
He glanced at his two guests. “Do either of you know what Christmas means, by
the way?”

 
          
Kek
didn’t even look up; he’d been lured away from one of the computers where he’d
been engrossed in Mortal Kombat XX , and now he grabbed a slice of the sausage
pie and started wolfing it down.

 
          
But
Tome smiled and said, “Lights and trees and presents.”

 
          
“Yes,
that’s a big part of it. A time of peace on earth and good will toward men, I’m
told. But what about
sims
? Does that include good will
toward sims?”

 
          
Zero
had made the mistake of allowing himself a glass of holiday cheer: one Scotch
and water. Terrible tasting stuff, didn’t know how Ellis Sinclair had drunk so
much of it all those years, but he’d forced it down—the season to be jolly and
all that. Now he wished he hadn’t. Not used to alcohol, and though he wasn’t
feeling much in the way of physical effects, it seemed to have untethered his
thoughts, leaving them to wander. Now they were wandering into terra incognita.

 
          
“Tome
not
know
, Mist Zero.”

 
          
Not
know what? Oh, yes…about good will toward
sims
.

 
          
“Of
course you don’t, Tome. Christmas has become a secular holiday for the most
part, but it’s still a religious occasion for those who celebrate the arrival
of their god to save mankind. But what of us
sims
? Are
we included in that salvation? Or are we damned?” He toasted with a piece of
plain pie.
“Joy to the world.”

 
          
But
he felt no trace of joy, felt instead as if he were standing on the brink of a
precipice, gazing into the unknown. The world as he’d always known it was about
to change.
Radically.
And with it his relationship to
that world and all the people he knew in it. Nothing would ever be the same.

 
          
He
tried to imagine what it would be like to come out of hiding, to wander about
with his face exposed to the world, to be a
person .
He could not.

 
          
He
surprised himself by starting to sing: “We three
sims
of chimpanzee blood, wondering how we’ll ride out the flood…” He noticed Tome
and Kek staring at him. “Come on, sing! You know the words!”

 
          
But
then he couldn’t go on, not with his throat constricting around a sob.

 
          
What
have I done? My race, my brother
sims—
what will happen
to them when Meerm’s baby is shoved in the face of the world? By saving them
will I doom them to extinction?

 
          
SUSSEX COUNTY
,
NJ

 
          
DECEMBER
25

 
          
“We
leave at oh-three-hundred,” Luca told Lowery. The two of them had the SimGen
security offices virtually to themselves. He checked his watch. “That gives you
ten minutes to get the other four assembled by the cars and ready to go.”

 
          
“Got
it,” Lowery said and trotted off.

 
          
Luca
turned back to the printouts on his desk. This genetics stuff was so
complicated. He’d done search after search before tracking down intergenomic
and intragenomic competition, and then more searching before finding articles
he could understand. Weren’t many of those, but he’d managed to glean some idea
of what it all meant. He still didn’t see what was so frightening about it.

 
          
Intergenomic competition…a theory that arose back in the nineties
about the maternal and paternal halves of the fetal genome competing for
dominance during development.
Luca understood it best when he translated
it into combat terms. In a male embryo, the Y chromosome from the father
directs the struggle against the maternal half of the genome. But in a female,
with no Y to marshal the forces of the paternal genome, the maternal X has an
easier time against the paternal X; it can then push more characteristics from
its own underlying genome toward the front, thus showing more of its maternal
DNA to the world.

 
          
Intragenomic
competition was a newer and more controversial theory. While intergenomic
competition applied to all species, intra genomic competition applied only to
recombinant transgenic species of higher mammals, and it was a double war.
While the usual intergenomic competition was being waged, there was also a
civil war going on within the recombinant genome. As Luca understood it, the
recombinant half would try to express the genes from its original underlying
genome at the expense of the foreign genes that had been spliced into it.

 
          
Yeah?
So what?

 
          
If
all this held true, a human father meant the pregnant sim’s baby would look
more like a human if it was a boy and more like a chimp if it was a girl.

 
          
Again:
So what?

 
          
I
must be missing something, Luca thought, because the only scary thing here is
how boring this is.

 
          
He
checked his watch again.
Time to go.
An
0300 departure would get them to
Mineola
in plenty of time to gear up for the raid.

 
          
And
they had plenty of gear. Like the others, Luca was wearing
a
black
cotton BDU; but before they went in they’d add body armor and
Kevlar helmets with visors; each would carry tactical forearm 15,000
candlepower flashlights and an HK submachine gun equipped with double 30-round
translucent magazines.

 
          
He
hoped to use that weapon. He wanted that sim, yes, but wanted Cadman and
Sullivan there too.
Especially Romy Cadman.
He wanted
one last look at that pretty face before he put a bullet into it.

 
          
MINEOLA
,
NY

 
          
The
racket—footsteps in the upstairs hallway, a fist pounding on a door, Betsy’s
voice shouting—startled Romy awake. She found herself up and moving without
knowing how or why.

 
          
“Wake
up! Patrick! Romy! It’s time! We’ve got to go!”

 
          
Go?
Where? She pulled open her door and caught Betsy as she hurried by. “What’s
wrong?”

 
          
“Meerm’s
in hard labor. We can’t hold off any longer.
Got to get her
to the hospital right now!”

 
          
Romy
saw Patrick stick his head out of his room and called to him. “Did you hear?”

 
          
He
nodded blearily. “What time is it?”

 
          
“Three-twenty!”
Betsy cried, moving away. “Get dressed.
We’ve got to move!”

 
          
Romy
jumped into her clothes and was down the stairs in seconds, Patrick right
behind her. They dashed to Betsy’s bedroom where they found a very confused and
frightened Meerm lying on a cot and wrapped in blankets.

 
          
“Patrick,
you carry her,” Betsy said as she yanked the spread and blankets off her own
bed. “We’ll fix up the car.”

 
          
Romy
followed her to the garage where they flattened the rear seats in the Volvo and
spread out the bedclothes. Patrick appeared a moment later carrying the moaning
Meerm. They nestled her in the rear section.

 
          
“Patrick,
you drive,” Betsy said. “Do you know the way to the hospital?”

 
          
“No.”

 
          
“I’ll
direct you, then. Romy, you stay here in the back with me.”

 
          
And
then they were on their way, Betsy and Romy kneeling on either side of Meerm in
the back as Patrick pulled out of the driveway. Romy opened her PCA and left a
beeper message for Zero: “It’s happening. We’re on our way to the hospital.”

 
          
As
she hung up she heard Betsy on her own PCA.

 
          
“…know
it’s Christmas, Joanna, but this is more than just an emergency section, it’s
an historical event…I wish I could say more than that, but I can’t. Have I ever
lied to you? Well then, believe me,
Joanna,
you want
to be part of this. Okay, good. I’ll see you there.”

 
          
As
Betsy hung up and punched in another speed-dial code, she glanced at Romy and
smiled.
“My surgical team.
A
dedicated bunch, but itis Christmas Day.
My nurse anesthetist is Hindu,
so she’ll be no problem; but both my scrub nurses have small children.” She
shrugged. “One’s coming. I hope I can persuade the other. If not…do you faint
at the sight of blood, Romy?”

 
          
“Me?”
Romy said, caught off guard. “No, I’m okay with blood. But if you’re talking
about assisting on a surgery…I don’t think…”

 
          
“Let’s
hope you won’t have to, but be prepared. I may need you.”

 
          
Slice
open Meerm’s belly? Romy didn’t know if she could help with that.

 
          
“Second floor—clear!”

 
          
“Office—clear!”

 
          
“Garage—empty!”

 
          
Luca
stood in the center of Dr. Cannon’s living room listening to the reports
through his headset, and felt ridiculous.

 
          
The
op had started out perfectly. With the six team members divided between two
Jeeps and a rented van, they’d arrived in town with time to spare. They’d left
the Jeeps in the lot of an autobody shop and headed for Cannon’s house in the
van. The plan was to ditch the van at the shop lot after the op and make it
back to SimGen in the Jeeps.
But now…

 
          
Shit,
the house was empty.

 
          
Luca
had had his first premonition the moment they’d pulled up in front: the lights
were on.
Upstairs and down.
At four
in the morning?

 
          
They’d
crept up to the windows—no one moving about inside. They’d slammed through the
rear door—no alarm.

 
          
Footsteps
pounded down the stairs behind him. Luca turned and saw a helmeted figure
approaching, recognized him as Lowery when he lifted his visor.

 
          
“Three bedrooms upstairs.
The reports on her say she lives
alone, but all three have slept-in beds. They’re not warm, but I’d guess they
haven’t been cold too long.
Looks like they left in a big
hurry.”

 
          
Luca
felt as if he were turning to ice. “You’re saying they might have been tipped?”

 
          
Lowery
shrugged. “Who’d tip them? You and
me
were the only
ones who knew where we were going. Maybe they got spooked. Maybe they spotted
us watching the place and decided to take off.”

 
          
Luca
turned away and ground his teeth. He should have kept someone here until the
raid, but without Snyder and Grimes he was short-handed. What did he do now?

 
          
“All
right,” he said into his helmet mike.
“Everybody back to the
van.
We’re outta here.”

 
          
They’d
return to the other cars, but not to SimGen. Not yet. He was staying in this
area. Maybe he’d split up the team and send them looking for Cannon’s Volvo.
Slim chance there, but better than doing nothing.

 
          
Needed time to think.
No question now that Cannon and the
sim were together. Find the doc and he’d have the sim, and Cadman and Sullivan
too, no doubt.

           
But where?