The Rise and Fall of Khan Noonien Singh, Volume One (22 page)

“Extermination is no solution,” Seven warned her, “only an invitation to extinction.” He wished he could somehow plant a seed of doubt in Kaur’s mind, but feared that nothing could grow there but her own unshakable convictions. “When do you intend to release the virus?”

“Bacterium,” she corrected. “Genetically modified streptococcus, to be precise, capable of devouring soft tissue at an accelerated rate.” Judging from the silent acceptance of Williams and the guards, none of this came as a surprise to Kaur’s inner circle. “As for deployment, that’s still under debate. To be honest, the contagion remains something of a work-in-progress; I am not yet entirely satisfied with its rate of communicability. We’re almost ready to start testing the bug on selected population centers, though, so I’m currently negotiating with moles in the Soviet germ warfare program, Biopreparat, for a quantity of ICBM missiles equipped with specialized biowarheads.”

Seven nodded gravely. Although the Soviet Union had only recently signed the Biological Weapons Convention, banning the development and use of germ warfare, he was not surprised to hear that the Russians were secretly continuing their efforts in that area.
Something to look into,
he acknowledged,
if and when I survive this current mission.

“Ultimately, of course,” Kaur continued, “there’s no need to fully unleash the final version of our lovely, flesh-eating bacteria until the children of Chrysalis are ready to inherit the Earth.” She patted her gravid belly. “Still, I must say, Mr. Seven, that your own success at penetrating our security makes me think that sooner might be safer than later.”

“Please don’t rush on my account,” he told her dryly. “If I were you, I’d worry less about your security, and more about the long-term implications of what you’re doing.” Although willing to make the effort,
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he was rapidly abandoning any hope of convincing Kaur through logic and argument.
I
need to contact Roberta and Isis,
he concluded, planning ahead to the next phase of this mission,
and find out what they’ve learned.
Touching base with the two agents was not going to be any easier now that Kaur had taken his servo, but Seven was confident that he could locate one or more of his operatives once he succeeded in escaping this cage. After all, he had once managed to track down Roberta in the middle of that fifth-dimensional maze of mirrors, so finding her in a multistory underground laboratory should pose only minimal difficulties. All he needed now was for Kaur and the others to leave him alone for a few minutes.

He resisted the temptation to start searching for an escape route already.
Not while Kaur is watching me so closely,
he knew. Hopefully, she would tire of this fruitless interrogation soon and give him a bit more privacy. He had no doubt that he would be able to outwit a mere guard or two.

“You seem to have a genetic predisposition toward stubbornness,” she remarked with what Seven considered an encouraging degree of impatience. “An annoying trait, at least when harnessed to a reactionary desire to hold back the future.” She stepped back from the cage to regard Seven from a greater distance. “Fortunately, we possess effective means to erode that stubbornness.” She turned her head to address a guard. “The bag, please, Sanjit.”

Seven didn’t like the sound of that. Was Kaur really obsessed enough to resort to physical torture? That hardly meshed with the utopian vision she espoused, but, then again, she would scarcely be the first reformer in Earth’s history who proved willing to build a paradise atop the bones of countless victims. Unevolved humanity, Seven had learned the hard way, was capable of embracing appalling contradictions.

Fortunately, he had little to fear from torture except the actual physical discomfort. Carefully constructed psychological blocks, implanted in his mind well before he ever set foot on this backward planet, would prevent him from revealing any of the Aegis’s most dangerous secrets, no matter how brutally he was treated. His only real
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concern, besides an innate instinct for self-preservation, was that his ordeal might leave him too weak to complete his mission, let alone come to the assistance of Roberta or Isis.
They’ve both had plenty of experience in the field,
he reminded himself.
If worst comes to worst, perhaps they can neutralize Chrysalis on their own?

“Maybe you should examine your methods as well as your goals,” he said, trying even now to plant that seed of doubt in Kaur’s mind. “If one is suspect, perhaps there may be something profoundly wrong with the other as well.”

Kaur’s implacable demeanor remained unperturbed. “You needn’t worry about torture, if that’s what you’re thinking,” she told Seven. “Physical coercion is a barbaric remnant of the past.” She reached into her bag and drew out a capped plastic vial and a hypodermic syringe. “As always, I prefer a more biochemical approach.”

A dark purple fluid, the color of spilled Klingon blood, sloshed within the clear plastic tube. “Sodium pentothal?” Seven guessed uncertainly. The color didn’t match any variety of truth serum that he was familiar with, and certainly nothing available on contemporary Earth.

“Nothing so crude,” Kaur declared with pride, carefully filling the syringe with the contents of the vial. “We have something much better: an artificially synthesized neurotransmitter that stimulates the, shall we say,
confessional
areas of the brain.” She held the hypo up to the light, checking for unwanted air bubbles, then sprayed a small quantity of the serum through the point of the needle. “A useful byproduct of our research into brain chemistry.”

Handing the bag back to her bodyguard, she approached Seven once again, holding the syringe upright. The other guard stepped forward as well, responding to a subtle nod from the director. He reached through the bars of the cell and took a firm hold on Seven’s right arm. “Please refrain from struggling,” Kaur advised the prisoner. She waited patiently while the guard rolled up Seven’s sleeve, exposing his lower arm. “It will hurt less if I can make a clean stick.”

Seven did not try to yank his arm from the guard’s grip. As long as he was handcuffed to the cage, not to mention outnumbered and
[137]
unarmed, there was little point in resisting.
I guess we’ll see now,
he mused,
just how effective Kaur’s serum is.

With her free hand, Kaur stroked the large vein at Seven’s elbow, palpating the dull-blue blood vessel until it stood out prominently against his skin. He winced as the needle pierced his flesh, the brief sting being followed by an unpleasant burning sensation as the serum entered his bloodstream.

Pleased with the smoothness of the procedure, Kaur stepped back and consulted her wristwatch. “We shouldn’t have long to wait,” she explained to Williams and the others. “Judging from our results in the past, the drug takes effect within minutes.”

I
wouldn’t be so sure,
Seven thought.

CHRYSALIS BASE

MAY 18, 1974

“THAT’S IT: THE REACTOR CORE,”
Takagi said boastfully. he and
Roberta stared through a thick Plexiglas screen at a huge concrete cylinder, roughly a hundred feet in diameter. Enormous pipes filled with either coolant or heated gas connected the heavily shielded nuclear reactor with the massive steam-powered turbine and generator that provided virtually all of Chrysalis’s electrical power, or so the Japanese biochemist eagerly informed her. “At peak capacity, the generator produces current in excess of twenty-five thousand volts.”

Roberta stifled a yawn. Despite having slept for a solid fifteen hours the night before, taking full advantage of a private room provided by Chrysalis, she was still feeling kind of jet-lagged this morning. She was also concerned that she hadn’t heard from Gary Seven since spotting him at the Delhi airport yesterday She had tried to contact him via her servo, both this morning and shortly before turning in last night, but he hadn’t responded to any of her hails.
I
hope he’s okay,
she worried, remembering the arid and inhospitable desert she had crossed to reach this location.

That he hadn’t responded to any of her hails was inconclusive. Seven had been known to switch off the communicator function of his servo when he was conducting a particularly covert maneuver, lest
[139]
a badly timed beep risk exposure, but he had seldom kept the pen-phone off the hook this long. Surely he must have had an opportunity to talk to her sometime in the last umpteen hours?
This isn’t good,
she thought, fingering the servo in the pocket of her jeans.

They had spent the last forty-five minutes touring Chrysalis’s laboratory facilities, which, to her inexpert eye, certainly looked impressive and state-of-the-art. She had oohed and ahhed over a generous assortment of electron microscopes, incubators, radiation counters, test tubes, petri dishes, titration setups, gas chromatography equipment, MRI scanners, and other apparatus she couldn’t even begin to identify. As far as she could tell, none of the labs had been devoted to breeding great quantities of killer bacteria, not that she was sure she could tell if they were. Her legs were tired from trudging all over the underground base, yet she wasn’t any closer to reestablishing contact with Gary Seven.
He has to have gotten here by now,
she surmised,
but what is he up to?

“Ronnie? Dr. Neary?” Takagi waved a hand in front of her face, and she realized that she had let her mind wander a little too obviously.

Oops!

“Sorry about that,” she apologized hastily. Her face assumed a more attentive expression. “The reactor. Right.”

This high-tech control room, overlooking the reactor, was the latest stop on the tour. She and Takagi stood at the rear of the room while industrious technicians monitored an impressive array of lighted panels and gauges. Mounted schematics illustrated the internal workings of the reactor, currently hidden behind several feet of reinforced concrete. Her unfamiliar face drew a few curious glances from the workers present, but apparently Takagi’s presence was enough to vouch for her status as a security non-risk.
If only they knew why I’m really here,
she thought, feeling guilty once more for taking advantage of these people’s trust.
Undercover missions really suck sometimes.

“I’m sorry again,” Takagi emphasized, “that neither Viktor nor Dr. Kaur could join us this morning, but both of them have plenty of responsibilities to keep them busy.” As a safety precaution, a badge-sized radiation tag was affixed to the front of his T-shirt.

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“I’ll bet,” Roberta replied, wondering how she could shake Takagi long enough to go searching for Gary Seven on her own. She glanced around the control room, pretending to be interested in the various flashing lights and switches. The sterile white chamber, with its long banks of consoles and computers, reminded her of Mission Control at Cape Kennedy. “I’m afraid I don’t know much about nuclear power,” she lied, having defused an A-bomb or two in her time. “So where’s the self-destruct switch?” she joked. “In the movies, there’s always a button that blows everything up.”

A serious expression came over Takagi’s face, momentarily dimming the friendly young scientist’s natural ebullience. “Believe it or not, there really is a self-destruct procedure, just in case some newly developed recombinant bacteria or virus is in danger of escaping into the environment. If the director judges the threat is serious enough, she has the option of triggering an irreversible chain reaction in the reactor core. In theory, the resulting atomic explosion would completely sterilize the area, preventing the bug from spreading.”

“Like in
The Andromeda Strain
,”
Roberta said, nodding her head in understanding. She had seen that creepy super-germ movie the year before. In the film, an overzealous computer nearly triggered a thermonuclear blast in order to keep the titular Strain from escaping a significantly more fictional underground lab. Of course, if Seven’s dire theories were correct, Kaur and her colleagues were already whipping up some sort of Chrysalis Strain. “You aren’t actually breeding any bugs like that, are you?”

Way to go, Roberta,
she thought.
Real subtle.

“Well, not on purpose, certainly,” Takagi insisted, sounding quite sincere, “although it doesn’t hurt to play it safe.” He tried to lighten the mood by flashing Roberta a reassuring smile. “That’s a completely last-ditch emergency measure, of course. It’s never going to happen. We’re extremely careful when it comes to handling hazardous materials, especially genetically modified microbes and such.”

Why don’t I find this terribly comforting?
Roberta wondered, readily imagining a mushroom cloud rising over the Great Thar Desert.
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Maybe because she knew how easily at least one potential saboteur had already penetrated Chrysalis’s supposedly airtight security?

Namely, me.

Kaur lied when she promised Seven that Chrysalis eschewed torture. Resisting the neurotransmitter’s effects was proving to be an agonizing ordeal comparable to enduring the tender mercies of a Klingon mind-sifter.

He hadn’t eaten or slept for hours, maybe even a day, and his jaw ached from the strain of keeping his teeth tightly clenched together. Kaur’s supersophisticated truth serum had worked its insidious alchemy upon his brain cells, provoking an almost irresistible compulsion to reveal his secrets to whomever was listening, in this case Williams and one remaining guard. He couldn’t even open his mouth for fear that vital intelligence, like Roberta’s true identity, would start pouring out of him uncontrollably.