The Rise and Fall of Khan Noonien Singh, Volume One (29 page)

In marked contrast to Chrysalis’s stated preference for smaller classes and personalized instruction, there was only one instructor present, keeping watch over at least two dozen dysfunctional children. More like an attendant, really, since Roberta didn’t get the impression that much actual instruction was going on. The sole adult in attendance—a squat, hunched man with sallow skin, awful posture, bushy black brows, and two large, oddly protuberant eyes—rose up quickly from behind a cheap, plywood-and-aluminum desk, a dog-eared paperback novel dropping from his fingers. He didn’t look like a rocket scientist or world-class educator; Roberta guessed that babysitting Chrysalis’s failed experiments was hardly one of the Project’s most eagerly sought-after jobs.
No wonder they stuck this room way off in the middle of nowhere,
she realized,
so that the rest of the team wouldn’t have to be reminded of their occasional setbacks.

“Freeze, buster!” she warned him, holding her servo like a revolver. “You heard the announcement. I’m armed and dangerous.”

Her declaration provoked more screams of terror from some of the more alert children, but Eygor obligingly raised his hands above his head, taking her implied threat just as seriously as she hoped. Roberta scanned the room, looking for any sign of an alarm or security camera. She was tempted to put the creepy, bug-eyed attendant to sleep, then ’port out in front of the children.
These kids are so messed up,
she thought,
who’s going to believe them if they say I disappeared into thin air
—
or even a glowing blue cloud?

“Hello,
bonjour,
hello!” A surprisingly strong little hand tugged on her skirt, and she looked down to see a cherubic little boy, maybe five years old, staring up at her with eyes that positively shone with excitement and enthusiasm. His entire body, in fact, vibrated with barely contained energy, as if he’d just consumed a year’s worth of Cap’n Crunch in one sitting. “Whoareyou? Wheredoyoucomefrom? MynameisOliver.” He pelted her with questions, speaking so fast the words literally ran together. “I’veneverseenyoubefore. What’syourname? Whatdidyoubringme? I’mthesmartestonehere. CanIhaveyourpen?”

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“Er, pleased to meet you,” Roberta answered distractedly, trying to keep one eye on the attendant while continuing her search for hidden cameras. The last thing she wanted to do was let Kaur and her fanatical associates capture the Blue Smoke Express on film. Her ability to transport was an ace in the hole that Roberta didn’t feel like giving away just yet, especially with Seven still a prisoner of Chrysalis.
When I come back for him,
she vowed,
you’re not going to see me coming.

Oliver wasn’t brushed off so easily. “MynameisOliver. What’syours?” He tugged on her skirt so hard that she had to grab on to the top of the garment with her free hand to keep it from being yanked down to her knees. “Whoareyou? Whyareyouhere?”

“My name’s Veronica,” she lied, mostly out of habit.

“
‘Whatdidyoubringme? CanIhaveyourpen?”

“Er, not right now,” Roberta temporized. Between Oliver’s insistent craving for attention, plus the more frightened children crying and wailing in the background, she was finding it hard to concentrate on the vital business of making a clean escape. Isis hissed menacingly at Oliver, and Roberta deftly inserted herself between the boy and the annoyed cat, in hopes of shielding the hyper youngster from Isis’s ever ready claws and teeth. “How ’bout we shake instead?”

She offered Oliver her hand, which he grabbed on to with unexpected force.
Ouch,
Roberta winced as the motor-mouthed little terror squeezed her hand harder than a two-hundred-pound quarterback with something to prove.
Must be that genetically enhanced muscular development,
she deduced.
Lucky me.

“Givemeyourpen!” he demanded, bouncing up and down at the end of Roberta’s arm. She tried to pull her hand free, but Oliver held on to it like a vise. He started grabbing at her other arm, trying to snatch the servo away. “Giveittome! Giveme! Giveme!”

“Oliver! Stop it! Let go of me!” The excited child tightened his grip, squeezing her trapped hand so tightly that she could feel the bones grinding together. For the first time, she realized she was in actual physical danger from the berserk supertyke. Oliver kicked her savagely in the shin, staggering her, but she still couldn’t bring herself to
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strike back at the little boy.
It’s not his fault,
she thought, torn between panic and compassion.
He’s emotionally disturbed!

She held the servo above her head, out of Oliver’s reach. The tip of the weapon pointed uselessly at the ceiling, but, ignoring the pressure crushing her other hand, she struggled to turn the servo around with her fingers, a test of digital dexterity she could have gladly done without.
If I can just do this,
she thought desperately,
without dropping the darn thing or zapping myself by mistake
...
!

Then Oliver jumped for her upraised arm, sinking his teeth into her biceps. Roberta cried out in pain, feeling his jaws bite down on her even through the fabric of her lab coat, and the servo flew from her fingers, landed several feet away among a gang of children, who instantly started fighting each other for possession of the shiny silver prize. “No, no, no!” Oliver shouted, letting go of Roberta to chase after the escaped servo. Roberta yanked her injured left hand back, shaking it hard to restore the circulation to her fingers. Nothing felt permanently broken, but it had been a close call. She looked quickly for Isis, half-wondering why the combative feline had not come to her defense. Then she saw that Isis had another crisis to deal with: taking advantage of Roberta’s predicament, Eygor had lowered his hands to reach for a button beneath his desk. Isis sprang at the slouching man like a miniature panther, but she was too late. An alarm sounded and a metal grille descended from the ceiling, sealing off the exit.

Trapped! Roberta stared bleakly at the riot of thrashing children that had swallowed up the servo, along with her ability to transport herself and Isis to safety. High-pitched screams and angry yelling joined with the blaring alarm to produce a nearly unbearable volume of noise that just made it harder to think clearly. She approached the kicking and clawing children warily, uncertain of how to safely separate the kids, let alone retrieve her servo. She glanced at the only other adult present, the hunched, pop-eyed attendant, hoping he might intervene to halt the violence, only to see him gaping at the ceiling with an apprehensive expression on his homely face.

Her gaze followed his upward where she was shocked to spy tendrils of thick white gas pouring into the classroom from vents in the
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ceiling.
This is not good,
she thought, instinctively taking a deep breath and holding it. Alas, her quick reflex bought her only enough time to wonder whether every chamber in Chrysalis came equipped with knockout gas, for reasons of internal security, or if this was just an emergency measure installed just in case the Developmentally Deviant kids got out of control.

If nothing else, the gas attack served to quiet the brutal skirmish that had broken out over possession of the servo. Trying hard not to breathe, Roberta watched as, one by one, the brawling children, along with the rest of their behaviorally impaired classmates, succumbed to the narcotic effect of the billowing white fumes. She couldn’t help noticing how angelic, how touchingly
normal,
Chrysalis’s misfit children looked when they slept.

She rushed forward, gently pulling the children’s collapsed bodies off each other as she searched frantically for her servo. The kids’ inert forms were dead weight, which left her struggling against gravity as well as time.
If I can just find it in time,
she thought desperately,
I can still ’port us out of here!

But such furious exertion only used up her last breath faster. Cheeks bulging with exhaled carbon dioxide, she caught one brief, frustrating glimpse of metallic silver, poking out from beneath a pile of slumbering toddlers, before she burst out gasping, sucking in lungfuls of tainted air that sent her head spinning and turned her legs into overcooked spaghetti. She tried to focus her increasingly fuzzy vision, which fell helplessly upon an indistinct black blur atop the attendant’s desk.

Isis was already out cold by the time Roberta’s world went completely dark.

“YOU KNOW, WHEN YOU THINK ABOUT IT,
she caused more confusion than actual harm.” Walter Takagi tugged uncomfortably on the collar of his T-shirt as he and Dr. Kaur contemplated the gassed form of the woman he knew as Dr. Veronica Neary, prostrate upon the padded floor of the Developmental Deviations Unit. All around them, teams of security guards and child-care specialists tended to the unfortunate children who, with their caretaker, had been gassed along with Ronnie.
Like these poor, defective kids didn’t have enough problems,
he thought sourly. “Ultimately, the project was only compromised, not irreparably damaged.”

“That’s small comfort, Walter,” Kaur said soberly. The director of Chrysalis watched the unconscious children being carted away to the infirmary, a discontented expression upon her refined features. “After years of secrecy and meticulous preparation, we have now been infiltrated by two spies in nearly as many days, one of whom we actively welcomed into our ranks.” A slippered foot tapped impatiently against the floor, hinting at the degree of anxiety at work behind Kaur’s composed exterior. “A most unsettling turn of affairs.”

Takagi gulped nervously. He had heard rumors about what happened to those who violated Chrysalis’s acute code of secrecy
Like that American, Singer, who disappeared without explanation while I was in Rome,
he remembered.
Nobody even mentions him anymore.

“I take full responsibility,” he offered, secretly hoping that his willingness to own up to his mistake would count in his favor, perhaps
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mitigating whatever harsh disciplinary action Kaur had in mind. “She fooled me completely.”

“So it seems,” Kaur agreed. Takagi waited for the axe to fall, resolving to face his punishment with as much dignity as he could muster. Grisly visions of seppuku, lifted mostly from old samurai movies he saw as a kid, slashed their way across his imagination. To his surprise, however, Kaur merely sighed and gave him a thin, rueful smile. “Unfortunately, Dr. Lozinak and I were equally taken in. Nor can you be blamed for the unwelcome advent of Mr. Seven. Clearly, our essential security was breached at some earlier point, perhaps via our New York operation.” She scowled thoughtfully. “I think it best that we declare a moratorium on recruiting new talent into Chrysalis until we get to the bottom of these incursions, and perhaps beyond.”

“Absolutely!” Takagi responded hastily. An overwhelming sense of relief coursed through his body, rendering him almost light-headed.
Looks like I’m not dead meat after all!
“That’s a very good idea, of course.”

About a meter away, the guards hefted the last of the imperfect children off the floor. A glint of silver caught his eye, and he recognized the slim, metallic pen that Ronnie had used to put Dr. Lozinak to sleep. Judging from the alert expression that suddenly leaped into Kaur’s eyes, she had spotted the suspicious device as well.

Without waiting for one of her bodyguards to retrieve the disguised weapon, she pounced on the pen herself. Lifting it from the floor, where it had lain hidden beneath the bodies of the narcotized toddlers, she held it up to the light, inspecting it carefully from every direction. “Of course,” she murmured intensely, her eyes narrowing in anger, “I knew there had to be a connection.”

Before Takagi’s baffled eyes, she fished an identical pen out of the pocket of her lab coat. She held them side by side in front of her, then collected them both in her fist and forcefully thrust them both back into her pocket. “It appears that Mr. Seven and Dr. Neary, or whatever their real names are, are supplied by the same unknown agency,” she explained curtly.

Takagi was tempted to ask for more details, but decided, upon rapid consideration, not to push his luck.
Best to keep a low profile for a while,
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he resolved, as much as he was dying to find out more about who this Gary Seven character was,
until this whole fiasco has time to fade in people’s memories. Assuming it ever does.
Times like this, he couldn’t help wondering if he wouldn’t have been better off sticking with his comfortable teaching gig in Osaka.

Sprawled upon the cushioned and graffiti-covered floor of the DDU, Ronnie stirred fitfully, coughing hoarsely before dropping back into drug-induced slumber. Despite everything, Takagi was glad to see that she was recovering from the potent anesthetic gas used to subdue her. Kaur nodded at her personal bodyguards, and the two Sikhs took hold of Ronnie by her wrists and ankles, lifting her from the floor. “What would you have done with her?” the senior guard inquired.

Kaur stared at Ronnie as she would at a particularly virulent strain of bacteria. “Put her in with her partner,” she said harshly. “I’ll deal with them both soon enough.”

Another guard, a survivor of the recently overthrown right-wing regime in Portugal, lifted a limp clump of glossy black fur off the caretaker’s desk. “What about the cat?” he asked brusquely

“I couldn’t care less about the blasted cat,” Kaur snapped, her patience clearly nearing its limits. Exasperated, she clenched her fists and unleashed some of her pent-up frustration on the unlucky guard. “Adopt it. Eat it. Dissect it. Do whatever you wish with the miserable creature.”