The Rise and Fall of Khan Noonien Singh, Volume One (37 page)

He cursed Sarina Kaur as well, for dragging him into this bloody project in the first place. Not that he’d had much choice in the matter; having uncovered his own legally dubious efforts at human cloning, along with its unfortunate casualties, Kaur had all too easily blackmailed him into joining Chrysalis. Now, with the entire insane enterprise seemingly crashing down all around him, he couldn’t help wondering if he wouldn’t have been better off facing the music in the first place.

A loud hiss escaped from inside the lab as the airtight metal door unsealed itself. Only three individuals in Chrysalis had access to the facilities on Level Four: Kaur, Lozinak, and himself. Now, with his future suddenly thrown into uncertainty, Williams intended to take advantage of that privileged status to secure a crucial bit of insurance to help him weather whatever storms might lie ahead.
Nothing like a
[235]
unique, new bioweapon to use as a bargaining chip,
he thought, formulating desperate new plans on the run.
The Russians are bound to be interested in Kaur’s pet bacteria, and may be the Americans as well
. ...

“
Attention. Twenty-two minutes to atomic sterilization,” the PA system announced, continuing its inexorable countdown. Acutely aware that time was rapidly ticking away, Williams ignored the protective biohazard suits hanging inside the entrance to Level Four, hurrying on to the inner chambers of the laboratory. Empty steel vats, waiting for the vast quantities of peptone that had just arrived from America, rested between aisles of sterile white tiles and plastic tubing. Williams glanced nervously over his shoulder, half-expecting to be surprised by either Seven or Sarina Kaur, arriving just in time to catch him in the act. He wasn’t sure who he was most afraid of confronting. Kaur, most likely; as far as he knew, Seven had never ordered the cold-blooded execution of any of his subordinates.

Another set of airlocks stood between him and the object of his impromptu shopping expedition. Sweaty fingers pounded a frustratingly long numerical sequence into a mounted keypad, and he waited impatiently for the lock to verify his security clearance. He yanked hard on the gleaming chrome door handle the minute he heard the welcome hiss of escaping air, and hurriedly entered the earthquake-proof chamber beyond.

Strictly off-limits to all but Kaur and her most trusted associates, the cool, air-conditioned metal vault contained only a locked filing cabinet and a refrigerator hooked up to its own emergency generator. Williams attacked the filing cabinet first, hastily unlocking the top drawer and rifling through an assortment of tightly packed hanging folders. An adhesive label reading “Carn-Strep—gen.18.7” identified the specific file he required.
Yes!
he thought avidly.
Just what I was looking for.

Enclosed was the exact genetic sequence for the latest generation of Sarina Kaur’s carnivorous streptococcus. With this recipe, he knew, and the proper facilities, anyone with sufficient know-how and desire would be able to re-create the fearsome flesh-eating bacteria, and perhaps even improve on it. For himself, Williams only wanted to use the
[236]
formula to buy himself a comfortable retirement somewhere far from the reach of anyone who might come looking for him. The West Indies, maybe, or South America.

He glanced quickly at the nearby refrigerator, containing actual samples of the modified Strep A bacteria. He briefly considered snatching a carefully sealed specimen of the vicious microorganism, for added insurance, but promptly decided against it. Transporting a living sample of the bug, even in an unbreakable plastic container, would be just too nerve-racking, particularly given the uncertain exodus ahead.

“No need to get greedy,” he muttered. The formula for the disease was more than enough. He pocketed a folded piece of paper bearing the relevant genetic sequence, then looked toward the exit. His head throbbed miserably.

“Attention. Twenty-one minutes to atomic sterilization.”

Time to go,
he realized. In a moment of perverse defiance, he tugged open the door of the refrigeration unit, exposing the vulnerable bacteria inside to room temperature, not to mention the coming nuclear holocaust.
Take that, you blackmailing witch,
he thought.
Let your microscopic little monsters go up inflames with the rest of this wretched place!

Carrying a stolen recipe for a biological nightmare, along with half-cooked plans for the future, Williams rushed out of Level Four in search of safety—and whatever else fate had in store for him.

00:19:51

LESS THAN TWENTY MINUTES TO GO
,
Seven noted from his seat at the control panel. He studied the various gauges on display, carefully monitoring the self-destructive process unfolding within the concrete reactor silo. According to the instrumentation, temperatures within the reactor core were rapidly approaching two thousand degrees Celsius, while the chain reaction building inside the silo would soon pass the point of no return, as the uranium fuel rods melted into a single critical mass. Seven intended to stay at the reactor controls until the very last minute, just in case Sarina Kaur and her followers attempted to abort the coming explosion.

As he familiarized himself with Chrysalis’s primary source of energy, he had to admire, in a perverse fashion, the manner in which the reactor had been expressly designed to provide a spectacular funeral pyre for the project, had circumstances so required. Ordinarily, the breakdown of this sort of primitive pressurized-water reactor would only result in a catastrophic meltdown, not a full-scale nuclear explosion, but the Chrysalis reactor was different; as far as he could tell from the schematics on display in the control room, the processed uranium at this reactor’s core had deliberately been arranged in precisely the right quantity and configuration to guarantee an atomic explosion deep beneath the desolate sands of the Great Thar Desert.

“Typical,” Seven muttered under his breath. The reactor’s insidious
[238]
design seemed emblematic of the project’s overall approach: the latest in cutting-edge technology inextricably wed to an overwhelming potential for disaster.
The sooner the whole endeavor is obliterated,
he resolved,
the better.

“Fifteen minutes to atomic sterilization.”

The recorded announcement confirmed the digital readout before him. Seven prayed that Chrysalis’s numerous inhabitants had heeded the previous warnings, and that they were already on their way to safety. He worried less about the fate of the project’s blameless super-children; Roberta and Isis, he knew, could be trusted to carry out that end of the mission. If only the larger problem caused by the children’s very existence could be dealt with so easily ... !

A blinking red annunciator light alerted Seven to a worrisome buildup of hydrogen gas within the reactor core. While insufficient to halt the chain reaction itself, the excess hydrogen could cause preliminary explosions inside the concrete silo, explosions that might pose some danger to Seven himself.
Best to keep an eye on that,
he determined, at least until it was time for him to transport out of the doomed complex, roughly ten minutes from now.

To his surprise, however, an explosion came not from the enormous cement cylinder beyond the open window, but from the sealed metal door at the far end of the control room. The powerful blast literally blew the heavy metal gate inward and out of the doorframe, while the accompanying shock wave knocked Seven out of his seat and onto the floor. Billowing clouds of black smoke permeated the control room, making his eyes sting, and the acrid scent of crude plastic explosives assailed his nostrils.
What in the Aegis’s name
. ...
?
he thought, his ears ringing from the thundering detonation.

Dazed, he lifted his battered head from the floor just in time to witness Dr. Sarina Kaur come striding through the hazy fumes into the control room. She held a Walther PPK pistol in her hand and a determined expression on her face. Behind her, as the smoke quickly cleared, Seven glimpsed the now-open doorway, through which he spotted the elevator and foyer beyond. Kaur carefully stepped around the scorched and crumpled remains of the fallen gate as she aimed the
[239]
muzzle of her weapon at the stunned and defenseless man upon the floor. “Please don’t get up, Mr. Seven,” she instructed him, her icy tone belying the blazing hatred in her dark eyes. “And keep your hands where I can see them; we don’t want another demonstration of your singularly efficacious penmanship.”

His servo tucked away in his pocket, Seven avoided any sudden moves, not wanting to provoke Kaur to further violence. “Listen to me,” he beseeched her hoarsely. Lingering traces of smoke irritated his throat as he spoke. “You have to believe me, this is for the best.”

“Silence!” Kaur barked. She was without her ubiquitous Sikh bodyguards, whom Seven assumed she must have given leave to evacuate with the rest of Chrysalis’s personnel. He found it hard to reconcile that concern for her people with the ruthlessness which he knew, from firsthand experience, she was capable of, but then, he recalled acidly, twentieth-century humans, no matter how brilliant, still tended to divide the world into Us and Them, with only the former worthy of concern.
I wonder if Kaur’s all-star team of geniuses managed to eliminate that trait from the human genome?
he wondered.
Somehow I doubt it.

Keeping her gun pointed at Seven, Kaur hurried to the control panel Seven had just vacated. Without bothering to right the toppled chair next to the console, she flicked a switch on the control panel and leaned toward the attached microphone. “Abort Emergency Self-Destruct Sequence,” she commanded emphatically. “Executive Authority Kaur-slash-alpha-alpha.”

Was it still possible to halt the chain reaction? Seven honestly wasn’t sure, and, judging from the worried expression on the director’s face, neither was Sarina Kaur. How could anyone make reliable predictions about such an archaic and unstable piece of atomic engineering?

“Attempting to abort emergency self-destruct sequence,” the computer reported.
Easier said than done, apparently,
Seven noted, as Kaur stared uneasily at the gauges before her. Seven himself couldn’t see the displays from his position on the floor, but he guessed that the data was not encouraging. “We need to get out of here,” he told Kaur sincerely. “Please believe me, if not for yourself, then for the child you carry. Let me up and I can get us both to safety.”

[240]
“Quiet!” Kaur snapped at him, punctuating her command with a gunshot that burrowed a hole in the floor in front of Seven. The gravid geneticist frantically worked the controls of the reactor, trying to undo the irreversible.

“Ten minutes until atomic sterilization.”

All of Kaur’s attention was focused on the reactor controls.
Now is my chance,
Seven realized. Mobilizing his bruised and aching muscles for one more superhuman feat, the extraterrestrial operative sprang to his feet and hurled himself out the empty windowframe looking out over the turbine chamber. “No!” Kaur shouted angrily, squeezing the trigger of her Walther PPK, but she succeeded only in chipping out more fragments of the control-room floor.

Seven fell fifty feet to the level below. The impact when he hit the ground jarred his bones, but he absorbed the blow as best he could by tucking his limbs against his torso and rolling as he landed, then used his momentum to end up standing upright upon the asphalt floor of the turbine room. He found himself not far from the base of the massive containment silo. Iron scaffolding circled the gigantic concrete cylinder, then stretched out over the nearby turbines, which seemed to roar even more deafeningly as the reactor core overheated, sending a torrent of hot steam through the power-generating turbines. Seven wondered how much longer the immense turbines would be able to withstand the strain.

“Attempting to abort emergency self-destruct sequence,” the loudspeakers announced over the churning din of the turbines. “Ten minutes and holding.”

Damn,
Seven thought. Kaur had succeeding in arresting the chain reaction, if not yet reversing it entirely. In his mind, he visualized the carbon-alloy control rods sliding back into place between the partially melted uranium fuel rods, preventing the radioactive ore from attaining critical mass.
I
can’t let that happen,
he vowed, hurriedly climbing the scaffolding between the silo and the turbines.
I
have to make sure that reactor blows, no matter what happens to Kaur and my self.

Ideally, of course, he would just transport the control rods out of the reactor core, but the intense amount of radiation generated at the core,
[241]
not to mention the dense, reinforced shielding, made such an operation problematic. Seven’s eyes narrowed shrewdly as he contemplated the massive pipes carrying much-needed coolant into the containment silo. Fortunately, there was more than one way to cook a reactor.

Setting the servo for a wide-angle beam, he targeted a stretch of pipe less than twenty feet away. The dense metal conduit, painted a dull green, dissolved beneath the influence of the disintegration beam, spilling a cascade of radioactive H
₂
O onto the floor of the vast chamber. Even located upon the scaffolding, several feet above the flood, Seven winced at the thought of what the invisible roentgens were surely doing to his own cellular structure.
I’ll have to give myself a couple of strong antiradiation pills,
he realized,
provided I make it back to Manhattan at all.