Z. Raptor (21 page)

An earsplitting alarm tore violently through the game room, like a Brute's roar in Adam's ears. He sat bolt upright, yanked away the headset, sweat prickling through every pore. As he peeled off the pressure pads, he realized he could smell burning. The console? No. ...

The smoke was seeping in from outside.

The next moment, Loner smashed through the door, soaking wet. Adam jumped up in alarm. Sprinklers in the ceiling were filling the smoky corridor with fierce showers of water, but the acrid stink of burning plastic still carried from—

“The records room?” Adam stared at Loner in confusion, still tugging his mind from the last grips of Ultra-Reality.
Which raptor will you choose?
“What . . . what happened?”

“Don't know,” Loner barked over the alarm. “Chen sent the e-mail, Harm tried to load a disk and—”

“A fire started?” Adam jerked properly awake and staggered across the room. “Are they all right? We've got to get them. This alarm, it'll bring everyone in the building running.”

“Wait.” Loner flicked out his tail, curled it around Adam's arm. “Chen called his ship. Did you stand down the defenses?”

“I . . . I haven't found the interface yet,” Adam told him. “Come on, first we've got to get Harm and Chen out of—”

A torrent of crackling blue energy smashed into Loner from the doorway and held him helpless in its bonerattling grip. Adam, jolted clear of the raptor, smashed into a desk. He stared helplessly as a guard pushed into sight with an electroshock gun; Loner shook like a doll in the grip of an angry toddler, panting with pain as he curled into a ball.

“No!” yelled Adam. But his vision was blurring. Blackness was slipping into his pounding skull. As he blacked out completely, he was glad he couldn't see Loner's death throes any longer.

A
dam woke with a splitting headache. It was cold. A rushing hum of power pulled at his ears—air-conditioning or hard drives whirring, he wasn't sure. Memories tumbled through his mind like hot coals, and he just barely dared open his eyes. It was like being trapped in a nightmare, when you know the horror of what you will find before your eyes meet it.

When he did look, he caught movement just meters away—a Brute striding toward him. He flinched, then realized the beast was only an image on a massive TV screen set into the wall opposite. Six smaller screens were ranged above it, but they were turned off. The main image was shaking as if the camera was swinging about, but with a start, Adam recognized raptor eggs at the Brute's feet, lying in piles of sand and dirt.

Looking away, Adam took in his own surroundings. He was in a large rectangular room, painted white and painfully overlit. As he recoiled from the glare, he found he was sitting on the floor, leaning up against a wall with his arms tied behind his back.

Straight ahead of him lay Loner, curled up on a huge steel slab. From the circular lamps arranged above, Adam guessed it was an oversized operating table. The raptor was just barely breathing. A guard in a hazard suit, cradling his shock gun, watched as a woman and JJ's friend Dr. Haskins—both dressed like surgeons in scrubs and plastic aprons—hooked Loner up to a half-dozen high-tech monitors. With a stab of fear, Adam saw trays full of medical instruments had been ranged around the beast's body.

Must be the labs on level two,
he thought helplessly.
This is so not good.

“I hadn't expected to see you again, Adam. From your physical condition, I assume you washed in on the wreck of the
Hula Queen
?” A short, neat, petite woman stepped in front of him, her skin just a shade lighter than Harm's. A sad little smile creased her unblemished face. “You were touching the raptor when my guard shocked him, so I'm afraid you received a little of his punishment.”

“Samantha Josephs,” croaked Adam. He watched her as warily as he would a Brute. “Where's Harmony? And Chen?”

She nodded beside him. Adam saw Chen and Harm were tied up just as he was. Chen was beginning to stir.

“Your father's not with you,” Josephs surmised. “I wonder who you've turned to for support in his absence. Agent Chen? Or the too-clever raptor here?” She shook her head. “Neither choice is a good one.”

“Josephs?” Chen's voice sounded like his throat had been sanded down. “Glad . . . I found you.”

The woman turned to him primly. “I can only assume you're here because someone has learned about the money I paid you to stop your investigation into Geneflow's affairs. Had I known then what an incompetent you obviously are, I would have paid you a good deal less.”

“I got past your guards and all the way down here without your knowing a thing about it,” Chen said smugly. “Though I guess you've been kind of busy this morning.” He looked at the guard. “Was it you who took the elevator up top to see why your buddies hadn't come back? If you'd only taken the stairs, you might have run straight into us.”

The guard said nothing but gripped his gun a little tighter.

“Don't let our prisoner rile you, Ford,” Josephs told him coolly, then turned her attention back to Chen. “What is it you want, I wonder. More money to keep your mouth shut? I'm afraid our plans have come on a little too far for that to seem attractive.”

“I want to know what you've been doing,” Chen said.

“Then perhaps you shouldn't have set fire to my research center.” The look in Josephs's brown eyes had hardened. “If my team hadn't already scanned and archived the data—”

“I don't know how that fire started. But, you know, you seem kind of angry, Sammy,” Chen needled her. “Did we spoil your morning, stirring up your pet dinos?”

“Promising specimens have been destroyed.” Haskins spoke like a doctor giving bad news. “Not one of the Velociraptor eggs survived.”

So even the one he took away was bad,
Adam realized.

“Now our hopes lie with the Brutes' eggs.” Josephs turned to a big TV screen. “Or perhaps with this Velociraptor you've adopted.”

“Loner?” Adam said automatically. “What are you doing to him?”

Josephs grinned. “Is that what you call him? Loner?”

“It's what he calls himself. He knows he's different from the other raptors.” He couldn't resist the chance to goad her. “It's Loner who's really messed up your experiment—maybe with a little help from my brain waves in the Think-Send you've been using. Your own creation turned against you.”

He wanted to see Josephs dismayed or angry, but she simply looked at Haskins. “I honestly thought this Vel was another failure, at first. But if he really remembers his past . . .”

“It could mean a breakthrough far ahead of schedule,” Haskins agreed.

“Remembers what past?” Adam asked.

“Never mind Loner.” Chen nodded to the unconscious Harm. “I want to know why you've abducted this kid, and Lisa Brannigan and all the others. Why you took death row cons from across the United States—and what you did to them.” He strained forward angrily. “I want to know what
I
did by letting you go, what I helped you put together here.”

“So you can pull it back down again, single-handed?” Josephs seemed amused. “I've brought you here to give
me
answers. You must tell me more about Loner, as you call him. I want to know exactly how he has helped you. I want you to describe his behavior and his abilities.”

“What about your spy cams in the raptors?” Adam asked. “Haven't you seen for yourselves?”

She waved to the large screen. “We've been monitoring the different packs through camera implants in the alpha males and females. Loner here fell sick and was shunned by his pack, so he has escaped scrutiny.”

“Lucky him,” Chen muttered. “We're not helping you, Sammy.”

“Not even if I agree to help you?” Josephs asked. “I'm a scientist, not a murderer. Cooperate and I'll turn you loose once the experiment is over. Leave you on this island.”

Chen sneered. “And that's not a death sentence?”

“A real death sentence is handed out with good reason,” said Josephs. “That certainly was true in the case of Neil Richard Lowe.”

Adam was lost. “Who?”

“He's a killer who preyed on those weaker than himself,” Josephs replied. “All our convicts had a strong predator's instinct, of course. That was the whole point. But some took to the raptor simulations better than others. And some, like Mr. Lowe, were clearly in a league of their own.”

“I played that simulation,” said Adam. “Why make people pretend to be raptors?”

Josephs looked at him. “For the day when they would
become
raptors.”

Adam's blood froze. “Neil Richard Lowe . . .” He pictured the high-score table he'd seen in the simulator, one of the names shining in his memory:
LOWE, N.

Without even thinking, his mind pushed the word and letters together into a pattern.

Lowe, N. And an
R
for Richard.

“Oh, no.” Adam fought against the tears of helplessness he could feel bunching in his throat. “No, no, no . . .”

“Get out of here,” Chen said hoarsely. “I'm not buying that. We saw the bone pit. We saw the remains of those cons.”

“You saw the remains of their bodies,” Josephs reminded him. “Their minds had already been uploaded to our computer model, adapted for our purposes, and then downloaded into the original raptor embryos.”

“That . . . that's why you stole the brain-map research from Mindcorp?” Adam felt sick. He remembered the deformed, hunchbacked Brute shouting at Loner in the jungle—it hadn't been ordering him to kneel low. It was shouting “Neil Lowe.” Somehow it had made the connection. And when it had picked on Harm—sweet Harmony, perfect Harmony—and said “you're mine . . .”

It really did know her,
he realized.
That thing was all that was left of Harm's father. And it died trying to protect her.

Adam was glad Harm was asleep right now.

Chen looked sickened. “You tricked all those convicts into coming here, did
that
to them—and then fed them to the things they'd become?”

“If we'd left them on death row, they would have been killed uselessly,” Josephs reminded him. “At least this way their deaths helped science.”

“Bull! This isn't science. It's plain sick.”

“We're working to build a new society, Agent Chen,” Josephs argued, “free from murder, free from crime.”

“Only because you're choosing what they think,” Chen shot back, “as well as how they look.”

“The sick raptors . . .” Adam stared at Josephs. “Are they the ones who remembered something of who they used to be?”

“Yes.” She crossed to check the connections between Loner and the machines. “In most cases, it drove them mad. Although Mr. Lowe here was a psychopath even before his conversion. A master manipulator. One of the most dangerous men we had.”

“But . . .” Chen looked way out of his depth. “Why would anyone want to take a human mind and put it in the body of a raptor?”

“Because,” Josephs said, “ultimately it's easier to change ourselves than to change our world.”

Chen swore. “You want to change people into
dinosaurs
?”

“Don't be an imbecile,” said Josephs. “This is simply the first step on a long journey of evolution.” She crossed to the still-sleeping Harm and nudged her with the toe of her boot, exposing the gash on the back of the girl's head. “See how fragile people are? You must know better than anyone, John; you've seen so much death in your time. ... So many people killed every day. So many people who still had so much to give.” She crossed back to the slab on which Loner lay. “Imagine if we could heal ourselves fully after trauma, the way a reptile or amphibian can. A lizard can regrow its tail; a salamander can regenerate whole limbs or even parts of its spine.” She smiled. “Like the Z. rex, our Z. raptors contain molecule machines that can rebuild damaged cells—but we have made the healing process more powerful still by incorporating amphibian DNA into their genetic makeup.”

Chen sneered. “Taken from those things in the sea that wrecked my ship?”

“The guardians are the result of some of our less successful experiments in DNA sampling,” Josephs conceded. “But put to excellent use here as attack animals.” She looked between Adam and Chen. “You still don't grasp it, do you? Did it ever occur to you to look up what ‘gene flow' even means? It's the transfer of genetic material from one population to another; amphibians into reptiles—”

“And humans into dinosaurs,” Adam whispered.

“The dinosaurs thrived on Earth for hundreds of millions of years,” said Josephs. “We
Homo sapiens
face extinction after a few hundred thousand. Pollution, climate change, weapons of mass destruction—sooner or later, we must destroy either the planet or ourselves.”

One of the female doctors, an Asian woman with pulled-back hair, joined in. “Global agreement to cut back on carbon emissions or reduce the stockpile of nuclear weapons can only delay the inevitable,” she insisted, like she was quoting some mad scientist handbook. “Humanity needs to adapt.” She looked at Josephs. “It needs strength and boldness of vision.”

Josephs smiled approvingly. “Now that science has shown us that our bodies are simply vehicles for our genes, as a race we must take control of them and achieve our true potential—or suffer the consequences of our inaction.”