armed. But we’re not telling them where they’re going till we get there.”
“Well maybe I can help, guv. What’s the strategy?”
“I’m telling as few people as possible about that—no need for that hurt look, Bill; it’s not that I don’t trust you. But if Jasmine’s place was bugged—what else might be? You could be overheard talking about it to me, or Sullivan. We’re going to keep this under wraps. The fewer know about it, the better. We must try to be more…
“Quite astonishing, the rate at which the child is growing,” said Brigid Tenenbaum, staring at the toddler lying in the transparent bubbling incubator.
“Yes,” muttered Dr. Suchong, as he pored over the biochemical extract results on the clipboard in his hands. “Mr. Fontaine will be quite pleased. Also—may have implications for all mankind. Children—so vile. This one… not child for long…”
They were in a cramped laboratory space lit by a yellow bulb—the door doubly locked, the air stale, smelling heavily of chemicals and hormones and electrical discharge.
The naked little boy floated on the lozenge-shaped incubator on a table between them, his sleeping face above the liquid. The child was in a kind of trance within the thick fluids.
Little “Jack” seemed older than he was—and that was as per schedule. The accelerated-growth program was really remarkable. Perhaps Suchong was right—it could lead, someday, to entirely sidestepping the need for a childhood in future children. They could be grown with fantastic acceleration and taught with conditioning—as this child was being taught. Flickering lights, recorded voices, electrodes sparking his brain imbued him with the basics of learning—the ability to walk, memories of imaginary parents—that would have taken years to accumulate normally. He was a tabula rasa—anything they wished to imprint on him could be pressed into the yielding tissues of his young brain… just as Frank Fontaine had requested. She had heard Fontaine refer to young Jack here as “the ultimate con.” The backdoor entrance into the well-protected fortress that was Ryan. Jack had been, after all, taken from Jasmine Jolene’s uterus, extracted as a tiny embryo that was just twelve days past being a mere zygote…
“I must complete the W-Y-K conditioning,” Suchong muttered, setting the clipboard on the table. “The child must be set in bathysphere soon, sent to the surface… Mr. Fontaine has a boat waiting already…”
She frowned. “What is this W-Y-K?”
Suchong glanced over at her in rank suspicion. “You test me? You know I am not to tell you everything about conditioning!”
“Oh yes—I forgot. Scientific curiosity is strong in me, Suchong.”
“Hmph, woman’s curiosity, that is more to the point…” Suchong tinkered with a valve, increasing the flow of a hormone into the incubator. The child twitched in response… its legs kicked…
What, she wondered, were they doing to this child?
And then she wondered:
But they’d troubled her increasingly. Their work with the little girls; this work with this child. It was beginning to stir memories in her. Her childhood. Her parents. Kind faces…
Moments of love…
It was as if all the exposure to children called to some child locked within her own breast. A child who wanted to be set free.
She shook her head. No. Sympathy, caring for laboratory subjects—that was a scientific hell she would not enter.
Unless, perhaps—she was already there…
“Crikey, how many men d’we have here?” Bill asked, a bit awed by the numbers of heavily armed men massing in front of the broad, steel-walled corridor outside Neptune’s Bounty.
Bill was carrying a tommy gun; Sullivan had a pistol in his right hand, a hand radio in his left. Cavendish had a shotgun in one hand and the Rapture version of a search warrant in the other. “Lot of buggers for a raid, Chief, innit?” Bill asked. “We really need all these blokes?”
Sullivan muttered, “Yeah. We do. And there’s a lot more moving in on Fontaine Futuristics.”
“Fontaine Futuristics—what, at the same moment?”
“Same time. Boss’s orders.” He shook his head, his unhappiness as clear as his wide scowl. “Let’s face it, these aren’t exactly bloodthirsty desperadoes we’re talking about. Rapture’s full of poets, artists, and tennis players, not hired gorillas. But Fontaine… he seems to have a whole segment of Rapture in his pocket.”
“So where’s Fontaine? We want this raid to work, we’d better take him down personally.”
“That’s the plan: word is he’s here today, somewhere in the fisheries—maybe on the wharf, up to something in their supply boat. Anyway, it’s not just a
“How planned is it, Chief? Remember what happened last time. Maybe we should’ve spent more time setting the bloody thing up?”
“It’s planned, all right. We’ve got two waves of men going in here, two more waves ready at Fontaine Futuristics. But Ryan wanted to keep it under wraps as much as we could. Trouble is, you tell more than two people about something, maybe even just one, and ten always seem to find out about it. And Fontaine’s got all kinds of splicers on his pay, cuts them free plasmids in return for info. So I’m not sure if…” He shook his head. “I’m—just not sure.”
A crackle on the little portable shortwave Sullivan held in his left hand. “In position,” came the voice over the radio.
Sullivan spoke into the radio. “Right. Move ahead when I give the designation ‘Now.’” He changed frequencies and spoke to another team. “This is the chief. You ready up there?”
“Ready to hit Futuristics…”
“Goddamnit, don’t say that name on the radio, just—never mind. Just count to thirty—and take the initiative, hit ’em. We’re moving ahead, here.”
Sullivan glanced at his watch, nodded to himself, looked around, made a hand signal to the others—and then they stalked up to the Securis door. He nodded to Cavendish, who swung it open, held the heavy door for the two lines of grim-faced men at ready—and shouted, “Now!”
And with a shared howl the men rushed through the door. Behind the rushing ranks—shouting in excitement, guns raised—came Sullivan, Head Constable Cavendish, Constable Redgrave, and Bill, all of them storming down onto the water-flanked wooden peninsula of the wharf toward the small tugboatlike vessel tied up there.
And suddenly the splicers were everywhere.
Some of them were literally dripping from the ceiling—spider splicers dropping down, slicing with their curved fish-gutting knives as they came, so that five men in Ryan’s attack force fell within seconds, spouting scarlet blood from their slashed-through necks, headless bodies stumbling over their own heads rolling about underfoot. Bill had to step sharp to keep from stomping a man’s still-twitching face. A splicer turned from its victim and slashed at Bill but he had the tommy gun ready and squeezed off a quick up-angled burst, blowing the top of the
