Axis

'You're busy,' she said. 'What's going on?'

'We're leaving.'

'Where are you going?'

'Here and there. It's not safe to stay, for reasons I imagine you understand.'

'I really just need a few minutes. I want to ask you about—'

'Your father. And I'd be happy to talk to you, Miss Adams—Lise—but do you understand what's happening here? Not only do we have to leave with all deliberate speed, we need to destroy much of what we've built. The bioreactors and their contents, documents and cultures, anything we don't want to fall into the hands of our persecutors.' He consulted a printed paper, then made a checkmark as two men dragged a dolly of cardboard boxes to one of the trucks. 'Once we're ready to go, you and your friends can ride with me for a while. We'll talk. But for now I need to attend to business.' He added, 'Your father was a brave and principled man, Miss Adams. We disagreed about some things, but I held him in the highest regard.'

That was something, at least, Lise thought.

* * * * *

Turk had gotten up early.

The sound of hurried footsteps in the hall woke him, and he was careful to roll out of bed without disturbing Lise, who had climbed in with him sometime during the night. She was half-wrapped in a blanket and softly snoring, tender as the creation of some benevolent god. He wondered how she would react to what he had told her about himself. Not the CV she'd been hoping for. More than enough to chase her back to her family in California, maybe.

He went to find Ibu Diane, meaning to offer his help if help was needed: everybody seemed to be carrying something. The Fourths were obviously getting ready to abandon the place. But Diane, when he found her in the common room, told him all the duties had been assigned and were being performed in some meticulous order by the Fourths, so he made himself breakfast. When he figured it was time to wake up Lise, if she wasn't up already, he headed back to their room.

He was intercepted by a young boy peering out of a doorway down the corridor. It could only be the boy Diane was so worked up about—the half-Hypothetical boy. Turk had pictured some freakish hybrid, but what stood in front of him was just a babyfaced twelve-year-old, his face flushed and his eyes a little wide.

'Hey there,' Turk said cautiously.

'You're new,' the boy said.

'Yeah, I got here last night. My name's Turk.'

'I saw you from the garden. You and the other two.' The boy added, 'I'm Isaac.'

'Hi, Isaac. Looks like everybody's pretty busy this morning.'

'Not me. They didn't give me anything to do.'

'Me neither,' Turk said.

'They're going to blow up the bioreactors,' the boy confided.

'Are they?'

'Yes. Because—'

But suddenly the boy stiffened. His eyes widened until Turk could see the small uncanny flecks of gold around the irises. 'Whoa, hey—you all right?'

A terrified whisper: 'Because I remember—'

The boy began to topple over. Turk caught him in his arms and called for help.

'Because I remember—'

'What, Isaac? What do you remember?'

'Too much,' the boy said, and wept.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

By dawn Brian Gately was on a transport plane lofting out of Port Magellan's major airport, strapped into a bench seat with Weil on one side of him and Sigmund on the other. Elsewhere in the plane was a group of armed men—not quite soldiers, since they wore no insignia on their flak jackets. The interior of the plane was stripped- down and possessed all the homely comfort of an industrial warehouse. Brian could tell day was breaking by the red glow coming through the porthole-sized windows.

Weil had ordered him to the airport well before dawn. 'In the event that we get involved in negotiations,' he had said, 'or in any other talking-type situation—a post-event interrogation, say—we'd like you to be the one who interacts with Lise Adams. We think you'd be better than someone she doesn't know. How do you feel about that?'

How did he feel about that? Shitty basically. But he could hardly say no. He might be in a position to protect her. He certainly didn't want her questioned by some hostile DGS functionary or one of these mercenaries. She was in the wrong place for the wrong reasons, but that didn't make her a criminal, and with luck Brian might be able to defend her from the threat of prison. Or worse. His memory of the photo of Tomas Ginn's body throbbed in his head like a fragile aneurysm.

What he told Weil was, 'I'll help if I can.'

'Thank you. We appreciate that. I know it's not what you signed up for.'

Not what he had signed up for. That was becoming a joke. He had signed up with Genomic Security because he possessed a talent for administration and because one of his father's cousins, a DGS bureau chief in Kansas City, had opened the door for him. He had believed in the work of Genomic Security, at least to the degree to which it was professionally necessary to believe. The Department's mission statement had made sense to him, the idea of preserving the human biological heritage against black-market cloning, unlicensed human modification, and imported Martian biotech. Most nations had similar bureaus and they followed the broad guidelines set down by the United Nations under the Stuttgart Accords. All clean and above board.

And if there were bureaucratic nooks at the more carefully classified levels of DGS, hidden aeries in which less politically palatable attacks on the enemies of human genetic continuity were planned and carried out—was that so surprising? Those who were required to know, knew. Brian had never been required to know. Ignorance was his preferred mode of consciousness, at least when it came to the Executive Action Committee. Of course not everything could be done legally or visibly. As an adult, one understood this.

But he didn't like it. It was Brian's nature to prefer rules to anarchy. Law was the gardener of human behavior, and what lay beyond was brutal, red in tooth and claw. What lay beyond the garden was Sigmund and Weil and their uncommunicative smiles and their cadres of armed men. What lay beyond, fundamentally, was the battered body of Tomas Ginn.

The aircraft lurched as it rose to cross the coastal mountains that absorbed most of Equatoria's rainfall and made the inland a desert. 'We'll be in Kubelick's Grave in an hour,' Weil said. Brian had passed through Kubelick's Grave once before, part of an orientation tour he had taken when he was newly-arrived from the States. It was a nothing town, an adobe armpit that existed for the sole purpose of refueling land traffic bound for the oil sands of the Rub al-Khali or back through the Mahdi Pass to the coast. Weil said there was a community of robed eccentrics living in the desert foothills north and east of Kubelick's Grave: rogue Fourths, in fact, since aerial photographs taken in the past few hours showed Turk Findley's little bush plane nearby.

And now the site would be seized and secured, Brian thought, and would the seizure be violent? There was a large number of weapons on hand, he hoped, mainly for show. To make a plausible threat. Because Fourths were supposed to be nonviolent, gentled by the same tech that granted them longevity. No killing would be necessary surely. And if there was any killing involved, it wouldn't involve Lise. He would see to that. In his intentions, at least, he was brave.

* * * * *

It all happened quickly.

The airport at Kubelick's Grave was barely large enough to accommodate the transport. As soon as it had settled at the end of a cracked concrete runway, the rear cargo door dropped and the armed men trooped off in military order. A handful of lightly armored vehicles waited in the coppery morning sunlight. Brian joined Sigmund