The Dragon Factory

Sunday, August 29, 4:09 P.M.

Time Remaining on the Extinction Clock: 67 hours, 51 minutes E.S.T.

“What is this stuff?” asked Tonton as Hecate injected a golden liquid into the IV line attached to the Berserker’s arm.

“A gift from my father,” said Hecate. She emptied the syringe and threw it into a red sharps disposal. “It’ll make you feel better.”

“I feel pretty frigging great right now,” Tonton growled. Even when he spoke in ordinary conversational tones, he had a deep voice that rumbled like thunder. Over the last few months the gene therapy had taken him a few steps further than the other Berkserkers. Tonton’s brow had become more pronounced, his nose wider and flatter. He looked less like his natural Brazilian-German and more like a mature silverback gorilla. Hecate had even noticed that Tonton’s back hair was starting to fade from black to silver. It was one of the things that troubled Paris, because they hadn’t given the Berserkers the genes for hair coloration or facial deformity and yet the traits had emerged anyway.

Hecate found it fascinating and wildly sexy.

It also reflected some of the changes she was experiencing with her own covert experiments. The gene therapy she used on herself was nowhere near the scale used on the Berserkers, and it drew on feline traits from the Panthera gombaszoegensis, the European jaguar, a species extinct for a million and a half years but whose DNA was recovered from a German bog. Her goal had been to enhance her strength by making her muscles 20 percent denser and to heighten her senses. She could not achieve feline sensory perception, but already she realized that it would soon become necessary to start wearing tinted contact lenses to hide the pupilary deformation and color changes. Her teeth were growing sharper, too, and that was absolutely not part of the plan. Hecate accepted the reality that these would need to be filed soon, but for the moment she liked the extra bite.

“So… what’s it do?” growled Tonton.

Hecate gave him a playful slap across the face. “It’ll keep you and your boys from going apeshit during missions.”

He stared at her, then got the joke. They both cracked up.

“Yeah,” he said at length, “some of the boys do get a bit rambunctious. In Somalia… Alonso and Girner were really fucked up. I had to stomp them a bit to keep ’em from eating people. Dumb sonsabitches.”

“It’s not their fault,” Hecate said. “The therapy has some wrinkles, but my father had some ideas on what to do.”

“And I’m the guinea pig?”

“Yes.”

“Jeez.”

“You scared, big man?” she purred.

“Scared? No. Who’d be scared with a crazy bitch like you pumping God knows what into me based on the advice of a total whack-job.”

Hecate slapped him again. Harder.

He grinned at her. There was a trickle of blood at the corner of his mouth and he licked it up. The cut was deep, though, where the vulnerable flesh of his inner mouth had been smashed against his teeth. A new bead of blood formed, and Hecate pushed Tonton back in the chair, climbed on him, straddling him with her white thighs, and then bent and licked off the trickle of blood.

“Is the door locked?” he asked.

“Yes,” she said huskily.

“Good,” Tonton said with a growl. A second later they were tearing at each other’s clothes.

Chapter Eighty-Eight

The Hive, Barracks 3

Sunday, August 29, 4:10 P.M.

Time Remaining on the Extinction Clock: 67 hours, 50 minutes E.S.T.

“Wait-what?” said Bunny.

“Neanderthals,” SAM said again.

“Slow down,” Top said. “There are no Neanderthals. Not for-”

“Not for over thirty thousand years,” SAM said. “I know. And I guess these aren’t true Neanderthals, but they’re close enough. Otto and Alpha started with mitochondrial DNA recovered from old bones and then mapped the genome. Then they repaired any damage with human and ape DNA. These people are the first generation. By studying them the science teams will know how to improve the model in the next generation. And they’re working on adjusting performance and attitude with them through gene therapy and conditioning.”

“What do you mean by ‘conditioning’?” Top asked.

“The guards… they’re told to do anything they want to the New Men. Beat them, torture them, rape the females. Some even rape the males.”

“For the love of God-why?” demanded Bunny.

“Part of it is a test to see if the New Men will ever talk back, or strike back, or rebel. Or try to escape. The sales brochures claim that they’re perfect servants, with zero ability for insubordination.”

Bunny gaped. “They have sales brochures for this shit?”

SAM nodded.

“Who are the buyers?”

“Rich people, mostly. Some corporations have bought them for work that’s too dangerous or expensive for human labor. Mining, unskilled labor around radioactive materials, toxic-waste handling…”

Top opened his mouth to say something, then bit down on it, unable to let those words have voice. I felt fevered and light-headed, like this was some weird dream and I was lost in it.

“Is this all of them?” I asked.

SAM shook his head. “No. There are three barracks in the compound. Barracks one and three are the same. Five hundred in each. Barracks two is the nursery.”

“ ‘Nursery’?” Top’s eyes closed and his face fell into sickness. “God save this sinner’s soul.”

I stared at the rows of New Men.

At the rows of Neanderthals.

The word was jammed into my brain like a knife.

“SAM… how do I tell them to relax? To… stand down?”

“They’re trained for code words. If you want them to relax but still listen, you say ‘community’; if you want them to do what they were doing, you say ‘downtime.’ ”

“ ‘Downtime,’ ” said Bunny. “Christ. Hey, I have an idea. Can we tell them to go out and find the rest of the guards and tear them into dog meat?”

“No,” said SAM. “They’re incapable of violence. Otto and Alpha made sure of that. There are certain genes for aggression that were-I don’t know, removed or deactivated. But they just won’t get violent no matter what. There’s one… a female… who was hurt by that guy Carteret.”

“The one you went after with your rock?” I asked.

“Yes.” He told us about the female who had been brutalized over the dropped rock. “Otto says that a dedicated program of humiliation erodes the will and rewrites the instincts to accept all forms of abuse as a natural part of life.”

Bunny said, “Boss, I really want to spend some quality time with this asshole, Otto.”

“Stand in line, Farmboy,” Top growled. “I got a few things to say to him myownself.”

“Okay, Kid,” I said, “time for answers. What’s happening in Africa on September 1, and what the hell is an ‘Extinction Clock’?”

“Didn’t you watch the video?”