“Get into the cell,” Mildred ordered. Common sense told her it would be better to chill all three of the guards, including Clove, before she took off. It would have at least tipped the odds in her favor a little. But with the cell handy, she had the option.
The uninjured guard had to help the wounded one inside, dragging him. A blood slick smeared behind them.
Once they were inside, Mildred slammed the door shut. She turned and ran down the hallway, cursing because she should have searched the guards for a light.
Unexpectedly a torch beam flashed over her, blinding her. She brought up the rifle, intending to go down shooting. She aimed for the center of the light.
Then J.B.’s voice said, “Don’t shoot, Milly. Last I heard, we were on your side.”
Suddenly Mildred found herself laughing, and it surprised her that tears were running down her face as she hurried to her friends.
VICTOR BOLDT HAD only been in the cryo vault a half-dozen times since he’d reawakened into the world to find his father dead.
Computers and machinery covered two of the walls, extending up every inch of the twenty feet until they met the ceiling. Stainless steel gleamed, reflecting a panoramic rainbow of colors from dials, switches and buttons. Most of them he couldn’t fathom at all. The systems were controlled through Merlin, and through that cybernetic intelligence, ultimately by Victor Boldt.
The cryo chambers were built into the third wall, to his right and behind him. All he had to do was activate the plague program, then crawl into the cryo crypt and let Merlin put him away for the next few decades.
He walked to the fourth wall, which held a hydroponics vat that stretched nearly a hundred feet back, carved from the rock walls outside the root branch. Thick, nutrient-rich liquid filled the various chambers, throwing out smells that were both intoxicating and repellent.
The vats were seven feet deep, the bedding grounds for so many of his father’s hybrids and creations. The liquid was soupy, greenish black and sometimes bubbling white froth.
Boldt climbed the ladder beside one of the glass sides, ignoring the churn of vegetable matter only inches from his face. At the top he stepped out onto the narrow runway going across the heart of the hydroponics vats. Hoses and nutrient tubes depended from the ceiling in a spiderweb of chemical support.
The hydroponics experiments had been his father’s greatest love. It was here, in this self-contained world, that he’d had control over all the variables that turned life into a thing of chance and random mutation.
Boldt stood out over the genetic stew. He could feel eyes upon him, knowing his arrival had been noticed, then feeling guilty because his visits had been so few. But he’d been told to stay away, to leave things alone.
And, in truth, knowing what lay here, he’d been happy to do that.
He gazed down into the swirling organic mix and fought the urge to wretch. The old fear, from the time he’d been a child looking at some of his father’s creations, returned. He felt it crawling under his skin.
“Father,” he said, “I have come.” He waited. The lights were dim across the hydroponics tanks, mimicking a night cycle. Mostly long shadows lay undisturbed.
At first it seemed as though nothing would happen. It was possible. Years had passed since the last time he’d been here. Still, Merlin would have notified him if something had gone wrong.
Then, incredibly, a vine-veined bubble oozed to the top of the hydroponics glop. It popped at the surface, throwing root-haired tentacles into the air ten feet up. In a matter of seconds the tentacles wrapped themselves into a vaguely humanoid shape, complete with a head, chest and arms. The legs were hinted at by definition, but bled back into the hydroponics glop. Chunks of the glop shot up the tentacles, fleshing out the hairy root infrastructure.
The thing looked nothing at all like the elder Boldt, but there was a presence that had always been there. It had been one of his father’s most macabre experiments, even by the precedents already established a combination of plant cells and the elder Boldt’s own DNA, fired by solar energy stored in the hydroponics tank and aided by a computerized memory dependent on Merlin. It was intended to be the first evolution of an environmentally correct life-form. If successful, the elder Boldt had intended to replace humankind altogether.