James Axler – Stoneface

“You fucked up this place and our personnel pretty good, Cawdor,” Doug said petulantly. “You made a big mess that your elected officials will have to clean up. Same as it ever was.”

“I liked it better when you spoke corporatese,” Ryan replied. “As long as we’re on the subject of gibberish, what does Novus Or do Secolorum mean?”

Doug laughed derisively. “I can see that the educational level hasn’t risen in America. It’s Latin, meaning the beginning of a new order of the ages.'”

“Like this place?”

“Exactly like this place, Cawdor,” Doug declared pridefully.

He directed Ryan away from the perimeter of the city, stepping over the Beltway. A beetle appeared, hovering silently behind and above Doug, following them like a bird dog. Ryan noticed that Doug was wearing another ID badge, identical to the one he had lifted.

When they reached a vanadium alloy wall, Doug aimed a small remote-control device at it. It was a simple sonic lock switch, of a type Ryan had seen before. There was a muffled, hissing sound. A large section of the wall moved forward, tilting back from its bottom edge. It slid out on pneumatic hinges, turning into an up-slanted ramp. Ryan was herded up the ramp and into a wide metal-walled tunnel. It was fairly long and obviously ran into the bowels of the mountain.

They walked for what seemed like a long time. Ryan saw that one section of wall to his left consisted of a glassy, smoke-tinted panel. He glanced into it, then halted. Doug didn’t object; in fact, he snickered. Frightful life flapped behind the transparent panel. Within a darkened chamber recessed deep in the wall flitted a swarm of screamwings. The chamber was a specially designed habitat, with branches to roost upon and prey to pursue and kill.

However, these screamwings were larger than the creatures he had seen a few days earlier. Their scaled black bodies were nearly a foot long, and their wing-spreads were more than three feet. They looked like depictions of demons he had seen in an old predark religious text. He couldn’t understand why such dangerous animals were kept inside the facilitywere they curios, conversation pieces, or something worse?

Turning to Doug, he asked, “What’s up with the screamwings? The Commander’s pets?”

“In a way. More like a project. We’re working on a way to increase their size and reduce their birth mortality rate. The mothers tend to eat their young. That’s one reason they’re rare.”

“Damn good thing. They’re some of the most vicious predators in Deathlands.”

Smiling a superior smile, Doug said, “We wouldn’t be interested in them otherwise. Many of the mutations that veered toward polyploidism”

“Polywhat?” Ryan asked.

A sneer lifted Doug’s upper lip. “Polyploidism. Gigantism. Anyway, they were evolutionary dead ends, examples of a spontaneous doubling of the chromosomes. Most of the giant mutants aren’t healthy, with extremely limited life spans. The screamwings, on the other hand, are perfectly adapted to their environment. They’re a purer breed of killer.”

“That’s my point. Why make them larger and more numerous?”

“Microcircuitry, Cawdor, introduced into their brains, connected to the visual neural system. We’ll be able to control specific behavior and they’ll make an excellent offensive-defensive measure. They’ll be completely expendable, too, since we’ll always be able to breed more.”

He gestured impatiently with the shotgun. “All of this is way beyond you. If the Commander wants to give you a tour of our bioengineering facility, that’s up to him. Let’s go.”

They continued another hundred yards down the tunnel, then took a hard right turn and crossed a short catwalk that stretched over a cavernous workshop. Ryan saw jigs, tooling machines, drill presses and equipment he couldn’t easily identify. Men handled pieces of metal of all shapes that were spread out on tables. Many of the metal pieces were frameworks that resembled the skeletons of human arms and legs. A number of others looked like the molds and casings of the beetles.

Ryan stopped to survey them, but was pushed forward by Doug’s shotgun. They reached the end of the catwalk, walked into another stretch of tunnel and entered a room. The doorframe bore a square-armed red cross.