Ancestor

  “Yeah,” Sara said. “I remember. Which brings us full circle. Why didn’t you at least call me, or say good-bye?”

  “You gotta understand … my wife had been dead all of seven months when I met you. You talked about a connection? Well, I felt it, too, but I couldn’t feel that way when her grave was barely cold. I couldn’t betray her memory like that.”

  Sara stepped forward until their chests touched. She reached up and caressed his cheek, her fingertips somehow warm despite the frigid temperature. “No wonder you’re so gung ho for this project, Peej. I thought you were a rotten douchebag, but now I know I was wrong—you’re not all that rotten.”

  Colding laughed. “Wow, am I glad I bared my soul to you.”

  Her smile faded, and she touched his cheek again. “Any woman would just melt inside if she knew how you felt, Peej. You did what you thought was right, to honor your wife’s memory. But now she’s been gone a lot longer than seven months. It’s okay to move on with your life.”

  Colding leaned toward Sara and kissed her. Her lips were soft and warm, and he forgot all about the cold.

  NOVEMBER 13: I HATE IT WHEN YOU CALL ME BIG POPPA

  Implantation +4 Days

  ONE OF HIS cell phones buzzed. Lower-left inside jacket pocket. Only one person had that number. Magnus quickly walked to his office and shut the door behind him. He didn’t need to share these calls with Danté. Not just yet, anyway.

  Danté’s will seemed to be faltering. They’d reached that point before. With Galina. Magnus, of course, had fixed that, just like he would fix things now.

  He answered the phone. “Go ahead.”

  “Well helllooooo, Big Poppa.”

  The incoming area code said 702—Las Vegas. All he knew about Farm Girl was that she had once worked for the NSA. Maybe she still did. Judging from the crap sound of the call, she had already bounced the signal through a dozen relay points and was nowhere near Vegas.

  “You sure know how to throw a party,” she said. “Dad is looking for you and your friends in the dairy industry.”

  Magnus nodded. Dad was Fischer. She wouldn’t have called for just that. Didn’t take a rocket scientist to know CIA assistant director Murray Longworth would still be driving Fischer to track down Rhumkorrf and Jian. Longworth did not like loose ends. “So why doesn’t Dad come ask me himself? He knows where I live.”

  “He is,” she said. “He’s coming to see your brother.”

  Magnus felt his eyes narrow and his lip curl. He forced himself to relax. If Fischer tried to screw with Danté, the man had another thing coming.

  “How close is Dad to finding my friends?”

  “Doesn’t have a clue where to start. Heck, Big Poppa, even I don’t know where they are.”

  That was as close as you could get to a compliment from this woman—if Farm Girl couldn’t find you, you couldn’t be found. Colding and Danté had really pulled it off, hiding the project right under the Americans’ noses.

  “Dad’s frustrated,” Farm Girl said. “If your friends stay quiet, I don’t think he’ll find them at all.”

  “Glad to hear it. Anything else?”

  “I need to expand my wardrobe a bit. Things get more costly every day.”

  Farm Girl wanted more money. Well, fuck it, she could have more money. Thanks to her intel, Genada was the only horse left in the xenotransplantation race.

  “That’s fine,” Magnus said. “Maybe Santa will be nice to you this year.”

  “I like Santa. I love to sit on his lap.”

  Magnus sighed and hung up. Once she started with the sexual innuendo, she didn’t stop. She sounded sexy as hell, true, but he’d heard enough about her in certain circles to know that getting horizontal with Farm Girl could be a very bad experience. The woman was nine shades of psycho.

  Fischer and Longworth were clueless. The rest of the G8 nations had no idea Genada was still in the hunt. The Chinese knew, but they weren’t about to talk and give up a chance to save millions of their own people.

  Genada now had the most valuable resource it could hope for—time. The Rhumkorrf project, it seemed, might just pan out after all.

  NOVEMBER 14: HOT MIDNIGHT

  Implantation +5 Days

  COLDING TYPED IN the supersecret password of 0-0-0-0 and entered the security room. Gunther sat at the terminal, his eyes wide and his fingertips flying across the keyboard.

  “One sec,” he said without looking away from the screen. His fingers never paused. Colding shut the door behind himself and stood there, waiting. Once Gunther got into a writing groove, you had to just let the man do his thing.

  “She screamed … and grabbed … the broken pool cue,” Gunther muttered, leaning so close to the monitor that he had to turn his head a little to read from left to right. “Never again, Sansome said … never again … will you harm my love. He jabbed the cue down … like an axe … and the point punched through Count Darkon’s … unprotected … chest. As the body … vanished … no, wait, as the body … disintegrated … yeah, that’s the shit right there … he knew that it was over. Forever.”

  Gunther leaned way back in the chair until it almost tipped over, pumping his raised fists in victory. “The end, bitches!”

  “You’re done?”

  “Hell fuckin’ yeah. I just finished Hot Midnight. The trilogy is complete.”

  “Nice work.” Colding checked his watch. “Not to muck up your afterglow or anything, but I need to report to Danté.”

  “Oh, right.” Gunther stood, then leaned forward to tap in a few more keys. “Just saving this slice of brilliance.”

  “Congrats, man. When do you send it to publishers? How does that even work?”

  “Screw the publishers,” Gunther said. “I’m going to give this baby away.”

  “Give it away?”

  “Yeah, online,” Gunther said. “You’ll see. I’ll rack up so many fans that the publishers have to give me a big fat deal.”

  Gunther walked past, his eyes once again dopey-looking and half-lidded. He held up his hand for a high five, which Colding met, and then Gunther walked out and closed the door behind him.

  Give the book away, for free? That was the dumbest thing Colding had ever heard of.

  He moved the mouse and clicked the icon labeled MANITOBA, then waited patiently as the encrypted line connected with the home office. Less than a minute later, Danté’s smiling face appeared.

  “Good morning, P. J. How is the weather out there?”

  “Getting colder, sir. Word is we’re due for a big dose of the white stuff.”

  “When it comes, you have to get on those snowmobiles. Fabulous times. What’s up?”

  “They did it.”

  Colding watched Danté’s reaction. The man looked half hopeful, half skeptical. “They’ve done what, exactly?”

  “Implantation.”

  “Finally,” Danté said, more of a breath than a word. “And it’s successful thus far?”

  Colding nodded. “Forty-seven cows are pregnant. Two failed to implant, one fetus aborted on day two. What’s more, all of the pregnancies are either twins or triplets.”

  Danté smiled a wide smile, a genuine smile. Colding realized that he had never actually seen a real, heartfelt smile from Danté. It made the man look a bit maniacal.

  “How long?” Danté said. “How long until we have an actual birth?”

  “Well, we don’t know,” Colding said. “Getting to this point was a major accomplishment, but Doc Rhumkorrf said there’s bound to be complications. The fetuses are growing very fast, which makes it hard to react to problems. It’s been five days and they’re already around fifteen pounds each.”

  “If they survive, how long until a live animal, P. J.?”

  Colding shrugged. “Too early to tell, really, but it could be anywhere from a month to three months.”

  Danté grimaced. “Just do what you can to get me at least one live animal.”

  “Will do. Danté, as long as I’ve
got you here, I was wondering if you had an update on Doctor Hoel? Any word on her?”

  Danté sat back. His demeanor seemed to change instantly. “She’s fine. Don’t worry about her and do your job.”

  That subject was clearly off-limits. And Colding could do nothing about it from Black Manitou. “How about Colonel Fischer? Does he have any idea where we are?”

  Danté shook his head. “No. But he’s looking. Hard. We must have live animals if we’re going to get the media and the public on our side.”

  “The fetuses will grow at their own rate, Danté. It’s up to nature now.”

  Danté didn’t like that answer, but had to accept it. He knew enough about biology to understand things had to run their course.

  “Very well, P. J. Keep me updated.”

  Danté broke the connection. Colding looked at his watch. He could go check up on Jian, or he could see if Sara was around. Jian was with Rhumkorrf and Tim … she’d be fine.

  He’d go find Sara. Colding walked out of the security room, amazed at once again feeling excited and nervous about talking to a woman.

  NOVEMBER 14: TASTE

  Implantation +5 Days

  THE TWO FORMING creatures floated inside the amniotic sac, pressed face-to-face like sleepy lovers. The liquid environment supported their growing weight. Millions of chemical compounds drifted freely within that liquid. Some of those compounds were strong enough to register as scents.

  And others, strong enough to register as tastes.

  Inside two tiny mouths, those taste compounds landed on tiny tongues. Newly formed dendrites fired off chemical messages, chemical messages that traversed a tiny gap, known as the synapse, to land on the axons of the next nerve cell. This process repeated up the chain, traveling from the tiny tongues to the tiny brains in a fraction of a second.

  Those taste signals activated a very primitive area in the newly formed brains. In effect, taste turned the brains on for the first time.

  There were no thoughts, no decisions, although those things would come soon enough. There was only a short, intense race against time.

  For the taste activated an instinct that would drive the creatures’ every waking moment.

  Hunger.

  NOVEMBER 15: COW SIXTEEN, MINUS ONE

  Implantation +6 Days

  HANDS SHOOK HIS shoulder.

  Claus Rhumkorrf tried to open his eyes, but they seemed glued shut. Lights blared right through his eyelids.

  “Doc, wake up.” Tim’s voice? Tim, who had replaced Erika. A stab of emptiness. Claus had told himself he didn’t feel a thing for that woman anymore. That had been easy to believe when she was around every day, but now that she was gone he felt her absence.

  “Wake up, dammit.” Tim’s voice, ringing with stress. His breath, reeking of scotch. And the man’s palpable body odor—how long since Tim had bathed?

  “Come on, bro,” Tim said. “There’s a problem with Cow Sixteen.”

  Claus moaned. His back was so stiff. Where was he sleeping? On a cot. In a plane. He wasn’t even bothering to go back to the mansion anymore. Instead, he just slept in the C-5’s bunk room. And the body odor? That wasn’t Tim. Maybe a shower was in order. Claus opened his eyes to see Tim’s blurry, anxious face.

  “Cow Sixteen?” Claus said as he reached for his glasses. “That one has twins or triplets?”

  “It was twins,” Tim said. “But now the ultrasound shows only one fetus.”

  Claus slid his glasses in place. Tim’s words hit home. He stood and walked out of the bunk room, Tim following close behind.

  NOVEMBER 15: THAT’S NOT NORMAL

  Implantation +6 Days

  COLDING COULDN’T HELP but wince a little. Sure, it was science, but that didn’t change the fact that he was watching Tim Feely slide a tube into a cow’s vagina. A harness suspended the cow, keeping her hooves just a few inches off the ground. Tim wore long gloves that were smeared with a clumpy, whitish substance that Colding could only think of as cow smegma.

  “A little deeper,” Rhumkorrf said. His voice had a flat tone but dripped with anger and tension. He sat at a portable fiber-optic workstation, staring intently at a screen showing a fleshy, pinkish tunnel—the view from deep within the cow’s womb.

  The 3-D ultrasound workstation sat close by, pressed up against the door of the stall opposite Cow 16’s. Jian half hid behind the machine, trying to stay out of the way. Rhumkorrf had shoved the workstation there in disgust when the high-tech, gold-tinted image showed only one ancestor fetus where yesterday there had been two. Then he’d started screaming, apparently, which was when Jian sneaked away and asked Colding to come to the C-5.

  “Deeper,” Rhumkorrf said. “Get it in there.”

  “Love it when you talk dirty, Doc,” Colding said.

  Rhumkorrf sighed and shook his head. “This is not the time for your stupid fucking jokes.”

  “Yikes,” Colding said. “Just trying to lighten the mood.”

  Trying, and failing. Rhumkorrf was mad because the cow had reabsorbed one of its twin fetuses. Reabsorption was when the mother’s body made some primitive yet calculated decision to not only abandon the small fetus but also break it down and reuse the raw materials. The problem was, reabsorption only happened when fetuses were a few ounces—it did not happen when they were roughly twenty pounds.

  “Deeper, goddamit!” Rhumkorrf shouted. “I don’t have all day!” His comb-over was starting to fray.

  In the cow’s stall, Tim started to sweat.

  “Doc, come on,” Colding said. “Just take it easy.”

  “I don’t need your input, Colding. Shut up or I will kick you out of here. Mister Feely, you insufferable idiot, can you do your damn job?”

  That would be just about enough of that. Colding put a hand on Rhumkorrf’s shoulder, letting his thumb slide behind the trapezium muscle just to the left of the neck, pointer finger in front, just above the collarbone. He pinched the fingers together.

  Rhumkorrf stiffened in his chair and hissed in a short breath.

  “We’re all under a lot of stress here, Doc. Wouldn’t you say?”

  “Yes,” Rhumkorrf said. “Of course.”

  “Good. And you know shouting and stress affect Jian, so let’s just calm everything down. Tim is doing fine, don’t you think?”

  Colding relaxed the pinch a little, but kept the muscle firmly between his thumb and forefinger.

  “Of course,” Rhumkorrf said. “Uh … Timothy. My apologies.”

  In the stall, Tim nodded absently. His attention remained focused on the fiber-optic tube.

  Colding released the pressure and gave Rhumkorrf’s shoulders a quick, friendly rub. “There you go, Doc. All better.”

  Rhumkorrf leaned forward, probably already forgetting Colding’s rebuke. On the monitor, a crystal clear image flared to life. Colding sensed Jian walk up on his right, Tim walk up on his left, all three of them looking over Rhumkorrf’s scattered comb-over at the image.

  Rhumkorrf reached out, fingertips touching the screen. “Beautiful, isn’t it?”

  “It’s bigger,” Tim said quietly. “It shouldn’t be that big … can’t be.”

  A placental sac filled the screen, translucent pinkish-white lined with thin red and blue veins. Inside the sac, the fetal ancestor in profile. Its head looked twice as large as the rest of the body. Tiny paws folded up under a long snout, which was dominated by the huge, bluish, closed eye. Colding could even see a tiny, fluttering thing … the ancestor’s beating heart.

  “Fetuses average twenty pounds,” Jian said quietly. “They grow twenty pounds in six days.”

  Rhumkorrf’s fingertips traced the closed eye. He turned and stared at Colding with wild eyes, his anger gone.

  “You see? We’ve done the impossible!”

  Colding couldn’t find words. Until now, this had been something on paper, a process he administered just as someone might administer an assembly line or a manufacturing plant. Even the gold-tinted image from t
he 3-D ultrasound had seemed somehow … Hollywood. The live image from the fiber-optic camera finally brought it all home in full, wet color—this was a living creature. A man-made organism that had germinated somewhere in Jian and Rhumkorrf’s genius, then clawed its way into existence.

  Colding tore his eyes away from the image to look at the little man who made it all happen. “Pretty frigging impressive, Doc.”

  Rhumkorrf turned, smiled and started to reply, but a strangled scream from Jian cut him off. Terror wrinkled her face into a disquieting caricature, locked her attention on the workstation’s screen. As one, Colding and Rhumkorrf looked back to the monitor.

  The fetal ancestor, eyes open, stared right back at them.

  Rhumkorrf jerked his fingers away from the screen and almost fell backward into Colding.

  An inexplicable wave of fear tingled up Colding’s spine before he remembered it was only a computer monitor and this was a picture of a small fetus, not some six-foot-long creature looking at him with a malevolent gaze.

  Jian’s hands flew to her head and grabbed huge fistfuls of hair. “Tian a! It is coming for us!”

  “Jian, calm down!” Colding snapped. “Claus, is that supposed to happen?”

  “No,” Tim said. “Fuck no that’s not supposed to happen.”

  Rhumkorrf’s skin looked even paler than normal, the hue of the walking dead. “I must say it’s a bit unusual, but it’s nothing to worry about.”

  “What?” Tim said. “A bit unusual? Dude, you are so full of shit! Just look at the goddamn thing!”

  “Mister Feely! I’m not going to—”

  Once again Rhumkorrf found himself interrupted, this time by blurry motion on the monitor that drew everyone’s attention. The fetal ancestor turned its wedge-shaped head. Now two black eyes stared out from the screen, right through the translucent placental sack. Colding knew the fetus was actually looking at the fiber-optic camera inside the womb, but the tiny eyes seemed to be looking right at him.