Dark Foundations (23 page)

He's remembering Lorrin Venn
, Merral decided.
Neither of us will ever forget that death
.

“So you decided to stay on?” Merral asked quietly.

“I hope that's all right, sir. I was going to ask you.” Frankie looked hopeful.

“What do you want to do?”

“Whatever I can. The dressings will be off soon; the prosthetic's ready. Zak was suggesting a desk job.” The look on his face communicated undisguised disappointment.

“Frankie, I'm looking for people to command these regiments. I'd prefer people who have fought. Would you like a command position? You don't have to say yes.”

Frankie's smile slowly warmed. “You mean that? That'd suit me fine, sir. It really would. I mean, would that be okay?”

“See me tomorrow.”

“Yes, sir!”

By four, Merral had had enough. He had met with what was already being called the Urban Defense Planning Team and sent them away with a request for some feasible ways of defending towns and settlements. He had signed orders for more—and lighter—cutter guns and prototypes of more advanced guns. In addition to confirming Frankie Thuron as colonel and head of the Eastern Regiment, Merral also interviewed and appointed two other veterans of Fallambet—Leroy Makunga and Leopold Lanier—as the heads of the Western and the Central Regiments respectively. Zak Larraine was promoted to colonel as well and put in charge of training.

His head reeling with names of people, administrative charts, and weapons specifications, Merral left his office to look for Vero. The office door—marked simply
Chief, Intelligence
—was closed. Finding the room unlocked, Merral entered. Apart from a desk, a chair, and a large cabinet stuck against the wall, the windowless room was bare.

He walked outside to the nearest desk. “Anybody seen Vero?”

A crop-haired woman setting up a deskscreen looked blank.

“Thin, dark-skinned guy? Sunglasses in his breast pocket?” said Merral.

“Oh Mr. V.? He comes and goes.”

“Did you see him go?”

She shrugged. “Sorry, sir. I didn't see him leave. But he's very quiet.”

Suddenly seized by an idea, Merral walked back into the room and went over to the cabinet. The doors didn't open. An examination and a push revealed that it was not just flush to the wall, but also securely attached to it. Suspicion mounting, he looked around for a catch or a key slot, but found nothing.

Merral left the room and went back to the woman at the desk outside.

“Let me guess. Were there people working in this room last week? Drilling, banging?”

She frowned. “Yes, sir. There
was
a lot of dust. Why do you ask?”

“Just forget I asked the question.”

Merral walked back to his office. He considered calling Vero, but instead, with a heady mixture of emotions, decided to call Anya instead.

For at least a dozen seconds, there was no answer from her diary, and it crossed Merral's mind that she was going to refuse to answer him. Just as he was about to give up, her face appeared on screen. She was dressed in a lab coat. Even with her red hair tied up under a white cap, he thought she looked both weary and beautiful.

“So, the commander of the Farholme Defense Force calls,” she said, in the driest of tones. “I thought I'd better answer.”

“Hi, Anya,” he said slowly.

She gave him a grimace. “I'm in the middle of chopping up dead bodies and I get a call from you. How
very
appropriate.” He felt the humor was labored.

“I want to talk to you about your work. Can I visit?”

She gave a long weary sigh. “Very well. In half an hour. The end lab. You can't miss it as there's a guard at the door. A professional meeting, right?” She bared her teeth. “And I'm wielding a remote electro-scalpel, so don't mess me around.”

At the lab, Merral left Lloyd with the guard and went in though a series of doors marked with lurid biohazard signs.

Anya, still wearing her white lab coat, came out of a room at the end of a corridor. Merral could see no trace of the electro-scalpel, but noticed that the coat was creased and grubby.

“Over here.”

Merral followed her through doors that closed behind him with sucking noises into a large, brilliantly lit room full of steel drawers and tables and reeking of disinfectant. Through a glass panel on the wall he glimpsed something red and moist stretched out on a table with a fearsome apparatus of glittering steel blades hanging over it. He averted his eyes and looked at Anya.

“I've come to find out about your research,” he said. His voice sounded flat. “And to say sorry again. And to ask that, if at all possible, we can go back to being friends and colleagues. And—”

She raised a hand to interrupt him. “Let's take it bit by bit, shall we? My research. Yes, let's talk about that. You saying ‘sorry' . . .” She paused. “Do you mean it?”

“Yes,” he said, staring at the ground. “I do mean it. What happened was bad and wrong. I can make excuses, but it would be wrong to do so. I apologize unreservedly.”

Anya stared at him, as if trying to decide whether she believed him.

“May I?” Merral asked as he sat on a lab stool.

Anya pulled up another stool and sat facing him. Their eyes met.

“I accept that apology,” she said in very quiet voice. “But I don't do it lightly. It's been a hard time for me. I had built so much on what you said.”

She paused, her face a picture of turmoil, then gave a little shake as if trying to throw something off. She took a deep breath. “I watched your speech,” she said.

He was struck by how the lighting here accentuated her freckles and pushed the thought out of his mind.
Stay focused!
“So then you heard what I said. Another bad move on my part, but I felt I had to say it.”

But as he said the words, he realized that now—this close to Anya—he wished he hadn't said what he had.
By ending everything with Isabella that way, I have also ended the possibility of anything with Anya.

“Did you mean it?” Anya flushed slightly as if embarrassed. “Sorry, we never used to ask such things. But now . . .”

“But now, people lie.”

Anya did not correct his completion of her sentence.

“Yes, I meant it,” he went on, “for the foreseeable future.”

Anya open her mouth to speak and then closed it. “Very well,” she said eventually. “Let's try and work something out on that basis.”

“We can try. . . .”

Merral was aware that in the reflections in the glass partitions he could still see an out-of-focus moist redness that made him uncomfortable.

“You heard that your guess about predators was correct?”

“The Krallen? I read your report.” She shook her head. “I was only partly correct. I failed to realize that these intruders might go beyond biology to make artificial predators.”

“An understandable oversight. But it's a pity we don't have one to dissect or dismantle. We killed these things—” Merral gestured toward the corpse in the other room without looking at it—“but the Krallen seem to be in a different league. They seem almost invulnerable. I gather they resisted everything the men could throw at them.”

Anya frowned. After a pause, she said, “So, let me tell you about my research. I haven't done a great deal, because there were changes that needed to be made to this lab to make it more biosecure. And my team and I have gone slowly; we don't know what we face. I have done one AC and one CB. Sorry, code: one ape-creature and one cockroach-beast. And I checked some things on other specimens.”

She gestured to the chamber beyond the glass. “Almost all of the work is done by remote, of course. It reduces the contamination risk and any others. As we guessed, they are clones bioengineered for tasks. They have a limited life span and reduced neural circuitry.” She toyed thoughtfully with a strand of hair. “Yet, the most interesting thing is not what we learn about the beasts, but what we learn about the makers.”

“Go on.”

“I'd better show you our biggest puzzle.”

Anya opened a steel drawer, pulled out something in a small clear box with the label
DANGER!
pasted over it, and handed it carefully to Merral. “Don't open it—it could kill you.”

With great care, he held it up and stared at it, seeing nothing more than a small gray disk the size of a large coat button from which six tapering arms extended, giving the object an approximate resemblance to a small starfish.

“What is it?”

“We found it on the upper chest of both ACs and CBs. The arms are linked to blood vessels. They all seem to have them. We call it the spider circuit.”

“What does it do?”

Anya shrugged. “Frankly, we don't know. There are circuits at the heart of it and something that may pick up an electromagnetic signal. But it dispenses a rather nasty neurotoxin that would be rapidly fatal.”

“Internally? That makes no sense.”

“None.” She shrugged again and he sensed more irritation.
Is it me
,
or is she angry with the world
?
She was once full of energy and life; now she seems drained and tired.

Merral handed the box back. “I suppose it gives whoever is in charge of these things the power to kill them.”

“True. Two other facts by the way. All the spider circuits we have looked at secrete toxin. Extrapolating back from their current rates of flow, it looks like they started issuing poison a day or so after the creatures died.”

“That definitely makes no sense. Why poison a dead crew?”

Anya gave another tired shrug. “I was hoping
you
could tell
me
.”

“I'm sorry, Anya. I can't see any sense in this. But it's evil.”

“Tell me something new.”

A strange stillness fell between them. Merral caught a glimpse of some deep emotion in Anya's eyes. Aware that he was on the edge of difficult matters, he spoke suddenly. “So, are you planning to work longer on these creatures?”

“No. Vero called me today. He wants me to shift my emphasis to the Krallen.”

“Ah. But I see two problems. First, they are synthetic—biomechanicals to use your word—and you are a biologist.”

“Are you doubting—?” she began and then stopped. “Sorry. I'm just fed up with things these days.”

“Is it me?”

She gave a faint semblance of a smile. “You haven't helped. But it's more than that. It's everything.” She sighed. “Anyway, these Krallen imitate animals and even adopt animal behavior, so I may be able to predict some things. Remember, I predicted, however partially, the existence of specialist predators.”

“True.”

“What was your second objection?”

“Simply that we have none to study.”

“True. But although we haven't any specimens we can try to make guesses from your account and from what the others have reported.”

“I wish you well. But you are right to focus on them.”

Suddenly, Merral realized that he ought to leave. This meeting had gone better than he had any right to expect and he had no wish to jeopardize things by staying longer. “I'd better go.”

“Yes,” she replied with an odd intensity and for a second he glimpsed longing in her eyes. He felt an almost overpowering desire to hug her, but knew he had to resist. It was all over.

He suddenly realized how much he had lost. “I'm sorry,” he said, his voice thick with emotion. He moved toward the door, his feet feeling as if they were weighted down. “Good-bye. And thanks.”