by Anne Harris

In a near-future Detroit, the living polymer industry has the city in its grip. While vat-divers struggle to organize, the GeneSys Corporation works on making human workers obsolete. An escaped mutant, a con-artist and a techno-geek team up to unravel corporate blackmail, deceit and murder. One thing is certain: the city and the world will never be the same once the latest R&D development is unleashed.

Chapter 18 — What Have You Done?

Benny ran up the stairs to his apartment. He went straight to the closet, pulled out a case he’d been keeping for just this occasion, and started throwing his clothes inside. It took him ten minutes to pack clothes, toothbrush, razor and his daddy’s Smith-Corolla machine pistol. He stood in his emptied closet, staring at the small panel in the back where he’d cut through the ancient drywall and later fastened a piece of panelling over the hole. They’d lain there all this time. He’d sealed them in the wall the way he’d sealed his mind against the memory of what he’d done. He wondered if someone would search the place after he’d gone and find them. His secret would be discovered at last.

But he’d be far away and someone else by then. He switched on the transceiver at his wrist and called up his numbered account. Benny sat down on the bed, gaping at the pitiful balance glowing in the air before him. There should have been a sizeable deposit made in the last few hours, but it wasn’t there. The arrangements for Hugo’s funeral had only left him with a couple hundred — too little to purchase a ticket to where he was going.

His hands clenched. That bastard Graham had screwed him over. He’d seen to it that Helix was taken into custody by GeneSys security. That was the agreement, but Graham hadn’t paid. Benny stood up and took the pistol from the case, fitted it with a cartridge and stuck it in his waistband. A little visit might jog Graham’s memory.

oOo

Hyper walked through the polyglass doors of the GeneSys building and onto the first floor mezzanine. The ceiling arched high above him, glittering with murals. Lush, red-haired women entwined themselves among eagles and fruitbearing vines, and the pictures were all edged in gold. It was like a palace.

Catching himself he looked down again and walked to the information desk. He had decked himself out for the occasion in a lab coat, white shirt and grey dress slacks. The shirt and slacks were part of his funeral clothes, along with the thin black tie throttling his neck. For added effect, he carried a black briefcase with most of the scuff marks wiped off it. But his sartorial efforts were needless. There was no one at the information desk, or anyplace else, at this hour.

He swiped a card through the transceiver mounted on the desktop. It held Hector Martin’s id codes and his authorization for Chango’s release. The system acknowledged him as Martin and he dialed the security desk.

“Security offices,” said a clerk whose blank face appeared hovering above the counter. “Can I help you.”

“I’m here to pick up Chango Chichelski. I have clearance for her release.”

The clerk tapped at his console. “Chichelski. She came in tonight on trespassing charges. You say you have clearance for her release?”

“Yes,” Hyper said, trying not to hold his breath. According to Martin, he didn’t need to have a reason why Chango should be released, all he needed were the clearance codes for such action, and he had those.

“Send it through,” the clerk said.

Hyper allowed himself a long, slow exhalation, and swiped the card through the transceiver a second time.

The clerk scanned the release form, nodded his head and tapped away at his console some more. “She’s being released. Do you want to come down for her?”

Hyper smiled slightly at him. “I’ll wait here,” he said.

Hyper waited, trying not to stare at the vaulting archways or the frescoed ceiling they supported. Instead he turned his attention to the floor, a disc of brass lay set into the marble tile nearby, the figure of a dancing woman all but worn away from its surface by generations of scuffing feet.

In a large alcove off the mezzanine and directly opposite the desk where he stood, an elevator pinged open and three figures struggled out. It was a pair of guards leading a man, handcuffed but still struggling, between them. “This is outrageous,” he shouted, his face red with fury. “You have no right to arrest me! What are the charges?” He swung around, nearly dislodging the guards’ hold on him. They responded by grasping his wrists, which were cuffed behind his back, and bending them up to his shoulder blades.

“Ow! Goddamn it, what do you think you’re doing?” the man fumed, hopping forward in pain. “What is your name?” he demanded of the guard on his right.”

“Marcus Walsh,” the guard told him, grasping his upper arm firmly and leading him towards a door just past the information desk where Hyper stood.

“Well let me tell you something, Marcus Walsh,” said the man, now pretty much allowing himself to be escorted. “You’re never going to work here, or anyplace else again. This will be your last act as an employee of GeneSys, Marcus,” he said with a nasty edge in his voice. The guards took him through the door, and Hyper could hear his voice echoing up the stairs as they led him to security. “You’ve both made a big mistake. Nathan Graham is not to be trifled with in this way, you’ll find out...”

oOo

Chango couldn’t be sure how long she’d been sitting there when a new pair of guards came to her cell, opened the door and escorted her out. Finally, county, thought Chango, but as she stepped through the polyglass doors into the receiving area they moved away from her side. “You’re free to go,” said the blond guard, gesturing at the door on the far side of the room. “Dr. Martin is waiting for you upstairs.”

“I’m free to- Dr. Martin is- Oh.” Brown Eyes handed her backpack and Chango turned to the door just as it burst inward and two more security guards came through, escorting a tall man in a suit. His reddish brown hair was in disarray, flopping in strands across his forehead. The guards took him to the counter, where he fixed the clerk with a steely look. “Will you explain what I’m doing here? On what grounds and whose authority am I being arrested?”

The clerk held his gaze. “You are?”

“You know goddamn well who I am! Just this evening I had a bunch of you people out at Mercy College. What’s the matter with you?”

The clerk shook her head. “Your name?”

“Nathan Graham.”

“Nathan Graham.” The clerk scrolled through an arrest roster. “You’re being held for questioning in relation to a murder charge, Mr. Graham.”

“Murder? That’s insane. I didn’t murder anyone.”

“Would you like to call an attorney, Mr. Graham?”

“You better believe I would. What’s your name?”

“Cynthia Hewlitt.”

“Well let me tell you something, Cynthia Hewlitt. When I get through with this department, there won’t be a one of you-” he turned to motion at the guards with his shackled hands, “-still working here. You have no grounds to do this, no authority. This is harassment.”

Cynthia raised one eyebrow. “Your warrant was issued from the very highest levels of GeneSys personnel, with priority authorization to arrest.”

“But you can only hold me for two hours unless you make a charge. That’s the company charter.”

Cynthia ignored him and looked at the guard on his right. “Let him make his call, then put him in cell D-19”

Unnoticed, Chango slipped through the door and went up the steps. She saw Hyper standing by the information desk, studying a brass inlay in the floor. He was all tricked out in a lab coat stained with motor oil, his grey dress slacks and a scuffed black briefcase.

“Hyper! What are you doing here?”

He shot her an alarmed look hurried to her side. “Let’s get out of here,” he murmured, taking her arm and leading her across the mezzanine to the exit doors.

“Hyper, what is going on?” Chango asked as soon as they were outside. “How did you get here? Why didn’t they take me to county? How did you get them to release me like that?”

Hyper kept walking, so fast Chango had to trot to keep up with him. “Remember this?” he held up a data card, the GeneSys logo flickering in and out of view with the passing streetlights.

“Helix’s card.”

“Not Helix’s, Hector Martin’s. I got worried when you disappeared. I talked to him. He’s the one who got Graham arrested.”

Chango nodded and took this in. “We went to U of D Mercy,” she said, Hyper’s pace making her voice ragged. “There’s an old biopoly research institute there, an abandoned vat for Helix, but GeneSys security showed up. They got me. I’m sure they got Helix too, but she wasn’t in the lockup.”

Hyper nodded and said nothing, his eyes scanning the street warily.

“Benny took us there. He was supposed to be on lookout, but when the guards came, I didn’t see him around. Hyper, I’ve been thinking. Benny set us up. I think he had something to do with Ada’s death, too.”

“Graham arranged it,” said Hyper pausing on a street corner to face her. They were already three blocks from the GeneSys building. “Martin told me he had someone in Vattown working for him. From what you say it sounds like that’s Benny. And if he’s working for him now, then he probably was in the past, when Graham was in production.”

“What happened to Helix?”

“Martin’s taking care of that end of things. He got Graham arrested. The security files show that she was taken to Martin’s lab. He’ll get her out.”

“What do we do now?”

Hyper shrugged. “What do you want to do?”

Chango looked around her at the quiet, dark streets, the shadows and the secrets that they held. “Let’s find Benny,” she said.

oOo

They had no difficulty retrieving her car from where she’d left it at the U of D campus. As Chango drove to Benny’s, Hyper made plans. “Okay, so if he’s home, I’ll invite him out to Josa’s. If I say I’m buying that should get him out of the apartment. Then you can sneak inside while he’s gone and have a look around.”

“I don’t know, Hyper, I’d rather just confront him.” Chango pulled around the corner and parked, out of sight of the apartment building.

“You’d rather just get killed too, apparently. If he’s done all you think he has, then he probably has a gun, and no compunction about using it on you.”

Reluctantly she nodded.

The building was dark and quiet. Chango waited at the bottom of the stairs while Hyper knocked on the door, but there was no answer, and no light coming from underneath it, either. “He’s gone,” Hyper called softly to down to her.

She had the simple lock on Benny’s door open in moments. They went inside, still wary, moving through the darkened rooms with slow and careful movements. She stepped into the bedroom to find a suitcase filled with clothes sitting open on the bed. “Look at this,” she called to Hyper, “He packed, but he didn’t take it with him.”

They went through the drawers of Benny’s dresser, searching for something that would tie him to Ada’s death, or at lest confirm his connection to Nathan Graham. Chango stepped inside the nearly empty closet. It was empty. As she turned away, something caught her eye. A piece of panelling about two feet square, screwed to the back wall down by the floor. He’d probably just put it there to patch a hole. She took a screwdriver from her backpack and unfastened it, pulling the plywood away to reveal not a jagged hole but a carefully sawn opening. The hair on the back of her neck stood on end as she reached her hand inside, and touched something metal. A set of air tanks, she realized, her hand fumbling over their rounded surfaces. Grunting she pulled them out of the hole and into the meager light from the bedroom windows. Something silver glittered near one of the release valves — a pair of initials scratched in the black plaint. An A and a C. “Ada’s tanks,” said Chango.

oOo

Awkward under the weight of her sister’s dive tanks, Chango pushed open the door of Josa’s Bar and stepped inside, followed closely by Hyper. Human voices and the smell of smoke and growth medium surrounded them. There was a good-sized crowd, buzzing with the excitement of the morning’s riot. The place wasn’t packed though. This was no victory celebration.

Chango spotted Vonda at the far end of the bar, conversing with Josa. Without a word to Hyper she walked towards her, attracting as many glances for the determination of her stride as for what she carried on her back.

“Vonda,” she said, closing on her.

Vonda turned, her eyes widening as Chango hoisted the tanks from her shoulders and slung them onto the bar. They hit with a solid bang, immediately silencing all conversation and riveting attention to herself and Vonda.

“I found them at Benny’s apartment,” Chango said, loud enough for everyone to hear. For Vonda’s benefit she pointed out the initials scratched on the tanks. “They’re Ada’s.”

Suddenly she was surrounded by a hubbub of voices and bodies, but she kept facing Vonda, kept talking to her. “That plan of Benny’s to take Helix to U of D Mercy was a trap. After we got there, GeneSys security showed up and arrested us, except for Benny. He set us up. When I got out of the lockup, I went to his apartment. He wasn’t home. There was a packed bag on the bed, and these - “ She put one hand protectively on the tanks. “- were hidden in a hole in the closet wall.”

Vonda didn’t say anything. She just stared at Chango, and then at the tanks. But Pele was at Chango’s elbow. “How do you know Benny set you up? Maybe he just got away.”

“He was supposed to be on lookout.” Chango kept looking at Vonda. “And Hyper talked to Helix’s father, Hector Martin, who said that Nathan Graham has somebody in vattown working for him. Somebody he told to turn that strike this morning into a riot.”

Vonda examined the dust clouded gauge on the tanks, aimed the release nozzle at the wall and twisted it experimentally. “They’re empty,” she said, looking at Chango over her shoulder. “But maybe I can get a residual sample from the valves.”

oOo

Graham strode down the hall to his office, fresh anger at his recent imprisonment burning inside him. It had only taken an hour or so for his lawyer to intimidate security into releasing him, but it was just a temporary reprieve. He was going to have to do something of a permanent nature about Hector Martin.

The best thing would be to discredit him, get him dismissed from GeneSys in disgrace. It would take some doing. There was very little that a man of Martin’s professional standing couldn’t wiggle out of. Except possibly corporate treason. Anna would take a very dim view of him selling corporate secrets to a competitor. It was good. Worth following up on, but now he had more pressing matters to attend to. Helix was loose again, he felt sure. Martin wouldn’t go to all the trouble of locking him up just to leave her there in the lab.

There was a light on in his office. His secretary would be gone by this hour, and in fact, the reception area was dark, the desk empty. Graham opened the door to his inner office to find Benny sitting in his chair with a glass of scotch in his hand.

“Oh good,” Graham said, “I was going to call you.”

“Were you? I thought you’d forgotten about me.” Benny stood up, and pulled a gun from the waistband of his pants. He pointed it lazily at Graham. “I thought I was going to have to remind you.”

Graham laughed. “You’re talking about your payment, of course. But you’ll never get paid if you kill me. Besides, I’m not through with you yet, son.”

“What? I did everything you asked me to. Now I’ve got to get out of town!”

“Getting a little hot for you? Well, if you remember, I asked you to get rid of Helix, and you botched it up.”

“But I took them to U of D, I saw the guards nab her.”

Graham shook his head. “It didn’t take. Martin pulled some strings somewhere and got me thrown in security before I could do anything with her.”

“But that’s not my fault!”

“Well it wouldn’t have happened if you’d taken care of her in the riot, now would it? I’m pretty sure she’s at Martin’s now, and I think I know what we can do.”

“How do I know you’re not going to just string me along again?”

“Well, that’s the risk you have to take, isn’t it? Believe me, I’d like nothing better than to see you jetting off to a foreign land, but first, you have to finish your job.” Graham crossed the room, ignoring Benny and the gun now hanging loosely at his side. He switched on the transceiver, called up the yellow pages and dialed an all-night hardware store. “How are you at welding?” he asked Benny over his shoulder.

oOo

Quick hands untied the cords at Helix’s wrists and ankles. She stood and flexed her arms, stretching the cramped muscles in her back.

The guards stood between her and the tank of growth medium. She stepped around them to dangle her fingers in the delicious fluid. The guard that untied her cleared her throat. “Hector Martin has reserved a plane ticket for you. We can either escort you to the airport or take you to his apartment, but you can’t stay here.”

Helix looked at them, and then back at the little tank, barely big enough to hold her. It was no good. She might be able to fight them off and get into the tank, but more would come to take her out, or to examine her, run tests and take samples — make of her what she was, an experiment. They were right, she couldn’t stay here, but she couldn’t leave either. Graham had told her things she didn’t want to know. But knowing, she couldn’t erase his words. It was time to go to the source, time to confront her father with his lies.

oOo

His door buzzer went off, and Hector rushed to it, to peer through the peep hole. His heart fell. It was Helix. She had decided against taking the airplane ticket, apparently. He had hoped she would get away, far away, and be safe. He had hoped he wouldn’t have to face her.

He opened the door and the next thing he knew he was grabbed by four strong arms and slammed against the wall. His head struck first, pain lanced down his neck and shoulders.

“What have you done?” she snarled, her face only inches from his.

He shook his head, unable to speak. She looked awful, worse than she had when he first found her, after she’d been thrown out of the nest. Her skin was raw in large, flaking patches. She had a bruise under her eye and a cut on her lip. But worst of all was the look in her eyes. What he saw there he could not bear to look at for long.

She bared her teeth and grimaced. This close, it was an awesome sight indeed. “What the fuck am I, Hector? Huh? Tell me!”

He was afraid. She could kill him with no trouble at all. She was stronger than him, and she had the advantage of an extra set of arms. Right now, she could just tear his jugular vein with her teeth if she wanted to. And why wouldn’t she? What had he ever done except tell her lies?

“Tell me!” she screamed, lifting him and slamming him back into the wall again for emphasis.

“You’re, you’re... I don’t really know, alright? You’re a genetically engineered organism. A product of corporate research and development.”

She stared at him, eyes blue and wide with rage, stared and stared until he thought that in the next instant she would kill him, but instead she said, “Your research.”

He licked his lips and nodded his head ever so slightly. “Yes.”

The blow happened so suddenly he didn’t see it coming, just heard something go crack, and then felt the stinging pain on his cheek and in his mouth.

She had released him and stood now with her back to him. He raised his hand to his lip and brought it away bloody. He glanced at the door. He might be able to make it, he might never have another chance, but how could he do that? She was his responsibility.

“Liar,” Helix growled, her back still turned. She was staring down at the glass top of the coffee table, where the prism for the holoweb sat amid scattered mylar documents and takeout cartons. Her shoulders were shaking. “You lied to me.” She turned and her eyes were full of tears. “There never was any orphanage, you didn’t adopt me, I’m not a sport. I’m not even human!” She screamed the last, picking up the heavy glass prism and sending it crashing through the top of his coffee table.

Hector cringed at the sound of splintering glass and suppressed the impulse to run. “No, you’re not,” he said loudly. “You’re something else, Helix, something new under the sun. You and your kind, I may have created you, but I don’t even know really, what you are, because there’s never been anything like you before. I know what you were designed for, but that’s not the same thing. It’s very important for you to realize that, Helix, it’s not the same thing.”

“What was I designed for, Hector?” She stood over the shattered remains of his coffee table, eyeing him coolly. “Why do I exist?”

He laughed in fear startled amazement. “Because I thought of you, I suppose, or... I don’t know. I — I was given a project, you see, to create a — a biological machine.” When at last he blurted the words out he flinched, expecting her to strike him again, but she didn’t. She just stood there, staring. “To replace the vatdivers,” he explained.

She nodded her head slowly. This new calm of hers was more frightening than her rage and tears. He didn’t know what to expect next. “And put all those people out of work,” she said at length.

“It’s lousy work, Helix. It kills them. You know that now, I’m sure you do. But you — you and your sisters and your mother — you can swim in the vats all day and all night, and it won’t harm you. And besides that, it was a fascinating problem. You had to be intelligent, you see, at least I felt you did. That was my solution to the complexities of vatdiving. Another researcher might have taken a different approach, but I made the multiprocessor brains, and that’s where I started with you.”

“I suppose you think I should be grateful to you for creating me, for making me... intelligent.”

He shook his head and looked down. “No, not really, no.”

Helix walked slowly about the living room, her gaze wandering, seeing nothing, crunching slivers of glass beneath her shoes. “My sisters and my mother, you said.”

“Yes.”

“My mother — she’s...”

“The first of your kind. Her name is Lilith,” he said gently.

She stared at him again, froze him with the cold blue fire of her eyes. “My mother was a vat diver. I was an orphan. You adopted me.” she whispered, advancing on him slowly. He wanted to back up, and probably would have, but the wall was in his way. She took his face in her four hands, gently cradling his jaw and skull in her fingers, and gazed into his eyes with a look so wounded that his heart went cold. “Why did you lie?”

He swallowed with difficulty. He was crying now too, it seemed. He closed his eyes, unable to bear her gaze any longer. “My work is my life, Helix,” he whispered, “and you are my life’s work. I didn’t want to see the pinnacle achievement of my career wiped out or relegated to the status of slave labor. That you are finely suited to work in the vats cannot be denied, but there’s more. Your social structure, other things. You are a brand new, intelligent life form. I wanted to see what you could do outside of the laboratory. I wanted you to get loose, undetected, to pose as a sport, to get good and far away from GeneSys. That was my hope for you, in particular. Until you came along there seemed to be no future for your kind, but when I found you-”

“Found me?” Surprised, she took away her hands.

“Yes, you’d been driven from the — the nest quite shortly after you were born. I don’t think you can remember.”

Her eyes went cold again, this time not with anger but with hatred. “Oh, I don’t think you want to know what I remember,” she said, her voice shaking. She turned from him, her four fists clenched, her arms stiff. “I remember torture, you bastard! I remember being a pathetic little specimen, picked on and beat up for what I was. Now I find out I’m really some kind of laboratory experiment gone awry, and none of that really happened. None of that shit I based who I was upon ever happened. I don’t exist. I’m somebody else. Why didn’t you just tell me all of this? No, you had to make me hate myself, instead! How could you,” she turned towards him again, “how could you do that? You made me think you were the only one in the whole wide world who cared about me, and all along, you were the one who had hurt me.”

Hector sank to the floor and bowed his head over his knees. She was absolutely right. That was what he had done. That his intentions had been otherwise, that he had reasons for making up her past made no difference. In trying to save her he had betrayed her. He had burdened her with the memories of a childhood that was not her own.

“You’re right,” he said, finally, out of the depths of his inner darkness. “You’re absolutely right.” He looked at her, but made no other move. Just forced himself to look at her without flinching. She stared back at him hollowly. She was more lost than he was, which felt impossible, but there it was.

“Why didn’t you want me to know what I am?” she asked. “Is it so horrible?”

“No! Oh, no, Helix. That’s not it at all. I thought I was protecting you. The project wasn't going well. I knew it was only a matter of time before the project was canceled. In the eyes of someone like Graham, it was a useless waste of funds. He wouldn't even stop to consider that it was a new species of intelligent beings which he was eradicating with the flick of his pen." Hector trembled, with anger, he realized. "I didn't care that the project failed its objective. As far as I was concerned, it was a complete success. I didn't want the beings I'd helped bring into the world to disappear without a trace, and with you, I knew I had a chance at seeing them survive.

“I knew someday you'd have to leave here, and I didn't want you to go back to the nest of your birth. They drove you out, and I didn't think they'd let you in again. And if you tried to find out more about the project, you'd be discovered. So I made you think you were human, and I taught you to fear people and hide what you are so you could remain undetected for as long as possible."

Helix shook her head in confusion. She turned to the couch as if she would sit down. Broken glass lay scattered on the upholstery. She picked up one of the larger shards to toss it onto the pile debris that had been his table. It sliced her hand and she dropped it. “Because of you my first memories were of hostility. Why did I have to start out like that? Not knowing who I am, forced to find out by myself in a world that didn’t welcome me.”

Anger flashed through him again, surprising and sudden. He stared up at her. “Don’t we all start out like that? Where do you think I got the material for your memories? Do you think I could have made them that vivid for you if I hadn’t experienced them myself?”

She stared at him, nonplussed, blood dripping unheeded from her lower left fingertips. “You were never in an orphanage.”

“No,” he said, standing. “But I did go to school, and I was different, and kids are like that.”

She sighed and shook her head, "But you could have told me the truth, and together, we could have reached the same conclusions."

"Maybe, maybe not. I couldn’t take the chance."

"No, you just had to decide for me,” she retorted hotly. “You had to manipulate me, make all my choices for me. If you'd treated me like a human being, instead of just making me think I was one, maybe I wouldn't hate you now."

He laughed bitterly and began making his way around the wreckage to the dining alcove. "It's really not important how you feel about me, Helix. What's important is that you survive. Hate me if it helps you, but don’t punish yourself.” He pulled a chair out from the dining table and looked back at her. “I made the mistake, not you. Take what help I can give you now, I beg of you.”

She looked at him with more sadness than anger. “What help can you possibly give me?”

He nodded at her bleeding hand. “For starters, I can bandage that.”

Amazingly enough, she sat at the dining table and allowed him to wrap her hand with cello tape. She knew almost everything now. To fill the silence between them, Hector told her the only thing left that might be of value to her. “I had a lot of trouble with the project,” he said, gripping her hand more firmly when he said ‘project’ lest she try to pull it away. “I was working off a multiprocessor brain. Trying to design a body with a sensory system and motor control reflex that it could use. Overlaps in the gene splicing caused your double set of arms and your enlarged eyeteeth, but the real problem was the sensory input. All multiprocessor brains have to do is think. The creature I was trying to create had to use all the physical faculties. I was beginning to think I’d taken the wrong tack, starting with the brains.”

He looked at her, staring hard into her eyes as if by the force of his gaze he could make her understand. “And then one night Lilith came to me in a dream. I saw her, saw for the first time what she would look like, and she looked into my eyes. She looked into my eyes, Helix, and I knew how to do it.”

She winced and he realized he was squeezing her hand. He loosened his hold, and went on. “The next day in the lab I stopped trying to build sensory systems onto the multi brain, and instead I just grew the cerebral cortex larger, and let the sensory nerves map onto it on their own. The senses of the body created their own intelligence. Within weeks she was born.”

"Born?"

He shrugged, "Call it what you will. She came into the world through me, and through her, I learned how to bring her here."

Reluctantly he finished bandaging her hand. He wished time would stop. He wished he could keep her here with him, but he’d already done that, and he’d already lost her some time ago. “And now you know everything I know.” he said, releasing her hand. “And you should leave. You’re in danger here. Take the airplane ticket, Helix. Get away from here.”

“I can’t do that. I need a vat, Hector.”

He sat back. Of course she did.

“Maybe I can remedy that,” said a voice from the living room. Hector turned to see Graham stepping out of the hallway, a young man with dark hair and sideburns close behind him. “Good of you to leave the door open, Martin,” said Graham as he raised his arm and squeezed the trigger of a tranq gun.

The dart struck Helix in the shoulder and she crumpled to the floor. Hector was up and out of his chair. “Get out of here Graham! Aren’t you in enough trouble already? Do you want to add assault and breaking and entering to the charges against you?”

Graham smiled at him. “So you want to play lawyer, huh? You should have stuck with that assault story you peddled to Anna. You don’t have the goods to pin attempted murder on me. I don’t know how you pulled the security clearance to bring me in on nothing but your say so, but it isn’t going to happen again. My lawyer can beat up your lawyer any day of the week.

“Besides,” Graham glanced to where Helix lay unconscious on the floor. “Murder and assault are offenses against human beings, and that’s not what we’re dealing with here, is it?

“I’m not through with you by a far sight, Martin. But first there’s a little loose end to tie up.” He nodded, and the young man stooped to haul Helix up off the floor.

In desperation Hector ran at the man and pushed him, causing him to drop Helix. He stood over her recumbent body, knees flexed, his arms tensed to do he didn’t know what. “Leave her alone!”

The man laughed and pushed Hector back into the dining table.

“As of right now, this isn’t your project anymore, Martin,” said Graham. “I’m taking you off it.” He held the tranq gun up again, pointing it at Hector this time.

“This isn’t about any project anymore, you ought to know that,” said Hector. “Just what do you think you’re going to do with her, anyway?”

“I’m going to take her back to the hive, where she belongs.”

“You can’t! They’ll kill her!”

“Or each other, preferably. There can only be one queen, right? With Helix and Lilith out of the way, the others will be much easier to deal with, I’m sure.”

Graham’s cohort bent to pick up Helix again, and as Hector rushed him he heard the click of the tranq gun, and felt the sting of a dart in his chest. His next step seemed to take hours as darkness closed in, taking Helix and Graham and the other man away with the fading light.

oOo

Chango paced back and forth from Vonda’s home lab in a back bedroom of the house to the living room where Pele, April, Coral and Hyper sat waiting for her diagnosis. Vonda had banned her from the lab for asking too many questions. All she could do was stand at the doorway watching Vonda work, and then walk back into the living room, to bask in the collective anxiety of her peers, which drove her down the hall again, to watch Vonda peer into slides and hold vials of different colored liquids up to the light.

“Hey, come on,” Hyper approached her on what must have been her twelfth or thirteenth circuit, laying a hand on her arm to stop her restless movement. “Come on in the kitchen, Pele’s making sandwiches.”

They were putting away the bread and stacking plates in the sink when Vonda came in. She sat down at the table and April handed her a fresh cup of coffee. Chango stood rooted to the floor, waiting while Vonda spooned sugar into her cup, stirred it, and drank. Finally she looked up, staring at Chango and nodded. “There was blast in those tanks.”

April pounded her fists on the table. “That fucking son of a bitch! I’ll kill him.”

“We don’t know where he is,” Pele observed.

Hyper switched off the game show he’d been watching on holo and keyed up his com page. “I’m going to call Hector. This may help him against Graham.” He typed at his wrist keypad, waited, shook his head and typed some more. “No answer, I wonder if something’s happened to him. He was trying to build a criminal case against Graham. This evidence could help him.”

“What are we going to do?” asked Pele.

“We’re going to find Benny, and beat the living crap out of him!” said April.

“I don’t know what’s happened to Hector Martin, but he needs these tanks. He can get them tested in the GeneSys labs. It’ll carry more weight if two independent tests show there was blast inside them.”

Chango picked up the tanks. “You guys find Benny. I’ll go to GeneSys. If something’s happened to Hector, then Helix is probably in trouble too. I have to try to help them, if I can.”