Children of Genesis (The Gateway Series Book 1) Page 5

  She was quiet at first, for a little too long for him to hope she’d taken the news in stride.

  “Are you shitting me?!”

  There it was.

  “Nikki, keep your—”

  “My voice down? Is that what you’re going to say? I don’t think so!”

  She was on her feet now, arms waving, eyes as wide as they would go, warming up a string of what promised to be some of her more contorted curses. All good signs, actually. As long as she didn’t get quiet again and start clenching her fists at her sides, Michael felt confident the tantrum would probably stay verbal. Probably.

  “Turns out my voice is damn near all I’ve got left! That and two sorry-ass changes of clothes. Thank you very much for that, by the way, you—tramp douche. If you’d told me we’d never be going back to the hostel, I’d have packed better—”

  In fact he had told her, more than once, but Michael kept his mouth shut and his expression as apologetic as he could manage, which wasn’t too hard to do. He really did feel sorry for putting Nikki in this position. Despite her volatile personality, fondness for violence, deliberate lack of manners and decorum, ridiculous mixed up curses, and her terrible taste in men, Michael adored his sister. She was, to put it simply, everything he had in the world, or at least everything that was important to him. So giving up what little money and few possessions they’d built up in order to keep other people alive was a simple choice for him because at the end of the day he’d still have what mattered. But Nikki didn’t get a chance to make that choice. He’d made it for her.

  “Wait, wait. I apologize.” she said, and for a stunned half second Michael missed the sarcasm.

  “I almost forgot this little patch of suck,” Nikki pointed with both hands at her freshly cut and dyed hair, which, although she couldn’t see it and would probably still hate it even if she were calmer, looked better to Michael than it had in years.

  Quality fast-acting dye was one of the expenses Michael had covered out of their money. He knew they’d need to change their appearance on the move as soon as the job was done. For Nikki that meant a solid black dye strong enough to cover her existing colors, and a shorter cut, the best Michael could manage in a cargo car lacking stabilizers. Michael was able to get away with a more subtle reddish brown shade in his own previously un-dyed and undamaged hair, which was enough of a change to his look that a cut wasn’t really needed. Probably for the best considering Nikki’s mood. Putting a sharp object in her hands at this point would have been suicide.

  Still, he’d made her hair as edgy and dramatic as he could, which was what she usually went for. So maybe when she calmed down—

  “—ham-fisted boob might as well have used a blender. Seriously. Looks like a blind kid went after it with a rubber knife—”

  Or not—if she was even still talking about her hair. Michael’s mind had drifted a bit and tuned out some of the stream, a coping mechanism that had become second nature over the years. “It looks good, Nik,” he gambled.

  “Really?” she baited him. And even though he knew she was setting him up for something—exactly what he wasn’t sure—he pressed on.

  “It does. And it was necessary. You know it.”

  “You’re right. It was, wasn’t it?” Her words and tone screamed agreement, which to Michael screamed trouble. “It’s going to let me walk around without getting hassled.”

  Uh oh. “Well, it will help, once we get—”

  “So I don’t have to, say, hide out on the hard metal floor of a stuffy storage car with some bilge-sucking jackass when I could be napping in a padded seat? Thank you, awesome new hairdo.”

  “Nikki, we really shouldn’t—”

  She snagged her small pack and cut him off with a single lift of her eyebrows. That are-you-dumb-enough-to-try-to-stop-me look had preceded too many fights for Michael to mistake it. So he hesitated as she pulled the release handle and the door hissed open.

  “—put it to the test if we don’t have to,” he said to the empty car as the door hissed shut behind her. “Well, that could have gone a lot worse.”

  Nikki

  Nikki was three cars away when Michael caught up enough for her to hear him calling for her to wait. Sure thing, dad.

  She moved on to the next cargo car, which she was beginning to think was all this bloody train had. If she didn’t find a passenger car soon she was going to feel like an idiot for leading her brother on this walking chase. Then again, as long as he looked like the bigger idiot for trying to stop her from being recognized by a box of toasters, that was fine with her.

  He got close enough in the next car that he didn’t have to shout. “Come on, Nik. We can’t take the risk right—” hiss.

  The closing door cutting him off was way more entertaining now that he was talking in a normal tone of voice. Nikki was almost disappointed to step into the first of the passenger cars, one with about a handful of people talking or sleeping in the rows of nicely padded bench seats on either side of the aisle. So she kept going, partly because somebody in this car smelled as bad as the crate she’d just enjoyed for seven hours.

  The next two cars were fine, but she led Michael on out of principle. Besides, now that he wouldn’t even talk and was just following her, the humor level was ratcheted up another notch.

  She finally took a seat on the sunny side of the next passenger car, near the front where she had clear view of the TV in the front corner. Much like the first passenger car she’d found, only a scattering of people were in this one: a weasely guy writing in an old-fashioned notebook, three ladies wearing makeup and clothes for people twenty years younger than they were—and fooling nobody—and an extremely fit but awkward couple that she never would have pegged for a couple if they hadn’t been sitting together in a mostly empty car. Not a huge crowd, but if she was lucky, the proximity of prying ears and/or the squawking TV would keep Michael from yammering at her.

  No such luck. He slid onto the bench facing her and launched right into a quieter version of the same warnings he’d issued back in the box, and in the pre-job briefing she’d mostly ignored. Minor fail. Still, she had the TV and a great view of what was probably northern California out the window. Maybe it was still Nevada. Who could tell?

  Dammit. Her reflection in the window gave her a good look at her hair. It was cute, which at any other time would have made her happy and proud of her brother. She and Michael had been cutting each other’s hair for years, and over time they’d each gotten a pretty good handle on what the other liked. This time Michael had cut the back the shortest, to just under her ears, her natural waves making it curl out a bit. He’d made it all chunky and piecey, the way she liked, and he’d left the front a little longer than the rest. For now she had to just tuck the bangs behind her ears, but once she got her hands on some product she could make some fabulous club hair out of this.

  She owed him an apology. He wasn’t getting it, but she owed it. The fact that she admitted as much to herself was enough. Her conscience started to argue, but she was distracted from the internal debate by an explosion, on the TV this time.

  On the screen, a statuesque blonde man was striding toward what the scrolling banner said was an Iranian Army base set up in what had been a suburban American high school. A stationary machine gun in one of the classroom windows opened fire on the man, but the bullets sizzled to powder on a hazy energy field a dozen centimeters off the man’s skin. He kept walking, and the tank beside the school fired again. The man waved his hand and a pulse of white energy detonated the shell in the air. The camera pulled back, and U.S. ground forces came into view behind the man, advancing on the school.

  Nikki had seen this or its like before, many times. It was old footage, forty-plus years old, according to the voice-over guy, of the one-man army who’d helped the crippled U.S. fend off occupation attempts by half a dozen nations before the Chinese stepped in and put the States under their protection. The man was General Christopher Hale, but nobody called him tha
t. The call sign the forces had given him during the post-Event conflicts had stuck. Now everybody knew him as Savior.

  The screen switched to a live shot of Savior at a podium with U.S. and Chinese flags flanking him and his own company’s logo front and center between them. The voice-over guy had to say it was live, even though it said so in the banner at the bottom of the screen, because Savior looked the exact same. Near as anybody could tell, he hadn’t aged a day since the Event.

  He started talking about some project his company was working on instead of taking the questions the reporters were shouting his way, but Nikki didn’t hear a word of it. She was too distracted by the look of him.

  “Damn, he is puuuur-dee,” she said breathily. “No way he’s as old as they say.”

  “You know he is,” Michael replied absently, his own eyes glued to the screen. “He was at ground zero the day of the Event. That was over fifty years ago.”

  “Yeah, but look at him,” she said, drawing one leg up to her chest on the seat. “He looks like he’s twenty-five, at best. Hell, with that bra-popping smile of his, even if he is eighty-five, I would tear that—”

  “Quiet,” Michael hissed.

  “Prude.”

  “No, listen to what they’re asking him,” he growled in a whisper.

  She couldn’t make heads or tails out of the babble of competing voices off camera, but she didn’t have to wait long to hear what had Michael spooked.

  Savior

  “Yes, I am aware of the events in Nevada this morning,” Savior said, giving the reporter from the Times a reassuring smile and keeping his eyes steady on hers. “But no, neither I nor Generation has any affiliation with those involved, Miss Houston.” He held her gaze instead of acknowledging the hands going up as the others competed for his recognition.

  It had become so easy over the years. He did it now almost without thought. Manipulating people was in fact much like manipulating genes in a lab. First he determined the behavior he wanted to change—in this case the questioning aimed at exposing his agenda. Then he identified the key areas to target—in this case the questioner being a female in the waning years of her sexual prime, one exhibiting social signs of eagerness to find a suitable partner, and no small amount of desperation. Then he had but to stimulate the genes that controlled suitable traits to produce the desired behavior—or in this case let her infer a promise from a smile and an interested look from a dominant male in his own prime. The result: the subject’s imagination made the predicted leaps, her face flushed, pupils dilated, respiration increased, and she was suitably distracted from her line of questioning, and would most likely subconsciously color her own memory of the conference when she put her story to words later.

  “But your company does claim to be the unparalleled leader in the field of genetic manipulation,” another reporter, a male this time, shouted as he stepped in front of the woman from the Times. “And the terrorists in these images—” the reporter gestured to a side screen now showing footage from the Sky City incident, “—have clearly been enhanced in some way.”

  The trouble with socially manipulating people on such an intimate level was that they tended to travel in packs, especially when the subjects in question were reporters. What worked with one pack member rarely worked with the pack as a whole, unless of course, the manipulator could find the one thing that would satisfy them all.

  Savior didn’t watch the footage, as were the reporters, and as was the viewing public no doubt. He’d seen the images repeatedly minutes after they’d occurred. He’d watched the images the first few times with a growing sense of satisfaction with the way the elements making up his destiny were once again aligning, and afterward he’d put plans in motion he’d abandoned nearly two decades prior. As the reporters watched the footage now, he watched the reporters. What he saw in their faces as they watched the twins told him exactly which areas to target. What he saw in their faces was simple fear, and that made manipulating this pack all too easy.

  “You are correct. Generation is unmatched in our field,” Savior said into the silence as the destruction escalated on the screen. “I would hazard a guess the enhancements you are seeing are chemically induced—and as you know, Generation is not in the business of dealing with performance enhancing or recreational substances. We are, however, the most qualified to discover the source of these enhancements.”

  “You have my word—” his eyes locked on to the active camera over the reporters’ heads as their eyes gravitated to him. Then he answered the fears of everyone watching by giving them exactly what he’d given them in the conflicts following the Event—salvation. “I will make it my personal mission to take these terrorists into custody, and I will use all the resources at Generation’s disposal to find out everything I can about their abilities.”

  The babble erupted again, but this time filled with questions of how he meant to find the two unregistered teens, when he expected to have answers. The accusations and mistrust were gone. Their faith in him was restored, as in their minds he was once again stepping into the role that had earned him his name.

  Mission accomplished. Ironically, this time he was shielding the scope of his agenda with the truth. He did indeed intend to seize the twins. As a matter of fact, their capture was already in progress.

  When the press conference concluded, Savior stepped away from the podium and started down a secured hallway toward his waiting transport. Price fell in beside him, the darker man’s eyes scanning the hallway for potential threats even as he produced a display pad and punched up the latest messages from the investors.

  “They’re concerned,” Price summarized as they walked. “They want to know if your promise to hunt domestic terrorists will impact the schedule further.”

  “Of course they’re concerned, but schedules are not the issue,” Savior said evenly, one side of his mouth twisting in distaste. “Their concern is for their anonymity. Assure them this domestic matter will be dealt with swiftly and without connection to our mutual business. Connect me to the site,” he ordered quietly.

  Price took the multiple commands in stride, switching from the message to keying in the codes on his pad to open a secure video line. The display switched to a view of the command center of Savior’s latest test site, a scene of barely ordered chaos as a team of technicians worked feverishly to incorporate an influx of new equipment as ordered. One of the technicians, a wiry man of mixed heritage, Southern Chinese and Indian by Savior’s guess, approached the communications console, cleared his throat, and adjusted his glasses. “Yes, sir?” the tech said into the camera.

  “Status,” Savior commanded evenly as he and Price approached the landing pad. As with Price, he spoke his commands simply and in his normal tone of voice. Savior had been in command positions for well over sixty years; he was accustomed to his orders being followed. Period.

  Although science was Savior’s first love, military structure was a close second. He had chosen to enter military life after earning his doctorate in genetic engineering at USC, where he had grown disgusted with the profusion of egalitarian idealists. Their lack of an organized command structure was simply illogical. If everyone’s opinion were to be given equal weight, nothing would ever get accomplished. The only way to stride forward was to do so with a singular guiding vision, everyone moving in the same direction under the guidance of a single mind. Unfortunately, history proved time and again that the masses refused to be led for long. Humans, having a primate ancestry, were genetically programmed to be violent, competitive, and territorial by nature. So the successful alpha was required to wage a constant battle of manipulation against the collective ego of the pack. He had to guide the people toward decisions, make them think his ideas were their own. It was a never-ending struggle. But operating from within the comfort of military structure, Savior could enjoy a utopian illusion. He could issue orders and see them carried out without question. He could lead without resorting to flattery, guile, and feigned humility. In a
military command structure, he could relax.

  When the Chinese government had forced the disbandment of the American armed forces, Savior had drawn heavily from the remnants to build his company and personal staff, surrounding himself with the structure in which he felt at home. Unfortunately, many of the scientists he had to recruit today had never worn a uniform, and their concept of discipline often disappointed.

  “We’re working to incorporate the new equipment you sent this morning, but I don’t see how it’s going to solve our power issues,” the tech replied, his tone dangerously close to complaining.

  “Your task is to bring the equipment online as instructed,” Savior said, maintaining his even tone. “Have it ready within seven hours. I’ll be on site then to solve your other problems. End.” His last word was directed at Price, who terminated the call with no further ceremony.

  “Inform the investors that we’ll have results ahead of schedule,” Savior ordered as they stepped out onto the landing pad.

  Price nodded and took a quick glance around the landing pad, then he keyed the message as they approached the transport.

  Savior’s men had the pad secured and the craft fueled and ready to take off, as ordered. As soon as he and Price settled inside, the insect-like transport lifted off the deck with a quiet hum and tilted forward as it gained speed and altitude.

  “Now the new business,” Savior said, looking at Price for the first time since the press conference as his assistant/bodyguard settled in across the cabin. Price was from western European stock, mid-thirties, with a solid physique, restless brown eyes, short black hair, and a runner’s tan typical of soldiers turned private-sector administrators. As a bodyguard, he had a stare that drove back paparazzi and hangers-on without the need to get physical, and he had an expert rating in every class of firearm. As an assistant, he was efficient, unobtrusive, and without ego. In short, he was an excellent soldier, and yet he’d come of age after the armed forces in this country had been disbanded. Price was a glowing example of what Savior’s paramilitary training academies could produce, given the right raw materials.