Bitter Harvest (Harvest Trilogy, Book 2) Read online

  “So what’s the plan now?”

  “As much as I hate to say it, I think I need to track down Mikhailov and see if he knows anything about the incident in Russia. Carl managed to pull some strings with their embassy here for a visa, so I’ll be on a flight out tomorrow morning.”

  “But what about the incident there in India?”

  “At this point, I think I’ve done all I can here without becoming terminally frustrated or being locked in jail. Kiran’s in a much better position to influence things until Vijay is back on his feet, and I don’t see any point in banging my head against a brick wall with the government. I’m just a civilian, anyway, and don’t have any official status.” He sighed. “Listen, not to change the subject, but how are you doing?”

  “Aside from wanting to clobber you for being an idiot, I’m fine.” It wasn’t quite the truth, but wasn’t exactly a lie, either. She wanted to tell him about what she’d discovered about Morgan’s Beta-Three, but decided not to. After the horrors he had suffered through that night, he didn’t need any more. Beta-Three was a nightmare for Naomi to deal with. “But all my technical mumbo-jumbo can wait. It’s got to be dreadfully late there, and you need to get some sleep.”

  “I’m not sure I’ll ever sleep again, Naomi. Not after what I saw tonight.”

  She wanted to reach through the phone to touch him, to hold him. “Just get some rest. Stay safe and don’t do anything stupid or I’ll have to hurt you.”

  He laughed, and that made her smile. “I love you, too.”

  The line went dead.

  Taking in a shuddering breath, Naomi put her phone in her purse. She was in her office, where she’d spent most of the night waiting for word from Jack after Carl had let her know he was all right after the incident at the village. She would have spent that time in the lab, but no personal electronics of any kind were allowed in the vault, and there was only one phone, which was a dedicated line to Howard Morgan.

  She looked down as she heard a squeak, and found her cat, Koshka, staring up at her with bright blue eyes. Koshka rarely gave a traditional meow, but could growl like a dog when she was annoyed, usually at Alexander. Naomi leaned down to stroke Koshka’s soft white fur, her fingertips brushing over the long scar in the cat’s flank that had been left by a harvester. “I’m sorry, honey, but I’ve got to get back to work.” She stood up and reached over to scratch Alexander, who was laying atop a filing cabinet, watching her with his deep green eyes, under the chin. “Stay out of trouble, and don’t chew up any more network cables, okay?”

  Alexander’s inscrutable feline expression gave her no reassurance of any such thing.

  Closing the door behind her and hoping that Alexander wouldn’t necessitate a sixth call to IT support, she headed down the hall to the elevators, taking one of them to the basement where Lab One was located. The Beta-Three crew was already hard at work.

  “You look like you haven’t slept.” As Naomi entered the vault, Harmony Bates handed her a cup of coffee, which Naomi gratefully accepted.

  “I haven’t. Jack almost got himself killed last night.” She collapsed more than sat into her chair, the emotional strain and exhaustion suddenly catching up with her.

  “Is he okay?” Harmony pulled up a chair and sat down, her blue eyes wide with concern.

  “Yes, but it was close.” She shook her head. “I respect what Howard’s doing here, but I’m starting to wonder if any of it’s going to matter.”

  “Is it really that bad?”

  Naomi nodded. Morgan had insisted that he tell the others on the team about the harvesters. She didn’t want to, because she feared that it would destroy her credibility in their eyes, but Morgan had insisted.

  “Doctor,” he had told her quietly after she’d finished her tale, “I’m not sure I can believe what you’ve just told me. But if it’s true, the Beta-Three team needs to know just what they’re dealing with. I don’t want them working on something that potentially dangerous without all the information we can give them.”

  And so Naomi had told them. Some had at least been willing to consider what she’d said, while others had written off her story — and her, most likely, even though no one had said as much — as a joke. Harmony had been, and Naomi was sure remained, a skeptic, but hadn’t dismissed the information out of hand. She was a scientist who realized that humanity’s collective knowledge was only a tiny drop of water in the great ocean of the unknown, and that there were many mysteries, great and small, in the world around her. But, like any good scientist, she wanted to see empirical proof, processes that could be observed, data that could be recorded and analyzed, before she believed. “Yes, it’s that bad. I know it’s hard to believe in these things, but only a dozen of them, along with people they’d unwittingly suborned, nearly did us in.” Reaching out to activate her computer, she added, “And I’m wondering if things aren’t even worse.”

  “What do you mean?” Harmony scooted her chair closer and looked at the screen as Naomi brought up several files for display.

  “Howard would probably be annoyed with me, but I jumped ahead a little bit, since you and the others have the work on the delivery system well in hand now.”

  Harmony smiled, and Naomi returned it. Naomi had helped the team leap over the obstacles in creating a stable shell to act as a delivery system for the genetic payload that had stymied them for months, and Harmony had been genuinely grateful.

  It was an interesting contrast to Dr. Kelso, Naomi thought. He popped into the lab twice a day like clockwork to check the work logs and chat briefly with Harmony, but thus far he had refused to go out of his way to even say hello to Naomi. According to bits and pieces she’d heard from Harmony and the others on the Beta-Three crew, Howard Morgan had been less than overjoyed at the progress the team had made under Kelso, especially after exorbitant sums of money had been spent on the project. While Kelso had other responsibilities as the company’s head scientist, Beta-Three had been his baby, and Naomi had unintentionally usurped the limelight. She was well aware of how bitter such enmity could become, and she hoped that she could somehow patch things up with Kelso. She didn’t need any enemies here, and there was far too much important work to do to let petty ego-driven squabbles sap any of their momentum.

  Pushing thoughts of Kelso aside, she tapped a few keys. The image of a DNA double helix appeared on the monitor, and with another click Naomi transferred it to the high definition wall screen, where the complex, twisting molecule leaped into clear definition.

  Its structure, however, wasn’t like the stereotypical twisting ladder that the public was used to seeing in science exhibits. This one had irregularly spaced extrusions along its length, and was much more tightly coiled than was typical for DNA molecules normally found in nature.

  Harmony stared at the image. “What am I looking at, Naomi? I’ve never seen a strand that looked anything like this. And it’s huge.”

  “This was taken from one of the original harvesters, what I’ll call Group A. We managed to kill or capture several, from which we took samples for study. And you’re right: it’s enormous. Human DNA has nearly three billion base pairs. Harvester DNA has more than eight hundred billion.” Harmony whistled. “Aside from its size, another thing we found from the samples we obtained is that there was no polymorphism in Group A. None. With humans, for example, there would be variations in the genes to account for the all the many differences in our bodies. But the Group A harvesters were like a group of identical twins or clones.”

  “But that’s impossible! Even if there were no spontaneous mutations, there must have been at least some minor differentiation caused by natural radiation or exposure to mutagenic compounds in the environment.”

  Shaking her head, Naomi told her, “While we know the harvesters, through the admission of one in our base just before it was destroyed, are very sensitive to ionizing radiation, they’re either amazingly resistant to DNA damage or have a phenomenal ability to repair it, or both. We ran a lot
of tests, and all of them came out the same. Zero polymorphism on a macro level, and zero deviation in the DNA sequences across samples from a given individual and across the limited group to which we had access.”

  “That’s incredible.”

  “You think so? Look at this.” Naomi tapped a few more keys, and another DNA molecule appeared beside the first one. “This is a DNA sequence from a blood sample taken from the rhesus monkey in the EDS lab before it completely transitioned to what I believe may be a larval form of the creature. It had been infected by what we believe to be a sample of Beta-Three corn. Let’s call this the first member of Group B.” Naomi shivered involuntarily, remembering what had transpired in the lab after the ill-fated monkey had been completely overtaken.

  “They’re outwardly similar, if not identical.” Harmony’s eyes traced both the diagram and the details in the text next to each diagram. “Wait.” She pointed to a long set of base pair sequences in the second map. “That’s clearly different.”

  “Exactly.” Naomi scrolled and zoomed the two maps so they were focused on the same region for easier comparison. The text changed to display only those molecular sequences that appeared in the diagrams. “I ran a comparison in the computer, and this is the only segment that’s been altered. It hasn’t just been modified, but has been expanded. There’s a great deal more information in here than there was previously, especially considering how huge the Group A DNA structure is to begin with.” She leaned back and folded her arms, staring at the screen. “The only problem is that I have absolutely no idea what genes are affected. We’d only been able to map a few genes to specific physical traits of the harvesters because they’re monomorphic and we had so few specimens to work with, not to mention the sheer size of their DNA structure. We didn’t understand them that well to begin with, and now we have this.”

  Harmony was staring at the two DNA sequences, a look of horrified wonder on her face. “They somehow engineered something this complex into a new generation, delivered by a viral RNA payload? That’s incredible!”

  “To say that the Group A harvesters were geniuses with genetics is a graphic understatement. We think they’ve been gently pushing us along in the biotechnology realm to the point where they could do this. The question is why? What does this sequence do?”

  The two of them sat there for a moment, their eyes fixed on the display.

  “Hmm.”

  Naomi turned to see Harmony’s mouth moving as she silently read through some of the DNA sequences in the Group B strand.

  “Oh, my God.” Harmony turned to Naomi. “I think I recognize this! Hang on.” She quickly scooted her chair to another computer and typed madly for a moment. With a click of the mouse, a third DNA segment, only a bit smaller than the massive harvester DNA strands, appeared on the wall display. Turning to look at it, Harmony zoomed into a particular area. The sequences displayed in the text weren’t exactly the same as the Group B harvester DNA, but the similarities vastly outweighed the differences. “Let me run a comparison with this sequence.”

  After a moment, the computer displayed the results on the screen: ninety-four percent.

  Naomi sat forward, her pulse quickening. “What is this?”

  “It’s a sequence from Amoeba dubia, which has a DNA sequence almost as long as the harvesters do: six hundred and seventy billion base pairs. I did my post-doc on dubia, and this was one of the sequences I examined.” She smiled at Naomi’s skeptical look. “I know what you’re thinking: out of six hundred and seventy billion base pairs, why would I look at this particular set? It wasn’t chosen at random, believe me. I was building on some previous work that had been done that had tentatively tagged the function of these genes. Part of my post-doc was to prove or disprove that hypothesis.”

  Unable to help herself, Naomi interrupted. “Harmony, what do these genes do?”

  “Well, in Amoeba dubia, they played a key role in reproduction. This doesn’t represent the entire scope of the reproductive genes, of course. But I was able to determine that they’re definitely related to the process of cellular fission.”

  Barely able to breathe, Naomi stared at the image of an Amoeba dubia that Harmony had added to the wall display. Naomi had known that the original harvesters could not reproduce, either due to sterility or some other unknown factor. She had assumed that the deadly Beta-Three corn was intended simply to create harvesters through transgenic manipulation of unsuspecting hosts, just as had happened with the rhesus monkey back at the EDS base a year ago.

  That was bad enough, but at least the number of harvesters would have been limited by the number of available hosts, if nothing else. While human losses potentially could have been horrendous, there had been numerous scenarios played out and contingency plans made for throwing up a sort of barrier or firebreak, isolating the human population from potentially infected food.

  Kempf, one of the Group A harvesters and Naomi’s one-time mentor, obviously took that into account when she created the RNA payload carried by the corn that New Horizons had intended to ship to the world. Inability to reproduce had been the only real weakness of the harvesters, and she had engineered a solution. If the new generation of harvesters could reproduce on their own, without the need for a host, there would be no stopping them.

  “Oh, my God.” Forcing down the bile that surged into the back of her throat, she got up and ran to the lab entrance, where she waited impatiently for the vault door to open. Once she was through, she kicked off her heels and sprinted down the hall, then up the stairs to her office so she could call Jack and the others to warn them.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  While it was self-aware, the thing did not apply the concept of a name to itself. It simply was, and was driven by the imperatives basic to survival in what it instinctively knew was a hostile environment. By its own definition, any environment in which it did not have predatory dominance was hostile.

  It had traveled a long way from its point of origin, the strange metal creche where it had grown from the mindless form, had molted, and finally become. It had killed all the humans that had destroyed its birth place, using the knowledge it had absorbed from its most recent victim, the soldier that had once been Ryadavoy Pavel Ivanovich Sleptsev. Its mimicry had initially been imperfect, as the thing was still young and inexperienced. But with every moment it had traveled from the flaming pyre it had left behind, it improved, matured.

  The thing was aware that others of its kind had survived the deadly flames. Some had left the creche — the facility, it corrected itself — early, soon after becoming. A few had left right after they had molted, assuming their adult physical form, but before the higher cognitive processes had been awakened by latent genetic triggers. Those had crashed through the flimsy walls after the last of the animals had been consumed. Where they had gone and what fate had overtaken them, the thing did not know, nor did it care. They were nothing but beasts that would attack and kill even their own kind to establish dominance. And obtain food.

  Food. The thing had dined on several creatures, human and otherwise, during its journey to feed its still-developing body. While it was an adult, it was not yet fully mature. Its digestive system was highly adaptable, and it could consume nearly any source of protein. It had, however, developed a taste for humans. Not because the taste or nutritional value was better than other food, for anything it consumed had to be broken down with extremely complex salivary acids first, but because through consumption came knowledge.

  “This is as far as I can take you, my friend.”

  The thing turned to look at the human in the driver’s seat of the small car. It was dark out, nearly midnight, with rain pouring down as the man pulled the car to a stop along highway A154 in Stavropol. The man had picked the thing up along the highway twenty kilometers back. Unlike the last human the thing had encountered, this one would live.

  “Thank you.” With a smile, the thing got out of the car and stepped into the rain. A nearby street lamp threw ou
t a pale globe of light that turned into a kaleidoscope of glittering fragments, caught by the individual drops of rain. It had never seen the like, and took a moment to marvel.

  “Close the door, would you?” The man’s voice was irritated.

  “Sorry,” the thing that looked like Pavel Sleptsev told him amicably. “Have a safe trip.” It slammed the door closed and threw the man, whose name it did not know, nor cared to, a jaunty salute.

  The car pulled away from the curb and, its engine wheezing, accelerated down the road. The thing watched it until the red tail lights faded from view.

  A few other cars passed by, throwing up great waves of water as they hit a deep puddle not far from where the thing stood. This, too, was a new experience. It held out a hand, watching as the rain pooled in its palm. Through the malleable flesh, it could feel the wetness and sense the temperature of the rain. Its true eyes, hidden behind the false eyes it presented to its prey, watched the ripples and splashes in a visual spectrum that ran from high infrared to low ultraviolet. Its sense of smell was acute, and it could discern the many chemical compounds in the air and in the water. While it had no names for the elements, it instinctively differentiated between them, just as it could see different colors. It found carbon, sulphur, and many others that it understood to be the by-product of human industrialization, what to them was contamination of the environment. The thing did not care about such things, for it instinctively understood that they would have no effect on it.

  Finished with its momentary reverie, it began to make its way along the roadside deeper into town, letting Pavel Sleptsev’s memories guide it like a transparent map in its brain.

  * * *

  Mayor Grigori Putin sat at the bar of the sleazy dive that just happened to be the favorite nightclub of many of the airborne troops garrisoned in Stavropol. Aside from a ridiculous-looking disco ball that pulsed over the tiny dance floor, casting glittering light over the dozen or so men and women who shimmied and ground their bodies together, the place was dimly lit and filled with a haze from tobacco smoke. Putin suspected the illumination was kept so low to keep anyone from noticing the cockroaches that probably ran rampant inside the scabrous establishment. The music, the latest trash from Britain, he thought, was so loud that the pounding bass was creating tiny waves that flitted across the top of the vodka in his glass.