Chapter 161 – March Wardens

Jack leaned back against the side of the truck and pretended to be helpful. Fu Man-new was busy yelling at his science officer. The guy looked at least partly Chinese, and even went with the ‘evil Oriental mustache’ bit. Jack decided to call the guy Dr. Zin. He was still hoping to find a minion he could name ‘Wo Fat’.

‘Dr. Zin’ insisted, “These cannot be true gorillas! Did you see their size? Their incisors? The shape of their skulls? Their fur and eyes? I need time to perform DNA analyses and study the results!”

Jack chipped in, “Why don’t ya just ask Walsh’s boys and girls what Mommy thinks? I bet Wacky Maggie already has it all figured out.”

Fu Man-new growled, “We do not need to talk to some decrepit American!”

Jack watched as he even hitched up his belt as he spoke. At the rate the guy was going, that belt was going to be up around his armpits pretty soon. This guy could give Willow a run for her money as worst liar of the twenty-first century.

Jack switched his attention to Dr. Zin. “So, those apes didn’t have pointy heads. No ridge down the middle. And they were too tall. And those teeth didn’t look like a gorilla’s teeth. Know what all that looks like?” Okay, what he knew about gorillas came from seeing them in zoos and watching ‘Gorillas in the Mist’. Plus he’d seen every version of ‘King Kong’. But he’d gotten a good look at a couple of those things’ heads, and he’d seen way too much of Maggie Walsh’s handiwork.

“Of course!” Dr. Zin practically shouted. “Those are human characteristics!”

Crap, that was just what Jack was afraid they might be. He pretended he’d already figured that out, and he asked, “And you don’t know why there’s likely to be a man-gorilla splice like that?” His first guess was Wacky Maggie, but that didn’t really make sense to him. From what Alex had gleaned, Maggie had a tight rein on every one of her experiments. Maybe this was from Maggie’s very first experiment, back before she learned she needed a control on what she created, and now they were running around loose. Or maybe she was following documentation she’d stolen from Howard Royer Locke, and this mess was all his fault. Or maybe it was yet another mad scientist. Still, it could be some accidental biochemical insanity like he’d seen up in Siberia. Maybe deep in that big-ass volcano, stuff was getting brewed up and it was doing freaky things to the local wildlife, in which case the gorillas — or the humans — might not be the only thing that was getting mutated. He could also think of some even crazier ideas.

Okay, ‘crazy’ just went with ‘Walsh’ the way soup went with sandwiches.

*               *               *

Alex just about jumped out of her skin when the gorillas came out of nowhere and caught her totally by surprise. On the other hand, ‘jumping out of her skin’ didn’t mean ‘spazzing out and screaming’ anymore. It meant going silvery and jetting straight up and blasting everything with lightning bolts. Which could be a lot worse some of the time.

She hit four of the gorillas with lightning bolts and just missed two others, who dived for cover. The seventh gorilla leapt through the air and missed her by a huge amount and landed on its face, which apparently made it really cranky.

Okay, crankier, because these apes were pretty cheesed off already. And she sure didn’t remember gorillas having great big fangs. Well, incisors.

The three that hadn’t gotten zapped roared at her, and she zapped all of them before they could call for reinforcements. Or tip off the badguys that someone else had showed up. But this was totally not good.

“Rainbow Dash to Spike. Come in, please.” Nothing. “Dash to Spike, come in.” She waited a few more moments and tried not to get worried. Okay, she was already worried. She was trying not to get panicky. Then she tried again.

“Spike here. Reception … kkkh … spotty while we’re … kkkkkhh … heavy canopy. Hold on for ten seconds.”

She waited impatiently. Finally, after ten really long seconds, Hanna came back. “Spike to Dash. We found a clearer spot and reception should be better.”

“Dash here. I found what is probably the first Walsh team, and the first India team. The second Walsh team and the second India team have already looked at the bodies. And there’s a boatload of mutant gorillas that ripped both teams to shreds.”

“Did you say mutant gorillas?”

“This is Maggie Walsh we’re talking about.”

“Right.”

“Dash to Spike, I’ll be patrolling the immediate area for threats. See you soon, and keep all your windows rolled up. Out.”

Alex stayed silvery and hovered about thirty feet off the ground, just in case more mutant gorillas showed up and wanted a rematch. In fact, she flew circles around the open area, going wider and wider, until she was sure there were no more muto-gorillas within maybe a quarter mile of the ex-camp.

When Hanna finally drove up, she skirted around the first trucks and the dead bodies, drove slowly past the remains of the camp, and parked the jeep over in the spot where it looked like something big and heavy had been parked for a few days and then taken away.

Alex flew down and hovered next to Hanna’s door. When Hanna grabbed all her gear and stepped out, Alex explained, “I think a Walsh team came first and set up the camp. They got overrun by all these gorillas. Then a Singh team showed up and parked back there and came to investigate — well, they probably came to shoot everybody — and they found the camp and got overrun on their way back to the trucks. All their bodies are facing the trucks instead of the camp. Whatever the Walsh team was using to clear the road — maybe a couple of bulldozer-like construction things — got parked over here, and so Walsh team two with Karen Ross probably took ’em and kept going toward the volcano. And finally, Singh team two is ahead of us and going after Walsh team two.”

By the time she stopped blabbering, Hanna was fully armed and prepped. “It sounds like you have been busy doing a lot of very smart work. Since Jack is not here to be all snarky, I’ll say ‘good work, Sherlock’.” She gave Alex a very Jack-like smirk.

Alex rolled her eyes. “Elementary, my dear Watson.”

By then, Eliza and her chimp were looking over the remains of the camp and the people and the gorillas. Darwin freaked as soon as he saw the first dead gorillas, and leapt into Eliza’s arms and hooted in fear. Eliza had to put Darwin down and throw up when she saw the first dead people.

Alex flew over and used her TK to keep barf off Eliza’s clothes and shoes and face. She said, “Sorry. I should have warned you.” She felt bad that Eliza was seeing this stuff. And she sort of missed being the sort of person who would lose their lunch when they saw stuff that was this horrible. Being Terawatt wasn’t exactly good for you in every way.

Eliza spat and drank some water out of a little soft-sided canteen. “Umm, sorry. You did warn us. You even told Action Girl the people were all ripped to shreds. But seeing it … That’s a lot worse than helping hurt animals.”

The chimp hooted frantically at her some more, and she added, “And Darwin says whatever these things are, they’re definitely not gorillas. Or anything normal. He says they smell more like humans than apes. He’s really scared.”

Alex shuddered inwardly at the idea, but she said, “Eliza, I don’t want to be harsh about this, but we are talking about Maggie Walsh and her Team Evil. These could really be more human than gorilla.”

Hanna calmly said, “I’ll get some DNA samples, so we can check later.”

“Good idea,” Alex said.

Eliza asked uncomfortably, “Do you really think Dr. Margaret Walsh did this, too?”

Alex admitted, “No, I don’t. She has control over her … creations. Or at least she believes she does. Her team — the first one that got slaughtered — had no control at all over these man-apes. If I had to guess, I’d say she found out about some other mad scientist who’s working here, and she sent in a team to take that guy down, or take whatever else he’s invented away from him.”

Hanna added, “She is not usually this sloppy, but some people she has worked with have been.” She looked at Eliza and added, “Most of them are not alive anymore, either.” Eliza cringed.

Alex didn’t grimace, but she sure thought about making a face. This could also be some Collective jerkheads who didn’t have Walsh’s inside knowledge, trying to pull a fast one on her. Or something even worse.

Okay, the idea of a bunch of Collective badguys taking each other out in yucky ways just didn’t bother her like it really should have.

Eliza asked, “Can I use a flashlight and look at some of these gorilla corpses?”

Alex said, “Sure. Let me move off to check along the path for more threats, and let Action Girl move off into the trees to make sure your perimeter is safe.”

Hanna added, “And let me get far enough away that your light is not ruining my night vision. It will be dawn very soon, and that is an excellent time to sneak up on enemy forces.” She pulled out one of her grapples, pointed it up into a tree, and fired it. As Eliza stood there open-mouthed, Hanna leapt into the air and operated the grapple so it hauled her up into the trees like she was flying.

Darwin hooted oddly, and Eliza hooted back at him and gave him a reassuring hug.

Alex told her, “Be careful.” She zapped the seven still-live man-apes again to make sure they’d stay unconscious while she was gone, and she darted off down the path.

She didn’t get very far before she heard the sound of distant gunfire. Lots of gunfire, somewhere way off toward that volcano. Definitely machine guns, although not gatling guns. And there was more than one kind of machine gun, too, if she was hearing correctly. Something that sounded like a regular submachine gun, and something that sounded heavier, with a faster rate of fire.

Were the Singh people attacking the Walsh people? Were one or both teams shooting at some other mad scientist’s forces or maybe at more man-apes? She really hoped Jack was okay. If Jack got hurt, she didn’t know what she’d do.

*               *               *

Jack wanted to duck down on the floor of the truck, or even dive out of the truck and take up a safe position on the jungle floor behind a couple trees. But the guards were watching him, and he was still trying to give a certain impression. So he yawned and closed his eyes like he was going to take a nap.

He had seen what Team Discord East was lugging around, and he was hearing those AK’s plus some heavy machine guns that Fu Man-new’s thugs weren’t carrying. So Team Discord East and Team Discord West were having a little disagreement.

The more disagreeing, the better, as far as he was concerned. He figured it was unlikely they’d wipe each other out, but they might cut down each other’s numbers enough for those ape-men to swoop in and kill everyone who was left. That would be a problem for him, unless he had a secure position with enough weaponry and enough ammo. And his tPhone, so he could call Alex to come save his sorry ass yet again.

The firefight abruptly stopped. He could hear some yelling back and forth, but he couldn’t make it out from where he was. Probably a parley. He could think of four things they might be negotiating over, and none of them were good. He could probably make at least one of them work for him.

*               *               *

About five minutes later, Fu Man-new yanked open the back of the truck and commanded, “Get out. We are handing you over to the primary bloc.”

“What? We’re not seeing each other anymore? Oh, I know, it’s you, not me. You’re not ready for a commitment. I’ve heard it all before.”

Fu Man-new growled, “What are you babbling about? You will shut up and walk over to the building. Once they see that you really are General O’Neill, they will communicate with their leaders and we will be paid for you. And good riddance!”

He leaned back against the side of the truck. “Not unless you cut off these zipcuffs and give me an AK. And four full magazines.”

“Why would we do that?”

He rolled his eyes. “You know that space between enemy lines they call ‘no man’s land’? Well, around here it’s more like ‘no man but lots of gorillas land’ if you ask me. So you can give me the AK, or you can shoot me and lose all that money, or you can drag me over there in the middle of an armed convoy which I’m willing to bet won’t make it back alive. Your call. Easiest is giving me the AK and just keeping several weapons trained on me so I don’t turn around and fire in your direction.”

Fu Man-new really didn’t want to admit some mere human had a better idea then he did, even if he wasn’t exactly a sterling example of Orphan brainpower. In fact, Jack was willing to bet real cash dollars that Singh deliberately tasked the less brilliant members of his gang with jobs like this, so they didn’t run off and make a new splinter group, like he had. Or at least, if they tried, they would fail.

Come to think of it, Jack had run into a lot of Orphans in one way or another, and this guy was ranking pretty much in the bottom percentiles on Jack’s Orphan intelligence scale. The guy probably made up for it in other important Orphan traits like strength, speed, ruthlessness, aggression, looking really handsome, mustache-grooming, and being a first-class asshole.

The guy gritted his teeth and finally gave in. “Your desperate plea is granted. Walk to the front of the truck. We will remove your bonds and give you a weapon. Then you will walk directly to the enemy emplacement and stop annoying me!”

“Yah, sure, you betcha.” He stood up and hopped out of the truck. He took a good look around. The dawn was breaking, and the blackness of the night was turning to lively green flora and clear blue sky. And plenty of brown dirt and mud. The more sunshine he had while making this walk, the better it would be for him.

Once he was outside, he could see that there was a screen of trees and other flora, followed by a gradual curve in the recently-plowed roadway, followed by a straight shot through some shot-up flora to what looked like a really old camp. There were wood buildings which had essentially rotted away and become a part of the jungle again. There were old fences that had become loose piles of rusty wire. And further back, there were four concrete buildings that looked pretty overgrown, but were still holding up pretty well.

He checked the AK they gave him, slapped in a mag, and pulled the charging handle. Okay. Safety off. He hoped it was ready to go. He shoved the other three mags in his right thigh pocket, and he gave his captors a big smile. “Well, so long, and thanks for all the fish.”

No one even smiled. “Ooh, tough crowd, tough crowd.” He walked along the ripped-up route toward the long-abandoned compound. It just couldn’t be old enough to be the source of the King Solomon’s Mines legend. The concrete said ‘twentieth century’. Someone with a lot of money and a lot of manpower had built this ugly piece of crap, and they had probably done it in the middle of the twentieth century, not in the 1800’s.

There was no sign of more man-apes, but he was betting they were better at moving through the jungle than people were, so they could easily surprise him. There were dead Singh boys, too, and he was figuring that plenty of big predators would find that pretty inviting. In fact, it was really suspicious that no big predators had gone for those bodies back at Team Discord West One’s camp. He had to wonder if the ape-men had killed or chased off every serious threat for miles.

He called out, “Hello, the camp! I’m coming in, and I have one AK-47 for protection from our furry friends.”

A male voice yelled back, “Stay on your current path and don’t move to either side. We have automated machine gun emplacements set up to discourage the gorillas. And the India bloc.”

Yeah, he had seen maybe ten corpses, all India bloc types, and all shot to pieces from heavy machine gun fire. He figured that was half of Fu Man-new and Dr. Zin’s forces.

He kept listening for any movements off to the sides, because he figured he wouldn’t see the ape-men until they were ready to leap on him and introduce themselves ‘up close and personal’.

He got all the way to the remains of the fences before he realized they used to be fifteen or twenty feet high. And made of barbed wire. And the remains of the gates had an overgrown metal sign that hardly even had paint on it anymore. But there was still enough paint to make out a little bit of the lettering. It was in German. And he could just make out two or three words …

He suddenly felt like vomiting. This was a World War II SS camp. All the manpower was almost certainly slave labor. And they wouldn’t have been able to put up the damn camp if the ape-men were running loose at the time.

He walked over the remains of the front gate. There were automated heavy machine guns set up way off to either side, with infrared detectors and fancy motors on their mounts. They looked like they could each cover perhaps a ninety degree arc, only if you looked at the concrete buildings as a center point, the machine guns looked like they were set sixty degrees apart. That could mean they had six of the things around their base, and each one provided maybe fifteen degrees of overlap with the guns on either side. That meant the worst point of attack was actually halfway in between two guns, which was probably where Fu Man-new would try to hit them at the first opportunity.

He let the AK dangle from its strap, and he walked up to the first Orphan he saw. “Here,” he said, handing off the AK. “Take me to your leader.”

The guy was a big, muscular black guy chewing on a cigar and expertly pointing another AK his way. “This way, general.”

“Call me Jack.”

The guy smiled suspiciously. He obviously recognized the ‘friendliness’ ploy for what it was. “You can call me Munro.”

Jack nodded. “Great. Did you know those guys had me captive for hours and never wised up? Apparently, Singh’s bloc runs on dumb muscle.”

“It runs on Singh’s arrogance and personality,” Munro replied.

“Along with a fascinating ethnocentricity that would be called racism if we were doing it instead of them,” said a smiling European type who Jack hadn’t seen. The guy had a definite Eastern European accent that Jack was going to guess was probably Romanian. Also, the guy had an AK and half a dozen grenades and a good place of concealment where two armed minions were still lurking, so Jack would have been screwed if he had planned to shoot Munro and make an attack run on the compound.

The two Orphans led him past several ruins, and past the first couple of concrete buildings. The closest concrete building looked like it had a slew of soldiers using it as a barracks. He could see past the second two concrete buildings way back to a large mine entrance that was barricaded. The steel and wood barricade was held in place by a big earthmover that had a loading bucket at one end, pinned against the barricade, while the other end had a massive clamp-like gizmo that looked like just what you would want so you could rip jungle trees out by their roots and dump them out of your way. There was also a truck that had a large brush-cutter mounted on its front. He figured the earthmover cleared the trees that needed to be moved, then slightly smoothed out the damage with the loading bucket. Then the brush cutter made the route passable by trucks and jeeps. Way faster than ten guys with machetes. And behind one of the last two concrete buildings was a little parking lot of two more trucks and three Land Rovers.

The second two concrete buildings were overgrown with vines, and there was moss all over the roofs, but the buildings still looked really solid. And really inhabited. There were big green metal-reinforced awnings protecting the second-floor windows from the heat of the day. There were curtains inside the windows, and the curtains were open. The ground-floor didn’t have windows, but there were a number of places that looked like rows of arrow slits. That would make them tough to shoot into, and tough to break into even if you were a ridiculously strong ape-man. Or a ridiculously strong Orphan.

The two Orphans led him through a heavy steel door into a narrow hallway that had a slit in the far wall. He figured there was a room on the other side that a machine gunner could stand in and mow down anyone or anything trying to bust their way in.

At the end of the hall, behind another steel door, was a hallway going off at a right angle. They walked down that and up to the second floor. The two men led him through a steel door into a ‘war room’. There were corkboards on the walls and maps laid out on a large steel table in the middle of the room. An extremely attractive man and woman were staring down at one map.

Jack led off, “Karen! Long time no see! And you’ve got a boyfriend! You don’t write, you don’t call …”

The man grinned. He had one of those ‘cornfed American’ faces. In fact, Jack would have guessed the guy could be related to Finn, if he didn’t recognize the guy from the lists of possible American Orphans.

The woman glared at Jack. “I don’t know you personally. We haven’t met. So how do you know who I am?”

Mister Wholesome-looking smirked. “Well, I guess the big bosses know what they’re talking about. The general knows things we didn’t know he knew. Like your first name.”

“Shut up, Peter.”

Just to be more troublesome, Jack kept going. “Oh, I know a lot more than that … Ms. Ross. I know Peter Mark Elliott’s full name. And I know those aren’t gorillas out there. And I know this used to be an SS slave labor camp where they forced slaves to mine in there or die. Or more likely, mine in there and die. Or maybe even get mutated, mine, and have a fate worse than death.”

Karen frowned. “Those are very good guesses, general.”

He smiled. “Since we’re being so informal and all, just call me Jack.”

She asked, “Since we’re being ‘so informal and all’ why don’t you tell me how you know my name?”

He shrugged in his most casual ‘Minnesota boy’ gesture. “Your people blab too much. After you shot Dr. Finn, she heard one of them call you Karen, and then one called you Miss Ross. It doesn’t take a genius Orphan to figure out your name from that. Oh, and nice shooting. She made it.”

She coldly said, “So you’re just encouraging me to be even more ruthless in future.”

He gave her another shrug. “It wouldn’t have made any difference. I knew you and Petey because Singh’s pinheads tipped us off about all the Orphans out there with their stupid email campaign, and our IT people did a reverse lookup of everyone in the U.S. who met our Orphan profile. Hence Ms. Karen Andrea Ross, M.S. in physical engineering, M.S. in civil engineering, telecommunications engineer at Umbrella Telecom up until your parent company tried to turn everyone in America into zombies. Oh, by the way, we think the India bloc and/or the main bloc had a mole in your operation, and it was probably the India bloc’s mole who screwed with the computer files for that anti-virus for you Orphans. Walsh would have done a much cleaner, smarter job.”

He looked over at Mister Wholesome. “Peter Mark Elliott. Biologist, specializing in higher mammals, like primates.” He looked over at the black guy. “Munro James Kelly, well-known African explorer. The Brits rumbled you and a couple dozen other European Orphans including the Ashfords.” He looked over at the fourth person. “And I have no idea about you. Sorry. I’ll guess an upbringing in Romania, and training as a mining engineer.”

The guy smiled broadly, but the smile didn’t reach his eyes. “Herkermer Homolka. Very good guesses. Bucharest. And tunnel design.”

Jack smiled back. Then he guessed, “So the primary bloc’s been wanting to come check this hotspot out for years, but they needed the right people with the right expertise. So that means they knew about the threat potential and they also knew the mine has stuff that’d be of interest to a telecom engineer. Super-high quality gemstones for telecom lasers or masers or maybe even grasers, or else deposits of really useful metals.”

Karen pulled a crappy-looking rock out of her pocket and rolled it onto the table in front of him. “Smart guesses, Jack. But I suppose you also know you don’t get to walk away with all that knowledge. You’ll be going back with us to our home base, and staying there permanently.”

Jack shrugged. “That’s the usual way plans like this go, except you’re supposed to hunch forward and rub your hands together maniacally and cackle as you gloat about my fearful predicament.” Herkermer snorted with amusement, but Karen looked grumpy. Oh, well, you couldn’t please all the people all the time.

Jack picked up the rock and looked at it. He’d only seen unpolished gems in museums, but this looked like the biggest unpolished gem he’d ever seen in his life. “Industrial diamond?”

She nodded. “An incredibly high-quality Type IIb diamond that’s essentially a near-perfect boron-doped artificial diamond, except made for us in a real volcano. You have no idea what we can do with a diamond like this.”

Except he did, because Alex had given him a really detailed report on her trip to the ISS, and Alex had talked now-Major Samantha Carter into sending him an after-action report that was so detailed he had needed to ask Bill Lee to translate several parts from Physicist into English. He casually asked, “You mean besides taking out ninety percent of the satellites now orbiting the Earth, and making an anti-missile defensive shield that would make current military efforts look like Tinkertoys, along with mid-range offensive weapons that would make a Barrett .50 caliber obsolete?”

She froze for a fraction of a second. She didn’t give anything away by her expression or her posture, but that brief freeze was all he needed to see. This was not going to be good if the Collective got their hands on a few hundred of these things.

Munro laughed. “Walsh was right about him, after all.”

He glanced over at the man. “That I’m too big a smartass to get promoted to general?”

Munro smiled. “That, too. She said you’re a lot smarter than you looked, and you completely suckered her in. You also made her lose her cool, and I didn’t know that was possible.”

Herkermer looked at Miss Ross and chortled, “Karen doesn’t like not being the big genius all the time.”

Jack just looked at Karen and asked, “Hey, who does? We all like being the smart guy. So you got sent here with three other smart guys and a team of other Orphans and peons, and you ran into those gorilla-human splices, and lost a few people, and then you found out the ape-men live inside the tunnels where you want to go, so you’ve got the mine adit blocked to keep them out of that side of your camp.”

“Adit?” Peter asked.

“Mine entrance,” Herkermer replied. “Well, I had no idea the general knew any mining terminology as well.”

Jack gave him a grin. “I learned it from doing crossword puzzles.” That was actually true, but he doubted they’d believe him. In fact, he was figuring they’d come up with a much more sinister and suspicious explanation that would make him seem a lot more dangerous and a lot smarter. He was just a really good guesser.

He asked, “So what’s next? You can’t get down into the mines until you wipe out your colony of ape-men. You can’t leave the Singh bloc loose over there. You may not even be able to leave safely, thanks to the Singh-Singh boys and the furballs out there in the jungle.”

Karen said, “It’s simple. We deal with Singh’s troopers. We send all our data back to home base and let Walsh come up with an appropriate anti-ape approach. Once they’re all dead, we collect an adequate supply of industrial diamonds, set off the security systems the SS left way down in the lower mineshafts, and we get the hell out of Dodge.”

Herkermer said, “Assuming the cables to the security systems are still intact and the systems haven’t degraded unduly and the fuel storage hasn’t leaked too much.”

Fuel storage? Jack figured that meant really, really big fuel-type bombs, maybe down near the magma chamber of an active volcano, which might be enough to cause an eruption. That would probably bury all the evidence and keep anyone else from ever finding any more of the goodies in the mine tunnels.

Jack told her, “These things aren’t really gorillas. If they’re too man-like, whatever Walsh dreams up is likely to be toxic to you, too.”

Karen coolly replied, “I’m willing to take that risk, since I don’t plan to be one of the people who go into the mineshafts to verify the results or collect the diamonds.”

Jack looked at her. “You know, you remind me a lot of Maggie Walsh herself.”

Karen answered, “Thank you.” They both knew he hadn’t intended it as a compliment.

He looked at the maps, since they weren’t making an effort to hide them from him. One was a detail map of the area. One was a really old map of the mine tunnels. Crap, it looked like a couple of the deeper tunnels had hit the magma chamber and had to be sealed off, probably with miners inside. And for extra crap, it looked like several really massive tunnels were dug and then filled with thousands and thousands of gallons of fuel, so they had a secure fuel storage area and also a little doomsday device.

He managed to curb an impulse to do a little ‘Shimmer! It’s a floor wax and ALSO a dessert topping!’ joke.

He looked around the room. They had comms and a couple of LCD screens for Skyping or whatever. They had old notebooks and ledgers they were scanning and sending back to Wacky Maggie and her pals. They had …

Crap! That open ledger had drawings of people mutating into these ape-man-things!

Herkermer stepped over beside him and looked at Jack’s face. “Yes. Quite ugly. They had advanced biochemistry knowledge for their time, but they didn’t really understand about the human genome or splicing DNA. They just ‘tried things’. According to this record, they killed several thousand of their miners who had become injured or who had acquired lung diseases from the dust. But they kept scrupulous records, so when they got one chance success, they could duplicate it. They created dozens of these gorilla-human crosses, both male and female. They expected they would get stronger workers who were more docile and less intelligent and more cooperative. They had no idea that gorillas could be savage and protective and violent. When the first females became pregnant, the gorilla-men rebelled. And very successfully. As far as I have been able to tell from these notebooks and ledgers, every single record stopped the same night. So these creatures have been living here and breeding for decades.”

Peter added, “My guess is that they’re really heavily inbred, so they’re not a viable, long-term population, but this could easily be between their fourth and thirteenth generation, depending on whether their generational dynamics are closer to men or great apes or other primates.”

Jack thought about the numbers people had quoted at him for those damn silicates. “So we could be looking at thousands, or maybe even tens of thousands, of these things?”

“Exactly,” Peter nodded. “But they’ve probably reached some sort of Malthusian point in their population growth, and they’re not spreading more than a few miles away from the mines, so we’re probably only looking at numbers in the high hundreds. But still, that’s a lot of angry creatures defending their territory from intruders.”

Jack managed not to be sick, but this was Umbrella Corporation-level malevolence. Turning slaves into partly-human monsters and then turning them into a ‘breeding colony’ to get more slave workers. He hoped those scientists got ripped to pieces veeeeeeeery slowly. He was not looking forward to telling Alex and Willow what was going on here. This was soul-crushingly evil.

He just said, “They had cloning technology, so they must have had some idea about animal biochemistry and genetics.”

Karen looked surprised. “They had cloning technology? How do you know that?”

“British espionage secrets they were keeping under wraps since World War II. Lord Deathstrike stole the tech and created half a dozen clones of himself. The Brits think he was after a really creepy way to make himself immortal, like trying to figure out how to download his brain into teenaged clones whenever he was feeling old.”

Peter lectured, “That doesn’t actually work. You can grow a clone, but you can’t make its brain be exactly the same as yours down to the neural connectivity, because its experiences to date can’t be exactly the same as yours over the same span of your life. It will have different linkages between neurons and different memories to date. Koslowski and Partikanthi did some theoretical studies in the last decade or so, proving it pretty conclusively.”

Jack muttered, “Well, that’s nice to know now.”

A radio on one wall crackled, and a voice called in, “Leader, this is post four. Leader, this is post four. We have some kind of movement from the India bloc vehicles.”

Karen replied, “Make sure all automated defenses are engaged and operational. Prepare for indirect assaults.”

Jack stepped over and looked out the side window. He couldn’t see where Team Discord East was lurking, but he could see part of the area. The two windows in the room only faced the mine and the south, while the India boys were off to the west.

Still, he was in position to see an RPG go searing across the sky and hit dead center on the barricade over the mine entrance. A second RPG took the barricade down, while a third and a fourth exploded somewhere to the west.

“Leader, this is post two. They just took out automated weapon four and breached building one. They’re moving forward.”

“Leader, this is post one. We have a breach at the mine, and we have aggressors.”

Jack looked at the mine opening and could see ape-men climbing out through the wreckage and pulling down more of the barricade. Automated defenses started shooting at the ape-men, while other automated defenses started firing off to the west.

Peter calmly pointed out, “Building one is the barracks for our remaining forces. That could be a problem.”

Munro nodded. “We really need to know how many more RPGs they have.”

Karen looked at Jack and told him, “If the India bloc breaches this building, you won’t have to worry about being hauled off to our home base. You’ll just have to worry about being ripped apart by primates.”

 
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