And that would have been disaster indeed… because it was finally working.
She split her focus between wiping out the last vestiges of the rampaging computer programs and watching the God Machine’s readout. She would handle the other problems as soon as she could. Fixing the cameras would be a snap, but she didn’t know what was causing the hangar temperature to drop. Someone had manually shut off the radiant heaters, but why?
The God Machine interrupted her thoughts with a cheerful chime that sounded horribly out of place considering the current situation. Jian looked at the upper-middle-left screen, the one that showed the new announcement.
GENOMES A17 SEQUENCING: COMPLETE
PROOFREADING ALGORITHM: COMPLETE
VIABILITY PROBABILITY: 95.0567%
Ninety-five percent. She had done it. Whatever it took, she had to protect this data set.
HE HUNG IN that space between conscious and unconscious. Bits and pieces came back… a sound, his name, the shitty taste in his mouth. Andy Crosthwaite just wanted to stay asleep.
But that rotten cocksucker Gunther would just not shut the fuck up.
“Andy, come on, wake up!”
The only light in the room came from the vid-phone, which was damn near blinding to Andy’s squinting, sleepy eyes. The phone’s screen showed that dickhead Gunther looking like he needed a bathroom pit stop pronto before he dropped the Hershey squirts in his pants.
“Gun, don’t you have a fag novel to write, or something?”
“Andy, I’m not kidding, get your ass up now.”
“Fuck off.”
“Get up! Tim’s sabotaging the place, you need to guard the back door!”
Andy reached out and put the vid-phone facedown. Then he put his spare pillow on top of it. It didn’t drown Gunther out completely, but Andy was a very sound sleeper and it would be enough.
“ANDY, YOU SHITHEAD, wake up!”
The feed from Andy’s vid-phone had gone black. Gunther started to scream again, louder this time, when motion on another monitor caught his eye.
The hangar.
“Brady! Brady, come in!”
“Easy, Gun! This headset is inside my ear, okay?”
“Right, sorry.” Gunther continued in a calm voice. “Infrared shows the cows in their stalls in the hangar, but there is a person moving by the vehicles.”
“Just one? You’re sure?”
Gunther looked again. The black-and-white monitor showed heat in white, cooler colors in gray shading to black. Aside from the cows and the mystery heat source, he saw only Brady, moving from the satellite dish toward the hangar’s front door. “Confirmed, just one target. Gotta be Tim.”
“Can you see what he’s doing? Where is he?”
“Looks like he’s in front of the Humvee. No, he’s moving to the back of the hangar. He’s going for the cattle! Move!”
Colding’s voice sounded on the same channel. “Brady, slow down. I’m on my way outside.”
Gunther saw Brady’s heat signal close on the hangar’s front door.
“Gotta take him now,” Brady said as he closed the last ten feet. “Can’t let Tim kill the cows.”
“No,” Colding said. “Brady, just wait!”
On the black-and-gray monitor’s picture, Gunther saw Tim’s white heat signature sprint away from the hangar’s back door. The signature stopped for just a second, then Gunther saw a tiny flicker of white moving back toward the hangar. Very small, not human-sized at all, and moving fast.
“Brady, be careful, I’ve got another heat source…”
BRADY BARELY HEARD Gunther’s words as he put his big shoulder into the hangar’s front door, slamming it open with a clang. He ran through, cut left, then knelt and leveled his Beretta in the direction of the Humvee and the fuel truck, the best spots for cover if there was a second enemy soldier.
But it wasn’t his eyes that detected danger.
It was his nose.
What he smelled in that last second of his life told him he had made a really, really bad mistake. The thick, rotten-egg scent of natural gas. In a fraction of a second, his eyes flicked to the radiant heater inside the door, to the shattered plastic gas pipe leading into it. Hacked open, he realized, with a fire axe.
Brady didn’t have time to see that all sixteen ground-level heaters had suffered identical damage. For thirty minutes, sixteen cracked one-inch PVC pipes had poured gas into the hangar’s closed environment, where it floated up to the ceiling, gathering in an invisible cloud.
A gasoline-soaked rope made a simple fuse. The saboteur had left one end inside the back door, then trailed the rope fifty feet outside. One flick of a lighter had done the rest. Just two seconds after Brady Giovanni’s muscled mass slammed through the front door, the rope’s flame danced into the hangar and kissed the gathered cloud of gas.
The fireball started at the back of the hangar and grew exponentially, lashing out at a pressure of twenty pounds per square inch, the equivalent of a gust of wind traveling at 470 miles per hour. The shock wave smashed into Brady, throwing the big man back. Had he gone through the door he might have lived, but he hit the hangar’s inside wall and was knocked cold. He didn’t feel the three-thousand-degree Fahrenheit fireball engulf him, didn’t see his clothes burst into flame, didn’t sense his skin bubble.
The cows fared no better. The shock wave knocked them about like little dogs, not the fifteen-hundred-pound creatures they were. Cows tumbled, burned and smashed into stalls. Some hit the hangar walls with a gong audible even over the explosion.
The hangar’s huge roof seemed to lift up, balanced on a growing cloud of flame, then crash down, smashing the Humvee and the fuel truck, punching through the truck’s tank and exposing aviation fuel to the still-roiling fireball. Dark orange flames shot up from the destroyed hangar, scorching metal and melting plastic.
BEFORE ANDY’S MOTHER had abandoned him to try her hand at whoring for Alberta loggers, she had always said he could sleep through a herd of buffalo stampeding through his room. That was before the military. While there were many things he could sleep through, such as Gunther’s annoying voice on the vid-phone, a ground-shaking explosion was not one of them. If Andy knew one thing in this world, it was how to wake up fast to avoid getting killed.
He was off the bed, crouched on the ground, Beretta in his hand before he even processed what he’d heard. Gunther had tried to get him up.
“Oops,” Andy said.
He started scrambling into his clothes.
IN ERIKA HOEL’S bed, Tim Feely rolled over, the covers falling away from his face. Who was making all that damn noise? And he was hot. Someone had tucked the covers all up over his head. Damn, the room still spun like crazy. One thing about those Dutch women, they sure could drink. Drink, and fuck like nobody’s business. He often wondered what Erika Hoel had been like in her twenties, and he often reminded himself he probably didn’t want to know—the woman was forty-five, and he barely lived through their lovemaking sessions.
He reached out for Erika only to find her side of the bed empty. She was probably taking a leak. The room spun again, and Tim Feely dropped back into a deep sleep.
WHAT AN EXPLOSION, what a rush. Erika Hoel couldn’t believe how well her plan had worked. Simpletons. And the back door wasn’t guarded. In her projected timeline, she’d figured Andy would be there by now. She checked her watch, and waited. Another few seconds before the final hacking program kicked in. When it did, she could slip back inside, make sure the bioinformatics lab’s petabyte drive was erased, then crawl into bed with Tim and just play stupid. If she ran into Colding along the way, she’d just say she was trying to get away from Tim, who’d suddenly started making threats and acting crazy. The ruse wouldn’t last long, of course, but Fischer and his gorillas would be here soon. When Fischer arrived, Erika would be safe—then she could rub it in Claus’s face and her former lover would know that she had destroyed all of his work.