"Like 4,000 feet per second," said Bobbi Jo.
"Yes," he continued. "Perhaps the uranium slugs which Taylor is using can injure it. We will see. But for this I prefer the sword. If it conies to us inside the dark, and if fire fails to deter it, then we will be fighting face-to-face. In this, a sword can be superior to a rifle."
Hunter lowered his head. It was amazing to him, all at once, how much a man could consider in a single moment in time. He saw his life, what he had lived for, all he had learned, his hopes, his unfulfilled dreams, his sorrows. It seemed that all his skill, his knowledge, his understanding and wisdom had brought him to this place in time.
And he still didn't know what they faced, still didn't know how to destroy it. He only knew that he had overcome in the past simply because he had never surrendered to the pain, though he had bled with it.
Feeling a wrong kind of tired, he raised his head. He turned toward Bobbi Jo, smiled slightly, but she only looked sad. He glanced at the professor, sleeping, and nodded to himself.
It was time.
A tough man with a gentle heart…
Slowly, hiding any hint of the fear he felt, he stood and expelled a hard breath, staring at the cleft.
"Let's assume the worst," he said. "It's waiting for us in there. Assume also that it's not afraid of fire. Which it probably isn't. How, exactly, are we going to respond as a unit to an attack inside an enclosed space?"
"With any means possible," said Takakura.
"We blow the hell out of it," Taylor added.
"No." Hunter walked forward a pace and knelt, trying to feel what was there. He didn't expect success, and he wasn't disappointed. After a moment, knowing he was wasting time, he walked slowly back.
"Here's my plan," he began. "I'm gonna climb high, about twenty feet, and make my way through the higher tier of the crevice while you guys carry the professor through the passage. I'll lead, and if I sight it, I'll hit it with the rifle. It won't hurt it, but you'll know what to do. Retreat and blow the crevice behind you and then hold the position outside." He looked at Bobbi Jo. "If anything comes out or over that opening that isn't me… kill it."
She asked, "What will you be doing if we retreat?"
Hunter slung the Marlin on his back, began to free-climb the broken ridges that bordered the crevice.
"Probably fighting for my life," he said.
He gained a foothold and lifted himself with the strength of his legs to save his arms. "The main thing is to get you guys out of there before it can run you down, which it'll do quick since you're carrying the professor."
"Hunter—" She stepped forward.
He paused, looked down. Winked.
"Hey," he smiled, "you just make sure you don't miss that chopper."
Wearing attire appropriate to the landscape — khaki pants, a khaki shirt and a wide-brimmed fedora — Dr. Arthur Hamilton de-boarded a Ranger helicopter and loped, head low, from the landing pad, holding a black briefcase tightly under an arm.
Behind him a small entourage carried baggage, equipment, his parka and their own belongings.
At the edge of the pad, beyond the reach of the slowly rotating rotors and the dying whine of the engines, Colonel Maddox stood holding his hat to his head. "Nice to see you, Dr. Hamilton!" he yelled above the whir of the chopper. Then: "I can't say I'm surprised, though! I'm amazed you didn't come earlier!"
Hamilton nodded curtly and kept moving as Maddox fell in beside him. "We've done everything you ordered, Doctor! I don't know exactly why you wanted the equipment removed, but we flew it out this morning on a chopper!"
"Good!" Hamilton responded as they were finally out of the chopper's annoying range. "Did you follow all of my instructions to the letter, Colonel?"
Maddox nodded. "Right to the letter, Doctor. We shipped it by Sea Stallion to the installation in Los Angeles. Even the pilot doesn't know what he's flying."
"Good." Hamilton moved for an oversized steel door and in moments was at a sub-basement two levels below the visible facility. He inserted his chin into a small cup as a scanner read the blood vessels of his left eye, and then a steel vault opened, allowing entrance.
He was greeted by a tall woman — black-haired, thin pale face with two crescent moons of dark skin sagging beneath her eyes. She smiled as he neared and Hamilton raised his eyes to a glass tube suspended in the middle of the laboratory.
The tube, as large as a sarcophagus, floated in an electromagnetic field. It touched neither the floor nor ceiling and was filled with a liquid that allowed small air bubbles to rise to the top where they disappeared in a lace of reflective mesh. Green light cascaded down over the figure in a halo; it was an aura of holiness.
Hamilton smiled, almost reverent.
For within that liquid, equally suspended, was a thing such as the world had never seen and never imagined. Its head hung in death, hair all but gone to ten thousand years of ice, but its body preserved, almost fossilized by the intense pressure and cold of a glacier melted by an oil fire that had decimated Alaska's North Ridge.
Magnificent, terrifying, and godlike, the humanoid shape floated alone in its own dead space. Its chest was enormous, huge cords locked into the sternum like unbreakable iron cables stretching out to connect with Herculean shoulders. Its arms — heavy and thick and overly developed— ended in large powerful hands tipped with black curving claws. And its legs were equally dynamic; the legs of a hunter, of a creature that could run for days or even weeks without rest or respite only to ferociously attack and feast, and run again, leaping, climbing, attacking and attacking. Though dropped forward in death, its face was surprisingly visible on an imposing mound of neck muscle. The brow was broad and low beneath withered white hair, its nose broad also and flattened with wide nostrils. And its wide mouth, uncannily open in death, revealed fangs as long and deep-set as a tiger's. Then the primitive face ended with a square, solid chin with knotted muscles set deeply in the hinges and high in the cheeks to indicate a uniquely formidable countenance. It was the image of what Homo sapiens might have been if he had possessed the strength of a dinosaur, the mind of a man and the terrifying aspect of a tiger.
Hamilton gazed upward in awe.
"Surely… the purest of all beings." He stepped forward softly. "Surely it ruled the world like a god."
Consumed by the sight, Hamilton lowered his head, a faint smile on his lips. His voice was hushed. "And so, my dear friend Emma, have you managed to finish analysis of the sequencing?"
Dr. Emma Strait, holding a clipboard to her chest, took a slow step to stand beside him. "It was as you suspected, Doctor," she said in a low voice. "Its protein levels were clearly regulated by a long version of the genes that control dopamine and serotonin. But we also found something we hadn't expected."
Hamilton gazed expectantly. "Yes?"
"It's rather complicated, and unexpected, and we don't even understand it ourselves yet." Nervously she glanced at the suspended dead form. "There are variations — some severe — in the regulatory regions for the transporter genes. We haven't mapped the entire genome, but the reconstruction we've managed to produce allows us a hint at its makeup. The D2 Dopamine receptor gene is at least thirty times as large as modern Homo sapiens. Apparently a product of heredity. Or a mixture of heredity and environment. So you were correct in surmising that extraordinarily oversized genes regulating emotional and intellectual control faculties had been severely metamorphosed by some unknown outside influence. Possible diet, climate. It's unknown. Quite possibly we will never know unless… it's captured."
"Something we are hard at work on, I assure you," Hamilton answered. He turned back to the mummified giant. "Yes, it is as I assumed. Its genetic coding prohibited the manufacture of those very chemicals which give modern man control, consciousness, morality, and mercy. A creature that lived forcefully for itself and nothing else. A creature that by its genetic structure was incapable of caring for anything but its own self-serving goals. And look what it became. The strongest of its kind. The strongest of our kind."