“Of course they’re violent,” snapped Cyrus. “They’re killers. They’re supposed to be violent. What kind of idiocy is this?”
At the sound of his raised voice two animals stalked quietly out of foliage behind his chair. Hecate and Paris did almost comic double takes on them because at first glance they appeared to be large dogs, Danes or American mastiffs, but immediately that idea was torn to shreds as the animals stepped from shadows into sunlight. The animal to Cyrus’s left was the bigger of the two, a female with heavy shoulders between which a hideous head lolled. He stared at Hecate with the hateful slitted yellow eyes of a hunting lion. He hissed silently at the Twins and pawed at the ground with retractable claws that left furrows in the tile. The second animal, smaller but thicker in the shoulders, circled the entire clearing at a slow and silent pace.
Hecate and Paris were frozen to their chairs. Paris’s eyes tried to follow the stalking creature; Hecate couldn’t take her eyes off of the big animal. There was a gas dart pistol in her pocket, but she knew she had no chance at all of drawing it if that thing moved. He crouched there, his tension etching the taut lines of each muscle.
Paris was always the better actor and he reassembled his composure first. He recrossed his legs and cocked one eyebrow as if appraising a pet poodle.
“Cute,” he drawled. “What do you call them?”
“Otto calls them tiger-hounds.”
“That’s boring.”
“It won’t be the catalog name,” snapped Cyrus, and just as quickly his voice softened. “We’re working on something catchier. The big one is Isis; her mate is Osiris.”
Moving very casually, Paris reached under his shirt and withdrew his dart gun. It was made from a high-density polymer blend and had a gas-injection clip that could fire .32 pumpkin balls filled with glass flachettes. He laid it on his thigh, his finger straight along the outside of the trigger guard. He said nothing.
Cyrus smiled and then made a clicking noise with his tongue. Osiris stopped prowling and came over to sit on Cyrus’s right. Isis stopped hissing, but her eyes never left Hecate’s. The animals sat straight, their bodies as motionless as stone statues carved into the legs of a throne. Every once in a while one of them would blink very slowly, the action serving to remind the Twins of their reality and potential.
“Hmmm, trainable,” murmured Paris, nodding approval. “Will they bond with multiple handlers?”
“Within limits,” said Cyrus, “but push comes to shove they’ll protect whoever feeds them first. They bond very quickly with the initial human handler but can be taught to tolerate others.” He reached down and stroked the head of the bigger of the two animals. “I make it a point to be the first person with whom each of my animals bonds.”
“They’re… beautiful.” She could feel the gaze of the animals like a physical touch.
“They’re ugly as ghouls,” Cyrus snorted. “However, I didn’t design them for their beauty. Pretty can be frightening,” he observed, “but not in a guard dog.”
“Are they dogs?” Paris asked.
Cyrus shrugged. “Technically they’re about sixty percent canine. The rest is a mix of useful genetic lines. They’re very much made to order as the perfect free-roaming guard animals. Nothing comes close.”
Hecate stared, lips parted, at Isis, and the big creature stared back at her and into her with an intensity that was palpable and a personality that was familiar. Hecate said nothing, but when she blinked the animal blinked.
Paris wasn’t paying attention to his sister. He was hiding a smile provoked by Cyrus’s claims that these creatures were perfect. Paris personally disagreed with that assessment, but that wasn’t a topic he wanted to discuss with his father. Back home, at the lab Paris and Hecate called the Dragon Factory, he had his own guard dogs, and he thought how interesting it would be to pit his Stingers against these tiger-hounds. The Stingers were a breakthrough in deliberate chimeric genetics. The Twins had managed to create animals with mammal and insect genes, a feat of morphogenetics that had kicked open a lot of doors for them. It was one of the benefits of being able to combine research from so many different sources, thanks to Pangaea. A pit fight between his Stingers and the tiger-hounds would be a huge moneymaker. He’d already made some side money with steroid and gene therapy on standard fighting dogs. This would be a more select market, but the more exclusive the commodity the higher the price.
“We could move twenty mated pairs of these things by close of business,” he said. “One photo and some bare-bones specs in an e-mail and you could name your price.”
Cyrus shook his head. “I’ll sell pair-bonded brothers, but you can’t have any of the bitches.”
“That’ll drop the price.”
“It sustains the market,” Hecate corrected him, earning a nod from their father. “We want to sell fish, not teach our customers how to catch fish.”
Paris shrugged. This was one of the areas on which his father and sister always agreed. For his part, Paris preferred constantly bringing a series of new products to market rather than establishing ongoing markets. “Well, at least let me take orders on the males.”
“Talk to Otto,” Cyrus said, and dismissed the topic with a wave of his hand. “Now, what about the Berserkers?”
Hecate smoothed her skirt. “For reasons we can’t quite chart, the transgenic process has had several unexpected side effects. On the plus side, physical strength is about ten percent above expectations, but intelligence seems to be diminishing. They’re not idiots, but they seem to rely too much on instinct and too little on higher reasoning. But it’s their aggression level that has our clients concerned. If their aggression continues to escalate with each mission, then there is a very real concern that their behavior will deteriorate beyond a point of practical command control. That will shorten their duration of usefulness in the field.”
Cyrus opened his mouth to reply, but Paris jumped in. “We understand that planned obsolescence is part of any sensible manufacturing system, but this is way too fast. We’re expected to turn over comprehensive reports for six field tests, and just based on the preliminary reports we’ve shared with our clients the aggression factor has caused concern. We could bullshit our way through a three or four percent increase in violent behavior, throw in some mumbo jumbo about the natural variables of transgenics and so on, but we’re talking about a fifteen-point-seven increase in aggression between test one and test three.”
Cyrus pursed his lips. “Ah,” he said, “I see your point. That’s higher than our worst-case computer models.”
“By almost eight percent,” said Hecate. “With a comparable drop in higher reasoning. We can’t fudge the math on that kind of behavioral shift.”
“Is this just in the GMOs?”
Genetically modified organisms were the easiest to bring to market, but anomalous behavior and other gene-clash problems tended to come at them out of the blue. The much more stable genetically engineered organisms were ideal, but they had to be grown from embryos and raised to full maturity. For the Berserkers that was a fifteen- to twenty-year span. The Twins had chosen the faster route of making modifications through the introduction of viral vectors carrying exogenous pieces of DNA. It was quicker, but the likelihood of unexpected mutations was much higher.
“Of course,” she said, “but we don’t have GEOs mature enough for field-testing.”
Cyrus leaned back in his seat, chin on his breast, and pondered the problem. Hecate and Paris waited while Cyrus thought it through.
“I doubt you’ll see these problems in the genetically engineered animals. Different blueprint, different results. But in the modified animals… it’s difficult to control random gene incompatibility. Even if you suppress a gene, it doesn’t remove it and unwanted traits can emerge.”