Silas remained silent. He remembered the blood. He remembered the swing of guts in the sawdust. The U.S. gladiator had outlived its competitor by forty-seven seconds. The difference between gold and silver.
“I’m not sure that you fully appreciate the pressure that the program is under right now,” Baskov said. “We can’t afford to lose. While you’ve spent all your time sequestered away in your personal little laboratory retreat here, the rest of the program has had to exist in the real world. Or have you forgotten?”
“No.”
“I think you have. The gladiator event is a bloody business—that’s why it’s so popular and why it’s always under attack. The activists have a powerful lobby in Congress this time around, and they’re pushing for a new vote.”
“And they won’t get it.”
“No, they won’t. Not this time. But public opinion is an unpredictable thing. Success has buoyed it up till now, and the commission was informed that we must continue to be successful if the gladiator event is to remain part of the Olympics. We do not have any other option.”
Informed by whom? Silas wondered.
“This competition is not going to be as simple and straightforward as the last,” Baskov continued. “Our sources tell us that China’s contestant will be very formidable. Let’s just say that when we compared your designs to what we know we’ll be up against, your ideas came up lacking. You couldn’t have won with the codes you had in the scrollers.”
“How could you know—”
“You couldn’t have won,” Baskov interrupted. “Our decision wasn’t made lightly.”
Silas’s face drained of expression as he considered the man sitting before him. He wanted to grab him by the lapels, pull him off his feet, and shake him. He wanted to yell in his face, What have you done?
But he thought again of broken heads, and by slow degrees managed to put his anger in a place he could shut down. In controlled, clipped words, he said, “I understand. Perhaps I don’t have all the information, but I’m still program head. We still have problems that need to be dealt with.”
“I’ve heard. We’ve been aware of the problems. Your reports during the last several months didn’t fall on deaf ears.”
“Then why hasn’t the commission acted?”
“We just decided to wait and see what happened.”
“Would you like to see … what’s happened?”
“I was waiting for you to ask.”
THEY SHUFFLED slowly down the narrow corridor, with Silas consciously shortening his strides to accommodate Baskov’s hobbling gait. He wondered at the anticipation the older man must be feeling. Hell, he was feeling it, too, and he’d already seen the organism, inspected it, held it. The newborn was the most beautifully perfect thing Silas had ever seen.
Baskov broke the silence between them as they turned a corner. “The commission is very troubled by the description we received. It isn’t really humanoid, is it?”
“Maybe. Not really.”
“What the hell does that mean?”
“When you see it, you’ll understand.”
“And what about the hands?”
“What about them?”
“Does it really have … well, hands? I mean … it doesn’t have paws or hooves or something like the others?”
Silas suppressed the urge to laugh. Let the cocky old son of a bitch sweat a little. “I’d have to call them hands. They aren’t like ours, but they’re hands.” His bitter humor abated somewhat. “The similarities are mostly superficial, though.”
“Are you going to have trouble proving no human DNA was used in the design?”
Silas looked down at the old man. For a moment, he felt his temper rise again. He took a deep breath. With the competition less than a year away, it was a little late to be asking that question now. “Your guess is as good as mine at this point,” he said. “Chandler’s masterpiece didn’t provide us with any sort of explanation for the data in the scrollers, just raw code. I assumed that since you chose his design over mine, you would have some sort of idea what you were getting. You need to ask him. My reports are accurate, and if you read them, you—”
“We read them; we just weren’t sure if we could believe them.”
Silas mulled over several responses to the older man’s statement, but since most of them involved the end of his career and quite possibly his incarceration for battery, he decided to say nothing at all. For the first time, he considered the possibility that the head of the Olympic Commission might be utterly irrational in some aspects of his thinking. Power did that to men sometimes.
They stepped through a set of steel doors and followed the narrow hall around the corner. “I want to remind you that the sponsor dinner is still on for tomorrow night. I need you to be there,” Baskov said.
“I’ll send Dr. Nelson.”
“You’ll be there in person. We need to quell the rumors that have already begun to fly. Image is money in this business. The delegation will leave from the complex at six o’clock.”
Rumors?
They came to a second set of steel doors. A large yellow sign read:
ATTENTION
BADGED PERSONNEL ONLY
BEYOND THIS POINT
Silas carded them through, and Baskov stopped short, blinking against the white brightness of the nursery. A stout, flame-haired man sat against a console near the far wall. There were no windows, but a large glass chamber boxed in the center of the room.
“How’s it doing?” Silas asked the redhead.
“Just fine,” Keith answered. “Been sleeping like a baby for an hour now. Come to show off your little creation?”
“Not mine,” Silas said. “This is Chandler’s handiwork.”
They peered in. The crib was large, and behind the chromed bars, a loosely swaddled shape twisted and bobbed within a cocoon of pink blankets.
“Looks like it’s awake now,” Silas said.
“Probably hungry again,” Keith replied. “You wouldn’t believe how much it loves to eat.”
Silas checked the paper printout of the infant’s eating habits, then turned back to Baskov. “The chamber is a walk-in incubator. The system has autonomic control of everything from temperature to humidity to oxygen-sat levels.”
Baskov nodded, shifting his weight for a clearer view.
“Want to get a closer look?” Silas asked.
“Of course.”
They donned sterile masks and gowns, and stretched latex gloves over their hands. “Just a temporary precaution,” Silas said.
“For us, or it?”
“It.”
Baskov nodded. “Why are we calling it an ‘it,’ anyway? It’s male, right?”
“No, female by the external genitalia. Or lack thereof.”
With a soft hiss, the door to the inner chamber opened and they stepped through. The air was warmer, wetter. Silas could feel the heat of the lights on the bridge of his nose above the mask. He bent and reached his hands through the bars and into the crib. Baskov hovered just to his side. The covers peeled back from the writhing form.
Silas heard a sudden intake of air near his shoulder.
“My God” was all Baskov could manage.
The newborn was on its back, four stocky limbs pedaling the air. Once again, Silas struggled to wrap his mind around what he was seeing. There was nothing to compare it to, so his brain had to work from scratch, filling in all the pieces, seeing everything at once.
The newborn was hairless, and most of its skin was a deep, obsidian black, slightly reflective in the warm glare of the heat lamps, as though covered with a shiny coat of gloss. Only its hands and forearms were different. It was roughly the size of a three-year-old human toddler. Wide shoulders tapered into long, thick arms that now bunched and stretched toward the bars. Below the elbow, the skin color shifted to deep red. Its blood-colored hands clenched in the air, the needle tips of talons just beginning to erupt from the ends of the long, hooked fingers. The rear legs were raptor monstrosities, jointed in some complicated way, with splayed feet that corded with muscle and sinew just below the surface of its skin.