Hell's Teeth (Phoebe Harkness Book 1) (29 page)

Cloves’ face twisted into a grimace of irritation.

“They saw me coming. The bastards were lying in wait for me,” she explained. “I figured out they were bad news, that my location had been compromised, so I got the hell out of there, but they’re relentless. I’ve been dodging them but everywhere I tried to go, they were there. I managed to lose them near the Boundary Brook. Had to abandon my goddamn car though. It’s hardly an inconspicuous ride.”

She looked livid at this.

“I’ve been lying low in the slums since then; in the fucking slums! Trying to get hold of your sorry arse.”

“Why didn’t you call for backup?” I asked. “Surely Leon Harrison would send some ghosts to pick you up, bring you back safely to HQ?”

Cloves stared at me, hands on her hips.

“Harkness, do you have
any
idea how it would sound if I called in to my superior and told him that not only had my brief to use you to discreetly gather information gone horribly,
horribly
wrong, but that I had also
lost
you, had no idea where you were, and had – without Cabal sanction – dispatched a ghost squad to aid the police and a random GO in what turned into a shooting match in the middle of one of New Oxford’s venerable churches?”

She sighed.

“I have my reputation as a Servant to consider. I don’t think the higher powers would be best pleased with me declaring war on a pack of GOs when we are supposed to be, above all,
diplomats
.”

“What happened at Carfax?” I asked. “Allesandro and I got out and … got the hell away from there. I have no idea what went down after that.”

Cloves snorted.

“You’ve clearly not seen the DataStream today then,” she said. “It’s headline news. We’ve managed to spin it so that officially the police were involved with a gang war incident, unrelated to any of the events at the fundraiser, which is the main story on everyone’s lips right now anyway. I’ve kept the Cabal out of the picture as much as I can. All the media knows is that there was police involvement, and that arrests were made. The good people of New Oxford can sleep soundly in their beds. Nothing on their minds but crop circles.”

“Is that true?” I asked hopefully. “Arrests?”

Cloves gave me a look of withering scorn.

“Of course it’s not true, you idiot,” she snapped. “Our men had your kidnappers cornered in there, like rats in a hole, but then they just vanished into thin air.”

She peered at Allesandro suspiciously.

“Can you actually do that,” she demanded, “turn into mist or whatever? We lost them. The church was empty.”

Allesandro shook his head.

“No. We can’t do that,” he glanced over at me. “Not on our own anyway.”

I saw what he was thinking.

“These guys are working with a Bonewalker,” I said to Cloves. “We kind of forced it to get us out of there. It had disappeared afterwards. My guess is that it went back for its pals. That’s how they got away. It’s how they were able to send people for you. God knows where they are now.”

“Well, there’s a police warrant out on Di Medica right now,” Cloves said. “I doubt he’ll head back to the club. He’s probably out there looking for you again, while his goon squad chase my arse around.”

“Cloves, you said you had the files,” I interrupted, trying to get her to focus. “What’s in them?”

She looked at Allesandro suspiciously.

“How much do you know?” She asked him directly.

“He knows everything,” I answered for him, “and now so do I. Unlike you and everybody else, he’s the one person so far who
hasn’t
kept things from me. I know about the Pale, Cloves, what they really are, where they came from. I know about Tassoni…”

I watched her reaction and stepped towards her.

“And I think you do too.”

Cloves was tight lipped.

“Well, you
have
done your homework, haven’t you?” She said. “Yes, Subject One, the father of the cursed race we created, was spliced from humans and a vampire. That’s hardly public knowledge. Let’s keep it that way.”

She looked to Allesandro, her eyes narrowed.

“How do
you
know about Subject One?”

“He was my clan master before the Pale.”

“Well that certainly makes you super trustworthy then,” she snorted sarcastically.

“I’m not part of Gio’s Sacrament,” the vampire growled back. “He and the others, they took those people and want those files because they believe they can bring Tassoni back from the dead. They want to reignite the apocalypse, bringing the Pale down on humanity in one final fell swoop.”

“Sacrament?” Cloves looked at me, eyebrows raised. “Back from the dead? I’m lost. How about you share what you know with the rest of the class?”

I flicked a thumb at Allesandro.

“
He’ll
fill you in,” I said, “while I look at what was on these files.”

Cloves gave the vampire a look of undisguised distaste.

“I don’t trust him,” she spat. “He’s one of their kind.”

The vampire loomed over her.

“I don’t trust you either,” he said. “You’re a shady government spook. It’s practically your job to lie to people.”

“Only the general public, dead man walking,” she sneered. “I might spin the truth, but only the unpalatable parts.”

“Which is pretty much everything these days,” he countered.

“Children!” I snapped, glaring at them. “We don’t have time for this.”

They both peered at me sulkily, openly hostile.

“
You
,” I said to Cloves, “practically threw me at
him
for information. He gave it to me, mission accomplished. And
you
,” I stared at the vampire, “you didn’t have any problem going to
her
to help find me. So for God’s sake, play nice and give me the damn files.”

I had had enough. Enough attempts on my life, enough dead bodies, enough with monsters trying to eat my face. I wanted to go home to my tiny messy flat and drink hot chocolate and not worry about
any
of this. Instead I was hiding in an alleyway in the most dangerous part of town with two very unlikely companions, not to mention the fact that I was infected with a mutagen virus which could at any moment turn me into a ravening monster.

Cloves stared me down for a moment and then sighed heavily. She reached into her Russian spy trench coat and withdrew a DataScreen, handheld and portable, which she dropped into my open palm.

“You’re not going to like what’s on there, Harkness,” she said ominously. “Trevelyan didn’t. It’s a scientific log. Most of the entries were damaged beyond repair. There are gaps, but there’s enough that was salvageable.”

I leaned against the wall behind the dumpster, loading the data and watching the screen flicker into life before me. Its light reflected coldly on my face as Allesandro and Cloves stepped away, giving me space. The vampire began to fill in Servant Cloves on Gio’s vendetta, but I wasn’t listening. The file menu appeared.

Archive
data
file
011
.
Classified
.
Authorised
personnel
only
.

I flicked a finger over the password, which had been thoughtfully hacked by Cloves’ techs, and the files opened for me.

31

Project Sentinel Program Notes:

The date is September twenty-fourth. I am dictating these field notes for scientific record, to the secure server cloud at Norfolk military base, location 452. We have been instructed to detail progress to be fully disclosed to Her Majesty’s Counter-Terror Unit at Scotland Yard, to Internal Military Defence at M15, and to select Eyes Only authorised personnel in Level One military and parliamentary ministers.

If you have accessed this information and are not the intended recipient, you are both committing treason and an act of information terrorism. You will be held accountable and detained.

Right. That’s out of the way then.

I am the project leader for the Bio-Engineering facility, presiding over Project Sentinel. For the record, I should name myself and the team. I am Doctor Alistair Rutheridge. Other than myself, the Bioengineering Team working here at the classified Norfolk base consist of Dr Richard Trevelyan, bio-engineer Riley Coleman, Professor Marlin Scott, and biologist and gene-mapping expert Doctor Phillip Harkness.

Each of the team has been vetted thoroughly, each is the top of his respective field, and each of us have signed the Official Secrets Act, plus at least eight other military documents which bind us to secrecy. Our work here at the base is classified to an unprecedented level. We have signed our lives over to the project.

Trevelyan suffers the most from the isolation here. He has a wife and baby daughter, down in Mayfair I believe. He misses them terribly. We are allowed to write but everything is checked, double checked and triple checked before it is allowed to leave the base. We cannot really say much other than that we are fine and well, and working hard to make the world a better place.

Harkness works hard, but I know he misses his fiancée too. Five years here, until the Sentinel Project is complete. It’s a long haul.

Scott is a genius. He is bad tempered and aloof, the eldest of our team, but his breakthrough work on the embryonic stages of the Sentinels has been astonishing.

Coleman, I cannot help but think of as a child. We plucked him from Oxford. He’s still a student technically but he has some inspired theories, and his experimental approach is bringing the project along awfully well.

So far, the Sentinels are still embryonic. Fifty of them are held in deep storage in our underground facility. The man-sized test tubes lining the walls down there are a magnificent sight to behold.

They are still cryostasis adolescents. We find the gene-manipulation takes hold more effectively during the mutable stages of physical growth. Our rejection rate of new tissue is down to 38% now, and the bonding of the major macromolecules – the DNA, the RNA, and the enhanced and revised proteins – are taking well.

On a side note, one unusual result of the engineering has shown in several extreme mutations on a cellular level. In samples taken from the embryonic Sentinels, we have observed triple-stranded helices containing three long biopolymers of nucleotides, not the usual two. Coleman believes he can stabilise this.

Log 899:

Coleman’s hunch was correct. We have introduced recombinant DNA, constructed by Drs Harkness and Trevelyan. After transforming these into basic organic plasmids and utilising a viral vector, we have reduced rejection rate of manipulated cells to 2%. This is truly a phenomenal breakthrough. We can now purify the DNA for true manipulation, restriction digests and polymerase chain reaction. We have begun profiling.

Log 902:

Batch One of the Sentinels will be activated tomorrow morning. The team are insisting on celebrating the birthday of the Sentinels. I don’t approve.

Scott refers to the fifty as our ‘wondrous children’ while Harkness terms them the Nephylim. Coleman simply calls them the Pale Soldiers.

We will have to work on cosmetics once motor functions and other primal instincts have been successfully programmed. The Sentinels will be the world’s new peacekeeping force but mankind at large will only accept them if they do not seem threatening. We are developing them to protect us, after all.

Their albino appearance, a form of severe achromatosis, does give them an unsettling otherworldly appearance, I must admit. Of course, such a congenital disorder – the absence of pigment in the skin, hair and eyes – is common throughout all vertebrates. Recessive gene alleles result in defective tyrosinase, the copper rich enzyme which produces melanin. It is curious that this affects every one of the fifty Sentinels. They all share the same human DNA gene pool, however. Our very own chromosomes were used to bioengineer them – all five of us.

I suppose in a way Scott is therefore correct. We are all their fathers, the five members of the Development Team. Our mixed DNA provides the building blocks for us to engineer the Sentinels. But the other samples, those DNA slices we are given to play with from Subject One, I wish I knew more about them. Their complexity is fascinating.

Harkness tells me he believes that the mysterious Subject One is actually right here in the Norfolk base with us on one of the deeper, secured levels.

This may well be the case.

None of us know where the bio-samples come from; the other half of our DNA recipe.

Log 927:

It has been three weeks since the activation, or birth, of the Batch One Sentinels. Of the fifty originals, seven remain functional, the others are retired.

Seven are still alive, the rest are dead.

Trevelyan says we should have anticipated the violence levels. We have engineered them to this level of aggression ourselves, after all. But in our foolishness, we had thought there would be more control. They slaughtered one another – immediately after we woke them from stasis.

It was particularly brutal in the holding pen. We extracted seven who were merely unconscious. Better to do that than have to start afresh again with our DNA in Petri dishes and lose all our work so far. The military torched the dead ones. It still smells of burning fat down on this level. We have been promised relocation to a deeper subsection, but who knows when that will happen.

Harkness, Scott and Coleman work on extracting what useful material we can from the surviving Sentinels, while Trevelyan and I work on tweaking the primal chromosomal restraint levels to be inserted into batch two. The seven survivors of batch one will then be torched.

Log 934:

More samples from Subject One arrived today. We are still marvelling at the cellular structure it comprises. Coleman is convinced we are the British Area 51 and that the military have a captured alien down there somewhere beneath our feet. Where else could this DNA come from, he argues.

Log 1135:

Batch Eight. Our magnum opus at last. It has been two years since Batch One, and finally we have living, breathing, and above all else, compliant Sentinels.

Scott has now taken to calling them Übermensch, after Nietzsche’s theoretical supermen. I admit they are a dazzling and vital breed: stronger than humans, faster, denser, molecularly speaking, far more complex. Superior in almost every way, except of course that they are far more compliant than any human has ever been. I should hope so too. We made them to obey us.

Log 1256:

They have been active for seven months. So far from testing they have astounding levels of physical strength, endurance, and regenerative tissue capabilities. We cannot make them speak. All are mute but they fully understand and comply with our orders.

The one flaw we cannot seem to fix is the alopecia. Hair loss occurs shortly after full maturity on a full body scale. Again, with the albino condition, this does make for a startling appearance, but our government and military masters seem more than pleased with the results.

Harkness was granted shore leave last month. The only one of us to leave the base since the project began. He was heavily guarded, of course, for security’s sake. Imagine our surprise when he returned with the ring on his finger. He has married his girl, the young rascal. Good times are ahead, he says. Scott firmly believes our good work here will make us all rich beyond our wildest dreams.

Coleman and myself I feel are more idealistic than the others. We seem to want only to be remembered for bringing a tool of peace to our troubled world. Imagine an end to all war. A golden age of mankind is approaching, where our civilisation can finally flourish in perpetual peace. We will never again fear the uprising of a nuclear armed nation, never hear of a London bus exploding or a gas attack in Tokyo, because everywhere our Sentinels will be there. Our guardian angels, they are the strongest of us, the fiercest.

The ultimate deterrent.

Log 1384:

The military bosses came to oversee the handover today. Batch Eight is ready to be passed into higher hands than ours. They have been perfected, ready for mass production.

Bio-labs have already been prepared nationwide in Britain, with similar facilities worldwide in our allied countries. A proud moment for any father, I suppose, watching your children go forth into the world to multiply. This will be our legacy, Trevelyan told us. Our DNA, the five of us with help from the mysterious yet miraculous Subject One, cloned and living on forever to serve the people of the world.

I feel Harkness has spent too much time interacting with the Sentinels. It is in all our natures to be fascinated with what we have achieved here, of course, but he seems at times unsettled by them. They are placid enough, unless instructed otherwise, but he says he does not like their silence, and the way they watch us. It’s though they are all speaking to each other without words, he says.

We have wondered if some extreme instinctual bond has formed between them, a kind of latent, low-level telepathy resulting of their shared genetic heritage. But these are not tests for us to consider any longer. We have made a huge leap forwards, and soon everyone in it will know about them. I think it’s best for us to get back out there and live our lives, our children watching over us.

Log 1389:

This will be my final entry. Our team has been disbanded and there is little more for me to log or record other than my findings on our final night at the Norfolk base. Even now I am unsure what to make of it.

I record it here in the hope that whoever these reports are eventually filed with will make more sense of it. I assume those working in other levels of the base are required to make similar logs. I hope the records of whoever presides over Level Thirteen will shed more light on my discovery.

It was Coleman who came to us with the pass code. All through our long project here, it has been a constant source of speculation as to the origin of the samples from Subject One. Their DNA structure was so complex and so unlike our own models, our human contribution to the engineering of the Sentinels, or the Pales as we have all seemed to settle on calling our silent white super soldiers.

Coleman would not say where he had obtained the access codes to Level Thirteen. We all knew he had strokes of computing genius in him, but we did not know that in his hunger to know more, he had been steadily hacking every firewall and security code in the base. It was all under the radar, of course, covering his tracks.

I realise that by naming him here I am exposing him to dire consequences. It was, I suppose, treason, this breaking of high level military security, but if he is to be damned by his transgression then I must take the fall with him – for I admit that, despite my reservations, I was overcome with curiosity myself.

Please understand: we had to know what we had been working with these last five years. We are scientists, each of us.

Harkness, Trevelyan and Scott wanted nothing to do with our proposed breach. Let the record state that they cautioned us against it, even tried to talk us out of it. They would not accompany us. It is, in fact, testament to the strong fraternal bond which has by necessity grown between us over this five year project that they did not report us.

The base is sparsely manned now, being taken apart piece by piece. Most of the military personnel have already moved out. The Sentinels have been shipped out for cloning worldwide. Soon the world will be full of them.

We made our cautious way, Coleman and I, using the security elevator and the hacked codes my colleague had obtained.

What I found on Level Thirteen has raised more questions for me than it answered. There is a single laboratory on this deep level and one holding pen with the highest level security. We could not gain access to the pen itself but there was a viewing gallery, looking down to the pen itself.

What I saw is still hard to describe. It seemed a corpse, a single withered husk of a man laid out on the medical slab. The vast array of tubes and electrodes connected to its carcass made it difficult to discern much specifically, and from almost every angle the view was blocked by the many machines which surrounded it – their purposes I can only guess.