Perpetual Winter: The Deep Inn (25 page)

              “Okay,” Andrew decided, we’ll wait for you for two hours. If you don’t show up, we’ll carry on with our plan to attack Hendriks’ laboratory.”

              Lucas appeared with the two friends in a half hour. They had been summonsed to Hendriks’ office with a phone call from himself, but the police car sent to pick them up detoured from the route, going off base. That was when Lucas saw them, attacking the vehicle by throwing a high speed rock that destroyed its windshield, stopping the car. Now there was no doubt: Tyrell Hendriks wanted them killed. Crane was probably right—he’d already gotten what he wanted from them: their genes.

              This redoubled their desire to attack his laboratory. The old Deep Inn research center was probably not still active, but it was not impossible that it was since it was close to the Houston Spaceport Senator Hendriks liked to visit. Otherwise, they had no alternate plan. The seven continued the march in the fog. On the way, Lucas knocked out security, police, and military personnel with such ease that his companions realized that he was not just a bookish arms expert—he was a medieval combat machine, straight out of some untold fable.

              Arriving at the laboratory, they confirmed that Andrew had bet on the right horse. The code generating system was, indeed, the old one. They further realized that Hendriks cultivated his past, collected it, was incapable of abandoning it. He had a museum of everything he’d achieved, after which came his laboratory and then an exhibit of everything he hoped to achieve. A museum of the past and a museum of the future. He was a doctor and insane. For him, the normal world was nothing more than a hallucination of the healthy.

              There were wax statues of him everywhere, at his various ages, be they past or future, in areas that communicated with the laboratories as if they were chapels containing the stations of the Cross in Catholic Church’s Via Crucis. The last ones and the first were the most impressive. The first related not his human birth but his emergence. Instead of from a woman’s womb, he came from nature’s very elements—iron, fire, and ice. The last stations, those reporting facts that had not yet taken place, were no less disturbing. He was a man with a plan. His dream today, which had always been his dream, was being built in the same place as always and he was one step from finishing it. That last station was not his death but his glory. Eternal. He would be President of the United States and Chancellor of the Solar System. At the end, he was accompanied by his father, who was much younger than him. It was said that he supplanted Christ, because he ascended to Heaven without being crucified, opting for a less painful route.

              They searched through the labs and came across the production zone for fusion embryos, their children, some inside animal uteruses. Others, copies and copies of fusion embryos just a few days old, without human form, little more than morulae, chimeras frozen at an early stage, impeccably labeled according to genetic alleles, identified and ready to be implanted. They were the first step of the final staircase.

              They—the eight friends, because this demiurge did not know that, genetically, Mariah was a mere mortal—were the collection field, mutants captured, fed, and maintained as servants so Tyrell Hendriks could guarantee the emergence of a human being more capable of settling the solar system by way of martyring their descendants, using as many generations as he needed. Only then would they be “liberated” and sent to a distant world. If they were. First they would leave their seminal origins so the genius could play at being god. They did not understand why, for what reason he had dedicated himself to that task if he saw the arrival of the apocalypse on the horizon which, passing Jupiter, would pitilessly spit his sowing of new humans into the everlasting fire of the Sun. Even if man survived in orbital stations, when they returned, they would find a very different Earth without laboratories, cities, electricity or civilization that could support that project—as malign as it was sophisticated.

              Passing the area with the chimeric embryos, most of them frozen in the microscopic phase, following a hall, they came upon a large armored door, sealed with a password and baptized with the Latin word
Colleccion
.

              The door would not open using the code generating software in Andrew’s laptop, so deciphering the secret to opening that door was taking too long and their anxiety increased as the hours ticked by. At some given point, Lucas, who was sitting on the floor somewhat distant from the others who were discussing deciphering alternatives, said in a loud, but bored, voice, “Use the emulator for the Swabians’ Enigma.” They stared at him, trying to understand what he meant by Swabians, but then the expression Enigma for the German code during the Second World War drove that word away and permeated their thoughts, clarifying that Lucas was speaking of the Nazi code. They used it and it worked. Tyrell Hendriks had come up with the idea of taking advantage of the encryption system of those he designated as sons of bitches in order to seal that wing instead of the code generator that Andrew was familiar with.

              When the door opened, they entered a museum, once again of the future, not of the present or the past. Innumerous medium-sized glass domes communicated with a colossal aquarium that they crossed in a transparent acrylic tunnel anchored in steel structures like a mine. Inside each glass dome was a human fetus, several months old, preserved with its placenta at ninety degrees below zero. Not almost microscopic embryos, but perfectly formed fetuses, babies prior to birth, with human forms and faces. Worse yet, they were not fusion embryos, the fruit of embryonic and genetic manipulation. They were a different collection. Each panel that lit up when someone approached it described the characteristics of those fetuses coming from diverse countries, of these future people and their classification. In a row below, next to the floor, in smaller receptacles like small pictures or frames, multiple twin copies in the morula or embryonic state of the fetus above, in the dome. They were not clones: they were twins. No two were alike in the most advanced fetal state of a baby about to be born, but only several copies in the initial embryonic phase. The reserve. Dozens of glass capsules with fetuses from all over the world in suspended animation, glued to the glass of the aquarium that imprisoned them, with their eyes open as if they were seeing the visitors. A collection of human seeds, frozen in a private winter after sprouting and outlining their first leaves, ready for uterine reimplantation for the emergence of a new humanity, be they allies or servants of the new man.

              “This unit is protected from the rest of the lab,” Pierre said, who guessed the thoughts in Sofia’s, Mariah’s and Lucas’s tense faces. “If the rest disappears, this will remain. This part of the structure was designed to be transported easily and autonomously somewhere else,” Andrew said.

              Beyond the immense tunnel traversing the aquarium, there was another door, as protected as the first. It closed the autonomous zone. Immediately after, in an empty corridor that ended at a new door with the word Cunabula and bordered with the subtitle “Homo Glacialis Eximius, HGE 1
st
generation”; the new human subspecies. It was neither the present nor the future, but a new verb form: the future perfect.

              Also opened by Enigma, they entered the new wing, which was no more than a nursery with real children and which, in turn, faced the street. They were all sickly looking girls. On their skin you could see disperse tumors that grew like ulcerated mushrooms. They were ankylosed children, pregnant with stomachs disproportional to their size. Their immune systems must not have tolerated the sexual parasitism because they were infected. The oldest girls could not have been more than five years old. As proof of their humanity, upon seeing the young invaders, they called out for the mother they didn’t have and opened her arms. Their faces left no doubt: features of the alpha mutants’ daughters, granddaughters, or great granddaughters. The pain they all felt was a knife in the back.

              Tyrell was already preparing the first Homo Glacialis Eximius, despite having a collection of fetuses from which he could perhaps extract genes for improved versions. Lucas took the term “glacialis” personally. It was personal. Pain gave way to a rage that was difficult to contain, a maelstrom of images, mental photograms that were flipping, seeking a path that would lead to Tyrell, the enemy. He confirmed that he had a gun, a revolver stolen from one of the military policemen, and it was loaded. He only needed a way.

              Sofia was more practical. She grabbed the telephone and dialed 911, notifying them that there were sick girls, abandoned to their luck, at that location. She requested many ambulances for the many girls. She did not know the name of the street, but she knew the GPS coordinates. The laboratory, overall, was an enormous complex. A capital of science. As there were computer experts, engineers and scientists among the intruders, they’d been able to override the heat and smoke detection systems and had gathered explosives and fuel. They confirmed that the fetuses located in the protected tunnel’s aquariums would not suffer since they had their own autonomous ventilation and electric power, separate from the rest.

              After they saw the emergency rescue teams on the horizon, approaching the nursery, they set the cruel metropolis on fire. They incinerated that Hell, burning it to its underground foundations. Everything was torched, taking with it part of the past, part of the present and, they hoped, part of the future.

Chapter 21

Ascension to the Heavens

Having destroyed the laboratory, they quickly ran through the shadows until reaching a safe zone, in a small abandoned shack. They stopped there to decide what to do next. They heard the police and fire truck sirens crossing the streets and helicopters flying overhead, sweeping the ground with spotlights.

              In addition to Hendriks and his men, Lucas was still wanted by the long arm of Interpol, a sign there was no safe place for him, no matter where he went.

              “Neither for you nor for any of us,” Andrew said.             

              The others agreed. They seemed to have reached the end of the line. At that moment, Pierre had an idea and whispered, “There’s a place where their goons can’t reach us.”

              “Mars,” Lucas responded, with a sparkle in his eyes.

              “The eight continent...” Sofia said.

              “We’ve got to get back to the Spaceport. Nobody’s expecting us there,” Pierre confirmed.

              “How long until lift off?” Larissa asked.

              “One hour,” Mariah said. “One hour.”

              “Let’s go,” Andrew ordered. “Time’s running out.”

              All of the television stations opened with news about the accident that had destroyed a military lab in Houston while Tyrell Hendriks launched one of the largest manhunts ever seen in Texas. The police, dogs, the National Guard. He unleashed everything.

              The seven who had laid waste to the lab were secretly replaced with other astronauts in the space program by order of Hendriks. For the launch, their substitutes were wearing spacesuits with Sofia, Mariah, Lucas, Andrew, Pierre, Larissa, and Caroline’s names. They waved to the crowds, with closed helmets, and went straight to the ship. They entered the ramp that led to the access elevator for the very large space capsule, filmed by all of the television chains. They even hesitated before gaining access to the elevator, as would be expected, since they were embarking on a voyage of no return.

              When Hendriks was informed that the secret substitutes for the polar team’s seven members had been found, tied in the elevator, the launch countdown was at twelve. He immediately grabbed the direct red telephone and screamed an order to suspend the spaceship’s launch, but from the other side, they asked him to calm down and repeat his order, saying it was Pizza Hut. They also asked for his address and a telephone number for contact. He left his office and ran to the command and control center, shouting for them to stop immediately, but the noise of applause for the polar ship’s lift off kept them from hearing him. It was too late—the mutants were on their way to Mars.

              He asked for the elevator’s security footage and discovered that the seven were already there when the substitutes entered. There were also four armed men, wearing suits, ties and sunglasses who tied up the substitutes. He zoomed in on the four men’s faces. They were easy to identify—they all were dead ringers of Tyrell Hendriks himself.

              Seven minutes later, he received an alert from the Holy Ghost—a notification of maximum danger. There had been skirmishes among the Secret Services all over the United States and NSA had detected a large scale illegal CIA operation in Texas. They didn’t know what the CIA wanted or knew and they feared a civil war among the Secret Services. It was indispensable that Trinity have an extraordinary meeting and that Vice President Tyrell keep reinforced personal security twenty-four hours a day. They were afraid he was a target. Out there, the nine Argonauts’ families watched the launch of the gigantic rockets. It was something from out of this world.

              Meanwhile, the email with the digitalized letter that Sofia had hidden between the Tabriz pages of the old atlas traveled through the ether to its destinations, along with the program for a game or a virus that she had not understood but whose danger she had suspected. When it reached the FBI, it was forwarded to the section that selected emails based on the importance of the crimes related, falling to the bottom of a long list of apparently more serious complaints. Upon entering the White House, it was forwarded to public relations, that thanked them for sending it and promised to give it adequate attention. But the CIA had software that detected relevant names and it picked up the name of Anthony Crane. It was forwarded to the CIA’s Star Wars Section in milliseconds and two hours later they had sent it on to computer security. The following day, the telephone rang in the Director of Star War’s office and he didn’t like what he’d heard. The CIA’s director of computer security was alarmed by what the engineer who analyzed the software had told him. They conferred with the CIA’s Director who listened to them attentively and thanked them for their good work. He did not say anything to them, which was normal, but he made two telephone calls: one to Houston where he ordered an armed operation inside the United States. The local commander resisted, saying it was illegal but the Director said he took full responsibility. The second was to the President of the United States’ Chief of Staff, asking for a meeting with the President within the next two weeks. When the Chief of Staff asked him what subject he should place on the President’s schedule, the Director of the CIA answered that it was about the doubtful legality of the impending apocalypse.