The Rise and Fall of Khan Noonien Singh, Volume One (28 page)

They might as well have been speaking in Martian for all that Roberta intended to obey their commands. The race to rescue Seven had turned into a chase, with herself the primary quarry.
Shades of Berlin,
she thought, remembering the tumultuous and exhausting mission that had first launched her and Seven on the investigation that had eventually led her to this hidden stronghold, deep beneath the surface of the Indian desert.
How come I always end up running from gun-toting goons?

Keeping her head low, she spotted a small cluster of scientists milling about in an airy underground atrium, complete with a spewing marble
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fountain sculpted in the shape of a dolphin leaping above chiseled waves. Many of the white-jacketed workers appeared to be enjoying a late-afternoon cigarette, safely distant from the volatile chemicals back in their respective labs.

“Over there!” Roberta hollered to Isis, before plunging into the throng of stunned researchers. She barreled through the crowd at top speed, hoping to discourage her irate pursuers from opening fire, but her plan backfired when the onrushing guards called out to the civilians surrounding Roberta. “Stop her!” their angry voices demanded. “Don’t let her get away!”

A few brave scientists grabbed on to Roberta, hoping to hold her long enough for the security team to catch up with the apparent fugitive. “Hey, watch the hands!” Roberta objected indignantly.

Luckily for her, a couple of overeager lab jockeys were hardly a match for her hard-earned martial-arts expertise. She flipped one over her shoulder onto his back, while jabbing her elbow into another guy’s sizable gut. For a second, she thought she was free and clear, and started to race ahead once more, only to discover that yet another techie, more determined and/or foolhardy than the rest, had what felt like a death grip on her hair. She winced, her eyes watering, as he pulled mercilessly on her roots, until Isis doubled back and bit the clinging creep in the ankle. “Ow!” he yowled, letting go of her hair and hopping away on one foot.

Roberta made tracks before anybody else felt inspired to play catch-the-fugitive. “Thanks for the assist,” she murmured to Isis as they broke away from the crowd and veered toward a blessedly less populated corridor. Isis mewed a curt acknowledgment.

So much for losing my self in Chrysalis’s teeming employment pool,
she realized, resolving to keep away from any and all of Kaur’s loyal personnel from now on. A moment of inspiration struck her and she spun around, adjusting the setting on her servo, until the elegant marble fountain came within her sights.

ZAP! The sculpted dolphin exploded upon impact with a beam of invisible force, producing a geyser of unchecked water that sprayed wildly into the air, flooding the once-tranquil atrium. Shrieks of
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surprise from drenched technicians mixed with angry curses as Roberta turned her back on her torrential handiwork and ran down the nearest convenient tunnel.
Gee,
she thought ingenuously, grinning at her own brilliant improvisation,
I guess the monsoon came early this year.

“That should slow them down a little,” she muttered to herself, grateful for a momentary respite. Her legs were already sore from running so hard, and she was, she realized, panting like Bobby Riggs after Billie Jean King whipped his butt on the tennis court. She was running out of steam, she knew, but that ought to be
okay. Just need to put a little more distance between me and the bad guys,
she promised her fatigued legs and lungs.
Then I can look for a quiet corner to ’port out of.

It was a cardinal rule of Gary Seven’s, observed in all but the most extreme of instances, never to transport in front of witnesses, lest they expose primitive twentieth-century minds to the futuristic reality of matter-transmission technology. Scooting down a deserted-looking side corridor, Roberta scanned ahead, looking for a phone booth or a closet or any place where she and Isis could ’port away without fear of being observed by passersby.
Why is there never an abandoned bomb shelter around when you need one?

“Dr. Neary! Ronnie! Stop!”

A pair of figures stepped out in front of her, cutting her off as they called out her alias. Roberta almost tranquilized them with her servo, then realized that the men before her were none other than Takagi and Dr. Lozinak. “Don’t move!” she warned them, holding them at bay with a fountain pen, which must have looked vaguely ridiculous. “I’m serious. Trust me, this is more than just a pen.”

“We
did
trust you, Veronica,” Lozinak said pointedly. His ancient eyes held bottomless reservoirs of sorrow and resignation as he leaned wearily upon his wooden cane. “That is why this is such a disappointment.”

Roberta felt a stab of guilt. “Look, my name’s not Veronica,” she explained, as if that somehow justified her deception. “You have no idea who I really am.”

“
Apparently,” Lozinak reproached her, eliciting another pang from her conscience.

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“I can’t believe this!” Takagi exclaimed, visibly agitated. His face was flushed and his hands fluttered erratically. “How can you do something like this?”

Tension suffused the air-conditioned atmosphere of the subterranean tunnel. How very different this confrontation was, she thought, from that convivial dinner in Rome only a few days before.
That seems like weeks ago now.
“Sorry, guys,” she said in as tough and hard-boiled a tone as she could manage, doing her best to harden her heart in the best double-agent tradition. Would Modesty Blaise have any qualms about hoodwinking a pair of mad scientists?
Heck, no!
Roberta scolded herself, but she still had trouble looking Viktor Lozinak in the eyes.

“It’s nothing personal,” she insisted. Isis mewed impatiently, rubbing her head against Roberta’s leg to get her attention. The cat had the right idea, she realized; she didn’t have time for this. “Step aside,” she instructed the two scientists, gesturing toward the left with her free hand. “With any luck, you’ll never lay eyes on me again.”

“No,” Lozinak said firmly. He limped forward, clutching his cane like a weapon. “Whoever you are, I cannot permit you to endanger our work. The future of humanity is at stake. Everything else, our own small confidences and betrayals, do not amount to—what is the phrase?—a peak of peas.”

“Hills of beans,” Roberta corrected automatically. Behind her, from not very far away, she heard bootsteps and shouting. The sounds of pursuit, drawing nearer. “Please, Viktor, get out of the way.” She glanced quickly over her shoulder, not seeing any troops yet, but knowing they were on the way. Isis’s squawking grew more insistent. “Now is not the time to get all kamikaze on me.” She waved the servo like a talisman, but it failed to ward off the old man’s steady approach. “Don’t make me do this.”

Cane in hand, Lozinak advanced on Roberta. The boots and shouting sounded much closer now. Isis was practically turning herself inside out trying to get Roberta on the move again, but the human woman still hesitated, her fingers on the servo’s concealed controls.

“To stop Chrysalis you must stop me first,” Lozinak informed her
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solemnly. He raised his cane, perhaps intending to knock the servo from her hand.

You crazy old man,
she thought sadly. The servo hummed once and Lozinak collapsed toward the floor, his cane still clutched in his bony fist. Roberta spared a precious second to ease the elderly scientist’s descent, then stood up quickly to confront Takagi.

The younger man stared aghast at his fallen mentor, then looked at Roberta with shock and disbelief written all over his crestfallen face. He took a single step forward and opened his mouth to speak.

“Don’t!”
she cut him off decisively. She gave him a warning look that might have stopped a rampaging cybernaut in its tracks. Takagi got the message; nodding meekly he shut his mouth and stepped back against the wall while she hurried by. Roberta reached the intersection at the end of the tunnel, then looked back at Takagi. “One more thing, Walter. If anything happens to me, make sure my cat is okay.”

Takagi nodded once more.

Just a little insurance,
she thought.

“Halt! Stop or we’ll shoot!” A pair of guards appeared at the opposite end of the tunnel. They raised their weapons to fire, but Roberta and Isis had already fled around the corner, trying to keep out of sight of their relentless trackers. Roberta zigzagged through a maze of identical-looking tunnels, changing direction at random in hopes of shaking the determined guards.

This was harder than it sounded. No matter how fast she ran, or how wildly she detoured, she could still hear the persistent clatter and clamor of the security troopers in the distance, never less than a few turns behind her.

“ATTENTION!” a loudspeaker suddenly boomed overhead, adding to her anxiety. Roberta recognized the familiar cadences of Sarina Kaur. “INTRUDER ALERT! BE ON THE LOOKOUT FOR A BLOND-HAIRED AMERICAN FEMALE, APPROXIMATELY TWENTY YEARS IN AGE. SHE IS BELIEVED ARMED AND DANGEROUS. REPORT ALL SIGHTINGS TO SECURITY IMMEDIATELY!”

Okay, things are getting seriously out of hand,
Roberta thought as Kaur
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repeated the announcement in Hindi and Japanese. The hunt was heating up almost as fast as she was running down. Adrenaline could only carry her so far, she knew; her legs already felt like they weighed a hundred pounds each, and her breaths were coming harder and harder. The indefatigable guards weren’t giving her a moment’s rest, never mind a chance to call up the Blue Smoke Express.
Gotta keep on going,
she coached herself on.
Just a little bit longer.

Her flight soon led her to an out-of-the-way sector of Chrysalis that she didn’t believe she had ever visited before. The lonely corridor was conspicuously deserted, while the bare concrete walls were devoid of any color or ornamentation.
Definitely off the beaten track,
she concluded.
Just what I need, maybe.
She could hear the guards gaining on her, and realized with horror that she might have reached a dead end.

The barren hallway led to a single unmarked door at the far end of the tunnel. There was absolutely no indication of what lay beyond, but Roberta didn’t exactly have a choice. Through the door was the only way to go.

She tried the door, swearing under her breath when she found it locked. That slowed her for merely a moment, though, as she zapped the lock with her servo, then turned the knob again, finding it much more cooperative this time around.
Better than a Swiss Army knife,
she thought approvingly of her handy, all-purpose, alien gadget, smiling at this small success. She hurriedly shut the door behind her as she dashed through the now-open portal, looking back momentarily to make sure she didn’t close the door on Isis’s sinuous black tail.
Please,
she thought,
let there be nobody in sight.

Instead she found herself the focus of many small, wide eyes. “Ohmigosh,” she murmured.

At first, Roberta thought she had simply stumbled onto another classroom full of bright, genetically engineered superchildren, just like the one she had visited before. Very quickly, however, she realized, with a sinking heart, that this was a very different assortment of kids.

The walls of the chamber were padded and covered with incomprehensible graffiti. Cushioning the walls was an obvious necessity, given that one child—a little boy with strangely leonine features—was busy
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pounding his mutated forehead against the wall repeatedly, with no one present making any serious effort to restrain him. A few children shrieked hysterically at Roberta’s abrupt arrival, but just as many kids paid no attention to her at all, staring autistically into space, or engrossed in one-sided conversations with themselves, often in bizarre private tongues that even Roberta’s automatic translator couldn’t make sense of. One little Asian girl, who looked about five years old, rocked back and forth on her knees as she carried on a singsong chanting that seemed to incorporate fragments of several different languages, while a pale, gnomish child, whose cheek twitched uncontrollably, kept counting his own toes over and over with a frightening degree of concentration. He looked up from his task just long enough to register Roberta’s existence, then went back to counting with renewed intensity. Nearby, a small boy with dark black bangs copied everything the toe-counting child did, facial tics included. “Mr. Eygor!” a nearby tattletale cried out. “Jarod is copying people again. Make him stop! Make him stop now!”

Elsewhere in the crowded classroom, an industrious toddler scribbled on the walls with a thick black crayon. Roberta couldn’t make head nor tail of his jagged scrawlings, which, in places, resembled mathematical equations, Egyptian hieroglyphics, obscene stick figures, or some warped combination thereof. Just looking at the markings, which were scribbled over several previous generations of graffiti, frequently spilling out onto the thickly cushioned floor, made Roberta feel vaguely queasy. A few feet away, another child, not content to write upon the walls or floor, adorned his own arms and legs with intricate swirls and curlicues. Out of context, her avid self-decoration would have been cute, perhaps, but surrounded by so much other peculiar behavior on the part of her classmates, it was difficult not to see even this harmless pastime as evidence of a deeper and more pathological disorder.

Appalled and dismayed by what she saw, Roberta’s heart nearly broke completely when she spotted the little epileptic sculptor from the earlier class, now sobbing forlornly in a corner of the room, clearly frightened and distressed by her unsettling new classmates and
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sur
roundings. “Let me guess,” Roberta said bitterly, her eyes stinging with angry tears. “This would be the Developmental Deviations Unit.”