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By Root 1449 0

generating new code faster than the system broke the old code, causing the system’s outgoing mail to increase exponentially. And each new antidote-paired copy of the virus contained an embedded packet of active code that attacked the receiving system and sent yet another help request shooting back to the virus zoo.

In twelve seconds the off-site provider’s network exceeded capacity, locked up, and went down. The target was cut out of the flock, and Cohen was ready to go to work in earnest.

Li maxed her realspace feed. Her squad was still sampling tank contents. They moved systematically down the rows of tanks, scanning and logging their contents. No search and destroy on this mission, just information-gathering.

she told them. She went back on-line just in time to watch Cohen fish a series of clearance codes out of the lab’s personnel files and drop into the database as a system administrator. she queried.

And back to realspace.

They were running late. Li sent Shanna and the two new recruits over to the far end of the lab, signaling that she’d cover the middle rows herself. They were flirting dangerously with missing their retrieval, and she didn’t want to contemplate the possibility of a delayed pickup in the dust storm that was still raging above ground. Nor did she want to find out the hard way that Soza hadn’t arranged backup retrieval.

A few rows away, Dalloway stopped and put a hand into an open tank. He jerked it out and waved it in front of him while a rainbow oil slick of mutating viruses and counterviruses battled across it.

Then one of the newbies screamed.

A short scream; Shanna clapped a hard hand over his mouth before it really got started. But when Li saw what the two of them were looking at, she couldn’t blame the kid.

The tank had a body in it. All the tanks at that end of the lab had bodies in them. They were women. Or, more precisely, one woman: smallish, recognizably Korean—a rarity in and of itself in this fourth century of the human diaspora—and brown-skinned despite the artificial pallor induced by water and lab lights.

Dalloway said uncertainly.

Li said.

But this was no approved wetware she’d ever seen.

She looked into the tank in front of her. Took in the bar codes stamped on the sallow flesh, the atrophied limbs, the silver glint of ceramsteel filament twining through exposed nerve cells. At first glance the wetware being grown here was no different from the AI-supported wire job every soldier in the squad was equipped with, or even from the civilian VR rigs rich teenagers used to surf streamspace. But this wetware was growing in adult bodies, not viral matrix. And the pale, submerged faces were too identical, too regular, too inhumanly perfect to be anything but genetic constructs.

Li stared at the bodies, caught by an echo, a wisp of memory that skittered away like a spooked horse every time she tried to lay hands on it. Was this a geneline she’d seen before? On Gilead? Were they culturing wetware for Syndicate soldiers? And why? Who would be crazy enough to risk it?

she asked Shanna.

Li checked their time. Seven minutes, twelve seconds.

Cohen answered, this time on a private link.

Li made sense of Cohen’s words just as Shanna pulled up the first DNA read.

“They’re constructs,