The Gates of Winter - Mark Anthony [136]
33.
Dr. Ananda Larsen leaned forward in the desk chair and drummed her fingers beside the computer keyboard. The writeable disk drive whirred as a progress bar crept across the screen. Fifty-seven percent.
“Come on,” she whispered, her face bathed in the ghostly phosphorescence of the monitor.
For the last three weeks, she had been timing how long it took the security guard to make a complete round of the building. The average was just over twenty-three minutes with a standard error of two minutes. She glanced at the wall clock. It had been exactly sixteen minutes since the guard had walked past the lab and she had darted in behind him.
It wasn't unusual for researchers to be in Building Five after hours; many experiments, particularly those involving PCR gene sequencing, required observation around the clock. However, regulations required that the researcher notify security first, and she was not about to tell the guard what she was up to.
Her tortoiseshell-rimmed glasses slipped down her nose; she pushed them back into place. Seventy-eight percent.
Maybe she should have chosen a few files instead of copying the entire directory. Except there hadn't been time to sort through everything during the day. Dr. Adler was always looking over her shoulder, curious what she was doing—and no doubt hoping to see something he could use. As far as she could tell, Barry Adler had never had an original scientific thought in his life; all he could do was steal from others.
And that's what makes him perfect for this place, Ananda. Duratek doesn't create anything—you've seen that. All it ever does is copy the work of others, then dispose of the ones who created it.
As they would dispose of her the moment they learned what she was doing. But they would have done it soon enough anyway. After all, if they got their hands on what she had learned today, they wouldn't need her anymore.
The computer emitted a chime, and Larsen nearly jumped from her seat as a tray popped out, bearing a silvery minidisk. She took the still-warm disk, snapped it inside a case, and slid it into the pocket of her lab coat. She typed a command on the keyboard and pressed Enter. A new message appeared on the screen.
Deleting . . .
They would have archived versions of the files, but the backup programs didn't run until after midnight, which meant they would never be able to recover today's results. And it was the data Larsen had collected that afternoon that had finally convinced her to go forward with her plan.
Last October, after the sudden and violent termination of the project she had been working on in Denver, Duratek had transferred her here, to their facility just outside Boulder, and had placed her on a new project. At first, after what she had witnessed in Denver, research had been the last thing on her mind. However, over the course of the last five months, her need to learn and discover had returned, and she had immersed herself in her new work. No doubt they had been counting on that. It was why they had hired her in the first place.
Until last October, working for Duratek had been the pinnacle of her career. In Denver, Larsen had been part of an incredible project: a member of a team studying two extraworldly beings. True, she had never interacted directly with the being cataloged as E-1. However, she had read the reports, had seen the test results, and had sequenced its blood. It was more than enough to convince her that what they said was true—that this creature was alien to Earth.
Less alien in appearance was the other subject, E-2, with whom she had worked more closely. He had looked like a Viking warrior transported from another century. Only it was another world he had come from, just like the being E-1.
At the time, it appeared all her choices had been vindicated. Even in graduate school, her views had been too radical for the musty world of academia. Her idea to use gene therapy to enhance the mental functioning of nonhuman mammals had made the professors on her