GM

GM

Alan Porter

Eyelevel Books

GM

Alan Porter

Copyright Alan Porter 2015

This edition published by Eyelevel Books at Smashwords

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each reader. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

And the fox said to the little prince:

men have forgotten this truth,

but you must not forget it.

You become responsible, forever,

for what you have tamed.

Antoine de Saint-Exupery

You can out-distance that which is running after you,

but not what is running inside you.

Rwandan proverb

Chapter One

Something was changing in Hangar 17. For the first half hour the swarm had spread out across the field, leaving a fan-shaped trail of destruction behind it. Now its progress had begun to slow, its area of operation already beginning to contract. In the area of flattened rice Dr Whitelock looked down on, there were large patches of the crop left untouched. And there were bodies, dozens of them.

The green light on the roof of the observation booth flashed and Rachel Whitelock condemned another of the creatures to an icy death in the holding jars. Sample Six, time-stamped to match up with the dozens of photographs taken by the ceiling-mounted cameras and the mass of data taken by the sensors throughout the hangar. She stowed the collection pipe in its holder and knelt at the edge of the walkway. The characteristic tangle of shredded and stripped grasses lay where the locusts had been active. But deeper, down on the glistening floor of the drained hydroponic channels, she could see bodies scattered among the remains of the rice. There weren’t dozens; already there were hundreds.

The temptation to remove the helmet to get a clearer view was powerful. She even reached for the zip before a cold tingle ran down her spine and the remains of Dowty and Shaw swam like ghosts before her eyes. The swarm had ignored her as it rolled over the walkway like black fire, but they could easily turn around as soon as they sensed exposed human flesh. They’d done it before in the disastrous L103 tests. Two men had died and Whitelock herself had paid a high price to get the experiment even to this stage. But this was only the beginning.

The mesh of steel fibres in the glove made fine control difficult and it took several attempts to get hold of one of the bodies. She rocked back and held the creature up to the visor.

‘What do you see?’ Huppert’s voice in her ear made her jump and she almost lost hold of the insect.

‘Well, its eating days are over,’ she said.

‘How bad?’ She winced as the earpiece crackled.

‘Not too much. The head’s missing, but there’s no other damage.’ She looked towards the ever-diminishing swarm. They were still advancing on the observation booth at the centre of the hangar.

‘Bring it in,’ Huppert said.

Another pulse of green light flashed out across the paddy. Dr Whitelock dropped the headless locust into an open pocket on the outside of the suit and got to her feet. With the collection nozzle back in her hand she stepped down into the field and advanced on the swarm.

Looking out across the destruction she could see just how much their behaviour was changing. At the current rate of contraction all the creatures would meet about thirty feet from the observation booth, where their attack would finally burn itself out. Fifteen thousand starving locusts would have destroyed barely ten per cent of the crop. Even the most optimistic models had not predicted that. If the results scaled, a super-swarm of eighty million locusts could be destroyed in just over five hundred acres.

With the nozzle of the collector fully extended she pressed the button on the control panel. There was a whoosh of air, but no familiar clunk. She took a step forwards and tried again. This time there wasn’t even an intake of air.

‘Problem?’ Huppert said in her ear.

‘No.’

‘You need to get a sample. We’re T plus thirty seconds.’

‘I’m getting it.’

She drew the nozzle back in on itself and looked down the open end. There did not appear to be any blockage. Again she pressed the button, and again there was no sound of air being sucked into the chamber.

She was about to reach for the pliers on her belt when a locust crawled from the end of the tube. Its wings beat lazily and it flew with a heavy crack into the visor. She recoiled and dropped the pipe, swatting at the helmet with her left hand. She missed; the locust clung to the rivets that held the perspex into the helmet, seeming to look in at her.

‘Dr Whitelock?’

She did not reply. She tried to focus on the monstrosity that was heaving itself across her visor. A trail of thick white fluid dribbled down the transparent plastic.

‘Dr Whitelock! Is the suit compromised?’

‘No. It’s…’

‘What? What is it? We can’t see a thing in here, it’s too close to the camera.’

‘It’s badly damaged…’

‘But it’s moving…’

‘The body’s thrashing; fluid’s still pumping from the spiracles. It’s lost all but the meta-thoracic legs. Huppert, this thing should have been dead long ago.’

‘Get a sample. Quickly!’

Rather than pursue the swarm, Dr Whitelock grabbed the nozzle and applied it to the creature on her visor. This time it was unable to resist the pull of the vacuum and it thumped into the collection jar where its state of mutation was frozen for later examination.

‘I think it’s about time you released Huey,’ she said. ‘We’re well into the end-game now.’

‘Roger. Get back to the walkway. He may need some encouragement.’

‘There’s no time. I need to stay with the swarm.’

A hatch over by the decon chamber hissed open and the sound of inquisitive bleating drifted across the field.

Once more the entomologist moved closer to the rippling movement in the rice. Around her feet she could see the bodies of thousands of the creatures now. By the time she reached the edge of the remaining group, it had contracted to a patch barely ten feet across.

Most of the remaining locusts had formed into clumps of some dozen or so insects, clambering over each other as the individual at the centre of the cluster clung to a stalk of rice. Body parts rained down from the clusters; legs, wings, shredded abdominal segments, heads. Now and then more complete insects fell from the writhing ball; Whitelock was astonished at how long some of them managed to keep up the fight with so much of their bodies eaten away.

‘Where’s Huey?’ she said.

‘He’s on his way. He’s almost as far as the booth. If they’re interested, they’ll smell him any time now.’

‘I’m going to take more samples,’ she said. ‘I’ve got eight jars left, and this thing’s not going to last much longer.’

‘Whatever you think,’ Huppert said. ‘From what we can see on the monitors, they’ve more or less given up on the rice. There’s very little damage in front of you.’

Dr Whitelock agreed with part of that. There was very little damage to the crop, but there was catastrophic damage to the swarm.

She sucked another of the creatures into the collection chamber and stopped. She leaned over one of the clumps of insects. There were maybe ten arranged in a tight ball (it was hard to tell exactly; there were probably not enough body parts to make three complete locusts all told).

‘Are you getting this?’ she said.

‘We can see the clusters. What are they doing?’

‘They’re tearing each other apart.’

‘That’s what they’re supposed to be doing.’

‘They’re meant to turn cannibal to defend their food supply, but they’re not feeding any more. Their sole driving force is to destroy. This is way beyond anything we predicted.’

Over the next five minutes she took seven more samples, each of an increasingly shredded insect, but all of them alive when they entered the collection jars. After that, there was very little point in going on. Almost all the locusts were dead. The mutation had reached its natural threshold.

She pushed her way through the rice to the wooden walkway and placed the sampler well away from the edge. Huey looked at her, bleated, then looked at her some more. He wasn’t going to venture down into the rice, and what was left of the swarm was not going to venture onto the walkway. Ten minutes ago Huey might have earned his oats, but at this late stage his continued healthy existence proved nothing. He had been released too late for the swarm to pay him any attention at all. The test would be heralded as a resounding success, but Whitelock was not about to sanction field trials until they were sure of one last detail.

Leaving Huey by the sampler, she walked back towards what remained of the swarm. A few individuals still clung to ears of rice, though none of the balls remained. Her feet crunched over the tattered remains of thousands of locusts that had fallen like autumn leaves into the hydroponic channels on the ground.

It took a few minutes to find one that was still alive enough for her needs. She found it clinging to the underside of a broken ear of rice. White fluid covered its carapace, but the level of damage it had sustained was minimal. Either it had hidden from the rest of the swarm, or it was an unusually aggressive mutation. She closed her hand around it and fumbled through the corpses at her feet until she found another that was still moving. She examined it on the flat of her gloved left hand (its head and thorax were undamaged but the wings and most of the abdominal section were badly shredded), then brought it close to the intact insect. Immediately, the locust on the rice ear attacked. It fluttered onto the palm of her hand and began to slash wildly with its mandibles. Its attack was unfocussed, but it was effective. In under ten seconds, the insect rescued from the ground had been reduced to a scattering of glistening body parts. It was certainly an aggressive mutation.

She glanced back to where she had left the sampler, but Huey was nowhere to be seen. The final test would have to be done alone.

With her free hand, she began to unzip the join between the sleeve and glove of her suit.

‘Dr Whitelock? What are you doing?’ Huppert said.

‘Taking the final reading.’

She began to remove the glove with the locust still on it.

‘Don’t compromise the suit! Just get out of there, we’ll deal with the rest.’

‘There is no rest. I doubt there’s more than a dozen left alive in here.’

‘And one of them’s on your glove. Put it in the sampler, and get out. That’s an order.’

‘Art, I’m not one of your old army buddies. I don’t take orders.’

‘No, but I’m still your boss, and I’m telling you to reseal the suit and get to decon.’

‘I know what I’m doing. The forms have been signed, so you won’t get sued.’

Art Huppert did not speak again. She could hear him breathing in her ear, the sound merging with her own heavy heartbeat.

With the glove removed, she reached for the insect with her bare hand. Dowty and Shaw had died in the L103 test because no one considered that the swarm would be attracted to mammalian flesh. The insects had not been designed to be and the researchers had worn minimal protective clothing. Jim Dowty had been the first to be attacked. David Shaw had attempted a rescue, but it had been too late for either of them. There had been no means of stopping the swarm back then, not even the napalm tanks in the ceiling to put the two men out of their misery. All Huppert and his lab rats could do was watch as the two men were stripped clean and the security guards ran round donning protective suits and readying the flame-throwers.

Since then, the geneticists had made some refinements and run dozens of tank tests.

The basic principle was the same as it had been back with L103. It was not the locusts that had been modified, it was their food source. To the standard Oryza glaberrima rice genome the labs had spliced two alien genes. The first was from Euphyllia coral, incorporated to make the plants fluoresce slightly under UV-heavy tropical light. The glow would attract insects to the bait crop from a long way off, in the same way as the electric fly-killers attracted bluebottles in certain kinds of restaurant. The second gene, the important gene, came from a rare African sugarbush, Protea lyssa, found only in a handful of locations in eastern Congo. This had been Whitelock’s real breakthrough, and it had nearly cost her her life to get it. This addition was what gave the rice its astonishing power to alter the insects’ behaviour and turn them into their own means of destruction. But L103 was imperfect; the cannibalistic behaviour it induced was undirected and two men had paid a high price for the lab’s oversight. L611, with its single switched C-G pairing in the lyssa gene, was the perfected strain. All the tank tests proved it, but out here in the field, in the aftermath of a major insect civil war, who knew? Huey had been drafted in to see what they would make of mammalian prey but he had arrived on the scene too late. And now he’d gone walkabout.

She shook the locust onto her bare palm. Her heart beat furiously, the only sound in the dead air of her protective suit. Huppert had killed his end of the comms channel. For a moment the locust rested on her warm flesh. Then it began to move. Slowly, it crawled along her hand and up her index finger. At the tip it paused, probing the soft skin with its mandibles. It did not break the skin and there was none of the frantic movement she had seen earlier.

She was about to brush it off when it fluttered its wings. With some difficulty it took to the air and flew a few feet into the crop. It landed on an ear of rice then simply dropped to the ground out of sight. It was either exhausted or dead, and the chance of finding it to determine which was almost nil. All that mattered now was that Dr Whitelock still had all her fingers.

She let out a long slow breath and her earpiece crackled.

‘You satisfied now?’ Huppert said quietly.

‘Yes,’ Whitelock replied.

‘Then get out so we can lock it down.’

‘On my way.’

With a final look out across the swathes of untouched rice, she returned to the walkway to collect the sampler. If any further specimens were required, they could be retrieved later by techies from the labs. After that the remaining crop would be harvested for the field tests along with that from Hangars 15 and 16.

Huey watched from the door of the decon chamber as Whitelock made her way back across the hangar. She unzipped the suit’s hood as she walked and shook her hair out as the fresh air began to cool the sweat on her face. Steel reinforced neoprene was not the coolest material to be wearing in a tropical paddy field. She pressed the button to open the first door and she and Huey stepped in. Another thirty seconds and she would be able to feel real air, see real sunshine and leave the sterile killing field of Hangar 17 behind her.

Lined up in the wide outer corridor that ran between the inner and outer walls were a dozen men in plastic protective overalls, goggles and dust masks. As Whitelock left, they filed in through the decon chamber to start the clean-up inside the hangar. Their job was little more than to walk the irrigation lines to check for pockets of locusts still left alive, though by now no one really thought there would be any. After that they would reset the air conditioners to dry the crop and turn the actinic lights off, leaving only the dull yellow rays of the low energy bulbs.

Whitelock stood outside for a few minutes, drinking from a bottle of ice-cold water. She took the pack of Marlboro Menthols from her pocket and shook one out. She looked at it for a moment then shook it back again. Maybe today was a good day to start the rest of her life.

She walked back into the hangar and took a mask and pair of goggles from the lockers beside the main door. She then made her way back through the decon chamber and across the field to the booth at its centre. As the men walked the lines out in the artificial paddy, she watched. With the hangar’s fans off, little droplets of condensation gathered on the booth’s outer window. The view of the workers was fractured into a kaleidoscope of ant-like activity and the field was silent except for the gentle rustle of the crop, a sound like distant fire.

A tingle of excitement ran through her. Since she had left Zaire seventeen years earlier with the first seeds of this idea in her mind, everything else in her life had been secondary to this project. It had taken years for the technology behind GM to become advanced enough to do what she needed it to do, but it had. Since then, despite the appearance of living a normal, productive life, every move she had made had been calculated to push her further along the path to bringing this seed of an idea to fruition.

And now the crop had proved its ability, she could move on.

Now, at last, she could put into operation the plan that had driven her for almost half her life.

Chapter Two

It was past midnight. Light and noise drifted up from the city, bringing with it exotic smells and the occasional sharp report that, these days, was probably just some kid letting off firecrackers.

Mitchel Behane allowed the binoculars to drift down towards the streets. The boss lifted them again with the tip of his walking stick. The ship was still just a cluster of twinkling dots on the dark horizon, but they knew this was the one they were waiting for.

The Karamov was an ageing red and black hulk out of Marseilles. It plied the routes between Europe and West Africa, often moving on down the coast to Cape Town. At one time it would move on up the east coast to pick up coffee and tea, but piracy had put paid to that. It was a small ship, carrying maybe two thousand twenty- or forty-foot containers, bringing aid supplies in and taking fair trade goods out. Bengara was always its first stop. When it left, it was often with a few rough diamonds hidden in the captain’s private quarters, but when it arrived it regularly carried something that was of even more value to the Freedom Brotherhood.

If nothing else, it brought containers which, once landed and freed from the port, made very profitable little condos that the Brotherhood rented out along the main I-6 out of the city. Since the end of the war they had set up so many such dwellings that even the police referred to that stretch of the I-6 as Maersk Road, since that was what was painted on the side of every house. But it was not just containers he was waiting for tonight.

The good old EU Aid programme, fronted this time by the optimistically named Future Farming Alliance, was rumoured to be sending tractors, ploughs, threshers, parts for grain silos and even a pop-up bagging plant, God bless them. In this stultifying peace Colonel Jelani fancied himself as a bit of a farmer – or at least a farm supplier – and he intended to make good use of whichever bits of that generous donation were destined for the Eastern provinces.

He lay back and pulled the brim of his stained and frayed cricket hat down over his face. The hat was functional and ironic. He loathed cricket as much as he loathed the old colonialists that indulged in it. The only rules he respected were those of the military; arbitrary, ritualised order made his flesh crawl.

Tonight he wore plain dark trousers and had forgone his camouflaged jacket in favour of a simple dark blue shirt. Only the heavy black boots remained of his military persona. To a casual passer-by he and Behane were just a couple of regular guys out watching the stars and dozing in the sticky night.

Behane took the binoculars from his eyes, but kept watching the twinkle of the Karamov’s lights just the same.

An hour and a half later the ship docked and cranes began to relieve her of some three hundred or so containers. Colonel Jelani himself scanned the port with the binoculars, nodding slightly as he did so.

‘There!’ Behane said. Jelani glanced at him then trained the binoculars on the little house just outside the port. What had previously been just another shack burning a dim white light in its windows now appeared red. It was a simple and effective signal. When Amadu had seen the target cargos off the Karamov and the trucks checked out of the port, he’d walk the three blocks to his house and drape an old red shawl over the lamp. Four out of five times the lamp stayed white, indicating that the cargo was all UN or military (the Brotherhood hadn’t graduated to ripping off either of them yet), and they would all convene for a beer at Jojo’s on East Road. Tonight the light went red. Tonight was what they had been waiting for.

Mitchel Behane helped the colonel up, passed him his walking stick and opened the passenger door of the Land Cruiser. Jelani was not a big man – five-eight and narrow in the shoulder, which made his head look slightly too large for his body. In most walks of life he might be dismissed as insignificant, someone on the unfortunate side of ordinary, but what he lacked in raw muscularity he more than made up for in ruthlessness. A twelve-year-old farm worker could have beaten him in an arm wrestle without breaking a sweat, except that Jelani would have blown his head off before they’d even locked hands.

With the boss in the back seat, Behane got in and began to drive down the scrubby hillside away from the city. There was no hurry; the checkpoint was ready and Amadu would get to it long before either he or the little convoy of trucks were clear of the watchful eyes of the capital.

They joined the I-6 at Maersk Road and turned inland. Colonel Jelani flicked the cabin light on and did a cursory check of the two Kalashnikovs that he kept stowed beneath a rug on the back seat. He removed the magazine, checked the chamber and bolt and test-fired the empty weapon at the back of Behane’s head. He did the same with the second, but this time rather than just reassembling it and putting it aside, he squeezed out a short burst of automatic fire through the window. Bullets pinged off a roadside warehouse and shell casing pinged off the car roof above him. Behane barely flinched.

Satisfied that the two old AKs had a good chance of not blowing up if the situation required them to be fired, he propped them between his legs and turned his attention to his own pistol. He preferred his vintage Beretta M9 to the unwieldy and unreliable AKs. The M9 was useless at distance, but satisfying close up and it could be fired accurately with one hand, a consideration for a man who relied on a walking stick. He’d made his first kill with this gun, and he’d been using it ever since. He called it Stanley.

With Stanley cradled in his lap, the colonel dozed, his cricket hat once more pulled down over his eyes and the stone he wore around his neck on a simple gold chain bouncing on his almost fleshless chest. It was his deep regard for inner strength and passionate dislike of outward show that meant the stone remained uncut. At a glance it was no more than a dirty pebble. Only someone who could appreciate what lay beneath the surface would recognise it for what it was, and what it represented. His people had spilled blood for stones like these, stones stolen from Africa for the kinds of people Jelani despised most in the world. The kinds of people, for example, who thought that cricket was a civilising sport.

The shanty dwellings of the suburbs gave way to fields of cassava and sorghum; the fields gave way to scrubby bush punctuated by stands of bananas and palms. The main I-6, paved only twenty miles or so beyond the city’s edge, was now just a wide strip of packed earth that stretched arrow-straight into the distance. They drove on in silence for another hour, past the main arterial roads that peeled off to the north and south, past the hilly, depopulated town of Amerville and on into the dark heart of Bengara. Into the place that Ato Jelani still considered home.

‘We nilly there,’ Behane said. The colonel snapped awake. Dawn was just beginning to tint the horizon ahead of them a subtle pink while the world behind them – the world out of which the container convoy was due to emerge – was still inky black. A warthog sow trotted across the road in front of the car, followed by three piglets. Within seconds the little family had been swallowed by the bush.

‘Kill the lights,’ he said. Behane flicked the switch on the steering column and darkness filled the road ahead. He slowed a little until his eyes grew accustomed to the gloom. There were no lights, no other signs of human presence, but it paid to be careful. The police had been watching the checkpoint on and off for the last three months.

Less than five minutes later the checkpoint loomed into view. It had been built during the war as a marker between government-controlled territory and the wild badlands held by groups such as the Brotherhood. When the government prevailed these checkpoints had been abandoned. But in a tradition that stretched back through generations of the Jelani family, Ato made good use of anything that was left lying around. The checkpoint was far enough out of the city that very few civilian vehicles passed it, but it had the benefit of being on the only road fit to take heavy trucks destined for the interior.

Behane swung the Land Cruiser off the road and along the side of the little hut. He came to a stop where it could still be seen from the road and turned the engine off. Amadu’s Suzuki DR350 stood some distance behind the hut, its engine ticking gently as it cooled in the morning air. There were no other vehicles.

Jelani opened his door and swung his legs out, then hauled himself upright, leaning heavily on his stick. His damaged left foot could give him hell if he had been immobile for too long.

‘Kabo,’ Behane called softly. Out of the bush, still too far away to have heard the greeting, the wiry figure of Amadu emerged.

‘OK?’ he said as he approached.

‘OK,’ Jelani said. ‘How many trucks?’

‘Five,’ Amadu said. ‘Two grain, three container.’

‘Machinery?’

Amadu nodded.

‘Good. Now we wait.’

They had done this many times before, sometimes successfully, often not. East-bound convoys came this way all right, but some were more susceptible to the lure of the roadblock than others. Foreign drivers were easy meat. They knew all too well the dangers of these roads, and the necessity of accommodating the requests of anyone in authority, whether by showing papers and answering questions or greasing the local economy with bribes. If, however, the drivers were local, these canny men, sometimes ex-Brotherhood soldiers themselves, ignored the checkpoint as often as not and Colonel Jelani was not inclined to shoot his own people unless he was desperate. Today’s drivers had the misfortune to be rostered onto a job when Jelani was beginning to get desperate. Whoever was behind the wheel of the lead truck, he was stopping here. It had been four months since the last convoy carrying anything more than fertiliser or building materials, and it could be as long again until the next one.

Mitchel Behane took three high-vis jackets from the back seat of the Land Cruiser, put one on over his t-shirt and threw the others to his comrades. Colonel Jelani slipped his on over the blue shirt that in the half-light of dawn, or against the rising sun behind him, was a very passable facsimile of a regulation Presidential Investigation Unit, or PIU, shirt. That and a reflective vest was all it took to change bandits into officials out here. By the time a passing stranger was close enough to ask questions (which most of them never did anyway), they were within range of Stanley. Jelani always did the talking, and Stanley backed him up. Once the operation was under way Behane and Amadu and their flaky AK-47s were just window dressing.

The final piece of dressing that this pantomime required was the big sign that Amadu now attached to the side of the Land Cruiser so that it could be seen for at least half a mile back along the road. Years of uneasy peace had lent considerable authority to these three blue letters on a plain white background, emblematic of the government’s secret police. ‘PIU’ carried more weight than guns out here.

With