Read Project Nemesis (A Kaiju Thriller) for Free Online

really understood how he got the eyebrow so high on his forehead, but everyone knew what it meant. You missed something obvious, which wasn’t always true. Sometimes what Gordon considered obvious was a mystery to the rest of the world.
    She looked behind her, half expecting to see Endo there, leveling a gun at her forehead, but all she saw was the curved back wall of the white lab. A row of computer stations and hardware lined the wall of the round room. Centrifuges, nucleic acid extraction systems, a fluorescent spectrophotometer, incubators, DNA hybridization ovens, heat and cooling baths, electron and florescent microscopes and a long freezer—everything required for a multitude of biological sciences. The long countertop stopped at a line of refrigerators with glass doors. The first five held carefully labeled samples. The sixth, lunch, though that fridge was nearly empty today.
    I’m alone, she remembered.
    And then she remembered why, and whipped her head around toward the lab’s centerpiece. She gasped, nearly falling from her chair.
    “Yes,” Gordon said. “Magnificent.”
    It wasn’t the word she would have chosen. Impossible came to mind first, and she was in the impossible business.
    The center of the room was an artificial womb. While spherical in appearance, the top and bottom didn’t complete the eight-foot-diameter sphere. The bottom led to a filtration system that constantly sterilized the embryonic fluid that filled the womb, running it beneath a powerful UV light. The top of the sphere, which could only be reached from the floor above the lab, was the only way to access the inside. A black umbilical hung from the ceiling, coiling and twisting in the clear fluid, attached to the body that floated at the center of the womb. It served the same function as a normal umbilical cord, supplying the fetus with the nutrients and raw materials it needed to grow.
    “How did you do it?” Gordon asked.
    Elliot stood slowly and placed her hand against the glass. The fetus inside the womb was at least fifteen inches from head to toe. She glanced down to the touch-screen controls and tapped the black screen twice, waking it. The weight, measured by fluid displacement, showed 3.5 pounds. She shook her head.
    Impossible.
    “Kendra,” Gordon said, his voice insistent. “How?”
    Her eyes flicked to him, back to the baby girl she’d created, then back to Gordon. “I attached the DNA you supplied to a retroviral vector, which wasn’t as hard as it sounds, because we’re making a systemic change rather than targeting specific organs. The vector was injected into an embryo already in progress, to speed things along. It’s fast acting and has few side effects, so there was no danger to the embryo, but the end result was that all of the DNA, in every cell, was altered inside an hour. I had no idea what the effect would be, but I would have never guessed… Gordon, this—she—was barely four weeks along.”
    “And now?”
    She huffed, unable to believe the words coming out of her mouth. “Seven months, at least. It might survive if it was born.”
    “If it doesn’t turn to sludge, you mean?”
    She nodded.
    “How long until we can extract the heart?”
    “What time is it?”
    Gordon looked at his wristwatch. “Five-twenty. A.M.”
    Her eyes widened and this time she said it aloud. “Impossible.”
    “What?”
    “Gordon, I—”
    “Stop calling me Gordon.”
    She barely heard him, but spoke again, “General. I put the embryo in the womb at four-thirty.” She’d been sleeping for just over thirty minutes, but she’d never felt more awake. She opened the calculator via the touch screen and tapped furiously, speaking her equations as she worked them out. “It’s only been growing for fifty minutes. If we assume that it’s roughly thirty-two weeks along, minus the four weeks it had grown prior to the DNA insertion, that’s twenty-eight weeks of growth in fifty minutes. To make it easy, lets round up