CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
The Mess
I felt far too nervous to eat, but I figured I could stand to have coffee. Besides, I wanted a closer look at the mess hall of this facility. If it was anything like the conference rooms, there might be a robotic cook. Hell, with their early access to technology they probably had their own food replicators.
Tea. Earl Grey. Hot.
Some guy had beat me to the mess, though. He looked to be a fellow civilian. Husky frame but bad posture, nondescript hoodie, and headphones around his neck. Come to think of it, I knew those hunched shoulders and headphones. “Frogman?”
He flinched at the sound of my voice. He turned around, and it was him. “Oh. Hey.”
“What are you doing here?”
It was completely unexpected, and my mind raced with the implications. Frogman, here, as a civilian. What would the DOD want with a genetic engineer, anyway? Maybe they’d hired him to independently assess the animals. He had developmental expertise.
“Looking for coffee, same as you, I’m guessing,” he said.
What’s with the attitude? Maybe it was my imagination, but he didn’t seem surprised to see me, either. I stood there with my mouth open for a second, and then I put it together. “You’re working for Greaves?”
“Guess you could say that.”
“Why?”
He shrugged. “Not many places you can take our kind of skills.”
That was a total dodge of my question. Then again, I hadn’t asked it in full, like Why would you go work for that total asshole after what he did?
“Oh, here you are,” said another voice, this time from behind me. And I recognized him, too.
“O’Connell,” I said.
Brian O’Connell had a slight build and the same dirty-blond goatee that I remembered on him. As usual, he wore faded jeans and a flannel shirt that looked at least twenty years old. He gave me a heavy-lidded stare. “Parker.”
“I guess I shouldn’t be surprised, you both working for Greaves. You two were always a package deal.” Everything fit. With O’Connell to run the biological printer and Frogman to design the dragons, all Greaves needed was a place to work and the prototype Redwood Codex. He’d essentially duplicated the dragon manufacturing process on which the Build-A-Dragon Company was founded.
“Someone had to do it,” O’Connell said.
“You didn’t have to do anything.”
Frogman half turned back toward the back wall of the mess, looking like he wished he could be somewhere else. He never was one for confrontation.
“Better to join a winning team than stay on a sinking ship,” O’Connell said.
I made an indignant noise, but comebacks were never my strong suit. And honestly, I was still thrown with the realization that they were part of the competition. Part of the enemy.
“Come on, Frogman,” O’Connell said. “They’re starting.”
Frogman shuffled past me and mumbled something I couldn’t hear to O’Connell. The latter snickered. “The contract is practically ours anyway.”
The encounter soured me on the idea of futuristic coffee. And I wasn’t sure how long it would take them to reset before our dragons got their turn. I hurried back to the conference room so I wouldn’t miss anything.
“You’re just in time,” Evelyn said. “Almost late.”
“Sorry. I ran into some old friends.”
“How is Frogman?”
I gave her a double take. “You knew?”
“I surmised.”
“From what?”
“Robert needed someone to design dragons. And that last one had Frogman’s fingerprints all over it.”
I should have seen it. Frogman loved his developmental model organisms and Xenopus most of all. Hence his nickname. This model did seem his style. “Not the first model, though. He’s not the type to build attack dragons.”
“No. That seems more like Brian O’Connell.”
“Jeez.” I shook my head. “How do you do it?”
“It’s the logical conclusion. They worked together a long time and were close.”
“Doesn’t explain how Greaves got to them, though.”
A shadow passed across her face. “He has ways.”
I wanted to follow that up, but Major Johnson interrupted us.
“Here we go.”
First up were the diving retrievals. Just as before, the sailors hauled their bright orange dive targets to the side and threw them overboard. The cages slid open. Four dragons—our dragons—dove in after them. They were bicolored, iridescent blue on the top and pale on their bellies. Korrapati and Wong had insisted that this coloring offered advantages, and besides, they just looked cool. Almost like a bluefin tuna.
I scanned the underwater cams, eager to see them in action. At first, I thought maybe the cameras weren’t working.
I leaned closer, fighting the urge to jump out of my chair. “Where are they?”
“There.” Evelyn pointed. Motion flickered on one monitor, then the other. It hit me then about the coloring. From above, they blended almost perfectly with the ocean’s depths, and from below, their pale bellies blended in with the sky. A coloring system perfected by nature in pelagic species.
Then Camera Four zoomed out for a better view, and we saw our dragons swimming for the first time. It reminded me of the contrast between seals on land and seals underwater. Or an ungainly bird on land that suddenly takes flight. Our dragons didn’t just swim. They undulated through the water, their entire bodies swaying in elegant motion.
“Look at them go,” Evelyn breathed.
“Way to go, Wong and Korrapati,” I said.
The dragons were fast, too. I hadn’t even thought to time them when they swept down on the diving targets, clamping them in strong jaws. No hesitation, no struggle. One moment they were undulating down, and the next, back up toward the surface. I had the presence of mind to glance over at Major Johnson. He stared at the monitors, transfixed. So did the operators. The curving, sweeping rhythm of their bodies was hypnotic.
Only when they broke the surface, targets held high, did the spell break. And the best part, the craziest part, was that they were still in formation. A perfect diamond of dragons, equidistant from one another, the targets at precise angles.
“Outstanding,” Johnson said.
I couldn’t agree more.
Then it was on to task two, the package delivery. If the cold water had started to bother our dragons, they didn’t show it. All four of them raced to the target. As far as I could tell, they held their pace. The endurance was impressive. Then, as they approached the hull of the target ship, they fanned out. One dragon went to the bow, one to the stern, two amidships beneath the mast. Johnson started his watch. Then the dragons reformed and peeled away, still bending like sinus waves through the dark blue water.
Still in formation. I shook my head, marveling at the performance. It wasn’t that the other team’s dragons had done too poorly. These weren’t easy tasks. Yet our dragons did it faster and behaved like a cohesive group, rather than four individuals each making their own struggle.
“The speed trials should be next,” Major Johnson said. “We’re going to test the remaining dragons simultaneously.”
“What’s the format?” Evelyn asked.
“Straight run, Point A to point B.”
“Winner takes all?”
“No, the times will be averaged.”
That made sense. A good team was only as fast as its slowest member. Besides, whoever won this contract would go into production and make lots of these dragons for the military. The mean performance was the key metric.
There was a setup period, of course, but I didn’t dare leave the room again and risk missing the action. So I fiddled anxiously while they got the ships and dragons into position. Not having my phone or my tablet was slowly killing me, especially in the downtime. Then again, I doubted I’d have a signal on either device anyway. This whole building must have shielding. Or even active jamming for all signals except their own.
Evelyn was making conversation with Major Johnson, trying to get to know him a little better. This proved rather entertaining to watch, because the major seemed either reluctant or unaccustomed to giving up information about himself.
“So, Major,” Evelyn said. “You’re a married man.”
Johnson was still reading his tablet—the link for which still worked, lending support to my theory—but he made eye contact when responding. “I am.” Then he looked down again, clearly unaware that he was the object of a burgeoning interrogation.
“Any kids?”
“Two.”
“And they’re . . .”
Johnson smiled for the first time that I’d seen that day. “Girls.”
“Aww. How old?”
“Six.”
No second number was forthcoming, and Evelyn’s eyes lit up. “Twins?”
The major nodded.
“Genetic engineers love twins. Don’t we, Noah?”
“Sure.” I grinned. “Built-in experiments on nature versus nurture.”
Evelyn was poised to ask another follow-up question, but the major’s tablet beeped.
Must be nice to still have your tablet.
Johnson grabbed it with a hint of relief. “Here we go.”
It was midday at the testing site but the winds had calmed, and the sea was almost flat. The “lure” for the dragons was a bright orange buoy attached to a winch cable on the destination ship. It all happened so suddenly. The winch started turning, a buzzer sounded, and the dragons’ cage doors flew open. All of them dove into the water, fast as lightning. As if they knew what this was.
The race was chaos. A single mile, and it was hard to really tell what was going on. We could tell the dragons apart individually because of the swimming styles—frog versus snake was a useful shorthand—but I had no idea how to tell which ones were in front. Right until our dragons began leaping out of the water like a pod of dolphins. Evelyn and I laughed in astonishment. It was clear then that they had the lead. Both of them. The other team’s dragons had lagged behind by a good distance, clearly struggling with the cold water. What made ours think to jump? It was like they knew this was a competition and took the chance to dunk on the other team. And oh, it was sweet. I hoped Greaves was watching.
“Not much of a race,” I said to Evelyn.
She smiled but made hushing motions at me. “It’s not over yet.”
But it was over in less than two minutes. For our dragons, at least. That’s how fast they were in the water at top speed.
I could tell Johnson was impressed. His voice seemed louder, and his handshake felt extra bone-crushingly firm. By the time Evelyn and I had taken our victory lap with him, Greaves and his team had already left. I guessed they saw the writing on the wall, at least with this exercise.
It still rankled me that Frogman and O’Connell had not only refused to work for me as Director of Dragon Design, but thought they’d be happier under Robert Greaves. The guy who’d imposed a debilitating points system for dragon designs, thoughtlessly killed dragons to save costs, and even hid a cure for the canine epidemic from the world so that his company could reap huge profits. I mean, what a dick.
Surely Frogman and O’Connell knew the truth about what he’d done—everyone else in Design did—but they still went with the guy. I didn’t get it.
But that didn’t matter for the moment. My small-but-scrappy team had clearly won the marine trials, which put us back into real contention. Only the air trials remained, and I intended to win them.