CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
The Dry Run
We won the water dragon trial. Major Johnson only waited a day before giving Evelyn the official word. That made it one-to-one, which meant that everything rode on the performance of the flying dragons. Yet compared to how the infantry dragon trial had gone, things looked much better. I tried not to think about the fact that it was mainly because I’d let someone else do the design.
We held a little celebration in the Design lab, of course. Wong and Korrapati deserved their victory lap. They were both curious about my encounter with Frogman and O’Connell, too.
“I had no idea Greaves was recruiting genetic engineers out from under us,” I said. “Did you?”
Wong shook his head.
Korrapati blushed and looked away. “A little.”
“What?” I thought maybe she was kidding, but not the way it showed in her face.
“After he left, O’Connell contacted me and asked if I was looking to find a new job.”
Oh my God. I’d had no idea they tried to poach Korrapati, too. If we’d lost her this would have been a very different competition. “What did you tell him?”
“I told him I was going to stay and give Noah a chance.”
Well, that flabbergasted me too much to say anything. Of course, Evelyn chose that moment to swoop in. “Do you regret it, Priti?”
Korrapati shrugged. “Not so far.”
Everyone laughed, and I did, too, though I’m sure my cheeks were bright red. “Well, I’m glad you stayed. The dragon you and Wong made—”
“AquaWong,” Wong interjected.
“—will definitely not be named AquaWong,” I continued. “And it was a thing of beauty. I wish you could have seen how they swam.”
“Like salamanders,” Wong said.
“Yes, I suppose that’s true. But seeing a group of them, trained to act in concert, all swimming like that . . . it was . . .”
“Hard to look away,” Evelyn said.
“Exactly. I’d have taken video on my phone, but Major Johnson would probably have confiscated it.”
“Yes, he would have,” Evelyn said.
“Not Evelyn’s, of course,” I said casually. “She could have live streamed the whole day on her phone and he wouldn’t say a word.”
“Noah Parker!” Evelyn’s mouth fell open with mock offense. “What are you saying?”
“You’re up here.” I held my left hand up as far as I could reach. “And I’m down here.” I held out my right hand down near the floor.
“It is your imagination.”
“I think he’s kind of sweet on you, too, after your little conversation.”
“I was asking him about his family,” Evelyn said.
As much as I wanted to give her more trouble about it, she was being honest. We should get to know these people a bit if we were going to be working with them. Hell, maybe I should chat up Major Nakamura if she ever decides to meet with us again. I had nothing against Major Johnson, but it still bothered me that she spent her time with the other team.
So yes, we had a mini celebration to recognize the achievements of the never-to-be-named-AquaWong. Then all of our attentions focused on the crucial third trial. The aerial dragon. I’d taken to working on it at one of the workstations adjacent to the God Machine. My office was nice and all, but it felt too removed from the process. I chose Korrapati’s old spot because it was out of the way, but if I’d hoped that would let me avoid the scrutiny of my fellow designers, I was mistaken. Wong and Korrapati both wanted to see the design in my simulator before we hit the print button. For some reason, this made me nervous. I suppose I considered myself the expert in flier designs and didn’t want that particular bubble bursted at such a critical time. But they both had only compliments for me as we admired the three-dimensional dragon conjured by the simulator.
“You’ve put a lot of work into this,” Korrapati said. “It looks good.”
“Very good. Very strong flier,” Wong agreed.
The click-clack of approaching high heels announced Evelyn’s arrival. “Is that the flier?”
“Yes, what do you think?”
She peered at the model as it spun in the air in front of her. She even took the liberty of controlling my projection keyboard to tilt it back and forth. “The wing design is very interesting.”
“It’s a design from nature. The swift,” I said.
“It looks more like a swallow.”
“They’re pretty similar, actually. Convergent evolution,” I said. That happened sometimes, when Mother Nature worked out the optimum solution in two different groups of organisms and got the same answer. The most famous example in humans was lactose tolerance, which had arisen independently at least twice in hunter-gatherer groups.
“Did you give it the wing joints to . . . Oh, I see you did. Nicely done. It should be very efficient in the air.”
She knows about the wing joints. Sometimes I forgot that Evelyn had a broader knowledge of biology than all of us put together. Sure, she was the CEO now and rarely got time to enjoy it, but for years before that, she was a scientist in the trenches. Just like I was.
“I hope so. For the horizontal flight speed, it should make a difference.”
“There is one way to find out,” Evelyn said. “Let’s print a couple of eggs and put them through their paces.”
The warm, lifting feeling in the pit of my stomach felt strange. It had been a while since I’d printed a dragon egg. Too long, really. Korrapati and Wong handled the day-to-day workload, which occupied less then twenty percent of their time. Even Marketing seemed to be holding its breath to learn how the DOD trials turned out.
I took a deep breath and hit the print button. The God Machine purred into motion, its robotic arms moving back and forth like knitting needles. Then the conveyor belt started up.
The egg came out the color of sky and clouds. Pale blues, soft white, and a touch of yellow. All three colors whorled together in intricate curving patterns. We admired it while a second one was printed. They were taller and skinnier than most eggs I’d seen so far.
“They’re very slender,” Evelyn said.
“What’s wrong with that?” I demanded.
“Nothing, nothing. Different is good.”
I stared at the eggs and hoped she was right. Their shape reminded me, somewhat ironically, of the huge caches of pterosaur eggs that paleontologists had discovered in China in the mid-2010s. Hundreds of fossilized eggs—presumably swept into a lake when a roosting area flooded a hundred million years ago—were encased in slabs of rock that had once been muddy lake-bottom. Some with the tiny, fossilized embryos still inside. They resembled turtle eggs in some ways, but were taller and more slender, too.
Fossilized pterosaur eggs didn’t have this coloring, though. Our admirations were cut short when two white-garbed hatchery staffers whisked both eggs away to our on-site incubators.
We haven’t printed an egg in days, but they’re ready to answer the call. I wondered what the hatchery staff did in their increasing amounts of downtime. These two eggs would give them something to do. The distraction would be short-lived, however, because we’d already implemented the shorter incubation periods. Still, at least they had a couple of eggs to fuss over. I couldn’t do much else until we knew how close these dragons were to spec.
“Another aerial demonstration,” Evelyn murmured. She looked at me, probably curious about how I felt.
I put on as big a smile as I could manage. “I hope it goes better than the last one.”