No way could he keep his little prodigies hidden then.
But the contractor recommended to him, one who promised confidentiality, disabled everything before the hacker made another appearance.
Thank Christ.
At least he could take a horde of zombies descending on him off his worry list.
He’d been obsessively watching the basement cameras since that little mishap down there. And thewhat the hell are they doing?question had become a familiar refrain.
They weren’t interested in the elevator or the tunnel doors. Or at least they never wandered in those directions. The cameras in the basement hallway showed them clustered in front of two doors—both leading to labs.
Nor were they interested in Oswald’s body, which was still lying there. Unmoving. No sign of reanimation. But then, it took the NNB26 prototype over a month to reanimate the specimens from Karaveht. Was that why Oswald wasn’t up and moving around—or more likely standing and staring—because the bots hadn’t had enough time to restart him yet? Would he join the rest of the motionless brigade in a month or so?
He leaned back in his desk chair and stared through the camera down the basement hallway. The two groups of specimens were split in front of two doors. One door led into the nanobot testing lab, while the other led to the clean room with the prototype’s storage tank.
Interesting...both labs housed NNB26 nanobots. Their interest in those two doors could not be a coincidence...could it?
They were back in their motionless mode.
His instincts from earlier returned. They weren’t just standing and staring. They were waiting...for something....
In the specimen lab earlier, Comfrey and the rest of Karaveht’s dead appeared to be waiting for the door to unlock. In fact, just before the panel had turned green, Comfrey had reached for the door handle. She’d seemed to know she’d be able to open the door.
Which, on the face of it, was a ridiculous hypothesis. Unless she was psychic, there was no way she could have known the hacker would greenlight the door. Still, she’d reached for the door at the perfect time...
He leaned forward, watching the camera feed closely. It was interesting they’d chosen those two specific doors to cluster around. Did they sense there were trillions more of their sisters beyond the steel?
Was it their intention to break into the labs and release all the nanobots? He’d engineered the prototype to replicate and infect, to seek out new hosts, to spread themselves. There were certainly enough bots in those two labs to spread themselves throughout DC. But they would have to find human hosts, and finding hosts would prove difficult when they were locked in the basement.
They were obviously evolving. Had they produced a way to retrieve the bots from those two labs and smuggle them out of the building?
But how would they know there were bots in those rooms? Although that question did have a possible explanation. They could have access to Comfrey and her assistants’ memories. The three women had known what the rooms held. If the bots could access their memories, they would know too.
His gaze shifted to the reanimated villagers. His hypothesis didn’t explain their behavior. They didn’t have Comfrey’sknowledge or memories. They wouldn’t know there were more nanobots in those labs. Unless...Comfrey and her team had passed the information along. But he’d been watching the damn things for days now and he’d seen no moving, no talking, no hand gestures, no way they could be passing on knowledge or information.
That’s when he was reminded of the whole virus debacle. The bots in the testing tank had vibrated, as had the bots in the holding tank. The vibrations had occurred simultaneously. Plus, there was the simultaneous emergence of the tentacles in the two tanks. Were the bots in the tanks communicating?
His thoughts scattered as Comfrey suddenly reached for the door handle. His gaze flew to the security panel beside her just as it turned from red to green.
Son of a bitch!
Before he could click over to the security module, she twisted the handle and opened the door. Too late now.
Fuck…fuck…fuck…
His chest tried to split open beneath the beating of his heart.
His hand flew toward the mouse with such speed he knocked it off the desk. It bounced under his chair. No time to root around for it. His fingers flew over the keyboard. Maybe he could still stop the other door from—
Nope. Fuck. The security module showed the clean room’s panel was operational. He disabled the module and reset the password. The panel remained operational.
Dammit.
He switched back to the camera screen and collapsed into his chair. Locking the doors was useless now. Both rooms were full of specimens.
This made no sense. He’d been watching them for days, and the whole time they’d just stood there. They hadn’t done a damn thing, and now all the sudden they opened that door and got intothe labs within seconds? How the fuck did they know the door was about to unlock.
The explanation exploded inside him, as thunderous as lightning and thunderstorm.
