“Dr. Turner, precisely. He recruited you and I approved the recruitment. Your father and I worked together overseeing his project. Your dad was intelligence attaché to Dr. Turner’s group. I was on Senator Rockefeller’s intelligence oversight staff. Your dad came to me with the report you have in your hands. The Senate Intelligence Committee took one look at it and canceled the whole hybrid program. A grotesque, immoral nightmare, they thought, that could lead in some very bad directions. The idea of brilliant, ruthless, and almost unkillable soldiers who had no human rights was interesting, of course. But programmable? No. Dr. Turner’s budget was pulled.”

“But why was I brought in? Simply because of my father?”

“Largely not. You have exceptional electronics skills.”

She couldn’t disagree. Most of the equipment in her office she’d revised herself. There was always something that could be done to add functionality or increase efficiency.

“You think he intentionally preserved some of them? Or they survived? How were they killed?”

“You don’t want to know how they were killed. But it was thorough.”

“Unless it wasn’t.”

“Turner’s argument before the senators was that he could save the soldier from the battlefield. He believed in his work totally. So, yes, he might well have kept it going, hidden in some budget somewhere. And that might be what’s out there, getting out of control.”

“You’ve known all of this, and yet we were just a recce unit. Strictly tasked not to kill.”

“Dr. Turner gave no indication that there might be a problem. It’s been years since his project was dismantled. Gina, you have to understand that the departure of the aliens was a tragedy for us. We wanted their friendship. So the appearance of successful hybrids was cause for celebration. Even with all the limitations—they couldn’t remain long in our atmosphere, they didn’t use verbal communication—we’d learned so much from them. Now here was a chance to meet them again, but on much more useful terms. Speech, at last. The ability to breathe Earth’s air, to exchange with our scientists, to teach us. We were delighted.”

“Except—”

“Except now we’re in terrible trouble.”

“Do we know these hybrids aren’t alien? For certain?”

He nodded slowly. “Their DNA profile fits the configuration Dr. Turner created.”

“The senators must be furious.”

“The senators have not been told. We’ll clean it up, then bring it to the politicians.”

“So they’re—what?—mixes of genes from all sorts of different creatures? Reptiles whose limbs regrow, insects whose organs are self-repairing.”

“There’s a lot of different genes. Including alien. Plus there are the artificial elements—”

“The programmability.”

He sighed. “They’re highly intelligent. They’ve probably gained control over their own programming. Including Mark’s.”

“Have you seen them? They’re sleek, like snakes. That pearl-white skin. But Mark is utterly human.”