He remembered the huge splash as the containment had hit the water, and that booming that had come from within, which had torn at his heart and still tore at his heart.

To do this, he had to believe that they were using the equipment in the old lab. They had to be, there was nothing else like it on earth. He had to find out. He had to try to reach them and gain control over them, because they were misidentifying friendly Delta Force operators as enemies. As with any replicated device, defects were bound to set in as new generations were created.

So he had come here, back to a place he had vowed never to go again. He had suffered his flight as he had never suffered anything before in his life. Again and again, his mind had returned to his work, to the programming he and Emma had done, and what might have gone wrong with it and, above all, how in the world the threes had survived.

Nothing could live through being sunk into the Challenger Deep, not the pressure of seven miles of water. It would have crushed the vessel flat, and those brilliant, mysterious beings, his beloved soldiers … he couldn’t even think about it, not even after all these years.

They had—and had not—been in the containment, and he thought he knew what they had done.

While the hybrids the aliens created had been bizarre psychopathic failures, he had succeeded too well.

He had been miserable about the aliens’ leaving. He’d hated them for their impatience, and hated the senators who’d ruined his project for their boneheaded stupidity.

Now, as he drove through San Francisco toward his old lab, he hated himself for his mistakes, and the disaster that was now unfolding because of them. He had to admit, now, that the senators had not been entirely wrong, because this was going to be difficult to control. Very difficult.

And there it was, the nondescript building now festooned with signs affirming its new role as San Francisco’s “most watched” station.

For a time, he sat in the car just looking at it. Since the day they’d sealed the underground lab and left until this day, he had been unable to come back to this place. Then, he had been too unhappy to do it. Now, as he looked up at the building, he felt a new emotion. He was afraid. He’d rather be entering a cage with a famished tiger.

The television station had transformed his beloved building entirely. The windows where his bedroom had been were blacked out. Probably the residential floor had been opened up into soundstages.

He sat in the car, double-parked, looking up at the building and remembering his lab, which had been a place of miracles.