He’d never removed a manhole cover before, but the levered device made it easy enough, and he was soon shining his flashlight down into a place he had not seen since the worst day of his life, which was when he had brought generation three topside and transported them to the ship in a sealed truck driven by a Delta Force operator who could be counted on to ask nothing and see nothing.

First, he shone his light down. The little foyer was dusty now, the floor gray with mold. He saw no footprints, which was some small reassurance.

Carefully, he climbed down the twenty rungs of the rusty access ladder.

The room was as he remembered it, just a small concrete foyer with a sealed elevator door dominating one side of it. The air was cool, scented with the strong musk of mildew.

On the wall opposite the ladder was a low iron door of the type you might find—would find—in a sewer system.

He went to this door. If his hybrids were using this place, they would be working in the lab below.

When he confronted them, he was not really sure what would happen. They had been bred to destroy their enemies with relentless precision—and precision was the correct word. No matter how complex, or how seemingly human, their responses were, they were machines and had the limitations of machines.

Without the elevator, he was going to have a long walk down the two hundred feet to the lab floor. He’d had it dug this deep because he did not know exactly what would happen when gen three was brought to consciousness. It had been possible to blow all exits from the lab area, sealing it off.

It would take perhaps ten minutes to descend the stair, then another five or so to check the condition of the lab. If anything appeared to be in use, his plan was to tell Gina about it and let them come here and destroy the equipment as part of the overall cleanup effort.

He hated to lose it. Not even the most detailed schematics revealed how it worked, especially not the way the zinc-finger controller actually processed information, or the way the editor could create nonlocal quantum entanglement between its artificial neurons and the real ones in a nearby brain.

In contrast to their complexity, both devices were quite easy to use. He remembered being trained on them at Dulce by a gruff alien female who could read his mind and screamed in anguish when she discovered that he thought her ugly.