“Herero,” H. A. whispered with resignation as the wave of warriors burst into the ship.

THE storm was a freak of nature, a once-in-a-hundred-years occurrence that raged for over a week, forever changing the coast of southwest Africa. Once mighty dunes had been rendered flat, while others had grown to newer and even greater heights. Where once there were bays, now great peninsulas of sand thrust into the cold waters of the South Atlantic. The continent had grown five miles bigger in some places, ten in others, as the Kalahari won one of its battles against its arch foe. The map would have to be redrawn for hundreds of miles up and down the coast, that is if anyone cared to map the forlorn shore. Every sailor just knew to stay well off the treacherous seaboard.

Of the Rove and all those aboard her, the official report listed her as lost at sea. And that wasn’t far from the truth, though she lay not under hundreds of feet of water, but under an equal amount of pure white sand, nearly eight miles inland from where the icy waves of the Benguela Current pounded against Africa’s Skeleton Coast.

2

THE LABORATORIES OF MERRICK/SINGER GENEVA, SWITZERLAND PRESENT DAY

SUSAN Donleavy sat hunched like a vulture over the eyepiece of her microscope and watched the action unfold on the slide as though she were a god of Greek mythology being entertained by mortals. And in a sense she was, for what lay on the slide was her own creation, an engineered organism that she had breathed life into as surely as the gods had molded man out of clay.

She remained motionless for nearly an hour, enraptured by what she was seeing, amazed that the results were so positive this early in her work. Against all scientific principles, but trusting her gut, Susan Donleavy removed the slide from the scope and set it on the workbench next to her. She crossed the room to where an industrial cooler hulked against one wall and removed one of several gallon jugs of water kept at precisely sixty-eight degrees.

The water had been in storage for less than a day, having been flown to the lab as soon as it had been collected. The need to keep fresh water samples was one of the principle expenses of her experiments — nearly as costly as the detailed gene sequencing of her subjects.

She opened the jug and smelled the salty tang of ocean water. She dipped a dropper into its surface and siphoned up a small amount, which she then transferred to a slide. Once she had it centered under the microscope, she peered into the realm of the infinitely tiny. The sample teemed with life. In just a few milliliters of water there were hundreds of zooplankton and diatoms, single-celled creatures that formed the first link of the food chain for the entire ocean.

The microscopic animals and plants were similar to the ones she’d been studying earlier, only these had not been genetically modified.