Prologue

Doctor Raul Pakow blinked twice into the scanning-tunneling microscope. He was exhausted, but couldn’t even rub his eyes because of the damn biohazard suit he was wearing.

He sat back and activated the heads-up display on the faceplate of the suit. 11:58:59. Almost midnight here in Seattle. Three am, in New York. Two months already he’d been in Seattle, but his body still seemed back on East Coast time. Back in New York, where Shiva would be sleeping soft and warm in their bed right now, where he’d left behind everything he’d ever been and ever loved…

From where he sat Pakow had a clear view through the Plexiglas into the private lab of the man who’d brought him here from New York. He was surprised not to see Doctor Wake also hard at work in there, where he’d been just minutes before. Pakow closed his eyes wearily, thinking how it was only Plexiglas separating them but that it could just as easily have been a gulf of a thousand years.

Pakow’s lab had the sterile feel of every clean room he’d ever been in, but Wake’s work area was an almost frightening mixture of science and the arcane. To himself, Pakow had silently begun calling it the mad scientist’s laboratory.

Science had been turned upside down by the return of magic some fifty years ago, and Wake’s lab was no exception. Medical equipment rested side by side with fetishes and magical implements that Pakow couldn’t even begin to comprehend. Long golden rods and books with rams heads on the covers. Parchment scrolls and strange diagrams covered with indecipherable symbols in faded ink. The entire floor of Wake’s lab was coal black, throwing into sharp relief the blood-red pentagram that stretched almost ten meters in diameter, completely encompassing the carefully arranged implements he had gathered for his use.

Pakow gave himself a mental shake, knowing he couldn’t sit here dreaming all night. It was time to run his final check. He tapped a key on the terminal beside him to record the hour and date-00:00:00/l2-08-2058-then turned back to his microscope.

Picking up the datacord set into the microscope’s base, he ran it through the small, clean port in the helmet of the biohazard suit, easing the cord through the tight. sterilizing passage. Pakow had been fitted with three datajacks into his right temple. One for the Matrix, one for off-line memory, and the third to jack into the virtual-reality equipment used in most labs. As the datacord clicked softly into the third port, his vision blurred for an instant, seeming to condense down to a pinpoint and then expand at lightning speed, exploding into lurid purples and yellows.

To Pakow, the infinitesimal virus he’d been studying was suddenly five meters high. He turned and stepped into the heart of the rocket-shaped image, double-checking the projected outcome of the new RNA sequence. He had predicted that even though the virus would be similar to the original, the injected transposon cocktail would suppress the expression of certain detrimental genes.

Inside the core of the virus, Pakow reached out a chrome-gilt hand to touch the spongy mass at the center. He loaded the new RNA sequence, which took the form of a large, neon-green hypodermic needle filled with glowing amber fluid.

Using his free hand, Pakow separated the proteins of the virus and stabbed upward with the needle, releasing the fluid.

A stream of amber coursed outward, greedily attaching itself to the viral protein matter and insinuating flecks of golden material at different places along the RNA strand.

Within seconds it was finished, and Pakow stepped out of the virus to observe the effects of what he’d done.

Outwardly, the virus stayed stable, one of the concerns Doctor Wake had expressed early on, but its shape began to shift subtly. Where it had started out looking like a hexagonal rocket, the new sequence bulged slightly at the head, taking on an almost circular form.

As soon as the virus had mutated completely. Pakow pulled his view back until the image was tiny again. He turned to his left and lifted one hand, causing a small digital display to form in mid-air. Entering the combination he wanted, Pakow overlaid the display of the virus with a simulated projection of a human already infected with the original strain.

Placing the newly formed virus into the subject’s bloodstream, Pakow was able to track its amber-colored progress.

As predicted, the new virus assimilated the older version and supplanted it completely. The effects of the modified strain altered the subject exactly as planned. Many of the deleterious effects of the original were modified or eradicated completely.

Pakow smiled to himself. Send a killer to kill a killer, or something like that.

Reaching once again for the digital display, he sped up the time lapse, and watched as the final modifications to the new virus did their work. Within the first year, nothing new showed. By the beginning of the second year. however, the new virus began to deteriorate. Slowly at first, then much more rapidly, eventually killing the host.

Satisfied, Pakow jacked out.

“Well?” The voice came from directly behind Pakow, making him jump in his chair.

Turning, Pakow found Oslo Wake looking over his shoulder. Even in the biohazard suit, Wake was a thin man, and possibly the tallest human Pakow had ever encountered. Well over two meters tall, he was a skeleton wrapped in the florescent orange suit that clung to his frame.

Through the clear helmet, Wake’s face was gaunt to the point of emaciation, cheeks hollowed and sharp, his forehead stretched parchment-tight over an angular brow. His blue eyes were sunk into the sockets of his skull like some childhood nightmare his head covered in a snow-white mass of hair that tangled and spiked off his scalp like some live thing trying to fight its way free.

“Provided the other aspects of the procedure go as you’ve suggested, I feel very confident in this Beta strain,” Pakow said. “You realize, of course, that without extensive testing, I can’t promise anything. With a virus of this nature, there’s always the chance I may have overlooked something. What I can tell you is that the virus will remain stable, will negate any previous infection, and will deteriorate within two years, killing the host.”

Wake rocked back on his heels, smiling. “My dear, Doctor Pakow, you have more than justified my faith in you. Once again, I apologize for the conditions under which you’ve been forced to work. And despite it all, you have outperfomed even my highest expectations” A small tic in Wake’s right cheek made his face jump in a second-long, lopsided grin.

Something in the other man’s voice raised the hackles on Pakow’s neck. Looking at Wake now, it was hard to believe this was the same man who’d approached him just two mouths ago at the conference where Pakow had been giving a paper on viral mutations in specific metahuman genotypes. The lecture had been poorly attended, and Pakow had come to the conclusion halfway through that maybe a total of two people in the whole room had any idea what he was talking about.

After the lecture Wake had come up to him, speaking in that soft voice about a new direction for his research-something totally out of the mainstream-and a chance to push the parameters of lab work farther and faster than would be possible under any laboratory conditions Pakow had ever heard of, here or anywhere else.

And so far, all those promises had come true. Wake had lived up to his reputation as a genius of the first caliber, proposing methods and directions that would never have even occurred to Pakow. He himself had managed to identify certain problems in Wake’s research, but he couldn’t help wondering if Wake might have let those flaws remain on purpose, just so Pakow could feel like he was contributing.