Project Hyperion (A Kaiju Thriller) (Kaiju #4)

“Is the pressure too much? Can you handle it?”


Yes and no, she thought. “No and yes. I’m fine.” But she knew she wasn’t. A year ago, Gordon had asked the impossible. Find a way to grow viable, adult, human organs in under a month. He’d given her an eighteen-month deadline. She was no closer to success than she had been a year ago.

“Uh-huh,” he said.

He doesn’t believe me, she thought. He’s going to fire me right now. Not that people were ever fired from BioLance. They were disappeared.

“Tell about the results,” he said.

“You’ve seen the report?”

“You know how I feel about those reports,” he said. “Until one of you eggheads starts writing them in plain English, I’m not going to know what’s being said.” He motioned to the trash can containing the crumpled list of failures. “Though the last page sums up everything pretty well, I’d say.”

She cleared her throat. “In layman’s terms, we’ve successfully increased subject growth rate. Through a combination of genetic tinkering, steroids, electrical impulses, and raw materials provided by the umbilical, we can grow a twenty year old male inside of a month.”

“But?” Gordon asked.

“But once it’s removed from the amniotic fluid, it loses viscosity. Organs become sludge. Bones powder. The body just falls apart.”

“But before that happens,” Gordon said, “the body is...alive?”

“Physically,” she said, “not mentally. We’ve engineered the bodies to grow with only a cerebellum, which controls bodily functions such as respiration, digestion and the heart. But there are no higher brain functions. No soul, if that’s your concern.”

“Hardly,” he said, and then reached into his leather jacket—no one wore uniforms—causing Elliot to flinch. Gordon paused, a smile on his face. “Don’t worry, Kendra, you’re still too valuable to let go.”

Still, she thought. She swallowed and determined always to be valuable.

Gordon took a glass vial from his jacket’s inside pocket. It contained a clear liquid. He held the vial out to her slowly. “Treat this like it’s your child.” He paused and corrected himself, “Unless you would treat your child like you did your—”

“I get the idea,” she said, and took the vial. A hand-written label had been stuck on the side, and up over the top, keeping the cap in place. She read the words aloud. “Kyodaina”.

“Endo’s name,” he explained. “Not sure what it means. Don’t really care.”

Elliot was not a fan of Katsu Endo. She stood nearly five inches taller than him, but his eyes burned with a passion that made her uncomfortable. His unflinching loyalty to Gordon, and the gun worn on his hip, left few questions about the fate of the few people who’d lost their jobs during her time with BioLance. She’d share their fate, too, if she didn’t start producing results. She closed her eyes, imagining her end—staring in the burning brown eyes of Katsu Endo.

She wouldn’t allow it to happen. She would do anything—anything—to avoid it.

“What is it?” she asked, stepping closer to the General.

“DNA,” he said.

“From what?” she asked.

“You don’t need to know.”

She didn’t like that answer, but hid her aggravation behind a smile. “The computer is going to tell me what it is the moment it’s analyzed.”

“No. It’s not.”

Elliot stood so close that she felt his breath on her face and smelled the coffee he’d been drinking. French Vanilla, artificially sweetened. She looked in his eyes. Tired and bloodshot. Decaf.

“Just add this to your stew and see what happens.”

“That’s not very scientific,” she replied, her face just inches from his. She tilted her head and opened her lips slightly, the invitation as easy to read as a billboard.

“You’re not my type,” Gordon said, nonplussed by her blatant advance.

“You’re a man,” she replied. “Does it matter?”

He looked down briefly, his tongue flicking between his lips for just a moment.

It didn’t matter, she knew. Something else was stopping him.

She connected the dots.

“Our chances of success might increase if we focused on a single organ,” she said. It was a lie, but his answer told her everything she needed to know.

“The heart,” he said without missing a beat.

She stepped back and nodded. “Heart it is. I’ll get the team—”

“Not the team,” he said. “Just you.”

“W—what?”

“You’re on your own, Kendra. Your team has already been dismissed.”

She blanched, which drew a laugh from Gordon.

“They’re confined to quarters.”

“Confined to quarters?” It didn’t make sense. What he was asking would take the entire team months of trial and error. That he was simply confining the staff to their quarters meant she had a very limited amount of time. “How long do I have?”

“Two days,” he said.