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Colding didn’t bother hitting the
transmit
button.
    “Don’t sweat it,” Gunther said. “I don’t mind. Let me say hi to Bobby and I’ll close up the hangar, crank the heat. Cool?”
    Colding nodded. The two men reached the Sikorski as the rotor blades started their slow spin-down and Bobby Valentine hopped out.
    Bobby was the Pagliones’ private pilot and all-around errand boy. He pushed his heavy brownish-blond hair away from his eyes and flashed the smile that seemed to get him laid everywhere he went. He carried a lunchbox-sized metal case in his left hand. His right he offered to Colding, who shook it firmly.
    “P. J., how are you?”
    “I’m just fine, Bobby-V,” Colding said. “Okay flight?”
    Bobby nodded. “It was fine, as the return trip will be if I get out of herebefore that low-pressure system comes in.” Bobby reached out to shake Gunther’s hand. “Gun, my man, how’s the writing coming?”
    “Good, real good! I’m almost finished with the third book. Stephenie Meyer won’t know what hit her.”
    “Go get ’em, tiger,” Bobby said.
    Gunther nodded, then jogged to the hangar. He ran by Brady, who was dragging a fuel hose to the Sikorski.
    Bobby gently lifted the metal case like it was a fragile heirloom and handed it to Colding. “Right there is a regular who’s who of extinction,” Bobby said. “Caribbean monk seal, Stellar’s sea cow, pig-footed bandicoot and a Tasmanian wolf.”
    “A Tasmanian wolf? Those have been gone since the thirties.”
    Bobby nodded. “We found a stuffed one in Auckland. Got some DNA out of the fur or something. Okay, package delivered, so let’s get me turned around and outta here.”
    “That soon? Doc Rhumkorrf is dying to go flying with you.”
    Bobby checked his watch. “Can
Herr Dok-tor
do it right now?”
    “He’s in the middle of an embryonic immune reaction experiment.”
    “Sorry, I can’t wait,” Bobby said. “Besides, Doc Rhumkorrf doesn’t really need any more lessons. I’ll take him out next time.”
    Colding checked his watch: 10:50 A.M . Rhumkorrf & Co. had been at it for three hours now and would soon finish. Colding hurried inside, leaving Brady and Gunther to get Bobby turned around quickly.
    Hopefully this time, unlike the last fifteen embryonic runs, Colding would be able to report to Danté with some good news.

NOVEMBER 7: SHE’S GOT BALLS
    THE TINY, FLOATING ball of cells could not think, could not react. It could not feel. If it could, it would have felt only one thing …
    Fear.
    Fear at the monster floating close by. Amorphous, insidious, unrelenting, the monster reached out with flowing tendrils that touched the ball of cells, tasting the surface.
    The floating ball vibrated a little each time one of its cells completed mitosis, splitting from one cell into two daughter cells. And that happened rapidly … more rapidly than in any other animal, any other life-form.
Nothing
divided this fast, this efficiently. So fast the living balls vibrated every three or four minutes, cells splitting, doubling their number over and over again.
    The floating balls had begun as a cow’s single-celled egg. Now? Only the outer membrane could truly be called
bovine
. The interior contained a unique genome that was mostly something else.
    The amorphous monster? A macrophage, a white blood cell, a hunter/killer taken from that same cow’s blood and dropped into a petri dish with the hybrid egg.
    The monster’s tendrils reached out, boneless, shapeless, flowing like intelligent water. They caressed the rapidly dividing egg, sensing chemicals,
tasting
the egg for one purpose only:
    To see if the egg was
self
.
    It was not. The egg was
other
.
    And anything
other
had to be destroyed.
    JIAN KNEW, EVEN at this early stage, that failure had come calling once again.
    She, Claus Rhumkorrf, Erika Hoel and Tim Feely watched the giant monitor that took up an entire wall of the equipment-packed genetics lab. The monitor’s upper-right-hand