SUSSEX COUNTY, NJ

DECEMBER 25

"We leave at oh-three-hundred," Luca told Lowery. The two of them had the SimGen security offices virtually to themselves. He checked his watch. "That gives you ten minutes to get the other four assembled by the cars and ready to go."

"Got it," Lowery said and trotted off.

Luca turned back to the printouts on his desk. This genetics stuff was so complicated. He'd done search after search before tracking down intergenomic and intragenomic competition, and then more searching before finding articles he could understand. Weren't many of those, but he'd managed to glean some idea of what it all meant. He still didn't see what was so frightening about it.

Intergenomic competition...a theory that arose back in the nineties about the maternal and paternal halves of the fetal genome competing for dominance during development. Luca understood it best when he translated it into combat terms. In a male embryo, the Y chromosome from the father directs the struggle against the maternal half of the genome. But in a female, with no Y to marshal the forces of the paternal genome, the maternal X has an easier time against the paternal X; it can then push more characteristics from its own underlying genome toward the front, thus showing more of its maternal DNA to the world.

Intragenomic competition was a newer and more controversial theory. Whileinter genomic competition applied to all species,intra genomic competition applied only to recombinant transgenic species of higher mammals, and it was a double war. While the usual intergenomic competition was being waged, there was also a civil war going on within the recombinant genome. As Luca understood it, the recombinant half would try to express the genes from its original underlying genome at the expense of the foreign genes that had been spliced into it.

Yeah? So what?

If all this held true, a human father meant the pregnant sim's baby would look more like a human if it was a boy and more like a chimp if it was a girl.

Again: So what?

I must be missing something, Luca thought, because the only scary thing here is how boring this is.

He checked his watch again. Time to go. An 0300 departure would get them to Mineola in plenty of time to gear up for the raid.

And they had plenty of gear. Like the others, Luca was wearing a black cotton BDU; but before they went in they'd add body armor and Kevlar helmets with visors; each would carry tactical forearm 15,000 candlepower flashlights and an HK submachine gun equipped with double 30-round translucent magazines.

He hoped to use that weapon. He wanted that sim, yes, but wanted Cadman and Sullivan there too. Especially Romy Cadman. He wanted one last look at that pretty face before he put a bullet into it.