Code Name Flood. Laura Martin

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СКАЧАТЬ style="font-size:15px;">      “Whoa,” Todd said, letting out a low whistle of appreciation, and I nodded in mute agreement. This place was massive. Unlike North Compound’s confining walls of stone and concrete, these walls were made of glass, so you could see through all the rooms from one end to the other, making it hard to tell where one room stopped and another room started.

      “Pretty impressive, isn’t it,” Chaz said proudly. “This is just the research floor; wait until you see the rest of it.” The next floor the elevator descended through was covered in wall-to-wall troughs of plants under grow lights, reminding me of the underground chambers in North Compound where we’d grown turnips, potatoes, and other vegetables. Like the floor above, this one too seemed ten times bigger than even the large meeting auditorium back at North.

      “Are you seeing this?” I whispered to Shawn.

      “I am,” Shawn breathed.

      The elevator didn’t give us long to gawk before dropping down into the biggest room I’d ever seen. All comparisons to North Compound disappeared as I pressed my hands to the glass and stared in wonder at hundreds of dinosaurs, all housed in enormous glass cages. Arching above the dinosaur pens was a tangled network of glass walkways, bustling with blue jump-suited people.

      “No way.” Todd gasped. Shawn made a disbelieving choking noise, and I pounded him on the back with my bound hands.

      “You keep dinosaurs down here?” I gasped.

      “Of course,” Schwartz replied. “We run one of the top breeding programs in the world.”

      “We run the only breeding program in the world,” Chaz muttered.

      Schwartz glared at her before turning his attention back to us. “We have also tamed and trained some of the brighter species. We’ve gathered invaluable data from living in such close proximity. They act as message carriers, test subjects, and pets. You may not kill any of them,” he said, giving us a hard look. “Everyone who lives down here does so because they believe in the beauty and continuation of the dinosaur. Remember that.”

      “But why?” I asked, dumbstruck.

      “What do you mean why?” Schwartz sniffed.

      I shook my head in amazement as I took in the hundreds of cages. “Why would you breed them? After what happened with the pandemic?”

      “The ecosystem,” Chaz said. “When people brought the dinosaurs out of extinction one hundred and fifty years ago, no one thought about the impact these guys would have on the ecosystem if they ran wild.” She jerked her head at one of the cages. “They were supposed to just stay in zoos and wildlife preserves, right? Well, obviously, they didn’t. After the pandemic, these guys took over and a lot of other animals went extinct. It threw everything out of whack. Our lab has been trying to correct that with selective breeding and repopulation.”

      Her explanation sounded like a more scientific version of Ivan’s table demonstration when we had been back at his house the night before the marines found us again. He’d been trying to explain to Shawn that if you removed all the dinosaurs, the carefully balanced world of predator and prey that we lived in would collapse. And while Chaz wasn’t talking about removing the dinosaurs entirely, she seemed to be making the same general point. Had things changed so much in the last 150 years that we now needed dinosaurs to keep the topside world functional? And if that was true, then what Chaz was saying about balancing out the dinosaur population made a lot of sense. I shook my head as I tried to process this bizarre concept. I had grown up in a compound where everyone talked about the time before the dinosaurs like it was this ideal utopia that could be reclaimed. But what if Ivan and Chaz were right and the dinosaurs were here to stay?

      Before I could respond, the elevator continued its steady descent, and I craned my head back to get one last look at the cage of what had to be Parasaurolophus before it disappeared from sight. We passed through a floor that looked like a school, glass desks lined up neatly in glass rooms. The place seemed to go on forever, and I tried to wrap my mind around the fact that it was all underwater. If I hadn’t been standing in the middle of it, I never would have believed it.

      “So much glass,” Shawn marveled next to me, and I realised he was right. Glass had been something we’d had to scavenge and reuse over and over again in North Compound, as we were unable to manufacture it.

      Chaz leant forward. “I’m not sure if you noticed while running from that pack of carnotaurs, but we have a lot of sand around here.” When neither of us said anything, she cocked her head to the side. “That’s how you make glass. You heat sand to really high temperatures. Didn’t you know that?” All I could do was shake my head in wonder as we passed through another floor, this one made up of small apartments.

      Our elevator finally bumped to a stop, and we spilled out into a gigantic lab lit with harsh fluorescents. Floor-to-ceiling windows looked out into the dark murk of Lake Michigan. A few scientists glanced up from their large stationary port screens as we entered, eyeing us with interest before turning back to their work. Schwartz gave Chaz a meaningful look before striding away to meet three lab-coated men huddled around a port screen. A small yellow dinosaur that only came up to my knee scurried past us and clambered nimbly up Chaz’s leg and onto her shoulder. Chaz dug a large dead beetle out of her pocket and handed it up to the little creature. It cooed happily.

      “This is Pip.” She grinned as she passed up another treat. “She’s kind of the mascot for this floor of the lab. She was supposed to get released back into the wild, but she was so darn cute they decided to let her stay.”

      “What is she exactly?” Todd asked, slightly less green now that we weren’t in the tiny elevator.

      “Compsognathus,” Chaz said. “It’s Greek for dainty jaw. Dr Schwartz’s team was able to extract her DNA from a bone found in Germany. He’s one of the most brilliant paleontologists we have here at the lab.” The little creature was more bird than dinosaur, and I had to admit that Chaz had a point; she was sort of cute. Vibrant yellow with blue eyes that took up most of her pointed face; she lashed her long, thin tail delicately from side to side for balance as she surveyed us from her perch on Chaz’s shoulder.

      “Ecosystem or no ecosystem, I can’t believe you’re still actively bringing new species back to life,” Shawn said, his fists clenched. Oblivious to Shawn’s anger in her preoccupation with Pip, Chaz nodded happily.

      “Ten new species just last year. We have an above-ground facility where we release them. It’s really amazing.”

      “Amazing is not the word I would use,” Todd said sarcastically.

      “Spoken like a true savage,” Schwartz said drily as he rejoined our group. He turned to Chaz. “Dr Robinson is sending a team out to tag the carnotaurs we stunned. Please accompany him. I’ll escort these three to see Boznic.”

      Chaz nodded and was turning to go when one of the men in lab coats trotted up, a worried look on his face. He whispered something quietly in Schwartz’s ear, and Schwartz scowled and nodded. With a resigned sigh he turned to Chaz, who had stopped to watch this interaction. “Change of plans. Escort them to conference room B. I’ll alert Boznic and meet you there after I deal with this.” With a curt nod to the man in the lab coat, Schwartz turned and followed him at a jog.

      “Looks like you’re with me,” Chaz said as Pip hopped from her shoulder and scampered away. “Which,” she said confidentially, “is kind of shocking. I’m not sure if you noticed, but Schwartz isn’t my biggest СКАЧАТЬ