next under the skin. Two of them had been incised and the skin pinned back to expose the contents of the masses. One which had broken through the left temporal wall of the skull was in particularly clear focus. The granular folds of the tumor were studded with spikes of bone and glassy, blue-gray polyps; the tumor was trying to grow teeth and eyes.
"The odds of this kind of cancer forming in even one person are one in several million, and the odds of survival are painfully self-evident. You alone, of all those exposed, showed no sign of cancer immediately after exposure. Your suit was examined, and millions of microscopic pinholes were found burned into the vinyl, so there was no doubt that what hit them, hit you as well. But you survived.
"It was RADIANT, wasn't it? The military built an orbital antipersonnel device which caused cancer, but there was more to it, wasn't there? Radiant Dawn was a form of laboratory, where they were testing the effects of the weapon on those who already had cancer. The effect on them was very different from what happened to previously healthy bodies, wasn't it, Sgt. Storch?"
No response.
"There was a very different kind of Radiant Dawn community on the very same spot in the seventies, did you know that? Records are extremely sparse, and there's not so much as a picture of the leader, a man named Quesada, but there were rumors that it was some sort of a radiation cult. This has been going on for a very long time, hasn't it, Sergeant? This thing that you and your friends were trying to protect the world from, I mean. You might be of the opinion that such an undertaking could never come so far without sponsorship from within the government, and after all I've seen and heard myself, I couldn't say you were wrong. But you know what? Despite all the blood you and our friends spilled, it's still going on."
Storch staring through the pictures. Cundieffe turning over another. A field shot from a helicopter, a tiny toy church with a sheet-metal roof, and an ashtray beside it in the dirt. No, the ashtray was a pit, and the crumpled butts were human bodies. "There've been reports over the last six months of messianic movements in Uganda, Ethiopia and Kenya, where cancer incidence is high and treatment nearly non-existent. World Health Organization relief workers reported finding this body pit in Uganda with well over two hundred corpses, completely incinerated with gasoline. They turned out to be victims of AIDS. Their families said they left their homes to go to be healed out in the country. Flyers were found which instructed cancer sufferers to gather at predetermined places in the middle of the countryside to be healed. The AIDS patients just came along hoping for a miracle, and those who already had cancer and survived cremated the dead. Well over four hundred cancer patients in those three countries alone have vanished, and we have no idea how many more of these pits there are."
He turned over a satellite image, this one of a city. There were no cars on the roads, no smoke coming from the factories, and the giant broken eggshell in the center told the story. To not recognize it, one would have to have avoided all news coverage throughout the late eighties and early nineties. "There are at least three colonies in the former Soviet Union. The largest is a squatter colony in the quarantined zone surrounding Chernobyl. We still have no idea how large it is, but it's estimated that cancer victims in the Ukraine alone number in the tens of thousands."
He leaned across the table, so close that Storch could have bitten him, if it was worth getting shocked. "If it was your aim to exterminate RADIANT, you failed utterly. The program is still going on, and it's spreading."
Storch might've been an oil painting. Cundieffe sat back, then launched himself out of his chair and walked around behind Storch. Through a gap in the soldiers' cordon, he saw Nye and Hoecker stand up and approach the bars. He signaled
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