Animalis by John Peter Jones Read Free Book Online

one hundred percent certainty that their decision will be executed.”
    “This soldier may have prevented us from making a bigger mistake,” Hank said.
    Jax kept silent but cringed at Hank’s audacity to speak back to the captain with that much confidence.
    Hernandez straightened with a scowl. “What do you mean?”
    “I had given Jax permission to review the information retrieved from the computer …”
    The captain’s nostrils flared at this reported breach of need-to-know protocol. But Hank kept talking.
    “And when we were on board, he came across two never-before-seen animals. They don’t match anything that is known to science—animal or Animalis.” Hank let that sink in for a second before continuing. “This is more complex than just cutting off one shipment of weapons.”
    Hank looked back at the pod door. “There. You see that?”
    Jax turned along with the captain and saw the white creature’s head sniffing the air around the window on the pod door. Now that they were on the plane, in the presence of the captain, the creature looked more like an infestation than some important scientific discovery.
    Captain Hernandez grew so big that Jax thought he was on the verge of erupting. “You brought an animal on my plane?”
    Hank kept going. “Two, sir. But what Jax found in the data recovered was much more disturbing than these animals.”
    The captain raised his head, looking at the air three feet in front of himself.
    “That is the document that highlights what we discovered,” Hank said. “The Animalis are not planning to attack the States, like we all thought. Their next target is going to be in Australia, somewhere in Port Hedland.” Hank waited a moment while the captain scanned the document.
    “What does this have to do with those two animals?” Hernandez asked while reading.
    Hank lowered his voice, almost dramatically: “They may have the ability to create new forms of life,” he said and then waited.
    The captain stopped reading and looked at him, nearly rolling his eyes.
    “Check for yourself; they are completely new to science,” Hank said. “And it’s impossible that they have just now been discovered. They were created , and the only explanation is that the Animalis now have the same technology that created the Animalis in the first place. It could be the Ivanovich Machine!”
    Hernandez folded his arms and let out a breath weighted with lost patience.
    Jax had never heard of an Ivanovich Machine, and couldn’t tell if the captain had, either. The way Jax had always understood it, there hadn’t been any special technology used to create the Animalis. It had been the work of hundreds of scientists working in secret for nearly a decade at the beginning of the twenty-first century—a deranged Russian billionaire named Romanov, throwing aside every moral objection to achieve his insane vision for the future.
    But the captain wasn’t stopping Hank. “Proceed,” he said.
    “With the protection clause in the United Nations Security Council’s resolution ten-nine-seven-five,” Hank said, “all participating members of the body—Australia included—are required to foster efforts made to maintain normal societal functions.
    “There is a precedence,” Hank went on, though the conversation had officially gone beyond Jax’s understanding, “for a US Army unit, or company, to peruse hostile combatants into an obliging country.”
    “And Australia is forced to oblige,” Hernandez said. “You’re talking about what happened in Germany, with the Sen Grial unit?”
    Hank watched the captain’s face as he thought about it. Jax was amazed to even see him considering it. Would their company be sent on a secret mission to break up a series of terrorist attacks? If Hank was actually trying to convince the captain to act on the information, it was real. The documents and the threat to Australia were real.
    “I had the foresight to leave the rat’s computer with the appearance that