Renner Morgan by Anitra Lynn McLeod Read Free Book Online Page B

from a bag sustained him but offered no pleasure.
    Quintus sat bolt upright in his bed. What if he’d just exposed himself to the blood madness? Slowly, he eased himself back until his head hit the pillow. All his meticulous lab work rolled around in his mental landscape as he tried to determine if there might be a way to find out. Initially, he had thought the disease was a virus, but then he didn’t, yet now he wasn’t so sure what to think. At one point he came to the conclusion it was some odd genetic quirk that was being suddenly expressed. That notion held longer than any of the others. The only problem was he couldn’t prove it. Not with the equipment or tests he had access to. Initially, he worried that all the gentrymen would eventually fall victim to the sickness if it was due to a genetic anomaly, but he figured if they were going to show signs, they would have by now. Still, he hadn’t disabused McBride of the notion he could quarantine against the illness. He wasn’t certain how to tell him his theory or even if he should.
    When Quintus had floated that particular idea to his fellow crimetechs, they’d laughed openly at him then turned back to their computers. But the notion simply wouldn’t go away no matter how diligently he tried to make what was happening fit in terms of being a virus. He found it too odd that suddenly, in multiple areas, a disease expressed the same symptoms. To his scientific brain, it didn’t seem like coincidence so much as it was…time.
    Not that the Genetics Board had planned for the explosion of illness, just that with the way they cloned specific lines and hadn’t bothered to enrich the gentrymen gene pool, they had been asking for trouble. Quintus probably never would have hit on the idea without finding very old books about preplague genetics. On the verge of the world-destroying plague, couples were using advanced techniques to engineer specific traits in their children such as blue eyes or musical ability. But then the science went beyond that, allowing people to alter their own genetic structure. Governments tried to put restrictions, but it was the era of megacorporations that cared more about money than anything else. Men and women augmented themselves with animal genes, and soon there were humans with fur, scales, and hides as tough as a rhino’s. They gave themselves metallic sheens, the ability to withstand extremes of temperature, or even the ability to extend their canines and take sustenance from blood.
    From that genetic mess, the plague had arisen.
    Quintus hadn’t been able to find the details on how the Genetics Board came about, but he imagined the remnants of one of the old corporations had survived and toiled to put things back the way they were before they’d started mucking about. Sadly, they weren’t able to bring everything back. In his nightmares, Quintus imagined them trying to untangle the strings of double helixes to put the DNA back into tidy little coils. But they never were able to bring back women, horses, or dogs. Most of the domesticated animals—those used for food—were simpler to restore because there was an abundance of untainted stock, but the exotic breeds weren’t recreated, or perhaps they decided they didn’t need them.
    If not for the science of mating any couple in a bottle, the entire human species would have been wiped out. Since they went the other direction and feared any change to the genetic structure, they preferred clones for the highest class. Slammers, thralls, and grinders had variations, but they were all formed from the same genetic pool. They just mixed and matched unlike the gentrymen, who were exact clones.
    Quintus sighed and wondered what would become of all of them now. If he was right, if this was some kind of genetic crisis, then it didn’t matter what planet mankind lived on. He imagined all the planets suffering similar illnesses. Society would collapse. The survivors would either cling to the old