Shield - A New Species Fanfiction (Wild at Heart Chronicles, Book 1)

Chapter 7

Chapter 7

NICOLAI TESTING FACILITY- SECTOR 1: SURVEILLANCE ROOM.

Dr. Anita Rosenburg gripped the pencil in her hand until she felt it snap in two, releasing some of her tension. She pressed her back to the chair, keeping her distance from the men congregating near the surveillance console. They ignored her presence as usual. Though she retained a façade of absolute composure, a tendril of fear began to coil inside her the longer she analyzed the events which had transpired in the past twenty-four hours.

The plan had gone to hell, and she had no one to blame but herself.

The senior guards had assembled this morning to witness the execution of the young Evans girl. Among them was Dougal, reclined in a chair with his feet propped over the monitor table while he nursed his coffee mug and glowered at the live feed displayed on the screen.

"The picture looks like shit," he remarked to Randall, his second in command. "Thought we had better angles, and what's with the static?"

"It's the cooling system generator," Randall replied. He leaned against the wall, texting on his cell phone. "Fucks with the signal. And we did have more angles, but that son of a bitch took down at least half the cameras we planted in a single night. It's like he can hear them move around or something, can you believe that?"

Naturally, Anita thought. She glanced down at X-013's case file resting over her lap.

Dr. Isaac Crawford designed the male to surpass Mercile's First Generation test subjects, but unable to fulfill that objective after his incarceration, Dr. Malcolm had continued with her grandfather's project and secured Rafael Nicolai as their investor when the man presented his interest in X-013. For a ruthless CEO with military background, his appeal to the enhanced new breed was to be expected.

X-013 was engineered with keen senses like his predecessors, but his level far exceeded Mercile's original breeds. Upon reaching sexual maturity, the data compiled over the years of his development since birth revealed a thirty percent increase in ocular and auditory trials. Forty-five percent increase in strength and endurance, with a higher tolerance for pain as discovered by the technicians when testing the speed of his tissue and bone repair. But it was X-013's acute olfactory trait that procured his position as the ultimate predator. His sense of smell was eighty-five percent more advanced than a First Generation test subject, a statistic that would put a canine breed to shame.

After all, nature designed bears to be the one of the best trackers in the animal kingdom.

In his quest to introduce an extinct breed into the second phase of the hybrid program, Dr. Crawford acquired the preserved DNA of Arctodus simus-an extinct giant bear from the Pleistocene epoch. The sample was donated by Nicolai Research and Development before the NSO shut Mercile Industries down six years ago. Dr. Crawford had selected two additional species of the Ursidae family to complete the sequence in X-013's genetic makeup-Kodiak and Polar bear.  His granddaughter had predicted the splicing of these aggressive species would influence the male's behavior, categorizing him as a Class Five test subject.

She was right.

The research Mercile had gathered from their continuous observation of the original breeds proved obsolete when evaluating X-013 in a controlled environment. Anita had documented his unusual habits often enough. His presence alone called to attention, though his disinclination to socialize with the other test subjects had earned him a rogue status in his case file.

Even placed in a breeding experiment, with the hope of replicating his unusual DNA, the male had coupled with only two females before he rejected any further sessions.  X-013 was territorial, antisocial, and he possessed a forbidding temper. The psychosomatic analysis had concluded his behavior to have derived from the human aspect of his DNA, diagnosing him with an intermittent explosive disorder that he'd developed in his adolescent stage.