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“With the ability people have to globe-hop now,” he said, “that 1918 figure would be a drop in the bucket”

“This time, it’s the whole bucket, Kurt The feds classified our findings and overn out of turn could be prosecuted for treason They also added White House and military people to the board Then they moved most of the research to a secret undersea lab”

“Why not stay at Bonefish Key?” Austin asked

“Too public, for one thing But there were practical reasons too We wanted to be near the resource The blue medusa once covered a wide area, but now it is found primarily in and around a specific deepwater canyon And anted to quarantine our work We were developing an enhanced version of the erous predator, not the kind of thing you’d want to find in your swi pool”

“Are you saying you orking with nant mutant life-forms, Doc?”

“Essentially, yes”

“What would happen if they got in the wild?”

“Don’t worry, there’s no danger of the out the ocean’s biomass They can’t reproduce and would eventually die out in the open We took great care during the genetic engineering to prevent the possibility of proliferation”

“That’s still playing with dynaed”

“I know, I know,” Kane said, his voice tightening “But ere under intense pressure froreater quantities of the toxin to conduct our synthesis experier ressive than the original, and the toxin they produced went off the charts”

“Before you came to the Beebe, you were in the Pacific Ocean,” Austin observed “Is that where they put the lab?”

“Yes Micronesia, to be overnment used an undersea observatory under development for the Navy We call it Davy Jones’s Locker I orking there when I heard I’d been nominated for the B3 dive The project was about to be wrapped up, so I left e and took a leave of absence You know the rest”

“Only up to the point when the Coast Guard snatched you from the deck of the Beebe”

“The call I got on the Beebe was to tell me that the secret lab had vanished around the sa the lab was heavily daed by a missile that may have been launched fro quarters, along with the staff, disappeared fro”

Austin gazed at Kane as if he’d seen the little man asn’t there