cChapter Two

It was impossible. And yet, that very thought did little to allay Feld’s fears. Very little is impossible outside the realm of scientific and mathematical laws and there is nothing scientific about the end days of a civil war.

When the Genome War ended, the Cleansed and Tainted leaders of Nova Terra took a long, hard look at how the war was conducted. In order to forge a lasting peace, new laws regulating genetic engineering were passed. The cleansing manipulations which formed the foundation of the war were made available to the population at large without any financial consideration. The other less savory manipulations were banned and the scientific discoveries were either locked away or destroyed.

The dark side of the peace process dealt with the living implementations of these manipulations. Each manipulation invented by each side was listed and a judgment made as to containment. Most of the current in utero manipulations in progress were aborted. The mature carriers of manipulated genes had to be dealt with differently. In some of the mild or benign cases, like the pheromone signature sense, the mutation was allowed to propagate. Other cases, like berserker rage, required an immediate, terminal solution.

Dermal camouflage, or chameleon skin, the primary manipulation that spawned the Gray Ladies, was deemed too harmful to society to be allowed to propagate. However, three points were presented during the peace discussions that kept the Gray Ladies from extermination. The first was that this particular mutation was not inheritable by their offspring. The Gray Ladies were the first and last carriers of that genetic mutation. The second point was that, while dermal camouflage can be unsettling to look at, it took hard training and discipline to effect the virtual invisibility the assassins guild relied on. The third point involved the sheer numbers of women who had had these manipulations. By the end of the war, some 16,000 women had undergone the dermal camouflage manipulation. Terminating that many women was deemed too harsh a measure. With these points in mind, rehabilitation and reintegration into society were favored over extermination. In hindsight, it was a regrettable decision.

The first sign of trouble came approximately two years after the peace agreements were signed. In New Berne, a baby girl, the child of a Gray Lady, was born with dermal camouflage. Two months later in White Cap, another baby girl was born with dermal camouflage. Within a year, some 500 baby girls had been born with the inherited mutation. An investigation into the scientific studies and the report to the peace commission regarding the inheritability of this mutation discovered that the scientific reports in the computer archives did not match the original hand written notes made during the dermal camouflage program development. There had been a data transcription error.

However, the real trouble began six years after the peace agreements. A former Gray Lady had been arrested on New Home for involvement in a murder-for-hire scheme. Initial investigations revealed that the assassins guild had not fully disbanded after the war. The Gray Ladies were still in business. A closer look at the rehabilitation and reintegration programs for them revealed a complete failure based on fear and prejudice by the society at large. Shunned by the general population and faced with no employment or other social prospects, the Gray Ladies had turned to each other and fell back on what they knew best. They had become hired guns and, worse yet, had re-established the training programs.

The reaction was swift and forceful. The former Household Guards units with their pheromone signature senses were mobilized and, together with planetary law enforcement personnel, an attempt was made to round up all known Gray Ladies. The result was a six year conflict involving inner city street fights, kidnappings, assassinations and bounty hunts on four different planets. In the end, over 7000 of the Gray Ladies were killed and all known survivors, women and girls all, were rounded up and put into underground prisons for life. It became Nova Terra’s silent secret.

75 years later, the last Gray Lady quietly passed away and the underground prisons were sealed up, never to be opened again. The last, dark chapter had been written and the book finally closed.