When Portman spoke, he sounded like he was trying to convince himself: “Five bucks all this shit is a disgruntled employee with a gun…”
Sparks spat from a broken power line then, announcing the return of the juice. Reaper spotted a light switch, hit it, and an overhead fluorescent tube came on. But there wasn’t much reassurance in the grim, echoing, bloodstained corridor made visible.
Reaper noticed the corridor branching left and right up, ahead…which way to go?
“Pinky,” Sarge said into his comm, “you get us a schematic?”
There was a pause as Pinky shot them the layout from the mainframe. “Uploading to you now.”
Sarge held the flashpoint uplink in his hand, angled downward; it projected a schematic of the lab on the blood-scuffed floor. They all stared at it but it seemed mostly a jumble of interlocked squares. After a moment they made out patterns — and labels: GENETICS, LAB OFFICE, WEAPONS.
“Goat, Portman…” Sarge ordered, “…Genetics. Destroyer, Kid: the office where Carmack sent the mayday…” He pointed with his free hand to indicate the place. “Reaper, keep Dr. Grimm safe on her salvage op. Duke and I will take the Weapons Lab, make sure the hardware’s secure.” He looked at each subteam as he gave them their assignment, a hard look emphasizing the inflexibility of the orders. And added, “Fluorescent powder marking as rooms are cleared.”
The squadron nodded as one and after a final glance at the schematic to get their bearings set off.
In the wormhole chamber, Pinky watched a monitor displaying a layout of the labs, tracking the squadron with GTS blips tailed by their names. The guncams showed in thumbnail images across the top of the screen.
Pinky found himself wondering for the tenth time that day if they were doing the right thing. Complete and instant evacuation would’ve been wiser. They could return later with a larger force and get the data then. But the way things had been going, the whole base, labs and all, could be destroyed in their absence. And they had to seal off the Ark. Something might get through, otherwise…
Still, they might simply be wasting more lives, sending the men in — and Sam. He felt a twinge, thinking about her going in there. He should’ve tried to talk her out of it. But he knew that’d be like trying to talk the moon out of rising.
He glanced at Mac, leaning against the wall near the door, gun cradled in his arms. Mac was looking at the monitor, frowning, trying to decode the floor plans and blips.
“They’re on the move,” Pinky told him. After a moment, looking Mac over — Mac was obviously Oriental — he added, “You don ’t look like a ‘Mac.’”
Mac looked at him expressionlessly. Then recited his full name. “Katshuhiko Kumanosuke Takaashi.”
Pinky nodded. “So…Mac!”
Sarge and Duke moved down their divergent corridor, toward the Weapons Lab. Wall signs confirmed they were going the right way.
Duke wondered just what kind of weapons were squirreled away down here. How much had they been tested? The M-100 in the jungle was still a fresh memory — a bad memory. If they tried out one of these weapons — and how could a weapons expert like Sarge resist? — they might find out why the damned things were locked away up here…
It never occurred to him to try to talk this over with Sarge. Someone else maybe, not Sarge.
Duke wished he’d been assigned to go with Reaper. Someone to talk to. One thing Sarge wasn’t, was someone to talk to.
They kept on, in silence, through passages where the lights flickered; past cross corridors that led into restless shadow, where things moved — intuited more than seen. Things that snuffled and chuckled and clicked their teeth together.
Both Sarge and Duke felt the things out there. And neither one of them said a word about it.
Destroyer and the Kid swept the back hallway and storage rooms, marking with the fluorescent powder as they went.
“Clear,” the Kid said into his headset, as they passed through another nondescript room. Trying to keep the nervousness out of his voice.
The Kid had come to the squadron right from secondary training, just a week before. But in the short time he’d been with Unit Six he’d come to look up to Destroyer. Didn’t want him to know how scared he was. Destroyer was tough, all right: he could go from smiling to flinty in a heartbeat. But — despite some ribbing — he’d spent a long time showing the Kid how to field strip his weapons, in the days before this assignment. He’d given him a couple of lessons in hand-to-hand fighting, hardly hurting him at all — if he’d wanted to, he could have broken the Kid’s neck — and he’d listened to the Kid talk about his family without once making fun of him for it the way Portman had. Destroyer had shown the Kid a holo-cube of his wife; had smiled at the Kid’s cell-images of his girlfriend Millie. Hard-nosed moniker or not, the Kid suspected that Destroyer had a soft heart.
Unless you were the enemy.
The animal lab was freaking Portman out.
Monkeys, rats, dogs in cages, some of them alive. All of them staring at Portman and Goat as they passed. Some whimpering, some growling, some cringing in terror. Patches of bare, inflamed skin on some of the animals where the fur had been shaved off for operations, for wire inserts; stitches across skulls and bellies. Nasty. Poor little fuckers.
And there — a series of shelves with dissected animals suspended in big jars of viscous liquid: gels and solutions glowing livid yellow, blue, red. Some of these creatures were still alive, intubated and sprouting electrodes. Visible hearts beating.
Just to ease the tension, Portman considered making a joke about how maybe they’d find a goat in here with the lab animals, and it’d be one of Goat’s relatives. Goat — goat, get it? But he glanced at Goat’s grim face and thought better of it. Goat had even less sense of humor than Sarge.
Flatscreen monitors on the deserted lab’s consoles streamed anatomical and genetic monitoring diagrams, MRI images, X-rays, 3-D constructs, as if ghostly technicians were there to study them. Some of the MRIs showed what you’d expect — familiar mammalian organs.
But some of them looked completely unfamiliar. Unnatural. What the hell was that thing? A severed head, all tubed up and twitching, it was mostly jaws, clusters of eyes. Where’d they find that? And was he imagining those eyes following him as he walked by?
He got the strange notion that he could hear it thinking. Kill you, it was thinking. Want to kill you. Please. Let me. Kill you.
Seemed you got crazy notions, in a place like this…
“Pinky, you getting this?” Goat asked, turning his guncam to take in the lab animals.
“There’s another chamber to the north,” Pinky prompted them.
Goat jabbed his gun that way, and Portman nodded. They headed north, going through a door into what looked like the surgery: there was a ventilator, EKG, bloodied cutting equipment, a gurney with the heaviest restraints Portman had ever seen. Something about that gurney, those suggestive restraints made Portman want to turn, run the way they’d come back to the air lock.
Get a grip, chickenshit, he told himself. He needed to get his game on. Sometimes it helped to listen to speed-metal, to something that really rocked — it seemed to throw a switch in his nervous system, turned him around so that he went from defensive to ready for action. He found his earphones, plugged them in, hit the PLAY button. Pounding music: Sado-Nation’s vocalist singing: