The fibre armour in his lab coat held up well enough to the incendiary grenade he threw at Prototype, but that android has had work done. No Progenitor-class should be able to take three sniper rounds from Rennin’s rifle, which itself is illegal for the amount of damage it can do. No Progenitor-class has ever been rated as combat grade. The chassis has been extensively upgraded.
Without warning, Jellan Roths opens the door to his office and sees him in all his ‘glory’. “Good god, William, what have you done to yourself?”
At first he doesn’t fully acknowledge her. It’s her absent scratching that draws his attention. His frame isn’t the largest but his muscles are wound so tightly that he looks like he could go fifty rounds bare-knuckled.
“Did I call you?”
“No, you made a complete spectacle of yourself. What were you thinking?” Roths asks, wincing as she regards his body.
“I needed to get some samples.”
Roths scoffs. “What for?”
Caufmann faces her but isn’t paying attention to her words, just her periodic scratching.
“William, what’s that?” she asks, pointing at his right arm. “Didn’t I tell you that you can’t be seen doing things like that to yourself? What will the rest of the staff think?”
“I’d gone too far not to finish it. Now I can talk to other staff and order pancakes.”
“This is not a joke. Why did you deny security interception of the progenitor?”
“The Prototype is being tracked as we speak. We need to know if it’s working alone or with others, and that was worth the risk to me,” says Caufmann slowly.
“Worth the risk, what rubbish, you wanted to see it for yourself eye to eye, didn’t you?”
Caufmann smiles at how well she knows him. “Yes. Yes I did. I know it’s not alone. It’s wearing radically advanced armour. It took three rounds from Rennin’s rifle to get through its defences.”
“What does this mean?”
“It means we have to find where Prototype is going and kill it along with all who are working with it. This is not a capture mission. Once we find it and its accomplices, they will be killed.”
“You could have captured a rogue progenitor-class and you thought it best to play cat and mouse?”
“There’s more at stake here, we can’t just cut the fingers off the hand trying to open the door. We need the whole arm,” he says lifting his own, damaged, arm in front of himself for effect. “If you’ll excuse me, Doctor Roths, I have to repair my bracer.”
“There are tests being conducted in the lab and we need your guidance on many of them. Adrenin is taking far too long to gestate and Del’s programming is an absolute mess, it’s a miracle it even functioned enough to talk to that degenerate sitting in his tower.”
“Del is a he and Rennin proved once again why he has that job by four brilliant shots. If you knew how close his pay is to yours you’d be sick.”
“A warmonger earning five figures is more than he deserves.”
Caufmann points up indicating the figure is more dramatic.
“Six figures?”
Caufmann nods. “That war veteran is an expert sniper and finding someone of his quality to shoot any target when ordered is very difficult.”
“I hear he lives in that disgusting Godyssey commission housing area.”
“He does, yes. He said his needs are simple.”
Roths glares at Caufmann for a moment with an incredulous expression. “How often do you talk to this sniper?”
“Often enough to worry the general population.”
“General population is usually a term applied to prison inmates.”
Caufmann smiles. “Look around you. You think you’re free here?”
A moment of silence, and they fall back into desultory conversation, what lab supplies are running low, and how Del’s progress has been hampered by anomalies produced by his simulated Instinctual Cluster Unit. The first simulated IC Unit ever.
All business related topics exhausted, Roths leaves Caufmann to his thoughts of Del and IC Units. The original IC Units were postulated to house the remnants of the human soul from the donor body, supposedly giving them all the instincts of a real person.
The thought gives Caufmann the distinct feeling of indigestion and he hiccups slightly, tasting acid at the back of his throat. He scratches his chest and is reminded of Roths digging at her arm. A realization dawns on him.
She’s infected.
He can’t use the treatment on his staff yet as he isn’t sure of what it will actually do. He can’t afford to make things worse at this critical stage. Roths should still have a fortnight before things get really bad, so he decides to make maximum use of her until then.
Caufmann sighs and estimates that in one month the city will be overrun, but by what is another question. He’s seen this sickness do terrible things. The mutations are grotesque but the effects it has on the mind are as fascinating as they are horrible.
The treatment is untested and most likely hopeless, but it is literally the city’s only chance. He opens his radio to make his desperate gambit.
“Attention all Godyssey staff, initiate the closing stage of Project Outreach. I want all shipments of flu vaccinations out by tomorrow morning.”
Rennin is reclining in his tower thinking through the day’s events, replaying the shots taken at the android intruder. Armour that thick is rare, so rare that Rennin can’t think of a place that would have it available, much less how the progenitor-class could possibly attain such funding.
What he still can’t understand is why bother upgrading it to combat ready when assassin androids can be built for half the cost and wouldn’t bother making an appearance. It would just kill its mark. Seems overly elaborate.
Raddocks Horizon is in serious trouble, and for the first time in his long career he considers desertion. If that’s what it is called when one abandons a corporate entity.
He remains seated for the rest of his shift, occasionally looking out to the streets that are a little busy for this time of night.
The pub can be seen across the street but the mirrored glass makes seeing into it impossible. He briefly thinks about using his thermal-vision goggles to see if he can make out Carla working at the bar. Since his shift is over in an hour, he decides against wasting the effort.
His hangover is almost gone now and the more it fades the more desertion is on his mind. Is it desertion? He’s only a security watchman after all, despite his shoot-to-kill orders. He could give notice like a normal person but something inside tells him that if he tells them he’s leaving he’ll be denied and put under observation, or worse: made a permanent resident of Godyssey.
Eventually, and in painstaking time, his workday is over. He exits the lab into the night, to unintentionally mingle with the crowds of people swirling all around the streets. He wonders if there’s some kind of night festival. Or maybe the Gorai Aurelia Rally is a few days early.
He paces up and down the street, wondering if he should go into the bar to see Carla or if he’s really going to do a runner. Rennin isn’t accustomed to feeling nervous about anything except when he’s in a crowd unarmed.
He takes a breath and knows he’s not capable of running away from this or anything else. He despises cowardice, no matter what glib label it’s given, especially pacifism.
Then again he also hates the military, so much he even shot his superior officer when he made the mistake of forgetting his morals with a prisoner of war.
He’d also received remands for refusing to be a decoy in the field.
What kind of idiot would actually follow an order to commit suicide? Suicide sends you to Hell, after all. Not that Rennin’s religious either.