We found ourselves in a short tunnel, with a door at the other end. Ching pushed past Lou, walked up to the control panel on the wall beside the door, and pushed a button.
With a hydraulic hiss, the door slid open, and we rushed through, weapons ready to fire.
The room was empty. The four of us looked at each other, partly relieved, partly confused. Ching turned and closed the door behind us, then loosened her rebreather and signaled that it was safe to remove the apparatus. Slowly, we relaxed and began to look around. The space was large and circular, like the dome over it. Computer consoles lined the perimeter, and several computer stations dotted the center of the room.
We fanned out, and I walked to the nearest console. Most of the equipment was running, with monitors displaying everything from camera views to data readouts. The first section I checked was labeled Maximum Security Zone 10. Several dozen cameras were trained on an area that resembled a prison camp. None of them showed any movement whatsoever. Wherever this maximum security area was, it appeared to be completely abandoned.
I circled around, pausing every few feet to inspect computer screens. There were inventory displays, prisoner records, and a good deal of indecipherable data. One bit of information caught my eye. It was a listing of zone populations and seemed to show that, as of November 22, there were four hundred and eighteen occupants in Maximum Security Zone 10. What happened to the prisoners?
As I continued my examination, I saw several other banks of camera monitors, all of which showed deserted areas like the one I’d already seen. From what I could gather, the entire complex was abandoned. My investigation was interrupted by Ching, who called me over to where she was standing.
She found a computer display of the complex’s layout. Most of the areas were color-coded, and we were able to identify sections of minimum, medium, and maximum security. The op-center was also clearly marked, but there were three sections without a description. Ching and I agreed that we should explore those areas first. According to the layout, there four transport tubes, one at each primary compass point. We looked around the room and saw four corresponding exits. Ching would explore one area, I’d take another, and Lou and Felipe would go cover the other two.
I walked to one of the doors and examined the control panel beside it, which was not unlike and elavator panel. One of the buttons looked especially important, so I pressed it. A yellow light flashed on and began to blink. Thirty seconds later, the light changed to a solid green, and the door slid open. Beyond was a small compartment with two rows of facing seats and windows all around. I buckled myself into one of the seats near the door, then pressed a button to the left of the door. It slid shut, and the compartment began to move.
Through the windows, I saw the moon’s landscape flying by. I looked in the direction I was moving and saw a long, clear tunnel. The compartment seemed to be moving along a monorail. A few moments later, it began to slow down, then came to a rest against a door identical to the one back at the op-center. I pressed the button by the door, and it slid open.
Suddenly, all the oxygen seemed to leave my lungs, and I groped for my rebreather.
Apparently, this section had been shut down. Once my rebreather was in place and I’d regained my composure, I stood up and entered a narrow hallway that looked like it ran all the way around the dome’s perimeter. A door directly in front of me proved to be locked, so I turned right and started walking.
Doors were built into the inside walls every twenty feet or so, but they were all locked.
It wasn’t until I’d gone at least halfway around that I found one left ajar. I pushed on it, but it didn’t want to move. Then I lowered my shoulder and pushed hard. The door moved inward, and I heard the sound of something sliding on the floor. When the opening was wide enough to pass through, I squeezed in and took a look at what had been blocking the door.
It was a body. A heavy set, middle-aged man stared up at me with unseen eyes. He had a massive wound in his chest, and his white shirt was stained dark brown with dried blood. I pried my eyes away from the corpse and saw eight others, all within twenty feet of each other. Every one of them had been shot. It looked like a mass execution.
Immediately, I thought of the missing prisoners. But these people didn’t look like convicts. I bent down and went through the pockets of a dead woman. Keys, a pen, a pack of chewing gum… and an ID card. It read, “Janice Bergman — Genetic Research Systems.”
So this is where they’d ended up. Now, the question was, what had they been doing?
And why had these people been murdered? Was there a mutiny of some kind? I stood up and looked around. The room was semicircular. Along the left side, the wall was rounded, and the ceiling rose up at quite a steep angle. To my right was a long, straight, high wall of Plexiglass. Up against the Plexiglass was a series of workstations and chairs. It looked like the engineering booth in a large recording studio.
I walked toward the clear glass wall. On the other side was what appeared to be the interior of a biosphere. There were trees, grass, flowers, and plants of all types. I estimated the size of the garden-like area to be at least the square footage of a football field. It would have been a beautiful site, except for one thing. The floor was covered with dead bodies.
The scene was nightmarish. There were literally hundreds of men, women, and children.
It looked like old pictures I’d seen of the Holocaust. I pressed my face against the glass and stared at the corpses nearest to me. These people were probably the missing prisoners. As I looked over the carnage, I was especially horrified at the presence of children. For a moment I wondered why children were here, but then I remembered hearing that minimum-security prisoners weren’t automatically sterilized and that male and female prisoners were allowed to mingle. Sometimes, even marriages were allowed.
So, it wasn’t just incarcerated scum that had been slaughtered here, but entire families.
Why had the prisoners been murdered? And how? Unlike people on my side of the wall, the victims in the biosphere hadn’t been shot. In fact, there was no visible cause of death.
I decided to take a closer look. There were doors at either end of the Plexiglass wall. I walked to one of them and was about to open it when I noticed a row of decontamination suits hanging on the wall. Maybe it wasn’t such a good idea to enter the biosphere.
I turned away and began searching through the workstations for details on what had happened to the prisoners. There was no power for the consoles, so the contents of the computers were off-limits. I opened drawers and looked in wastebaskets for some time.
Eventually, I found a printout that provided some information.
ATTN: Project Supervisor
RE: Length of Process
The virus will be introduced into the atmosphere via dispenser satellites. With maximum flight-path alignment and a minimum of one thousand dispensers, Earth’s atmosphere will be thoroughly saturated within twelve hours. We estimate that eighty to eighty-five percent of the population will expire within the first twelve hours, an additional 10 percent within thirty-six hours, and the effective remainder within seven days.
I read the message several times. If it meant what I thought it did, the cult was planning on fumigating Earth with some kind of virus. And if the biosphere full of corpses was any indication, the billions down below wouldn’t stand a chance of surviving. I didn’t know anything about chemistry, and most of the other things I found were too technical for me to understand. As far as I could determine, the GRS scientists had spent the past few years developing the virus referred to in the message. How it worked was beyond me, but it was quick and lethal.