‘Rannu, if you’re finished I could do with another shooter here,’ I said.
‘I’m taking Morag out of here,’ he told me. I wished I’d thought of that. There was the hiss of the door’s seal breaking and then it swung open. Gregor’s twisted silhouette stood in the doorway backlit by the harsh strip-lighting of his cell. He stepped over the lip of the door. I took an involuntary step back. He opened his mouth and screamed. It was like the sound of the spires in my dream, except he wasn’t singing, he was angry, and it was mixed with a very human scream of rage. Mudge and I fired. We both hit. Gregor didn’t seem to register the twin impacts. Both of us dropped the dart guns and moved back, bringing our own weapons to bear. The prisoners screamed and heedless of Pagan’s laser carbine began scrambling over each other to get to the door.
I think Balor thought it was Christmas. His trident extended, snapping into place as he moved purposefully towards Gregor. Gregor swung towards him. Even his movements were inhuman, his strange gait more like Them than us. Balor stabbed forward one-handed with his trident. The three-pronged weapon pierced Gregor’s chest though he gave no indication of noticing it. Balor forced him back into the corner by the open door. Roaring, Balor leapt into the air, his free hand swinging back as he prepared to claw the pinioned hybrid.
I saw Gregor’s black fingernails grow and solidify until each of them was an eight-inch-long black blade. With his right hand Gregor grasped the shaft of the trident and pushed it back, tearing it out of his flesh. His left reached up, moving with the sort of speed I’d only ever seen once before, on the night Gregor had been taken. He caught Balor’s wrist with his left and letting go of the Trident swung upwards with his clawed right hand. The blow tore into Balor’s heavily armoured stomach and chest, halting and then reversing his trajectory. Gregor clawed him with so much force that Balor went crashing back into the operating table.
Immediately Balor was up as Gregor closed on him. He swung with one clawed hand and then the other. He tore rents in Gregor’s skin, revealing black liquid below the surface that immediately started to knit the torn flesh back together. I think that was when I stopped believing that my friend was alive and that I was looking at anything other than an alien wearing the distorted and tortured flesh of Gregor’s body. I felt like he’d been hollowed out. I dropped the shotgun, letting it hang on its sling as I drew my Tyler, stretching it out in a two-handed shooter’s stance for maximum accuracy. I was going to kill this mockery and then kill every fucking person who worked here. I didn’t care if I was still here when reinforcements arrived; I’d kill as many of them as I could as well.
Balor was slammed against the stainless-steel wall. He howled as alien claws pierced his side, pinning him to the wall. I was about to fire when the pistol was forced up and Mudge was suddenly in front of him.
‘What are you doing?’ he shouted.
‘It’s not him!’ I screamed in Mudge’s face, trying to break free.
Gregor staggered back for no good reason I could see. Balor used the opportunity to push him back further while repeatedly clawing him in the face. Each time Gregor’s distorted features were torn off, the black liquid began re-knitting the flesh and then Balor’s claws tore them open again. Gregor sank to the floor. I lowered my pistol, sure that Balor would do the job for me, but suddenly Gregor struck out. The blow sent Balor flying back into the air so high he broke through one of the hanging strip lights and slammed into the ceiling, before bouncing off the wall and landing on the ground.
Gregor stood up but swayed as his facial features reformed. Balor pushed himself to his feet and began striding towards Gregor. As Balor closed with him he swung out with his left with surprising speed. He caught Balor firmly on the face and picked him up off his feet again, sending him over a table and into the wall, hard enough to make a significant dent.
Balor threw the metal table aside and stood up. Gregor swayed again and then sat down hard. His eyes were still black pools but the expression on his face was one of confusion. Balor made for him again, presumably intent on finishing the job. Mudge let go of me.
‘No!’ he shouted at Balor. I wondered why Mudge had his AK-47 in his hands. Balor was ignoring Mudge. I watched in horror as Mudge shouldered the AK-47 and fired a three-round burst, staggering the pirate. Balor stopped and turned to Mudge. He looked furious. He looked inhuman. Gregor’s eyelids flickered and closed over the black liquid pools of his eyes as he slid to the ground. Mudge lowered his smoking AK-47. I saw him swallow before he turned and fled. Balor charged after him but I knew he had no chance of catching Mudge’s cybernetic legs.
I moved to stand over the inert body of the hybrid, the Tyler still in my hand. I pointed the laser pistol at him. Unconscious as the last of his wounds knit shut, he looked almost peaceful. More like my friend.
‘We’ve come a long way just so you can shoot him,’ Rannu said from the doorway. I lowered the pistol.
‘Morag?’ I asked.
‘She can move,’ he said.
‘Right, you go and calm Balor down, share some brotherly warrior shit with him or something. Get Mudge back here; I need a hand bagging Gregor.’ He nodded and left the room. I could hear him sub-vocalising over the net, trying to reach Balor. I turned to Pagan, who still did not look right.
‘Pagan, I want you to junk whatever’s left of their comms and security, okay?’ He nodded. We needed to leave here and we needed to do so quickly.
Exfiltration wasn’t exactly easy but it was less violent. Morag was up and moving, most of the blood cleared away, though her eyes were completely bloodshot. After making sure they had no way of communicating we pretty much left the surviving lab staff to it.
We put Gregor in a survival bag, gave him an air supply and a heat source – if indeed he needed either – and vacuum-packed the bag. Mudge and I slung it under a collapsible pole. We’d carry it between us.
We moved through the facility until we came to the place that Morag had predicted was the weakest part of the superstructure over a place least likely to be populated. Balor had the canister. The canister had been the real cost. Not the transport, the weapons, the intel or even the Wraiths. The canister he held in his hand was the really expensive thing and contained one of the most proscribed substances in human space. Unlicensed possession was normally enough for a substantial jail sentence; using it in a terrorist act like we were doing was worthy of the death sentence in most states and all Spokes.
Balor sprayed the programmable concrete-eating microbes on the concrete floor at the back of the loading bay. I watched as a sizeable circle of the concrete turned to liquid, becoming a deeper and deeper pool until it cascaded out of the hole it had eaten. Balor quickly sent the microbes their destruction code before he and Rannu jumped through.
We moved through the maintenance level below. Pagan tricked out the sensors and sent fake images to the cameras, sending ghost images of us in all the wrong places and making sure everything looked empty and normal where we actually were. Morag was supposed to be helping, but she did not want to enter into the net again and we didn’t have time to deal with that now.
There was activity from Spoke security and their emergency services but nobody was quite sure what was going on and they didn’t have the surrounding layers secure yet. They’d probably been warned off by Rolleston’s people and were waiting for their response. We slipped through.