Two of the creatures dropped dead before they could close the distance, their flesh and wiry sinews torn to shreds by the gunfire. But one of the creatures managed to evade most of the bullets – ignoring the few that grazed its body – and got close enough to leap into the air towards Gabriel, knocking him to the ground.
Gabriel found himself pinned down by a snarling mass of teeth and claws. His shields could protect him from extremes of pressure as well as block or deflect high velocity objects like bullets or shrapnel; but they were no good against the beast’s comparatively slow-moving teeth and claws. However, his armour still made him virtually invulnerable, and the creature’s teeth fractured as it clamped its jaws around his gorget armour.
Someone managed to wrap an arm around the creature’s belly and yank it away from Gabriel, tossing it back down the corridor. As the creature rolled across the floor and tried to scramble to its feet, someone else shot it with a single round. The bullet penetrated at the base of the creature’s neck, punching straight through the vertebrae, and almost severing its head in one go. Death was instantaneous.
“Thanks for the assist.” Gabriel said.
He picked up his weapon and jumped back to his feet. With the immediate threat apparently neutralised, Doran returned to work on the door lock’s encryption while Cato covered the corridor in case of other threats. The rest of the squad turned to examine the vicious animals that had attacked them.
The three creatures were vaguely canine in appearance, but bioengineered beyond recognition as normal dogs. They had grotesquely enhanced musculature and elongated snouts lined with razor sharp teeth. Upon closer inspection, their teeth and claws had a dull grey sheen to them. They had been coated with nanopolymer, strong enough to make the enamel and keratin that made up the teeth and claws much sharper and more durable.
There was something else visible in the mutant creatures’ ruined flesh. Gabriel stuck his gauntlet into the mangled meat of the mutant canine, and plucked out a single sinew of muscle, holding it up to the light. It was a dull grey colour and was strongly elastic. Holding both ends, he tugged sharply on the strand, but no matter how hard he pulled on it, the strand of muscle wouldn’t snap.
“Synthetic muscle tissue?” Bale asked, crouching down beside Gabriel for a look.
“Looks like it.” Gabriel concurred.
“Who the frick would do this sort of thing to animals?” Viker said in disgust.
As if to answer Viker’s question, the squad’s motion trackers flashed red again.
“Another contact!” Cato shouted a little redundantly.
The squad snapped back to attention and trained their weapons on the newest threat, closing ranks to cover Doran as he worked on the door lock.
A lone figure stood motionless at the far end of the corridor, clad in a jet black suit. The silhouette looked vaguely female, but it was difficult to tell. The squad’s networked sensor suite couldn’t make heads or tails of her, but all she did was stand there, watching them intently whilst making no effort to take cover or attack them. Gabriel altered a setting on his weapon, switching from full automatic to a single, high-powered shot.
“One shot from me,” Gabriel said, crouching down on one knee, “kill burst from you.”
The squad understood exactly what he meant, and readied their weapons accordingly. Gabriel’s helmet optics were synced with his weapon’s electronic sights, so there was no need for an old-fashioned targeting scope. His HUD marked the target with a red outline and zoomed in for greater detail, projecting a virtual targeting reticle on the mysterious figure.
With a clear image of the target now filling his HUD, Gabriel could see that the figure was indeed female, and the jet black suit she was wearing was combat armour, albeit not a kind he had ever seen before, lacking any visible protective plating. Her helmet was bulbous looking, like a classical drawing of an alien without any features drawn on, and she wasn’t carrying any sort of weapon, not even a simple sidearm.
Gabriel took dead aim at the eerily calm target’s head, his helmet labelling the range as 38.913 metres, a reasonably close range. Just as he was about to squeeze the trigger, the figure slowly raised a hand and traced a finger across the back of its other hand.
The biometric lock chimed approvingly and the reinforced door slid open, breaking the squad’s focus as they reacted to the unexpected sound behind them.
“We’re in!” Bale said, relieved, “Good job, Doran!”
“I didn’t do anything.” Doran replied, mystified.
Gabriel snapped his attention back to the mysterious target. She was gone.
“What do you mean you ‘didn’t do anything’?” Viker demanded of Doran.
“I mean the decryption program needed another few minutes,” Doran answered, “something or someone opened the door for us.”
“Who wants to bet our mystery target opened it?” Gabriel asked rhetorically.
“Codename ‘black widow’ for later?” Cato suggested.
“Sounds good to me.” Gabriel replied.
The squad filed into the decontamination chamber and the door sealed behind them, the chamber filling with anti-hazard gas. The three mutant canine corpses were still visible through the now-clouded glass, bleeding out in the corridor like piles of discarded meat.
Bu the ‘black widow’ was nowhere to be seen.
* * *
Slipping out of Lawrence’s office like a thief – which now, she technically was – Aster powerwalked down the deserted corridor back to her office, hoping to reach the safety and privacy of her own office before someone saw her.
“Dr Thorn!” a voice called out from behind her.
Aster froze up. Had she been caught already?
She turned around slowly as someone approached; a young woman with a ponytail and a tablet computer in hand. One of the newer hires.
“I just wanted to update you on the reactor core simulations we’ve been running.” She said, sounding slightly out of breath as she showed Aster a table of results on her tablet, “all the metrics look green.”
Aster inclined her head to examine the graph of results; her muscles were rigid and her heart was pounding with the guilty fear of being caught.
“Looks good to me.” Aster assured the woman woodenly, “email me the results directly and I’ll take a look at them later.”
“We won’t know for sure until we do live-testing–” the junior engineer began.
“I know, I know,” Aster answered, anxious to end the conversation, “but without authorisation from the board we can’t do any live-testing. Good work though.”
“Thanks…Dr Thorn.” The junior engineer answered, puzzled by her boss’s less than enthusiastic attitude, “I’ll send you the results in a minute.”
“Good. See you later, then.”
Aster abruptly turned on her heel and headed back to her office. She didn’t stop walking until she had sealed and locked the door behind her.
Though safe from prying eyes, she couldn’t bring herself to heave a sigh of relief. There was no relief to be had now. Unless she handed over the data chip to the authorities, she was now officially complicit in whatever Lawrence had been involved in.
Aster fished the little red memory chip out of her pocket and stared at it. Logically speaking, Lawrence wouldn’t have gone to the trouble of hiding the chip if it didn’t contain important information, particularly information that he’d wanted to hide from his colleagues, or even from the company itself.