“Yeah,” Michael replied.
Erin snorted.
“Keep the comms open,” Michael said. “If anything seems off, you tell me.”
“Understood, Commander,” Les said. He gestured toward Layla. “Follow me.”
She paused and said over a private channel something that Les couldn’t make out. Then they were off.
Jumping onto the dock, Les noticed a patch of orange barnacles that he didn’t recall seeing earlier. There was also a growth of reddish moss—the same stuff he had seen in the bizarre graveyard inside the ITC ship.
Les had heard about the moss before. Michael had mentioned finding some at the Hilltop Bastion where Commander Rick Weaver was killed. But no one knew what it was, and Les avoided the strange growths.
As they approached the building, Layla pumped several shells into her shotgun. Then she slung the weapon and pulled out her handheld tablet. When they got to the wide entrance doors, Les wiped off the triangular security panel with his sleeve.
“Let me,” Layla said. Pulling a cable from her cargo pocket, she uncoiled it and plugged one end into her tablet, the other end into the panel. Les stood watch, rifle up.
“Michael told me about the creepy boneyard back on the ship,” Layla said. “Any idea what that’s all about?”
“My guess? I think the Cazadores were here at some point and had something to do with it. Either that, or it’s what’s left of Dr. Diaz’s team.”
“Or the defectors Diaz talked about in the video.”
“Could be.”
A beeping sounded, and she bent to look closer at the screen, tapping at the monitor. “Two more codes to crack.”
Les continued to scan the area with his rifle while they waited. Two minutes later, the doors creaked open to a cavernous space frozen in time.
Several old-world military vehicles sat in the front of the garage. They were armored with mounted weapons and welded metal cages covering the windows.
Their headlamp beams flashed around the room, lighting up cobwebs and floating dust particles disturbed for the first time in God only knew how long.
Not far behind the vehicles were several skeletons, curled up where they had died. Layla pointed at them, and Les took a step forward, his boots crushing metal.
Bending down, he found spent bullet casings.
“Reminds me of Hilltop Bastion,” Layla said. “And you know what we found there, right?”
Les replied, “Sirens.”
The very thought froze him where he stood. This place gave him the creeps. First the horrifying scene on the ITC ship, and now a scene of slaughter. He didn’t want to keep walking into the dark building, but he didn’t have a choice. Sirens or no Sirens, his mission was to get the satellite link up and running.
“Come on,” he said to Layla.
She kept her shotgun slung over her armor and pulled out the Uzi as they walked deeper into the garage, shell casings snapping and cracking under their boots.
On the other side of the vehicles, a door stood ajar. Les grabbed the handle and slowly pulled it open. Layla squeezed through with the Uzi up.
Following her into a passage, Les could see over her head since she was a good foot and a half shorter than he.
Layla motioned toward an elevator ahead. They stopped near the open doors and shined their beams into the shaft. The beams shot into the darkness, but he couldn’t see the bottom.
“Let’s try and find another way down,” Layla said.
They walked side by side to an intersecting corridor.
On the right lay another body, mummified in the closed space. This had been a woman. Scraps of a chemical, biological, radiological, and nuclear hazard suit covered her dried skin, and a helmet with a crushed visor encased her head.
To the left, the passage was blocked with metal barriers, all of them pocked with bullet holes. They took a right, continuing deeper into Red Sphere, their lights sweeping over evidence of another battle. Brown streaks led to a door on the right side of the hallway, and Les saw the first signage in the building. It read simply, stairs.
“Let’s try it,” he said.
Layla opened it into a concrete stairwell. She slipped inside and set off toward a landing below.
Les shuddered with dark imaginings of what awaited them.
They continued down, flight after flight, for several minutes. Oddly, there were no doors at any of the first ten landings. This building was buried deep beneath the waves.
Layla finally stopped at the first door.
Les opened it and moved into a passage. His headlamp revealed more metal barricades blocking the end of the hallway. At a door on the right, he stopped and gave a hand signal. Layla met him there and tried the knob. Locked. She pulled out a small packet from her vest and shook out some lock-picking tools.
“Wait,” Les said. His beam had revealed another way into the room. About ten feet down, a window had been shattered.
Moving cautiously around the broken shards, he directed his light to a gap in the furniture piled up against the window.
On the far left, something had broken its way in.
“I’ll go first,” Layla said.
He helped her climb onto the windowsill. A shard of glass dislodged from the mullion, hitting the floor with a crunch. Les lifted her higher, and she dropped through the gap.
“I’ll be right back,” she said.
Les waited in the hallway while she searched the other space. Two minutes later, the handle clicked and the door opened.
Their two beams speared through the darkness, uncovering a space filled with laboratory workstations and storage areas. Some of the surfaces still held vials and medical equipment.
“Holy shit,” she whispered. Layla held her light on another skeleton at the other end of the room. Normally, the remains of people on the surface didn’t bother her, but Les quickly saw why this one did.
It was split in half lengthwise.
He moved over and crouched down beside the female skeleton, also wearing a CBRN suit. Even the helmet had been split smoothly down the middle. Black grooves extended away from the remains, where the weapon had carved the floor in a straight line.
“What kind of blade could do this?” Layla asked.
“I don’t know, but I doubt it was the Cazadores.”
Les straightened up and kept moving through the lab. Tools and shattered monitors littered the floor. They explored the rooms for the next half hour and finally emerged into a clean room.
Suits hung from hooks, and helmets were stacked neatly on a shelf. Much of the place seemed undisturbed. Whatever happened here had happened fast.
The next door, blown completely off its hinges, led to offices furnished with desks, several couches, and more monitors. Layla shined her light at a framed map on the wall. Hurrying over to it, she brushed off a thick layer of dust and pointed at the cracked glass.
“Looks like the operations center,” she said. “It’s a few levels from here.”
She led the way, and Les followed, sweeping his light and rifle over more debris. The next hallway had been barricaded with furniture and steel door frames, which had done little to hold back the defectors—whoever the hell they were.
A nearly perfect line had sliced through the barriers, leaving a three-foot gap between the pieces. The floor was marked with the same black groove as in the first lab.
The more Les saw, the more this looked like what he had seen on the rooftop. Maybe it wasn’t lightning after all up there.
“A blade didn’t cut that person in half,” Layla said. “This was some sort of laser.”
Les remembered the video from Dr. Diaz, saying the defectors had military-grade arms. Maybe their fabled laser weapons weren’t a myth, after all.
“Come on, we’re almost there,” he said, flattening his body and squeezing through the gap in the barrier. Halfway through, he stopped, his light capturing a scene on the other side.