It’s Working As Intended

by N M Tatum

  “This is the location of our next job. A Jasob district warehouse located on a backwater moon at the edge of the system. It doesn’t look like much. Because it isn’t, really. Just an off-site storage facility where they keep decommissioned equipment.”

  “That’s it?” Joel said. “You couldn’t have just told us that on the way over there? We have to do a whole briefing thing?”

  Reggie suddenly became a whacky game show host, pointing at Joel like he’d said the secret password that won everyone in the audience a free car. “No, that’s not it. Because that isn’t just your average warehouse full of old junk. It’s a secret, off the books, Jasob storage facility!”

  Magic to Cody’s ears.

  Sam shook her head. “Why are you so excited about that?”

  “I don’t know,” Reggie said. “I was just feeling out the room. Everyone seemed kind of bummed. Thought I’d jazz things up a bit.”

  Joel clapped Reggie on the shoulder. “Feel free to never jazz things up again. With our life the way it is, things are jazzed enough.” He left the briefing room to prep for the job.

  Cody’s mind buzzed. Another attack on a Layton competitor. A secret storage facility. If he couldn’t find the proof the team needed on this job, he would never find it.

  Reggie’s shoulders slumped.

  Sam smiled at him. It was one of pity, but she did her best to appear uplifting. “I thought it was a great briefing.”

  “Yeah?”

  “I’m so jazzed right now.”

  The team gathered in the ready area.

  Reggie pulled all of his gear out of his locker then lifted the lid on the long storage locker that lay flat on the floor. From there, he pulled out his gatling and the team’s melee weapons.

  “We got caught a little by surprise with this last job.”

  Joel scoffed.

  Reggie continued as if he hadn’t heard. “With this job being more clandestine, feeling more high-stakes, I think we should pack the mobile footlocker and bring as much gear as we can. Everyone get suited up in body armor, and grab long and short-range weapons, including melee.”

  Sam tested her retractable shield gauntlet. “Now I really am jazzed.”

  Chapter Eleven

  The approach to the job site was smooth. The moon was the only thing orbiting the uninhabited planet, so Ragnarok didn’t need to pass through any neighboring gravity wells. Once they entered the moon’s orbit, they were hailed.

  “Approaching ship, identify yourself immediately, or you will be fired upon.”

  Joel cocked an eyebrow. “Tight security for a storage house.”

  Cody could hardly contain himself as he answered the call. “We are representatives of Intergalactic Pest Control aboard the ship Ragnarok. We have been contracted by Jasob.”

  The line was silent a minute. The bridge filled with tension thick enough to spread on toast—which Cody would have loved to do, it was all so delicious. A secret base on a moon that orbited an uninhabited planet. Tight security.

  This was the place where he’d break the case. He could taste it on the air.

  “You are clear to approach,” the voice said. “Sending you the coordinates for the landing platform now.”

  Cody brought the ship down closer to the surface of the moon. As they did, the scanners on the bridge went wild.

  “What is that?” Reggie said.

  Joel studied the blinking lights and readouts. “This moon is terraformed. It’s got a breathable atmosphere and controlled climate.”

  Reggie scratched the back of his head. He looked at Cody, reluctantly feeling that he may be on to something. “Why would they terraform a moon around an empty planet just for a storehouse? They could have just dropped a prefab station.”

  Cody tightened his grip around the controls as he readied the landing procedures. “We’re about to find out.”

  Ragnarok touched down. Cody didn’t know what to expect from a top-secret storehouse, but he thought there would be a little more than what he got. No agents in black suits and sunglasses. No highly sophisticated androids patrolling the perimeter. It was just a warehouse. A very quiet warehouse.

  There was no one on the landing platform to greet them.

  A shudder ran up Joel’s spine. “I’m getting a horror movie vibe here. Anyone else?”

  “Never seen one,” Sam said.

  “You don’t like horror movies?” Joel said.

  “I’ve never seen any movie.”

  Joel shook his head. “No, now you’re just messing with me. Because that’s impossible.”

  Sam smiled, leaving Joel to wonder whether she was serious or not.

  Reggie shushed them. He was getting a call on his communicator. “Mr. Dewayne?”

  “Yes, sorry I couldn’t be there to meet you in person,” the caller said. “But, well, frankly, I didn’t want to. I’m sure you’ll understand once you go inside. I am nearby. Contact me when the job is done.”

  The line went dead.

  Mr. Dewayne was the director of the site. Reggie had only spoken with him the one time earlier that day when he offered IPC the contract, but Reggie already had the sense that Dewayne was a stuffy suit. He spoke with a self-important inflection, like he knew he was the most important person in the room and confused by those who didn’t.

  Reggie shrugged. “I guess that ends the orientation phase of the job.” He walked back up the ramp to the cargo bay of Ragnarok, then reappeared hauling the mobile footlocker. It was a hover unit, one of the pieces of equipment they’d acquired in the windfall that had allowed them to purchase the ship. The mobile locker allowed them to take practically their whole armory with them into the field—which Reggie fully intended to do on this job. Whether he liked it or not, Cody’s conspiracy theories were starting to look less crazy.

  “We don’t know what we’re going to face in there,” he said. “Dewayne’s contract just says ‘infestation’—it doesn’t identify what the creature is that’s doing the infesting. But…” He looked down at the footlocker and pretended to fiddle with the hover controls. “There’s a chance it could be ShimVens or Rapoo. Or, you know, both…”

  Validation shot through Cody, firing up his mind and muscles. “Ha! Starting to see reason, are you?”

  Reggie immediately regretted saying anything. “I’m just being cautious.” He pulled the footlocker to the main entrance of the storehouse, an overhead door large enough for a truck to drive through.

  Cody pulled up the floorplan to the building. “This door opens to a decontamination room. Pretty common for interplanetary shipping. It should be secure unless the critters are able to input six-digit security codes.”

  “Dewayne provided all the access codes for the building in the contract,” Reggie said. “We’ll use the decontamination room as our forward operating base.” He opened the lid of the footlocker and handed each of the team their weapons, opting for his semiautomatic. “Just being cautious,” he repeated.

  They lined up at the door, preparing to breach. They nodded to Reggie, signifying they were ready. He typed in the access code, and the door opened. Cody, Joel, and Reggie dropped to one knee and scanned the room as the door raised. Sam stooped and entered, her shield gauntlet activated.

  The decontamination room was still intact. It was large enough for a truck to drive in and drop its cargo, sixty feet by sixty feet. Scanners lined the ceiling. Their job was to read cargo as it came in and conduct a detailed analysis of the contents before it was opened. On the walls hung long nozzles attached to longer hoses. Those were used to spray down the cargo with several different concoctions that killed bacteria, viruses, and microorganisms.

  There was no cargo waiting to be scanned. That deflated Cody. If contaminated cargo was sent from Layton to sabotage the facility, it should have been detected here. He had a hard time understanding how cargo carrying Rapoo or ShimVens could have made it through this checkpoint.

  Reggie pulled the footlocker inside. He pressed a b
lue button on the side, and the container began to transform. Legs dropped from the bottom, and the whole container set down on the floor. Panels on the top slid down the sides, opening up to reveal the contents.

  The sight of it made Sam’s heart race. “Now this is something I can get behind. I can’t believe we have one of these and you’re still complaining about a pancake robot.”

  Joel raised his eyebrows. “These two things are not comparable at all.” He stared at her a second. “Don’t tell me you’ve never had a pancake? No, never mind, I can’t trust a thing you say, anyway.” He took a collapsible spear and his sniper rifle from the locker.

  Cody also took a spear. He slid it into the stretchy cord on the side of his pack meant to hold a water bottle and cinched the cord tight. He raised the storehouse plans as the others continued to get ready.

  The storehouse consisted mostly of one large room. After exiting the decontamination room, they would be standing in a wide-open space nearly a square mile in size. A catwalk lined a quarter of the left side of the room. It was ten feet up, accessible by a staircase at the far end. On the catwalk were three rooms: the director’s office, a records room, and a security station.

  The rest of the large, open space was a maze of shipping containers, each eight feet high and twenty feet long.

  As much as Cody wanted to go straight for the records room and office, he knew that wasn’t the best approach. “Once we exit this room, Joel should take up a position on the catwalk. Visibility on this level is going to be poor, and he can provide overwatch support from up there.”

  Joel patted Cody on the back. “I love when you call me overwatch.”

  Cody shrugged Joel away. “I didn’t. And I never will.”

  Sam pressed her forehead to the door of the decontamination room, the only thing separating them from the infestation, whatever it may be. It was clear plastic, but distorted her vision enough that she couldn’t see what was on the other side.

  “Can’t you hack into the cameras or whatever?” she said to Cody. “Find out what’s waiting for us in there?”

  He shook his head. “This place isn’t networked. It’s a closed system. Only way to hack in is manually, so I’d need to be in the security room.” The moment he said it, he realized that not only was it a good tactical move, but it put him exactly where he wanted to be. “Maybe I should do that?”

  Sam looked at him like he was an idiot. “You think?”

  Reggie attached his gatling to a new harness that Joel had fabricated for him. It allowed him to secure the beastly gun to a track system on his back. When he needed it, he pressed a button on his side and the gun slid along the track to where he could grab it and blast some unfortunate fool to smithereens. It made the gun more portable and allowed him more mobility while carrying it in the field.

  He stood at the entrance, one hand on the door controls, the other holding his semiautomatic. “Ready to breach?”

  The others nodded.

  Reggie input the code Mr. Dewayne had given him, and the door slid open. They did their best impression of a Navy SEAL team as they walked through the door, weapons raised, methodically fanning out as they entered.

  Sam peered over the edge of her shield, sword pointed forward, shoulder tensed and ready to swing. She stared forward, unblinking, but her eyes focused on nothing in particular. They took in as much information as they could, waiting for something to move, to spark a reaction.

  But they saw nothing.

  “Clear,” Reggie said.

  The others echoed that.

  There was open space for another twenty meters, until they reached the first line of shipping containers. Instead of venturing blindly into that maze, wandering around until he found the stairs up to the catwalk, Joel opted for a more direct approach.

  “Give me a boost,” he said to Reggie.

  Reggie dropped to one knee under the railing of the catwalk and cupped his hands. Sam stood next to him. Joel stepped on Reggie’s hands and held Sam’s shoulder for balance. Then, on the count of three, Reggie boosted him up.

  Joel grabbed the edge of the catwalk and, with more effort than he would have liked, pulled himself up. He slid on his belly under the bottom rung of the railing and popped up onto his feet, drawing his blasters. He looked down the long catwalk, making sure he was alone. Then he looked out over the huge room.

  His heart tightened in his chest. He saw movement in the shadows between shipping containers. The darkness was alive, and he knew it was only a matter of time before it tried to eat them all.

  He laid on his belly and lowered his arm to Cody. “You’d better get up here and do whatever you’re going to do. I don’t think we’ve got long before shit gets real.”

  Cody jumped and grabbed Joel’s arm. Joel pulled him up, and Cody made straight for the security room, scatterblaster ready to meet any resistance. The door to the room was ajar, giving him pause. He waved Joel over.

  Joel nudged the door open as Cody tightened his grip on his blaster. As soon as the door was open enough, a Rapoo leapt out. Its teeth sparkled in the fluorescent light cast by the bulbs overhead. Cody fired when the Rapoo’s open mouth was just inches from the barrel of his gun. The back of the creature’s head exploded.

  “We’ve got Rapoo,” Cody said through comms.

  They performed a quick scan of the room. Once they knew it was clear, Joel ran back out. “Whatever else is in the storehouse knows we’re here now. Get jacked in quick and meet me on the catwalk,” he told Cody.

  Cody grunted his acknowledgment as he pulled the wire from the port on his wristcom and plugged it into the security terminal.

  Joel set the barrel of his sniper rifle on the top railing. He looked through the scope and spotted a small pack of Rapoo running the gauntlet of shipping containers toward Reggie and Sam. “Pack of Rapoo coming your way,” he warned them.

  He shot the lead Rapoo in the neck. If he was firing normal rounds, the shot would have damaged the creature, but not killed it. But he was using his Rapoo teeth-infused rounds. The shot punched a fist-sized hole straight through the Rapoo. Using the bastards’ own body parts to kill them was a sweet bit of irony that Joel could chew on all day.

  He peppered the pack with blaster fire, killing two more before they reached the end of the maze. Sam pressed her back to the shipping container at the mouth of the maze with her shield and sword at the ready. Reggie opened fire on the pack as they appeared, his shots not killing them but causing enough damage that they dropped into bloody heaps. When he stopped shooting, Sam moved in and finished them off.

  “Clear,” Joel said. “Nothing else on the move. Yet.”

  He kept his eyes on the shadows. He felt a tingling on the back of his neck, that feeling you get when you think someone is watching you. He looked up and was happy to see nothing. There were no rafters or ventilation shafts, no hidey-holes for the creepy crawlies to scuttle around in. This would be a straight-out fight. No crawling through the sewers. Nothing jumping out of the walls.

  Cody cloned the security interface to his wristcom. He struggled to stay focused on the job, to not allow the desire to scan through every document for proof of Layton’s culpability to overcome him.

  The storehouse was outfitted throughout with infrared scanners that would perform routine checks of cargo. Cody took control of them and turned into his own personal pest hunter.

  “I’ve got eyes,” he told the team as he stepped onto the catwalk.

  He recognized the glowing orange and red shapes scattered through the storehouse. Rapoo and ShimVens. Both of their worst enemies in one spot. They didn’t seem interested in attacking each other, as they had in the amusement park. Such a drastic difference in temperament and instinct didn’t make any sense. Then Cody remembered that the creatures were genetically modified. He remembered the stark difference between the generations of ShimVens they had encountered in their first few jobs.

  He wondered if whoever was responsible for the attacks had
monitored IPC jobs. Maybe the culprit saw firsthand how Cody was able to turn the ShimVens and Rapoo against each other, then modified the creatures not to view the other as an enemy.

  Another glowing shape on the scanner brought Cody out of the realm of speculation and back to the dingy storehouse. This was a shape he didn’t recognize. There were only a few scattered throughout the entirety of the storehouse, long, snake-like forms that flopped about like fish on dry land.

  “I’ve got Rapoo, ShimVens and an unknown,” Cody said.

  “How should we proceed?” Reggie said.

  Cody looked at the infrared scans then out over the storehouse. From his elevated position, he could clearly see the maze created by the shipping containers. A lot of blind corners and opportunities to get surprised by beasties. But it could also be used to their advantage.

  Cody planted his foot on the middle rung of the catwalk railing and swung his other leg over the top. With a steady breath in, he jumped onto the top of the nearest shipping container. It rang with a hollow sound. He walked to the edge and peered down into the maze.

  “Join me up top, Reggie,” Cody said.

  Sam boosted Reggie up. He struggled to pull himself up, with the added weight of his gatling. He was still breathing heavy by the time Cody hopped across the two shipping containers between them.

  “I think Reggie and I walk along the top and pick off the critters. Sam trails us from down there, finishing them off with her sword. Joel watches our backs. If any of the Rapoo or ShimVens get past us and on top of the containers, he takes them out.”

  Reggie nodded. “Sounds like a solid plan.”

  The others agreed.

  Cody hopped across a few more containers until he was on the opposite side of the path as Reggie. They walked slowly, following the path like it was a river leading them home. Cody kept one eye on the scanner and the other on the area below.

  “Coming up on a pack of Rapoo,” Cody whispered.

  “How many?” Sam asked.