Voidstalker

by John Graham

  So why was she already having second thoughts about Felix’s suggestion?

  * * *

  As Teller shouted the key phrase, his verbal command caused the power to die, killing the lights with it. The squad was completely blinded as their helmet filters adjusted to the sudden darkness. Gabriel’s helmet filters made the adjustment just in time to see their erstwhile guide charge at Ogilvy and body tackle him against the railings. They tumbled over the top of the railings together and went spinning down into the depths below.

  “Fuck!” someone shouted.

  “Get that door open!” Gabriel ordered, “I’m going down there.”

  Without pausing to hear any objections, Gabriel mounted the railings and leapt down after Ogilvy and his attacker. He kicked back and forth between the glass tanks to slow his fall before landing cat-like on his feet, weapon ready.

  Suddenly, the power returned, re-illuminating the hydroponics lab and briefly blinding the squad again as their helmet filters had to reset. When his visual filters had adjusted, Gabriel found himself in a maze of vertically-arranged hydroponic tanks, the thick green trunks of genetically-engineered food plants visible through the steamed glass. Neither Ogilvy nor Teller were anywhere to be seen.

  “Ogilvy!” Gabriel called out through the comm., “status!”

  “…Six…eight targets!” Ogilvy shouted back, “…maintenance area…Ah!”

  Gabriel heard struggling and more shouting; then a sound like electricity or surging static filled the comm. from Ogilvy’s line before it suddenly went dead.

  “Ogilvy, come in!” Gabriel tried to hail him, “Lieutenant Ogilvy, respond immediately!”

  Silence.

  Gabriel felt a small but treacherous fluttering of panic in his chest. A member of his squad had been captured, and with such speed and tactical competence that no one had managed to fire a shot in response. They’d been blindsided. He had been blindsided.

  At least Ogilvy’s bio-readings were still green. His comm. was dead, but he wasn’t; and his tracking signal was still within detectable range. But now, Gabriel was confronted with the invidious choice of pressing on towards central operations – their primary objective – and rescuing Ogilvy, which was what the squad would demand.

  “Colonel.” Bale hailed Gabriel, “the door up here is sealed with a biometric lock. We can’t get through without a staff member’s DNA.”

  “And it’s based on a rotating encryption protocol,” Doran added to the bad news, “It’d take days to bypass the lock electronically.”

  “Can you breach it?” Gabriel asked.

  “Breach the fricking door?!” Viker snapped in disbelief, “Ogilvy’s been captured–”

  “Answer the question!” Gabriel shot back, “can you breach the door?!”

  “...Negative…sir,” Viker replied through gritted teeth, “not without damaging the lock, and it’d take about an hour to cut through with a torch.”

  “Understood,” Gabriel answered, “Join me down here. We’re going after Ogilvy.”

  “Aye sir!” they chorused.

  Gabriel’s decision had nothing to do with prioritising Ogilvy’s life. If they couldn’t get through the door to central operations, they would have to find an alternative route, and following the trail of Ogilvy’s captors was the best way forward.

  As the rest of the squad found their way down to the ground floor and fanned out to secure the processing area, Gabriel came across a small door on the far side of the room marked ‘maintenance’. It was slightly ajar.

  “Found a service hatch, far end of the room,” Gabriel informed the squad, “Ogilvy must have been taken through there.”

  “I’ll rip that little snake Teller’s throat out!” Viker snarled over the comm.

  “Interrogation first, retribution later.” Gabriel reminded him.

  Viker’s unprofessional anger irked Gabriel. The life of a fellow soldier was important, but if Gabriel were on this mission solo, he wouldn’t let the desire for revenge distract him. Viker’s attitude could be a problem.

  The squad converged on Gabriel’s position as he pulled open the hatch and ducked inside. On the other side of the threshold was a steep flight of steps leading down into the maintenance area. Not bothering with the steps, Gabriel jumped straight down, landing square on his feet and continuing on as the rest of the squad slid down the rails after him.

  The ambient temperature was 35 C, close to Human body temperature, rendering the thermal enhancement filters in their HUDs useless. It was also pitch black, requiring the squad’s helmet filters to switch back to night vision.

  “This is clearly a trap.” Cato muttered the obvious.

  “Doesn’t matter,” Viker shot back, “we’re not leaving Ogilvy behind.”

  Gabriel had to agree with Cato; this whole situation reeked of a trap in the making. Whatever the broader motivations were, the kidnapping of Ogilvy was tactically brilliant, and clearly intended as bait for a larger ambush. In which case, the service hatch had probably been left open deliberately in order to lure them further inside.

  Out in the open, Teller would be dead meat; but down here, the squad was at a serious disadvantage. The maintenance area was a convoluted maze of narrow passageways barely wide enough for the fully armoured commandoes to walk down in single file. If it weren’t for Ogilvy’s tracking signal, they would have had no idea which way to go, and would have been forced to split up to search for him.

  And what was that surging noise over the comm.? It sounded like radio static, but the DNI didn’t use radio technology. Was it some type of device for immobilising an exoskeleton? Technology like that existed, but DNI armour was supposed to be impervious to it. That someone might have found a way to defeat DNI safeguards was a disturbing thought.

  More disturbing still, Ogilvy had shouted about at least eight hostiles attacking him; and yet the squad hadn’t detected anyone or anything right up until the power died. Had they all been too distracted by Teller’s guided tour to pay attention? Or had their ambushers found a way to defeat DNI sensor technology?

  After a while, the path traced by Ogilvy’s tracking signal led the squad to another access hatch. They ducked through into a new area, a fully-lit corridor wide enough for two people. Once again, the squad’s helmets had to readjust to the light.

  At the end of the corridor were two bodies slumped against the door, both dressed in maintenance overalls. One was clearly dead, his fingers still clutching his throat, having died trying to staunch the blood dribbling from his neck. Moreover, he had clearly been left to die by his fellows as they rushed ahead with their prisoner.

  The other was their treacherous guide. He was still alive, barely; clutching his stomach as blood trickled from a wound there. He looked up at the approaching commandoes and gave a wry smile in between catching his breath.

  “Should’ve known…about those…damn claws.” Teller wheezed.

  There were cleaner and more professional ways of doing this, but there was no time to deal with Teller cleanly or professionally. Besides, Ogilvy’s kidnapping had left the squad angry and unfocussed; they might beat Teller to death before he could tell them anything.

  With the rest of the squad holding the prisoner at gunpoint, Gabriel stowed his weapon and clenched his fists. The action caused three slightly curved blades on each hand to slide out from grooves on the back of his gauntlets. Gabriel used the eight-inch long combat claws to impale Teller through his shoulders. Teller groaned and squirmed in pain as he was lifted bodily off the ground, hanging like a limp doll on a set of meat hooks.

  “What is going on in this place?” Gabriel demanded through his helmet speakers.

  “Things you can’t begin to understand.” Teller grinned defiantly.

  Gabriel responded by twisting his claws inside Teller’s shoulders, eliciting a howl of pain from the prisoner as little rivulets of blood trickled from his wounds.

  “Answer the question,” Gabriel said menacingly, “and we’
ll decide if we understand.”

  “Well, your earlier hunch was right,” Teller admitted smugly, “There is xenotech here; the scientists have been studying it for years. But they found something new, something that enlightened them. And they made sure everyone else here was enlightened too.”

  “‘Enlightened’?” Gabriel scowled suspiciously, “What in Terra’s name does that mean?”

  “It means the dissolution of a prior state of ignorance and the attainment of a state of knowledge.” Teller replied sneeringly.

  Gabriel didn’t like being sneered at, and made his displeasure clear by twisting his claws inside Teller’s shoulders again. Teller let out another shriek of agony in response.

  “What kind of xenotech did they find, and where did they get it?” Gabriel demanded.

  “I don’t know anything specific,” Teller replied, “I’m just a junior tech.”

  Pleading ignorance wasn’t an answer, and Gabriel twisted his claws again.

  “I never attained that level of enlightenment!” Teller screamed, his prior smugness dissolving under torture, “I really don’t know!”

  “THEN WHO DOES KNOW?!” Gabriel bellowed.

  “The scientists! Who else?!” Teller screamed back, “They studied it. They’re the ones who required everyone to be enlightened by it.”

  “So where are they taking our squad member?”

  “Enlightenment takes place in the heart of the Temple.” Teller answered, “You can reach it by passing through the labs.”

  ‘Temple’ was an odd choice of words; but at least he’d given them a clear answer.

  “One last question,” said Gabriel, “J.E. Co. sent one of its security teams to investigate this place, what happened to them?”

  “You don’t want to know.” Teller replied with a madman’s grin.

  Gabriel made clear what he thought of that answer by giving his combat claws another vicious twist, turning the captive’s grin into another agonised scream.

  “If I didn’t want to know, I wouldn’t have asked you.” Gabriel said menacingly.

  “They were captured and taken to the Temple to be elevated.” Teller replied, starting to lose breath, “they will serve far better…than they could…in life.”

  “Is ‘elevation’ different from ‘enlightenment’?”

  “…Very…” Teller replied, slurring his words, “…tell Dani…to go frick herself.”

  Gabriel want to ask him who ‘Dani’ was, but the prisoner had lost consciousness, so he let the dying man slide off his claws to the floor. Then he relaxed his fists, causing the claws to retract back into their grooves. It was safe to assume the J.E. Co. team was dead.

  “Priorities have changed.” Gabriel said over the comm. as he readied his weapon, “We’re heading to the labs, since that’s probably the epicentre of this.”

  “Most of the doors on the way to the labs are biometrically sealed.” Doran said.

  “No problem,” Gabriel replied, pointing at Teller, “Take off his hand.”

  The squad looked at him.

  “You heard me,” Gabriel repeated, “take a knife, cut off his hand, and bring it with us.”

  The squad hesitated at the bloody-minded order; but it was a direct order, and they could hardly disobey. Besides, there was no love lost for the treacherous Teller.

  Doran crouched down and clasped one of Teller’s hands, drawing a combat knife from his shoulder sheath. He flicking a switch with his thumb, and the edge of the dull-grey blade turned a soft orange colour as it was flash-heated and wreathed in a thin cloud of energised plasma. Teller had already passed out, so he didn’t feel the knife touch his skin, severing his hand in one clean slice and instantly cauterising the wound.

  Doran deactivated the flash-heated blade and replaced the knife in its sheath, rising to his feet before waving the severed hand in front of the door’s biometric sensor. The door light flashed green and the door unlocked, sliding open in response.

  “One more thing: the rules of engagement have changed. If you see anyone other than Ogilvy,” Gabriel fired a single round into Teller’s skull, followed by a second shot through the skull of the other technician. “Shoot to kill.”

  THE LABORATORY

  Yanking open the biometric scanner beside Lawrence Kane’s office door, Aster uncovered a hidden keypad and punched in her personal override code to bypass the biometric lock. The red light flashed green, and she slipped inside like a thief in the night before anyone noticed. Once the door was sealed behind her, she leaned against the wall and hyperventilated to dispel the panic over what she had just done.

  As project-lead, Aster could use her personal override code to access almost any place in the labs, including other people’s offices if necessary. That meant it was a privilege of her position meant only for emergencies, not for snooping around a co-worker’s office. Even though it wasn’t technically a violation of her employment contract, she certainly didn’t have a legitimate reason for doing it.

  Felix’s insistence on digging up whatever Lawrence might have found had stoked a dangerous curiosity in her. Part of her did want to know what had happened to their colleagues on Loki, if only to provide some sort of closure. Not to mention, anything she found might help the authorities and thereby clear the cloud of suspicion hanging over everyone else. Of course, Aster had adamantly rejected versions of those arguments only an hour ago. But they had slowly eaten away at her resolve until she could stand it no longer.

  Most companies in the high tech sector used the same highly compartmentalised research and development chain. The researchers carried out the basic research with no immediate commercial value in one facility, then passed on their findings to the engineers to develop into a usable product in another facility.

  In theory, this was supposed to leave each section free to focus on their respective areas. In practice, it was just legal cover, and everybody knew it. Hardly a year went by without a major corporate scandal being uncovered involving experiments of a legally questionable nature, either due to an industrial accident, or the revelation that corporate espionage was involved. In the event of legal trouble, the research end of the chain was the most likely to be cut loose to save the rest of the company.

  Of course, the process couldn’t be completely stovepiped. Lawrence’s job as ‘liaison’ was to observe the research process and ensure at least one point of contact between the two ends of the chain. It also meant that if anyone knew for certain whether the Loki staff had been breaking the law, it had to be Lawrence. He must have had a set of notes about what he saw at the Loki facility, and his office was as good a place to look as any.

  The office itself was cramped and austere, and looked like it hadn’t been used in weeks, which it hadn’t, of course. At the back of the office was a stack of crates, and at the front was a simple desk welded to the wall like in any standard office. An automated cleaning drone buzzed back and forth across the floor, silently vacuuming up the dust collecting in the corners. Other than that, there wasn’t much to see.

  Aster sat down at the desk, and the holographic computer screen lit up in response to her presence, displaying the computer’s main menu. Everyone had their own locked office, so nobody bothered to password-lock their computers. Besides, if it were code-locked, Aster could use her personal override code to access any project-related files she wanted – another way of abusing her authority as project-lead.

  Cycling through the main menu, Aster came across a folder labelled ‘Loki Observation Notes’. That was a little too easy to find. She opened the folder and scrolled through the notes. All of them were second-hand observations of experiments conducted by the Loki team along with Lawrence’s comments. None of it was recent.

  Aster kept glancing at the office door, fearing that someone might walk in and catch her looking through someone else’s files. She knew of course that no one would; she was the only one on this floor with a personal override code. But the wrongness of what she was doing and the
paranoia of being caught made it hard to concentrate.

  Eventually, she stopped scrolling and threw her head back in silent frustration. Of course they were just second-hand observations; that was Lawrence’s whole job. What exactly was she looking for, a written confession of guilt? If he had been kept in the dark, he wouldn’t have known anything worth writing down in the first place; and if he had known, why would he leave behind evidence indicating his own complicity?

  Aster got up to look at the collection of boxes stacked at the back. Would he have hidden anything in them? They were standard storage crates with a simple turn lock, not meant for storing anything valuable. She popped open one of the crates without much effort, finding old components and circuit boards inside. There was nothing immediately relevant to the project, let alone anything nefarious.

  There were more boxes piled up at the back of the office, and Aster spent the next half hour rummaging through each of them. She found an assortment of worn-out parts, burnt out circuits, spare tools, an extra set of dirty engineer’s overalls, and nothing else.

  Aster slumped against the wall. Again, she had to ask herself: what exactly was she hoping to find? Lawrence hadn’t been to this office in weeks, why would he have left anything incriminating behind? Every entry-level engineer and technician had their own office, but Lawrence's office was just a glorified storage closet.

  The cleaning drone zipped along the edge of the wall, meticulously scrubbing the corners before vacuuming up the dust around Aster’s shoes. Moving on, the drone found its path blocked by the pile of boxes. It paused its routines and hummed patiently, waiting for someone to clear the obstruction.

  Aster looked at the drone curiously. Since Lawrence was hardly ever here, why would he bother having a cleaning drone in his office? She bent down and plucked the drone off the floor, flipping it over and examining the underside.