by John Graham
Gabriel swung his left fist, the clenching motion causing his remaining three combat claws to extend. He caught the death spike in between the curved claws as it descended towards his neck, and twisted it out of its wielder’s grip, sending it clattering across the floor – or the wall. Then he knocked the black widow’s leg out from underneath her.
With the agility of a gymnast, the black widow turned her sideways fall into a backward somersault, but by the time she was back on her feet, the regenerative systems in Gabriel’s suit had kicked in, restoring his exoskeleton to functionality. Gabriel pushed himself off the ground, returning to his feet, and drew the alien sword from his back, activating its energy field.
The black widow extended her palm towards her baton and used her gravity glove to pull it back towards her. A clever trick, but by the time the baton was back in her hand, Gabriel had already closed the distance and brought the sword to bear, severing her arm at the elbow before bringing the blade back around and striking her neck.
The black widow stood for a moment like a tottering, one-armed statue. Then she fell to her knees and then to the ground, her helmeted head rolling off her shoulders and across the floor like a badly-designed horror prop.
At that exact moment, the column unexpectedly retracted back into the ceiling and the squad’s comm. signals returned to sensor range as they all came flying out of the gravitic tunnel. All three men, apparently alive and well, alighted on the ceiling of the chamber.
“Seems like you didn’t need our help with that one, colonel.” Bale remarked, noting the freshly decapitated black widow.
“Actually, I probably could have used it.” Gabriel replied.
“That fucking observer.” Cato cursed.
“I know,” Gabriel answered, “It split us up on purpose.”
“And almost got us killed in the process.” Viker added.
The giant black column re-emerged from its slot and resealed the gravitic passage, and the members of the squad jumped back down to the floor of the chamber. Gabriel disengaged his gravity belt and joined them.
“Two blocks, over there.” Gabriel pointed to the two ‘keys’, still lying on the floor where he’d dropped them, “the black widow called them ‘keys’.”
“Sounds like superstitious ramblings to me.” Bale suggested.
“Probably,” Gabriel conceded, “but I’m not so sure we should put them back, now.”
“In fact,” He continued, this time speaking aloud, “I’m not so sure that you aren’t at full functionality already, or that you can’t hear us or talk back.”
Silence.
“Fine, I’ll do the talking.” Gabriel shouted at the chamber, “I think you want us to believe that these columns are a power source without which you can’t help us, and I think you’ve avoided helping us until we restore the keys in order to make us think that one requires the other. Why the charade of pretending that you’re less capable than you are?”
More silence.
“Maybe it really does need those columns to speak.” Viker suggested.
Without warning, a section of the floor beneath them and the ceiling above glowed, and a gravitational force hoisted them into the air. It felt like a far more precise version of the black widow’s gravity glove, with minimal strain on the limbs; and they were only being suspended a few feet above the ground.
Nonetheless, they were trapped and helpless.
“The observer underestimated you.” The observer noted.
“So you did intentionally split us up.” Cato said.
“Correct.” The observer admitted without apology, “The deception was necessary to induce you to accomplish your assigned task as quickly as possible, and provided that you did so, there was no serious danger.”
“What do the columns do and why do they need to be restored?” Gabriel demanded.
“They are, in fact, power sources,” the observer explained, “but the observer’s own systems are not dependent on them. Rather, they provide energy to a containment shield. Perhaps you recall seeing it when you first entered the central chamber?”
“It’s for containing the Swarm?”
“Correct. Although with all six columns disabled, the containment shield was barely functional, and unable to prevent the Swarm from entering an organic host.”
“How strong is the containment shield, exactly?” Gabriel asked.
“Clarify your question with context.” The observer requested.
“You know what a ‘joule’ is from listening in on the researchers here, correct?”
“It is a unit of measurement that your species utilises with respect to energy.” The observer replied, “Do you wish to know the maximum amount of energy that the containment field can contain without failing?”
“Yes.”
“The maximum pressure which the containment shield can theoretically exert is equivalent to five multiplied by ten to the fourteenth joules. Which is itself approximately 1.39 times greater than the explosive force of the device you are carrying.”
The rest of the squad collectively blinked, thinking they might have misheard.
“Uh…Colonel,” Cato said tentatively on behalf of the rest of the squad, “with all due respect, what the fuck is he talking about?”
“My ‘command module’ is an antimatter bomb.” Gabriel replied matter-of-factly, no longer seeing the need to keep it a secret, “It has an explosive yield of 86 kilotons, hopefully enough to destroy the observatory, and the facility above with it.”
There was another round of stony silence on the comm. channel.
“So when were you going to tell us this?” Viker asked, his voice trembling with rage.
“When it became necessary to tell you, and no sooner.” Gabriel answered calmly, unmoved by Viker’s anger.
“If, in the course of your private deliberations, you have devised an alternative plan for destroying the Swarm, the observer desires to be informed of it.” The observer interjected.
“So the plan consists of the following.” Gabriel said aloud to the observer, “phase 1: restore the containment shield to full power–”
“Which you can do immediately.” The observer interrupted, deactivating the artificial gravity holding them in place and dropping them back to the floor.
“Phase 2:” Gabriel continued as the squad collected the remaining two oblong keys, “lure the Swarm back to the central chamber.”
“Phase 3:” the observer finished as the last two keys were reinserted, “trap the Swarm and its host inside the containment shield and use your antimatter device to annihilate both.”
“Wait a minute,” Viker interjected, “what about Ogilvy?”
“Clarify.”
“Our squad mate,” Viker clarified, “isn’t there a way to force the Swarm out of him?”
“No.” the observer replied bluntly, “not unless the Swarm departs of its own accord. And even if there were such a way, the effects of neural fusion are irreversible. Even after the Swarm is destroyed, he would remain enthralled to it.”
“He knew the risks when he signed up,” Gabriel said grimly, “and so did we.”
The squad was silent, but out of sombre agreement. From the moment they had sworn the oath and put on the armour, all of them had accepted death as a hazard of duty. Ogilvy’s fate was horrible, but he was no exception.
“This is an armoury,” Gabriel noted, “everyone check your weapons and armour, and stock up on anything that looks useful. Then we’ll head on to the central chamber.”
The entrances to the chamber were suddenly blocked off by energy barriers.
“The observer advises haste.” The observer said, “The Swarm’s thralls have identified your location and are converging on this chamber with speed. The protective barriers will pose only a temporary obstacle.”
“Let’s make it quick, then.”
The squad began to scavenge through the armoury, unearthing a specialised storage case for spare ammo blocks. Gabriel check
ed his own light machine gun and found he only had a few dozen shots left out of about fifty thousand possible shots. He began dismantling his weapon in order to replace the ammo block with a fresh one.
“Do you value your continued existence, voidstalker?” the observer asked.
The squad paused their work, caught off guard by the question.
“Keep working.” Gabriel ordered, then replied, “What makes you think I don’t?”
“You have a high yield explosive attached your armour,” the observer pointed out, “of a kind which must be actively prevented from detonating. Either you were coerced into carrying it in spite of your sense of self-preservation, or you volunteered for reasons which transcend the self-preservation imperative.”
“I volunteered with full knowledge and complete freedom to decline.” Gabriel stated.
“Why volunteer for a mission with near complete certainty of death?”
“Because there are tens, if not hundreds of millions of lives at stake,” Gabriel replied resolutely, “and if no one is willing to step forward and put their own life on the line for them, they would all be extinguished.”
“You sound as committed to your objective as the Enthralled are to theirs.” The observer replied, “Unless there is a mechanism for safely detaching the device?”
“…There is.” Gabriel confirmed reluctantly, then added over the comm., “thirty minute timer post-decoupling, with anti-tampering fail-deadly mechanism.”
“The concealment of crucial information is not conducive to trust.” Said the observer.
“Neither is splitting us up against our will.” Viker pointed out.
The observer was silent for a moment.
“True.”
“And just as an aside,” Cato added hostilely, “none of us are totally convinced that you aren’t somehow connected to the Swarm itself.”
There was another pause.
“That inference is logical, but inaccurate.” The observer replied, “The Swarm’s nature and origins are unknown, but since its motives are malevolent, its destruction is paramount.”
“On that, we can agree.” Gabriel answered.
They had no choice but to trust the observer, for now.
* * *
The owner of the club had been furious when one of his servers had panicked and called Civil Security instead of him first. His anger was assuaged, however, when the ACS officers pointed out to him that concealing a suspicious death in his establishment would count as criminal complicity, whether or not he had anything to do with it.
The body was lying sideways, knees bent as though he had been kneeling when he died, with a single entry wound through his right temple. The cheap, black market handgun he had presumably used to take his own life was still clutched in his cold, dead hand.
The forensics drone hovered over the body, bathing the corpse in sensory light as it scanned the body from head to toe and back again. Several patrol officers stood guard outside the room whilst two other officers, a forensics specialist and a supervising detective, stayed in the room itself to examine the crime scene.
“Suicide looks like the obvious verdict.” The detective concluded.
“Really?” the specialist asked, raising a sceptical eyebrow.
“Well, look at him,” the detective pointed to the body, “he clearly blew his own brains out. What other explanation is there?”
“A murder set up to look like a suicide.” The specialist replied.
“How?”
“Well why would someone go to the trouble of renting out a private room at some nightclub in order to take his own life?” the forensics specialist asked rhetorically.
“One last fabulous ride before ending it all.” The detective replied, “Seen that before.”
“Which hand did he prefer?” the specialist asked.
“Why does that matter?” the detective asked, puzzled.
“Tell me and I’ll tell you.”
The detective had already reviewed the footage, but he duly pulled up the video from the club’s security cameras. As a Civil Security officer, he enjoyed automatic access.
“Looks like he favours his left hand,” The detective said, “at least, he does in this video.”
“Which raises the question,” the forensics specialist pointed out, “why would a left-handed person hold the gun with his right hand in order to shoot himself?”
The detective was silent, realising his colleague’s point.
“Maybe we should swap jobs.” The forensics specialist quipped.
“Maybe he was ambidextrous?” the detective retorted defensively.
“No evidence for that,” the specialist countered. “It’s more likely that someone forced the gun into his hand without knowing that he was left-handed.”
“And what’s the evidence that someone forced the gun into his hand?”
As if on cue, the forensics drone completed its post-mortem scan and displayed a life-size, holographic recreation of the body in the air. Highlighted in red was the fatal wound through the skull, appearing as a red-shaped cone with the entry wound at the tip and the exit wound at the base. However, there were also uneven blotches of brown on the elbows and wrists as well as on the backs of the knees.
“See those,” the specialist pointed to the parts highlighted in brown, “subcutaneous bruising. Likely caused by applying substantial pressure to the skin.”
“He was physically restrained?” the detective asked.
“That’s what it looks like.” The specialist confirmed.
“So our victim comes here to meet someone,” the detective pondered aloud, “and he even though he looked agitated in the security footage, he came alone; so he probably wasn’t expecting his contact to betray and murder him.”
“At least two suspects forced this guy onto his knees and put their feet on the backs of his knees to keep him on the ground.” The specialist explained, “Then one of them forced the gun into his hand and bent his arm until the muzzle was touching his temple, hence this area of bruising in the crook of the right elbow.”
“A murder made to look like a suicide…” the agent mulled it over.
“Exactly as I said.” The specialist concluded, “probably a professional hit.”
“Not very professionally done, actually,” the detective replied, “a professional killer would never make sloppy mistakes like this.”
“Then who would think to do it this way?”
“Someone who wanted to make sure the job was done in person,” the detective surmised, “with accomplices, but without the expertise to do it properly.”
“Well that leaves motive.” Said the forensics specialist.
“Masterminds know what the motive could be at this point.” The detective replied, “But a DNA match and a name would be a good place to start.”
The forensics specialist scanned the body, coming up with a profile almost instantly.
“Dr Felix Kessler.”
THE TRAP
Whoever the observatory’s architects might have been, they had clearly been immune to motion sickness. So was the squad, thanks to their physical enhancements; but even though the gravitic tunnel network shaved an hour off their journey, Gabriel couldn’t help but think that most people would rather walk.
After the insane, high-speed journey through the bowels of the observatory, one by one the squad dropped down through the ceiling into one of the many sub-chambers. Several of the Enthralled saw the squad drop in and were shot dead before they could raise the alarm. Once they had secured the room and made sure there were no enemies hiding there, the squad took stock of their surroundings.
Having abandoned the original facility, the research staff had also abandoned all the labs they had been using before becoming enthralled. But they had taken with them as much equipment as they could move into their temple, and this particular sub-chamber had been converted into a substitute lab. The walls were lined with all sorts of machinery, including surgery tables equ
ipped with robotic medical suites, and fluid-filled growth tanks; some with live subjects and others lying empty.
Upon closer examination, the term ‘live subject’ seemed like a polite exaggeration. The subjects were mutilated and deformed, their skin turned pale by exsanguination or darkened by injuries, the victims of revolting experiments to enhance their bodies and minds. Some had had their chest cavities opened, and half-finished cybernetic components were visible inside them, while others sported cybernetic limbs or other implants.
Life signs were still visible on some of the monitoring screens, but even if the test subjects weren’t dead, they might as well be.
“What were they doing in this place…?” Cato said with disgust, inadvertently talking through his helmet speakers.
“This chamber is one of several which were requisitioned for experimentation by the Enthralled.” the observer explained, having overheard his question, “All surviving test subjects have since been ‘elevated’. The rest were abandoned.”
At the far end of the chamber was another fluid-filled growth tank, much larger than the others; in fact the top reached all the way up to the chamber’s ceiling. It was also the centrepiece of the lab, with a constellation of computers and other equipment connected to it, still churning out the result of constant scanning.
The specimen inside the tank wasn’t Human.
“What about this tank?” Gabriel asked.
“A leftover from the experiments your kind were conducting prior to falling under the influence of the Swarm,” the observer replied, “It appears that they were attempting to create a clone using DNA extracted from fossilised remains discovered within the observatory.”
The squad looked up in a mixture of fascination and disgust at the strange creature housed inside the tank. It had shrunken, stunted-looking limbs and claws like a lizard as well as an elongated tail. Its skin was egg-white pale, and its eyes were glossy black; it looked like an alien embryo grown to adult size.
“This thing looks like a half-grown mutant.” Bale observed with disgust.
“The DNA sample had already degraded to a fraction of the number of original base pairs.” The observer explained, “The experiment ultimately failed.”
