SINdrome

by J. T. Nicholas

  “Wait, what?” Tia started to ask, but I cut her off.

  “Sorry, Tia. No argument on this. The cure is all that matters, and you’re the only one with the training to identify and administer it.” In the faint red light, her face was a mask of shadows, and I couldn’t read her expression, but she quieted. I continued. “We move quick. We keep it quiet as long as we can. We avoid alarms as long as we can. But once we trigger them—and make no mistake, we will—then it’s fast and loud. We go from cat burglars to a smash and grab. Everyone clear?”

  I could see them nodding. “Good.” I slipped back in position, taking point once more. I pulled the NVGs from my head, stuffed them back in my pack. I heard the others doing the same. We’d have them if we needed them, but odds were pretty good there would be lights on the other side of the door. “Kill the cameras.”

  I heard a rather emphatic tap at the screen. “Done.”

  “Move, move, move,” I snapped. I put action to my words rushing down the hallway. I covered the ground quick and double-timed it up the stairs, aware of Hernandez at my back. The others fanned out in the landing, those with firearms taking up shooting positions to cover the door. LaSorte made his way up the stairs and knelt before the screen embedded in the wall to the side of the door.

  “Same tech,” he said. “Two minutes.”

  I waited, rifle at the ready as LaSorte worked the screens. Then he was stepping back, his personal screen in hand. “On your word, Detective.”

  “Go.”

  Somewhere in the walls, gears started whirring, and the doors began to open.

  Chapter 19

  I took a kneeling position on the stairs, clearing Hernandez’s fire zone above me and getting closer to the entry. I peered through the rapidly expanding crack between the doors, straining to pick up on any danger.

  I could see little of the room beyond. Just a small, empty space, maybe eight feet on a side with an industrial looking fire door facing directly opposite the bolt hole. Light filtered in from a window set high above the door, giving enough illumination to see, but painting the room in shades of gray. No sign of any people, for which I was grateful. We were still firmly in a shooting gallery. I’d be a hell of a lot happier when we could get some cover.

  The doors opened enough for me to slip through. I surged forward, crossing the distance to the other door in two strides and posting up beside the doorframe. Hernandez was on the other side in an instant, with the rest moving in and taking up positions along the wall. LaSorte was the only exception, as he panned a flashlight around the room, keeping it at about knee level. The circle of light traced the wall, pausing at each electrical outlet for a moment before moving on.

  “Nothing here,” he whispered. “We need to get somewhere where I can hardwire to their network.” He pulled his screen out, and from the corner of my eye, I could see him flicking and zooming across something. The blueprints, most likely. Then he worked his way past the line of shooters, having enough sense to stick close to the wall in case the door burst open, until he had taken the position right behind me. “I think we need to go here,” he said, pointing at the screen.

  I took my eyes from the door long enough to study the map. He’d outlined a path from our current position, past a few larger rooms and intersections and down a long hallway. On either side of the hallway were a number of small eight by eight rooms. Nothing was labeled—the files Silas and LaSorte had managed to track down either hadn’t ever shown what the space was going to be used for, or that information had been added later. But the purpose seemed clear enough. “Office space?” I asked.

  “I think so,” LaSorte replied. “If they are, I should be able to wire into the network.”

  We knew we couldn’t wander blindly around a vast underground facility. So the plan was to find a spot where Silas and LaSorte could plug in, and wait while they cracked open the network and spilled out all the secrets contained therein. We’d then use the information to locate the cure, secure it, and get the fuck out of Dodge, hopefully before we were noticed. That last part was a long shot, but we could hope.

  “Right,” I said. “Looks like it’s fairly close, too. We’ll make a play for it. You drop back, and send Al forward.” LaSorte nodded. A moment later, Al’awwal was by my side. “We’re going to boost Hernandez up,” I said. “So that she can have a look through that window and see what’s what.”

  “Roger that.”

  “I get to have all the fun,” Hernandez chimed in from her side of the door.

  I ignored her as Al and I both set a shoulder against the door, standing facing each other. We held each other firmly at the wrist, right arm to right arm, left to left. In addition to providing us some extra stability for lifting up Hernandez, the position had the added benefit of putting my bulk and Al’s as a barrier against opening the door. It had probably been under two minutes since we took out the cameras, maybe not long enough for security to even have noticed, much less send a response team. If they were on the ball, though, a team would be en route. Or there could simply be people out in the corridor, going about their normal business.

  We both sank into a squat position, and Hernandez stepped up onto our crossed arms, putting a hand on each of our shoulders to steady herself. She was small, but fit and solid. Still, we managed the weight easily. Hell, Al’awwal could probably have curled her. We straightened our legs slowly, lifting her until her eyes cleared the bottom sill of the window. “Little higher,” she muttered. “I need a better angle.” We lifted more, until I was standing not-quite stiff-legged. It was a tiring position, and I could feel my quads starting to tremble. She surveilled for a good thirty seconds. Then, “Down,” she said.

  We reversed the procedure, and she hopped off our arms. “Long corridor to the left. Nothing to the right. Dead ends, just like on the map. No sign of people. No cameras that I make out. A few doors. Everything seems to line up to the blueprints.”

  That was good news, at least. “We move quick,” I said. “If we meet resistance, we try to take them down quiet. But don’t be stupid. If we have to go loud, we go loud. They’re not expecting us, so hopefully we can maintain an element of surprise even once the shooting starts.”

  There were nods all around and then we were moving. I visualized the blueprints in my head while wishing for the augmented reality helmets that would have been part of the standard kit for the Special Response Teams. Still, even without the map projected directly into my field of vision, it wasn’t hard to remember where we were going. And even if it was, Silas and LaSorte were non-combatants. Both of them moved with their eyes to their screens. If we took a wrong turn, I had no doubt they’d correct it. We moved in good order, me on point, Hernandez behind me, then Fortier. Fortier and I had the only silenced weapons, though “silenced” would be a relative term in the narrow hallways. The rest were strung out behind us in a tight line.

  We passed several doors along the way, but didn’t deviate from the plan. Any one of them could have provided access to the network. Hell, any one of them could have held the cure. It was just as likely that they held a security team, or that opening one would trigger an alarm somewhere. We had a solid plan, and we were going to stick to it. From my best estimation, we were maybe twenty or thirty feet from the hallway where what we hoped was office space should be. Another few seconds and…

  We turned a corner and ran full on into Walton Biogenics Security.

  It was a team of three, wearing the same blazers I remembered from the lab. In that first frantic instant, I couldn’t tell if they were human or synthetic, but it didn’t matter. The response had to be the same in either case. Firing the silenced subgun would sound about like dropping a stack of books. Maybe quiet enough that it wouldn’t be noticed. Maybe not. The security team didn’t have weapons out, so I surged forward, letting my gun dangle from its strap. I was vaguely aware of the Hernandez and Fortier moving into action a
s well.

  Surprise was on our side, and the fight was short and brutal. I looked into the widening eyes of the first member of the security team as my elbow lifted above my head and sliced down at a forty-five-degree angle, palm turned toward the bad guy. My elbow smashed across the bridge of his nose in an explosion of blood and I heard the louder crack of the zygomatic bone. He dropped to the ground. I turned, ready for the next guard, but it was already over. Fortier had produced a baton from somewhere in his gear, and while my former nemesis may have been hefty, there was obviously strength there as well. He’d laid out a guard with one well-placed blow, and from the amount of blood pooling on the concrete floor, had probably killed the man. He didn’t look too upset about it, either.

  Hernandez was behind the third guard, a rear naked choke in place. I hadn’t seen her attack, but from the inhuman angle of the security guard’s knee and the countless hours I’d practiced on the mats with her, I knew what had happened. She had stepped around the security guard, lashing out with a well-placed side kick that impacted just above the knee, separating the femur from the patella and destroying the MCL and LCL. That alone would have been enough to end any fight, but she had slipped behind the man as he was falling, locking in the choke, and using his own weight and momentum to finish it. It was one of her favorite techniques, though she had never executed it fully in training, for obvious reasons.

  I briefly considered the bodies. Three large men, all three down. I did a quick check, and sure enough, found the skin tag on all three. Synthetics. All three were also carrying sidearms. “At least we’re in the right place,” I muttered. I considered whether to try to stash the bodies or leave them where they lay. Fortier’s guy was going to be out for a while. I could see the slight rise and fall of his chest, so Fortier hadn’t killed him, after all. At least, not yet. But we weren’t about to administer first aid. Still, only Hernandez had managed a bloodless takedown, and even if we hid the bodies somewhere, the pool of blood was going to raise eyebrows. And the alarm.

  “We leave ’em,” I said. “Let’s move.”

  We turned the corner, and found ourselves in the hallway of what I hoped were office doors. No heads were poking out, wondering at the commotion. In fact, from what I could tell, the offices were dark. No light was bleeding out from beneath the doors. There were also no name tags or any other identifiers affixed to the portals, beyond a simple number. The doors, stark white against the darker gray of the unpainted concrete, were somehow unsettling. I wondered if, instead of offices, we were about to open cell doors. The place had that kind of feel to it.

  “That’s not creepy at all,” Hernandez muttered, shifting her grip on her pistol.

  “Any one is as good as the rest, I guess,” I whispered in return. I chose a door at random. The number centered at eye level was four. Trusting the others to move behind me and keep alert for threats from other vectors, I let my subgun fall back onto its sling and drew my forty-five. I used my left hand to test the knob—it was unlocked. I threw a quick glance at Hernandez, who gave me a nod. Then I threw the door open and bolted inside, moving left and sweeping the small interior with my pistol.

  Empty. The lights flicked on as I stepped in, triggered by a motion sensor. The room was simple, with a desk, chair, screen, and hutch. The walls were unadorned. The desk was clean. No loose papers or personal effects. “Clear,” I said.

  The other piled in, and with eight of us in the small space things felt real cramped, real quick. We had to jostle and shuffle around to let Silas drop into the chair in front of the scree, LaSorte standing and peering over his shoulder.

  “Something doesn’t feel right about this,” Hernandez muttered.

  “This whole place feels off,” Thompson agreed.

  “It’s quiet… Too quiet,” Al chimed in, drawing out the phrase and wriggling his eyebrows. It was trite, but that didn’t make it less true. I’m not sure what I had been expecting at a top-secret Walton Biogenics facility, but dimly lit hallways, empty offices, and small security teams weren’t it.

  Silas and LaSorte were busy working their magic, and all the rest of us could do was stand in tense silence, waiting. No matter how quiet things were, we had just butchered a security team, so we knew the place wasn’t completely abandoned.

  “We are in,” Silas said. His voice was quieter than normal, straining against the numbing agent Tia continued to give him from time to time. “It appears this facility is in the process of being decommissioned.”

  “Decommissioned?” Tia asked. She looked uncomfortable in her tactical gear, the shotgun that seemed almost as long as she was tall cradled in her arms.

  “I suppose once you release a plague designed to kill every synthetic on the face of the planet, it doesn’t make much sense to keep the factories open,” Fortier said.

  “Maybe not,” I agreed, wincing slightly at factories. Even if it was sort of the right term. “But they’ve still got security on site. Hopefully that means they’ve still got something worth guarding. And if we’re really fucking lucky, maybe it means a lot less security and no civilians to get in the way if things go south.”

  “I think we’ve got something,” LaSorte interrupted, still reading his screen. “Looks like there’s a medical facility toward the north end of the compound. Several laboratories listed, as well as testing and research facilities.”

  “That’s our best shot,” I said. “Can you send it to us?” Before I even finished asking, our screens beeped. “Good. What about electronic security?”

  “Allow us a few more minutes, Detective,” Silas said. “There are measures in place, but I believe that we can defeat them. Many seem to have been deactivated as part of the decommissioning process.” I supposed that made sense. Not a lot of point paying for high-tech security on an empty vault.

  The minutes ticked by and my skin began to itch. The security patrol had to be missed by now. Which meant that another patrol would be heading out. How large of a security force had been left behind at the “decommissioned” facility? A dozen? More? We’d gotten lucky with the first three. Taken them by surprise. But if we had to go up against a well-trained and well-armed force, things wouldn’t be so easy.

  “We have done it,” Silas said, voice triumphant. “We cannot take over their security measures, but we can deactivate them as we go, turning them back on in our wake. And we can make sure that no alarm or electronic lock will stand in our way.”

  “Good,” I said. “Then let’s roll.”

  We moved out, working our way into the corridor and through the twisting nightmare of intersections. If you didn’t know what you were doing, the place really was a maze. There were no signs indicating where you were or where you might be headed, no convenient color coding to prevent you from getting lost. Nothing. Not even a legally required emergency evacuation plan. If it wasn’t for the blueprint, we’d have been wandering around down here for hours, with no fucking clue. I realized once again just how central Silas and, to a lesser extent, LaSorte, were to the entire revolution.

  We’d been moving deeper and deeper into the complex until we came to a door that was quite different from the others. Either Silas’s electronic magic was working, or we’d gotten extremely lucky, because if security was on to us, they hadn’t managed to cross our paths. Unlike the plain wooden doors we’d seen up until now, this one was made of metal, steel from the look of it. There were two doors side by side, with latches rather than knobs. They reminded me vaguely of hospital doors, the kind that were built to take impacts from gurneys and swing out of the way. Only more solid, somehow.

  There was a screen to the right of the doors, glowing a soft red. That lasted for about three seconds, as Silas tapped his personal screen. The glow shifted through amber and to green, and the click of a heavy lock disengaging was clearly audible in the hallway. There was no signage present on the door and no windows. We had no idea what we were steppin
g into.

  I went first, and I went fast. When stealth wasn’t an option, speed was often the best bet. I hit the door with my shoulder and followed it in at a near sprint, conscious of Hernandez and the others on my heels. That lasted for about three strides, and then my legs caught up with my eyeballs and I came to a skidding halt.

  The room was vast, easily the size of a football field. I should have realized, from the maps that we had seen. The roof stretched a good thirty feet above us. The stairs from the surface level hadn’t delved that deep. The room must have stretched up into the building built above it. Or maybe the topography of the land was different, and the overt façade of the Potato Farm was built atop a hill. Or maybe the two miles walk to get here from the farmhouse had been on a steady, if hardly noticeable, decline.

  I shook my head, forcing the thoughts aside. Forcing my mind back to the actual reason I’d come to a skidding halt. It wasn’t the scale of the room, no matter how impressive. No. It was the contents.

  I didn’t have a word for the machinery that filled the room. Too many science fiction vids and games gave me an approximation: cryo chambers. But, no. That wasn’t quite right. More like specimen tubes. If specimen tubes were made big enough to hold a fully grown human.

  Or synthetic.

  They stretched from floor to ceiling stacked one on top of the other and stretching into neat rows, like the shelves in an old grocery store before delivery services had made that sort of shopping obsolete. I wished to God that they were empty. But they weren’t.

  The bodies were recognizable, if only just. The ones I could see were men and women who had, at some point, been fit and trim and in the kind of shape that everyone envied but only professional athletes or early twenty-somethings could actually achieve. Unless, of course, you were synthetic. At some point, because those I could see were several days into the process of putrefaction.