Galaxia

by Kevin McLaughlin

  Somehow, she looked different. There hadn’t really been time for her to lose weight or anything like that. It was something subtler in the set of her mouth or the expression in her eyes. No doubt it had something to do with what she’d been through—a genuine life-or-death situation. That must be it.

  “Oh, Laura, what are you doing? And why?” she mused.

  She had answers to both those questions. Having asked them of herself and now having to answer them bolstered her confidence. It reminded her of how important all this truly was.

  Roden’s declaration that she would never go into the jungle again didn’t dissuade her. It made her even more determined. There was a great scientific discovery to be made and something told her the monkey-reptile mutants were the key to that discovery. She couldn’t shake the feeling that the creatures were up to something important.

  Was it reckless to go into the jungle in search of scientific breakthroughs? Most people would say yes, but her sister would’ve understood. She had to take this opportunity for Alicia. There were also lives at stake. She might be able to save some of them if she could shed light on exactly what it was the Zoo was doing. Hauptmann Shalwar was obviously an intelligent man and so were many of the others, but by and large, soldiers were not scientists. They specialized in dealing with problems in the here and now.

  Discovering the causes of problems and proposing new ways forward—those were the things scientists were trained for.

  And weren’t they missing a head researcher at the moment? It might take days or weeks for someone else to arrive and they were on the brink of a dangerous new development. Something terrible might erupt from the Zoo at any moment and they wouldn’t have people on hand who were qualified to explain it.

  She could not allow that to happen if it was in her power to prevent it. And if she was forced to spend who knew how long stuck in the lab, she might as well do as much work in the Zoo as she could now.

  “No,” she said to the mirror. “I must accomplish something, and I have to help save the people here before it’s too late.”

  That meant going back into the Zoo. She would proceed with her plan, hasty and daft though it was, to retrace their steps to where she had found the trapped men. Now, she merely had to get there.

  Remembering that she’d have to cross miles of desert on foot before she reached the jungle, she bent over the sink and drank as much as she could from the faucet. Hopefully, she’d be able to get her hands on a suit, but in case that wasn’t possible, she thought it best to hydrate as much as she could. Finally, she turned and opened the door.

  When she emerged from the bathroom, she glanced both ways. The hallway was empty. She turned right and proceeded in the direction in which she’d headed previously. This section seemed to house most of the base’s maintenance and infrastructure-type stuff.

  In order to reach the Zoo, she would have to get through the gate—or at least a nearby section of the wall. Hence, she needed to find the base’s generator.

  As a teenager, she’d once had to operate her mother’s generator during a blackout. With Mum gone as she frequently was, she’d had no one to help her. But still, she had managed. The newer models used in Europe these last couple of decades were not actually that difficult to operate.

  Conveniently enough, a sign at the end of the hall pointed to the right and read, Generator. It might be another word that was identical in both English and German. She headed that way and located a small room housing the large apparatus.

  “Well, this is much bigger than what I’m used to,” she sighed, “but it’s basically the same.”

  It took a few moments but she found an emergency shutoff switch. Once she flipped it, the base would, of course, go into lockdown. That was both good and bad. It would heighten everyone’s alertness but it would also buy her a few minutes of chaos in which she might slip away. She would have to reach the gate quickly. Fortunately, she had managed to orient herself while she was outside and knew where to go.

  She turned the power off and plunged everything into blackness. In moments, the cold backup lights, the red emergency lights, and the loud, obnoxious, buzzing alarm activated. She moved to a couple of random wires and pulled on them until they snapped and came loose. While she felt bad causing damage to the generator, she knew merely turning it off might not buy her enough time. She felt sure a few broken wires wouldn’t be too hard to fix.

  Satisfied that she’d done what she could, she left the generator room behind her and retraced her route down the hallway. She moved at a light jog and decided to trust that anyone who saw her would assume she was merely rushing to her emergency post or something.

  As she neared the doors leading out of the building, two men burst in. They flicked their gazes toward her but did not seem about to stop and question her, so she simply waved over her shoulder. They passed by.

  “Shit,” she muttered as she pushed through the doors and made a sharp left turn. It wouldn’t take them long to determine that the power had been shut off manually. However, they’d then try to turn it on and it might take a while for them to notice the damaged wires and decide how to repair or replace them.

  It was still dark outside. She’d lost track of the exact time but it probably wasn’t that long after midnight, with dawn still some hours away. The peace and quiet she usually associated with the graveyard-shift hours were nowhere to be found, though. People ran around, orders were shouted and questions asked, and a couple of automated searchlights swept the grounds. The alarm still blared like an obnoxious backing-track.

  Laura headed toward the gate. She would try to approach it from an oblique angle to do some hasty surveillance and determine if she could get past Coop, the sharp-eyed guard. If not, she’d have to find some other way through the wall.

  A low palette of what she assumed was building materials stood partway between the generator section doors and the gate. She ran up to it and hid behind it for the moment as she squinted toward the huge metal portal.

  “Hey—hey! Get all these people back,” a deep voice yelled in a British accent. It was Coop. He had emerged from his cubicle built into the wall to stop a small team of soldiers presided over by a couple of civilian bureaucrats. The man now blocked the path and waved his hands to emphasize his words. “No one leaves the base during lockdown. Hauptmann Shalwar’s rules.” His voice calmed a little. “Sit tight, my friends. These outages never last long.”

  The gate, unfortunately, was closed.

  “Damn,” she said. A quick scan did not reveal any other way through the wall anywhere nearby. She could run along it until she found one of the incomplete portions but by then, they might realize she was free and have people looking for her.

  She had to sneak into Coop’s little office behind him and try to open the gate, then.

  “You know this will never work, Laura,” she chided herself under her breath. Still, she had to try. She moved as quietly as she could and kept to the deep shadows as she bolted to the cubicle.

  As she entered, a quick glance reassured her that Coop and the people he was speaking to were distracted and had not seen her. The team he’d stopped began to drift toward the main personnel doors. Another man had arrived and conferred with the guard in a low voice. She wondered idly if it might be a guard reporting that their criminal scientist was on the loose before she turned her attention to the gatekeeper’s control panel.

  Unlike the generator, this was not simple at all. It looked like the command console of a goddamned spaceship. She had no way to quickly tell which of the switches, buttons, or touchscreens controlled the gate versus which controlled the cameras, gun turrets, microphones, or anything else.

  Trying not to panic, she glanced around the office to gather her thoughts.

  There was a door on the far side of the cubicle.

  “Huh.” She breathed deeply and raised an eyebrow before she took two hasty steps over to it and tried the handle. It clicked downward and the door popped opened gent
ly. Beyond it lay a long hallway the width of the cubicle. It stretched a good ten or twelve meters ahead of her and she stared around her for a moment. “Well, then,” she said, stepped through, and pulled the door shut behind her.

  A narrow door to her right—secured with an electronic panel on the wall beside it—stirred her curiosity. After a little puzzled consideration, she realized that beyond it would most likely be the space for the gate to retract into and probably also the mechanism that controlled it. Logic suggested that they’d want to keep that safely secured where the average Joe couldn’t enter.

  Hastily, she reminded herself that she needed to get out of there before Coop discovered her. She crept down the corridor to the door at the far end. It opened easily into what appeared to be cramped living quarters in which a single lamp burned. She was about to leave when she saw a suit on some kind of metal frame beside the door. Quickly, she stepped closer and examined it, hoping that she’d maybe struck gold. It looked a little heavy and definitely too large, and she had no idea how to adjust it—if that was even possible. Regretfully, she stepped out and pulled the door closed behind her.

  Another door, this one a little wider than what she imagined was a standard size, was on her left as she faced toward the cubicle again. She’d not seen it before, obviously focused on the more obvious one directly ahead. With a deep breath, she tried the handle and surprisingly, it opened. She entered another hallway that ran toward the Zoo and a second door. Quickly, she darted down its length and stifled a curse when she found the exit—unsurprisingly—locked.

  Obviously, this was the backup entry-exit for emergencies when the gate was on lockdown. It was appropriate, really. This definitely qualified as an emergency in her book. A little desperate now, she glanced around the shadowed space and noticed the outline of what looked like a small wall-mounted cubbyhole with a door. This, thankfully, stood slightly ajar, and she suppressed a crow of triumph when she saw the innocuous looking key hung on a single hook within. She snatched it hastily, almost dropped it and fumbled to retain hold of it, and scooted to the door again. In seconds, she’d inserted it, turned it, and pushed through the exit.

  It occurred to her that under normal circumstances, simply opening the door might have tripped an alarm. But, she reasoned, the alarms were already activated anyway, so that worked out nicely.

  She turned and confirmed that she’d successfully escaped the base. Up ahead was a tall dune. In only a moment, she could be over it and out of sight of the wall and its cameras. She started uphill through the sand.

  “Now then, Laura,” she said softly. “We’ll find out if this was actually a good idea.”

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Jan froze in thought for only a few seconds when a sheet of blackness fell over him and his surroundings, only to be dispelled by the white backup lights and red emergency flashers.

  “What’s that, sir?” the cook asked and stepped up behind him, entirely unfazed by the power outage and the sudden blaring of the alarm.

  “She’s escaped!” he snapped.

  Sonny eased toward the doorway as though he felt the need to confirm what he had said with his own eyes.

  The hauptmann spun on his heel while he gritted his teeth and clenched his fists, then headed down the hall at a jog. He knew where to go because he knew where she would go.

  “Miss Laura? Why—how could she have escaped? I wouldn’t have expected that, sir. And where on bleeding Earth would she…” his voice trailed off as the officer left him behind. Jan could already imagine the man’s shrug as he returned to the kitchen to start heating his beans.

  Dr. Curie would, he felt quite sure, head to the gate. In the interest of considering all possibilities, he ran some of the other things she might attempt through his mind, although those already seemed less likely.

  As she was there as a punishment, it might be conceivable that she was trying to escape to return to civilization. That made no sense, however. She seemed to want to be there. In fact, being inside the Zoo seemed to delight her despite the danger.

  No, the most likely scenario was that she would attempt what might be the stupidest thing of them all. She would set off into the Zoo alone and without adequate equipment to look for something that might be of scientific interest. Something they’d seen in the jungle had caught her attention.

  Within his mind, a thousand curses for her madness and irresponsibility battled it out with a sickening worry that she might well get herself killed. He did not want that to happen.

  Of course, he didn’t know why he should particularly care what happened to her at this point. There might be some vague reason, but it was far too ridiculous to devote any serious thought to it.

  As he continued to run toward the exit without slowing or stopping, he tried to tell himself that if foolish civilians insisted on suicidal courses of action, it was not his responsibility. There was nothing he could really do. He should simply focus on the base, on its security, and on the bigger picture of things that were directly relevant to his own duties.

  The rest of him ignored the one small part of him that continually reminded him of this. Instead of heeding the voice of reason, he ran.

  Before he headed outside, he stopped at the armory and quickly snatched up a nice Heckler & Koch G36 and a few spare magazines as well as extra magazines to supplement his pistol. He had a disturbing suspicion that he might end up needing them. He also snagged a spare suit for Dr. Curie in case she hadn’t had time to procure one. For a moment, he considered taking a pistol and spare magazines for her, but there weren’t any suitable weapons nearby and he didn’t have time to go through the rigmarole of signing more out at the armory admin desk. The guard looked curiously at him but he ignored the man, slung the rifle over his shoulder, and continued toward the exit.

  He emerged through the main doors into the predictably deep darkness of 0200 hours. A squad of troops returned to the structure. As they passed him, he overheard some of their chatter and surmised that they’d been preparing to go through the gate but had been rebuffed by Coop. His frown deepened.

  Jan cleared the open space and came within speaking distance of Sergeant Cooper as another man walked away from him toward the section that housed the generator and most of the maintenance equipment.

  “Hauptmann Shalwar,” Coop said and nodded. “It’s good to see you. You will be pleased to know that I’ve enforced our lockdown. No one has come in or gone out.” Behind him, the gate was very much closed.

  “Yes, I see,” he replied. “Coop, listen to me. We have an emergency situation.”

  “I noticed.” The man smiled.

  “No. Not the power outage. We have those all the time. The woman has escaped—Dr. Curie. She’s headed to the Zoo, I am sure of it. I need to get through.”

  “Escaped? Well, no one has been through the gate,” the guard observed. “She must either still be on base or if by some chance she’s gotten past the inner wall, she probably went through one of the gaps farther along. You’d have to review the security camera footage to determine if she went left or right, though.”

  “We do not have time for all that,” Jan snapped. “She might already be halfway across the desert and by herself, she will not last long in there. I do not want her death on your conscience or mine. And she…ah, might be useful to the scientific part of our efforts here.”

  “The gate is closed,” Coop repeated. “You know well that it shuts itself automatically during an outage and remains shut until things are back to normal.” His friendliness had begun to give way—as it always did whenever the issue of the gate’s security arose—to a hard, aloof, and indifferent professionalism. Although it also looked like something amused him slightly and Jan assumed he was speculating about the woman. That only annoyed him more.

  “I know, and I also know you have an override switch. Use it. Open the gate for me so I can catch her quickly and bring her back without incident. That way, she will be safe and we will not need to invol
ve the entire base in a huge operation to track one idiot civilian.”

  The man looked at him with a cool, even expression. “No,” he said.

  He bristled and was about to protest, but Coop cut him off.

  “I can’t do that,” he explained, “because, Hauptmann, it’s one of your own rules. Number Eleven. No one leaves the base during lockdown.”

  “Yes, well—”

  The guard interrupted him again. “Not to mention that it’s still dark. It’ll be dawn in a few hours but it takes an extra hour for the sun to really make a difference in that dense jungle, doesn’t it? Going in now would violate Rule Number Five. Never operate in the Zoo when it’s dark.” The man was all business and yet the faint suggestion of a small smile was visible near the corners of his mouth.

  The hauptmann’s face scrunched in what he supposed was a mixture of frustration, annoyance, and embarrassment. “The full wording states, ‘Never unless necess—’”

  “And that’s not to mention,” the guard went on in a slightly louder voice now, “that you don’t have the right people with you. Or any people at all, for that matter. That’s Rule Number One. There’s no way I can allow you to break all three of those. You know how Hauptmann Shalwar is with his rules.”

  Jan decided that later, when he had time and wasn’t furious, he might have to laugh at this. Maybe. For now, though, he took a step back, hung his head, slumped his shoulders, and allowed his face to fall in an expression of defeat and resignation.

  “Yes,” he sighed, “you’re right once again, Coop. Pardon my insolence in questioning the rules.” He turned as if to return to the base.

  Without warning, he pivoted and converted the momentum of his turn into a punch that connected firmly with the guard’s head. The man staggered, shuddered, and his eyes rolled before he dropped to the sand like a sack of potatoes that had fallen off a supply truck.