“We might well have ended up in the same shape as that dust planet we saw,” Dan said.
“Precisely. We need to close that gap, and fast. Allies would help, too. There have to be other races out there, other inhabited worlds. Maybe some of them are more friendly than the Naga.”
“Maybe. But we’ll need to be more careful, too. We don’t want to lead a potential enemy right back home. You have any ideas on preventing that?” Dan asked.
Before his friend could reply, an alarm sounded over the base intercom system. Dan froze. There had to be something very wrong for that alarm to be going off. It was reserved for massive calamity. John tapped his console, speaking quickly into the radio microphone embedded there. “Caraway here. What’s going on?”
“Emergency in the special projects lab, sir. We need you here right away,” came the reply.
Dan began wheeling for the door before John could respond. The doors opened for him and he started down the hall, all thoughts about exploration momentarily set aside. John caught up and passed him. The special projects lab was where they were storing all the alien artifacts they’d acquired. If something was wrong there, it could be deadly for all of them.
Ten
The sound of someone running down the steps toward them echoed loudly through the stairwell. Charline stopped in her tracks, aiming her pistol at the point where the person would first become visible. Behind her she heard Beth hiss with frustration. Beth wasn’t used to being helpless, but without a weapon there wasn’t much she could do at that moment. There was no question which of them was the better shot. Charline knew she’d keep herself and Linda out of harms way. Everything was in her hands now.
Why the hell had Cory slipped her this gun? Had he known shit was about to go down here? If so, why help them? If the security detail were on the side of whoever was after them, then why arm them? Too damned many questions, and no way to get the answers. She focused on clearing her mind and sighting down the barrel of her gun.
A man in thick glasses and a lab coat rounded the corner. He saw her, saw the pistol, and gave a squeaking noise. He raised his hands in an automatic alarmed response.
“Don’t shoot!”
Charline kept the pistol trained on him and stepped up closer. Once she could read his badge - he was a grad student, and a lab tech in the building, it said - she waved him on. He rushed down the stairs, almost tripping and tumbling forward in his haste to get away. She sympathized with the notion. She would rather be just about anywhere but here. Not without the sample, though. If that fell into the wrong hands, it could cause irreparable devastation. There was no way she was leaving without it.
It was a good bet she wasn’t the only one on their way to try to acquire it, either.
She reached the thirty-second floor. That was where Linda’s lab had been. The door out of the stairwell had a small glass pane. Charline peered through, but the hall looked clear.
“Which way from here?” she asked Linda.
“To the left. The guards should be at their post,” she said.
Beth cocked an eyebrow. “Even with the fire alarms?”
“Yeah,” Linda said. “They have a secure room where they’ll sit until the alarm is done or they are ordered to leave by the fire department. We have classified military work going on in that lab. It’s never left unsecured. So I don’t think there is much to worry about…”
Her voice trailed off as they rounded the corner and looked down the hall toward the lab in question. Charline recognized the guards she’d seen during her earlier visit. They were both dead, pools of blood spreading from beneath them.
“Oh my god,” Linda whispered, her hands going to her mouth.
Charline swept down the hall in a fluid motion, her pistol still at the ready. With her left hand she reached down to touch the neck of first one guard and then the other, checking their carotids. The bodies were still warm, but there was no pulse. She wasn’t surprised. There was so much blood that she hadn’t thought either of them could still be alive. She slipped a second pistol from one of the guard’s holsters. Neither of them had even had time to draw their weapons before they were gunned down.
“They’re dead, but it was recent,” she said.
Beth moved past her to check the door. The biometric console had been ripped from the wall. Charline watched her begin fiddling with what was left of the device.
“It’s been hacked,” Beth said.
“Can you open it?” Charline asked.
Beth glanced over her shoulder and rolled her eyes, which Charline took as a positive. She went and grabbed the third pistol and walked over to Linda. “Take this, you might need it.”
Linda looked at the weapon like it was a snake. “I can’t! I’ve never used one… No.” She shook her head and took a step back.
“Fine, but then stay out of the way,” Charline said.
“Door is going to pop when I unlock it,” Beth warned.
“Better be ready then,” Charline said. She passed Beth the spare gun. “Here.”
“Thanks.”
Charline took up a position just outside the doors, one pistol in each hand. This was risky as hell. She inhaled a deep breath, trying to calm her rattling nerves. How many enemies were inside? Were there any noncombatants? Was she going to shoot anything that might blow them all up? Was there someone even now training his gun on the door the same way she was?
Too many questions. She inhaled again, exhaling her fears as best she could in a smooth breath.
“Do it,” Charline said.
Beth clicked something together on the console, igniting a small spark that made her swear. The doors popped open, and Charline went into motion. She flowed forward with a handful of economic steps, striding inside the room and counting targets as she moved. No one was waiting for her just inside the doors. There were eight men in the room that she could see. All of them were armed. That was going to be a problem. She needed to even the odds a lot, quickly.
The raiders didn’t seem like they were expecting company, which was one mark for her side. She fired the gun in her left hand first, taking one of them in the shoulder. Her right hand tracked a separate target independently. Her aim was better with this hand, taking down the target with a well placed shot to the chest.
Charline stepped sideways, gliding to the left so that she wasn’t framed in the doorway any longer. She dipped down, taking some cover behind a desk, and kept moving. Bullets whizzed by over her head or thudded into the furniture.
Then Beth opened fire from the cover of the doorway. Confused, most of the men swung their guns toward the new target. That was what Charline had been waiting for. She rose from behind her cover, and it was just like a shooting range. Only one of the men was even facing directly toward her. He died first, bullets from both of her guns taking him in the torso. Then she swung her pistols out, each seeking a new target. Two more men went down.
Not everyone could shoot like this. Charline had discovered early in her target shooting career that she was ambidextrous. She’d begun playing around with firing with either hand. Then as a joke her instructor asked her to try two pistols at once. By the time she was done shooting, nobody was laughing. She’d been able to obliterate both sets of targets at the same time. Somehow her eyes and hands coordinated in a way that let her track multiple targets with an ease that most people couldn’t replicate.
Her instructor had looked at her and bluntly said he never wanted to be in a firefight against her. She’d laughed at the time. After all, she shot for fun and trophies. Charline could never have imagined using a gun for violence back then.
But here she was, the specter of death. She fired again, missing with one shot and taking someone in the arm with the other.
The men she fired on were screaming, yelling to one another. Bullets zipped her way through the air but she was still moving. A moving target was more difficult to shoot, Andy had told her. Keep in motion and even at a slow pace you’d be surprised how
hard it was to hit you. People panic when the bullets fly, and they can’t track a moving target well. Most shooters would tend to stay put while they fired, too, just like these men were. It made them easier targets for her guns.
“Go, go, go!” someone was shouting from the other side of the room. There was a loud bang and the crashing sound of a lot of glass shattering, and then the surviving raiders were running, fleeing away from her. She took another one down with a shot to the back of his head. That was three dead, and she had at least winged all five of the survivors. Two of them were so badly wounded that their friends were dragging them toward the smashed window.
Then the clatter of automatic fire got her attention. She dove for the floor, tracer fire flashing overhead where she’d just been standing. She couldn’t move from this spot, not even to get off another shot at her attacker. Little bursts of fire kept her pinned down. First there were two guns shooting. Then there was one. And then it was silent in the lab.
Charline rose back to her feet, pistols coming up at the ready. They’d smashed out a window. A hover-car was floating just outside, and the last gunman was jumping across the short gap to the car. He looked back over his shoulder at her.
It was Pete. Damn him. She fired, but her bullets ricocheted off the air-car’s glass windshield. Bullet-proof. She raced to the hole they’d blasted - they must have used explosives to blow it open. But by the time she reached the gap the car was already speeding away. From the wing, Pete flashed her a little salute before stepping into the car and closing the hatch.
Charline lowered her pistols and looked around the trashed lab. She had a sinking feeling that they’d accomplished whatever they had come for. If the target had been the black blood she’d brought to Earth, it was about to be a very bad day for the planet.
Eleven
Linda glanced around the mess. It looked like very little of her lab had missed being torn apart. Experiments that had taken months to get underway, gone. Equipment that cost more than she earned in a decade, trashed. She was so totally fired. Linda wasn’t sure which thought was worse, that she had lost months of research on half a dozen projects. Or that as soon as her bosses saw the lab, she was going to get the fastest pink slip the University had ever issued.
That wasn’t fair, but it was how the cookie crumbled. Somebody’s head was going to roll for the destruction and dead bodies. It wasn’t going to be the people in charge. She knew enough about how college politics work to know they would find a way to cover their asses. She was going to be left holding the bag for this mess.
She slumped to the floor in the middle of the carnage, holding her head in her hands. Lab trashed. Job toast. Career in shambles, if not yet then soon. Who was gonna hire her after this? She was going to be lucky if she could get a job at Starbucks. Shit.
The sound of someone making a still bigger mess by stirring through the debris roused her a little. She looked up. Charline was sifting through some of the wreckage while Beth worked at getting a computer put back together. Seeing both of them rooting around in the ruin of her life got Linda back on her feet again.
"What the fuck do you think you're doing?" Linda said.
Both women stepped dead at her tone. And rightly so. How dare they go through what was left of her life?
"We need to find the vial," Charline said. She sighed. "We need to know if they took it."
Linda got to her feet and stomped off toward the bio-hazard containment unit. The device was cherry red, an expensive piece of refrigeration and double-layered containment. The front of which had been smashed in. It was empty. All of the samples contained inside were gone. Not just the black stuff these people had dropped off for her to examine, but the ongoing samples from most of her other projects as well.
"If you'd asked, I could have just told you," Linda said. She glared at them. “It’s gone. They took it. This was all about your stupid black shit, wasn't it? They came looking for it, and now my lab is wrecked."
But neither of them were really listening to her anymore. Charline had gone very quiet and gotten very pale at her news. Beth got red instead of pale, turning in a circle and swearing a blue streak. Linda looked back and forth from one of them to the other, trying to figure out their reactions. It was a big deal, sure. But it was one oddball little chemical. She'd lost the results from a half dozen experiments in progress, and they were worried about one little sample? Linda was willing to bet they had more of the stuff, so why were they acting like losing it was the end of the world?
"You gonna tell me what the hell was so special about that goo now?" Linda asked. "Because then I can tell you if I think it's more important than the smashed nanoparticle generator over there. Or the new battery power pack we were developing over there."
Charline opened her mouth as if she was going to start talking, then spread her arms wide before settling them back to her sides. "I can't. Beth, you tell her."
"Tell me what you learned about it," Beth said.
"Why?" Linda said. She sounded a little petulant even to her own ears, which made her wince.
"Tell me!" Beth snapped.
"Oh, fine," Linda said. "You don't need to shout. It's biomechanical in nature."
"Say what?"
"It's an engineered substance. Man made. Created to do a thing. It's cool and all, but the only thing it seems to do is carry oxygen around and reproduce itself when exposed to water," Linda said. That wasn't entirely true. The goo had some other odd properties as well, some stuff she hadn't entirely figured out yet. But for the most part it seemed to carry oxygen and multiply. It was an odd material, like nothing she'd ever seen before. It was hard to imagine what use it might have, though. "But then you already knew all that, since you made it, right?"
"Wrong on oh-so-many counts," Beth said, chuckling to herself. "You want to fill her in, Charline, or shall I?"
"It's not man-made," Charline said. "Why would we come to a xenobiologist with a man-made substance?"
"As a test?" Linda said. That's more or less what she had been postulating. "To see if you could pass it off as alien in origin? If that’s what you were after, it flunked. It's clearly not purely biological. That stuff was made, not born."
"That matches up with a lot of my guesses," Charline said. "And it means we're in a lot of trouble if we can't get it back."
"The ocean theory?" Beth said. Charline nodded. "I overheard you talking about it when I was fading in and out back on the moon."
"What are you talking about?" Linda asked.
"OK, short version. Since you're never going to repeat this to anyone, and if we don't get the stuff back it's not going to matter anyway," Charline said. "We have a starship capable of instant interstellar travel via wormholes. We travelled to another star system in that ship, recovered that goop from something that looked like a cross between a rat and a lizard."
"Except they stood about this high," Beth said, holding her hand just above her knee level.
"We got away," Charline said. "Barely escaped an alien starship. My hunch is that those aliens - the Naga - seeded the ratzards as a bio-weapon."
"One ratzard gets killed near water, the blood goes in, and pop, the black goo goes wild," Beth said, snapping her fingers.
Linda glanced from one of them to the other, looking for even a single sign that the two of them were pulling her leg. But both of them seemed absolutely serious. Which left only one option. "You're both nuts."
"You got the video?" Beth asked Charline.
"Yes, but..."
"Show her the video."
Charline sighed and popped out her phone. She tapped a few buttons on the screen. Then she tossed the phone to Linda, who snatched it out of the air. A video was primed and ready to play.
Linda hesitated. Part of her was a little curious. What was on the video? Clearly it was supposed to convince her that what they were saying was true. She couldn't imagine anything that would accomplish that, so the whole thing had her wondering what the video showed.
At the same time, neither Beth nor Charline was looking at her right now. Both of them were looking elsewhere. Each of them seemed to be wrestling with their own demons, with some memory that was haunting them, brought to new life by the turn in the conversation. Something about their manner made her hesitate.
She pushed the play button. What flashed across the screen were bits of video, snippets really. It looked like terrible body camera clips. Something that had been hacked together by a person, not a video studio. If they'd been trying to make a convincing fake, they might have actually failed simply by making it too gritty and real-looking.
The video showed a short bit of Beth, in a space suit and almost dying. It showed a dead world, with black oceans and dry, arid soil. It showed a flash of some sort of reptilian predator - were those the animals they were talking about? The things looked terrifying, all sharp teeth and darting movements. Then the video showed a snip of a firefight with some sort of bipedal creature covered with chrome armor. There were more little clips all woven together to make a crude narrative.
The scene ended with an image of Beth, lying pale and bleeding on a steel floor. Someone was putting pressure on a wound on her chest. Someone else was holding a rifle unlike anything Linda had ever seen before.
Linda looked up from the video as it ended. Beth was standing two feet in front of her, staring her in the eye. She pulled down the front of her shirt. The skin above her left breast was red, puckered, held together by bright new tissue and barely starting to heal.
"Just in case you were wondering if that last bit was faked," Beth said.
"All of this..." Linda's voice trailed off.
"Is real, yes," Beth said.
Linda was breathing hard and a little fast. This couldn't all be real. It couldn't be. And yet, it would explain a lot about the black goo that she couldn't account for otherwise. What had surprised her the most about it wasn't that it had been created, but rather how complicated it was. Similar if simpler stuff had been made before. But the detail, the intricate structures involved that she had barely begun parsing through? Those were years beyond what she thought anyone on Earth was capable of. Maybe she'd been right.
Adventures of the Starship Satori: Book 1-6 Complete Library Page 29
