by Isaac Stone
“We can always ask Barbara Ann,” Costa smirked. “Isn’t this her job on the team? Say, where did she go?” Everyone looked around the vestibule, but the quiet android was not to be found.
“Did anyone see her come down the stairs?” Ash questioned his team. No one had.
He turned to Costa. “Why don’t you go back up there and see if you can find her? Maybe you made her mad. We can’t leave her behind.” This was an order and Costa understood.
He grumbled about “not my turn to watch her” as he climbed back up the stairs to where the marketing people were left behind. Why had she remained up there? Did his insult cut that deep? Surely, she was built to tolerate such slights. Costa sighed as he went back up the stairs, the metal rail soft under his glove. He would be glad when this whole mission was finished. Inferno has been brutal, but at least it was a brawl, this place was just flat out weird and he wasn’t sure what he could shoot and what he couldn’t.
5
The door was open to the next level, which he found odd, as Costa was sure it was closed when they went down. Why had he thought Barbara Ann was with them? He seemed to recall her as she travelled down the stairs with him, but he couldn’t be sure.
Costa walked out from the door to see the table still occupied by the arrogant marketing group. How they managed to travel down and return to the surface was a puzzle he didn’t need to solve. Now where was that android?
The door shut behind him and he saw Barbara Ann standing there with her hand on the handle. She’d waited for him to come back upstairs. The artificial woman had sat there all the time and anticipated his return.
“I knew he’d send you up here to look for me,” Barbara Ann told him. Her eyes once more turned from green to red.
“Those power packs have unique crystals in them, Costa,” Barbara Ann told him as she moved closer. “Did you know that? No, I don’t think you or anyone else with us did. You found a shipment ready to go in the terminal. I think the strikers destroyed the others out of rage. Those crystals don’t obey normal laws of this universe.” Barbara Ann was now in his face. Costa couldn’t understand how she’d moved so quick across the floor.
“Would you like to see what those crystals can do?” she asked him.
“I’ve seen them power the lights and everything else,” Costa snapped back. “Look, we need to find Haddo, let’s go downstairs. I’m sorry if I said the wrong thing to you.” He reached out one hand and took her by the shoulder.
“That was the wrong thing to do,” Barbara Ann told him.
Costa couldn’t move his hand. It was frozen in place. He looked at it and couldn’t understand. He turned and looked at Barbara Ann and started to ask her to explain what was going on this with his arm. It was frozen.
But he wasn’t in front of Barbara Ann. Well, not the same Barbara Ann who’d stood there a second ago. This Barbara Ann had grown to stand over six feet tall. She was no longer a pale red head but colored a deep shiny black and had a red tongue. Fangs surrounded the tongue and she was naked. Naked save for the rows of human heads that wrapped around her waist on strings.
Costa stiffened when he saw the red blood on her mouth.
“Do you like this form, Costa?” she asked him. “Would you like to see more? I can do this a lot better when I’m close to a supply of those crystals. Shall we talk about what I see in your mind this very moment?”
“Glad to see you found your way back,” Ash told the Costa and Barbara Ann when they returned to the vestibule a few minutes later. Ash noted Costa trailed Barbara Ann by a few steps when they came down the stairs.
Ash also noted Costa was a little reserved at the moment and moved away from Barbara Ann when they were in the room. Usually Costa was the one in front who wanted to be the first man in line to take the position. Suddenly he’d toned it down a bit. Barbara Ann was quiet, but she seemed to have a way to find out things and accomplish others. Perhaps she’d had “The Talk” with Costa after his snide remark. In any event, they needed to get through the next objective behind the door in front of them.
This door was a little different from the others. It was covered with a hazmat warning sign and several restrictions on who could enter. The frame around the door was sealed which meant that whatever was on the inside was supposed to stay there. Ash looked it over and made the decision to have everyone max crank their air filters.
He heard them seal a few seconds later as his did the same. The armor was rated for chemical warfare, although it was something he hoped never to encounter. The suits were built to withstand most chemical and biologicals in use and few more that no one was supposed to know about. The armor would prevent a breech into the containment, but any crack in the suit structure might be fatal. Ash checked to make sure everyone’s suit was sealed from his helm monitor, and then turned around to make sure everyone was ready.
As usual, Barbara Ann stayed in the rear and didn’t need a suit. “You sure you’ll be alright in there?” Ash asked her.
“Of course,” she told him. “Just ask Costa, he can tell you there is nothing to worry about.”
Costa turned and tried to look away from her.
The warning light flashed red as Ash opened the door to the next level. He walked inside with his gun up. He doubted it would be of use if this were the kind of environment he expected. The rest of the crew followed, with Costa in the rear this time. He shut and sealed the door as he entered. Ash noted Barbara Ann smiled as she watched Costa. She seldom showed emotion and when she did, it was always for a reason.
In front of them was a vast open chamber. Rows of drums were lined up everywhere with a rack above the ones on the floor for the next tier. An aisle ran down the middle, but each row of drums could be accessed by another aisle from the main one they walked down. Ash stopped and counted ten rows that stretched to the arched ceiling in the chamber.
“So what are we showing?” he asked Theo who carried the AI on his belt. The question was directed at both Theo and Char.
“Place has enough background toxins to kill a whale,” Char told him from the box. “Some of these drums have been stored here 200 years. I don’t sense any other AI’s in this place, but you really don’t need anything down here other than some monitoring equipment.”
“Where are the toxins from?” Kris asked Char. “It could be any one of these drums, they all look the same.” She paused and looked for a label of some kind on the nearest drum. She found none and saw that it was stenciled with a number.
“Several of them are leaking,” Char explained. “I can’t tell which ones are spewing out their contents; it could be anyone of them. Whoever was supposed to be in charge of this place has let it go to rot for too long. My guess is that it’s part of the original military base. In which case, we could be walking in the middle of nerve gas, strong oxidizers, or just rocket fuel residue. Any one of them will kill you in the concentrated form.”
“So how did Haddo come through here?” Jack asked the AI. “I don’t recall he had a traveling biohazard suit with him, or at least that wasn’t part of the briefing.”
“He could have found one and used it,” Ash explained. “I wouldn’t put it past him to have stolen a suit on his way down here. The man is supposed to be human and, from what you say, would any normal person last long in this environment?” Ash had his eye on a small office built into a temporary hut up ahead at the halfway point.
“Only if he had the constitution of a tyrannosaurus rex,” Char replied. “There are enough bacterial toxins in this place to take out a city. He might be able to make it through, but no one would live very long if that stuff got into their system. He’d be coughing up blood in an hour and dead in one more.”
“So how does all this bad crap stay inside here?” Makulah asked. “How do they prevent it from leaking out the door we opened and wiping out the whole facility?” He began to worry about this level. How long they could expect to survive in it, even with the environment suits?
�
�Electrostatic barrier,” Char explained. “There was one on the front of the door when we entered. We didn’t notice because of our suits, but it should kill any microbe that comes close. As for the chemicals, the place is under negative pressure. Did you notice the wind when the door was opened? Air is sucked inside so that nothing leaves the chambers. I still don’t care much for being inside here. This is the last place where you’d want to be in a gun battle. One crack in your armor from a bullet or bludgeon and you’ll be terminal.”
A few minutes later, they were in front of another remote office. This time it wasn’t high in the air where the managers could look down on the workers, but a small one-story unit with a few basic furnishings. Ash looked inside the window and saw it vacant. This was not too surprising considering what this level contained. He tried the door and it swung open on its hinges. There was very little light inside the office and he reached over around the doorframe until finding a switch. Ash flicked it on the heard the overhead light come to life. He was surprised they used such a primitive light source, but the office was not meant for any long use, just to store records. Someone had decided to spend the minimal amount of money on it.
Theo went through the logbooks on the shelf. The office was designed for by someone who worked in an environmental suit. The computer on the counter, not used in years, was dusty and had a pile of paperwork next to it. He looked up and saw Chinese characters over the ancient cybernetic system.
“Guess this base was built by the Zhang Republic,” Theo commented. He activated a light no his helm and began to go over the paperwork on the bench.
Meanwhile Ash and the crew searched the office over for any signs of Haddo. They couldn’t find a single reference to him in the office. There wasn’t a single Enochian letter painted inside it. If Haddo visited this level, he’d gone through it very quick. Barbara Ann was quiet and stood by the door as Costa tried to avoid making eye contact with her.
Kris opened a door to a closet and found four environmental suits on hangers. “I don’t get this,” she spoke up. “Why would they have extra suits in here if you can’t even come inside without one? Sort of defeats the whole purpose.” She closed the door.
“Not if the level wasn’t originally contaminated,” Ash pointed out. “The environmental suits might have been placed here in case there was a breech in containment. I see a few monitors that would start to squawk when it happened. If it wasn’t a serious breech, a technician would have time to suit up before things got too critical.”
“Hey, Char,” Theo said to the box on his belt, “what do you make of this old cybernaut? Can you talk to it?” He stared at the dark screen.
“Not enough to be of any use,” the AI told him. “It’s loaded with raw data, but this unit isn’t self-aware. All it can do is run basic programs. You’d need to extract all this data if you wanted anything to do with it.”
“Thought I should ask,” Theo commented. “Never know what you can find that can be used later.”
Finished with the office examination, the team left it and turned off the light.
6
Kris was tired of this mission. She wanted it to be over so she could return home, back to Old Earth and go into another line of work. She was thrilled years ago, when Ash recruited her to help open locks and fight pirates across the solar system. It was exciting work, but lately it wore on her. This particular mission had gone on long enough. She thought it would be over when they reached the final level of the Inferno, only to discover Simon Haddo had snuck out and escaped. They’d tracked him to this old military base on Mercury, but how did they know he wouldn’t run off again? She read up on him during the trip and found he was known as “Slippery Simon” by many other people who tried to locate him over the years.
The money to capture him was more than she ever imagined. But what good would it do her if she were blasted to molecules in some trap Haddo might set or torn to pieces by some horror machine dreamt up by whatever shadow faction of the EAC was responsible for all of this? From what she read, several other famous bounty hunters were certain they had him, but he managed to slip from their grasp each time. She trusted Ash, but they needed to find this man soon because she was fed-up with this entire hunt. Kris was tired of wearing too many clothes, as she’d grown up in a warm climate where most people in her little town wore none in the summer months.
Then there was the whole matter of the freak show they’d discovered in the “research station” called “Inferno”. According to Barbara Ann, whom she didn’t trust much, the place was turned into a giant torture chamber. They’d found whole levels where people were systematically frozen to death. The corporation pretended it was all the work of Simon Haddo when he landed on the station in the asteroid belt, but she refused to believe them. He hadn’t been there long enough to create levels where people were burned alive or forced to fight each other to the death. Those levels were in operation long before he arrived. The corporation might want Haddo for their own reasons, and they might be willing to pay a mountain of gold to get him, but it didn’t mean they would hold up their end of the bargain when Team Omega brought Haddo to them. Kris suspected they all would meet with accidents. They all knew too much.
Just what were they walking into right now? This place was poisoned by any one of several biohazard weapons. She wanted to get out of here in a hurry, but didn’t want Ash to think her “weak” for reluctance.
Get me through this nightmare, she prayed to whoever listened, and I will go back home, burn my clothes, never wear them again, and never leave the town. She had it all planned out, what farm she would buy, where it would be located, how many primary husbands she needed and the exact number of boy and girl children she wanted to have.
“You wonder why this place exists?” Barbara Ann said to them as they left the office. Ash was a few feet ahead of everyone else on his way to the door to the next level when he heard her speak.
“It strikes you as strange,” she spoke again, “this place was turned over to ECA without the least little bit of complaint from the Zhang Republic?” Now everyone else had stopped and turned to look at her.
Jack found it weird they needed to use the transmitters to converse with each other while she didn’t. It wasn’t a matter of their external microphones that picked up her dialogue; she had the ability to transmit to them without a radio. At least she talked to them. If her lips failed to move during the transmission, it would have been just too creepy.
“Okay, Barbara Ann,” Ash said to her with an exasperated tone, “You’ve told us about the last place built as a torture center. Why did this base come into being? What is the big dark secret behind it?” He stared at her and knew she could see his face through the closed visor.
“Originally,” she told them, “the Zhang Republic wanted to capture the sun. This was a feasibility study.”
“Impossible,” Jack snapped at her. “There is no way they could have done such a thing. First of all, the sun doesn’t have a solid surface. Second of all, it’s too damn big. Where did you get this information?” He stood in disbelief at what she’d told them.
“It was in the computer we left behind,” Barbara Ann explained. “Buried deep in the hard drive. I can see such things. Char can’t, he relies on other AI’s, but I have my ways to find them out.”
“They really thought it was possible to control the sun from Mercury?” Ash questioned. He wanted to see where she was headed with this.
“Yes they did. In theory, they could have done it too. The right amount of energy applied at the cardinal points in the inner orbit below Mercury with the planet to serve as a pivot. Of course, in theory everything appears easy. They spent a lot of money on this project, and then decided the costs didn’t justify further research. Besides, there was no guarantee it would work in the end.”
“But you have to admire the will to control such power,” she told them. “Think of it, an entire star harnessed for one sole purpose, the control of all energy
that left it. Had it worked out, no one would have opposed the Republic. They were looking for ways to around the disaster of the Mars Colony Wars. This would have made it all worthwhile. The Republic might still be there today if the ZR military had made it all happen. But they didn’t and now there is a base that the current government sold to a major corporation.”
“I will say this, “Ash told her. “You are much different than any other android I have ever known. Most don’t have a will of their own. You claim to have been grown in a laboratory, but you have your own agency. Why were you made?” He continued to stare at her.
Barbara Ann glided across the floor so fast she seemed to fly. She stopped in front of Ash and turned the sparkle on inside her green eyes. This was another gift she had. At least he didn’t have to worry about her seeding the air with pheromones. When they first found her, Ash thought she might have the ability to pump pheromones in the air to get what she wanted. However, Char examined the gunship’s atmosphere after she was picked up and confirmed there was nothing strange in it. Whatever skills at people manipulation Barbara Ann possessed, it was not from chemicals dumped into the air.
“Why are you so interested in my origins so suddenly, Ash? After all we’ve been through already?” she asked him as she traced one finger down the front of his chest armor. In some ways, it was amusing to see her do it. The tiny little woman with red hair against the tough owner of Team Omega.
“You appear at the most convenient time to be picked up by us,” he told her. “Next, you claim your memory is blocked and can’t recall much unless you find the pass codes inside Infinity Station, or Inferno or whatever, and we need to take you along. Now you know everything about a military base closed for years. I’ve seen you turn on the charm and you can manipulate people all sorts of ways.” He looked at Costa’s form in the armor. “Or you can scare them so bad they don’t want to mess with you again.” She back smiled at him.
