by K. C. Finn
“Do you have permission to be out here sir?” the soldier asks.
His voice is a horrible combination of strained human sounds and amplified simulations coming from the box in his throat. He looks at himself in deep confusion, his hand flying up to touch his neck.
“Don’t!” Kendra shouts.
He freezes, obedient and interested in her once more.
“Your neck is damaged, soldier,” she says as gently as she can manage. Kendra creeps a few inches back towards him, her eyes still huge and fear-soaked. “We need to get you to a professional. How about Julius Cadinsky? You know him right? Maybe he can help you?”
Cae is tempted to believe that’s true. If Howard Fowler was the kingpin on the BiAndro project, then Cae’s father would certainly have wanted to learn everything he could about that kind of technology. Cae often remembers him that way, more concerned with his scientific operations than anything to do with spending time with his only son.
The solider shakes his head worryingly, the broken flesh beneath his chin wobbling in a way that makes Cae’s stomach turn.
“I can’t go to Professor Cadinsky,” he states in that awful amalgamated voice.
“Why not?” Cae asks, helping Kendra up to her feet before they both set to work on the heavy solider.
When he has risen, the injured android gives them both a quizzical look, like he’s the only sane one in this bizarre situation.
“You’re definitely not from around here,” he confirms with an oblivious laugh, “The Professor’s gone. His whole lab was shut down about six months back. Nobody’s seen him since.”
Whatever reservations Cae might have felt before about meeting with his father, he knows now that there must have been plenty of positive hope in the mix, a hope which is slowly fading as he stares into the soldier’s puzzled expression.
“This guy’s a stellar detective,” Kendra says quickly. It’s clear from her face that she doesn’t like the sound of that news either. “Missing persons are cake for him.”
“We’ll take you to someone who can help with the…er…medical issue,” Cae says, actively trying to stop staring at the metal in the soldier’s neck, “And on the way you can tell me what you know.”
With some carefully phrased orders, the android soldier becomes all the keener to spill the beans as he hangs onto the back of the buggy, his feet tucked up above the back wheels. His augmented voice carries clearly over the noise of the engines and the obstruction of the gasmasks and Cae begins to wonder if it’s an enhancement intended to communicate over the din of battle. It seems like something Howard Fowler would call terribly practical. Cae isn’t sure he can fully agree, but it sure is useful as he tries to take in the tale of his father’s disappearance.
The critical clue in the tale is that no craft could have taken him away from Lachrymosa. It was hard enough for Kendra to arrange passage for her and Cae to get on the navy boat, even with her station as chief of police and running the request through all the official channels. Crafts are carefully controlled in this place and thoroughly checked for stowaways. So either Julius Cadinsky is dead, or he never left the base.
Cae and Kendra are walking away from a large military hospital when the young detective finally surfaces from his deep conclusions. With the android man gone, Kendra seems a little less manic than before.
“If someone’s killed him,” Cae says, trying to detach the fact of the potential body from the memory of his father, “then why would they go to all the trouble to lock up his laboratory?”
“Something ain’t right,” Kendra agrees, “I think we ought to look the place over anyway.”
They walk a few paces back to the dreaded buggy, but Kendra stops Cae in his tracks before he can board it. Her dark brow is furrowed heavily over her mask.
“You know something about that solider,” she decides, “That’s more than some medical implant. The guy didn’t even know he was injured, or that we’d hit him with the buggy. Yet he didn’t seem deranged or anything.”
Cae keeps his eyes void of feeling.
“That’s not our concern right now,” he answers.
It’s not the right thing to say. Kendra’s grip on his chest tightens, pulling the shirt now stuck to his raw skin away from the wound. He flinches.
“What aren’t you telling me?” she demands.
“Stop hurting me,” he orders, the authoritative tone making her let go before she’s even aware that she’s done it.
Cae climbs into the buggy and waits patiently for her to give up her sulk, knowing full well that Kendra wants to reach Julius’s lab just as much as he does. She isn’t likely to waste too much time being angry with him, not right now at least. Eventually she huffs a breath out that fills her mask with condensation, leaping around to the driver’s side.
“We’re gonna talk about this later,” she insists.
Cae just nods, already calculating several ways to shield her from the truth.
4.
The most disturbing thing Cae discovers about the abandoned laboratory is that it smells like home. Not his home in Buchanan Street, mortgaged and paid for by Dartley Police, but the home he’d had before that, the home where he’d grown up when both his parents were present and very much alive. Kendra fires up the power supply in the old building, flicking on the lights and giving the air filtration a few minutes to suck the poison from the vicinity. When Cae takes off his mask, that familiar scent fills him up, the memories threatening to choke him far quicker than the smog would have.
They were scientists, both of them. Jennavive and Mortimer Rex (for that had been Julius’s name, all those years ago) had set up a nice three bedroomed home at the far end of Dartley town, where the pavement met with the sand dunes that led out to the sea. In his youth Cae had often wondered if the third bedroom meant that a brother or sister would soon be on their way to him, but as the years passed he saw it filling with more and more scientific equipment, until one day he realised the room had become a full-fledged laboratory.
The constant beeping and bubbling from it kept him awake for whole nights at a time, the scent of science itself permeating the house, putting him off his meals. Science was necessary, he had understood that much, but whether it was truly so necessary for it to invade his own home, he wasn’t so sure.
Kendra takes a deep breath of the lab air with a faint smile, but Cae can feel his lips contracting where a sourness is building on the tip of his tongue. For a moment he is ten years old again, something heavy in his hands, wondering just how mad Mum and Dad would be if he smashed the godforsaken place to bits. Seeing the same scene here, on this huge scale, he wonders if he could even find something big enough to destroy it all with.
“Stop staring and start snooping,” Kendra says with an impatient flick of her hands, “There’s gotta be something here that’ll show us where he’s got to.”
Cae resists the urge to roll his eyes at her eagerness.
“Won’t the military police have already combed this place when he vanished?” he asks.
Kendra shakes her head. “They’re not big on asking questions where top secret research is concerned.”
Cae knows well enough that that’s certainly true, since there are god knows how many super soldiers with robotically enhanced skeletons walking about the place. Kendra herself seems to have put the man they had run over out of her mind again; Cae wonders worriedly if that’s part of her programming too. Selective memory would be a handy skill for a solider that’s trained to kill and destroy.
It takes a while to shake the venom from his thoughts as Cae surveys the masses of dusty test tubes, bottles and other glassware that make up the various benches of the lab. Kendra circles him, opening refrigerators and peering into them forlornly as coloured vials of liquids stare back at her, abandoned and left to decay. Cae tracks one black-gloved hand through the dust, watching it form a thick layer, six months of dead air and matter collecting on his fingertips.
Strokes of
brilliance are not usually very far from the mind of Caecilius Rex. Even though his bright blue eyes have been consumed by the unpleasant, memory-wrenching sight of all the scientific equipment, something else in his vision has been brewing slowly at the back of his thoughts. A flash of inspiration hits him and he moves with a sudden swiftness to one of the fridges Kendra has just explored, opening it again.
“It looks like he just left in the middle of his work,” Kendra ponders, watching Cae carefully, “That doesn’t bode well.”
But Cae is grinning into the fridge, his pale face reflected in some of the bottles as he enjoys his own moment of revelation. He flexes his fingers for a moment in Kendra’s direction, the dust flying off in a little brown cloud.
“Come and look at the surface of this shelf,” he invites.
Kendra shakes her head immediately. “No, I’m not doing the guessing game thing with you today,” she says irately, “You’ve figured something out, so tell me. This is too important for delays.”
Cae turns, his brow rising.
“Too important to who?” he asks.
It’s his father they are tracking after all, but something in Kendra’s look is almost embarrassed by his question. She falters, her lip curling for a moment before she folds her arms and glares at him.
“Just tell me,” she demands.
“The dust is uneven,” he says flatly.
She quirks a dark eyebrow at him.
“That clearly means more to you than it does to me,” she replies.
Cae stands, glancing around at the dusty benches, confirming his suspicions. He takes Kendra’s elbow and moves them to one prime example that catches his eye.
“This,” he begins with a pointing finger, “is what six months’ dust looks like.”
“Okay,” Kendra says, observing the heavy layer of grime with an impatient look.
“So how many months of dust is that?” Cae asks.
He points now to a rectangular shape that has sunken in to the dust layer, a clear shape with about only half the depth of the layer around it.
“Someone’s removed something from that spot,” Cae explains, “a box or a stack of files, maybe, but it was taken several months later than the lab was closed up.”
He darts around the remainder of the lab, watching his feet making scuffs and lines in the dirt on the floor. Then, at the very edges of the room, he notices marks very similar to his own, spaces where the dust has almost been cleared by the scraping of shoes. Recent shoes.
“Someone’s coming back for supplies from this place,” he continues, “quite often by the looks of it.”
Kendra comes to join him again, putting a hand on his shoulder.
“Might I suggest a stakeout?” she asks.
5.
It is entirely possible that the person raiding Julius’s lab for supplies is not Julius himself. Caecilius Rex knows this as he hides in a dark, dirty corner of the lab, now wearing his gasmask again to protect against the fumes Kendra has let back in. He’s aware that there could be any number of desirable substances in this place that any aspiring chemist or mad scientist might want to get their hands on. But somewhere in the back of his mind, Cae’s still expecting to see his father creep through those doors when the moment arrives. Memories insist on reminding him of the steely commitment he had to his work, his determination to always get the job finished, no matter what.
Cae supposes that’s where he got his sense of duty from, though he’s certain his choice to move into law enforcement is doing the world a far better service than mucking about with test tubes. And robots. And somehow becoming involved in a criminal mastermind’s murderous schemes. It’s a terrible thought, but it’s not entirely impossible that his father could have disappeared willingly the first time around. Being offered a lab of this size and scale to play with might have been a temptation too far for a man too obsessed with science to remember his son’s birthday.
The synthetic leather of Cae’s gloves creaks as he clenches his fists. Kendra shoots him an accusing look, though he doesn’t see the danger in threatening their cover when there’s nobody around. But as usual her too-keen senses have picked up something he hasn’t. A second after she glares at him in the dark, someone opens the laboratory’s doors. And, unlike Kendra and her lock-picking skills, this person clearly already has a key.
If the interloper is his father, then Cae will have to accept the fact that he’s put on a hell of a lot of weight. The figure prowling through the dark benches is male and heavy and round, his wide face turning back and forth in the darkness and the thin smog as he flicks on a torch to guide his way. It’s no wonder the track marks in the dust are so obvious: the figure is trailing around the edge of the space and Cae can hear his heels dragging, almost like he wants to make tracks, like he wants someone to know he’s there.
Whether he wants it or not, he’s about to get it.
Kendra rises slowly from her crouch, guns pointed forward and clicking the safety off each one in turn. The sound echoes through the large space and the intruder turns his torch on her, his face cast into shadow.
“Kendra?” he murmurs.
It’s a voice Cae knows, but can’t quite place. Kendra stands her ground still.
“Identify yourself,” she demands.
The figure lowers the torch to a bench, letting the light reflect back into his face. From his still-concealed position in the darkness, Cae takes in the flushed cheeks and balding head with a relieved sigh.
“Stand down solider, it’s only me.”
“Howard?” Kendra says, replacing her guns.
Doctor Howard Fowler, long-time associate of Julius Cadinsky and the man responsible for Kendra’s robotic interior. Cae rises from his hiding spot as Howard stumbles closer, causing the poor old doctor to jump at the sight of another dark figure emerging from the shadows.
“Thank God you’re here,” Howard says, his cheeks flushed over his tatty mask, “We need you two right now. We really do.”
“I didn’t know you still worked here,” Kendra says, and Cae notes the disappointment in her tone. The last time she and Howard had met, Kendra was over the moon to see one of her old mentors. This time she seems let down, as though she too had been hoping for the other to appear.
“I don’t,” the doctor replies, “else I wouldn’t be sneaking around pinching supplies.” He holds out a hand suddenly, clutching Kendra’s forearm. “You must come with me,” he insists, “You can help us.”
“Come with you where exactly?” Cae asks.
“I can’t say,” Howard says, shaking his round head, eyes wider suddenly, “there could still be microphones in this place. It wouldn’t be the first time we’d been bugged. Just let me grab a few things, then we’ll go.”
The doctor rushes off again with his torch, examining a few fridges and filling his pockets with vials and tubes of liquid. Kendra turns to Cae in the darkness, her mouth pressed close against his ear, her words little more than a whisper.
“There didn’t used to be so many secrets around here,” she breathes, “I don’t like it. Something’s gone very, very wrong.”
“He keeps saying ‘we’,” Cae answers with a nod, “You don’t think he means…?”
He can’t quite bring himself to use his father’s assumed name in that moment, not with the resurgence of memories so fresh in his thoughts. A little part of him thinks that a half-spoon of FORGET would go down well right now, but he tries to keep that particular monster well-caged. He has made too much good progress staying away from drug powders to start listening to those kinds of demons again.
“If we ask him here, he won’t tell us,” Kendra replies, “The base doesn’t know anything about the disappearance, at least not on a public level. But if he’s delivering lab supplies, then who better to deliver them to, right?”
There is something different in Howard’s demeanour as he collects the things he needs. The capable doctor seems too jumpy, too desperate to be given the same
level of trust he’d once earned when he saved their lives from a horde of clockwork assassins. Now Cae just feels as though he’s watching a frightened old man clinging to a fragile hope. It’s something he’s seen many a time in the eyes of old criminals and not something he’s comfortable seeing in the face of their only lead towards Julius.
“Right,” he says eventually, teeth gritted as he approaches the beckoning doctor, ready to follow him out into the night.
6.
Being on foot in the smog is not sensible procedure, so Cae can only assume that Howard Fowler doesn’t have another option for them. When Kendra offers to fetch the buggy, carefully hidden at the rear of the building, Fowler waves her off with a manic hand, almost dropping his stash of stolen chemicals. The farther they walk into the darkness, the less secure Cae feels. Even at the best of times his sense of direction isn’t a wonder and this is decidedly not the best of times.
“We’re being led into the dark by a madman,” he whispers to Kendra, “you’re aware of that, right?”
To his surprise, Kendra doesn’t leap to the old doctor’s defence. She nods very slowly, her eyes never leaving his rotund form.
“You said The Face was involved in plenty of projects out at this base, didn’t you?” she asks.
He can see where her suspicions are leading her; they’ve both walked into enough traps of late to be able to sense another coming on. Cae steps a little closer to Kendra, bumping shoulders with her in an effort to be sure she’s still there. Between the moonless sky and the brown toxic tendrils encircling them, his vision is starting to falter. A cold sweat drips from the straps of Cae’s gasmask, running down through his dark hair to pool at the high collar of his long black coat.
“Weapons out then?” he whispers, though it isn’t really a question anymore.
When Howard Fowler suddenly stops and turns to face them, the doctor really does drop some of his test tubes with shock. The sight of the two dark figures packing serious weaponry, most of which is pointed at him, is a lot for the older man to handle. He offers his palms to them as best he can, trembling a little.
