by Mason, Jolie
“Blow this door!”
The men all trotted back from the doorway as a munitions officer placed gel explosives around the door seals before joining the others in cover. The door popped like a can and fell inward before base security poured out of the now empty frame.
They fired until each white uniform fell, and then several of Alpha group moved smoothly up and into the next room. He peeked into the room, medical equipment scattered everywhere. Monitors beeped in several rooms. The soldiers had several medical staff members on their knees, hands behind their heads. He approached them, but stopped to talk to a lower ranking officer and issue an order.
“Check these rooms. Get me an assessment of what we have here.”
“Yes, sir.”, came the snappy reply.
Emery strolled up to the only dark blue coat among the prisoners. He leaned down to read the tag on his jacket. “Dr. Allantoa? What do you study here exactly?” Silence.
“That's fine, of course.” He leaned in to whisper. “You can tell me or the IG. I don't really care.”
A twitch behind the eyes alerted Emery to the doctor's fear and discomfort. He babbled, “It's not an experiment! We do procedures that are well developed and tested.”
Emery nodded. “I see. With what goal?”
“Genetic manipulation, in this lab.”
“What are the other labs?”
The doctor wanted to stop talking now. Emery thought there must be someone scarier than IG on the premises. “I can always let one of the IG interrogators work with you, Doctor. Besides,” He gestured. “We're in. It's just a matter of looking at the files to figure out what to charge you all with.”
The fear returned to the man's eyes. “Charge us! We work for Imperial Services.”
“Wrong, Doctor. Your operation is unsanctioned. That's why we're here, and IG isn't going to care if you didn't bother to ask the right questions. They'll just kill you..” The young officer trotted up with his report. Emery stepped aside and bent his head to hear the man's whispered words.
“Sir, we have seven teen-aged youths in various stages of genetic modifications I don't understand. Two, at least are critical but stable. Once the facility is cleared we'll need to get them back on the 40, sir, quickly.”
“You'll be in charge of that, Sergeant, and make sure they are placed in highest level containment until they're cleared of disease and pathogen.”
“Yes sir.”
“Do it the minute you get the all clear. Dismissed.” He turned. “Lt, where are we on Charlie and Delta teams?”
The young blonde had a real time running report on a pad pulled up and waiting. “Charlie is being reinforced by Bravo drones. Delta team is not reporting in, sir.”
“How long since the last check in?”
“Ten standard minutes, sir”, he answered grimly.
“That's too long”, Emery said. He called to several men by the door. “With me.”
“The tunnels are to our southeast, Commander. I've called Bravo to send in two small mechs. Careful, sir.”
Emery laughed humorlessly. Small mechs made big fire. That's why they hadn't opted to send them in in the first place. Each of these were basically a man in a slightly modified exoskeletal suit equipped with weapons and counter measures, standing about seven feet high. Some mechs were much bigger and more elaborate. These were employed in ground combat, closer quarters, though Emery had always thought them risky.
He and the ten men he took with him double-timed to the tunnels between buildings that allowed the staff to avoid the aggressive vegetation and whatever else lurked in the jungles. The tunnel was wide enough and tall enough to haul cargo through and had low track lighting at floors and ceilings. Long flat gray walls stretched before them. They headed carefully toward the large double door exit at the end of the long corridor.
There was no cover, but the occasional column or beam support in the long hallway, so the faster they got to the doors the better off they were.
It wasn't going to work out. No sooner had they made it a quarter down the hall in a spread formation, two enemy combatants in their stark white, plainly adorned uniforms never meant for field combat appeared in the small, squared window of the doors. The enemy dove through the doors for the two buttress style columns winging over each end. They had cover, and Emery's men didn't at first. The ten man team had to dash for the walls and the cover provided by the occasional columns along the wide hallway.
He heard a pained grunt behind him as he aimed and fired at the two troopers ahead. For several tense moments, the two ahead kept him pinned with heavy fire because he held the closest position with the best shot, until one of the men behind him got off a lucky shot.
The trooper on Emery's right folded to the floor.
He waited. The other wouldn't have a good shot at him. He'd have to barrel roll to his partner's position to get a good shot off since most of the men in Emery's team went left for cover.
Stalemate, Emery thought as he kept up suppressive fire, then checked his weapon charge. Something had to give or they would never get through the door. He gestured to the soldier behind him in cover, making the international symbol for explosion with his left hand on the gun stock. The other man looked to be about twenty something. He still had that cocky bloom of youth on, so he could smile at the gesture in the heat of battle.
He pulled out an incendiary. Emery raised an eyebrow. It was a wide hallway, but they were going to get singed. He shrugged and took the round, metal explosive. Pulling the small pin, he paused, breathed, and tossed.
Yelling “Down!” to the other soldiers, he and the younger soldier hugged the wall and braced. Flame's billowed down the center of the hall in a flash of intense heat and light, then it faded back. Emery turned to peek out and survey the damage. Charred remains lay where the enemy had been and the doors rocked on the hinges, hanging haphazardly in scorched, battered ruins.
They all moved up as one. Taking a quick survey, he had eight men left.
The next corridor repeated the sterile, white theme of the facility with an almost identical layout to the other building. The men kept to the left when they came to a turn.
On the second turn, they encountered resistance. A troop of more than a dozen men blocked the hallway. Emery fired repeatedly using the wall as his only cover. This was not going to be pretty, and the other men had the advantage.
“Don't suppose anyone has another incendiary?” He asked ruefully.
The men closest who could hear him shook their heads. However, the young tech eased up the wall digging in his pack. He pulled out a small disc and remote. “I may have something”, he said.
Pressing a button on the disc, the metal phased and inflated, for lack of a better word, to form a tiny drone. “Surveillance mech. If I keep it to the ceiling, they might miss it till I can detonate it.”
“Detonate?” One of the men asked.
“The self-destruct on this model is designed for warfare. It's anti-personnel.” He released it into the air, and, using the remote, guided it up into the vaulted corner of the ceiling. They all waited tensely, while Emery continued periodic barrages of fire to draw the others' attention to them. Doubtless, they were concocting their own way to smoke the enemy out.
It was a minute or more before the tech, watching a tiny monitor on the small remote pad, hit a control and whispered, “3..2..1..”
The explosion rocked the corridor. Screams erupted, but Emery only heard them distantly, since the detonation damaged his hearing, making every sound fuzzy. He looked aghast at the young tech who appeared to be equally stunned.
When Emery stuck his head out to see about hostiles, he drew in a deep breath. The metal walls caved on one side. What was left of the bodies would be hard to identify. It didn't look as though the mech exploded with heat as much as force. Gingerly, the men moved into the hallway in careful, slow formation on each side, all of them taking in the destruction in awed silence.
Ahead were the laborat
ory doors, the tech, looking pale and subdued, jacked in while the rest of the men stood on alert. As they waited, Emery's comm became active, buzzing instead of the usual auditory beep. “Charles, go ahead.”
“Copy, sir,” It was LT. “Beta team is reporting they've cleared the cargo bay area and are spreading mechs into the facility to clear it.”
“Acknowledged. Make sure they keep those mechs on monitor, so none of the noncoms get hurt.”
“Acknowledged. Charlie company is reporting target acquired. They found the quarantine lab.”
“Copy.” He looked at the tech who still appeared glazed. “We're attempting entry to the final lab. No sign of Delta yet.”
“Copy. Good hunting, sir.”
“Charles, out.”
The red light on the door facing flipped red to green with a loud noise. The tech pulled out of the jack and backed away, allowing the men with more combat experience to lead through the door.
They filed in finding cover as they went, desks, chairs and cabinets. The room was almost oval in shape with a large common area in it's center, an occupied common area.
Emery almost choked on the air he forgot to breathe. He knew the man standing in the center pointing weapons at a group of kids in medical gowns.
“I watched you die.” Emery said.
His thoughts scurried from one possibility to the next.
Valek Morgan stood before him in the flesh, except that he couldn't because he was dead. Morgan laughed pleasantly, “You should see your face.”
The other men in the team stood, weapons at the ready staring at Emery for guidance, but all he could do was look at the man who shouldn't be standing there. As his brain began to slowly process the possibility of this man's presence, Morgan laughed again. “You'll get there.”
“Damn, your savior complex. You cloned yourself. How many of you are there?” Emery could never have predicted this move. Cloning was so unpredictable it was possible to get one specimen that was a perfect copy, another that was totally mad. He couldn't have ever imagined the Valek Morgan he knew holding weapons on children, so he thought he might draw some conclusions about the success of this particular clone.
“As many as her highness needs.” His eyes shone wildly in the vivid lights of the lab. Soft sobs rose from the kids on the floor.
“Morgan, what are you doing? I know you. You have a plan. What's the plan?”
Morgan relaxed his stance, dropped the barrel of his weapon a fraction. “Yes, Charles. I knew you'd get it. There is a plan. Victory. By any means. That's the plan.”
Emery looked around the laboratory assessing everything. “This isn't the work of weeks, Morgan. How long have you known what was coming?”
He smiled, and in that smile, Emery saw what he'd feared. This version of his superior took Valek's eccentricity and turned it into unadulterated insanity. He wouldn't glean much from this Morgan.
“Who are these kids, Morgan?” Emery needed answers, and this clone wasn't walking out of this facility alive. Judge, jury and executioner, he thought. But, there were far too many pols, soldiers and radicals who would find this man's plans acceptable. It was a slippery slope, this war of any means.
“Oh, Charles, I trained you. Didn't I teach you to always have a contingency for failure? You don't have one, do you?”
He raised his own weapon again, as did his men, and then every other man in the room. “Failure isn't an option this time, Morgan.”
Morgan smiled again and holstered his pulse iron carefully. “You needn't fear my weapon, Charles.”
Emery's days in training popped clearly into his head, as if it were yesterday. Words are your weapons, boy. The trick to intelligence work is to avoid firing a single shot.
Morgan began to open his mouth again, and Emery shot him, without a second thought aiming for his forehead. As his body limply crumpled, the children scattered screaming.
The young tech spoke first, “Sir, shouldn't we have questioned the prisoner?”
“What prisoner?” He looked sharply at the boy, noting he still had acne and new growth in his beard. “He was just about to slaughter us all with a word. Get a bomb disposal unit in here as soon as we clear the facility. Tell them to sweep absolutely everything. Even the toilets. Dismissed.”
The tech said nothing else, merely saluted and left. Emery was glad he had enough presence to carry command. Since meeting Luca, he'd begun to wonder.
He ordered some of the less intimidating men in his group to try and gather up the children, then he radioed LT and told him to start moving the wounded up to the P40.
Knowing his mentor, the way he had it was likely the computers were already burned. He shrugged out of his heavy gear and found a terminal, but Emery didn't expect to find much at all. With a small sigh, he watched as one of the men he hadn't met carried a dark skinned little girl on his hip and out to the transport, speaking softly to her the whole way of a stuffed animal she held tightly against her small face. She was probably no more than four.
He wanted to feel a flush of victory here, but he couldn't summon a flash of anything but frustration. They'd rescued this bunch, but there were more out there.
There weren't many legitimate cloning groups in the medical field. His first order of business was to find the company who'd cloned Valek, and discover just how many of him they'd made. Then, he would simply look for them and destroy them all.
Emery sent someone to find FDUs and a coffee for him while he checked the computer system for files and a fail safe device. It took a half hour before he admitted he was beaten by technology fair and square.
The incursion team moved out and the bomb team moved in. By the time, Emery boarded his transport, his jaw cracked a massive yawn. It would be dawn on the planet any moment, and he was no closer to finding anything. He gathered the computer core and packed it in a large bag.
As the shuttle pulled up tight into the upper atmosphere, it rocked in terrible turbulence. The shuttle pilot cursed, “Sir, you need to come see this.”
He moved forward in the small space to the pilot's cabin. They'd reached space now. Below them the planet where he'd just left behind twenty-four men, burned. The explosion spread, blanketing the whole planet in red orange death.
Emery stared in shock at the destruction a minute. Beside him the Lieutenant said, “Holy fuck, what was that?”
Silence descended on the occupants as the shuttle sailed toward the Imperial cruiser. The hangar bay doors had already been opened and the shuttle full of disheartened soldiers waited for the bay to re-pressurize while avoiding each others' eyes. No one wanted to acknowledge what they'd just seen. Some of them had doubtless lost friends today. Even sighting the alien horde for the first time hadn't twisted his gut like watching an entire planet's atmosphere burning away. What in hell could do that? Who would ever consider it?
And how would he stop it? He stepped off the shuttle into the cavernous bay full of identical shuttles in rows, and saw Luca standing near the hatch wearing the gray and black of the Imperial troops around her minus the jacket, just black undershirt and gray pants and gold blond curls spiraling around her face.
Blue eyes met his across the crowd of men, women and drones milling into the bay after a landing. Suddenly, he had to hold her. He had to feel something besides this cold dread in his gut. His legs ate up the distance as he dodged a maintenance repair drone and bounced off a shuttle mechanic. He had to get to her.
When he finally made it across the hangar, he clutched her to him, one hand cupping the silky honey colored curls that had grown so rare over centuries of breeding. He squeezed her so tight he thought it possible that it hurt, but something in him demanded, Keep her close! Don't let anything touch her.
How?, he thought, frantically breathing in deeply the floral scent of her. How in the hell was he supposed to protect her from what he'd just seen?
***#***
The debriefing of the senior staff had been nothing short of hellish as the team w
ent over the findings on the planet before the flames obliterated the surface. If one looked out the viewscreen now, one saw only barren, charred rock floating in space, dead as a fossil. Luca found herself glancing surreptitiously toward it as if to convince herself it was really there.
Tark cleared his throat. “We don't have a lot of data from the...” His gravelly voice cracked, but he paused, straightened his face and, with determination, tamped down his feelings. “moments before. We know only that they'd found a control panel to a large device in the lower levels. They had only just begun tests and analysis.”
Emery frowned in his chair. Unlike the rest of the team, he didn't look away from the planet. He stared at it with cold, haunted eyes. “So, we found part of his fail safe. Do we have any idea how it did that?” He gestured angrily at the planet.
“There's a team out there taking readings, sir. All they have are theories at the moment.”
“This changes the game when it comes to finding these facilities and shutting them down. What if this had had a population?”
“Surely, he wouldn't do this on a populated planet. Didn't he work for us at one time?”, Tark said.
Quietly, Luca told him, “Tark, he used me to start a pandemic on Sensor from which they have not fully recovered. This man believes we are all expendable.”
“And his clones could be even more unstable. We need intelligence. I'll convene with the director and see what resources he can spare. In the meantime, we need to see about dropping these children off at an appropriate facility and rebuilding our forces.”
The ship's doctor cleared her throat, “Commander that may be a bit difficult.”
“Why?”
“The kids are exhibiting symptoms and abilities like I've seldom seen in children so young.”
“Ability?”
The woman looked at the room. “Right now, we are combing the ship for a young girl named Leslie. We can't find her. She slipped out of sick bay, and she appears equipped with some sort of invisibility shielding.”
