Kraken Mare

by Jason Cordova

  I had to do something, and in a hurry. Isaac wouldn’t be able to withstand any sort of physical assault from Hernandez. He was a good kid, but the poor guy was built like a runner. A long distance runner at that.

  Hernandez was, well, changed.

  The prisoner looked emaciated, as though he hadn’t eaten in months. His eyes were sunken into his skull, his arms had almost no meat on them whatsoever. It was a terrifying change from the man who should have been the picture of health, which was precisely how he had looked earlier that morning when I had taken him down to Research.

  Had it only been twelve hours since then? It was amazing how time seemed to change when everything went to shit.

  Hernandez pushed Isaac against the wall and held him there with one hand. He leaned closer and put his mouth next to Isaac’s ear. He began to growl in a low, guttural tone. I strained to listen.

  “You smell strange, like fear, but smart, very smart to fear,” I heard him say. Jesus, the guy had totally lost it. I had to stop him before he did something to the only person I knew who could tell me precisely what the hell was going on with the prisoners.

  “P-please,” Isaac stammered.

  “We have to hurt you,” Hernandez hissed and bared his teeth. He pressed them against Isaac’s exposed throat. “You hurt us.”

  “Hernandez!” I called out in an attempt to distract him. Damn it, too many good people had already died. I didn’t know if Isaac was a good guy or not, but he was a saint when compared to guys like Jou and Hernandez. Plus, I still needed Isaac. He had answers. “Let him go!”

  Hernandez moved his mouth inches away from Isaac’s neck. “Boss wants them both alive. We have to hurt them though. But the boss wants them alive. If we eat their fingers, will they live? Yes, they will live. They will hurt. They will live. Boss will be happy. We can be happy.”

  Holy fucking shit…the bastard had absolutely lost it.

  “They won’t be happy though,” Hernandez continued to argue with…well, himself I think. I couldn’t be certain about it. “Do we care what they want though? No, only what the boss wants. Care what the boss wants. Are fingers even tasty? Probably very crunchy. But tasty? Like chicken? Do we know? Only one way to find out, we guess.”

  He snagged Isaac’s hand and raised it towards his mouth. I had to make a choice, and I only had two rounds in the magazine left. They had to count, and did Isaac really need all his fingers?

  I shook the fugue state from my mind. That was a dark train of thought that I shouldn’t even begin to contemplate. I needed Isaac unharmed and fully functioning, and had little use for the escaped prisoner. That made the decision very easy, once I put it that way.

  The pistol cleared the holster and was aimed at Hernandez’s hip in smooth and practiced motion. I didn’t hesitate and pulled the trigger. It broke clean and the round punctured precisely where I had aimed, shattering Hernandez’s hip. The prisoner slumped and cried out, enraged and in pain. His turned his head and looked at me, his eyes wild.

  “Boss wants you!”

  “I don’t have time for you or your boss’s shit,” I replied and put the second – and final – round right between his eyes. Blood splashed out of the exit wound and Hernandez fell to the floor, clearly dead. I kept the pistol trained on him, just in case someone else was watching from where I couldn’t see. There was no point in letting the casual observer know I was out of ammo, lacked a fully charged stunner and was pretty much unarmed at this point.

  Isaac looked down at the dead prisoner, over at me, then back down at the body before he let out a terrified scream.

  I slapped my free hand over his mouth and motioned for him to be quiet. His eyes were wild but he managed a weak nod. I held up three fingers, then counted down to one before I slowly let go of his mouth. He started babbling the moment my hand was clear.

  “Thank God you showed up! I think he was about to kill me. Or hurt me, I don’t know. He was rambling like a man with only half his brain on the task. I think he was distracted, but at least he was alone. I’d just finished my shift when the alarm hit, and I figured this place is pretty secure, even if it’s at the bottom of the station, so I’d ride out whatever was going on from down here. The doc would kill me if the research was compromised. Well, she’d write me up at the very least. She—”

  “Shush,” I ordered. “Take a deep breath. Count backwards from ten. In Latin.”

  He looked confused but noticeably calmer. “I don’t speak Latin.”

  Another classic movie quote wasted on the ignorant. However, he wasn’t babbling any longer, so I chalked it up as a win. I moved on.

  “I need to know something, and I need to know it now,” I said and grabbed the scientist by the shoulders. I shook the man hard, harder than I meant to, but I needed answers in a hurry. “What the fuck were you really doing in your experiments down here?”

  “C-can't s-s-say,” Isaac stuttered, terrified once more. “S-she'll f-fire me!”

  “I'll shoot you if I don’t get some answers!” I roared, losing patience with him. I was serious, too. The guy could still talk without a knee. Well, if I had any ammunition left at least. I wasn’t going to tell him that, though. Intimidation only worked if the person thought you had something to intimidate them with. An empty pistol made for a decent bludgeoning tool, and maybe a paperweight, but that was it. “Fired or shot. Choose quickly!”

  “Plankton!” Isaac blurted out. “Methanotrophic plankton!”

  “What the hell is that?” I asked angrily and let go of the young researcher. The man leaned back against the plasteel, shaking. I wiped my sweaty palm off on my pants.

  “Methane-based life-form that the kraken feed on,” Isaac said as he began to rub his arms.

  “Explain it to me, all of it,” I said as I holstered my sidearm, my anger dissipating rapidly. My hand lingered near it, though, just in case I needed to threaten—excuse me, motivate him once more. “Explain it slowly.”

  Isaac sighed. “Methanotrophic life forms are something we've found on Earth in the past. Think of it as a tiny life form that lives on eating methane. Pretty handy to have around if you don't want methane levels to get too high. Cattle farmers started cultivating them for the gut of their livestock in the late twenty-first century to cut back their emissions. It had a two-fold effect. First, the cows produced less methane without harming themselves. Secondly, it produced a higher quality of meat.”

  “Yeah, that's why beef products cost more than pork,” I said nodding, remembering something I had read about after I had shipped off to Soma. It was a brief news piece about potentially shifting beef exports from Soma, which would be cheaper than raising them on Earth. The only reason it had stuck in my mind is because I'm a huge fan of hamburgers. “I get that. But how does—?”

  “I'm getting there,” Isaac interrupted. The young, cocky, self-assured scientist was back. Good. I needed him to explain it all to me, in a hurry. “There is plankton here that the kraken eat. Methanotrophic plankton, to be exact. The kraken thrive, and they're hyper intelligent. They're as smart as humans, without a doubt. But how? How did they become so smart? We couldn't figure it out until Dr. Marillac suggested that, like humans, an evolving diet created a more evolved brain. So it must be something they eat became the theory. But since they only eat one thing from what we can see…”

  “The plankton,” I scratched my head, annoyed. Some weird stuff was going on here and I needed to figure out just what it was, as well as just how screwed we all were. “Same as whales on Earth.”

  “Close,” Isaac acknowledged. “The initial experiments indicated that Dr. Marillac's theory was plausibly correct. The possibilities of an expanded universe opened up. We began to wonder about the health applications for this. Alzheimer's? ALS? PCD? We could cure them. Now, and forever. We were excited. We would have done some animal testing but when the UN charter came down we had to find something else, since animal testing is currently banned. And we found…volunteers.”

>   “The prisoners.” My eyes widened involuntarily. I knew that this place was a research facility, and some of the testing going on swam in a grey area of legal mumbo jumbo, but I hadn't thought that they were actually trying to play God. Perhaps I should have, though. I'd known enough of the minor details that turning my head would have been easier. No, check that. It was easier to play ignorant than face the ugly truths I would have discovered if I'd actually looked at things. I swallowed and shook away the self-recriminations. There would be a time for that later. “What did you do to them?”

  “We thought we were helping,” Isaac insisted in a reluctant voice. “Each and every one of them suffered from some sort of terminal neurological disease. Even Captain Holomisa suffered from early onset Parkinson's. The cellular structure of the plankton showed remarkable prowess in rebuilding damaged brain cells and rewiring the damaged neurons within the brain. So, uh…how to explain this…”

  “Just say 'sciencey stuff', wave your hands like you're doing magic, and keep going,” I said and waggled my fingers as an example. “I don't have time for a dissertation.”

  “Right, okay,” Isaac exhaled. He mimicked my hand gesture. “We did sciencey stuff and fixed them.”

  “Okay, fine, you fixed them.” I looked away from the young scientist, my mind on overdrive as I tried to figure out just what had gone wrong. “You used the plankton, did sciencey stuff, and now they're healed. Now tell me what happened after. How did the prisoners change? How did they manage to physically change? How are they capable of some things that should be impossible?”

  “The human mind is a vast and untapped tool,” Isaac stated, his tone more excited and lively, “and the body is its vessel. We have such potential and we don't know how to harness it. So Dr. Marillac wondered—okay, we all wondered —that if the plankton can cure diseases, what can it do to a healthy, engaged neurological system that has already been exposed to the curative properties of the plankton? What depths of the mind can we plumb? Can the human brain evolve before the body?

  “So we pushed onwards. Every neuron in the brain we made better. Every synapse fired faster, new neurological pathways were created, damaged and aged ones repaired, cells rejuvenated—not cloned, but literally remade. We found a way to block addiction in the dopamine receptors by simply tweaking them a bit. That means we've cured addictions of all sorts. We've barely cracked open the quantum entanglement theorems that could reside in the folds of the brain itself to help enhance memory storage and retention, but the possibility is there for something huge, something amazing. We have so much more to do.

  “But…the question remains. What did we do to their bodies? Think of it this way: the brain controls the body. What if we gave the brain absolute control over the body? I mean absolute, one hundred percent control over appearance, bone structure, muscle density…”

  “Impossible,” I muttered. “That's just—”

  “Insane?” Isaac's chuckle was dark. “Yeah, in hindsight, maybe we should have slowed down. But at the time…wow. All of the research subjects exhibited varying behaviors and body modification. Gentry, who had been chronically overweight his entire life and needed waivers to get into the Navy to begin with, went the extreme other direction for long periods of time. He changed from morbidly obese to rail thin. Because he can't simply rid the body of mass, he made his bones denser so that his weight stayed the same. Then he simply tightened up his loose skin by rearranging them at a cellular level and could direct the excess mass wherever he wanted. It was a dietician's dream. Baptiste showed remarkable improvements in his motor skill functions, reversing years of neural degradation thanks to ALS, and even Holomisa exhibited signs that his overall body was improving. He could regulate—”

  “Can whatever you did to them give them… I don't know, some kind of psychic abilities?” I cut him off. I didn't have time for this. I’d already figured that something along those lines had occurred. Jou, for starters, had done exactly what he had described.

  “In theory, I suppose,” Isaac answered with a shrug. “Never really thought about that, but the human brain is a very strange thing. Who knows what goes on in it all the time? There would have to be something in the root DNA which would be unlocked by the treatments, though. Psychic abilities could be something as small as empathy, for example. Behavioral science is not—”

  “That could explain how they got out of their cells,” I growled, cutting him off again. I didn't mean to be rude but all of us on the station were running out of time. “They probably whammied someone into letting them out.” Isaac's face went pale at that.

  “Wait, they're out of their cells?” Isaac asked. I nodded, distracted by the thought of mind control. Could someone have put those dreams into my head? My thoughts drifted back to the now-deceased Doctor Marillac. She had moved awkwardly, like a puppet on strings. Had someone been controlling her?

  “Yep, they're out,” I answered as I thought of the implications of mind control.

  The odds of my survival were not good.

  “Oh God,” Isaac whimpered. “I thought you'd gone rogue or something.”

  “Not yet,” I replied. “But I'm getting real damn close.”

  “Where's Doctor Marillac? She has to know! She must know!” Isaac began to look frantically around the research level. “There are protocols for this.”

  “She's dead,” I answered in a harsh, cold tone. “And yeah, I know the protocols. Why do you think I have a firearm and not a stunner?”

  “She's…dead? What? How?” Isaac was shocked and horrified.

  “I put a round into her head after she ate my boss.”

  “What? You…killed her? How could you? Why?!”

  “She ate Gerry.”

  “Ate…how…?”

  “Later,” I said and looked around the research level. It was dimly lit and empty of all the other scientists. Nobody else from my shift was down here. I needed to get Isaac somewhere safe before heading back up to Control. I could only hope that the layered prison cells held them to the west side of the station. If they managed to get past more than half of the security posts, then all hell truly would break loose.

  The decision came easily to me. I grabbed Isaac by the back of the shirt and hauled him away from the plasteel. “Right now my job is to keep you alive. Worry about all that other shit later.”

  “We're on a moon where everything can kill us!” Isaac's eyes were as wide as plates. “Air. Lake. Planet's surface. Everything! Where are you going to find safety here?”

  The scientist had a point, as much as it bothered me to admit it. Inside the station was as safe as anywhere on this moon. Outside for any amount of time meant death, from either methane poisoning or the atmospheric pressure scrubbing the flesh from our bones before we would feel the pain. Theoretically, at least. Still though, I wasn't about to be the first volunteer to test that one.

  It was a tough position for anyone to be in. It still didn't quite top the list of bad places I've found myself over the years, though. Which either says a lot about my career choices, or my decision-making abilities.

  “Let's get to Central first,” I decided after running through our options a few more times in my head. “Control’s a lost cause, but Central might still be up and running. We'll worry about the dying part later.”

  Chapter Eleven

  “Science has made us gods even before we are worthy of being men.”

  –Jean Rostand

  I was shocked to find that Central was not only manned, but that both Thing One and Two had survived and taken control of the backup station. They had been equally surprised to see the two of us alive and relatively unharmed. Well, okay, Isaac was uninjured. I was nursing too many injuries to count. The Things looked like hell warmed over, but I was pretty sure my blood-and-gore covered shirt and pants trumped them both. Isaac’s pristine lab coat and well-groomed appearance was a stark contrast to us all. I wiped some blood on his sleeve.

  I’ll admit it, I felt a rush of
hope at finding the twins alive. The thought of trying to get the situation under control with only Isaac for help was depressing. Granted, we weren’t out of the woods yet– the odds were definitely against us, and we’d probably die trying. But hey, company!

  Once I had Isaac safely tucked away in the corner and quiet, I turned and began giving orders to the Things, who apparently had been waiting for someone in charge to show up. Unfortunately, they only got me.

  “Got the comms back up, but I’ve locked them out for now except on the emergency channel,” Poole told me as soon as I got Isaac out of the way. “Wi-Fi is back up but weak. Not sure why. General overhead PA system is back online as well. Someone did a number on the comms system but we’re good now. One of the maintenance people must have gotten into the system and fixed it.”

  “Seal off the access tunnels and make certain that the elevator is disabled,” I said, staring at the monitors. Nine of the twelve tracking devices were showing cell breaches and movement. The last—Captain Holomisa's—showed that he was still in his cell, though the containment field had clearly failed. I recalled what Gerry had said and nodded to myself. Treat a man like a man and he will act as such. Treat him as an animal… “Sound off the alarm to upstairs. The Navy has to know. Where is everyone else? Last thing we need are hostages.”

  “Posts One and Three are not responding,” Poole replied as he hastily complied, punching in various commands into his control console. “Two, Four and Five are secure.”

  “Damn it,” I growled. Post One led to The Well, and Post Three led to the civilian quarters. Neither news was good, but hostages could make things even more dangerous than they already were. I had already suspected Post Three was down, since it would have stopped anyone from making it to the Doctor Marillac’s quarters. Some bad news was worse than others at this point, though. Of course, I had no idea why Post One would be down. Other than The Well, there was nothing down that way except for some maintenance areas that contained very little. “Have you heard from anyone who is a senior supervisor yet? What about Joseph?”