by James Fahy
Probably.
I wasn’t reassured. I was such a bad liar, I couldn’t even lie to myself.
It was past ten by the time I got to Blue Lab, scanned myself in, descended to BL4 and made my way along our ultraviolet corridor.
I felt inexplicably guilty as I entered the lab proper and saw Griff at his station, same as always in his white lab coat, his glasses reflecting the data which currently surged across his screen. Everything looked normal. I fervently hoped Lucy hadn’t mentioned anything to him about our painting the town red.
“Morning boss,” he said, looking up as I entered. “I wondered if I was the only one bothering today. Did you get that admin done for Trevelyan yesterday okay? We missed you down here at the coal-face.”
“Admin?” I asked, blinking at him blankly for a second before I remembered my excuses for leaving yesterday. “Oh yes … That. Fine.”
I frowned as I shrugged out of my coat, glancing at the empty workstation.
“What do you mean the only one bothering? Where’s Lucy?”
Griff shrugged, unconcerned, not looking up from his screen.
“Hasn’t shown up yet,” he said simply. “What with the scary old bulldog, Trevelyan, and you both avoiding the office lately, I half-wondered if the three of you had gone off to form a travelling circus.”
He stuck out his bottom lip, making it tremble.
“I sure been awful lonely, Doc,” he said in a fake American accent. “But hey, you’re in now, and you’re going to be glad you bothered.”
He was smiling at me like it was Christmas morning. I immediately felt suspicious.
“Why, what is it?”
“I have some very interesting results for you.”
I was deeply worried about Lucy, but I tried not to let it show.
“What results?” I asked, slipping my lab coat on.
Griff led me excitedly to the rat pens, practically dancing with contained excitement. The pens are located at the rear of BL4, where we keep all our test subjects in a tall bank of individually stacked cages.
“Say good morning … to Brad.” Griff grinned with a flourish.
I peered into the numbered cage. A large white rat stared back at me placidly, its tiny eyes like drops of blood.
This was astonishing in itself because all around it, the other twenty-two rats were throwing their little bodies violently around their respective cages, slamming against the walls repeatedly. Their flanks were matted with scabs and crusted blood, muzzles pink with foam.
This was the usual state of the rats in our lab: frenzied, violent, and dangerous. We had made them this way. Each was deliberately infected with DNA samples taken from the Pale.
Cruel yes, I’m sure P.E.T.A wouldn’t approve, but how else were we going to develop a successful retardant? The sacrifice of a few for the good of the many, right? And yes, I’m aware I sound like Veronica Cloves.
Angelina had been just like them, furious and rabid, until we had injected her with the Epsilon strain. She had calmed for a couple of hours at least. Right before she exploded in an exciting, artistic, but scientifically redundant manner.
“This is Brad?” I stared, open-mouthed.
The calm rodent delicately cleaned its long muzzle with a tiny paw. He was a model of normalcy. I stared at Griff, wide-eyed.
“How long has he been like this?”
Griff checked his watch.
“Nineteen hours, thirty minutes,” he said proudly. “Angelina lasted four hours before she went critical.”
“Is this Epsilon?” I said.
He nodded.
“I ran the numbers again, like you told me to. I checked our existing data against the dailies that we’d gathered overnight. You weren’t here to consult, but I had the idea to reduce the potency of the inhibitor. I took a bit of a leap. It’s basically a more diluted version of Epsilon, but conversely a larger dose. I’ve sent the figures to your workstation.”
He was leaning down next to me, peering into the cage proudly like God looking at Adam. He smelled faintly of the cinnamon bun he’d had for breakfast, mixed with chemicals. My eyes were glued to the non-homicidal rat, but I could feel Griff grinning next to me.
“This is our best result so far.”
“Don’t jinx us!” I said, swatting him on the arm, but I couldn’t help but be astonished.
I wasn’t going to jump for joy and declare Brad the first rat to ever be successfully cured of the Pale virus, but this was astonishing work. If we had managed to develop a workable retardant…
“Maintain this dosage,” I instructed my assistant. “This is bloody excellent work, Griff. Clearly I need to leave you alone with the rats more often.”
“Yeah, thanks for that, boss,” he said wryly with a roll of his eyes. “Hey, how about we go wild? A celebratory Starbucks?”
I agreed, if only because it got Griff out of the lab and off on an errand for a while. With Lucy absent, there was something I wanted to do in private.
I know I should have been grinning. This could be the biggest scientific breakthrough since the wars began if it panned out. This was my life’s work, for God’s sake, my magnum opus.
Yet all I could think about right now was the GO rights protester Jennifer Coleman and Trevelyan. Two women and a pair of pliers wielded by a vampire killer who was surely even less pleasant than the one who had mind-melded me last night.
There was something I wanted to do.
As soon as Griff left the lab, I fired up my workstation. He had indeed sent me the figures for the revised Epsilon formula. I fully intended to look over them just as soon as people stopped being inconveniently kidnapped and tortured around me. But for now I guiltily dismissed the data. Instead, I opened my most secret and invisible sub-sectors and data files.
I wasn’t entirely stupid and I still didn’t trust Cabal to tell me anything they didn’t need to. When I had initially found the files Trevelyan had dumped on my station and transferred them to a data stick for Cloves, I had also made a copy for myself at the same time.
It was still heavily encrypted and there was nothing I could do to unscramble it on my own, but what had caught my eye at the time had been what was attached to the encrypted file. Trevelyan’s Blue Lab security clearance codes, all of them.
I had been told by Servant Leon Harrison that Trevelyan was head of other, more ‘sensitive’, departments than just my own little kingdom. Now I wanted to know what other pies she’d had her fingers in.
With a deft flick across the screen, I sent the codes to the printer. My heart was racing, expecting an alarm to go off somewhere in the building or for Griff to reappear at the wrong moment. Stealing higher clearance at Blue Lab is pretty much treason. I wouldn’t have been surprised if my monitor had fired a death ray at me.
However, nothing happened other than a security pass sliding innocently off the printer, bearing my boss’ name, a rather unflattering photographic likeness and about a thousand megabytes of data squeezed into an elaborate barcode. The printer had even laminated the pass for me, which was so thoughtful I gave it a little pat of approval.
Nervously I pocketed the swipe-pass, shoving it deep down into my lab coat pocket. As an afterthought, I deleted my print history from the workstation. I had no idea how effective this was, but it made me feel slightly better.
I re-hid the encrypted files and read through the clearance codes.
BL4 Toxicology; this was us, obviously. BL10 M.A; no idea what that was. BL26 Archives; pretty self-explanatory. BL29 Development; same again.
So Trevelyan had been busy in, or had at least had access to, four separate departments including our own. We barely knew what the other parts of Blue Lab were working on. Everything was sensitive here, everything classified. Anyone working in any given sector, on any given level, only knew their own work.
After sitting at my workstation for a while, tapping the laminated pass nervously against the table and occasionally glancing over at Brad the rat who
was determinedly not exploding, I decided to bite the bullet and stop being a complete pussy.
It was time to take a walk.
I haven’t always made the most sensible decisions. Returning to the ground floor atrium, getting into a different access elevator and swiping Vyvienne Trevelyan’s extremely personal security pass, I reasoned, was possibly the most stupid so far.
The amount of trouble I could get myself into for breaking protocol like this was mind-bogglingly immense, but I’m a scientist; curiosity is my nature. At random I pressed the button for level 10. MA. It seemed as good a place to start as any.
I was actually surprised when the lift began to smoothly descend. I had half expected that Cabal would have rescinded my boss’ clearance the second she had gone AWOL. I pictured metal bars descending with a clang and trapping me guiltily in the elevator until a troop of stone-faced security Ghosts turned up to escort me to Leon Harrison to explain myself. Cloves was a pain in my backside, Harrison actually scared me.
But the lift, evidently satisfied that I was Trevelyan, dropped me down into the darkness gracefully. I guess Cabal hadn’t counted on anyone else having access to her clearance.
The doors pinged open ten stories below street level. I took in my surroundings.
There was no plushly carpeted reception area here, no potted plants. It was nothing like the level where I’d had my cosy meeting with the nameless Godfather. Luckily it also wasn’t like BL4, my level, with its palm-reader pad and iris scanner security. Here there was just a long concrete corridor, with heavy metal doors set either side. It looked like I had stumbled into the boiler room or some kind of maintenance level.
No one seemed to be around to question me, which was good as I hadn’t bothered to think up any reason to be down here. For good measure, I clipped Trevelyan’s ID to my coat and made my way forward, my lab shoes making hushed whispers on the bare concrete floor.
The doors were locked and windowless on both sides, I tried them all. They were numbered like cells in functional black stencils. At the far end of the long corridor, once I had passed ten or more doors on either side, the corridor opened into a circular area with bank of workstations. They were all unmanned, but one of the screens was lit.
I glanced around. To my left, beyond the workstations, the corridor continued around a bend and presumably deeper into whatever this complex was. Whoever was meant to currently be on duty here was absent. Maybe they had gone to stretch their legs or take a bathroom break, grab a coffee. Ah well. Their prostate problem was my blessing.
I slid into the chair and ran my hand across the screen to activate it. The system purred awake and silently demanded identification.
I swiped Trevelyan’s pass on the side of the glass monitor. Words appeared on the screen.
Trevelyan, Vyvienne. Welcome.
Below the words, an empty box with the dreaded description: Password.
Crap.
My fingers hovered over the keys. I had no way of knowing what Trevelyan’s password might be. I knew next to nothing about the woman, other than that she made my life unpleasant on a daily basis.
On the off-chance that the universe had a sense of irony, I typed ‘password’.
The screen flashed red, and then returned to the login screen.
Incorrect password, attempt 1 of 3.
I hadn’t really expected anything else.
Hmm, think this through, Phoebe. This woman had heavily encrypted data and hidden it in my workstation. Whatever her password was, it wasn’t going to be something as simple as her first pet cat’s name or her favourite movie star.
I checked the code printed along the barcode on her swipe pass. It was fourteen digits long. I typed them in.
Again the screen flashed red.
Incorrect password, attempt 2 of 3.
Shit. This was always a lot simpler in the movies.
I looked around nervously, acutely aware that any second someone could turn up and catch me in the act. Plus, surely Griff would be arriving back in the lab soon with my coffee. I really didn’t have any more time to waste down here.
I rather hated Trevelyan for getting me mixed up in all of this in the first place. Why on earth she decided to hide her secret files on my workstation, I had no idea. Why make me take the R&D lecture instead of her? She had clearly given my name to her torturer, Evil Pliers Guy. Why else would he have mentioned me by name in the DataStream clip?
In a moment of inspiration, my fingers twitched. I typed in the box and hit enter.
Password: Harkness
Password Accepted
To my surprise, I was in. Information rolled across the screen, files and subfolders galore. It was like Pandora’s box opening in front of me. I frowned at what I was seeing.
+ Gamma Strain test results, subjects 01-50
+ Delta Strain field test results
+ Gamma Strain results, side effects on subjects 20-40
There were countless others. I clicked open a file at random and scan read the date.
This was my work. All the work my team had done at Blue Lab; the failed retardants, the cures we had tried which hadn’t worked but which had had other, less desirable effects.
The data had been transferred down here and from the detailed schematics I was now seeing rolling through these files, they had used it to make designs for handheld weaponry, modified military vehicles, light aircraft. Everything I had ever retired as not fitting or useless, every strain of virus I had mutated and tampered with before discarding, they were being further developed.
My hand froze on the screen as I realised what I was looking at.
Blue Lab was weaponising my work. In my fight to cure the Pale, I had been helping develop chemical warfare. To use against the Pale? Or against anyone the Cabal saw fit?
The air down on this level was cold. Goosebumps had risen on my arms. So that’s was what ‘MA’ was.
Military Application.
I clicked open the file titled ‘Delta Strain test results’ and, with some trepidation, read the reports.
The Delta Strain has been almost successful when we tried it on the rats. It had calmed the Pale in large doses, and made them manageable. The problem we had with it was that it had calmed them to the point of coma and then death. What use was a retardant which reduced its subjects to dribbling mindless vegetables, I had thought? Useless. Evidently someone amongst the higher powers disagreed with me.
The files before me detailed the further development of Delta. It had been weaponised as an aerosol. There had been field testing, according to the data, and it had been in Cambridge; crop dusting the city for blanket coverage of the populated areas.
My eyes stared at the words scrolling in front of me.
Pale Eradication level: 74%.
Human Civilian Casualties: 89%.
Protocol Rejected.
Refinement needed, further development required for effective combatant usage. Suggested downgrade to handheld gas canister/grenade dispenser for localised cleansing solution.
The date of the field test was three years ago.
Three years ago, the year that the city of Cambridge had burned to the ground in uncontrolled fires. A terrible tragedy. Fires had been started by the Pale, rampaging through the city, or so we had all been told by the Cabal over the daily DataStream.
My hands were shaking.
They had killed all those people? To stop the Pale from spreading, to experiment?
This was friendly fire on a massive scale. No, this was chemical warfare. And we, the rest of the world, had never even known it had happened. They had experimented on a human population at war with the Pale, exposing the mutants and the people alike to the retardant.
I pictured the city, filled with fallen bodies. Humans and Pale lying together, every one of them reduced to drooling mindless creatures, physically and mentally ruined. And then came the fires, of course, to hide the evidence, to cleanse the strain away, to get rid of the bodies.
/> My mind was reeling.
I clicked open another file. A list scrolled before me:
Gamma strain side effects on subjects 20-40
Subject One: Deceased
Subject Two: Deceased
Subject Three: Deceased
Subject Four: Deceased.
The world rolled along, a roll call of death. These were not rats. These were actual Pale, as far as I could judge. I became blind to that word until, right at the end of the list, something changed.
Subject Twenty: Damaged.
Held for further testing. Room Four.
I clicked on this subject.
Gamma Strain had been useless to us and, apparently, also to the military guys who were poaching my work as well, assuming of course that they had higher ambitions than killing off the Pale one monster at a time.
Room Four, Subject 20.
+ Hostility 100%
+ Sedation 90%
Observation requested: Y/N
My finger hovered over the option for a moment. I had already learned more than I ever wanted to know, but I had come this far…
I selected observation.
A sudden noise behind me, a whirring hydraulic rush, made me jump almost out of my skin. I span, half crouched in surprise. In the long corridor of locked doors behind me, there was now an oblong of light. I had clearly just opened door number four.
Lucky me.
Not wanting to leave the workstation open, I logged off, grabbed Trevelyan’s swipe card, and made my way slowly back along the corridor. My mind was still reeling.
Cambridge … good God, was that really true?
I was not sure what was going to be in Room Four but I was pretty sure that whatever it was, I wasn’t going to like it.
The room hadn’t opened, not really. The heavy metal door had indeed slid to one side and into a recess. My way into the room, however, was blocked by a thick pane of glass.
