by J N Chaney
I looked around the room but just couldn’t convince myself anyone actually worked here. “Is it just me, or is this a little weird?”
Andrea nodded thoughtfully. “Yeah, it is weird. The workstations are just workstations. No holos of family members, no creepy little dolls. It’s like a lab for robots. Check those lockers over there. Maybe we’ll find some sign of life.”
“Or a scientist clutching a teddy bear,” I joked. The truth is, I half expected to find just that. A researcher afraid of an angry mob might hide in the lockers, hoping to go unnoticed until the worst was over. But there was nothing in the lockers either. None of them were locked, and none of them had so much as a scrap of paper.
The lights were on in Sasha Ivanovich’s lab, but no one was home. As far as I could tell, no one had ever been home. It reminded me of something, but before I could follow the thread of thought, Andrea called me over. She was standing in front of another door.
“According to the schematics, this is the clean room. If we go in there, we could contaminate their entire experiment.”
“That’s probably a good thing, if you ask me.”
“Alright then.” She paused at the door again, but this time Thomas didn’t get the message. The red light on the keypad stayed as red as ever, and Andrea frowned slightly. “Huh. I wonder if he’s distracted by something.”
She reached down to her belt and unclipped a shaped charge. Though ideal for blowing doors, it was hardly our most discreet option. Still, with Thomas unresponsive, it was probably the only one we could use quickly enough to get the job done.
I stepped out of the way, despite the fact that the explosion would discharge all its force into the door itself. When it went off, the door jumped a little and then sagged on its mechanism. Andrea pushed it inward, and it scraped on the floor and then fell over.
On the other side, we saw the evidence of a gruesome massacre. When I say that, I don’t mean that the bodies were mangled or anything like that. They were lined up quite neatly, faces pressed into the tiled floor. The only thing that made it gruesome was the sheer number of dead, combined with the manner of death. They’d been brought to this room, forced to lie down on the floor, then executed with shots to the back of the head. Whoever had killed them, hadn’t done it out of passion or anger. It was a cold decision, the product of a rational mind.
“I count twelve,” said Andrea. She could be just as cold.
“Are any of them Ivanovich?” I asked.
“We’ll have to check.”
We went along the line, prodding at the bodies with the tips of our boots until we could see their faces. There were ten people in either lab coats or business casual, a mix of men and women. Two people wore formal attire, looking more like corporate types. No Ivanovich. Someone must have come here, killed everyone involved with his project, and taken him away. Either that or he was never here. He could have been at a meeting, or he could have left the facility on some random errand, thus escaping the bloodbath.
“It could be a kidnapping,” I muttered.
“Maybe. No point in speculating.”
That was exactly what Gabriel Anderson always used to say. Of course, without speculating, there was no way to do anything except gather evidence.
“I’ll get their faces.”
I used my dataspike to get a facial topography read on all the victims, a process that took a while considering the sheer number of casualties. I had to position each face so I could see both cheekbones, then stare directly at the dead person while the app did what it needed to do and stored the information on the dataspike behind my ear. The dead stared up at nothing, just as they had done in the last few seconds of their lives. Why would anyone be so passive, not even trying to fight back at all while someone murdered them one by one?
Andrea peered down at their bodies while I worked. “This looks recent. I think it happened within the last hour.”
I glanced at the body she was looking at. A blonde woman, brown eyes wide open, a trickle of wet blood still drying on her cheek.
“Yeah, I think you’re right. I’m just finishing up now and sending the data to Thomas—hold on, this is telling me I’m not getting any signal here.”
She looked around the room. “Yeah, I’m getting the same thing. No signal. Let’s go out to the main lab.”
I did as she said, and we both tried to contact Thomas again.
I shook my head. “No luck. We’re cut off completely.”
“I doubt they’ve booted him out; if they knew we were here they’d be on us already.” She bit her lip. “This is what I’m thinking: they’re conducting some kind of secret research here, which is exactly what Ivanovich wanted to tell us about. We can’t see what it is because we just don’t know enough, but something in here is too important to risk. They designed the lab as a Faraday cage, so no signal can get in or out. That’s why Thomas didn’t hack the door for us. He can’t see in this room at all.”
I shrugged. “Sure, but why don’t we just go out in the hallway?”
“We will in a minute, just let me think. Why would anyone kill all these people?”
“I don’t know, Andrea. I mean, they could have just fired them…”
She ignored the joke, or so it seemed, along with the fact that I had called her by her first name while we were on-mission. But then she snapped her fingers. “Tycho, you’re like a savant sometimes! They couldn’t just fire them, because that would only increase the chance that someone else would talk!”
“Someone else? You mean, they knew that Sasha was talking?”
“What is it with you and first names?” Apparently, she hadn’t ignored that part either. “As you know, I don’t like to speculate…”
No one in Section 9 ever likes to speculate, just as no one in the Arbiter Force ever likes to speculate. In both organizations, that only seems to matter until someone does want to speculate. Then they speculate at will, unhampered by anything they’ve previously said.
“Go ahead, Capanelli. I won’t tell anyone.”
I made a point of using her last name that time. For fun.
She went on. “Ares Terrestrial may be aware of Ivanovich’s intentions and are killing the entire research team to prevent the technology from leaking.”
“If that’s the case, then where is Ivanovich?” I asked.
“I don’t know. Maybe they have him.” She looked troubled, like she couldn’t quite believe her own explanation.
“If the company had him, they wouldn’t have needed to kill all these people. They could just torture him until he told them what he’d leaked and who was in on it.”
She nodded slowly. “If you’re right, then that implies he got away. Which would mean he’s out there, and we have no way of knowing where he is anymore. He could have slipped out hours ago, while we were still back at the hotel.”
I didn’t think so, but I couldn’t say why. I looked around the lab, as if the white walls and spotless equipment would suddenly tell me something that wasn’t immediately obvious. Our informant was missing, and everyone who might know anything about the man had been lined up and shot in the back of the head within the past hour. What were the walls going to tell me about that?
I sighed, and Andrea nodded. “Yeah, I know. This job really sucks sometimes. But what can we do?”
I smacked my leg with the palm of my hand. “I just might know!”
3
Andrea was looking at me skeptically. “Okay. What is it?”
“We had a mission to Triton once when I was still an Arbiter. It was basically what you’d call a beer run.”
“Arbiters don’t do beer runs. That’s a Section 9 thing.”
“Okay, sure. Just hear me out. It was a low-risk mission, okay? Just a little job, but it taught me something.” While I was telling her this story, I was scanning every bit of the room with my eyes. Upper-left to Upper-right, then down the wall a few feet at a time until I finished the wall, then on to the next. The whole
time I was doing this, Andrea was looking at me like I was speaking in tongues.
“There were helion shipping reports from Triton that didn’t match the production estimates. The mining company was suspicious, but they couldn’t pin it down. They had their eyes on one of the supervision teams, but they didn’t have any hard evidence that there was any grifting going on. Triton isn’t a big place, and Helium-3 isn’t easy to move.”
I finished checking the lab room and stepped back into the room where the bodies were. Andrea followed, still watching me like she might have to put me down if I did anything too weird.
“Alright, I’m following. What’s the deal here, Tycho?”
“Well, it was plausible to think the team did nothing wrong and the production estimates were just off.”
“Plausible?” she scoffed. “Those companies live and die by the numbers. The only way one of the estimates could be off is if someone was messing around on purpose. Which would just point to another kind of grift.”
“Right. Looking at the situation logically, there had to be some way to move the Helium-3 off Triton. Looking at the evidence, though, there wasn’t.”
“Evidence trumps logic. Your logic can be wrong, especially if you start from a bad premise.”
“Maybe so. But you just said it yourself, the premise wasn’t bad. There was no logical reason for the production estimates to be off. The He-3 had to be there somewhere.”
“So, what did you do?”
She was really just humoring me and crossing her fingers that I was on to something. As for me, I was pretty sure I was on to something, but I needed time to find it. If she aborted the mission or sent me off on a search through the rest of the facility, I’d miss whatever it was. I had to string her along, play the story out until I nailed it down.
“I kept looking, just like I’m doing right now. And in the end, I found a false floor in the landing bay. It was concealing a tunnel leading to an underground storage space in the surface ice.”
“For real?”
“For real. The natural cold preserved the helion until the supervisors could fence it. It was there all along, we just couldn’t see it at first.”
“Why do I have the feeling there’s a moral to this story?”
That was when I saw it. The room didn’t look deep enough. It was weirdly cramped, and the reason seemed to be the north-facing wall.
“The moral of the story is that if something should logically be there, then it is, and you just need to look closer.”
I pointed at the wall in question. “You see that? That is one awkward wall.”
“What are you talking about? Come on now, Barrett. We’re under the gun here. I don’t have any more time for inspiring stories about when you used to be an Arbiter.”
“It’s an awkward wall. The architecture in the rest of this place is really sleek. Clean lines, everything in proportion. Except for this one wall, which is just… too far forward. Architecturally awkward. Out of place.”
“Hold on, let me check it against the schematics.” Her eyes went distant for a moment as she compared what we were looking at to our blueprints of the building. Then she nodded. “Yeah… I have to admit, I thought you were full of it. This room should be nearly three times as big as it is. Start looking for a way in. We have a hidden room here.”
Stepping around the bodies, I went to the north wall and started running my hands along it. The wall felt smooth, with no switches or openings of any kind. I was about to give up, assuming there must be a mechanism in some other part of the room, when a section of the wall suddenly slid away under the pressure of my hands. It was a concealed sliding door, hiding in plain sight. I wouldn’t quite say that Andrea’s jaw dropped, but her mouth opened and stayed that way. I had just found the thing she couldn’t find.
“Not bad, Tycho.” Her insistence on last names seemed to have been forgotten, at least for now.
The door opened on a short passageway, which led to another door. There was a security keypad, but the light on the keypad was glowing green. Someone was in there, and whoever it was had left the door unlocked.
Andrea raised her weapon. “Whoever killed all those people could be in that room. I’ll take point. You cloak up.”
Standard protocol when making contact was to have one agent cloaked and one decloaked. That way the cloaked agent could deal with anything unexpected that might come up, like a hidden third party coming from behind.
The day I met Section 9, I sat around having a frustrating conversation with Andrew Jones for quite some time before Andrea suddenly decided to show herself. Now I was taking on the role she’d had that day, standing there unseen while people talked right in front of me. I wondered if whoever was on the other side of that door would turn out to be just as irritating as Jones was.
Andrea pushed the door open quietly, her rifle up in front of her just in case someone was waiting inside with a gun for us. No one started shooting, so she cross-stepped her way into the room. I slipped in behind her, visible only as a vague distortion in the air.
The real lab was in the secret room, and the sleek lab out front was just for show. Whatever Ivanovich was up to, he’d been doing it in here. The space was filled with what looked to be bioprinting tanks.
Some of them were empty, but others contained what appeared to be mutated animals. I couldn’t make them out at first, but they looked wrong. Twisted into unnatural shapes, the things in the bioprinting tanks were no longer whatever they were meant to be.
A man was standing in front of one of the tanks, his hand on the glass and his head bowed. As Andrea crept up to him with her weapon pointed, it looked like he was speaking to the creature within.
I almost activated my text system to crack a joke about Dr. Moreau, but then I remembered that she would only snap at me to focus. She probably wouldn’t have gotten the reference anyway. Late Victorian manuscripts aren’t to everyone’s taste.
Andrea finally spoke. “Sasha Ivanovich?”
He turned away from his macabre pet in the bioprinting tank and registered the weapon pointed at his face. It didn’t seem to bother him. As soon as he turned, I recognized the man I’d been trying to kill that morning. He really didn’t look like a researcher. He had a short but not particularly neat gray beard, receding hair combed back along his scalp, expensive purple floral shirt and shabby blue jacket.
“Yes?”
Andrea slowly lowered her gun. “This is an extraction. We’re here to get you out.”
He smiled.
I was supposed to be watching him, but I was more fascinated by the monstrosities in the tanks. All of them seemed to be predatory mammals, or to originally have been predatory mammals anyway. I couldn’t quite make out which mammals, but I caught glimpses of sharp canine teeth, front-facing eyes, and wickedly curving talons. As far as I could tell, these beasts were chimeras—combinations of DNA from different sources, different species even. Something about them was horrifying, like they should never have existed in the first place, but there was something sad about them too.
Some of the chimeras had missing limbs, others were missing the lower halves of their bodies, and others had partially integrated prosthetic interfaces. I wondered how Andrea felt about that. A standardized socket for artificial limbs, the prosthetic interface was an electronic device surgically implanted onto the stump of a severed arm or leg to allow the user to control the prosthetic with the same neural pathways as an organic limb. With four prosthetic interfaces herself, Andrea would recognize them instantly.
Ivanovich’s demeanor in talking to the thing in the tank had seemed almost tender, in skin-crawling contrast to the abject cruelty of these experiments. His smile made me feel vaguely nauseated. “Welcome to my laboratory. It’s a bit sad to have to leave it, but as you can see all my colleagues have been murdered anyway so I’ll just have to start over somewhere else. I take it you’re from the Federation?”
I couldn’t believe the man’s sangfroid. He was
in his secret lab, the one place where he should be confident that no one could find him, and we had walked right in on him anyway. Considering that the dead bodies of everyone he worked with were lying out there with their eyes still open in the room just past that door, his lack of concern was disconcerting.
Andrea cocked her head to the side like she was trying to figure something out. Maybe she was just as creeped out by this guy as I was. Then she gestured with the barrel of her rifle for him to step aside.
“Dr. Ivanovich, I’m going to need you to step back for a moment. Please go stand over there.”
“Doctor,” he chuckled, but he stepped aside. She took a closer look at the thing he’d been talking to—a creature that looked something like a primate and a large cat. It had no arms or legs, just prosthetic interface sockets. She looked at those sockets then glanced down at her own prosthetic limbs.
Her mother had been a black-market prosthetic surgeon, but when she was a child there was no work of that kind on Mars. She’d spent a lot of time alone with a nanny while her mother worked off-world, including several days trapped in the ruins of a collapsed building during the Great Martian Blackout. Her mother replaced Andrea’s shattered limbs when she returned home, but there was no helping the nanny by that point.
Andrea turned and looked at Ivanovich again. I couldn’t have described the look she gave him, but any ordinary person would have wilted under that gaze. Sasha Ivanovich just kept on smiling, a faint little grin that could have meant almost anything.
Always the professional, Andrea straightened up and turned away from the creature. She didn’t see it, but it was staring at her with an unsettling intelligence. Its eyes looked lonely to me at first, like a shelter animal, but then it slowly and menacingly bared its teeth at her. With those yellow fangs exposed, the eyes somehow didn’t look sad anymore. They looked deranged, like the thing it would enjoy most of all would be to dig its face into her intestines and paint the walls with her blood.
