Content warning:
Medical experimentation, loss of autonomy, blood, suicide, aftermath of suicide, surgery, body horror.
Click!
Eyes wide as he realised what happened and cursing himself for not keeping track of his shots, Scarlet thrust the useless gun back into its holster and turned to his only recourse: he ran.
The man hunting him rattled the bushes and eagerly gave chase, the scent of blood only spurring him on. The night was still, the moon was full and Scarlet made an easy trail to follow.
Scarlet was well aware of this but he simply did not have time to care. One hand he kept pressed against his side in a vain attempt to stem the pain, the other he used to push the dense brush out of his way or angrily swipe at the blood that dripped from his gashed brow whenever it blurred his vision. Inside he could feel the slow burn from the other insult to his body, the alien thing trying to integrate itself into him. Complicating everything, his head was swimming; whatever was in that last syringe was seriously starting to mess with him as his memory started to turn fuzzy.
The only bright note was while they had taken his ‘cap, they’d missed the emergency beacon now activated and safely in his pocket. Help would come, he just had to buy enough time.
Stark white light beckoned from a gap in the trees and he made for it, adrenaline spurring him on. He burst out into the monochromatic world that lay under the swell of the full moon and swore aloud when he saw what lay before him: a short swath of ankle-high grass that abruptly ended in a sheer drop. He was trapped.
The massively overdeveloped orderly laughed as he emerged from the tree line and Scarlet turned and backed up as far as he dared, risking a glance over his shoulder at the cliff edge. It seemed like a good twenty metres down to the dry ravine floor, a near sheer drop.
The orderly smirked as he observed his prey under the light of the setting moon, absently wiped at a thin trickle of blood that dripped from his shoulder wound then beckoned to his prey with the massive hand, intent clear – Come. There is no escape, and you cannot fight me, so come.
Scarlet took a moment to slow his breathing, to let his rapid heart rate calm. He knew his options and didn’t like any of them, but going with that guy took all his odds straight to zero. He gave the hunter a sardonic grin and shifted his weight.
“NO!” The orderly realised what was about to happen and made a lunge but his hand closed on empty air as his prey stepped off the edge and prayed that luck would be on his side as he desperately scrabbled for the nearest handhold.
Unfortunately, his luck had run out.
0o0o0
It was under a grey dawn that Rick found him, sprawled out on the rocks at the base of a cliff in a starburst of his own congealed blood.
Captain Ochre grimaced and turned off the triumphantly squealing tracker, then reached out and gently closed the blue eyes that stared sightless up at the fading stars. He bent down and picked up the beacon that had led him here from the ripped open pocket in Scarlet’s tunic, sealing it in a ziplock bag and hoping it had been activated early enough for Green to get some sort of idea of what path had led to this, then called in Destiny and the helijet that she piloted. His eyes narrowed in under the brim of his ‘cap as he acknowledged her ETA. This entire situation was the very definition of fishy.
One death could be written up as an accident.
Two were suspicious.
Even if the second death would only be temporary.
One day earlier...
“It’s like the world’s gone mad.” Green punched through the latest reports and gave in to the urge to stretch in his chair, feeling his back crack and pop in several places. “Captains Ochre and Magenta have returned from Malaysia, their Spectrum Passenger Jet is refuelling now and the maintenance crew have almost finished checking off the second SPJ,” he reported, scrolling through the latest updates. “Captains Blue and Scarlet have both finished their mandatory stand downs and Captain Grey will be returning to duty in another hour, sir.”
“Thank you, Lieutenant.” Colonel White’s near permanent frown deepened as he read over the latest trouble spots. Usually Cloudbase officers were only called in for the serious cases or wherever Mysteron involvement was suspected while the regional offices took care of local threats and suspicious activity, calling in backup as needed from neighbouring offices. But the world was in one of its flare ups and twenty-one Spectrum offices were crippled by a particularly virulent strain of norovirus contracted at an international Spectrum conference, leaving their resources stretched dangerously thin.
Though not typically a religious man the colonel prayed that the illness was not the first move in a new Mysteron plot. His only reassurance was that no one had died from it.
Yet.
Turning his thoughts back to the sheafs of reports before him, Colonel White shuffled through them, intending to arrange them by importance and skill sets required. A folder marked ‘Titan Industries Unlimited, Biotechnology Division – Stillwaters Facility, Canada’ caught his eye and he skimmed through it. Spectrum Halifax had sent an agent to them three days ago after reports of strange equipment malfunctions and weird green lights, but that investigation had stalled when the responding officer – Captain Bronze – collided with a bull moose on her way back to base and was killed in the subsequent crash. She had been the last healthy field agent left in that office, so the case was passed on to Cloudbase for help.
“This will be right down Ochre and Magenta’s alley,” White decided. He reached for the tannoy switch to summon the officers, then stopped and frowned. Ochre and Magenta had been on a mission for the past five days, any mission over fifty-five hours had a twenty four hour stand down enforced by Doctor Fawn.
The greying brows drew closer as he debated chancing the good doctor’s wrath and ordering the officers to the Room of Sleep for a two hour stand down instead.
No, it wasn’t bad enough to start violating medical protocols just yet.
It would have to be just Scarlet then. Blue was already earmarked for a different investigation where his test-pilot and counterspy background was crucial – Aerospace America was haemorrhaging trade secrets like a sieve and the local agent needed help – and Grey was going to back up Spectrum’s Canberra office on a threat to the Australian Prime Minister. White’s brow furrowed further. He hated sending lone agents, but there wasn’t much choice right now.
“Lieutenant Green, I want Captains Blue and Scarlet here immediately for their next assignments,” he ordered, laying out the relevant files for the briefing.
0o0o0
Scarlet was feeling distinctly twitchy as he drove his Spectrum Saloon Car up the private road to Titan Biotechnology.
The briefing had been short and to the point. Titan Unlimited had three branches: Titan Robotics in Toronto, Titan Chemicals in Montreal and Titan Biotechnology in Stillwater, British Columbia, not too far from the lake of the same name. The three partners, all friends from university, each had charge of a branch. They’d been making some loud noises in their respective industries and making the kind of money that made most people sit up and pay attention, so when Titan Biotechnology reported strange green lights and an odd glitch in their sterilising plant that had only just been caught in time, it had the whiff of Mysteron activity all over it, even though a threat hadn’t been issued yet.
After dropping Blue off in New York, Scarlet had continued on to Canada in the SPJ and requisitioned an SSC from the Prince George International Airport.
But he just couldn’t shake his unease about the whole business. They were spread thin and he would have been a lot happier if he had a partner with him, even a local colour-coded lieutenant who needed field experience. One just became accustomed to having someone there, to bounce ideas and theories off, to watch your back and pick up on the things that you missed. Not having that left him feeling off balance.
So it was an unsettled Scarlet who guided his Spectrum Saloon Car up the very long paved driveway and through three security checkpoints to the remote location that Titan had selected for their newest complex.
Nestled next to a reserve and buried neck deep in woodlands, it was an island of glass and concrete in a sea of trees. Their staff lived on site and flew in and out on rotation for convenience and security as it was a shockingly long distance from any civilisation.
Paul frowned as he considered the implications of the isolation. On one hand the location of the ‘T’ shaped facility made sense – if anything they were working on escaped, the human casualties would be minimal. On the other hand if something went wrong it would take large amounts of precious time for help to arrive. An appropriately armed raiding party on a smash and grab could be in and out before the police helicopters even took off. Their on site security would have to be substantial.
He finally pulled up in front of the main entrance, a slick and modern two storey edifice in black concrete and brushed steel. The visitors’ carpark was empty as he parked and entered an exquisitely appointed but curiously sterile foyer.
The concrete and steel from outside continued inside – polished concrete floors and walls funnelled visitors through the triangular foyer to the brushed steel reception desk backed by a floor to ceiling tropical fish tank. The starkness of the place was softened by plush visitor couches upholstered in pale blue and the corporate grade abstract canvases in hues of blue and green.
But it was the other features of the foyer that had him instinctively brushing the butt of his sidearm with his fingertips. Set somewhat behind and to the left and right of the fishtank were heavy, metal clad doors secured with swipe card locks. Just before those doors were recessed alcoves with armed security guards positioned so they were partially concealed by the thick concrete walls of their embrasures. Not only that, he’d seen the gutter and tracks for a drop down security shutter at the front door, at least six electronic eyes to cover all directions in the foyer and spray nozzles in the ceiling for something that wasn’t like any sprinkler system he’d seen.
These people didn’t take security lightly.
Walking forward, Scarlet presented himself to the receptionist. To his surprise a well groomed man with brown hair aged somewhere in his mid thirties was manning the heavy desk. “Good afternoon, I’m Captain Scarlet, here to see Doctor Elizabeth Millien,” Scarlet introduced himself as he offered his credentials.
The receptionist, his grey eyes narrowed, examined his identification with care and nodded politely to him. “Welcome, Captain,” he replied in a lilting Welsh accent and stood to better indicate the nearest of the couches. “Please take a seat, I’ll page the doctor. It may be a few minutes until she is available.”
“Thank you.” Scarlet nodded back to him and took the indicated seat, tallying up the new information with a measure of suspicion. Though the receptionist wore a nicely tailored suit it couldn’t hide his muscular shoulders and forearms and when he moved the unbuttoned jacket bunched in such a way to suggest he had twin kidney holsters underneath it.
They definitely didn’t take security lightly.
He spent the intervening minutes recounting the electronic eyes and plotting potential escape routes with more care than normal, keenly aware that he was alone and backup was nowhere close.
Finally the left hand door clicked open and a tall woman with a leonine bearing entered the foyer, going first to the reception desk where the man gestured in Scarlet’s direction. She paused to talk with the receptionist for a moment and Scarlet took the opportunity to study her. Under her tailored and spotless white labcoat she wore a wine-red blouse of material that draped like silk, and long black trousers. Her eyes were chocolate brown and the dark hair twisted into a bun behind her head was reddish in the sunlight.
Guessing she was Doctor Elizabeth, Scarlet stood to greet her and had the very unwelcome feeling of being eyed up like a piece of meat on the butcher’s block as she looked him up and down. “It’s been a while since that’s happened,” he mused to himself, consciously setting his expression into a professionally neutral mode. He knew he was good looking but people usually saw the uniform first and reacted to the man inside it second. If they did react to him it was rarely so blatantly – the uniform tended to put a damper on thoughts like that.
“Good afternoon, Captain Scarlet. I’m Doctor Elizabeth.” She finally crossed the intervening space and greeted him, holding her hand out for a firm handshake. Her voice put him in mind of any of the medical staff at Cloudbase – confident and welcoming, it had just a touch of a Quebec-French accent and was the sort of voice to put someone at ease.
But her smile was too practised and her eyes... something wasn’t there that should have been. The whole experience left him with the overall sensation of being eyed up by a hungry shark.
“Good afternoon, Doctor Elizabeth.” Scarlet returned her handshake with a smile that was polite and nothing more. “Thank you for seeing me.”
“My pleasure.” She smiled at him again. “With all the reports in the news about that ‘Mysteron’ group, we felt it better to play it safe when security picked up those strange lights in the forest and then we had that equipment failure. What is their issue anyway? Most terror groups have something they’re after, but they haven’t announced any sort of agenda.”
“We haven’t been able to pick up a distinct pattern yet other than harming as many people as they can.” The official not-quite-lie slipped off his tongue with ease of practice. Rather than admit to the world at large that aliens existed and were bent on the destruction of humanity, the current modus operandi was to let people make their theories and confirm nothing aside from ‘they’re dangerous and use imposters’, which technically wasn’t a lie either.
“Captain Bronze would have asked already, but exactly what is it that you do here?” Scarlet asked, deciding that getting straight to business was the safest course of action. “What would be the most likely points of interest for the Mysterons?”
“I can do you one better and show you, our labs are this way.” She elegantly waved him towards the right hand door off the foyer and swiped them both through with a key card from her pocket. “Our main work is in developing gene therapy treatments for inherited conditions, but we are also working on a range of other products such as methods to tailor medication based on the patient’s genetic profile, various treatments aimed at accelerating healing from trauma, new anti-rejection medications for organ transplants and prion disease treatments,” Doctor Elizabeth tossed over her shoulder as she led him towards the labs.
“Prion diseases? Such as kuru, chronic wasting and Creutzfeldt-Jacobs disease?” Scarlet asked, silently thanking Blue and his habit of reading esoteric articles and sharing the oddities he’d picked up for giving him something intelligent to say.
“I’m impressed, most laypeople refer to it as ‘Mad Cow Disease’.” She looked pleasantly surprised at his reply and continued her lecture. “We are also experimenting in temporary bio-enhancement treatments for people working in hazardous environments such as increased radiation resistance for reactor workers and astronauts, temporary non-steroidal strength enhancement and improved night vision, treatments to prevent bone density loss for astronauts, even eye protection for specialists who work in industries with high levels of UV light. Nothing has made it past animal testing yet, but we have high hopes for several projects.”
“Most, if not all of those things would be a perfect target for the Mysterons, either to discredit them or delay their development,” Scarlet mused out loud as they went through a white-painted hallway and up a flight of stairs. At her gesture they paused by a bank of observation windows looking down into a busy lab. Staff in bright yellow, fully self-contained biohazard suits were working with different gadgets and peering into microscopes. Scarlet made mental notes of as much as he could and half wished for Fawn to be here – the CMO would have had a much better chance at keeping up with the medical jargon and discerning if what she was saying matched up with what she was showing him. “Perhaps that could be a future upgrade for us, some kind of unobtrusive video recorder or live link to base so specialists can weigh in on things,” was the absent thought, quickly set aside as Doctor Elizabeth started speaking again.
“Yes, that is what the other officer, Captain Bronze,” Elizabeth replied. “When we heard her concerns we immediately implemented some enhanced security measures – all our staff now wear a bio-bracelet.” She pulled back the sleeve of her lab coat to show him the slim black bracelet-like device clamped to her left wrist. “As well as tracking locations, any sudden drop in heart rate or disruption in transmission sets off an automatic alert. Our security staff respond in teams of four to find the staff member and confirm their status. We are also doubling the amount of electronic eyes throughout the complex and the perimeter, we expect the delivery tomorrow.”
“All sensible precautions,” Scarlet nodded. He sized up what he could see of the lab, its vantage points and emergency equipment. “Is this a fairly standard layout for your labs?” he asked, indicating the features as he named them. “Multiple viewpoints, what looks like drop down smoke curtains, several total lab isolation switches for gas and electric and... negative internal pressure?”
“You have a good eye, Captain. Yes, it’s negative for this lab, it’s one of our prion disease labs, so we want to keep everything bottled up,” Dr Elizabeth explained. “All our other labs in the East Wing are medication development labs and positive pressure to keep out contamination, but we can switch them around should a lab be needed for a new project. We also make generous use of UV light and fogging systems for sanitising,” she pointed to the inactive bank of UV lights and more of those strange nozzles above them, “and in the South Wing is our irradiation and sterile packing facility. Anything leaving here, be it products or waste we can’t incinerate onsite, runs through there first. We operate on a principle of healthy paranoia. Even the air from non-clinical spaces runs through an irradiator before it leaves the building.”
“Wise precautions under any circumstances,” Scarlet approved as they proceeded further into the complex.
“Ah, this is a project we hope to roll out soon.” She stopped a white-suited technician pushing a trolley of various containers and plucked a tiny vial of red-tinted gel from an insulated, shock-proof case. “Haemostat will revolutionise in-the-field medicine, it’s a next generation haemostatic compound in a serum that actually accelerates healing. We have seen extremely promising results on multi-system trauma, with complex fractures and organ injuries healing in a matter of days or hours. Administered via direct application to the wounded area, we expect it to drastically improve patient outcomes, especially in disaster zones and remote areas.”
“Considering how often we get shot at this would be a very welcome addition to our first aid kits.” Scarlet looked it over with interest, recalling a number of times he would have liked to have had something like this. “What’s the estimated time frame until it’s released?” he asked curiously.
“Oh, not for another five years yet.” Elizabeth sighed and put the vial back, indicating for the man to continue in his duties. “We still have a battery of tests to run, shelf stability, human clinical trials and the World Health Council needs to be convinced it’s not simply wishful thinking and snake oil.”
“I wish you luck with that,” Scarlet told her. “Bureaucracy is enough to do my head in on most days, much less World Government level.” He paused and added, “With your permission I’d like to tell our CMO about this, he may be able to cut through some of the red tape for you.”
“Thank you, Captain,” she replied warmly. “I think we’ll need all the help we can get. It’s not just the Mysterons we have to worry about, can you imagine the corporate espionage we have to fend off with products like these?”
“Hence the chaps in the foyer?” Scarlet asked.
“Exactly.” Elizabeth nodded. “The sooner we can have it fully patented and legally recognised and protected, the better.”
“Speaking of security, I would like to see your security centre and meet your head of security, as well as any witnesses of the lights and sabotage,” Scarlet added as they passed another busy lab. “The sooner we can prove or disprove any Mysteron activity, the better.”
“I’ll need to clear actually seeing the security hub with Jack, our head of security, but I’m sure we can arrange something,” Elizabeth replied and checked her watch. “It’s getting close to dinner, he’ll be on his way to the canteen. It’s this way.”
They passed an unmarked metal-clad door with pump noises rumbling behind it and Scarlet stumbled, the unexpected flash of sixth sense nausea and disorientation catching him off guard. It was strange though, a sudden flare just as suddenly gone, like someone had struck a match in a dark room and immediately blew it out. In other words, something definitely worth investigating, but carefully. “What’s in there?” he asked as they passed, trying to keep his tone merely curious.
“Oh, it’s just a wet lab for keeping some of our bioluminescent jellyfish,” Elizabeth replied lightly; she hadn’t noticed his stumble. “We have an on-site breeding operation to minimise disruptions in the supply chain.”
“You use the bioluminescence as a marker to show if certain gene editing has taken effect, correct?” Scarlet asked as they walked on, vaguely recalling words to that effect in a text book from his school days as he marked that door for further investigation and started plotting how to do so without alerting her. No way would simple jellyfish give him a strange reaction like that. And strangely enough there were no electronic eyes in this area, though it would have been logical to have some here. Almost as if they didn’t want records of people in this spot.
“Yes, we do,” she replied. “The canteen is down this way.” She waved towards a stairwell leading down. “I could explain more about our security details over dinner? I think most of the people you’d wish to speak to will be there as well,” Elizabeth offered. “We have an extensive menu, I’m sure we can find something you’d enjoy.”
“Actually, you go on ahead and I’ll join you,” Scarlet demurred. “If you could point me towards the nearest facilities first?” he asked.
“Of course, down that hallway and the second doorway on your right.” She pointed down a windowless passage. “The canteen is down these stairs, turn left and at the end of the hall, it’s well signposted.”
“Thank you.” He turned to go in the indicated direction and walked until he heard the click of her heels fade down the stairs. As soon as he was sure she was gone he doubled back towards the door to the ‘wet lab’. He wasn’t quite sure how he’d get in, but he had to check out that room without tipping off why – instinct told him he didn’t want to explain things to Doctor Elizabeth and get her permission.
He was in luck as he retraced his steps – two technicians were going in that direction and he was able to unobtrusively trail them and eavesdrop their conversation.
“Yeah, the incubator’s been showing some flutters in its vital signs,” one of the white suited technicians was saying as he pushed a rattling trolley loaded with boxes down the hallway.
“What, again? Up or down?” the second asked.
“Up. Activity jumped a couple of minutes ago, high enough to set off the alerts in central control.”
“Wow. Wonder why?”
The two stopped at the locked door. “Are you coming in too?” the technician with the trolley asked as he fumbled for his key card.
“Nah, got to give the orderlies their shots before they get agitated,” Technician 2 told him. “See you at dinner,” he said with a wave as he headed off.
“Perfect. But it looks like this isn’t the only strange thing going on here,” Scarlet thought to himself, slipping in behind the oblivious technician into the dimly lit room and stepping behind a convenient giant pipe placed right beside the door. He waited there as the man puttered around, putting things away and whistling tunelessly to himself. Finally he left and Scarlet stepped out of his hiding place.
The room was filled with plumbing and lined with tanks full of jellyfish that drifted on the artificial currents. It was also bathed in purplish-blue sterilising UV lights – just within the light spectrum visible to humans, there was so much of it that it played havoc with his depth perception. The floor was of dark tile, some sort of textured ceramic like the anti-slip tiles at a pool. So far it lived up to the promise of nothing but a wet lab and he might have taken Elizabeth at her word, but the pulsing nausea and headache had flickered back into life so Scarlet searched the room carefully, hunting for whatever had set off his sixth sense.
At the back of the room, tucked behind a pipe as thick as he was, he found another door. It had a card reader on it, but Magenta had taught them how to fool those. A few minutes of work and he was into a second room.
This room was even darker with only the glow of the powerful UV lights to see by and he was forced to wait for his eyes to adjust somewhat before venturing further within. The room seemed to be L-shaped and he was at the very end of the ‘L’- long steel tables lined the wall to his right, ranks of giant gas tanks stood against the walls to his left, while the back wall led around a corner to somewhere else – somewhere with machinery and equipment if the humming noises and power cables going in that direction were any indication.
Finally his eyes finished adjusting and as he swept the room again he realised to his horror that one of the gas tanks wasn’t a gas tank.
It was a water tank.
And there was someone in it.
He stepped closer to the tank, curiosity outweighing his disgust as he peered at the distorted face through the thick, curved Perspex.
It was a shock when he realised he knew who it was.
The bloated body in the vertical tank could barely be recognised as Judy Chapman, the research assistant used to threaten Los Angeles with the K-14 virus. Gone was the carefully coiffed black hair, leaving a bald skull dotted with sensors and her features were strangely swollen and puffy under the full-face SCUBA-style mask strapped tightly into place. IV lines fed into both arms and her belly bulged out in a distended dome that rippled with strange undulations that seemed to be just under the skin. No attempt had been made to preserve modesty.
Suddenly the body jerked and a small slit, probably lined to keep it from healing shut, yawned open in her side. Something long, many legged and dark under the UV lights squirmed out, falling to the black grate of the tank floor.
Scarlet gagged, staggered back a few steps to lean on one of the tables and choked back bile, the Mysteron-induced nausea heightened by a wave of revulsion. Now he knew what the tech had meant by ‘incubator’. They were using her as a host to something, and his mind shied away from considering what it might be.
“Fascinating, isn’t it? One of my associates found her downstream of the Boulder Dam and sent her to me along with a hefty tranche of the data Spectrum has accumulated on the Mysterons. She’s been a part of my research ever since.”
He whipped around, right hand dipping to his holstered gun. “Monstrous, more like it,” Scarlet snarled back.
Doctor Elizabeth laughed as she came around the far corner of the room, showing off perfect teeth that glowed eerily under the UV lights. “Merely science in action, Captain,” she replied lightly. “Deciphering the mysteries of biology and turning them to my advantage is always fascinating.”
She took a moment to inspect her manicure before continuing. “To be quite honest, I prefer pure science to commerce, but science requires money – money for labs, supplies, equipment and competent staff and we haven’t been able to profit from any of my projects yet. Fortunately I have discovered through these creatures a renewable resource that I can sell on for the funding we need and my partners in Titan don’t look a gift horse in the mouth.” She sauntered over to the tank, caressing the polished Perspex with something akin to affection. “What the Mysterons have accomplished via their manipulation of energy and matter we shall achieve with biology, with much less clean up afterwards.”
The smile that came with the words was far too predatory for Scarlet’s comfort.
“All it will take is a small accident,” she went on, “A car crash is easy enough to arrange and warrant medical intervention without raising suspicions, and the injuries from it will cover our actions nicely. With one of our teams in place either at the hospital or even in the ambulance itself and ready to implant the parasite we shall have a completely undetectable agent. It will tie itself into the nervous system, reading the very thoughts of its host. Nourished and shielded by the blood supply and tissues of the liver, one of the denser organs and very resilient, my little pet shall wait. Even if the host does suspect something the parasite is self-aware enough to stop any action that will reveal it. When there is something we need to know a call will be placed and a single command word spoken. Any question can then be put to them, any order, and the host shall carry out their instructions and have no memory of it whatsoever. They will be the ideal sleeper agent – someone who doesn’t even know that they are one!”
She smiled at him again, a cunning, calculating expression. “Hence the reports we made of strange green lights to lure in a suitable subject. I was pleased with Captain Bronze but you’re even better. Who better to prove its effectiveness than one of Spectrum’s top agents, someone trained to resist every form of physical and chemical persuasion and the character to resist any other temptation. Our little pet will take up residence within you and in a few days you will tell me all that I wish to know.”
“Just one little problem with your plan, Doctor,” Scarlet snapped back. “I’m not some dazed car accident victim and you just told me everything.”
Elizabeth smirked, a sneeringly superior expression. “Not to worry, Captain. I came across a fascinating drug from the late 20th century and fine tuned it. Before, it would only stupefy and muddle the memory of the events of the night before, now it will eradicate any memory from within the past ten or twelve hours. You will soon be unconscious with no recollection of anything that has happened tonight. If any residual memories do happen to remain, my little pet shall ensure you can’t speak a word of it.”
“Not if I have anything to say about it.” He all but growled the words out, shifting his weight and ready to fight. There was no way he could risk shooting from anything beyond point blank range with the massive gas tanks lining the wall behind the doctor. He was a very good shot, but with the UV lighting throwing off his vision he wasn’t sure if he was that good. But hand to hand, he could take her easily.
“Orderlies, hold him!” She stepped aside and snapped the command out to someone out of sight. Scarlet instinctively dodged as two big figures burst out of the darkness, their eyes shining like cats’ eyes in the gloom. They were heavily muscled but moved like lightning, darting down the length of the room to corner him.
Scarlet was hard pressed to keep his feet as the two men closed in on him, raining down blows. “Their augmenting treatments! It must be that!” he realised as he ducked a roundhouse punch and answered with a jab at the solar plexus. Usually that would at least slow someone, but he barely flinched while Scarlet felt the impact all the way up his arm, it was like punching a rock! “So much for ‘nothing at human testing yet’! I have to risk it!” Scarlet went for his sidearm but one of the orderlies caught his wrist with both hands. He drove a gouging thumb at those eerie eyes but the orderly twisted his head out the way and hauled on his arm, yanking him off balance so the second orderly could grab his other arm.
Scarlet roared in defiant anger as the two massively developed orderlies then kicked his legs out from under him and wrestled him to the ground. A few deft strikes to the nerve points in his arms gave them the split seconds they needed to pin him down to the floor like a butterfly pinned to a card, keeping him secured and stretched out on the tiles despite his struggles. Two more orderlies appeared to help hold him into place so he was secured at his wrists, shoulders, ankles and hips.
“Don’t fight, Captain,” Dr Elizabeth purred. “It’ll all be over soon.” She began to reach out as if she was going to caress his cheek, but thought better of putting her hand within range of Scarlet’s bared teeth and turned her attention to unzipping his body armour instead.
“Stop this before you do something you’re really going to regret,” Scarlet warned, suppressing a flinch when she hiked up his undershirt and the cold air of the lab hit his skin. “Spectrum will find out what has happened here, despite whatever friends you have or people you’ve bought off, and we will stop you.”
“I doubt that,” she replied absently, swiping an alcohol swab over a patch of skin on his right side. Elizabeth stood and walked out of his sight into a different part of the lab. Scarlet heard several clacks and snaps of metal and plastic, the hiss of air as something pressurised, then her heels clicking on tiles as she made her way back, two large caulk-gun-like devices in hand and a capped syringe riding in her coat pocket.
“You sped up my timetable when you set off the motion detectors in here,” she remarked as she knelt beside him. “I was going to drug you at dinner and deal with you at my leisure but we can work quickly when we need to. Luckily we have enough leftover Haemostat from what we’d made up for Bronze. My staff have already prepared a cover story, your car has been smashed and pushed into a ditch and once I’m finished with you my orderlies will injure you and leave you there to be discovered in the morning. They’ve learned from their first attempt – when they faked the car accident injuries on Bronze. They’ll be much gentler with you.”
With that, she uncapped the almost comically long and wide needle on one device and smoothly pushed it deep into his side. Scarlet howled in pain and howled anew when she pressed down the plunger. He caught a glimpse of a sinuous black thing in the barrel of the device before it was gone and he could only lie there gasping at the intense burning sensation in his side. The second followed the same path, the reddish Haemostat it contained largely soothing the pain and plugging the wound. He almost missed the prick of the syringe – straight through his trousers and into the meat of his thigh – but he could feel the wave of weakness and lassitude spreading through his body like ink dropped into water.
Doctor Elizabeth tugged down the undershirt and re-zipped the tunic to cover her handiwork, then stood and smirked to herself as the Spectrum captain let out a weak “No... ” that trailed into a groan and slumped, blue eyes drifting shut. At her nod one of the orderlies released his grip just long enough to dig his fingers into the captain’s trapezius muscle and confirm he was indeed out cold.
“Good work, boys,” she congratulated them. “Give it another minute, take his cap and any other radio gear he has, then two of you take him to his car and rough him up. Report to me when it is done.” With that, she swept out of the room, mentally composing the ‘professional but concerned’ call she would place in the morning that ‘Your captain insisted on leaving last night but we just received the overnight report from the last gate and they haven’t seen him leave. After what happened last time... ’
0o0o0
Scarlet came to just as a fist connected with his rib cage and made the bones creak with the impact. Gasping, he answered the blow with a savage swipe at the faces hovering above him, his fingers stiffened into claws. One orderly flinched away instinctively, the other lined up for another punch and Scarlet jerked out of the way, catching a glancing blow across his forehead that split the skin. He rolled off the ground to his feet, the comforting weight on his hip telling him that while they’d taken his ‘cap, they’d not taken his gun.
Big mistake.
With his pistol in hand, Scarlet felt much better about his odds as he swept his arm around and laid down a half-dozen shots at the orderlies as they dove for cover. The blood dripping from the split in his forehead and a developing grogginess spoiled his aim, but one orderly dropped out of sight with a yowl, clutching a wounded leg, and the other ducked behind a tree. He took the moment’s breathing space to glance over at his nearby SSC – though the front was stove in and the windshield starred, it probably would have been drivable if it hadn’t been upside down in a ditch.
That option not viable, Scarlet snapped off another couple of shots to keep the hiding orderly pinned and started running for the treeline. If he could lose the orderly in the forest and make it to the boundary fence, he could get to the main road and hopefully wave down a truck or something. But the half-healed wound in his side started shrieking in pain as he ran, the muscles protesting and his damaged liver objecting to the jostling from his running gait. Scarlet forced himself to ignore it, fumbling in his tunic pocket for the emergency button beacon, just in case he couldn’t lose the enhanced human.
As he ran he had to holster his gun for a moment, needing both hands to pull the safety tab meant to prevent accidental activation, then he squeezed the central button to turn it on and slipped it back into his pocket for safekeeping. He’d just re-zipped the pocket when the second orderly burst from cover, forcing him to duck just as the orderly swung a massive fist that took a chunk of bark off a tree near where his head had been moments ago.
Cursing roundly, Scarlet jumped back, crashed through a scrubby bush and fired another half-dozen wild shots at the fast-moving orderly on his trail. At least one hit him, judging by the yelp of pain, and Scarlet started pelting through the trees again, his left arm wrapped around his midsection, desperately ducking and dodging between the trees and bushes. Hampered by his injuries and the mounting fogginess from the head injury, Scarlet wasn’t able to put enough distance between him and the orderly to even think about hiding his trail or finding a place to lay low and wait for rescue.
As he ran, Scarlet caught glimpses of the massive man as he easily loped along, his dark blue uniform the perfect camouflage in the shadow of the forest and cat-like eyes glowing in the dappled pools of moonlight. He snapped off more shots, but only took pieces out of tree trunks as the orderly dodged in and out of cover, moving as smoothly as mercury as he closed in.
Finally he found a clearing and turned to face his hunter, sidearm raised for a clear shot at the man’s head.
Click!
0o0o0
Today...
He woke to warm blankets, dim lights overhead and Fawn’s cheery “Welcome back, Scarlet.”
“... What... ?” Paul croaked, accepted the offered spoonful of ice chips and greedily swallowed the cool water as they melted.
“I’m not surprised you’re thirsty, Ochre said you left most of your blood volume on the ground,” Fawn observed as he helped Scarlet sit up and put a glass of water in his hand. “Do you remember what happened?” he asked.
Still figuring out which way was up, a not uncommon sensation after a particularly complicated recovery, it seemed perfectly natural to Scarlet to indicate in the negative as he drained the glass. But somehow it seemed wrong. He knew... something. Exactly what it was, though, eluded him.
“You were found at the bottom of a cliff,” Fawn explained. “Your car was in a ditch not far away. Did you hit something? All we know is your beacon was set off and that they called us when their gate guard didn’t report seeing you leave.”
“I don’t think so?” Scarlet absently replied as he reached for the water jug and refilled his glass. “At least I don’t remember hitting anything.” He frowned. “Something hit me. I think. I know I met the doctor there, but after that... nothing,” he concluded, finishing off the water.
“Strange, you’ve never had amnesia as a lingering symptom after head injuries,” Fawn remarked as he updated the chart, frowning in that familiar way as he pondered the conundrum.
“Don’t tell me, you want to run some tests?” Scarlet groaned, resigned to yet another four or five hours of examination.
“Yes, but later on. Get some lunch and the colonel wants to see you and Ochre, he’s going to be taking over your case since you’re on medical stand down,” Fawn explained. “I’ll page you when I’ve got the equipment set up and ready, I want to do a full EEG and MRI if your memory hasn’t returned by this afternoon.”
“S.I.G.”
0o0o0
When Scarlet looked back on it later while preparing his own report on the whole situation, it was such a minor thing but for some reason it was the necessary trigger.
Taking his lunch tray to the dirty dishes hatch, he’d smacked his knee against the edge of a chair that someone had left half out from one of the long tables. He’d yelped and staggered, thankfully not dropping his dirty dishes in the process, and as the bruise began to prickle with healing the foggy patch in his memory started clearing. Bits and pieces started to come back into focus as he stacked his dishes in the appropriate piles, washed his hands and started the trek up to the control room.
He’d stopped in his tracks as the memories from the wet lab finally fell into place, but just as swiftly, like the memory had summoned its attention, he felt an alien tingling at the edges of his awareness. Like oil poured onto rough water, the parasite overlaid his consciousness with its own and he fancied he could almost hear it whispering to him: “No, no, we mustn’t talk about that, it’s against Doctor’s orders to talk about that. Doctor wouldn’t be happy about that, mustn’t make Doctor unhappy. Continue with what you were doing, follow your orders, there is nothing to worry about.”
Against his own wishes, he found himself continuing to ascend to the command deck, getting the clearance to enter and quietly taking the indicated seat before Colonel White’s desk beside Ochre, who was already waiting for him with the file on Titan Unlimited open across his knees.
“Well, Captain?” Colonel White asked. “What do you have to report?”
Scarlet frowned as he tried to speak, but the words he wanted stuck in his throat. It was like being wrapped in a thick woollen blanket as the creature asserted itself. “Nothing much, I’m afraid,” he found himself saying instead. “I arrived at the facility, met Doctor Millien and then nothing. It’s a blank. I must have hit my head.” He swallowed reflexively, the reality of the situation and the depth of the parasite’s control starting to become more clear. This was bad.
“It was a big fall, Colonel, maybe sixty feet,” Ochre spoke up, frowning slightly as he glanced at Scarlet. “We found the crashed SSC not too far from the cliff. Scarlet must have staggered away and gone over the edge.”
Scarlet found himself nodding. “Yes, that sounds about right.” The words came out despite his best efforts to stop them. Try as he might, he couldn’t circumvent the parasite’s commands. Cold fear clamped its icy fingers around his heart and he discreetly dried his sweaty palms on his trousers. This was very bad.
“Do you recall anything that could indicate the Mysterons being active there?” Colonel White asked, brows drawn close.
“No sir, not as far as I can recall.” The words that the parasite scripted for him came out almost naturally, while Scarlet glanced between his commander and Ochre and willed them to notice something was off about him. “It all seemed to be coincidental, and their security and precautions are impressive, I do remember that much,” the parasite detailed through him as he picked at his watch strap in a rare nervous fidget. He vainly hoped that Ochre would notice the unusual action; over the years he’d worked very hard on suppressing most of his tells so fidgeting gestures were odd for him, but the other officer wasn’t looking at him, instead frowning at the file in his hands.
“Perhaps your full memory will return in time, Scarlet,” Colonel White mused aloud, distracted by the veritable cornucopia of different crises still to deal with and the stacks of reports awaiting his attention. “You’re on medical stand down for the next twenty four hours, report to Sickbay should there be any changes or when Fawn pages for you. If you do recall anything further, report it immediately. Go and get some rest. Dismissed.”
“Yes, sir.” With his next instructions given and the parasite pressing him into obeying them, Scarlet stood and turned to leave, his hands clenched at the creature’s orders to hide their trembling.
This was very, very bad.
0o0o0
Safely ensconced in his quarters, Scarlet could feel the creature’s direct control retract, but the covert command still remained- Stay here. Rest. Wait for further direction. Any thought he had to the contrary was ruthlessly quashed before it could lead to action.
Even as simple an action as walking to the door with the intent of leaving was defeated by the simple expedient of his legs locking up, like they’d been encased in lead. Every effort to fight back, to pit his indomitable will against that of the parasite and wrest back control by force was frustrated with the ease of snuffing out a candle until finally he sat on the end of his bed, hands shaking and sucking down air like a drowning man as he tried to get his heart rate back under control.
He was terrified.
Fear wasn’t unknown to him. Shuffling to the ramp for your first parachute jump, going into your first war zone, being dragged away for your first interrogation, getting into your first proper close combat fight where the other guy really is trying to kill you, those all triggered that cold knot of fear. But this... this... thing inside him, controlling him... this was cause for true terror. It was frighteningly close to one of his greatest fears – one day finding himself back under the control of the Mysterons.
All his training, all his skill and strength both mental and physical, and he couldn’t do a thing to stop it. “There must be something I can do!” Scarlet half snarled the words and snatched up a pen and paper from his nightstand, intending to write down what he couldn’t say.
He got as far as ‘There is a’ before his hand suddenly cramped at the creature’s command and he dropped the pen. “Well... that’s as far as that can go,” he muttered to himself, massaging the stiffened fingers. “It can read my thoughts, make me tell lies and make me stop communicating. Hopefully it’s not smart enough to access the Cloudbase computers through me, but I don’t want to risk finding out.”
Rubbing his hand to soothe the stiff muscles he cast around his room, searching for something, anything, he could use to communicate to the others that something was very, very wrong and hopefully where the problem lay. It had to be something that would be quick enough to get past the primitive intellect of the parasite. Something that was unexpected and attention grabbing, something that would get Fawn to look deeper and find the thing stuck in him. If only he could find it...
His eyes lit upon the ceremonial sabre that held the place of honour on a rack above his desk – his grandfather’s sword, passed down to him by his father when he graduated from West Point.
That could do it.
Careful to keep his thoughts from being too overt and thus alerting the thing, Scarlet crossed the room and unlocked his door. He had no intention of leaving, so the creature saw no reason to interfere. He then fetched the sabre and the shoebox containing the whetstones, steel wool, cloths and oil he used to clean and sharpen the antique blade and carried everything to the small bathroom. That was where he normally worked on the blade as the tile floor was easy to clean in the event of spills.
“This is going to be a large spill...” he muttered rather wryly to himself then chuckled, a hollow and empty sound when he realised just what he was saying.
Setting the sabre and box down, Paul casually peeled off his tunic and undershirt, tossed both at the laundry basket and sat down cross-legged on the cold tiles. He drew the sabre from its sheath, laid it over his knees and started to scrub the steel wool down the blade to clean away a few spots of rust, followed by brisk strokes of the whetstone. The dry rasp of stone against metal was oddly soothing as he honed the edge, a task that kept his body occupied and the creature within him unaware and unsuspecting. This was normal, his memories told it, he regularly tended to his grandfather’s weapon like this.
Pausing a moment between swipes, Scarlet pressed two fingers to his abdomen, just above his navel, and felt the faint thump of blood pounding through his abdominal aorta. That was his first target. “And the second is on the right hand side, just under the rib cage,” Scarlet reminded himself, then busied himself with wiping the blade with an oiled cloth before the creature could make sense of its host’s thoughts.
Scarlet reversed the sabre and held it point down before him, lightly drawing his thumb down the length of the blade and nodding in satisfaction at its keen edge. He rose up on his knees and rested the hilt on the floor, holding the spine of the blade in his hands; the cold Damascus steel tip pricking the skin of his abdomen. His arms weren’t long enough to both hold it by the hilt and get the correct angle of attack so this would have to do.
The creature currently in residence in his liver stirred, its alien awareness tingling at the edges of his own. It was realising something wasn’t right but the concept that he was readying to end himself baffled its animal intellect.
It was a hesitation that Scarlet quickly capitalised on. One sharp pull and the sabre broke through his skin, plunging through tissue and organs on its way up into his chest cavity. Pain registered a split second later – hot, wet and throbbing visceral pain that tore a ragged cry from Scarlet’s throat as he stiffened, jerking the blade further up through his diaphragm and into his left lung, missing his liver completely. His scream cut short as the very breath was stolen from him, chest and abdominal muscles struggling to try and force air into a system that simply couldn’t hold it any more.
The creature thrashed in his liver, adding new agony to what Scarlet was already suffering. His vision greying and the blade in his weakening hands slick and hot with fresh blood, Scarlet pitched forward and slumped over the sabre’s hilt, his weight driving the last few inches of patterned steel into his flesh as the tip exploded from his back.
His last moments were spent in a world of red, white and white hot pain, the light fading from his eyes as his blood pooled on the once pristine tile floor.
0o0o0
In the Promenade garden Ochre sprawled gracelessly on a padded bench in the sunlight, coffee mug in one hand and the Titan folder in the other, staring sightlessly at the brilliant blue sky outside.
He was suspicious and his gut was practically screaming at him. It was one of the defining characteristics of any frontline cop, the thing that separated the veteran from the green newbie – gut instinct, that unconscious adding up of details that are too easily glossed over, leavened with experience. Something didn’t sit right about Scarlet’s statements or his behaviour at the debriefing. Combining that with two Spectrum deaths, both from car accidents? It couldn’t be coincidental.
He frowned at the dregs of his coffee, the usual military-issue easily over-brewed sludge with a kick like a mule that Green somehow made palatable with a blend of cloves, cinnamon and cardamom. Idly swirling the dark residue, Ochre mentally replayed the brief conversation with his fellow officer. Something was wrong... something was there that shouldn’t have been there...
“ ... He was scared.” The former World Police Commander stood, eyes wide as the proverbial light dawned. “He was scared of something, but he couldn’t or wouldn’t say what.” Coffee forgotten, Ochre strode out of the room to the officers’ quarters, determined to get to the bottom of this.
It was time to get some answers from Scarlet.
0o0o0
Outside Scarlet’s cabin, Ochre pressed the door chime and waited. When there was no response or noise from within he knocked on the door, frowning.
This was unusual.
Like most of them Scarlet usually slept lightly when on base, the only times he didn’t was when he had little choice in the matter – either unconscious, completely exhausted or in Scarlet’s case temporarily less than alive. If he was sleeping the door chime and knocking should have woken him. “Scarlet?” Ochre called out, a thin coil of worry starting to grow in the back of his mind.
He pressed his ear to the door to listen for the sound of running water, the drone of a TV or music that could have covered the sound of the chime and knock.
Nothing.
But now he could detect a faint coppery smell over the slightly ozone tang of Cloudbase’s atmosphere.
That set off all kinds of warning bells and Ochre hit the ‘Open’ button above the door chime, right hand dropping to the pistol on his belt and his left preparing to enter his override should the door be locked. To his surprise the door obediently slid aside and Ochre stepped in, his eyes scanning the room. The smell of blood hit him like a punch to the nose. “Scarlet?” he warily called out.
Carefully he crossed the room, past the kitchenette and television in the lounge area. The empty sword rack over the desk shoved against the wall was noticed immediately. Ochre approached the bookcase that partitioned off the front area from the private area and slipped his gun from its holster, his back pressed to the bookcase as he carefully leaned around the corner to peek at the room beyond.
The bathroom door was open and the prostrate form inside was clearly visible, his back to the door, sprawled out in a pool of congealing blood. Ochre swore softly and put his gun away, digging in his vest pocket for the police-issue heavy duty disposable gloves he always kept there and pulling them on as he moved to the still warm body and rolled it over to get a better look.
“Scarlet?” Ochre quickly felt for a pulse but found nothing, his eyes flicking over the bathroom as he pressed two fingers to the pale skin of Scarlet’s neck. Everything, aside from the obvious, was in order. There was nothing to suggest a struggle and the blood pool was undisturbed, aside from where it drained away into a grate in the floor. “What was this?” he asked aloud, frowning. “A suicide attempt? But that doesn’t work on you, at least not like this...” Ochre’s frown deepened as he regarded the blade sunk to the hilt in his friend’s belly and protruding from his upper back. “... Something else is going on here. You have your gun, and that’s a much quicker and less messy death than whatever you tried to do here... and that’s your grandfather’s sword. You respect the guy too much to do this to yourself with his sword without a damn good reason.”
Ochre stood and activated his RadioCap. “Captain Ochre to Doctor Fawn, medical emergency in Scarlet’s quarters. Status Red Zero,” he said, giving the code for ‘Scarlet is dead’.
There was a moment’s startled pause before the reply came through. “What?” Fawn exclaimed. “I’ll be down there in two minutes, give me the full story when I get there. Fawn out.”
0o0o0
“I’m going to say it now – what the hell?” Fawn shook his head as the nurses and orderlies finished transferring Scarlet’s body from the gurney onto the examination table, sprawled on his side because of the sabre still buried in him. Ochre had already delivered his report, confirmed there was no obvious note to explain Paul’s bizarre actions and left to go and search the captain’s room properly before making a report to the colonel.
“Let’s get this out of the way first.” Fawn squared his shoulders and gestured at the sword. “O’Brian, help me. You take the other end, I’ll take the hilt, and we’ll pull it out. Careful...” Fawn cautioned his orderly as he took the protruding blade tip between finger and thumb to help guide it back down its exit point.
Working together, they slowly eased it out. Fawn eyed the bloody blade for a moment with some curiosity, then set it aside on a trolley. “Bring over the ultrasound, I want to see what the internal damage is like,” he ordered as he changed his bloodied gloves for a fresh pair.
O’Brian swung the ultrasound control panel into place while two nurses gently rolled Scarlet’s limp form onto his back, wiped away the blood and applied the contact gel. Fawn took the transducer wand and began to roll it across the cooling skin.
The grainy black and white images on the screen quickly resolved into the recognisable shapes of bones and organs. Frowning in concentration, Fawn quickly tracked the path of the sabre and rattled off the affected organs – large and small intestines, pancreas and potentially the spleen, diaphragm, left lung, abdominal aorta and a lot of muscles.
“Okay.” Fawn stared up at the ceiling for a moment as he tallied the cumulative damage and made an educated estimate. “We’re probably looking at about three hours of healing just for the organs, probably another hour on top of that for clearing any peritonitis, replenishing blood supply and repairing the muscle damage, but that multi-organ trauma makes our timeline for resuming organ function complicated.”
The doctor frowned and looked down this time, weighing up the benefits and risks of leaving the captain to sort himself out vs intervening, and absently ran the transducer wand over the right side of the torso just to double check things before making his conclusion. “We’ll rescan in two hours; if he hasn’t healed the lung damage by then I want him intubated and on ventilation, into the right lung and a solid seal. The left is perforated in both lobes and lung damage is a bastard for him to heal. I don’t want him accidentally giving himself a pneumothorax again if that lung hasn’t fully sealed itself before he starts breathing,” Fawn instructed. He was about to turn off the ultrasound when O’Brian pointed to the screen.
“Doctor Fawn, what’s that lump from?” he asked, tapping the offending image on the monitor. “It’s on his liver, right?”
“You’re right... but that doesn’t belong there.” Fawn clicked a button and took a still image. A few more clicks had him into Scarlet’s file where he brought up the last anatomy scan and retrieved the previous image of the captain’s liver. This one was missing the lumpy dome currently visible on the screen. “I think we’ve got the next part to our mystery here. Good spotting, O’Brian. Let’s get him prepped for surgery now.”
0o0o0
Just over an hour later, with the auto nurse monitoring Scarlet’s lack of life signs, the base anaesthetist Doctor Lapis prepared to do a rapid sequence sedation and intubation in case Scarlet decided to revive mid-surgery – a genuine concern for all in Medical whenever this scenario came up in contingency planning – and the normal array of surgical nurses and equipment, Fawn waited while the last of the drapes were placed and iodine swabs scrubbed over the area he would operate on.
“Okay everyone, we know our jobs, be on your toes and be prepared for anything unusual.” Fawn stepped up to the table, holding out his hand for the first of many tools. “Scalpel, please, size three.”
First cuts made, the surrounding tissue was carefully retracted and though the heart was still inert blood vessels were clamped off as per normal procedure. Fawn narrated each action as he worked, keeping everyone on the same page and providing a rolling log for the video recorders in the theatre.
The liver came into view, dark and dense with a leathery looking lump completely at odds with the texture of the rest of the organ. “Observing a large, round mass on the right lobe of the liver, about six centimetres across, maybe three centimetres high.” Fawn frowned behind his surgical mask as he worked. “James, get some photos of that please. Palpating the mass, it appears firm. Probe, please.” When the slim instrument was placed in his hand he prodded the lump gingerly. “Mass appears harder than surrounding tissue... hang on.” The probe suddenly punched through a weak spot into the lump. He pulled back the probe, seeing clear liquid well up. “It has some kind of fluid in it. Suction please, Kirimiko – make sure we get a sample of that fluid. Scalpel, size one. I’m going to try to open the mass and see what’s in it.”
He carefully drew the pointed tip of the blade across the lumpy mass several times, millimetre by millimetre slicing through the surface of the lump. “Huh. Mass appears to be hollow, the outer layer is thin,” Fawn observed as he felt the resistance change as he cut.
Then things became complicated.
“Doctor, he’s going out of asystole,” Nurse Kirimiko warned, pointing to the previously flat and featureless line of the heart monitor now showing increasingly regular bumps and spikes of electrical activity.
“Lapis, start intubation now, right lung! Keep him under!” Fawn ordered, backing off and pausing his work while Lapis went to work with drugs, laryngoscope and endotracheal tube. He glanced away for a second when the auto nurse warbled confirmation of tube placement and that was when the black-shelled creature reared out of its pouch through the cut Fawn had made.
“Look out!”
The shouted warning came a split second before the finger-long centipede-like thing flung itself at the nearest warm body – which just so happened to be Fawn’s. Yelling in fright, he jerked aside and crashed into one of the surgical carts, scattering kidney bowls, used equipment and bloody gauze over the floor. It landed on his arm and clamped down with legs and pincers as Fawn flailed and tried to shake the thing off.
“Hold still!” Kirimiko grabbed his arm while Lapis used a pair of forceps to seize the thing around its midsection and pull it off. Whether it was the rough handling or it just couldn’t survive outside of a body wasn’t clear, but the creature squirmed and went limp moments later. Lapis dropped it into a large specimen jar that was taped shut for good measure.
“Is everyone okay?” Fawn asked as Kirimiko hauled him up. Receiving affirmatives all around, he breathed a sigh of relief. “Okay, let’s clean out what that thing did to his liver, get him closed up and into recovery, then get to the bottom of whatever the bloody hell that was.”
0o0o0
“Well, Doctor?”
Fawn looked up from re-reading the latest of many printouts, blinked, and somewhat belatedly realised that:
A) He’d forgotten to eat anything from the meal tray that Nurse Tarris had dropped off,
B) A couple of hours had gone by since the meal tray was delivered, and
C) Colonel White had escalated from radioing down to Sickbay for updates to standing in his office looking very worried.
Well, ‘very worried’ insofar as Colonel White would permit himself to display in public that is. The Old Man was notoriously hard to read, but Fawn had dealt with enough stoic and difficult military types to pick up the nuances.
“Colonel, if this thing has anything to do with Scarlet’s last assignment, I vote that place gets nuked from orbit,” Fawn replied after a moment’s pause to gather his thoughts. “I am being literal about the nuke. Not figurative. Wipe it off the bloody map. And I know you can make that happen,” he added, not a trace of levity in his tone.
White’s brows drew closer and he stood very, very still. “Are you quite sure about what you are saying, Doctor?” he asked carefully, his full attention on his CMO as he processed the gravity of the situation so starkly delineated by the use of the word ‘nuke’.
The exhausted doctor waved his commanding officer over to the one chair not occupied by papers. “I can count on one hand when I’ve been more sure. Here, look.” Fawn shifted the dinner tray off his desk and laid out some photos of the creature both intact and dissected, another of the pouch it had made in Scarlet’s liver and a print out of a genetic profile that White privately admitted he didn’t have a hope of interpreting.
“From what I saw the thing burrowed into his liver and made a nest there,” Fawn explained, using a spoon from the meal tray as a pointer as he indicated the relevant images. “I excised the whole nest to examine it and the parasite somehow linked into his nervous system from there, I found ganglia, uh, nerve connection points, in the tips of these ‘pincers’ and exposed but intact nerve endings in the nest, like they’d been excavated out from the surrounding tissue.”
“The genetic sequence of the thing is still being double checked and run against the marine biology databases of every organisation Green can tap into,” Fawn went on, “but so far it seems to be a cousin to some kind of mid-sea parasite with a name I am far too tired to try and pronounce. Green’s also chasing up a specialist in Japan for me for more information.” Fawn dug through another sheaf of papers and tossed an article onto the pile for White’s inspection. “The short of that, it’s got this habit of hijacking its host’s nervous system, bypasses most of the brain and drives them around like a sub. It goes for fish usually, schooling fish, which is complicated – it has to still act like a fish that’s part of the school or it gets ejected and both it and the fish get eaten. It’s a smart bastard too, that specialist in Japan found one in a dolphin, acting just like any other dolphin.”
“So how did this... whatever it is, end up in Captain Scarlet?” White demanded, horror and disgust turning his face pale. “And why did his retrometabolism not get rid of it? He spat out a bullet once!”
“To the former, someone had to have put it there, we can ask him about that when he decides to wake up.” Fawn’s lips thinned into a grim expression. “To the latter, because as far as his Mysteronised body was concerned, that parasite belonged there.” He tossed a final greyscale photo of the creature onto the desk.
It was a strange image – opaque and clearly defined in the head and back, more transparent and skeletal in the legs. “I took that with the Mysteron detector,” Fawn explained, sitting back and waiting for the colonel’s reaction. “It’s some kind of hybrid.”
“... What.”
The word came after a long pause, spoken in a low, dangerous voice. A voice that in the past had made at least two double agents wet themselves in terror in interrogation.
“Best guess is on page six of that article,” Fawn explained, feeling sick. “The parasite lays eggs in its host, the larvae consume portions of the host’s non-vital brain tissue and incorporates the DNA to make key marker proteins in its chitin so the host’s immune system reads it as nerve tissue or similar. When they mature they break free and go find a new host of the same species to infect.” Fawn scrubbed a weary hand over his face. “I think someone at Titan, if it was them, has a Mysteron replicant and is using it to churn out parasites. I needed to be sure before I came to you, I’m still not 100% yet. But if it is, and they do, nuke the damn place. The parasite hasn’t started regenerating but as soon as I’m done I’m going to use the Mysteron gun on it. I’m not taking any chances and I’m keeping Scarlet under observation until I’m absolutely sure it didn’t leave anything behind. Spectrum Canada still has Bronze in the morgue; they’re sending her to me tomorrow so I can see if she has one too.”
“Thank you, Doctor.” Colonel White stood and scooped up the papers that Fawn had laid out. “How long until Scarlet wakes and you can develop a test for these... things?” he asked, his tone even but his jaw clenched, a thunderstorm brewing behind his eyes that promised terrible things for the perpetrators of this act.
“We can find it with an ultrasound now we know what to look for, but Doctor Burgundy is working on a blood-serum test too, it’s bound to make the liver unhappy or generate some kind of immune response and we can pick that up easily enough. The operation delayed his recovery but Scarlet’s breathing on his own now and his vitals are almost normal so he should be awake... ” Fawn checked his watch, “soon, next two hours at most.”
“Alert me the moment he is conscious and lucid,” White commanded, and left the room.
0o0o0
“... Uh... ”
“I’ve gotta say, that’s one of your less eloquent returns to the land of the living.”
Paul rolled his head towards the voice, quirking a faint half smile, and saw Ochre sitting beside his bed. He had the chair backwards as was his habit, his arms crossed atop the backrest. “You found... ?” Scarlet croaked the words out, then propped himself up on one elbow and gratefully accepted the cup of water that Ochre offered him.
“Fawn found the critter, I found the note you tried writing... and I found you in the bathroom,” Ochre replied in a carefully neutral, very professional tone.
Paul swallowed hard and looked away in shame for a moment, not trusting his voice just yet. He set down the cup on the nearby table and worked himself up to a sitting position. “I’m so sorry, Rick,” he apologised quietly, feeling like an utter wretch. He knew that Ochre had been to the aftermath of far too many suicides in his days in the police and the scars that such sights had left on his soul. “I tried to write that note, to tell someone... but the parasite... it stopped me. Fawn didn’t see it the first time, I had to do something drastic before it could...” he managed to get out before Rick raised his hand and stopped him.
“Paul, believe me, I’m not angry with you anymore. Until Fawn briefed us I was furious with you for doing that and not talking to us.” Rick held Paul’s gaze – not angry, not pitying, nothing but compassion in his eyes. “But I get it now, the desperation, I mean. If even half of the doc’s theories are true it was a chance you had to take.” He paused to lean back and glance out the door. “Speaking of which, he’s on his way now, the nurse ‘bot probably tattled on you, and I’d guess the Old Man will be about five minutes behind the doc. He’s really angry, not at you though.”
“Is he at ‘bite rocks and spit sand’ level or ‘chew wires, spit nails’?” Paul asked, reaching for the water again. He had a feeling he’d be getting interrogated at length shortly and his throat already felt like sandpaper.
“More like ‘check the radar for the four horsemen’. Green said the colonel was talking about ‘nuke from orbit’,” Ochre replied, looking distinctly uneasy. “Is it that bad?”
“Short answer: yes,” Scarlet replied, squaring his shoulders and looking up as a haggard-looking Fawn barged into the recovery room.
“Scarlet! You’re awake, good, how do you feel?” Fawn threw the question out as he poked the robot nurse to check the latest set of vital signs.
“Like myself, hungry but normal,” Scarlet replied. “Ochre said you found the parasite?”
“Bloody thing jumped out and grabbed me when we had you opened up to see what was going on!” Fawn answered, nodding to himself as he saw all the numbers looking the way he wanted.
“Should I go... ?” Ochre ventured, standing up to leave.
“No, stay, you’re still the case lead so stay here to get the reports first hand.” Fawn waved him back to his seat, then took one of the remaining visitors’ chairs for himself. “The colonel will be here soon.” He looked back at Scarlet. “You’re off duty until I know that your head and your guts are back to normal. I want to make sure it didn’t leave anything behind.”
The British officer surprised them all when he quietly nodded his acquiescence without a single murmur of protest.
“Well... good.” Fawn fumbled and faltered for a moment; he’d expected to have to argue it out with the captain as per usual. Fortunately the arrival of Colonel White spared them any further awkwardness.
“As you were.” White waved Ochre back to his seat as the younger man automatically moved to stand. “Now, Captain Scarlet, what the devil happened to you in that facility?” he demanded, fists on his hips.
“Colonel, that place needs to be burned to the ground.” Scarlet swallowed hard against the bile rising at the memories and began to detail what he’d found and what had happened to him at the hands of Doctor Elizabeth and her enhanced orderlies.
“So if all had gone according to her plan, you would now be running around with a mind control parasite in your liver?” White asked, aghast at both the violation his officer had suffered and the implications of what might have happened if the orderlies hadn’t been too enthusiastic with Captain Bronze or if he’d sent Ochre and Magenta as he’d originally intended. It truly didn’t bear thinking about for too long. White shook his head. “This needs to be ended now, before the Mysterons have a chance to hear about this and use it to their ends. Are you up to drawing a map of the facility and the location of this... incubation room?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Good, get onto that.” He turned his attention to Ochre. “Once you have that map, Ochre, you are going to take enough manpower with you to tear that place apart brick by brick if need be, and a Mysteron gun to put that replicant out of her misery. I want Doctor Elizabeth and anyone else who knows about this parasite in our custody.”
“S.I.G.” Ochre nodded, grim faced as he stood, a plan of attack already starting to formulate.
0o0o0
It was just before dawn when Ochre struck.
Using the Magnacopter to bypass the perimeter fence, he, Grey and Magenta, along with a sizeable commando team, slipped through the fading night to the Stillwaters facility. Another half a dozen Magnacopters were coming with more commandos and officers scrounged up from across North America, along with two investigative teams from Spectrum Intelligence and the local WAAF base at Edmonton was being stripped of every able bodied person to help, but assembling the extra forces was taking time that couldn’t be spared. No one had wanted to chance Doctor Millien escaping them, so Ochre’s advance party was going in first to secure her and the replicant.
That being said, while the orders from White in their official briefing had been to capture her, in the unofficial briefing that Ochre held while waiting for the Magnacopter to be readied, he expressed that he wouldn’t be upset if he had to write ‘shot while resisting arrest’ or similar when he was doing the after action report. By the time he explained what she’d done to Bronze and Scarlet, the agreement with this viewpoint was universal.
They landed between the second and third checkpoints and ran through the pre-dawn gloom to the Stillwaters building. Perhaps a dozen lights showed at different windows, but by and large it was dark and quiet.
The lone guard in the last guard shack had dozed off, making their job that much easier. Mindful of the camera above the guard, Grey poked the muzzle of his gun in the cracked open window and shot him in the leg with a tranq dart. He’d be out for hours.
“Mags, do your thing.” Ochre nodded to the key panel beside the door of the guard shack.
Magenta nodded and had the cover jimmied off in seconds, plugged in a small thumb-sized device and put the cover back on. A quick, hushed conversation with Green followed and he grinned tightly at Ochre. “We’re in luck, all the security systems are on one circuit,” he told them. “Give Green another two minutes to record footage for the camera loop and we’re clear to go in. He’ll keep cracking through their security systems, but he should have the front door unlocked by the time the electronic eyes are on loop.”
It was quite possibly the longest two minutes of Ochre’s life as they waited for Magenta to get the okay from Green. Finally he nodded and they moved like shadows through the landscaped surroundings to the front doors. Ochre pressed the appropriate buttons on the keypad and waved everyone into the foyer.
The exquisitely appointed space was eerie in the glow of the tropical fish tank behind the reception desk and everyone was on their toes, weapons drawn as they fanned out. The augmented orderlies that Scarlet had warned them about had them all worried.
Magenta quickly went to work on the reception computer and had a floor plan up on the screen in moments.
“Okay, three teams,” Ochre decided as he scrutinised the plans. “Grey and Magenta, take your teams and find the security centre. Once you’re in – Magenta, you get into their bio-bracelet tracking system and locate Doctor Millien and anyone who worked on the parasites or incubator and see if you can find somewhere to plug in and have Green drain their servers dry. Grey, you round up the targets as Mags locates them for you. I’m going for the incubation room in the West wing. Once that’s done I’ll join you on prisoner detail. The Angels are circling at altitude to pick up any escape vehicles, but stay sharp in case there’s other surprises here.”
“Understood.” Grey nodded grimly. “Be careful.”
“S.I.G.” Ochre adjusted the long-barreled Mysteron gun slung over his back and waved his team over as he made for the right hand door off the foyer while Magenta and Grey took the left.
0o0o0
The facility was like Cloudbase in some ways, Ochre reflected as his team fanned out around him. They were all moving at a half crouch, leapfrogging each other as they checked each intersection and waved each other through when it was clear. Just like on the base, though it was night, the building never truly slept. There was always something that needed attention, as proved when they intercepted two guards escorting a technician wheeling a cart of something in shock-proof containers.
If his commandos were perhaps a little overzealous when they pounced on the trio, disarming them with ruthless efficiency and leaving them zip-tied in a handy cupboard, he couldn’t blame them. Spectrum was tight knit by the simple nature of the organisation, Cloudbase staff even more so. An attack on one was viewed as an attack on all by Cloudbase people.
They ascended the same staircase that Scarlet and Doctor Millien had used the day before. The lab that Elizabeth had showed off was almost empty but for a handful of staff babysitting various experiments. Ochre led his team past, hugging the opposite wall and hoping that no one would look up at the wrong moment. He paused at an intersection, rechecked the rough map he’d drawn on the back of his hand and waved his team down the left hand hallway.
Two more corners were navigated without issue and they were standing outside the unmarked door with pump noises rumbling behind it. By now Green had complete control of the security systems and it only took one quick radio call to get the two doors open. He and his team first swept the room with powerful flashlights to flush out any hiding orderlies. Finding none, he had two commandos guard each door and another two duck off to go find a stepladder while he walked back along the row of oversized metal gas tanks to the lone water tank in their midst.
She was still there, exactly as Scarlet had described. Ochre gritted his teeth as bile bubbled at the back of his throat at the inhumanity of it all – a woman first being murdered and turned into an assassin, then instead of being allowed to rest in peace she was being used to turn out creatures that belonged in a horror movie.
There were times he almost believed humans deserved everything the Mysterons had up their sleeves for them. As he looked at the pitiful figure drifting in the tank a vaguely remembered phrase from a Classics class floated to the fore of his mind – homo homini lupus est – man is wolf to man. It certainly rang true at this moment. People really could be awful to each other if the stakes were right. Maybe the Mysterons had some justification in their chastisement of humanity after all.
But then he recalled what had led to this – the Mysterons had started this particular chain of events with the murder of an innocent who had no blood on her hands, who in fact was working to do good things. Doctor Elizabeth had simply picked up where they’d left off and was using her to emulate the actions of the Mysterons. No one had the moral high ground on this particular battle except maybe Spectrum and himself, here to balance the scales. Not that he really wanted to be the one doing this, but sometimes, needs must.
The two commandos returning with the stepladder interrupted his musings. They set it up and prised open an inspection hatch on the top of the water tank – encumbered by the unwieldy Mysteron gun, it was safer for him to wait until the preparations were made.
“All ready, sir,” one of the commandos reported as they got out of the way. Ochre nodded grimly to them, unslung the weapon from across his back, mounted the steps and pointed the Mysteron gun at the replicant.
It smelled like the tank was full of salt water, which he was glad of – he wasn’t an electrical engineer but he knew enough to know that salt water meant not only would the electricity get the replicant, but also any parasites hiding in the bottom of the tank.
Scarlet hadn’t been the only one to go on a fact-finding mission to Engineering after Doctor Magnus’ untimely end on Cloudbase. After all the captains and the colonel ended up down there with the same questions the engineering team had put together an educational presentation – ‘High voltage electricity: how to recognise it, weaponise it and not get killed by it’ had been a popular lecture topic for a good few weeks after that particular incident. ‘Water and electricity is bad’ had been a lesson the engineers had done their best to hammer home, right alongside ‘salt water and electricity is worse’.
He aimed carefully, made sure he was isolated from the tank, and fired.
0o0o0
At the same time, Grey and Magenta had been making a direct line to the security hub at the crux of the T-shaped building, a subterranean room well below ground level. They’d encountered three patrols so far and subdued them with barely a hint of alarm, the element of surprise on their side. But at the hub there were two guards manning the door, alert and undistracted, pistols at their hips. This was going to need a different approach.
“How do you want to play it?” Magenta whispered to Grey. They were huddled at the top of a flight of stairs leading to the hub, peering around the corner and down at the guards
“Quietly, I don’t know how thick that door is and I don’t want to give the game away.” Grey turned to his team leader. “Barrets, knockout gas.”
“S.I.G.” She grinned tightly and pulled a small round grenade from her belt, about the size of a tennis ball.
The two captains backed off and Barrets crouched to peer down at the hub, measuring the distance. She pulled the pin, released the spoon and waited a moment before lobbing the grenade with a smooth underarm throw. Her timing was perfect and the gas grenade detonated with a sharp pop right at head height, releasing a thick cloud of white gas. Before either man could think to cry out, the gas had taken effect and they crumpled.
They waited a minute for the gas to clear, then swept down the stairs. While the commandos searched and zip-tied the guards, Magenta helped himself to their key cards. “Once we’re in, stash the guards in here with us, then I want four on the door and two at the top of the stairs,” he ordered his team leader, a stocky man with a broken nose who answered to ‘Jefferson’.
“Yessir,” Jefferson intoned, motioning for his team to form up to flood into the security room.
Magenta took his position near the card reader, nodded to Jefferson and counted down from three on his fingers. On one, he waved the key cards over the lock, the door obediently slid open and Jefferson and his commandos surged into the room with a roar of “Hands up! Spectrum!”
There were cries of alarm, sounds of a brief scuffle, then Jefferson came back out. “Three occupants, sir, all secured,” he reported calmly.
“Excellent work. Now, let’s see what their system has to say,” Magenta congratulated as he went in, Grey following close behind.
The security hub was fairly standard – banks of screens for the various electronic eyes, several computers and a wall mounted map of the facility with various rooms marked with different codes. The three people who had been staffing the room were tied to chairs at the back of the room with two commandos standing guard over them.
Magenta selected one of the computers and took a seat before it. “Well now, what have you got for me, my beauty?” Magenta grinned to himself as he massaged his knuckles then set to gutting the firewalls and linking the computer system to Cloudbase, activating his RadioCap as he did so. “Magenta to Green, I’m in their system. Cut the recordings and give me the live feed on the security cameras. I’ve got the firewalls down and the remote link piped through my comms gear; drain the servers.”
“S.I.G. Starting uplink now,” came the reply.
A few keystrokes had him back to the home screen and Magenta flicked through the various programs on it, looking for the bio bracelet tracking, only to frown when his search came up empty. “No joy on the tracking system, I think that was a crock the doctor was peddling to pad out her ‘Mysteron’ story,” he reported to Grey, frowned and started hunting through the rest of the files. “I’ll see if I can find any sort of assigned rooms list or something.”
“Maybe I can help.” Grey turned to the three staff members tied to chairs at the back of the security hub. “Gentlemen, I am a reasonable man,” he began, arms crossed over his chest and looming with his full height. “You cooperate, you get nice things said about you to the judge. You don’t cooperate, you get lumped in with management as a full and willing accomplice. Just to give you an idea of things, murder is the lowest of the charges we’re aiming for.”
“Don’t need to tell me twice!” the oldest of the trio blurted. “What do you want to know?”
Grey pointed to the map on the wall. “Where’s Doctor Millien’s room and where are the people she trusts the most?”
Five minutes later, armed with a hastily copied map and a list of names that he relayed to Ochre, Grey was leading his team into the East wing towards the rooms occupied by the head of security Jack Jennings, head of R&D Mickey Hopeford and Doctor Elizabeth’s suite on the second floor.
Jack Jennings was easy enough to pick up – fifteen seconds to pick the lock, a gas grenade and he and the woman who’d been sharing his bed were zip tied, wrapped in blankets and laid in the hallway for Ochre’s arriving team to take to the foyer. Grey was very glad of the backup now that Ochre’s task was complete, things had been going slightly too well but also taking slightly too long. Dawn was breaking, people would be bound to start waking up soon and the personal quarters doors were all physical keys for some reason, not electronic ones that Green or Magenta could lock remotely to keep people penned up. They’d been glueing the locks shut as they went, but there were a lot of staff on site.
“How’s it coming?” Ochre asked quietly, all business as he caught up to Grey while they traversed a corridor.
“Mickey Hopeford should be next,” Grey reported. “Green says the next wave of Magnacopters and reinforcements should be here in twenty.”
“Good. I’m getting twitchy.” Ochre still had the Mysteron gun slung over his back and his service pistol in hand. “The orderlies haven’t shown up yet.”
They paused at a corner, Ochre peered around it carefully and ducked back, biting off a particularly sulphurous curse as he did so. “Spoke too soon,” Ochre whispered as he waved for their commandos to hang back. “Looks like Mickey Hopeford warrants a guard on his door. Two orderlies, and they’re big bastards.”
“Gas grenades?” Grey asked hopefully.
Ochre shook his head. “Too far, they’ll see us coming, and the angle is bad for trying to shoot them. Grey, take your team and go around and upstairs to collect the doctor. I’ll stay here, give it five, then we’ll try take them down. As soon as they see us there’s bound to be alarms everywhere, I’ll radio Magenta to lockdown whatever he can from the hub now, before we attack.”
“S.I.G.” Grey nodded and waved to his team to backtrack and take a different route to the next floor.
Ochre set the timer on his watch, quickly radioed an update to Magenta and a ‘tell the choppers to fly faster’ to Green. He briefed his team next – he was going to go first with two of the commandos and see if ordering the orderlies to stand down would work. If that failed, it’d have to be guns, at which point it could be expected to get messy. If that happened, the plan was to fall back to the foyer, bar the doors and wait for the reinforcements to arrive.
Ochre waited as the hands of his watch ticked through five minutes, then bold as brass, he stepped out with two of his team at his left and right, the others clustering at the corner behind him and ready to pounce.
“Gentlemen, I am Captain Ochre of Spectrum, the man you’re guarding is wanted for murder. Stand aside,” he ordered, hoping that maybe, just maybe, whatever had made them human juggernauts would have also made them thick enough to just obey any order given to them with enough authority behind it. That’s how it normally went in horror movies anyway – the flunkies, especially the enhanced ones, were all thick as bricks.
“Nice try,” the orderly on the left grunted in a voice that sounded like he gargled with gravel. He put two fingers in his mouth and whistled shrilly before he and the other orderly roared and charged like enraged bulls.
Ochre and his team brought their weapons up and a fusillade of lead cracked through the air, only just bringing them down – they collapsed within a foot or two of Ochre and his men. Then a door banged open and there was a chorus of more roars and pounding feet.
“Fall back! Fall back!” Ochre waved his team back the way they’d come, quickly reloaded his pistol and cycled through the clip to fend off the dozen or so orderlies that appeared out of what was apparently their dorm or something at the end of the hall. It bought him enough time to take a CS gas grenade off the belt of the commando next to him, pull the pin and send it skittering over the tiled floor to spew its contents in the midst of the pack. “Throw your gas grenades!” Ochre roared the order, reloading his last clip. “Save the flash bangs for last!”
He could barely hear an update from Grey but was too busy to acknowledge or ask him to repeat himself as they retreated. They worked their way back to the foyer, gunning down the odd suicidal charge by an orderly or taking out the occasional security guard that had joined in the defence of their complex, hauling their wounded with them – the guards had guns and used them freely. A couple of flash-bangs were tossed as they pulled their last people through the door, then it was slammed shut to contain the noise and light. Magenta was obviously watching and waiting for this – as soon as the last person had cleared the threshold, the heavy door bolted shut and the drop down security shutter fell into place.
Outside, the whup-whup-whup of multiple helicopter blades was a welcome sound as half a dozen Magnacopters and three troop transports dropped out of the sky to land on the manicured lawn and discharge their contents.
Ochre looked up as an Angel screamed in low over the building, then his epaulettes flashed green. He listened intently for a moment, then nodded sharply. “On my way.” Rick cut the call, ditched the Mysteron gun and pointed to his team leader. “Georges, contain things here, I’m backing up Rhapsody.”
“S.I.G.”
0o0o0
At the same time, using his hastily copied map, Grey backtracked with his team to an emergency exit that they’d passed earlier, exited the building into a blind courtyard and followed the black concrete wall to an external staircase for an emergency exit to the doctor’s suite on the upper storey. They ascended the stairs with care, then Grey and his team flanked the door. He nodded to Barretts and made sure his earplugs were well set as the door charge was slapped into place over the lock.
Even from out here they could hear the noise and chaos as Ochre launched his attack and hoping that it would drive the doctor away from her usual door and to the emergency exit, Grey gave his team the signal.
“Three, two, one!” Barretts hit the trigger on the detonator and the lock blew off with a sharp bang and a thick cloud of smoke.
“Spectrum! On the ground, now!” Grey roared out the words as he led the charge into the suite. He barely had time to react as two orderlies suddenly rushed towards them. Behind the orderlies, he could just make out some other people, one a woman in a pink dressing gown who had to be the doctor, fleeing out a door at the other end of the room. But he had no time to attend to them with the bigger threat bearing down on them. “FIRE!” Grey barked as he brought up his pistol to lay down a barrage of shots that the massive men almost seemed to shrug off. One of the commandos went down with a howl of pain and the sickening crack of breaking bones as an orderly punched him in the chest, but the orderly then crumpled with a howl of his own as Grey kicked him in the side of the knee, breaking the joint, and finished him off with a shot to the temple, while the other stopped in his tracks and folded with a groan as another commando brought their shotgun to bear and blasted him in the gut.
“Move, move! Rawley, the wounded, the rest, move!” Grey pushed forward into the suite, trusting his team to fan out, guard the door and take care of the injured.
The sumptuously decorated series of rooms showed signs of disarray – cupboard doors left open, drawers half out, bags and boxes lying about. “Grey to Ochre, in pursuit of the doctor, looks like we were just in time, she was packing to go,” Grey reported into his ’cap as he and his team worked their way through the rooms as quickly as they dared, haste balanced against caution and carefully sweeping each room for any other surprises that might be in wait.
Finally, as they approached a utility room of some sort at the very back of the suite, Grey heard the clang of something metallic slamming shut behind a secured door. Another door charge took care of that obstacle and they found a small, bare room that only contained a short metal staircase that led to a roof access hatch.
Grey threw open the trap door and peeked out onto the roof of the building just as some kind of protective dome finished retracting to reveal a small helicopter, the blades already slicing the air as it spooled up and took off. Battered by the downdraft, Grey ducked for cover and reached for his cap. “Grey to Destiny, white and blue helicopter taking off from the southern end of the building, has pilot, passenger and person of interest. Disable, do not destroy.” Grey felt a wolfish grin tug at his face as he looked up to where the fighters were orbiting. It seemed like the Angels were going to get a piece of the action this time.
“S.I.G.”
High above, Destiny tipped her Interceptor up on one wing and changed her heading, her wingmates forming up behind her. She narrowed her eyes, straining to see through the steely pre-dawn light as she looked for... there! She spotted the red beacon lights and white strobes of the helicopter as it tried to flee and allowed herself a small smile. She would have liked to have taken care of this herself, but one of her pilots had a much greater right to this target than she. “Rhapsody Angel, helicopter is at bearing 124, flying south. Make them land, oui?”
“Bearing 124, confirmed.” The response came a moment before the English pilot peeled off from the formation and swooped down like a striking falcon.
Dianne was a fighter pilot and before that a spy – a consummate professional who usually never let her emotions rule her. Usually. It was only the fact that there were other people in that helicopter that kept her from firing a warning shot that wasn’t.
Between her duties and Scarlet’s, she hadn’t had the chance to speak with her beloved while he was conscious, but she’d stolen moments here and there – slipping away to Medical to sit with him while he recovered, holding his limp hand in one of hers and used the other to stroke his cheek or finger-comb his hair back into some semblance of order. Paul normally hated it when people touched him unnecessarily while he was recovering, but he’d specifically asked her to whenever she visited him. Sometimes, when he was in that weird space between not-alive and not-conscious, he was vaguely aware of her presence and knowing she’d kept him company was a comfort to him.
Knowing what had happened to him at the hands of those people... her hands tightened on the controls of her jet as she plunged towards the helicopter. If the colonel had ordered a strike on the facility, she’d have instantly volunteered to be the one to drop the bunker buster bomb. Plus a couple of barrels of napalm. And white phosphorus, if she could find it, just to be sure.
With that thought in mind, she buzzed the helicopter as close as she dared, swooping around quickly enough to see it wobble wildly in mid-air as the pilot desperately tried to correct for the jet wash. It didn’t make any sign of attempting to descend though, so she came around for a second pass, buffeting it with her afterburners and making the civilian craft struggle to stay airborne.
Finally the pilot seemed to see sense and the helicopter turned back and started to descend. But as she looped around again, she could see some sort of commotion break out in the bubble cockpit of the helicopter. The craft bucked wildly, then dropped and landed heavily enough that the landing struts collapsed under it on one side, making it drunkenly list over.
As she brought her Interceptor in low, she could see what had to be the pilot tumble from the cockpit with a clearly broken arm, their good hand up in surrender, someone in a blue uniform slumped over inside the aircraft and a woman with dark hair and wearing a pale pink dressing gown run towards the woods from the other door of the helicopter. That could only be Doctor Millien.
“The helicopter is down and Doctor Millien is trying to escape. Pilot is wounded and surrendering, other passenger out cold, I’m going after her on foot!” Rhapsody reported as she landed her Interceptor on the road and jumped down from the cockpit, pistol in hand.
“S.I.G. Ochre is on his way to assist,” Green’s voice came back to her.
Ahead of her, Doctor Millien was fleeing towards the trees, unknowingly following almost the same path Scarlet had used when trying to escape her orderlies. Dianne followed her, pistol in hand and moving like the goddess that was her namesake, little more than a shard of moonlight slipping through the fading shadows under the trees as she hunted her prey.
Just as Scarlet had, Doctor Millien burst out into the clearing before the cliff and cursed aloud when she saw her path end in a cliff edge, then whirled to face her hunter, chest heaving as she gasped for breath and her face pale with fright.
“It’s a little different when the boot is on the other foot, isn’t it?” Rhapsody observed coldly as she stalked through the ankle high grass. The gun was pointed unerringly at Doctor Millien’s chest, her hands were rock steady and her eyes narrowed dangerously.
“You wouldn’t shoot me, would you?” She tried to wheedle, instinctively trying to appeal to or appease the more dangerous Rhapsody. “I’m unarmed!”
“After everything you’ve done?” Dianne scoffed, keeping her weapon trained on the doctor. “Don’t tempt me. Hauling you in in a body bag would be far easier and much more appealing right now.”
Watch their eyes. It was a lesson she’d heard in almost every self defence class she’d taken, from just about every teacher she’d had, right up to most recently when Paul had brought her down to the gym for sparring sessions and Harmony had taken her under her wing for further instruction. It didn’t mean to only watch their eyes, but to read them, to see where they are looking, to spot the little involuntary glances they are making as they try to plan out their next move.
The look was so quick she was barely sure she’d even seen it, a flick over her right shoulder and an accompanying little shift in the set of the doctor’s mouth. Dianne moved without thinking, instinct and training telling her to duck, twist left and move back just before air whooshed over her head as a massive fist swiped through the space she’d occupied moments before. She fired blindly at the moving figure, heard the yelp and saw blood fly in the morning air as she hit her mark.
“Kill her!” Doctor Millien shrieked from off to her left, but Rhapsody couldn’t spend any attention on her right now, all her focus on the wounded orderly now fixing her with a baleful glare.
He reminded her of a photo of a statue of a Neanderthal that she’d seen one time. Instead of the typical unkempt look and crude furs, the Neanderthal had been well groomed, presented to the viewer in a suit and looking relatively modern as he casually leaned on a railing. This orderly in front of her was much the same – tall and broad shouldered, heavily muscled and powerful, ignoring the blood staining his dark blue uniform from the gouge her shot had taken out of his side – the bullet had glanced off his ribs, at her best guess.
The orderly shifted his weight to lunge, but she was faster, fighter pilot reflexes letting her bring the gun up to his eye in little more time than it would take to blink. “Don’t even think about it,” she warned him coldly, “I can pull this trigger before you can move, and enhancements or not, not even you could survive a bullet to the brain.”
Crack!
At the sharp noise of a breaking branch, Dianne instinctively glanced in the direction of the sound and several things happened at once – taking advantage of her distraction, Doctor Millien had turned on her heel and fled along the edge of the ravine in the general direction of the main road. Then, seeing Rhapsody glance towards the sound of the branch that the doctor had stepped on, the orderly tried to take a swing at Rhapsody.
Dianne’s finger tightened on the trigger, her pistol spat lead and the orderly made a ghastly noise as the bullet tore through his throat. Dianne whipped around to draw a bead on the fleeing woman, barking out the words “Stop or I shoot!”, but cursed as the doctor reached the cover of the trees.
BANG BANG BANG!
Just inside the protection of the trees, Doctor Millien stumbled to a halt and crumpled, folding at the waist and the knees before she went face first into the forest floor.
Half an eye on the orderly, just in case he wasn’t as dead as he looked, Dianne watched as Ochre strode out of the trees into the strengthening light of the morning, pistol in hand. He nudged the body with his foot to make sure she was dead, an inscrutable expression on his face, then looked over at Dianne and nodded when he saw the dead orderly at her feet. “Well, that’s that then.” He holstered his gun as he spoke, then touched one hand to his cap. “Ochre to all points, Doctor Millien is dead, finish securing the site. Let’s get this over with.”
0o0o0o0o0o0
Two days later...
“Well, I can quite happily say that you’ve got a clean bill of health,” Fawn told his most regular patient as he put down the ultrasound wand. They were in the usual recovery ward for Scarlet, and after what was probably the most exhaustive round of testing since his first revival on Cloudbase, the final examination was at last complete
“Thank heavens for that.” Scarlet breathed a sigh of relief as he sat up and wiped the gel off with the damp towel Fawn passed him. “Can I go now?”
“Yes, you’ve got a 24 hour medical stand down, but after that you should be ready for duty at 1500 tomorrow,” Fawn told him. “Take it easy, you’ve had a rough few days. By the way, I didn’t mention to you that Rhapsody ‘pulled a muscle’ in her shoulder this morning fighting a storm to bring Blue back from his mission so they’re both on a 24 hour stand down now too, starting as of, oh, five minutes ago.” He winked. “Absolutely not a coincidence at all.”
Scarlet caught the drift and grinned back as he grabbed his undershirt from the pile of clothing on a chair beside the bed. “S.I.G., Doctor Fawn, and thank you.”
0o0o0
Meanwhile, Ochre sat stiffly before Colonel White as the latter finished perusing the former’s final report on the mission.
“All in all, sterling work, Captain Ochre,” White congratulated him. “A textbook mission – all parties involved secured, potentially crucial information obtained and only minor injuries taken. A pity that Doctor Elizabeth Millien will not be facing trial, but sometimes we cannot have everything.”
“Thank you, sir.” Ochre allowed himself to relax a little.
“But something is still troubling you?” White shrewdly asked, hands steepled before his face.
“Yes, sir.” Ochre paused, opened his mouth to reply, stopped and shook his head, then tried again. “It’s not in my report, Colonel, and I know the autopsy report said pretty much everything but the cerebellum was gone, but while I was in the incubation room, when I was ready to shoot... I could swear that the replicant... well... she seemed to look up and open her eyes, realised I had a weapon pointed at her... and... she nodded,” Ochre explained, clearly troubled. “Either the replicant wanted to be put out of her misery or something of the original person was still there.”
“And now you are concerned that that may be true of other replicants? That something of the original might still be lurking there, perhaps salvageable?” White asked quietly, his brows drawn into a frown of deep thought. “I can assure you, this is a concern I’ve long held. But consider this – if that was you, seeing yourself do terrible things with no way of stopping yourself, what would you wish?”
“For someone to do what I did.” Ochre’s expression wasn’t any less troubled, but he nodded his understanding. “I just hope it doesn’t come to that with someone from Cloudbase.”
“As do I, Captain. As do I.”
Fin.
Footnote:
Once again, my thanks to Chris for hosting the challenge, Hazel for the read over, ideas and beta-read, to Hubby for letting me horrify him with the idea of the parasite and to Jmount74 and Sineater on Ao3 for idea-bounding, encouragement and writer’s block-busting.