The stillness in the Ferox gaze chilled him. Jonathan saw something that neither he nor Douglas had ever seen before. The black drained out of its eyes. The creature, it whimpered—but not from the pain of its injuries.
As Jonathan watched, he realized something that he’d previously only known on an intellectual level. The Ferox, they never showed fear—short of the brink of their own death—but he saw fear there now in those eyes turned white again.
Not the loss of a fight, but his words—he’d scared a Ferox with words.
It would have been easy to assume that the Ferox whimper came out of fear of the hell that he’s just described. But no, he knew that wasn’t what had so profoundly saddened the beast. Heyer had told him once that the Ferox only really feared one thing.
It wasn’t danger to their individual lives, but danger to the species as a whole.
“Keeping the media out of this is already a losing battle, Mr. Tibbs,” Olivia said. “But we’ll lose all control of the narrative if we can’t contain your activities to the base.”
“You don’t need to worry about the media,” Jonathan said. “Our only priority for the next few days is learning as much as we can about the creature.”
“Don’t worry about the media, how the hell do you—”
“We don’t have enough time to worry about what’s going on anywhere but inside this hangar. Now, it’s a long story and I’ll keep my promise to tell it,” Jonathan interjected. “Just as soon as we get your people to work.”
“My team has been working since the moment the creature was contained,” Olivia said.
“Good, let’s join them,” Jonathan said. “Before your people do anything too invasive, there is something I need to see taken care of. Then we can chat for as long as you want.”
She wasn’t happy about it, but she held out her arm as if to say after you.
He borrowed a thick coat and made sure to zip the thing up to his neck as he stepped out of the locker room and walked down the corridor with Olivia beside him. His presence was distracting enough without the light of his device making him a walking glow stick.
“What is so important it can’t wait?” Olivia asked.
Jonathan glanced at her. “The Ferox is carrying an alien object. A stone about the size of an egg inside its chest. It glows, shouldn’t be too hard to locate with the right equipment. Our first problem is that we need to retrieve that stone without killing the Ferox.”
“And what purpose does the object serve?” Olivia asked, her irritation already taking a back seat to the news that there was more alien technology in The Cell’s possession.
“It will really make a lot more sense if I explain along with everything else,” Jonathan said. “For now, it’s enough to say it’s primarily a big battery. It’s extremely dangerous for anyone except me to be anywhere near—especially if it gets damaged. So, I’m going to be keeping it near me at all times.”
“I’m going to need a lot more of an explanation if I’m going to let you walk around my base with another piece of alien technology.”
“You can have my word; I won’t leave the base with it. I’m trying to protect you and your people. But this is not a point of negotiation.” Jonathan said. “Trust me, once you understand why it is here, you’re not going to want anyone else near it either.”
She was quiet a moment as they turned a corner and approached the entrance to the wider hangar bay doors where Soils the Ground was currently confined.
“I agree for now,” Olivia said. “But this slack I’m giving you won’t continue if I don’t get answers soon.”
“I’d shake on it, but I’d probably break your hand,” Jonathan said. “Now, did your people locate the box that came along with the cage?”
“Yes, contained what looked like a surgical blade made from the alien alloy,” Olivia said.
Jonathan nodded.
“It’s half a solution to our next problem,” Jonathan said. “I know a lot about these creatures, but one thing I can’t tell you is how the hell to anesthetize the damn things. But I need to extract that stone without killing it. So, we could try cutting off its air supply long enough to knock it unconscious. Might work, but I make no guarantees.”
“If it doesn’t, you intend to perform surgery on it using this scalpel? While it’s awake?”
Two of her armed guards saw them approaching and held open the doors.
They entered the hangar. The huge space had mostly been emptied. Tall dividers had been erected to one side to create a smaller room with the Ferox containment cell placed at its center. A woman stood directing a few of the soldiers to move or set up equipment, while others were heavily armed and standing watch over the cage.
“Not me, I don’t have that steady a hand. I’m gonna be in there helping to hold it still. You got a surgeon around here with balls of steel?” Jonathan asked.
Olivia walked away from him to speak quietly to the women there.
After they exchanged a few hushed words, she turned to him.
“Jonathan, let me introduce Dr. Watts.” She gestured to the woman beside her.
“Well, I guess my proverbial balls of steel are at your disposal,” Dr. Watts said.
THE QUEUE LOOP | ACTIVATION THIRTEEN
“You have to be allergic to something. Poisoned by something,” Jonathan muttered.
He hadn’t been talking to the Ferox, but it heard him and responded nonetheless, and its reply was disheartening.
“What did it say?” Dr. Watts asked.
Jonathan sighed. “It doesn’t understand. Has no Feroxian word to match the concept of poison or allergy.”
They watched the Ferox through a layer of the same thick transparent plastic his prison cell had been made from. That plastic had nothing to do with keeping the Ferox caged. What kept the beast restrained was the Borealis steel bonds he requested from Mr. Clean every time he was activated. If anything, the plastic shield was a splash guard. It protected Jonathan and The Cell’s researchers from getting any unwanted materials on them during testing.
Starves the Famine. That was what it called itself when he was capturing the molting Green. Jonathan had stopped thinking of it that way. The Ferox didn’t have a name, it wasn’t Starves the Famine, but test subject thirteen.
Thirteen was no longer fighting against its bonds. Like its predecessors, it had realized the futility after a few hours. Most of the Ferox eventually figured out that their best choice was to save their strength and wait for an opportunity to get free. Jonathan took precautions to ensure no opportunity ever presented itself. The main one being that he never left the lab while the Ferox was still alive.
Thirteen was a little beat up. Minor wounds received while Jonathan was subduing it. Its only real injury was a surgical incision that ran down its torso between two of its plates of biological armor.
Being in open war with Malkier had changed the rules of engagement. Mr. Clean still couldn’t provide him a space gun, that hadn’t changed, but there was a grey area between Borealis tools and weapons. Before, when Jonathan needed to retrieve a portal stone from inside a Ferox he had to go about it by beating on its armor with blunt force until something broke. This usually ended the Ferox’s life as well.
That surgical cut was made possible by something that fell into the grey area between weapon and tool. The strength of true Borealis steel and Mr. Clean’s ability to shape it to his specification, allowed the AI to provide him with what they were calling a molecular scalpel. The edge of the blade was only a few atoms wide; sharp enough to get through the softer spots of the Ferox’s exterior armor without killing it.
That wasn’t to say it was a pleasant experience for the Ferox. After all, if they had anesthesia that worked on the creatures, then this exercise might not even be necessary. Unfortunately, even Borealis steel wasn’t truly indestructible. The scalpel’s edge could hold that razor thin sharpness for only a few cuts before the physics involved reduced the knife to only amazingly shar
p—but not sharp enough to cut through Feroxian armor.
Even dulled it was still far more impressive than anything Earth based, but when Jonathan considered the idea of weaponizing the atom thin razer’s edge for future encounters he did so knowing the blades would rapidly lose effectiveness. They’d need to be swapped out like spent ammunition. While this limited their combat usefulness, he certainly wished he’d had one before today.
The thirteen specimens had produced a lot of information regarding weak spots. Pressure points that could be exploited, softer tissues at the fusions between plates of biological armor. That was all well and good, but Jonathan needed a universal weakness that could be used on a larger scale. Something a man didn’t need to be in a one on one encounter to exploit.
And that was why the subject in front of him continued to vex him.
“Liquid nitrogen on the exterior skin is—eventually—effective, but the quantities that would be required to weaponize it against a large number of assailants aren’t realistic. For that matter, we also don’t know how well your skin will protect you from that much cold . . .”
Olivia paused to look Jonathan up and down as though he were the specimen. “Unless you’d like to volunteer to be a guinea pig and find out?”
Jonathan shook his head. “Find something that works on them and I’ll take a bath in it for you, until then I’m just going to assume that, yes . . . it would hurt me,” he said.
Over the course of testing twelve live specimens—it would have been thirteen but Jonathan had torn the first to shreds during his experiment with the adrenaline shot—they had exhausted the laundry list of chemical weapons the armed forces had at their disposal. None had managed to get more than a sneeze from any of the specimens, and even that sneeze had been inconclusive.
Biological weapons had no effect either.
Viral agents were a nonstarter. The Feroxian cells were too different from Earthlings to be infected. Bacterial agents might have a chance but so far nothing they had exposed the Ferox to had resulted in any symptoms. This may have been a simple matter of incubation periods, but a weapon that might start slowing down the enemy after a week was of no use to him. That said, if Jonathan failed, humanity might need to explore the option further in the aftermath of the coming invasion.
They had tried pesticides, known poisons, and various other nasty chemical concoctions the researchers doing the autopsies thought might have a chance.
One item that had been somewhat effective was a flash bang grenade. The deafening noise didn’t seem to bother the beasts, but the sudden burst of bright light could impair their vision. The effect didn’t last as long as it did on a human, and only worked if the Ferox was caught unprepared. Still—he could see uses for it.
“We haven’t tried garlic, works on vampires,” Dr. Watts said, smiling at her own joke.
It was possible that Jonathan had spent more time with Dr. Watts than anyone else in The Cell. She was the one extracting and examining the portal stone from each specimen. Jonathan couldn’t risk a shadow—especially Dr. Watt’s shadow—being accidentally transported to the Feroxian Plane. Each iteration of her shadow knew way too much about what Jonathan had The Cell doing. As such, they had to establish a protocol where she always remained within six paces of Jonathan when she worked with the stone. She understood that he might well toss her across the room if the stone were compromised before he’d risk her catching a ride to the Feroxian Plane.
After repeatedly going through this on each iteration of his queue, Jonathan had become far more familiar with her, than she with him. She had to get more and more used to Jonathan’s familiarity each time, while he remained an almost complete stranger to her.
To Jonathan, she was one of the greatest assets The Cell could provide. Her curiosities in regard to the Ferox often taking them down tangents of inquiry that others might not.
“Garlic,” Jonathan whispered, a thoughtful expression on his face before he turned to Olivia.
“Send someone out to a grocery store, a spice store, a farmer’s market . . . I don’t care,” Jonathan said.
“I was joking,” Dr. Watts said.
“But you made a good point. Something mundane to us might be a problem for them, and all the better if we find something that won’t affect humans.”
Olivia looked at him as though she wasn’t certain. “We’re hoping for a peanut allergy?”
“Maybe. Look, I’ll shove mayonnaise down its throat, lather him in honey, and spray him with Febreze if there’s a chance something will bother the damn thing.”
Olivia arched an eyebrow at him but picked up a communicator to pass on the order for, “. . . groceries.”
“I suppose you never know until you try,” Dr. Watts said. “I saw a movie once where the aliens were killed with shampoo.”
Taking a break from the beast he joined Watts to observe her progress with the portal stone. Had she not been a shadow, had they not been in The Never, Jonathan wouldn’t have let anyone from The Cell within a mile of that stone. It seemed inevitable that their Earth Prime counterparts would eventually learn about the implant inside him. That meant they’d learn there were similar implants inside every man that would be on the front line of this war. That meant, he didn’t want any of their true selves learning how to activate those devices or mimic the power supply. However, seeing as how whatever the researchers learned while he was inside The Never stayed with him alone—he could allow the shadows to help him gain information.
The testing, while not revealing anything he didn’t at least have a sense of, did begin to fill in some details he’d not considered. For instance, the stone was remarkably difficult to damage—impossible for anyone but himself. He’d come to suspect they were designed to only break under specific circumstances.
The first was obvious. When it occurred to him, he remembered Heyer teaching him to break the stone that first night on the docks. Specifically, that the alien had made him remove his gloves. Perhaps that meant someone like him had to be in physical contact with the stone for it to become breakable. That made sense; if the stone was fragile while it was inside a Ferox it might be broken in the middle of a fight.
He suspected that if that were to happen, the man fighting the Ferox would be stranded inside The Never and would die inside when the temporary dimension collapsed.
The second instance was when a Ferox killed someone like himself.
There was a clear link between his device and the stone It was the reason he could sense its whereabouts inside The Never. Jonathan suspected that when a human combatant died, the device somehow triggered the stone to self-destruct. While he had no idea what the exact mechanics were, he knew the results. The Ferox and its trophy were returned to the Feroxian Plane, while the human implant itself was returned to Heyer’s armory.
The one time he had begun to ask Mr. Clean about any of this, the AI had been very reluctant to give details. Jonathan had a strong sense that neither Heyer nor the AI wanted him, or any man, tampering with the stone and—given a mistake might leave them stranded in The Never—he didn’t blame them.
At the moment, Dr. Watt’s stool was in front of a Biological Safety Cabinet. The BSC was a semi-sterile environment, not to the level one might use if they were dealing with a viral contagion, but rather a ventilated enclosure with a window that allowed her to reach inside. It made it possible for her to have various chemical components open inside the cabinet without the fumes spreading into the lab, but at the same time keep the stone isolated from any materials.
She sat with latex gloves, reaching through the window where the stone was suspended in a small vice over a thick layer of cushion. In one hand she held an eye dropper, likely containing one of various solvents she was testing. She wasn’t being too liberal with the stuff but dripping it slowly onto the surface while she attempted to scrape off a small piece of the outer shell with the molecular scalpel.
She’d yet to have had any luck. Despite the stone’s resi
lience, she was wisely wary of applying too much pressure in case she was suddenly successful in weakening the exterior. She treated the stone like it might become as fragile as an egg at any moment. However, this didn’t seem to be the case with whatever she was testing now.
She groaned. “Maybe if you touch it while I make the cut?”
Jonathan shook his head. “No, not while Thirteen’s alive. Can’t risk him getting home and reporting what we’re doing here. That and . . . well, let’s just say there’s a very specific message I want these bodies to give their leader once we’re done here.”
“That doesn’t sound the slightest bit creepy,” Dr. Watts said.
She put the scalpel and eye dropper down. “I can’t run any tests on this if I can’t get a sample.”
“You’ve been at it for hours,” Jonathan said. “Take a break.”
She sighed but took the stone out of the vise with a set of laboratory tongs and placed it into a cup of sterile water. “I ever tell you how much it looks like dyeing Easter eggs,” Jonathan said.
She smiled and finally placed the stone on a sterile cushion to dry.
After a while, Olivia came back with three guards carrying the first batch of random groceries. At which point Jonathan had to step behind the plastic spray guard and begin force feeding the Ferox. None of the researchers would have dared getting so close to the thing, and even if they did, they would have needed a Borealis steel car jack to pry its mouth open.
Thirteen spat out most of what he put down its mouth, though he didn’t seem to mind meat products. Occasionally the Ferox growled something that Olivia and the rest of the staff couldn’t distinguish as any different from the numerous other times it made noises.
“Well, I am paraphrasing, but Starves the Famine here is threatening a very bad review over the cuisine being served,” Jonathan said.
Olivia didn’t seem to find any of this humorous, but Jonathan noticed a curious expression on Dr. Watts. “What is it, Doc?”
The Never Army Page 16