Voidstalker

by John Graham

  It was a simple, commercial model, though the counter-espionage techs would have scrubbed it for malicious components and software before allowing it into the building. It was an older model, too, moving about on six motorised wheels instead of an anti-gravity cushion. Wheels? Really? In an age when Humanity could make a 100,000 tonne spacecraft hover above the ground, why not a simple cleaning bot? However, that also meant the drone had a simple, pop-open panel on its underside.

  Aster dug her nail into the groove and prised open the panel, exposing the components. There, hidden in the guts of the machine, was a red memory chip secured to the inside of the drone’s casing by adhesive. This wasn’t the kind of chip that a simple cleaning drone would need, in fact it wasn’t even connected to the drone’s circuitry. The manufacturing code indicated that the chip could store at least a zettabyte of data.

  Aster felt a leaden weight drop in her stomach. This kind of data chip was used to store and transport sensitive company information between locations rather than transmitting it through potentially insecure data links. The data chip, and whatever was on it, were proprietary material, and it clearly wasn’t meant to be found.

  Worming a finger into the circuitry, Aster peeled the chip cleanly away from the adhesive and held it up to the light. The weight in her stomach only grew heavier as she stared at the blood red data chip; but having come this far, she couldn’t just leave it where she’d found it. Aster slipped the fingernail-sized chip into her pocket and hastily reassembled the drone, before placing it back on the floor where it resumed its mindless cleaning routine.

  Then she fled the office.

  * * *

  After navigating the maze of service tunnels, the squad finally re-emerged into the main facility, itself a maze of pristine corridors and corporate offices. Ogilvy’s increasingly faint tracking signal was heading towards the laboratories at the opposite end of the enormous facility; at least that’s what their onboard maps were telling them.

  Losing a comrade in the field was bad enough; having a comrade be taken prisoner was almost worse. You could make your peace with the death of a brother-in-arms and resolve to avenge him later, but if he was captured there was no telling what might be done to him in captivity. The bizarre ravings of the treacherous maintenance technician didn’t give them any peace of mind, either; but that wasn’t even the strangest thing.

  The whole place was deserted.

  The facility was supposed to be big enough for a staff of a thousand or more, and yet apart from Marcus Teller and his dead accomplice, they had yet to encounter another staff member. There was no way only two men could carry a fully-armoured operator on their own, let alone whilst he was struggling and thrashing, so there had to be a lot more than just a dozen people in on the conspiracy.

  So where was everyone?

  To Gabriel, it was just as well that Ogilvy was being taken in the direction of their primary objective. Otherwise, this rescue mission was pure foolishness. As a soldier, he could certainly feel the need to rescue a brother-in-arms – or avenge him if he were killed, particularly one under his command. But if he had to choose between saving a soldier and completing the mission, he would have left Ogilvy to his fate. That wouldn’t make him popular with the squad, but events seemed to be conspiring to unite the two priorities.

  Ogilvy’s weakening signal meant that his captors were widening the distance between them. That, or the signal was being jammed, a difficult thing to do. Eventually, the signal disappeared from the squad’s sensors altogether.

  “Fuck!” Doran cursed, “Now all we have is his last known location.”

  “It’s better than nothing.” Bale pointed out.

  As they were speaking, Gabriel used his wrist-top computer and his command authority to deauthorise Ogilvy’s ID and remove him from the squad’s local network.

  “Woah! What the frick are you doing, colonel?” Viker demanded.

  “Using my command module to follow protocol.” Gabriel replied, minding Viker’s tone.

  “But you’ve cut him off from the squad’s comm. system!” Viker shot back, “what if he gets free and tries to contact us?”

  “He can still use his comm. to let us know that he’s free again,” Doran explained, “but unless Colonel Thorn reinstates his ID, he won’t be able to hear anything we say in reply.”

  “And more importantly, neither will his captors,” Gabriel added firmly, “Once a squad member is MIA, their gear is to be considered compromised until proven otherwise.”

  Viker was silent.

  “Unless you would prefer to allow the enemy to listen in on us?” Gabriel added.

  “No, sir.” Viker acknowledged grudgingly.

  “Good,” Gabriel answered, “then let’s go rescue Ogilvy.”

  The squad continued through the deserted facility until, at length, they reached the entrance to the laboratory complex. Ogilvy’s tracking signal had vanished beyond the door, but he had definitely passed through this way.

  The entrance was an atmospherically sealed door with a viewing window and another biometric lock, leading into a decontamination chamber. While the squad covered him, Doran planted Teller’s severed hand on the biometric reader. The reader rejected the hand with a red light and an angry beep.

  “Figures.” Said Doran, tossing the now-useless hand aside, “either they’ve de-authorised his biometric signature or he was never allowed in here in the first place.”

  “It’s another breach resistant door,” noted Viker, running his hand around the edges of the door, “Blast resistant too. Hard work even for a plasma torch.”

  “So you can’t cut through it?” Gabriel asked.

  “I probably could,” Viker replied doubtfully, “but we’d be here all week.”

  “I could try cracking the encryption, instead.” Doran suggested.

  “Do it.” Gabriel ordered.

  The squad’s motion trackers flashed red.

  “Contacts! Behind us!” Bale shouted as the squad spun round to face the threat.

  A silver object bounced off the wall at the far end of the corridor and slid to a halt in front of the laboratory door. Before the squad had time to take cover, the object detonated, releasing a wave of concussive force that sent them flying against the walls, temporarily scrambling their suits’ sensors.

  At the far end of the corridor, several creatures appeared from around the corner, bounding on all fours towards the squad with vicious, hungry snarls. Still climbing to their feet, the squad managed to raise their weapons fast enough to open fire, spraying flash-moulded pellets into the faces of the oncoming creatures.

  Two of the creatures dropped dead before they could close the distance, their flesh and wiry sinews torn to shreds by the gunfire. But one of the creatures managed to evade most of the bullets – ignoring the few that grazed its body – and got close enough to leap into the air towards Gabriel, knocking him to the ground.

  Gabriel found himself pinned down by a snarling mass of teeth and claws. His shields could protect him from extremes of pressure as well as block or deflect high velocity objects like bullets or shrapnel; but they were no good against the beast’s comparatively slow-moving teeth and claws. However, his armour still made him virtually invulnerable, and the creature’s teeth fractured as it clamped its jaws around his gorget armour.

  Someone managed to wrap an arm around the creature’s belly and yank it away from Gabriel, tossing it back down the corridor. As the creature rolled across the floor and tried to scramble to its feet, someone else shot it with a single round. The bullet penetrated at the base of the creature’s neck, punching straight through the vertebrae, and almost severing its head in one go. Death was instantaneous.

  “Thanks for the assist.” Gabriel said.

  He picked up his weapon and jumped back to his feet. With the immediate threat apparently neutralised, Doran returned to work on the door lock’s encryption while Cato covered the corridor in case of other threats. The rest of the squad
turned to examine the vicious animals that had attacked them.

  The three creatures were vaguely canine in appearance, but bioengineered beyond recognition as normal dogs. They had grotesquely enhanced musculature and elongated snouts lined with razor sharp teeth. Upon closer inspection, their teeth and claws had a dull grey sheen to them. They had been coated with nanopolymer, strong enough to make the enamel and keratin that made up the teeth and claws much sharper and more durable.

  There was something else visible in the mutant creatures’ ruined flesh. Gabriel stuck his gauntlet into the mangled meat of the mutant canine, and plucked out a single sinew of muscle, holding it up to the light. It was a dull grey colour and was strongly elastic. Holding both ends, he tugged sharply on the strand, but no matter how hard he pulled on it, the strand of muscle wouldn’t snap.

  “Synthetic muscle tissue?” Bale asked, crouching down beside Gabriel for a look.

  “Looks like it.” Gabriel concurred.

  “Who the frick would do this sort of thing to animals?” Viker said in disgust.

  As if to answer Viker’s question, the squad’s motion trackers flashed red again.

  “Another contact!” Cato shouted a little redundantly.

  The squad snapped back to attention and trained their weapons on the newest threat, closing ranks to cover Doran as he worked on the door lock.

  A lone figure stood motionless at the far end of the corridor, clad in a jet black suit. The silhouette looked vaguely female, but it was difficult to tell. The squad’s networked sensor suite couldn’t make heads or tails of her, but all she did was stand there, watching them intently whilst making no effort to take cover or attack them. Gabriel altered a setting on his weapon, switching from full automatic to a single, high-powered shot.

  “One shot from me,” Gabriel said, crouching down on one knee, “kill burst from you.”

  The squad understood exactly what he meant, and readied their weapons accordingly. Gabriel’s helmet optics were synced with his weapon’s electronic sights, so there was no need for an old-fashioned targeting scope. His HUD marked the target with a red outline and zoomed in for greater detail, projecting a virtual targeting reticle on the mysterious figure.

  With a clear image of the target now filling his HUD, Gabriel could see that the figure was indeed female, and the jet black suit she was wearing was combat armour, albeit not a kind he had ever seen before, lacking any visible protective plating. Her helmet was bulbous looking, like a classical drawing of an alien without any features drawn on, and she wasn’t carrying any sort of weapon, not even a simple sidearm.

  Gabriel took dead aim at the eerily calm target’s head, his helmet labelling the range as 38.913 metres, a reasonably close range. Just as he was about to squeeze the trigger, the figure slowly raised a hand and traced a finger across the back of its other hand.

  The biometric lock chimed approvingly and the reinforced door slid open, breaking the squad’s focus as they reacted to the unexpected sound behind them.

  “We’re in!” Bale said, relieved, “Good job, Doran!”

  “I didn’t do anything.” Doran replied, mystified.

  Gabriel snapped his attention back to the mysterious target. She was gone.

  “What do you mean you ‘didn’t do anything’?” Viker demanded of Doran.

  “I mean the decryption program needed another few minutes,” Doran answered, “something or someone opened the door for us.”

  “Who wants to bet our mystery target opened it?” Gabriel asked rhetorically.

  “Codename ‘black widow’ for later?” Cato suggested.

  “Sounds good to me.” Gabriel replied.

  The squad filed into the decontamination chamber and the door sealed behind them, the chamber filling with anti-hazard gas. The three mutant canine corpses were still visible through the now-clouded glass, bleeding out in the corridor like piles of discarded meat.

  Bu the ‘black widow’ was nowhere to be seen.

  * * *

  Slipping out of Lawrence’s office like a thief – which now, she technically was – Aster powerwalked down the deserted corridor back to her office, hoping to reach the safety and privacy of her own office before someone saw her.

  “Dr Thorn!” a voice called out from behind her.

  Aster froze up. Had she been caught already?

  She turned around slowly as someone approached; a young woman with a ponytail and a tablet computer in hand. One of the newer hires.

  “I just wanted to update you on the reactor core simulations we’ve been running.” She said, sounding slightly out of breath as she showed Aster a table of results on her tablet, “all the metrics look green.”

  Aster inclined her head to examine the graph of results; her muscles were rigid and her heart was pounding with the guilty fear of being caught.

  “Looks good to me.” Aster assured the woman woodenly, “email me the results directly and I’ll take a look at them later.”

  “We won’t know for sure until we do live-testing–” the junior engineer began.

  “I know, I know,” Aster answered, anxious to end the conversation, “but without authorisation from the board we can’t do any live-testing. Good work though.”

  “Thanks…Dr Thorn.” The junior engineer answered, puzzled by her boss’s less than enthusiastic attitude, “I’ll send you the results in a minute.”

  “Good. See you later, then.”

  Aster abruptly turned on her heel and headed back to her office. She didn’t stop walking until she had sealed and locked the door behind her.

  Though safe from prying eyes, she couldn’t bring herself to heave a sigh of relief. There was no relief to be had now. Unless she handed over the data chip to the authorities, she was now officially complicit in whatever Lawrence had been involved in.

  Aster fished the little red memory chip out of her pocket and stared at it. Logically speaking, Lawrence wouldn’t have gone to the trouble of hiding the chip if it didn’t contain important information, particularly information that he’d wanted to hide from his colleagues, or even from the company itself.

  Aster gulped at that thought. Normally, the stovepiped nature of the R&D process meant that the company board would be wilfully ignorant of the actual research activities, the better to reap high returns from questionable sources, and the better to sweep any incidents under the rug. But if Lawrence had evidence that the company board had direct knowledge of the incident; that would have made him a loose end…

  Still staring at the blood red chip, Aster’s head was swimming with unmade decisions. Should she look at the data at all or leave well enough alone? Should she access the data here in the labs or somewhere offsite? Should she hand over the data chip to her employers and risk a criminal complicity charge from the DNI, or give it to the DNI and risk getting permanently blacklisted from the private sector?

  The first decision was easy enough. Having taken the data chip, she may as well find out what was on it; but that still left the question of where to access the data from. The board of directors would be scrambling to contain news of the incident and rumours of malfeasance on their part. They would also be vigilant for employees seeking to jump ship by using stolen corporate secrets as leverage.

  All computer workstations had spyware installed to guard against corporate espionage from a turncoat employee, so accessing the data here in the lab would necessarily alert her superiors. However, taking the data chip offsite was also out of the question. Even if she could get it past the security scanners undetected, the data was corporate property and she would be stealing from her employers by taking it out of the building.

  Finally, whether or not she looked at the data herself, there remained the question of what to do with it. Accessing the data on a computer with company spyware on it would make running to the DNI afterwards a problem, whereas simply giving back what already belonged to the company might make the problem go away.

  But there was also Gabriel’s
position to consider. There were any number of ways in which she could be caught, all of which could burn Gabriel if his own wife was found to be involved in criminal activity, especially if it involved xenotechnology. Whereas if she went to his bosses instead of her own, it might earn them both points. As much as nepotism disgusted her, surely their marriage had to count for something.

  Aster clenched her fist around the data chip to hide it from her sight. People were dead because of the data she was holding, and the blood red colour was a far too literal reminder of that fact. Just looking at it made her stomach churn as much as her mind.

  It was also proving difficult to shake the unnerving thought that the company might simply cut her and the others loose once it knew for certain that anything incriminating had been safely locked away. The board of directors had already effectively sacrificed hundreds of their own employees to protect themselves, why wouldn’t they do the same to the rest of their workforce? In that case, there was no reason for Aster to alert them to the fact that she had the data. She would have to hide the chip first, then go to the DNI.

  Aster cast a fresh eye around her office. Where could she hide the data chip in case her office was searched again? The workstation was no good, since that was the first place anyone would think to look. What about the furniture? No. A decent scanner would detect anything electronic stuffed under the cushions. She couldn’t dismantle her computer and try to hide the data chip inside, and making a hidey hole in the wall or floor also wasn’t possible.

  There were no good hiding spots in her office. Come to think of it, why hide it in her office at all? If she came under suspicion, her office would be the most obvious place to search. She would have to hide the memory chip somewhere else in the building.

  Aster stuffed the chip back into her pocket and took a deep breath to calm herself. No one was any the wiser, and Felix had been convinced to drop the issue. She was still in charge of this research section, and in the absence of instructions from the board of directors, everyone was looking to her for direction. That ought to make it easier.