by Elin Wyn
The grin broke out, like I knew it would. “Nobody's checked all of those shelves yet. I'm sure there's something she could use in there.”
He turned a serious look on. “You promise you're not going anywhere other than the horror show over there?”
“I promise. They're there for a purpose. I want to know what it is.”
“Ronan will skin me alive if you get hurt. Please don't.”
I headed towards the tanks. “But at least it would give me something to do, sewing you back together.”
He didn't laugh.
I walked through the rows of tanks. There had to be an order, some connection between the experiments performed and the numbers engraved on the side of the tanks.
Maybe it was like the Venarian labeling system. First set of numbers referred to a class of experiments, second set to a further refinement within that class, the third set referring to that individual experiment.
Taking that as a starting hypothesis, could I find other similarities?
Of course, the tanks hadn't been stacked in numerical order. I muttered as I scribbled on one of the other tablets that we had found.
I could only see what had been done to the external body. No telling how much had been changed internally. But it was enough to start a theory.
I ran back and forth between the cylinders, grouping, comparing, spinning theories quite possibly out of no more than stardust and exhaustion.
I stood in front of one, occupied by a man that almost could have been one of Ronan's brothers.
But the hybridization had failed, the skeleton still obviously more lupine than human. It couldn't have worked; if it ever had lived, it would have been in horrifying pain to try to walk with the mish-mash of anatomy that I could see.
“It's like they were trying to re-create them,” I muttered. “But didn't know how.”
I walked to the tank that held the experiment that would've been next in the series. Nothing but a sad implosion of guts that had somehow never formed properly at all.
But they didn't know how. At least they knew to keep a record, probably trying to avoid past failures.
To run so many experiments at once was staggering.
I guesstimated the age of the dog-man at early twenties, looked around at the other more formed experiments, some with the bodies of children, others in their teens.
“This would take hundreds of years to breed, watching them develop, and then deciding if that variation failed,” I wondered. “Who could be running this for so long?”
Ronan's arms slid around me from behind. "Probably vat-grown."
“What?”
He laughed. “You don't think Doc kept a ship full of infants, do you? She had us decanted when we were about ten, I’d guess. Even in batches, we were still more of a handful than she could handle sometimes.”
He let me go, walked back down along the row of tanks.
“I'd bet they did a full-force grow on all of these, didn't decant until they decided the experiment was over. Faster, less mess.”
I thought about it. You could run almost everything simultaneously if you had enough vats.
But you wouldn't learn much doing it that way.
It would be like throwing everything at once to a wall and seeing what stuck, instead of trying a few things, analyzing what went wrong, and trying it again with better data.
I watched Ronan as he examined the tanks. The first time we'd been down here, he'd been angry. Now I saw nothing but pity in his eyes.
“Doc wouldn't have done it this way. She was better than that. Void, not morally. Doc’s morals were pretty firmly shaded to the gray side.” He touched the side of the tank that held the closest approximation to himself. “But skill? She'd never have turned out anything like this.”
"But then who was doing this, and what do they want? Why didn't they just hire her?”
“Maybe they did,” Ronan rumbled.
I looked around and he shook his head.
“Not for this. But look.” He stood away and, for the first time, looked slightly uncertain of himself. “We ran missions, hired out to provide funding for the ship. Doc’s hobbies didn't come cheap. But she took plenty of private clients.”
I waited. Nothing I said would make any difference to what had happened back then. But I had the feeling maybe she’d crossed a few more ethical lines than I’d realized existed.
“Nothing like this, we'd have seen it on the Daedalus. But bringing people on for a little adjustment here, a tweak there? She didn't have any problem with that.”
We headed back up to the secure area. If I had Dr. Lyall’s skills, would I have a problem adjusting people, tweaking their code?
I thought of Loree, trapped in a body that had betrayed her.
I would do it in a heartbeat.
Ronan
Hakon thought it was only fair, since I had been present for the mysterious damage in the engine room, that I help him test the rewiring.
“Anything?” he called out.
“No.” I'd been under the console for an hour now, waiting for one small light to turn on. But nothing; wire after wire, connection after connection.
It was almost enough to make me want to rip out the rest of it.
“What about now?”
I blinked. Finally, a flicker of light. “You're in the right area. How bright it's supposed to get?”
“Hold on, let me come down and look.”
I grumbled as I started to work my way out. Technically, there were maintenance grooves under the panels to let you go around and fix stuff without being tangled up in the wiring.
Practically, those grooves weren't designed for men the size of us.
I'd almost made my way out when my comm crackled in my ear, causing me to jerk my head and bash it into the last bit of control panel housing.
“Dammit,” I snapped. “This better be good.”
“Well, we could not tell you that Loree’s found a way to control the ship.” Nadira’s voice came through. “Does that count as good?”
“Wait, what?”
“Why don't you come up here and see if you're in a better mood when you see what we have to tell you?”
I finished crawling out and handed my tools off to Hakon. “It looked okay, but I gotta go.”
He stared at them without moving to take them. “You just don't want to test any more circuits.”
Stretching my back until it popped, I put the rejected tools down on the deck. “While it is true I don't want to do this anymore, I do have to go.”
He grunted and crawled back under the control panel to double check that my eyes hadn't failed us both.
Quinn leaned against the wall by the hatch to the secure area. “It's been like a parade, back and forth all day.”
“As long as it's a parade of our people, I'm okay with that.”
The soft voices of the women reached me before I got to Loree's door. Nadira’s voice sounded like she'd been crying and I stopped, torn. I wanted to comfort her, but if this was private, maybe I should let it be.
I glared at the wall opposite. Maybe Doc should've spent some time with us on how relationships work, instead of quite so much on tactics and strategy.
“I'll trust you to tell me when it's time,” Nadira said. “But don't wait too late, promise?”
“I won't,” Loree answered.
Humming loudly to announce my presence, I entered Loree's room. Nadira perched on the edge of the bed with a grin pasted on her face, but her eyes were bleak. I pulled her into my lap as I sat in the single chair, wishing things were quiet enough to talk. But that wouldn’t be today.
“Alright, ladies. Want to give me more details?”
Loree clutched the edge of the blanket, but I couldn’t tell if it was from nerves or she didn’t feel well. “Did she tell you about the missing room?”
My confusion must have shown enough on my face to be my answer.
“Sorry,” Nadira answered. “It slipped my mind. A
t the time I didn’t know if it was important, or just one more weirdness.”
Loree chuckled. “A little of both, as it turns out. It was in the schematics all along, just labeled wrong.”
She tapped the screen and enlarged.
“Auxiliary control room. We might not need to get into the bridge to get navigation back.”
This was great. But there was something else coming, I just knew it.
“What haven’t you said yet?”
“There are two problems.” She bit her lip and looked at Nadira, but I could outwait them.
“Always are.”
“First, the only way to auxiliary control is through a room with an odd cluster of heat signatures. I suspect they’re Hunters, but I haven’t been able to bring up cameras there.”
I nodded. “We’ve dealt with them all along. This time, we know where they are, and we finally have a few weapons.”
She tapped the screen again, then paused.
“The other problem is worse. You’re really, really not going to like this.”
And she was right.
You’d think Hakon wouldn’t mind a break from the repair job. But calling him and the rest of our small Pack back for a briefing was like catching spilt mercury.
“We’ve got a situation. All other tasks are on hold until we get this figured out.”
I gave Loree the nod. “Show them.”
With a flick of her screen, she sent the cam image to the holoplate on the wall where we could all see it.
“What is that?” Quinn muttered.
“Dunno, but I’m voting for setting it on fire now,” Lorcan answered.
“I don’t think you should do that.” Loree changed angles, but the image didn’t get any easier to comprehend.
A room, with what looked like a small control station running down the middle. It was hard to tell, because a sea of pink flesh, layered and striated in all directions, covered every surface.
“That’s the auxiliary control room. I think that’s how they’re controlling the ship.”
“So, no torching. Got it.”
“Not even ripping, blasting, or randomly cutting,” Nadira clarified. “We don’t know how deeply that tissue is embedded in the system.” She met my eyes, then looked away. Just because she was right, didn’t mean I couldn’t still be angry about it. “Which is where I come in.”
“When I first found the second control room, I couldn’t figure out how they’d locked the captain out from there. Surely it wasn’t designed that way.” Loree shuddered. “Then we got the cameras online.”
“With that creature?” Hakon approached the image, curiosity overcoming his innate crankiness. “They may have been able to trick`` the system into acting as if a human is at the controls. And has been, for as long as they’ve added to the thing.”
“You’re saying that’s alive? No way.” Aeden scoffed.
“In a technical sense, yes, I think it is.” In her field, Nadira was sure, confident. “Watching the room, there are pulses through the muscles. I think just enough to keep the room from shutting down, keeping the controls of the ship locked there.”
I took back control of the briefing. “And we have our favorite dance partners waiting for us down there.”
Loree brought up the schematic that showed the cluster of hot red dots.
“I’ll search for more weapons,” Lorcan volunteered, and Quinn nodded.
“Balance that with getting rest. There’s a whole series of compartments that I haven’t been able to get into before, and we’re going in blind. Regroup in six hours.”
Nadira
Xander took an exhausted Loree back to her room while I followed Ronan into the corridor and waited until his brothers had moved on to their assignments.
Ronan moved away from me and I brushed his arm. "Can we talk?"
“I don't think there's anything to talk about right now. You’ve made it pretty clear you won’t stay here where it’s safe.”
“How am I supposed to do that?” My pitch climbed, but right now I couldn’t do anything about it.
His hand cut through the air. “Let someone else go. You said you didn’t want to get involved in the fighting. So don’t.”
“Do you think you, any of you, have the skills to remove that thing?”
“You could show us. Walk us through, like Loree will on the comms.”
“She’s not walking you through how to reprogram the doors, she can do her work from here. I need to see what I’m doing. Are you sure the cameras won’t cut out halfway through? Do we know the angles are sufficient?”
I wrapped my arms around my waist, trying to stop shaking with anger. “Do you really think I want to go?”
The stubborn expression didn’t leave his face. “There're things to prep before we roll out.”
A small tendril of ice crept up my back at his distant tone. "What else needs to get ready? I saw that we already had weapons, we have the schematic and the comms. Your brothers found four fully charged laser scalpels for me. You’re the one that said we should rest."
"You should. I'll see you when it's time to go." He headed out of the secure area and I'd be damned if I would follow him.
Eventually I forced my feet to listen to orders. I retreated back towards our quarters, but, instead, turned in at the clinic and closed the door. If I were alone, this bed would do as well as any other.
When we left, I didn't feel particularly rested, but nothing to be done for it but to go through and get it done.
Quinn and Lorcan stayed with Loree, Quinn assisting her on the comms while Lorcan guarded the hatch.
They’d track us with the earcomms, and, with luck, be able to open the doors as we got to them without giving the Hunters within too much notice of our arrival at what they thought of as their stronghold.
Geir led us, followed by Aeden and Ronan. I stayed behind him, watching the rigid line of his shoulders moving before me. It would be so easy to put my hand on his side, try to wipe away the distance that had come between us. This probably wasn't the time. I’d just have to hope there was time later.
Xander followed me, for once all business, and gruff Hakon guarded the rear.
The brothers carried an assortment of small blasters, though I noticed several had knives strapped to their legs, as well.
My throat felt dry. I've never actually been around when a gun was fired. Not sure if I knew anyone who had.
I looked at the company I kept now and laughed at myself.
There was no question these men were as comfortable with the blasters in their hands as I was with the laser scalpels I’d packed.
In the belly of the ship, we emerged into a narrow hall, dark and tight.
“The first of the sealed doors will be in front of you shortly,” Loree's voice came through my ear. The link was uncomfortable, but Ronan had insisted I wear one, shoving it at me before we left.
“Yeah,” Ronan answered. “I’ve followed them this far, but never could get through.”
“Let’s see what we can do about that,” Quinn responded.
The men arranged themselves in some order that was logical to them. What didn’t change was my position behind them.
“There we go,” Loree murmured.
The door slid open and I winced at the wave of cold that rolled out.
Geir slipped ahead into the darkness while we waited. He came back with a quick nod to indicate that it was clear.
“We’re going in,” I whispered. Loree, in theory, could see every place we went by tracking the signal between her earcomm and ours. It couldn't hurt for her to have verbal confirmation, as well.
The first room lay empty in the dim light.
I shivered, wishing I'd found more layers in my scavenging. Or a coat, a long, full-length coat that would wrap around twice and cover my hands. I patted the pouch carrying the laser scalpels slung over my shoulder.
I had gloves, but only a thin, membranous pair for surgery. I wasn't sure what
tissue comprised the creature in the auxiliary control room. I had a disturbing theory, and the laser scalpels should cauterize any fluids as I cut.
Still, I'd rather none of it got on me.
Hakon stood by me while the rest of the Pack did a thorough sweep of the room.
Nothing, just another door leading on.
The second room was the same. Empty and, if possible, even colder. I tucked my hands into my armpits, thought about warm blankets, roaring fires.
Snuggling with Ronan.
Nope. Not going there.
“What do you think is up with the temperature?” Xander asked as he stood watch and the others inspected the empty room.
"No idea. If Loree’s right about tracking the Hunters by their heat signatures, maybe they need the cold to prevent overheating?" I scowled up at him. "If somebody had saved me a corpse to dissect I might have a better notion."
He didn't even grin. "After this, I'll try to make sure to save you one. But if we really can track them, maybe we can just kill them all and you won't need to know how they work."
Ronan signaled and we lined up again by the next door.
"Lousy plan. If you guys have run into these things before, it’d be stupid to assume you won't again. Killing them all here, doesn't mean they’re exterminated everywhere."
Ronan turned back and glared at us both for silence.
Fine. Whatever.
The third door opened, Geir went in for his patrol.
But this time it seemed to take longer. I strained my ears, but could hear nothing.
Glancing at the men, they didn't seem disturbed or concerned. Just intense.
Finally Geir’s voice came over the comm. “Ronan. You should see this.”
This compartment wasn't empty. But I wished it was.
The path through the room was clear, but, on either side, tossed like broken, discarded dolls, were bodies.
Tumbled piles of arms and legs.
I blinked then rushed for a closer look.
“This man, he was in the lab with us.”
I reached to turn him over, but Xander pulled me away. “Sorry, I don’t think you should touch them. We don't know what's been done here.”