‘Let me go first,’ said Coleman, realizing Vanessa was just leading them in a straight line towards the center of the level. ‘Let me have a couple of meters head-start, just in case we’re not alone.’
Stopping at the next intersection, Coleman tracked the small ripples caused by his passage down the corridor. The intersection resembled the lee in a polluted river where all the rubbish accumulated. Ahead, bobbing office paraphernalia half choked the corridor. Left and right must have led to hard copy archives. The water was covered in white paper printouts. All the paper would soon sink into wet mash, but for now it formed an undulating white carpet. Except in those places where the human shape of a limb or torso floated.
There could be anything underneath the surface.
He pushed steadily through the paper and floating obstacles like a human icebreaker. Glass crunched under his boots.
‘All the bodies are grouped together,’ observed Vanessa.
It was a pattern of carnage that Coleman had already deciphered, but thought best to leave unmentioned.
She persisted. ‘Am I imagining it, or are all the bodies together?’
There were a few bodies in the corridors, but most of the dead were grouped together in closely adjacent rooms. They had passed two such places before Coleman deciphered the pattern. She was right, but she hadn’t yet realized why most of the basement casualties had occurred in concentrated areas.
‘The Captain knows,’ prompted Forest from behind Vanessa.
‘Do you?’ she asked.
Coleman turned, shot a disapproving glance at Forest, and then said to Vanessa, ‘You really want to know?’
‘Yes. Of course.’
‘Okay.’ Coleman explained as they pushed on through the debris. ‘These glass walls let the staff see the creatures coming. So they fled into the corridors, streaming towards the exits. But the creatures were already blocking the exits and moving inwards. When the staff found their exits blocked, they backtracked and tried different routes. This place would have been like a maze with carnage at every intersection. Whenever the staff encountered creatures, the people who survived tried to backtrack. This meant they ended up running in groups. It’s a natural instinct. The bigger the group, the more vibrations they made, and the more creatures would have been racing towards them. At some point the surviving groups ran out of places to run, so they retreated into the nearest offices and tried to barricade the doors with the furniture.’
Coleman pointed into a room full of floating bodies and shredded furniture. The glass walls on three sides of the room had collapsed inwards from the force of the creatures trying to get in. Every piece of furniture was shredded. ‘At the end, those rooms were completely packed with a swarming, fighting mass of people and creatures.’
From the rear, Forest said, ‘That’s pretty much the same way we met you, Vanessa. Except you were running on your own.’
Vanessa didn’t comment as she took in the gruesome explanation.
Reaching the end of the littered corridor, Coleman added quietly, ‘Cairns and Gould ensured there was no escape. I doubt a single person left the basement alive.’
At the end of the corridor, a short flight of stairs joined a small landing. The water lapped just below the landing.
Coleman felt for the step with his boot toe. He pushed aside the floating debris and climbed from the water. The others hurried after, none wanting to spend a moment longer than necessary in the water.
The landing served a steel hatch, exactly like a submarine hatch, right down to the wheel handle and black rubber seals. Stenciled in big yellow letters were the words Diving Arena.
The hatch stood ajar; Coleman moved to where he could peer through.
Looks clear.
‘Okay,’ he said. ‘It’s dry, at least.’
‘The control room’s just beyond the diving labs,’ said Vanessa. ‘We’re almost there.’
Coleman found the next two hatches wide open, and that by ‘diving labs’, Vanessa meant another network of even tighter rooms and passageways. The area gave a sense of moving through a large rectangular submarine. Stenciled signs directed to lunch rooms and amenities. All the hatches looked like the first.
‘These facilities encircle the diving arena,’ Vanessa commented. ‘Three corridors loop around the arena, with about a dozen cross corridors.’
‘Like a spider’s web,’ observed King.
‘Exactly.’ She reached the end of the corridor. ‘It’s not all for diving. Some areas are hydroponics. It’s easy to get disoriented. We’re in the middle now.’
She pushed open the last hatch.
Beyond the hatch lay an incredible room.
Thirty meters across, the chamber was dominated by a large rectangular pool. A strip of floor some four meters wide surrounded the pool. The control room – like a long VIP spectators’ box protected behind a plexiglass splash barrier - was located across the pool on Coleman’s left. A single sliding door in the plexiglass provided entry.
Coleman approached the pool. A submersible diving platform hung over the water. He studied the platform and then the flood-lit water. The blue-green water looked startlingly clear. There’s no bottom. This isn’t a pool. This is a hole into the underground aquifer!
Coleman pointed into the pool. ‘How deep is this?’
Vanessa paused on her way to the control room. ‘One hundred and sixty-three meters. We’ve already had two accidents down there.’
Coleman drew back from the edge. Various-sized dive suits hung from the walls. Piles of diving gear were slung over trolleys or packed loosely into orange plastic containers. Nearby, a small mobile air-compressor rested near a trolley loaded with scuba tanks awaiting refill.
Scuba diving under the desert? Amazing.
Across the pool to Coleman’s right stood a hatch with more yellow stenciling. This one read Hyperbaric Chamber. The arena’s third exit was in the far wall, behind the submersible platform.
Three exits. A hatch in every wall except the control room.
A yellow electric forklift was parked near the far hatch. Custom-made for the diving arena, the forklift looked the right size for maneuvering around the pool. Above the pool, a system of rails and a motorized gantry crisscrossed the ceiling. The hook and chain gantry was currently retracted.
‘Underwater cameras,’ pointed out Forest.
Two big screens in opposite corners of the room showed continuous underwater video feeds.
Vanessa touched Coleman’s arm and nodded towards the control room. ‘We should find some answers in there.’
The control room appeared undisturbed. A continuous workstation of computer consoles and microphones overlooked the pool. It didn’t appear any divers had been underwater when the evacuation sounded. Two half-finished mugs of coffee sat abandoned on the long workstation.
Coleman signaled Forest and King to watch the three entrances into the arena. ‘Work quickly, Vanessa. I don’t want to get caught in here.’ There was no back door to the control room. The sliding door in the splash barrier offered the only exit.
She unclipped her tablet. ‘I should be able to track anyone approaching the arena through the basement. We have video surveillance on this level.’
Coleman pointed out the abandoned coffees. ‘That explains how these two staff got out so quickly. They would have spotted the creatures on the cameras. Can you bring up the feeds?’
Vanessa finished connecting her tablet to the system. After a fast glance to ensure her data was uploading, she side-stepped to the next computer and tapped the mouse. The computer system was just operating in stand-by mode. In a second the screen was tiled with twelve live video feeds from around the basement.
‘They’re all operating perfectly,’ she said. ‘They’re wireless.’
‘That puts us in a much better position,’ observed Coleman, indicating for Forest to come over and monitor the camera feeds.
Forest sat before the computer. He pointed out one video tile.
‘What is that?’
He double-clicked the feed to full-screen mode.
The screen came alive with action. The entire camera feed filled with a thrashing maelstrom of creatures clambering over two large freight containers. The area below the camera appeared flooded like the rest of the basement. Only the top half of the containers showed above the water.
‘That’s the storage area under the freight lift,’ answered Vanessa immediately.
‘Why are the creatures attacking those containers?’ asked Coleman. The entire area churned with white water as the creatures assaulted the containers.
‘They look like two of our incoming freight containers.’ Vanessa leaned closer to the screen. ‘I haven’t seen those two containers before. They must have arrived this morning.’
Coleman stared at the containers on the screen. He felt answers blossoming in his mind. ‘That’s how Cairns gained entry into the Complex. Gould and Cairns were carried right into the Complex in those freight containers. They somehow activated the creatures and sent them sweeping clean the Complex ahead of them. They took control of the admin hub and then used the facility’s systems to influence the creatures’ movements while they broke into the research labs.’
‘But we got the templates first,’ said Forest.
Coleman nodded. ‘But Cairns had to have a backup plan. Just in case the creatures were less predictable than he’d expected.’
Coleman pointed to the freight containers on the screen. ‘He’s rigged up some kind of intense vibration source in those containers. That’s what we felt in the water earlier. The containers are right at the bottom of the elevator, under the freight lift where their vibrations would move up through the entire facility. Gould must have predicted that the basement was going to flood. Cairns knew the water would amplify the vibrations. That would draw all the creatures down into the basement and give Cairns the chance to withdraw his forces.’
Coleman touched the screen. ‘This is Cairns’s exit strategy. But he had to activate his backup plan early. It was probably when we were driving all those vehicles on the pedestrian loop. That’s why more creatures didn’t show up. This basement is one giant thumping vibration source.’
The worst kind of respect for Cameron Cairns grew in Coleman. ‘That means Cairns is now at the point of desperation. Those containers are the last things keeping him alive. He will probably only get one more chance to take the templates from us before the creatures become totally out of control.’
‘He’ll be gathering his forces,’ predicted King. ‘They’ll all be coming down here to get the templates back before the creatures finish with those containers.’
‘Weapons check,’ ordered Coleman.
All three Marines quickly took stock of their remaining ammunition. They were basically down to their personal sidearms. Forest had less than half a magazine remaining for his CMAR-17. It was nowhere near enough to even stall any attack from Cairns.
‘And I’ve got these two,’ said King, unslinging two short rifles from over his massive shoulder. ‘I took them from the bodies of those two just before we climbed in the elevator.’
Coleman remembered the two dead terrorists that had been lying near the scorpion truck when the lights had come back on. King had taken a P190 assault rifle and a second weapon, something altogether different. The second weapon was unlike anything Coleman had seen before.
‘That’s not a gun,’ said Vanessa, swiveling in her seat and taking the strange rifle from King. She turned the entire weapon-like devise in her hands, consuming its fine details with her eyes. After a second, she flipped open a panel on the side of the unit. On the panel, a picture of her sneakers suddenly appeared.
‘It’s a digital video camera,’ she said. ‘The barrel is a powerful telephoto lens. This thing on top that looks like a weapon site is actually a broad spectrum light source. It looks like it has infrared and night-vision capability.’
‘Can you check what they’ve been recording?’ asked Coleman.
She explored some of the options on the touchscreen. ‘It’s capable of sending the images directly via satellite to a dedicated receiver, but this one is configured to store its own data. Probably because of the C-Guards,’ she reasoned. ‘Here we go. Here’s what they’ve been filming.’
Coleman moved behind her seat and looked over her shoulder. The image that came up on the viewing screen was perfectly clear. The first piece of footage was the close examination of corpses killed by the creatures. From the background noise, the screaming, the footage had been taken during the first few minutes of the evacuation when people were still crowding towards the escape routes. Vanessa scrolled through the most recent footage, her upper lip twitching in reaction to the atrocities piled again and again upon the people she had worked with every day.
‘A good scientist always records their results,’ she remarked bitterly. ‘This is the outcome of Gould’s work being carefully documented.’
‘Wait - stop there!’ Coleman pointed at the small screen. ‘Go back about forty seconds.’
She backed the footage up.
On the screen, Coleman saw Fifth Unit come racing around a corner. They were cut down in a devastating hail of weapon fire. Coleman heard audio of someone giving orders, and then the camera moved forward and carefully recorded every detail of the ambush scene.
‘That had nothing to do with the creatures,’ said Coleman. ‘Why are they filming Fifth Unit?’
The scene cut abruptly to a new location. It was the rec reserve.
The next scene looked familiar. They recorded Fifth Unit’s stripped corpses in the recreational reserve. Their bodies already hung from the suspended walkway, and the camera man carefully filmed every wound Fifth Unit had sustained in the earlier ambush. After filming the bodies, the camera focused on Fifth Unit’s damaged equipment laid out on the forest floor.
Coleman fished in his pocket and came out with the small plastic container he’d found at the scene. ‘Does that camera use tapes?’
‘No. Not tapes. It uses these.’ Vanessa stopped the recoding and ejected a small memory chip. ‘They’re more durable than tapes.’
Coleman took the chip and slipped it into the case. It fitted perfectly. He snapped the case shut. The recording had reminded him of how devastating Fifth Unit’s injuries had been. The bullet wounds resembled explosive ammunition damage, but all the weapons captured in the recording were standard assault rifles. It was something Coleman couldn’t explain at the time, and clearly something of interest to the terrorists. Hence the recording, and the considerable effort to displays the bodies and equipment to good effect. Coleman had never seen injures like that in his life.
‘King, hand me that second rifle.’
King handed over a far more familiar weapon. A FN P190 assault rifle.
Coleman ran a critical eye over the rifle and then disengaged the plastic magazine strip. Looks normal so far.
He up-ended the magazine strip and flicked out the next round of ammunition. The bullet spun up through the air and landed in his palm.
He examined the bullet. Bingo. We have a winner.
He held the strange ammunition up between his thumb and forefinger. ‘Anyone recognize this make of round?’
King and Forest shook their heads.
‘Me either,’ declared Coleman, drawing his multiplier tool. He carefully clipped off the tip of the round so he could see the projectile in cross section. The inside of the round, which could be composed of a number of different materials, was alien-looking. ‘What type of bullet is this? It looks like some kind of seed implanted in a thin brass shell.’
Vanessa spun in her seat. ‘Show me.’
Coleman passed over the bullet.
‘Let me have those pliers,’ she said.
‘I’m not sure you should tamper with the projectile,’ warned Coleman.
She kept her hand outstretched. ‘Trust me.’
Coleman handed over the pliers.
‘More lig
ht please,’ she requested. Forest snapped his rifle’s flashlight onto where she worked.
She spent a minute dissecting the bullet’s projectile from its protective casing. She held up the object Coleman had discovered.
‘You know what that is?’ asked Coleman.
‘I know exactly what this is,’ she answered. ‘You’re first guess was very close. It’s actually a seed pod, not a seed. Lots of plants use explosive expulsion of fluids and gasses to disperse their reproductive units and deter predators. Some undergo a rapid internal chemical reaction that blasts open the seed pod.’
‘Is that what this is?’ asked Coleman.
She nodded. ‘Well, this pod doesn’t naturally exist anywhere in nature. It’s been genetically designed. My guess is that this specimen has been tailored to exaggerate its explosive traits.’
‘It’s the super bullet,’ said Forest, referring to a rumor that had been circulated through the military for the last twenty years. ‘An explosive high velocity projectile that can be fired from an unmodified assault rifle. They’ve been trying to design this for years.’
Coleman found it hard to disagree. ‘Could this do the type of damage we saw on the recording, Vanessa?’
‘I would say so. It’s a very small explosion, but a small explosion moving very fast into tissue that is already compacted from the force of the impact. Under those conditions it would cause massive flesh trauma. You’d basically rupture outwards from the point of penetration.’
She thought of something. ‘Didn’t you mention you were searching for two new biological weapons?’
Coleman nodded. ‘It’s pretty safe to assume that this is the second weapon that Gould was developing. Biological warfare on an entirely new scale. A living bullet. They wanted to test how the super bullet worked in a combat situation. They’ve been filming the results of both their new weapons. That’s why they strung up Fifth Unit. They were recording the effect of the bullets on military equipment.’
King articulated what everyone had just realized. ‘We’re in the middle of a field trial of their new weapons. We’re the guinea-pigs to be slaughtered for the cameras.’
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