Sean Dalton - Operation StarHawks 03 - Beyond the Void

by Sean Dalton - [Operation StarHawks 03]

  Two ahead of her. She could see past the decontamination booth now. A door slid open, yawning as dark as a throat. The young Boxcan disappeared.

  With a faint sense of shock Beaulieu found herself facing a globe that pulsed white. When it spoke to her, its synthesized voice was flat and impersonal. Somehow that made it easier.

  “Name. Species. Age. Gender.”

  Beaulieu answered these questions.

  “Step forward.”

  She obeyed, thinking even then that she ought to turn and make a run for it. What did it matter if her legs felt like cold molasses? Being shot in the back would be quicker than this.

  But she did not want the youngsters around her to misunderstand. She didn’t want to be thought a coward.

  Proud fool, she thought, and entered the booth.

  Gas, smelling of antiseptic, fogged lightly around her. It felt greasy upon her skin. The rear door of the booth opened and she stepped forward into the waiting darkness.

  The door closed behind her. She stood there, unable to see and slightly disoriented. Nothing happened. After a moment she drew a breath, feeling as though this whole thing was rather anitclimatic.

  A light flashed on, dazzling her so that she shielded her eyes with a forearm.

  “Beaulieu, A. Physician. Scientist.”

  Was that a statement or a question? Beaulieu waited a moment, then said, “Yes.”

  “Follow the light.”

  The overhead light moved to her left. Beaulieu frowned but followed it. She stumbled off a ramp and fumbled past a bulkhead through a doorway that slid open jerkily as though seldom used.

  The light was small and so tightly focused upon her that it gave her almost no illumination as to where she was going. It remained the only light she had. Sometimes it got too far ahead of her and had to wait, shining down at the floor until she stood beneath it again. At such times she was able to see that she was in a corridor, a very narrow one fitted with circuit boxes and sealed cables.

  Her last stun dosage wore off with the exercise. She began to feel better.

  “What the hell is going on?” she said softly.

  After a few minutes when this trip looked like it was going to go on forever, she stopped, letting the light move on without her. When it finally sensed she wasn’t following, it hovered.

  “Beaulieu, A. Physician. Scientist.”

  “Where are you taking me?”

  It made no response. She stood where she was. After a moment the light returned to her.

  “Follow the light.”

  It moved away, but Beaulieu did not follow.

  “Where are you taking me? I’m not following you until I know that.”

  The device obviously had limited programming. It returned to her. “Follow the light.”

  “No.”

  She had the feeling, however, that this argument could go on forever. Whatever was going on, at least she hadn’t been processed yet. Maybe she was being rescued.

  Grumbling beneath her breath, she walked forward. The light moved ahead of her, and she gave it no more trouble.

  When she began to think she would walk down this dusty, cold corridor for the rest of her life, the light stopped and shone upon a door.

  “Place hand upon sensor.”

  Beaulieu peered at the door and located an oblong panel upon the door. It didn’t look like a sensor, but there seemed to be nothing else. She pressed her palm against it. The door slid open, and light from the other side spilled through, engulfing her.

  She stepped inside warily and found herself in a gleaming, sterile room all in shades of white and soft gray, fitted with desks, human-contoured chairs, bio-computers, and a library containing rack after rack of hard data.

  Siggerson sat in one of the chairs, eating from a bowl of steaming liquid. Ouoji sat on the table beside him, their heads nearly level. She noticed Beaulieu first and her tail twitched a greeting.

  Astonished, Beaulieu came forward. “Siggerson, am I dreaming? What are you doing here? What am I doing here? Where are the others? What is this place?”

  A tiny spotlight clicked on, shining into her eyes. “Beaulieu, A. Physician. Scientist. Computer will give you all duty assignments. Check them now.”

  The light clicked off. Beaulieu glared at the ceiling. “I’ll do no such—”

  “Don’t,” said Siggerson, only now glancing up from his soup. His eyes were red-rimmed with a strained quality to them that had her reaching instinctively for the medikit that had been taken from her. “Don’t resist them. You don’t want to be chopped up, do you?”

  He spoke in a queer, jerky voice, sounding as though he couldn’t get any air into his lungs. She leaned over to check his pupils, then took his pulse. It was racing.

  “What have they done to you? What’s wrong with your lungs?”

  He shook his head, averting his eyes from hers. “You don’t want to know. Just don’t cause any trouble.”

  “Siggerson—”

  He gripped her wrist, and his fingers were icy cold. “Don’t do it, Beaulieu! You don’t want to meet your masters. You don’t!”

  The hysteria in his voice alarmed her. She held his face in her hands and looked into his eyes, trying to calm him. “All right, Olaf. I won’t cause trouble. Just take it easy. Try to take some deep breaths before you hyperventilate.”

  He coughed, pulling his head free. “Hurts too much. Just leave me alone and do your work.”

  He needed attention, but Beaulieu could tell that any attempts to take care of him would only agitate him further. She backed off, puzzled and worried. Ouoji crossed the table to butt against her. Beaulieu met her intelligent blue eyes, wishing for once that Ouoji could actually talk.

  Ouoj; chittered and jumped off the table. She trotted over to the computer and turned to stare at Beaulieu. Her tail lashed once, imperiously.

  Sighing, Beaulieu touched the screen to activate it.

  “Beaulieu, A.,” it said. Words scrolled across the screen and stopped. “Duty assignments for Work Cycle 1. Commence immediately.”

  Beaulieu read with a deepening sense of outrage. “The hell I will! This is telling me to catalog DNA codes and start cross-matching them with previous entries for duplicates. Whose DNA codes? Those kids back there that I just left?”

  “Were you in the processing line?” said Siggerson.

  “What is wrong with you? A whole crew just went into the chopper and you—”

  “You don’t know what these things are,” he said with a spark of his old self. “They can make you serve them. Don’t make them do that to you. They g-go inside your lungs. They suffocate you. They invade ... and they—they force you—”

  His voice broke and he began to cry.

  Horrified, Beaulieu stood there and swore at herself for not having realized he’d been tortured. He was still in shock, and she’d blundered around with the finesse of an oleanphatant.

  Ouoji ran to him and jumped back onto the table. He clung to her for comfort, and her blue eyes glared at Beaulieu over his head.

  “I’m sorry,” said Beaulieu. “I was scared back there in the processing line. I thought I was done for and so I’ve been yelling ever since.”

  He nodded, his head still bowed away from her. “They need scientists to finish the work,” he said, sniffing. “Holborn is in charge. He’ll come by soon. It’s my rest cycle. I—I don’t have to work yet. W-watch what you say. They listen.”

  Beaulieu started to speak, then realized she couldn’t find words adequate enough to express what she was thinking. She went out of the room and found herself in a glass chamber. Fog curled against the three walls. Through its swirling whiteness she could glimpse row after row of drawers. A code bank.

  Before her was a panel of switches designed to open selected drawers. A small screen could be used to call up code data and cross-match it with other reference files. All done by remote, with no possibility of breaching the perfect sterility of the bank’s environment.

>   It was an engineering marvel. The scientist within her admired such an efficient setup. The rest of her was appalled. Were Kelly, 41, Phila, and Caesar already in there? What was it all for? What in God’s name was going on here?

  Then she thought of Siggerson’s broken spirit and his warning that it would happen to her if she didn’t comply. There had to be a way out of this.

  But in the meantime she had better go to work. It was, at least, a means of searching for the rest of the squad.

  Holborn was awakened from his sleep cycle by an insistent buzzing. He raised his head, and the lights came on, showing him he had fallen asleep at his desk. His back and neck felt sore and stiff. He straightened with a groan. The notes and figures upon his desk were meaningless squiggles. He stared at them, moving closer as though proximity would bring understanding. But it remained gibberish. He rubbed his eyes and sighed.

  The buzzing continued. Holborn heard it now. With a frown he rose stiffly to his feet and stood hunched like an old man. He knew that noise. That was an experiment-ending alarm. Someone had been careless and forgotten to remove a batch of cultures from the Series G tests.

  Angry, Holborn left his office, limping through the area where an unconscious Kelly still lay upon a gurney awaiting pickup for processing, and entered the testing section of the laboratory. Righa lay sprawled upon the floor, his lower limbs drawn up against his abdomen. His mouth was open; his eyes stared sightlessly. He had been dead for some time. Holborn crouched beside him, but he did not touch Righa’s scales. The cause of death did not really matter. Righa was a creature of sun and desert. He had never flourished here.

  With a grunt of exasperation, Holborn rescued the baked cultures and set them to steaming upon the counter. They stank. He slapped the nearest one to the floor, where it shattered.

  “What do you expect from me?” he shouted at the ceiling. “Maon! I must have reliable help! Do you hear?”

  His voice echoed in the room. Holborn walked out, crunching upon the broken glass. A robot would come in and clean up the mess.

  A carrier stood in his office when he returned. It held no Visci box, however.

  Disappointed, Holborn said, “Where’s Maon? I want to speak with it.”

  “Message from Maon: We are finished with processing. Earth studies are completed. Sufficient codes have been collected. Stage Two is ready to commence. Shut down this station and follow carrier to new station.”

  Holborn stared stupidly at the carrier. His tired brain was conscious of something wrong, but he kept thinking it was simply because he did not understand. “But I haven’t finished. I mean, I am close, perhaps within one generation of eliminating the biotoxin. A few more hours—”

  “We have seen completion projections. This work can be finished by workers.”

  Holborn was shocked. Machines in his laboratory, machines observing the final, glorious mutation ... no.

  “It’s my work,” he insisted. “I have the right to complete it.”

  “New tasks have been assigned. New assistants are already at work.”

  Holborn opened his mouth, but no words came out. He flushed to the roots of his hair and his soft white hands clenched at his sides. “Wait,” he said, and stepped back out of his office to gain a moment of composure.

  There, in the dimly lit privacy, he backed against Kelly’s gurney, making it rattle. His whole body was shaking. They couldn’t do this to him. He had believed his masters, trusted them. He had endured his fatigue and his fear in order to find the cure. It wasn’t fair. They owed him more than this. He was a scientist, after all, a rather famous one in his own time. He couldn’t just be shunted to a new task like some hireling.

  “Damn you,” he whispered. “Damn you!”

  Behind him, Kelly moaned. Holborn whirled as though stung. For a moment in his rage he wanted to strike the unconscious man. Kelly had jeered at him and insulted him. Kelly had implied that Holborn was nothing more than a deluded puppet. Was it so clear that even a stupid soldier could see it?

  Holborn felt branded with shame. Kelly hadn’t been sent yet for processing because his code was essentially a duplicate of another Kelly already listed among the samples.

  “Garbage,” muttered Holborn. “Useless garbage. You’ll be cleaned up with Righa and the rest of the trash.”

  “Holborn,” said an overhead speaker.

  He jumped, his heart racing as though he had been caught doing something wrong.

  “Coming,” he said.

  His voice was oddly breathless. He still had the urge to smash, to destroy. But he was just a doughy, soft specimen, nothing like this man lying here with muscles as hard as iron. A professional soldier could destroy. He would fight if he had the chance. Kelly wanted revenge upon the Visci for what Maon had done to his friend.

  Holborn blinked rapidly, going momentarily into a fugue as his brain shut down conscious thought. For several seconds he stood there, staring at nothing. Then he reached out and jerked the catch on Kelly’s restraints.

  “Holborn,” said the speaker.

  He came back with a start. Blinking, he stared around and wondered what he had come in here for. He went back inside his office where the carrier awaited him.

  “Follow the carrier to your new station,” it said. “Duty assignments will be made there for procedure in infecting DNA codes.”

  Again Holborn felt stupid, as though he were three steps behind. “But that test isn’t necessary,” he said. “We collected the codes for examination in—”

  “Codes will now be infected prior to return to Earth.”

  “What!”

  The carrier came toward Holborn. In his shock he didn’t notice.

  “You can’t do that!” he said. “It’s immoral. Tampering will cause mutations—”

  The carrier seized Holborn’s arms and lifted him bodily. Holborn screamed before he realized the carrier wasn’t going to crush him to death. It turned and bore him from the laboratory. He made no further efforts to struggle. And as he grew calmer, his sense returned. He could not make any more protests or he would be terminated. But at the same time anger burned his stomach like acid. His masters were treating him, Ansel Holborn, like a common hireling. After years of brutal effort to save lives, he had been reassigned to a murder team.

  He had never been permitted to do any cloning, but he’d seen the facilities within the City. Magnificent, technologically advanced far beyond anything he’d ever seen before. How many codes had he collected? Thousands. Which meant thousands of mutant clones to be released on Earth prior to the Visci invasion.

  Oh, he had been a fool, a blind, conceited fool to believe they meant the people of Earth no harm. And being made into a fool was perhaps the worst insult of all.

  Holborn blinked, his eyes burning and hot against his eyelids. Small things seemed to be snapping inside him. Each snap hurt. He gnawed at the inside of his cheek until he tasted blood. He swallowed it, sampling the coppery taste without any conscious awareness of it.

  When the carrier at last put him down at his new station halfway across the City, Holborn walked in meekly ahead of it. He saw two humans, male and female, and some kind of furry creature with blue eyes. His new assistants. Holborn glanced at them, then looked around the work area. It was spotless, well lit for once, and humming with activity. His assistants must already be cataloguing the codes.

  “Processing will be finished by the end of this work cycle,” said the carrier. “Then all codes will be in place. Carry out assignments.”

  It left, leaving Holborn alone with the strangers. He resented them, resented their competence, resented the stiff way they were looking at him.

  Maon had underestimated him. Maon thought he was too cowed to do anything but obey. But Maon had robbed him of his victory over the plague, and Holborn had already thought of the perfect way to defeat his masters.

  “I’m Holborn,” he said. “Stop working until I understand my duty assignments. Then I’ll coordinate everyone�
��s efforts.”

  No one answered him, but Holborn didn’t notice. He had work to do.

  * * *

  11

  Kelly awakened with a start. He tried to sit up before he remembered he was strapped down. But the restraints were loose. He pulled free and snatched the strap off his throat with a vengeance. Like a cat he rolled off the gurney and landed silently upon his feet in a half crouch. He listened, trying to place the noise that had awakened him. But he heard only quiet.

  He went right, aware that he didn’t dare hesitate long while he had this chance of escape. He found himself in an overheated lab where equipment he couldn’t identify hummed busily. A vaguely reptilian creature lay dead upon the floor in the midst of broken glass.

  Kelly backed out of there at once. In the other direction he found an office of sorts, littered with papers, data files, and color charts of cell structures. He hurried through without examining anything.

  Not until he was outside in the cool gloom of a corridor the size of a street did he pause to wonder who had set him loose. Holborn probably. Kelly wasn’t going to waste time thinking about it. He had to find his bearings and locate his people. His instincts were screaming urgency. He had the sense of having slept too long, of having missed something important.

  About forty meters along the corridor, he found what he’d been looking for: a hatch to a service passage. It took some time to figure out how to gain access, but once it opened, Kelly was through in a flash. He let out his breath, feeling slightly safer in this narrow place. His presence triggered a sensor of some kind, for dim lights winked on at long intervals. Kelly’s hair prickled on the back of his neck. He wondered what else the sensors had registered and relayed. But just the same, he wasn’t a robot with headlights built in. He needed the illumination to operate.

  A toolbox fitted with probes, scanners, circuit interrupters, and the like proved a treasure trove. He tucked the tools into his pockets, keeping only the circuit interrupter in his hand in case he met something metallic and nasty along the way. Now he didn’t feel quite so helpless.