“Request to deny information accepted,” Maisie said.
Maisie was getting a little creative with her answers. I liked it.
Bender strode in, a macro-sledge over one shoulder, a bare bicep bulging. “There’s no other way in, so I stopped at my craft.” He made his way to the wall where Lockland stood. “Whatever’s behind here, we’re about to find out.” He lifted the sledge over his head and bashed it directly into the façade.
CHAPTER TWO
It took Bender no more than three swings to create a hole big enough to see through. We all gathered around. The room was black, no light coming from anywhere, making it obvious there had been no other way to enter.
Reaching into my vest pocket, I grabbed my ultra-light and flipped it on, tossing it inside. The interior lit up, exposing the reason why it’d been locked away forever.
Breath escaped Darby’s lungs beside me as he stammered, “Are those…are those skeletons?”
Indeed, they were.
Dead bodies had been stacked along all the walls, seemingly in a hurry, and were now just piles of jumbled bones. “Whoever was tasked with sealing up this place didn’t care about the dead souls left behind,” I said, disgusted. “There’s no lingering scent of decay or any stench whatsoever. It just smells musty, like everything else around here. This had to have been done a long time ago.”
“Look.” Daze stuck his arm through the hole, gesturing toward the wall on the left. “I think that’s a medi-pod.”
I’d been so focused on the discarded bones, I’d failed to notice the end of a medi-pod sticking out of the wall. This one was horizontal, like the one at the barracks, meant to roll out of the wall. The end carried the telltale symbol of medical aid, a red cross.
“Looks like it,” I said.
We all stepped back so Bender could complete the task of decimating the wall, which took only a few more swings. He and Case pried the remaining stubborn pieces away and tossed them behind us.
To enter, we had to step over bones.
The room was bigger than it had seemed looking through the opening, covering about twenty square meters. Bender and Lockland headed toward the medi-pod, while I wandered along the opposite wall, bending down to inspect some of the remains that’d been left so carelessly behind. My stomach churned. These poor souls likely had had no idea what was in store for them when they arrived. There was no way to know if they’d come to this place of their own free will or had been coerced.
In the end, it didn’t matter. They were dead and gone.
“How many do you think?” Case asked, stopping beside me.
“My guess is around forty or fifty,” I answered. “The government must’ve panicked. They could’ve brought these bodies in from other places in the building. Sealing up this room proved to be an efficient way to get rid of all of the evidence in one shot. Who knows? Maybe whatever program they were running was about to be discovered. It’s unlikely we’ll ever know for sure.”
A loud noise clattered behind us as Lockland and Bender tugged the medi-pod free from the wall. I walked over as they rolled it out. Once it was stabilized, we all looked inside. Darby covered his mouth, barely holding back retching noises. Couldn’t blame him.
“That’s a body,” he managed before closing his eyes.
Fully decomposed human remains lay inside. “They were in such a hurry, they didn’t even bother to empty the medi-pod before they boarded this place up.” I made a gurgling sound in the back of my throat, half disgust, half anger. For the first time, I noticed that the pod had rolled cleanly into the center of the room, which was odd. “How come this thing is so far from the wall? Where’s the tether?” I moved to the front of the machine. Most medi-pods had at least one cable attached to the wall or ceiling, where all the wires and electrical connections were housed.
“It looks like this unit is self-powered,” Darby said, bending to examine the bottom.
“Self-powered? I didn’t think they came like that,” I replied.
Lockland knelt next to a side panel and yanked off the metal cover. “Well, now we know what the liquid hydrogen is used for.”
I squatted next to him. Sure enough, there were several perfectly intact vacuum canisters tucked inside. “Apparently, standard grid power wasn’t enough to get the job done,” I said. “But using liquid fuel to power this thing is pretty intense.”
“Whatever they were trying to do, they needed a vast amount of output.” Darby’s voice ended on a stricken note, causing me to glance his way. I watched as he slowly stood, splaying his hands over the top of the clear lid, his eyes glazing over.
In many ways, Darby was the most innocent among us, including Daze. He’d been raised by both his parents, who’d cared deeply for him, until the age of nineteen. He’d been sheltered and lucky enough to have had working tech to foster a fairly robust education.
I rested a hand on his forearm. “What do you think they were doing to these people?” I examined the bones lying around us. “Liquid fuel generates a hell of a lot of power. You don’t think this medi-pod was used to fix seekers, do you? And Roman just left it off his list?” It was possible this medi-pod might’ve been moved. The government was slippery, as evidenced by this walled-up room.
“No, not seekers,” Darby replied. “Look.” He tapped a finger on the glass lid, his tone miserable.
I glanced down, confused. “What am I supposed to be seeing?” Some of the bones had fallen to the side during the decaying process.
Case cleared his throat next to me. “I think he’s referring to the bones in the middle.”
Stark realization hit a moment before my mind fully computed the scene before me. I gasped, horrified. “She was pregnant?” The pile of bones in the middle of the skeleton were so tiny, they were almost barely there. There was a small skull no bigger than my fist resting on the pelvic bone. “Do you think they were trying to alter a fetus in utero?” Along with the quest for perfect health, our ancestors had been obsessed with unmarred appearances. The evidence was everywhere—in the setup of their homes, in the amount of money spent on augmentations and beauty products. Unborn genetic selection had been fairly common. A program called YOUborn, where the parents could select everything from hair and eye color, to skin tone, to size and build, was available, but it’d basically been restricted to the elite because the cost was so high.
If you didn’t fit into the world’s definition of perfect, your existence must’ve been difficult.
“That’s fucked up,” Bender said.
I took a step back, and a long, tired breath trailed out. “They created an extremely powerful medi-pod, powered by rocket fuel, to try and alter fetuses? For what purpose? Did these women know what they were doing?” My eyes rested on the other skeletons littered around the room, dumped without care, picking out tons of tiny bones, something my brain hadn’t computed before. They’d all been pregnant. “Didn’t anyone miss them?”
“That’s something we can never know,” Darby said. “And yes, these women likely thought they were doing what was best for their unborn children. At the time, there were comprehensive DNA tests that could be done noninvasively on a fetus as young as several weeks old. Some of the kits could even be purchased at a local merchant and completed at home. My guess is these women found out their child was carrying a certain mutation, and they sought help to try to fix it.”
“Could be,” I said, glancing around, “but there are so many. It doesn’t make sense that the government could amass this many pregnant women, kill them, and just wall them up never to be found again without someone discovering the crime. They should’ve been missed by their families—by someone. Meaning there should’ve been a record of this. It should’ve been a scandal. Fifty pregnant women gone missing is newsworthy.”
“Not if the government was extremely selective in their process,” Case muttered next to me, his voice echoing the disgust that still roiled through me.
“Selective how?” I asked.
<
br /> “Making sure these women were loners who no one would miss,” he answered. “If the government really wanted to cover their tracks and make sure this was never discovered, they would’ve incinerated the bones. That’s how all bodies were dealt with after death. Instead, they figured this would be enough.”
My stomach clenched. “If they were loners…they probably weren’t pregnant when they arrived.” Surely their partners would’ve had something to say about their unborn babies going missing. “That means these women were likely lured here and purposely impregnated with embryos that had known DNA mutations. So the government could experiment on fixing the problem?”
Darby coughed, taking a step away from the medi-pod. “That could very well be what happened. The government, as well as private companies, was constantly trying to bribe people to be part of human scientific studies, which were happening all the time. It was against the law to do any testing without consent, but if you had permission, you could do anything. There was a high court decision that established this as law more than one hundred years ago. It concluded that humans, at the age of adulthood, could make informed decisions themselves without interference from the government.”
“Ignoring the fact that most people would do just about anything to stay alive,” I huffed. “Including signing their bodies away for enough coin to put a roof over their heads. Living in a megascraper was expensive, and everything people needed was tied up in technology, which didn’t run cheap. There were definitely people living on the outskirts.” Just like there were now. On the shell, our ancestors’ world might have projected beauty, efficiency, and progress, but on the inside, it’d been almost devoid of empathy and feeling for those who couldn’t compete.
“Nobody cared about people without means,” Lockland said. “That was clear enough in the history left behind. The government provided housing for the poorest and gave people basic necessities, but from what I’ve read, those neighborhoods were like war zones. People preferred to be homeless, rather than live in fear.”
“Prior to the meteor strikes,” I said, “people were exiting the city in droves. The Rural Plan started ten years before Earth was shattered. According to what was left behind, rural areas consisted of 3-D-printed homes that were affordable. If you had a bio-printer, access to slurry, and a roof over your head, you were better off than in the city.”
“That did happen,” Darby concurred. “And the government considered the Rural Plan to be a success. But there was hardly any work outside the city, so there was almost no opportunity to earn a wage. Existence must’ve been very utilitarian. Every single thing our ancestors manufactured, they did with automation and robots.”
I ran a hand over the top of the medi-pod. “Well, we can hypothesize all day about what happened here, but we’re never going to know the truth. These poor souls are dead and gone, and there’s nothing we can do and nobody left who cares.” It was a shame all around. I addressed Darby. “Now that you’ve gathered more parts, is there any way to insert them into this medi-pod? It runs on rocket fuel. It would certainly have enough power to handle a DNA conversion.”
Darby shrugged. “Of course, having a working pod makes things easier than building one from scratch. But the key will be finding an intact control panel, if possible. That’s what holds all the software—what the engineers and scientists were working on for all those years. A program that would direct a magnetic field to read and rework the damaged DNA. Without that, the technology might be lost forever.”
I nodded. “I think the chance of finding one is high. It would’ve been incredibly stupid to destroy them all. All that engineering for nothing. It was the kind of work that could not possibly be replicated in our lifetimes.” To destroy those capabilities forever seemed unthinkable. I turned to Lockland. “There’s no way we’re giving this machine up, so we need to figure out a way to transport it to the Emporium. If we leave it here, we run the risk of someone else discovering it.” We weren’t the only salvagers in the city. But the medi-pod was too huge to be hauled by any of our crafts.
Lockland gave me a look, a cross between pain and acceptance. “The mover drone in Port Station is the only craft I know of that could get the job done.” Pain, because the mover drone was going to be hard to retrieve. Acceptance, because we’d do it anyway.
“I figured as much,” I said. “Just making sure you didn’t have something categorically simpler as a better option.”
Bender stood with one arm on the pod. “We’re going to need that mover drone for a whole slew of things in the immediate future. I say we go in and take it. The sooner the better.”
Lockland ran a hand around the back of his neck. “Once we do, we break all ties with Port Station for good and become their enemy. It will cut off our current informant relationships, too. We’re setting ourselves up for a constant ongoing battle with them, so we do it carefully.”
“There might be a better way to handle it,” Case said.
Surprised, we all glanced at the outskirt. “They’re not giving that drone up willingly,” I said. “It’s too valuable. I’m on Bender’s side. We go in and take it. In my mind, they have it coming. After all, they took Luce hostage without worrying about pissing us off.” Case and I had liberated my craft from Port Station a short time ago, which had involved weapons and deadly force. “I also haven’t forgotten they put an explosive tracker on her.”
“Yeah,” Bender said. “That thing was a bitch to get off.”
“I agree,” Case said. “We take it. But before we do, we can at least try to negotiate with them. It would make our lives easier, and I think we have something they might be willing to take in trade, at least for a while.”
“Yeah, and what’s that?” I asked, knowing he wasn’t talking about coin.
Case inclined his head at me. “Your E-unit should suffice.”
CHAPTER THREE
Everyone started talking at once. I held up my hand, my eyes rolling toward the ceiling.
“What E-unit?” Bender demanded.
“You have an E-unit?” Lockland asked.
“You told him about your E-unit?” Darby said.
“What’s an E-unit?” Daze asked.
My lofted arm did nothing to stop the barrage of chatter.
Maisie’s voice cut through the melee with her calm, soothing cadence. “An E-unit, otherwise known as an electrolysis unit, separates hydrogen and oxygen atoms from water using a strong electrical current. The objective is to harness hydrogen gas, compressing it for later use. Pure oxygen is an asset in our world and can be used for a variety of things.”
“Yes, we know what an E-unit is,” Bender grumbled. “We just didn’t know Holly has one.”
My eyes rested firmly on Case. “Look, I know you haven’t been around for very long, so you’re entitled to a modicum of leeway, but you should’ve known better.” He really should have. Even though he hadn’t been formally voted into our group, he’d earned his spot through his actions. But the man was still on probation. “In this group, we keep things private—for a reason. Now that everyone knows I have an E-unit, it puts them in danger. There’s a government here, unlike where you came from, and the more we know about each other, the more we risk. It shouldn’t have to be spelled out to you.” Without waiting for him to respond, I turned to Lockland and Bender. “Yes, I have an E-unit. And yes, I showed it to Darby recently. When it’s at optimal capacity, I can produce five hundred kilojoules of energy in the form of compressed hydrogen per day. I store much of what I produce in cubes, but I have multiple pressure vessels as well. I was forced to show the E-unit to Case that day we met Tandor at the gorge, after you two had been kidnapped. I needed to pick up a stash of hydro-bombs and was forced to bring the outskirt with me.”
Lockland crossed his arms. “A working E-unit at that capacity is impressive. I think Case might be right. Something like that coupled with a box of empty carbon bombshells, which I have, to avoid war with Port Station might be a better option.
I could negotiate a month of time with the mover drone in exchange for their ability to make weapons.”
“I’m not sure I agree,” I hedged. “Lending them an E-unit and shells to make bombs would mean arming Port Station. If things in our world change, and we find ourselves going up against them in the future, their firepower would be increased a hundredfold, thanks to us. That seems counterintuitive to me.”
“I don’t know,” Darby said from his position next to me. “If we offer them something of value, we align ourselves with them before the de facto government has a chance to do the same. If the Bureau of Truth realizes they’re outnumbered, they would probably look to Port Station for help. If we get their allegiance first, it could benefit us.”
I nodded. “I see your point, and that might be a good idea if they agree. But as of late, we haven’t exactly been on good terms with them.” Tandor’s group had infiltrated their ranks, and we were unsure what the environment in Port Station was now.
Bender ducked through the hole in the wall, and the rest of us followed. “I like it,” he said. “I have a bad feeling about this government group. With the UACs popping up all over, it proves they’ve been watching us for a while. A battle is brewing. If we set ourselves up with Port Station, it can better situate us for a win.”
Lockland said, “That settles it. I’ll set up a meet with my connection and offer him the deal. We’ll go from there.”
“Okay,” I said, not pointing out that I hadn’t yet agreed to go along with forfeiting my E-unit, even temporarily. It’d been Case’s idea, not mine. The thought of something happening to it was a little out of my comfort zone, but I was willing to go along with it for the greater good. “When you meet, make sure you set conditions with them. If anything happens to my unit, we get something of greater value in return. We’re not risking it for nothing.”
Danger's Cure: (Holly Danger Book 4) Page 2