It was impossible to determine how much time remained before someone on the installation grew suspicious. Right now there was a reasonable window for him to do what needed to do only because most of the facility’s inhabitants still believed Admiral Deek to be on his nearby warship. No shuttle had docked. Only those who had actually seen him knew differently, but that would change now that the main transceiver array was in full use, busily uploading even the station’s most encrypted database packets to the Ali Rinai. Adam watched the progress of the transfer while sifting through other files on the workstation, taking a closer look at the station schematics and studying areas of interest. His hopes that the process would flow quickly and efficiently died upon noticing how much information the Kuth held in storage. The total amount of data on file was a massive warehouse of facts and figures.
“Admiral, did you know that your battle cruiser is broadcasting a false profile?” someone asked tentatively. “I’m detecting the identification beacon of a cruiser under the command of a Captain Berrek, and yet our tactical files indicate that you only recently crossed over the Bridge.”
The young man had courage; Adam had to grant him that. He studied the youthful, freckled face of the kid with interest, noticing that the man reminded him somewhat of Thomas. He was an intense, wiry technician who couldn’t possibly be more than twenty years old. A wave of dark, chestnut brown hair was brushed casually to the right, leaving behind a sweaty forehead and beady brown eyes that studied the Admiral curiously, but not yet suspiciously. “Yes, I am aware of the false profile,” Adam told him. “For now, the Caucus does not want anyone in the battle zone to know that I have crossed over to this side of the Bridge,” he continued. “So yes, my ship is currently mirroring the identification of another vessel. When the rest of the ships from my convoy catch up to us, you’ll see that they too are transmitting false profiles.”
“I figured as much,” the young man replied with a clearly satisfied nod. “But we get paid to be certain.”
Adam barely heard him. He had been carefully studying the layout of several large chambers in the central part of the station where the quashing missiles were constructed, hoping to learn more about them. Then he noticed the presence of another, equally large facility located very close by. In fact, it was just a few hundred yards past the checkin desk where the on-duty guard had challenged him. Additional details regarding this section of the station and its purpose were impossible to locate, other than its broad, generic name of ‘Bio Services’. What other bizarre things are you bastards up to? Adam wondered silently. I can assure you; now that I’m here I intend to find out.
[“Nori? Thomas? Are you seeing this?”] he asked curiously via his implant link.
Thomas responded instantly. [“Yes, they seem to have a pretty large section of this facility dedicated to whatever is under development there. Do you think you have the time to check it out?”]
[“I will make time,”] Adam replied way more intensely than he intended to, before glancing up at the faces of the other uniformed men and women around him. All of them were doing their best to appear busy and completely focused on their work while in the presence of a fleet Admiral. The task bar for his upload to the Ali Rinai was barely thirty percent completed, driving him to a surprisingly swift conclusion on the matter. [“Our cover will be blown as soon as someone questions why we’re uploading so much data to the warship. So whoever notices will likely call or come HERE first to ask questions. That would suggest we be elsewhere when it happens. The guys on duty here will delay things even more, since they won’t be able to answer questions.”]
[“There you go,”] Thomas told him with a soft chuckle. [“Use the Admiral’s authorization code to prioritize your upload. Unless someone of equal or higher rank is currently aboard the station, no one will be able to stop the process until it completes. In the interim, you can backtrack to that security desk and check out this ‘Bio Services’ division. Like you, I would very much like to know what’s going on in there.”]
Complying with his brother’s request, Adam stood up sharply, abandoning the workstation and turning to face the young man who had addressed him earlier. “If anyone asks for me, I will be in the Mess Hall,” he lied brusquely. “After that I have plans to return to my ship. Please request that no one disturb me for any reason.”
“Yes sir.” The young soldier actually cringed a bit as Adam brushed by him on his way back to the exit hatch. The four Crasel fell back into formation and escorted him out. He smiled to himself while walking down the adjoining corridor, knowing that all of the station’s darkest secrets were currently being uploaded to the Ali Rinai. Thomas was no doubt eavesdropping on the transmission via the implant, so he would have immediate access to the encrypted database files even before Adam returned to his ship.
They returned to the security checkpoint, at which point the officer sitting behind the desk now studied Adam and his colleagues with obvious suspicion. It also didn’t bode well for them that the two soldiers now held their rifles at the ready instead of in the ‘stand by’ shouldered position from the earlier visit. Deciding not to waste valuable time in a pointless debate, Adam simply raised his wrists and generated twin bursts of electromagnetic energy that sent all three men spinning. The two guards were blasted backwards into the left branch of the “T” corridor and landed flat on their backs. The control officer slumped awkwardly forward over the top of his desk, knocked senseless by the intensity of the blasts.
“We have to hurry now,” Adam noted, urging the Crasel to follow him down the left branch of the corridor, past the unconscious guards. He gestured toward the green print on an overhead sign. “In Yakiir that text reads ‘Bio Services’, and we would really like to know what that means.”
“What if we don’t want to know what it means?” asked Tran Wuu somewhat guardedly.
Adam laughed with mild amusement, but shook his head negatively at the comment. “Would you like to find out on the battlefield someday that they’ve developed a bio-weapon?” he asked curiously. “Or does it make sense to determine what the Kuth are up to now, while we still have an opportunity to do something about it?”
“Your way would seem to make more sense,” admitted Wuu reluctantly.
“I agree completely,” Cren Hollis nodded. “Nevertheless, this place remains far too creepy for my taste.” His eyes scanned the empty corridor warily. “There is death here even in the rooms that are clean.”
Matters grew even creepier mere moments later, as they proceeded at a fast trot down the corridor and the first, distant sound of screaming became audible. All of them slowed their pace immediately, growing extremely cautious, continuing to move steadily forward. They proceeded down the corridor tentatively, listening to the tortuous sound of a human male screaming at the top of his lungs. It was blatantly obvious that he was suffering from enormous pain of some sort, a pain so intense that the scream barely sounded human. All that remained would be to determine its cause. “Bio Services,” Adam practically spat as he listened to the unsettling screams, glancing quickly behind him for a moment to verify that there was no one currently pursuing them. His companions were equally rattled, their expressions paling at the high-pitched shrieks that never seemed to stop and continued to grow steadily louder.
They found an access hatch a moment later, and four of them paused long enough to allow Cren Hollis the time he needed to unseal it. He cracked it open cautiously, just far enough to determine that this was indeed the source of the screaming. Adam stepped forward and peeked inside for a moment, then dropped to his knees and inched through. He glanced back at the others just long enough to whisper the words “follow me” and then passed through the hatchway and into the massive chamber beyond. There wasn’t room to move much farther, because Adam’s forward progress was halted by the presence of a large, circular balcony railing. The vantage point was nearly perfect, allowing them to look down upon a huge, multi-storied domed chamber that was by far the largest on
e yet.
Massive, rectangular block-shaped hardware components dangled from the ceiling in front of them, anchored in place by rows of huge, fist-sized bolts. Even so, they hummed and throbbed from the sheer amount of energy flowing through them. Multiple lengths of power cables emerged from the far wall, at least a hundred yards distant, and ran along the length of the ceiling before connecting directly to the strange devices. Immediately below them, the floor was mostly bare except for the presence of several large desks and a lengthy row of brightly lit computer banks. But it was the ground level along the far wall, where the non-stop screaming emanated from, that drew their full attention.
“Mott’s Ghost,” gasped Janney Stox, executing his usual series of religious gestures designed to ward off evil spirits. “What is happening here?”
Two men were sitting in chairs, firmly secured with restraints, obviously prisoners who were being forced to watch everything. Four armed guards stood behind them, their presence completely unnecessary. To the right of the terrified prisoners, a Kuth soldier reclined almost casually on a small couch. In front of him, a third, unclothed human was secured firmly in another chair, suffering the brunt of the output from the overhead devices. Some kind of hot, reddish-orange colored electronic ‘wind’ appeared to be blowing down upon him from above, and whatever it was doing to him was obviously quite painful. Each time the devices emitted a new burst, his screams intensified to the point where the man’s voice was actually starting to crack and threatening to fail completely. Behind him, the Kuth alien seemed to simply relax and absorb the brunt of whatever was being reigned down upon them from above. It certainly wasn’t feeling pain similar to that of the human, anyway. The mere sight of it all caused Adam’s blood to run cold.
“What in blazes are they doing?” asked Arte Kasik curiously, his features noticeably paler than they had been a moment ago. “They’re not even asking him any questions.”
“Somehow, I don’t believe torture is the motive.” Adam’s eye HUD activated automatically, prompted by his implant’s software which was already fully engaged in a detailed analysis of what was taking place below them. “Those units are producing some kind of radioactive vapor,” he whispered softly, reading the final statistics directly off the inner surface of his eyeball. “It’s an unknown type of a sort I’ve never seen before, but it’s definitely radiation and damaging to human flesh. They’re exposing that human to repeated surges of some sort, and somehow I don’t think this is a medical treatment of the sort we would apply.”
“If you mean that they’re doing a good job of killing him, I would certainly agree with you,” growled Hollis irritably. “Shades, but I’m going to have nightmares about all of this.”
The victim of the radiation blasts was weak from his experiences and appeared to be extremely malnourished as well. He was skinny and wrinkled, his body visibly scarred from the repeated exposure to the unknown radiation. There was absolutely no fight left in him other than the hysterical screaming triggered by the pain from his injuries each time a new burst from the overhead devices struck him. Watching carefully with his enhanced vision, Adam could literally see biological matter being ‘blown’ off of the naked human by the powerful, radioactive wind. Everything caught up in the large gusts surged first against the wall behind the Kuth before rebounding outward and swirling around him in large, circular columns. Unlike the human, however, the alien’s body seemed to actually absorb the genetic material.
“Why won’t they stop?” Tran Wuu demanded to know. “What can this kind of thing possibly accomplish, other than maliciously torture a living being?” He turned away in disgust and crossed his arms firmly.
Not surprisingly, the man who was stationed millions of light years distant figured it out first. [“They’re seeding the Kuth soldier with DNA from the victim,”] Thomas told Adam, suddenly realizing what was happening. [“This procedure is apparently what allows them to enhance their chameleonic abilities beyond simple color and texture changes to take on humanoid form.”]
From his position on the balcony, Adam continued staring in horror at the grisly site below. [“What?”] he gasped in response. [“How can this possibly be a factor…”]
[It is!”] insisted Thomas persistently. [“THINK about it for a moment… don’t you see? Each of the Kuth who wants to shape shift obviously chooses a victim in advance… someone they want to look like when they’re walking around in human form. Then they use those large devices to expose the human subject to large amounts of radiation. I can only speculate, but since bio-matter is visibly leaving that man’s body and settling on the Kuth alien behind him, it does appear that this is how they prepare someone for the process of shape shifting. It is totally unethical by any definition of science as we understand it, but for them it must be a historical accomplishment. This is what allows them to look like humans, to work covertly among the human clans and actually walk around AS one of them. Their bodies end up capable of mimicking the DNA that is absorbed from a victim during this procedure.”]
[“Unethical doesn’t even BEGIN to describe this!”] Adam snapped sharply in response. The unfortunate victim who had been screaming went suddenly silent and lost consciousness, his head lolling back with glazed eyes that stared straight ahead at nothing in particular. His skin had shriveled even more noticeably during the brief time they watched, clinging tightly to his bones and leaving him only a shrunken shell of his former self. It was still unclear just how long it would take for the radiation exposure to kill him, but blatantly obvious to all who were watching that death was now quite probably inevitable. The two men who sat waiting for their ‘turn’ were pale ghosts of what normally passed for men, their terror clearly etched on their noticeably paled expressions.
Without the slightest bit of hesitation and more than a little bit of impulsiveness driving his decision, Adam chose to act. He rose to his full height and vaulted cleanly over the railing. He dropped a full six meters to the ground below and landed softly next to the desks and computer stations. The startled faces of the people sitting and working behind them brought a sly smile to his face. In his mind, he could hear the presence of his wife and brother both screaming for him to stop, but on this occasion his anger hardened his resolve and he chose to completely ignore them. Raising his hands, he sent twin blasts from his wrist guns into the four guards supervising the session. The impact drove all of them backward and slammed them hard into the wall, dropping them senseless to the cold metal floor below. Residual flashes of crackling blue electricity along the surface of their bodies and limbs were an indicator of just how hard his attack struck them.
Adam turned his weapons next on the Kuth receiving the ‘Bio Service’ treatments. The creature leaped to its feet but hesitated, an action that was easily understandable. From its perspective, the alien had been lounging quite casually while receiving its application of human DNA when suddenly an Admiral who appeared to be Deek appeared seemingly from nowhere and began to shoot up the place. It hissed at him suspiciously, long tongue lolling along the lower rows of its sharp teeth. Adam glanced at it disdainfully for just an instant, right before he blew a massive hole in its torso. The blast was so powerful that he could actually see the couch and floor through the smoldering chest cavity. Against his fully powered guns, the creature never stood a chance and flopped awkwardly back onto the makeshift, reclining couch. Dark green stains quickly appeared on its cushions.
And still he wasn’t finished.
Next, Adam spun around and used his wrist-bound weaponry to stun the unarmed scientists manning the desks, leaving them flat on their backs and completely senseless. Then he mentally willed the weapons to power up to as high a level as he could possibly set them and unleashed everything he had left on the overhead radiation projectors. Thunderous explosions rocked the huge chamber, and smoldering debris fell from above in large fragments, crashing to the floor with the deafening sound of metal against metal. Adam continued firing fully powered energy pulses upward
until he was certain that he had destroyed everything. Only then did he lower his arms and approach the two humans sitting completely bewildered in their chairs. Wordlessly, he placed his fingers on the metal restraints binding them and ripped them off effortlessly, one by one, as though he were tearing paper. Then he gently helped each man to his feet. “We’re going to get you out of here,” he promised firmly. “We’re going to take you somewhere safe.” Both of them stared at him, completely bewildered.
He heard the gunfire at the same time as he noticed the blinking red dots indicating enemy movement on his eye HUD, all of them closing in on the chamber’s multiple hatchways. The explosions had been too loud and were drawing everyone stationed nearby directly to the bio-lab. Adam saw his friends maintain their position on the walkway above, firing down toward the targets entering from two locations. He released a couple of pulsing blasts from his wrist gun to assist, knocking down anyone who chose to enter the massive room. [“Thomas, is there room to generate a PTP portal in here?”] he queried mentally, helping the two men regain their footing. Next he checked the irradiated man in the chair for a pulse, but it that was a desperation move only and proved to be far too late. The unknown victim who had endured the bulk of the radiation blasts was mercifully dead and no longer suffering. His painful journey into the next life was over.
The Pathfinder Trilogy Page 64