“Hang on a sec,” Walker yelled back up. “This place is weird. I want to check it out a bit, first.”
Walker slung the rifle over his shoulder and rubbed away the last remnants of blood on his eye. Although it was daytime above, it was dim in the room; still, there was enough light to check things out. After a couple of minutes looking, something began nagging at the corner of his mind.
Although the furniture was unlike anything he’d ever seen before, it wasn’t that different from what he’d seen in some of the Galactic Union stations he’d been to. No, that wasn’t it. As he brushed off a foot of sand from a table, it finally dawned on him. Not only was the furniture unlike anything he’d ever seen, everything was trashed, and it looked like it had been trashed before the sand had fallen on it. The table was a case in point. Although it was in the corner of the room and had avoided the majority of the sand, the front four legs of the eight-legged table had been snapped off and were scattered about the room—with one in the opposite corner. Weird.
The doorway yawned, beckoning him forward.
“Hey!” he yelled up. “Anyone got a light?”
Someone tossed a GalTech flashlight through the hole. He knew from experience they’d last three days…and he didn’t plan on being here that long. Turning it on, he walked through the door. The flashlight’s beam illuminated a second scene of destruction, free of all the sand in the first room. If he had to guess, the room was a small kitchen. There was a variety of smashed equipment and what might have been a couple of tables and chairs if all of the pieces could have been put back together. A set or two of shelves might also have been included in the wreckage; there were places where it looked like they might once have been.
Shrugging, he walked through a second open door into an enormous open room. Once again, there was a general detritus of smashed and broken equipment laying around the room, but due to the level of destruction, Walker had no idea what any of it could have been. This room was different, in that it had a large hatch in the center of the floor. The hatch was circular and about six feet in diameter, and it looked like a pressure door from a starship, complete with a spinning lock.
The temptation to see what was inside the hatch was great, although he wasn’t sure he was strong enough to lift the large metal hatch by himself. Another time.
He shone the flashlight around the room. The room was a giant hexagon, almost 50 feet across; each of the walls had an open door in its center. Beside the one he entered through, only one other was accessible; the other four were blocked with sand. Perhaps the ceilings in them had collapsed; there was no way to tell, nor was there any way to enter them without shoveling out many tons of sand.
The other open door drew him forward.
As he entered the room, he could see it was different; whatever had happened to the rest of the facility had spared this room—a lab facility of some sort—and most of the equipment was intact. There were a variety of unknown machines on the walls, three tables with beakers and glassware, and a fourth with a variety of things that looked like implant modules in a number of sizes and shapes.
The fact the equipment was undamaged made this room the creepiest yet—he almost felt like he was looking into some sort of mad scientist’s lab. He could almost hear Dr. Frankenstein shouting, “It’s alive!”
Shaking off the shiver that ran down his back, he stepped into the room and walked down the line of tables. On the last table was a slate he hadn’t seen from the doorway. The device was unlike any slate he’d seen previously; it was smaller and made from a material that looked…different. He reached out to pick it up, but then paused with his hand a couple of inches above it, not sure whether he should touch it.
“Where did you come from?” he whispered.
“A long way from here,” a voice said from behind him.
Walker jumped and spun around, and his rifle jumped into his hands, seemingly of its own accord. The beam from his flashlight struck the MinSha in its heart-shaped face. The alien-ness of the MinSha combined with the darkness and other creepiness of the place caused another, long-lasting shiver to go down Walker’s back, and he almost pulled the trigger.
Every nerve in his body seemed to fire at once, and all of them screamed, “Danger!”
“What the hell are you doing here?” Walker exclaimed when he could breathe again. “You couldn’t warn me you were behind me?”
“Your friends were starting to wonder about you, and they asked me to fly back down here and see what was keeping you.”
“I was just trying to figure out what this place was,” Walker said. “It almost looks like a lab facility of some sort.”
“It’s a Kahraman research facility,” the alien said. “That’s why I convinced your friends to stay out. I had hoped to keep all of you from finding this.”
“What? How the hell do you know it’s Kahraman?”
“Because there’s one right behind you.” It nodded beyond the last table.
Walker turned and ran the flashlight beyond the table, then jumped back as it illuminated a skeleton on the floor he hadn’t seen previously. “Holy shit!” he cried. He took several deep breaths to get his heart rate back under control and then approached the skeleton. Walker wasn’t a xenobiologist, but it looked like the creature had been between four and five feet tall, and was probably bipedal as its legs were much longer than its arms. It also had another three feet of tail. The only abnormality, which might also have been the cause of death, was a half-inch hole through the skull. Perfectly shaped, it had to have come from a laser. Walker searched the area with the flashlight; a laser pistol lay nearby.
Something clicked for Walker. “You knew what this was the whole time,” he said. “That’s why you tried to get me to leave.”
“I didn’t know,” the MinSha replied, “but I suspected.” The alien came to stand next to him and looked down at the skeleton.
“Is that a Kahraman?” Walker asked.
“No; I suspect that’s one of their client races. Probably a C’Natt. I’ve seen something like this before—most of our mercs have—but if the C’Natt were here, then this probably was a Kahraman research facility.”
“You’ve seen this type of facility before?”
“Part of our cadre training involves information on the Kahraman so we could recognize a facility if we were to ever come upon one. That thing,” the MinSha indicated the C’Natt, “was a client race the Kahraman used to run their genetic experimentation projects. They had no
“No what?”
“No sense of what is right and wrong,” the alien clarified. “They were crazy scientists, unafraid of the consequences of the experiments they conducted.”
“So they were amoral,” Walker said. “The original mad scientists.”
“Mad? No, they weren’t angry; they had very few emotions beyond a lust for power and an innate curiosity to see how far they could push the boundaries of biological adaptation and genetic manipulation. In their labs, they saw themselves as minor deities under their supreme gods, the Kahraman.”
“Let me guess,” Walker said, shouldering his rifle again. “You were trained on this so you could exploit it if you came upon it.”
“Exploit it? Not at all. The experiments conducted here were likely illegal and immoral. We don’t want it, but it does have a significant salvage value to the Cartography Guild. Often times, they can find new star systems in the lab’s computer banks. There were hundreds of stargates that were lost or abandoned at the end of the Kahraman War.”
“Why are you telling me this?”
“Because you and I are now partners—we made the initial discovery and should receive the largest portion of the salvage fees.”
Walker looked around the lab. All the machinery appeared nearly brand new, despite its age, although its purposes were completely incomprehensible. “Why would they have it here? There’s hardly enough land for one Canavar, much less enough to experiment on.”
�
��Although the Kahraman made the Canavar, that was not all they did. They experimented with everything. They had monsters that flew, monsters that swam—”
“That’s it!” Walker interrupted.
“What?”
“We fought a couple of monsters before you showed up. I wonder if they are the legacy of these C’Natt?”
“It stands to reason,” the MinSha said. “This is a water world. They were probably working on an aquatic analogue to the Canavar.”
“But the Kahraman lived 10,000 years ago, or something like that! How would this thing still exist?”
“After the Kahraman fell, their creatures didn’t necessarily die, as long as there was a biome for them to survive in. While the victors in the war hunted down and destroyed the Kahraman’s creations wherever they could be found, many times their labs were hidden on distant planets, and the aquatics were always the hardest to find.”
“So the things in the ocean really could have been their creations?”
“It is possible; what did they look like?”
“Kind of like a cross between a giant squid and a Canav—”
Walker stopped suddenly, leaving the rest of the word unspoken. “Okay,” he said finally, “I get it.” He paused again, then nodded toward the skeleton. “What do you suppose happened here?”
“Before the C’Natt killed himself?”
“If indeed he did—perhaps it is a setup?”
“Either way, what happened here will have to remain unknown. Something leveled the above-ground portion of the facility, destroyed everything on this level beside this room, and set the monsters free. Who did this? Unknown, as is why this room and its occupant were spared.”
A new voice interrupted the conversation. “Colonel Enkh wants to know what the hell you two are doing down—” Sergeant Polanis said as he entered the room. “Woah, that’s some seriously nice tech you found, Staff Sergeant!” The beam of his flashlight swept the room. “What is this place?”
“Unknown,” Walker said, interrupting the MinSha. “It will bear further investigation, but it may be a Kahraman research facility.”
“Cool!” Polanis replied. His light stopped on the slate and modules on the table. “Did you guys look at the slate?” He walked over to look more closely at it.
“Don’t touch it!” Walker exclaimed as Polanis reached for the slate. “It might be booby—”
“It’s fine,” Polanis said, holding it up. “It’s gotta be a slate, even though it looks ancient. Probably has some great info on it, too.” He pushed several of the studs on it, but nothing happened. “Damn. Nothing.”
“It isn’t surprising,” the MinSha said; “that slate has probably been sitting there for 10,000 years or so.”
“Well, maybe I can get it powered up back at base,” Polanis said. “How about that?”
“Before we do anything with it, let’s run it by the colonel first,” Walker replied. “We’ll let her decide what to do with it.”
“Sure thing, Staff Sergeant,” the medic replied. He scooped the modules off the table and put them in a cargo pocket. “I’ll bring these, too, so they don’t get lost.”
“I doubt they were going to get lost, in the same spot they had been for the past 10,000 years.”
“Maybe not, Staff Sergeant, but now we know for sure.”
* * * * *
Chapter 15
Intel Department, Main Base, Trigar 2-A, Trigar System
“Found it,” Corporal Bolormaa Enkh said. “Bastards! That was well hidden.”
“What did you find?” Second Lieutenant Jim Parker, the intelligence officer, asked.
“I found the code that shut down our CASPers. There is a line of hidden code in their operating system that makes them shut down the second time it fires at an enemy in combat.”
“What do you mean? Our CASPers have been in lots of combat. They never shut down until now.”
“I don’t know,” the corporal said with a shrug. “This operating system makes it shut down the second time it targets something in combat.”
“Well, it must be something new. When is the last time the suits got updated?”
“No idea,” said the tech. “Sorry sir, I don’t know.”
“I do,” Sergeant Nergui Enkh said. “It was right before we left. Some supply guy brought it into the maintenance hangar. I remember; I was just going off duty when the supply officer brought it in.”
“What?” Lieutenant Parker asked. “How the hell do you know about that?”
“Like I said, I was just going off watch when one of my friends called me down to watch a wrestling match between two CASPers. The supply officer had just gotten a new program that did something—it upgraded the suit’s speed or reflexes or something—but the sergeant major didn’t want to use it for some reason. The supply guy challenged the sergeant major to a wrestling match since he said the new operating system was so fast. He beat the sergeant major, too.”
“That’s right,” another tech nearby added. “I was there, too. After that, the sergeant major said to upload it to all the suits.”
“So we were sabotaged from within.”
“It looks like it, sir. Whether he intended to or not, the program that killed this suit was provided by Lieutenant Summmerfield. No, Summerbeans. No, that’s not it.”
“Sommerkorn,” Sergeant Enkh said. “That guy’s a fuck-up. I heard the only reason we got him was he missed ship’s movement.”
“What do you mean?”
“A friend of mine was in the Cavaliers when Sommerkorn was there. Apparently, he failed to show up when the unit deployed, and they ended up leaving without him.”
“That’s embarrassing,” Lieutenant Parker noted.
“Yeah, the only thing that was left when he got to the starport was the pink slip telling him to go find a job somewhere else.”
“Well, damn,” Lieutenant Parker said. “Keep that code up; I’m going to call the colonel.” He made a brief transmission, and the colonel and first sergeant were there within a few of minutes.
“What did you find?” Sansar asked.
“It just wasn’t their lucky day,” Corporal Bolormaa Enkh said with a shrug.
“That’s kind of callous, don’t you think?” Sansar asked. “Some of those people, comrades of yours, died today.”
“No ma’am,” Corporal Enkh said, “I wasn’t trying to be disrespectful. That isn’t what I meant. Here, look…” She turned her slate around and pointed to a line of code. “Here’s the kill sequence for the CASPers.”
“Okay,” Sansar said. “What about it?”
“When I said today wasn’t their lucky day, what I meant was the failure is weird—today is the first day this failure could have occurred.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, yesterday, the system would have functioned fine. The software was meant to fail, starting today, the first time you tried to put the CASPer into a combat mode. It was programmed to fire once and then go dead, leaving the operator totally at the mercy of the enemy. It’s bad luck they ran into the creature and the MinSha today—yesterday, our guys would have kicked their butts, ma’am.”
Sansar’s brows knit. “Today? What’s so special about today?”
“Did someone know we’d be here today?” Lieutenant Parker asked.
“There are plenty of people in the last week who knew we were deploying; tracking down everyone who knew we were coming will be difficult.”
The technician looked up from her slate. “It wasn’t that recent, ma’am. This software was created over a month ago, and the failure has laid dormant ever since, just waiting to go active today.”
“Really?” Sansar asked. “A month ago? It can’t be—I only took the contract two weeks ago. Even if someone knew we were going to be offered the contract, no one could have known what our timeline to fulfill it would be.”
“So why today, then?” Staff Sergeant Walker asked, walking into the space.
“I
don’t know,” Sansar replied. “There must be something else, though; I can’t see how anyone could place us here, needing to use the CASPers in combat, on this very day.”
“Well, someone didn’t want us to have them today,” Mun noted. “My question is whether the problem is confined to just the CASPers we have here, or if it’s an issue with the ones we have back home, too.”
“Or all of the CASPers owned by all the companies on Earth,” Walker added.
“Can’t be,” Sansar said. “We use different software. We take the baseline software and modify it to meet our specific requirements.” She looked down at the tech. “Does the software say anything about who authored it?”
Corporal Enkh scrolled through the info on her slate. “Nicholas Imports is listed as the software importer. It says it was developed at the Science Guild center on Ajax 4,” Corporal Enkh finally replied.
“What? How can that be? That’s from off-planet and is not our supplier in any event. Wait a minute—that’s…that’s the black market ring that’s been moving in from Moscow!”
“I don’t know about that, ma’am,” the tech said. “All I can tell you is that’s what the operating system says.”
“Mun, do you know anything about this?”
“No, ma’am. Your orders are very specific about what goes in or on the CASPers.”
“Walker?”
“No ma’am…uh, wait a second; maybe I do know something. Seems to me, the first day I took a CASPer out, there was a wrestling match between the maintenance sergeant major and someone to determine what operating system we were going to use. I didn’t hear who the other person was, though.”
“We were just discussing that, ma’am,” Corporal Enkh said. “It was Lieutenant Summersquash—”
“Sommerkorn,” Sergeant Enkh interjected.
“—Lieutenant Sommerkorn and the sergeant major. The lieutenant took him two falls out of three.”
“Sommerkorn took two of three from Bull?” Sansar asked.
“Yeah,” Walker said, recalling the event. “I saw him put the sergeant major down for the third fall. The sergeant major was pissed, but when he got up, he said the other CASPer was the fastest he’d ever seen, and we’d start using the new program. That was a few days before we left, so it must be this operating system.”
The Golden Horde (The Revelations Cycle Book 4) Page 20