“Now she can’t run,” Jia declared. She holstered the stun pistol and readied the slug thrower. She pointed at one of the hallways. “Somehow I’m not surprised by what’s about to happen.”
“Keeps things interesting.” Erik aimed at the opposite one. The sounds grew louder, and the outline of something the size of a small dog emerged from the darkness.
The hallways lights flicked on. The hisses and chitters grew deafening.
“That might help,” Emma offered.
“That’s something you don’t see every day,” Erik muttered.
Two six-legged creatures crept down the left hallway. A layer of green mucus covered their thick, scaly hides, and two solid black eyes stared out of their squat faces. Several rows of long, needle-like teeth filled their mouths.
The nightmares didn’t end. In the right hallway, five smaller ten-legged creatures skittered backward along the walls. Their bright white fur and small bodies might have made them look cute if it wasn’t for the pairs of dark, furless, sharply-jointed limbs protruding from the fronts of their bodies that ended in barbed tips.
“They’re all afraid,” Erik suggested.
“Of the light?” Jia guessed. She kept her gun up. “I don’t know how long it’s going to keep them away.”
The six-legged yaoguai shook their heads and hissed. The monsters on both sides charged.
Apparently, not long.
Erik fired. His bullet nailed the first creature between the eyes, and it fell to the floor with a final hiss. He fired again. Half the head of the second monster exploded, coating the floor with green ichor.
Jia’s three quick trigger pulls sent rounds ripping through the furry yaoguai. They at least had the decency to bleed red. A survivor leapt to the ceiling, rushing across it with ease. Her next shot severed a leg, and two more finished the monster. Its body fell to the ground with a soft plop.
The remaining monster’s erratic movements saved it from her next few rounds, but Erik’s crossfire doomed it. The partners’ bullet streams converged and shredded the creature.
Jia took short, ragged breaths as she stared at the dead yaoguai. “She kept some here?”
“Good thinking on stunning her,” Erik commented. “I bet she was going to turn out the lights and let those things eat us. I wonder why she thought they wouldn’t get her.”
Jia hurried over to the stunned Dr. Karton and knelt to apply binding ties. “We’ll ask her at the station. For now, let’s call it in and get the hell out of here.”
“I’ve already called it in,” Emma reported.
Erik looked around. “Then I’m fine with the ‘getting the hell out of here’ part.”
Chapter Forty-Eight
March 8, 2229, Neo Southern California Metroplex, Police Enforcement Zone 122 Station, Interrogation Room
Jia took delight in Dr. Karton’s glum look. The scientist sat in a chair in the interrogation room, her wrists and arms bound. A purple-black bruise marred the side of her face, a reminder of her fall in the apartment. They would handle it after the interrogation. The suspect had been in her cell for several hours while Erik and Jia touched base with the captain, the CID, and the Militia.
CID agents now had Dr. Chen in a safe house in an undisclosed location. They wanted the case resolved but were fine with Erik and Jia taking point.
Erik turned his chair around and rested his arms on the back. “You might have had a small chance of talking yourself out of trouble before, but now we’ve got a list of charges so long we will ensure you never, ever get out of prison. Just having those creatures in your apartment is enough, and then there was the whole trying-to-kill-two-cops thing.”
Jia folded her arms. “You can wait until your lawyer comes if you want, but you’re just wasting everybody’s time. There’s not a lot of ambiguity for you to take advantage of.”
Dr. Karton slumped in the chair. “I should have run when I had the chance. I should have stopped after my first payment.”
Jia reached into her pocket and pulled out a small black cylinder. “I found this in your pocket. The boys in the lab haven’t cracked it yet. We know the other thing we found on you was a transmitter to open the cages, but what’s this?”
“It emits pheromones,” Dr. Karton murmured. “The yaoguai are engineered to avoid any targets with those pheromones. A monster is useful, but not if it bites the hand that feeds it.”
Erik laughed. “You saying they would eat you if they got a cold?”
Dr. Karton lifted her head to glare at him. “You’re too much of an ignorant buffoon to understand the brilliance of my creations, Detective Blackwell.”
“I might not be able to rattle off all that fancy science talk like Jia, but I understand weapons. I spent most of my life around them in different forms.” Erik’s gaze turned intense. “And I know that unreliable weapons are useless on the battlefield.”
“Is that supposed to mean something to me?”
Erik shrugged. “What it means is that you likely planned to sell these as terror weapons, but I don’t care about the details. You’ll be spilling a lot of that to the CID agents who’ll be coming for the follow-up. They had decided this case was mostly about Tomlinson, so they haven’t been doing much besides protecting Chen, but they are interested in whoever might be buying yaoguai. For now, I only care about the Shadow Zone and the Scar.”
“Why should I tell you anything?” Dr. Karton scoffed. “You’ve already bragged about sending me to prison. I have absolutely no incentive to help you.”
“You’re wrong,” Jia suggested. “You do have an incentive to help us. There’s no way you were making monsters on your own. You might have the technological know-how, but you’d still need the lab space and resources. I also doubt a mid-level biotech researcher has a bunch of black-market friends ready to shell out millions for monsters. Somebody helped you, and we want you to give them up. You do that, and we will tell the prosecutor you’re cooperating. If you agree to testify, you can cut a deal and shave some time off your sentence.”
Dr. Karton strained against her binding ties. “I’ll testify, but if you want my help, I’ll need them to guarantee I do no time. I’m not going to prison.”
Erik laughed. “Are you kidding? You tried to kill two cops. There’s no way you’re not doing time, but if you cooperate, you might make it out of prison at the point where a de-aging treatment might give you a chance to start over. And here’s the other thing. Every person who dies down in the Zone can be added to the list of your accessory charges. If you want to sit here and be tough, fine. We’ll track down what we need eventually, and you’ll have another fifty years on your sentence.” He frowned and slapped his hand on the table so hard she jumped. “Do you understand, Dr. Karton? You’re not getting transported, with some indentured servitude you can work off. You won’t be restarting your life on the frontier in a few years. You’re going to sit in an orbital prison and rot until you’re dust, but if you give up your friends, you don’t have to die there.”
“Kerrigan Biotech,” Dr. Karton blurted. “My primary contact is their CEO, Michael Kerrigan. They’re a small company, but apparently, he has all sorts of contacts lined up to buy the yaoguai. They paid me a flat fee for my help, and I’m going…I was going to get a percentage of the final deals.”
Jia didn’t keep the confusion off her face. “Kerrigan? But that’s not the new company you work for.”
“No, it isn’t.” Dr. Karton sighed. “I quit 46 Helix because after all that nonsense with Tomlinson, I was worried they would pay too much attention to the lab. I needed a cover, and it’s not like I would publicly join the people I was committing felonies with. I’m not a total idiot.”
“That’s up for debate,” Erik stated. “How does Tomlinson fit in? Why was he coming after Chen?”
Dr. Karton stared at the table, tears welling up in her eyes. “Chen’s supposed to be a focused genius, easy to fool, but it was like he smelled what was happening. He kept asking ques
tions he shouldn’t have, and I wasn’t sure how I’d cover things up. That idiot Tomlinson provided the perfect excuse. I passed the information on to my associates at Kerrigan, and they told me they would handle Chen using Tomlinson, and there was no way it’d get back to either of us.” She closed her eyes. “If they’d done their job properly, Chen would be dead, and no one would know about the secondary watermarks. We could have continued our tests.”
Erik snickered. “It’s real hard these days to find trustworthy people to go into crime with. It used to be you could pay a man to kill a person, and they strangled them the next day. No one respects professionalism anymore. It’s a sad turn of events.”
She eyed him, a glint of anger in her eyes. “Spare me your mockery, Detective.”
Jia gave Erik a look of warning. They still had information to get from Dr. Karton. She needed to cooperate for at least a few more minutes.
“Kerrigan is planning to sell yaoguai?” Jia asked. “You’re sure of that?”
“Yes,” Dr. Karton admitted. She opened her eyes. Her tears left a wet streak down her face. “Your partner described it perfectly. I’ve done some minor consulting work for Kerrigan in the past, and one time I made a joke about yaoguai that someone took seriously. I didn’t realize they had until they approached me a few months back. It’d been a few years since I had done any work for them.” She blinked away a tear. “It wasn’t like they were going to officially discuss my project with anyone, so I didn’t think it would catch up with me. At first, it was simply me advising them on the project, and then I realized I needed data from 46 Helix to achieve the necessary product quality. The problem is the nature of the market.”
“What do you mean?” Jia asked. “What about the market?”
“They had buyers lined up, but they needed test results to convince them of the products’ quality. It wasn’t worth the risk of smuggling them off-world without payment, so that meant the tests had to occur on Earth.” Dr. Karton frowned. “It was supposed to be limited to carefully controlled areas in the Scar, but those idiots must have let some loose. Their incompetence is staggering.”
Jia pushed. “Where is their facility? How many of the monsters do they have?”
“I don’t know,” Dr. Karton replied. “I helped with designs, but it’s not like they said they would make every single one.” She pleaded with her eyes. “I really don’t have any idea where the facility is, other than in the Scar. I know they have gestation tanks and specimen storage set up there, but I never visited. Why would I go to that awful place? I only helped them with the sequence design and drug formulations for the growth baths—that kind of thing. I was a consultant. I didn’t do the wet lab work. Trust me, if I knew, I’d tell you.”
“You had some in your home,” Erik reminded her.
“They were my babies,” she replied flatly. “It’s illegal to do it, but I don’t think it’s immoral.”
Jia folded her arms. “Fine, but if you’re holding anything back, you’ll suffer. We’ll make sure the prosecutor destroys you.”
Dr. Karton shook her head with wild abandon. “I’m not holding anything back. You have to believe me. I want them to pay. I want them to get in trouble. Those fools are the reason I’m here. They’re the reason I’ll go to prison. It’s unfair.”
“Unfair?” Jia stood so quickly she knocked her chair back to bang against the wall behind her. She glared at the suspect. “How can you be whining about something being unfair? You don’t even care about the people who died, do you? You aren’t blaming yourself for your decisions, but the stupidity of your partners.”
“Oh, please.” She sneered. “Those killed were Shadow Zone trash. We probably did them a favor. They couldn’t have enjoyed their lives, and we did everyone else a favor by getting rid of them. If you weren’t a police officer, would you go to that wretched place? Would you have even known about the deaths?”
Jia ground her teeth. “You’re lucky, Dr. Karton. Very, very lucky.”
“Why is that?”
“Because a few weeks ago, I might have punched you for saying that, but now I’ll just take pleasure in knowing you’ll spend a long time in prison.” Jia offered a mocking wave. “Don’t waste your energy worrying, though. We will find the yaoguai breeding facility and destroy it.”
“A simultaneous raid is our best bet,” Captain Ragnar suggested. He stood in the hall outside the interrogation room, concern etched on his face. “If we hit Kerrigan without hitting the lab, they might release every monster they have, and for all we know, they could have thousands of those things. If they flood the Zone, hundreds of people might die before we finish them off. We also don’t want to give Kerrigan enough time to delete anything incriminating.”
“What about the Militia?” Jia suggested. “We can use them and the Army to flood the Zone and look for the monsters.”
“We can’t turn the city into a warzone, and it’s the same problem. If they know an army’s coming, they’ll still release all the monsters to make people suffer while they escape.” Captain Ragnar punched the wall so hard he scraped his knuckles. “It’s enough to make me wish we were dealing with something simple like a drug syndicate.”
Erik glanced at the interrogation room door. “We don’t need her to tell us where they are. We have a general idea. We can concentrate people there.”
“No,” Emma interrupted. “We know exactly where they are. We can make this whole thing a surgical operation.”
“What are you talking about? Since when do we know where they are?”
“I’ve been analyzing the location data,” she explained as a map of the Shadow Zone appeared. “Although the reclaimed border zones are supposed to be completely disconnected from the Scar, there are historical records that prove they aren’t. After some additional examination, analysis, and triangulation, I further narrowed down the possible locations, and then I…borrowed a few maintenance drones to search.”
Captain Ragnar frowned. “You could have tipped them off.”
“Perhaps,” Emma admitted. “But I did it anyway, and they haven’t flooded the Shadow Zone with yaoguai. They aren’t aware of what happened, whereas I have an accurate understanding of where they’ve been coming from.”
Jia suspected Emma believed very much in Erik’s policy of asking for forgiveness rather than permission. Jia eyed her partner. Just where did Emma pick up that personality trait…or rather, from who?
Erik stepped toward the map and stared at a small rotating circle. “Is that the testing facility?”
“No,” Emma clarified. “My explorations located an access to some old tunnels that were obviously previously sealed but have been drilled into. They lead directly into the Scar. Despite your earlier concerns, I didn’t send the bot in farther, but I did find evidence of yaoguai passage through the area.”
“They tunneled into a radiologically contaminated area that’s at high risk of flood?” Jia glared at a data window displaying Dr. Karton inside the interrogation room. “They could have spread the contamination.”
“It’s not like the kind of people who make yaoguai care about a little extra contamination,” Erik observed. “They’re sacrificing people to test their roving biological weapons.”
“But the satellites are monitoring the border areas,” Jia insisted. “If they detected contamination, it’d lead to more attention, not less. They would get caught.”
“That’s all true, but it wouldn’t happen immediately,” Captain Ragnar mused. “Once they finished their proof-of-concept testing, they wouldn’t need the area anymore. They might have even planned to destroy it. Depending on when they started planning it, it might have made more sense. Shadow Zone enforcement has increased since you two stirred things up, and even then, it sounds like there were a lot of victims before one got reported.”
Erik eager’s grin took Jia off-guard.
“Emma’s got us the facility, and Dr. Karton gave up Kerrigan,” Erik noted. “It’s time to hit them. You
said it, Captain. Simultaneous raids. Jia and I can hit the Scar.”
“The Militia’s going to want to handle it,” Captain Ragnar replied. “It’s their jurisdiction.”
“Then make them let me and Jia come along.” Erik squared his shoulders. “Can any of them say they have thirty years of assault infantry training? Have they fought yaoguai?” He pointed to Jia and himself. “We have.”
Captain Ragnar nodded slowly, appreciation in his eyes. “It’ll take a few hours, between the calls and getting another team ready to hit Kerrigan at the same time. We need to decapitate this whole sick, twisted crew.”
“We need the break anyway.” Erik headed down the hall. “Come on, Jia. It’s time to go get my new toys and suit up.”
Chapter Forty-Nine
“Direct command, low light mode on,” Erik murmured. The view from his tactical goggles changed, adjusting for a few seconds to account for the helmet visor in front of him. The massive darkened ancient tunnel lit up in an eerie green that somehow seemed appropriate, given what they were about to hunt.
Because of the materials and the length of the tunnels, remote drone operation was impossible without special measures. Emma had neglected to mention she’d used a chain of drones to relay signals. Sending drones ahead cut down on the chance of surprising the enemy with weapons.
Sometimes boots on the ground was the only choice.
Erik adjusted the straps on his carryaid. The mechanized backpack, along with its hooks, would be of great assistance on this raid since it allowed him to carry his heavier gear, but it’d been a while since he’d used one.
With his missile launcher and laser rifle hanging from the carryaid, along with his TR-7, he was better-equipped than the squad of nine Militia, who bore rifles and were wearing form-fitting tactical suits. They had a few frag grenades, but he’d brought both frag and plasma. He only had one round for his missile launcher, but that might be enough to turn the tide of battle.
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