Vector Red |
Covert SinGen Facility
Unclaimed territory, East of La Vela
“Through here ma’am, if you please.”
Stiletto heels marched click-click-clicking across the polished floor of black basalt concrete, pursued by the deadened march of rubber-soled combat boots. A small group of people marched through the sterile laboratory corridors. Five of the men were mercenaries dressed in full combat order: black fatigues and body armor, assault carbines and bulging, insect-like face masks. The sixth was a small, nondescript man in a lab coat, his brown hair slicked back against his skull, who lead the way. The last was no man at all.
Sheva Sinclair possessed the kind of beauty that ended friendships and started wars. Big emerald eyes looked out a lovely heart-shaped face. Her skin was smooth and white as snow. She had red hair. Not cinnamon or copper, but a deep, scorching crimson that tumbled in thick, lazy curls onto her shoulders. Her full strawberry red lips were drawn in a perpetual sly, lopsided smile. She wore a black dress that emphasized her curves in ways so effortlessly sensual it would make glamour models weep with envy.
But the small group was a long way from the bewitching scintillation of downtown San Dorado, and Sinclair’s ritzy presence looked as incongruous here as a priest in a whorehouse. Stark fluorescent lights banished every shadow in the corridor. Biohazard signs were everywhere. The rooms on the sides were walled off with gunmetal gray steel and bullet-proof safety glass. Inside men and women dressed in sealed chemsuits worked with complex stainless steel machinery and vials of colored liquids, their movements slow and reverent as if to indicate that to spill at the wrong time could forfeit their lives.
The nondescript man hurried to the end of the corridor and waved a security card in front of a vaulting safety door. It rumbled open just in time for the small group not to have to break their stride. Behind the ten inch door was a small room that looked like a hybrid between an airlock and a bank vault. Its ceiling was a solid square of white light; its walls were made of cold rivetless steel, featureless except for a flush-mounted security system that featured a keypad, card slot, palm- and iris scanners and, most worryingly, what looked like a needle-like blood sampler.
“Just a moment,” the short man said, his voice pleading. His hands shook a little as he entered his security card into the machine and entered a string of numbers. Then put his hand to the palm scanner. A light on the security system flashed red.
“Access denied,” spoke a machine voice. The man cringed a little, half-turned, then decided not to look at Sinclair after all. “I’m sorry,” he stumbled and wiped his hands on his labcoat. He repeated the ritual, blinked a half dozen times in quick succession and lowered his eye in front of the retinal scanner. Again the light flashed red.
“Access denied.” Sweat beaded on his forehead. “I’m- Ah, this part is sometimes-”
Sinclair’s eyebrow twitched microscopically in a portent of a glare. The reaction was immediate. One of the mercenaries grabbed the man by the shoulder and forcefully man-handled him against the ash iron back wall. “Check him,” said the commando, his voice a weirdly stifled grunt behind his mask. One mercenary pushed a syringe into the scientist’s neck. The man gasped in pain as the others soldiers pointed their guns at him. The needle drew a tiny amount of bright red blood. “He’s clear.”
Sinclair appeared to ignore him, the edges of her lips curved downward in a mixture of boredom and aggravation as if the sudden violence was beneath her. She purposefully stepped past the soldiers, bent ever so slightly toward the microphone and huskily said, “the ash of the world.”
”Override accepted,” the machine promptly replied.
“Welcome, director Sinclair.”
The security door closed abruptly and the bottom seemed to drop out of their stomachs as the elevator started a sudden 200 meter fall into the bowels of the earth. Air scrubbers hissed and their ears popped with negative pressure. Mechanical locks released with a clunk. Airlocks hissed as hydraulics parted the thick slabs of steel.
The sight beyond was eerily similar to the one the small group had been in before. Once more there were bright lights, concrete and steel. But this time a one way mirrored window offered a view of what looked like a sterile operating theater. Cylinders of oxygen and other more exotic gases lined the far wall. Complex automated surgical machinery hung gleaming from the ceiling. Bright lights were angled onto a central raised table in the center of the room. Tubes from an anesthesia machine hooked surgically into the windpipe of the patient strapped to that table. Despite this he squirmed and trashed against his restraints. Pulse oximeters, automated blood pressure measuring machines and electrodes fitted to the patient’s head and chest displayed his vital signs on uncaring video screens.
According to those screens he should be dead. His heart rate, ECG and EEG were all well into what would be lethal territory for any human. And yet he lived. But that wasn’t the most disturbing thing.
What was, was that his skin rippled and shifted like his flesh was water - if water had a mind of its own, that could shift between faces in revoltingly unnatural ripples of skin and sinew. One moment there was a face, the next there were three, morphed onto a single skull in sickeningly inhuman caricatures of humanity.
“A-as you can see,” the nondescript man gulped at the sight, “it- well, it’s still unstable, but at least some of the time it looks and sounds and acts just like Bennings.” He rubbed his neck where the mercenary jabbed the needle in. “It’s a marked improvement over our earlier efforts. The thing you dug up from the ice, well, it allowed us to fill up some of the markers left by the Sankara sample. That just- as you know, it gets thawed out, wakes up - probably not the best of moods, it's weird and pissed off and it’s all kinds of awful.” He took a deep breath. “Before, we were aware there was cellular activity even in burned remains, but we didn't quite know what the hell was going on. Now though,” he pointed at the man on the surgical table, “well, we're obviously not there yet, but the structure of the second sample... It gave us, ah, ideas. Our latest sequences, they're more
controllled, you know? It now bonds with the host, more or less. Stays mostly in one shape. It’s more
human, for lack of a better word.”
“There now,” murmured Sinclair, her voice intrigued, her eyes transfixed on the shifting and changing flesh of the writhing man strapped to the surgical table. “I knew I was right to hire you after all, Doctor Renner. Tell me- It’s an imitation, a
perfect imitation. That’s all I want. That’s all I need.” Her voice shifted, became hungry and attentive. “What does it want? Does it speak?”
Renner let out an frozen gasp. “I don't know. I- maybe. Sometimes it talks. But it's different than us, see? It's from outer space. What do you want from me? Ask him!”
“Maybe,” Sinclair allowed, a macabre smile on her face. Renner suddenly felt leather-gloved mercenaries grab his shoulders. “Or maybe I will just ask
you.”
