17 – The Lab

When Humpty arrived on the scene, Addie saw Tony and Beef putting shrink-cords around the wrists of two seemingly unconscious corpo-sec officers. “I’m here,” she announced into comms. Tony stood and glanced at Humpty. His eyes were obscured by the visor he wore, but his mouth was set in a serious, unsmiling expression as he clenched his jaw.

“Can you interface with that security array?” Glitch asked from beside her. The netjacker was staring into her own visor, her fingers tapping little crystal-glass pads attached to the strange mechanical gloves she wore. Her fingers were left exposed, but the pads were mounted on small mechanical digits that extended from the back of the gloves, providing her with a tactile surface to tap on.

Addie refocused on Humpty’s feed and deployed his data jack. When she hovered near the security array, she saw the access ports were covered by a panel and spoke into comms again, “I need one of you to remove that panel.” She knew she could do it with Humpty’s other appendage, but it would take longer.

Beef unhooked his massive cleaver, stuck the corner of the edge under the plasteel panel cover and twisted, applying enough torque to strip the tiny screws out and send the little cover clanking onto the ground. Addy inserted Humpty’s data jack into the port, holding him still while Glitch sent her daemons through the link she’d established with the drone.

“All set,” the netjacker said absently.

“I’ll scout the floor,” Addie said into comms. While Tony and Beef both took up guard positions, watching the unexplored corridors, Addie piloted Humpty straight down the central one. She passed empty offices—not just unoccupied, but unused—no furniture or anything. At the end of the corridor, there was a T-junction, and she scanned both directions. Neither held any waiting corpos, but Addie saw something at the far corner of the one on the left.

She zoomed Humpty toward it, passing by another three empty offices, then she was there, confirming what she’d thought. “There's another elevator here.”

Beef’s voice came through comms: “But we’re on the top floor.”

“Bet it goes down,” Tony said. “Like, to the basement.”

“Why would they have basement access on the second floor?” Glitch asked aloud, not in comms.

“No idea,” Addie replied. Into comms, she asked, “Should I scout the rest of the level?”

“No need,” Glitch said. “I just got camera access, and it’s deserted."

“Coming to the elevator, which direction at the T?” Tony asked.

“Left,” Addie replied. She could already see him and Beef approaching through Humpty’s feed. Beef was lugging a big duffel bag. It looked about half-full, and Addie wondered what was in it. Had they seen something valuable as they’d come through the first floor?

When they got to the elevator, Glitch said, “I’ll open it in just a couple of secs. Almost have control. You were right, by the way. This elevator only goes down. The destination designation is Lab.”

Tony looked at Humpty, and Addie saw his mouth move as his voice came through comms, “Those two corpo-sec didn’t get any word out? No help is inbound?”

“Nothing. I caught their PAIs trying to message ‘Charlie Unit,’ but I own the wireless relay.”

Tony held up his fingers as he counted, looking at Beef. “Alpha, Bravo… Charlie must be downstairs. Three teams of two.”

Addie watched through Humpty’s feed as Beef grunted and shrugged. Then the elevator doors swished open, and Tony’s gun roared, startling Addie so much that she almost slid off the jump seat where she perched beside Glitch. She had a perfect view through Humpty’s feed of what happened. As the doors opened, they revealed another corpo-sec officer standing at the center of the elevator.

The man had tried to lift a short, black rifle, but Tony was faster, and he shot him right in the face, cracking his helmet’s visor and snapping his head back like he’d been kicked by a horse. Tony was on him in a flash, ripping his gun out of his hand and then slamming him to the ground.

“Hold him,” he growled, and Beef was there, stomping a huge boot into the middle of the corpo-sec officer’s back, pinning him to the ground as Tony dug in his pockets. A moment later, he jammed the nozzle of his autoinjector into the man’s neck, and it hissed.

“Damn, that got my blood flowing,” Glitch remarked, just to Addie.

“Yeah, me too,” Addie replied, but she wasn’t really paying attention to her. She was zooming in on the downed officer, wondering if he was alive. He hadn’t fought when Tony took his gun or when Beef held him down. Had the bullet gone through his visor? As she watched, Beef began loading the man’s gear into his duffel, and she realized what it was already packed with—corpo-sec guns, armor, and gear.

While he worked, Beef grunted, “That was more like it, T.”

Addie cringed inwardly; the big meathead kept using their real names, and she knew it was going to irritate Tony. He didn’t show it, though. He just nodded, swapping the magazine in his pistol so quickly that it looked like a magic trick to Addie. “We good to go down, Glitch?” he asked, looking into the elevator’s control panel where a camera was no doubt nestled.

Addie had another idea. “Let me go down with Humpty first. If the other guard is down there waiting…”

Tony nodded, grabbing the guard’s feet and dragging him out of the car. “Not a bad idea.”

Addie flew Humpty into the elevator, and Glitch said, “Ready?”

“Ready.”

Into comms, Glitch said, “All right, boys, sit tight. Humpty’s going down.”

Addie watched as the doors slid shut and a red down arrow appeared on the display. A couple of seconds went by, and then Humpty’s connection to her was violently severed. Addie’s perception slammed back home, and a wave of vertigo and nausea overcame her. She gripped her head as the ceiling suddenly seemed like the floor, and she toppled off the seat, crashing onto the van’s plasteel cargo bed, groaning as the world spun.

“Ember?” Glitch asked, flipping her visor onto her forehead as she leaned forward to stare at her. “What is it?”

“Bring it up. Bring the elevator up!”

Glitch didn’t ask questions. Her fingers flew on their little pads, and then she spoke into comms, “Something happened to Ember. I think she lost the drone. Elevator’s coming back up.”

Addie barely heard her. Her every effort was involved in keeping her stomach from succumbing to the spinning vertigo and emptying itself. She closed her eyes and pressed her hands to the sides of her head, trying to ground herself. Gradually, the spinning sensation began to fade. She’d been through something like that before—not to the same degree, but the effect was similar when Humpty ran out of Dust while she was running him. She imagined the increased severity was due to her being almost entirely focused on his feed, combined with the distance. Her awareness had been far from home when the connection was severed.

Gradually, things stopped spinning, her stomach calmed, and she could focus on the chatter on her comms. The first thing she focused on was Tony’s voice, and his words brought her a sense of immense relief: “Humpty’s in the elevator. Doesn’t seem damaged.”

“Th-thanks,” Addie muttered, but she hadn’t had the cognizance to open the comm channel.

Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

Glitch picked up her slack, announcing, “Ember’s recovering. I think there must be something interfering with Dust down there. At least external Dust connections.”

“We’ll keep Humpty safe,” Tony said. “Go ahead and send the elevator down again.”

“You sure?” Glitch asked. “If there’s another corpo-sec, he might have noticed the elevator going up and down. I don’t have eyes down there.”

“We’ll be ready.”

“Okay, sending you down.” Glitch leaned over again, peering down at Addie. “You gonna be okay?”

Addie nodded, pressing the palms of her hands against her eyes. “Just glad Humpty’s all right.”

“Well, he will be, assuming those two maniacs come out of there alive. I didn’t know they were going to bulldoze all those corpo-sec like that. What’s the point of hacking all these systems if we’re just gonna go in guns blazing?”

It took Addie’s muddled mind a minute to make sense of Glitch’s complaint, but when she did, she felt a spark of irritation. “Tony knows what he’s doing.”

“I mean, you aren’t patched into the cams, so you didn’t hear it, but Beef wasn’t exactly happy with him.”

Addie sat up, folding her legs under her as she looked up at Glitch. She stared at her for a long few seconds, frowning. “You don’t know those guys very well. They’re always bantering.”

“Hey—” Glitch waved a hand, focusing on Addie momentarily as she tapped away with her fingers. “—I didn’t mean to offend. Maybe I missed some subtext. Anyway, I hope your boy knows what he’s doing down there, ’cause we’re in the dark. I still own the signal, though, and so far, there haven’t been any alarms.”

“Should I do something?” Addie asked, clambering the rest of the way to her feet. She still felt a little light-headed, but most of her vertigo was gone.

“What’s the furthest you can be from your drone to pair with it?”

“Um, probably only a few meters. When I stretch out my consciousness, things get very vague and fuzzy the further I am from my body.”

“That’s so wild. I struggle to pair with Dust-tech even if it’s in my hand. I guess some people are just gifted, yeah? Can you do anything else—like what sparks do?”

Addie sat beside her, silently debating how much she should say. Were they going to work together more? Was it worth spreading information about her…talents to another operator if she didn’t need to know? She knew what Tony would say. Sighing, rubbing her temples to exaggerate her discomfort, she muttered a half-truth: “I have some sensitivity, but I never really learned to do anything with it.”

Glitch nodded, then she spoke into comms. “Boys? Check in?”

Tony’s voice came back right away, “Caught the last corpo-sec with his pants down—literally. Beef heard him in the bathroom when we walked by. This place… It’s not right. I’m recording everything.”

Glitch lifted her visor again and looked at Addie. “What does he mean by ‘it’s not right?’ What kind of lab is this?”

Addie shook her head. She didn’t know. She’d never really taken a minute to think about what kind of R&D a company like Boxer might be doing. They’d started as a freight company but had expanded over the decades, swallowing up companies that did just about everything. Then they’d been swallowed up by Oldfellow-Ryburn. It was really anyone’s guess what this particular satellite lab might be doing. “It’s strange about the elevators, though, isn’t it?”

“Yeah,” Glitch said, nodding slowly. “Strange.”

###

“Look at this one!” Beef said, gesturing his gun barrel toward the big glass window. They were walking down a hallway filled with glass windows. The glass was opaque, but if you held your hands up to it, you could peer through into the rooms beyond. So far, they’d seen some very strange things. The first room they’d looked in had genuinely freaked Tony out—dim red lighting, thick, coagulated liquid on the floor, and dozens of pink, meter-long, slug-like things slowly oozing around through the stuff.

The next room had held four people—shaved heads, tubes running from their stomachs to large machines, and utterly still. Tony had suddenly felt relieved that Addie’s drone hadn’t functioned down there. He wasn’t sure how she’d react to the apparent test subjects, but he knew it wouldn’t be good.

He leaned close to the window that Beef had indicated and pulled back immediately. “What the hell?” he hissed, peering through again to be sure he hadn’t hallucinated. No, his second look confirmed the first. A man wearing a gray, skintight jumpsuit was perched on a stool in the middle of the room. He didn’t move, but his gaze was fixed at an upward angle. The thing was, he didn’t have eyes. He had sockets where his eyes should be, but they were filled with glittering, roiling clouds of sparks.

“Reaver,” Beef grunted.

“Seriously?” Tony had never seen one. They were supposed to be humans driven mad by Dust, exhibiting dangerous, uncontrolled mutations. They were dubbed “reavers” because they were almost universally violent. “Ever seen one before?”

“Yeah, a couple.” Beef shrugged. “Boxer snags ’em up pretty quick.”

“What the hell are they doing with ’em?” Tony peered through the glass again, noting the man’s deathly pale skin, hairless head, and black fingernails. Whatever the Dust was doing to him went beyond his weird, electricity-filled eye sockets. As he stared, the man—reaver—suddenly jerked his sparking gaze right at him, and Tony cursed, stepped back from the glass. “Let’s find that damn squint and get out of here.”

“Damn right,” Beef grunted, moving to the next window. The following rooms were empty, but the ones after that held people tethered around the neck by copper wires. Tony was about to break down and admit they had to rescue those people, but then the one he looked at flickered in and out of existence like a glitchy hologram.

“Fades,” he said, noting the mad look in the woman’s eyes.

“They ought to just put ’em down,” Beef said. “Maybe we should.”

“I don’t know.” Tony shook his head. “They’re not screaming or anything. Maybe they have a way to keep ’em from suffering. Maybe they’re working on a cure.” Beef snorted, shaking his big head, and Tony knew he was probably right. Corpos rarely did the right thing. Still, if Boxer found a cure and thought they could profit from it, wasn’t that a lesser evil? “Come on,” he said, gesturing to the door at the end of the hall.

He'd figured the scientist, Victor Kwon, wouldn’t be in one of the glassed-off rooms, but they’d had to check. When they reached the door, it didn’t seem to be locked; the “open” button on the control panel was lit up with green LEDs. He looked at Beef. “Ready?”

The big man set his duffel down and braced his shotgun before nodding. “Yep.”

Tony gripped his pistol, stood to the side of the door, then pressed the button. The door clicked, hissed, and slid to the side, revealing a brightly lit room. “Get your ass down,” Beef hollered immediately. Tony shifted for a better view to see who he was yelling at and saw a man in a white lab coat hastily falling to his hands and knees. The room, as far as Tony could tell, was a laboratory. There were racks of fluid-filled vials and beakers, long counters lined with high-end-looking machinery, and what appeared to be an autodoc table on the far wall.

As he stormed into the room, sweeping his gun left and right to ensure they were alone, he saw an open door on the right-hand side. “Check that,” he said to Beef as he approached the cowering scientist. “Victor Kwon?”

“Th-that’s right.”

“We’re here to rescue you.”

“R-rescue?” He looked up, peering at Tony through a pair of high-end, multi-irised, bright yellow cybernetic eyes. Those kinds of mods always weirded Tony out; his brain couldn’t decide which iris he was supposed to look at while he spoke to the person.

“Yeah, some associates of yours hired us. Go on, get up. You anchor-chipped?”

“Anchor-chipped?”

“You know, leashed. Hard-wired to the premises?” When the man blinked at him, his face blank, Tony stepped forward and tapped him on the forehead. “Is your brain going to explode if we take you out of here? Are they tracking you?”

“Oh! Oh, um…” Kown licked his lips—they were very chapped—and turned around in a slow circle, surveying his laboratory. “N-no, I don’t believe so. I should take my research, though. My, um, associates, you say?”

“We don’t know who. We work through a fixer.”

“Ah, of course.” Kwon hurried over to one of the counters and started pulling wires out of a data cube.

Meanwhile, Beef came back into the room. “Just a cot and a toilet.”

Kwon chuckled. “They didn’t exactly give me five-star accommodations.”

Tony frowned at the guy. He seemed off. “We gotta go, doc. The job didn’t say anything about letting you bring your lab with you.”

“This will suffice,” Kwon said, holding up the matte-black cube.

Beef cleared his throat. “Hang on, partner. Some of this stuff looks valuable.”

Kwon laughed and pointed to a cabinet on the far wall. “There’s Dust in there. Uncontaminated. That’ll get you the most money for your efforts. You’d be wise to remove the tracking tags from the bottoms of the canisters."

Beef didn’t ask questions; he jogged, lumbering and limping, over to the cabinet and yanked the door open, almost ripping it off the hinges. Tony watched him grab a small rack of liter-sized metallic canisters—six of them. If that Dust was high-grade… He looked at Kwon. “What’s the LIR?”

“An average of 3.8. It’s refined, but poorly.”

Tony nodded, some of the bits dancing through his imagination fading away. 3.8 on the Luminal Index barely qualified as refined, but it was a hell of a lot better than the Dust you could gather in the Blast. Canisters that size would hold a lot of it, too. He figured each one, if they were full, was probably worth close to 5k bits.

He watched as Beef peeled the tracking stickers off the bottom of each canister, then said, “Let’s move.” He gestured for the doctor to precede him and, outside the door, they waited for Beef to load his duffel. As the big man hoisted it onto his shoulder, they walked briskly down the hallway. Tony gestured to the glassed-off holding cells. “Anyone in here we can help? I mean, like, set free?”

“Oh no! These are dangerous subjects!”

“What were you doing down here, squint?” Beef asked from behind them.

“Well, naturally, I’m working on curing Dust afflictions. It’s good that you get me away from Boxer, however. This research shouldn’t fall into their hands.” He held up the data cube. “They’re just as likely to bury it as release it.”

Tony nodded. It tracked, but something in his gut was bothered about Victor Kwon. He was too… blasé. Yeah—that was the word. He decided it wasn’t his problem, though. He had a job to do, and he was doing it. He didn’t want to jinx things, but it seemed like things were going to wrap up just fine, too. They’d get the doc to the van, take him to the drop-off address, and then they could put this whole, weird affair into their rearview.