Chapter 67: The Specimen Vault (Patreon)

They took the stairs fast, every one of them listening for the door above to break, and so far it had held. Every few seconds something heavy threw itself against the door, and the sound chased them down the stairwell, but the door stayed where it was.

“Stop for a second,” the Operator said. “I need a minute. Please.”

Dan slowed a few steps below her and looked back up. “That door. How long is it going to hold?”

“I don’t know.” She pulled the bag around to her chest and started digging through it. “But there’s something I need to do before we go any further. It could make all the difference down here.”

Her hand found it, a soft pouch with a port at the bottom and an IV catheter clipped to the side, the infusion she had built back on level nine, the muscular density formula, and she had been saving it for a moment like this one.

I need every advantage I can get down here. The first formula worked. This one will too.

“What is that?” Lessa asked.

“A better chance of staying alive.”

She unclipped the catheter, found the scar on her forearm, and slid the needle in beside it. Then she went to work on the pouch, squeezing it, driving the fluid down into her arm faster than it wanted to go.

Operator, slow down. That’s not a drip anymore; you’re pushing the whole thing in. Go too fast and you risk your heart giving out, or a clot.

“It’s a risk I have to take. I don’t know what’s waiting for us down here.” She let off the pressure, though not by much. “I’ll ease up a little. But I want all of this in me before we run into the next thing that wants us dead.”

Lessa and Dan exchanged a glance. She caught it, the look two people share when they watch a woman talking to no one again. “Alright,” she said. “Let’s keep moving.”

She swung the bag back onto her shoulders and tightened the straps, then looped the pouch’s line over her shoulder and tucked it down behind the strap so it rode against her back and wouldn’t pull loose while she moved.

They went down, and the stairs kept coming, more flights than she had counted on.

This many stairs for a single floor. Thirteen has to be enormous.

They reached the bottom, and the sign on the wall read Level 13. Dan stopped, and Lessa pulled up right behind him. The way down was buried; concrete and bent steel packed across the stairwell, a slope of rubble where the steps should have kept going.

The Operator looked at it, then at the two of them. “I thought you were taking me to fifteen.”

“We only know the way this far,” Dan said. “If you want fifteen, you go through thirteen. That’s all we’ve got.”

“Then where did the two of you come from?”

Lessa answered. “We were security for the administrative section, past the control room. When everything went to hell, Dan and I climbed into the air ducts and holed up in a sealed room off the cleaning bay. It had food, it had a bathroom, so we sat tight for a while.” She tipped her head toward a vent hanging open in the wall. “We came out of there looking for supplies. Couldn’t get back in. There was an explosion; it tore up the ducts, and that was the end of the way to the cleaning bay. We were in that room for days.” She let out a slow breath. “When we came out, we found the girl with those two scientists, and something was chasing them. We ran with them, and then we ran into you. You saw the rest.”

The Operator put it together. “So the girl came through this floor, or she came from down here. Same with the cult, and those monsters. They all passed through here, didn’t they?”

“We never had time to ask them anything,” Lessa said. “We just saw them running with the girl, and they looked like a family trying to get away from something. So we took them in to protect them and ran with them. That’s all we know.”

Far up the stairwell, the pounding shifted. The horde had found a rhythm now, throwing themselves at the door together, and the frame answered each hit with a deeper, uglier sound.

“Inside,” Dan said. “The corridor on this level. Move.”

Lessa reached the door first and hauled it open, and they all pushed through. The second the last of them was clear, Dan put his shoulder into it and forced it shut. Blackness came down over everything; no emergency lights, no glow from a panel, nothing at all.

“Why is it so cold in here?” Lessa’s voice echoed back from somewhere far off. “Dan, where are you? I can’t see you.”

“Right here.” A scrape of boots, then a hand finding another hand. “I’ve got you.”

The Operator stood in the dark. The others were shivering; she could hear it in the way they breathed, but the cold did nothing to her. She didn’t feel it at all.

The mutation. I’ll take it.

“Napoleon. Lights.”

His eyes came on, two hard beams, and he swept them across the black, picking up machinery and heavy industrial equipment, white metal walls with panels seamed together running back farther than the light could follow, workbenches, lab gear, and dead consoles. The floor went on and on, and the beams thinned out and died before they ever found the far wall.

“This place is the size of a football field,” the Operator said. “Maybe bigger.” She looked at the two guards. “What do you need a room this big for?”

“It’s the laboratory section,” Lessa said. “We never had clearance down here. Military only. We worked the administrative floors, checked bags at the entrance and exit, and walked our rounds. That was the job.”

Something caught her ear under the others’ breathing. Faint, but there.

“Quiet,” the Operator said. “All of you.”

They went still. Beneath the silence, beneath the muffled pounding on the door far above, she caught it again, a hum, low and steady, something running.

There’s machinery down here. How, with no power?

[Technological Sense activated]

The black bled out to gray, and the room rebuilt itself for her as current instead of light. Dead consoles in every direction, cold, giving off nothing. But under the floor a line of power ran strong, and she followed it back to where it started, a power plant of its own, sealed off in its own bay, feeding this level and nothing else.

Someone built this place to stay hidden. Even the power.

Lessa screamed. The Operator cut Technological Sense, and the room snapped back to Napoleon’s beams, both of them swung to the left wall now, where the scream had pulled them.

Bodies behind glass. Crystal cases hung from the ceiling in a frame that held them in rows, a body sealed inside each one, a serial number cut into the side of every case, spaced out, stacked, and slotted into place. Someone had built this according to a plan.

“There’s power in here,” the Operator said. “Get the lights on. There’s a panel by the door.”

“How do you know that?” Dan said.

“Just do it. Fast.”

“I can’t see a thing.” Dan turned toward the spider. “Little guy, give me some light over here?”

Napoleon didn't move. He turned toward the Operator instead, waiting.

Right. The language pack of this world only loaded into me when I got here. He never got it. Dan's just noise to him.

"Light his way," she told him.

Napoleon swung a beam onto the wall by the door and held it there, lighting the way, and Dan crossed to it and ran his hands across the surface until he found the panel. Dan turned on the lights. They came in banks across the ceiling, and the whole level opened up in front of them all at once.

It was as big as she had guessed, but that didn’t matter now. What mattered was the left wall. Before, Napoleon’s beams had only reached the nearest cases, the ones hanging in blocks of twenty, stacked one below another. Now, under the full lights, she could see all of them. Hundreds. Row after row of glass cases filled the level.

“It’s Lessa and Dan, right?”

“Yes.” The word broke as it left Lessa. She was staring up at the glass, tears running down her face, rooted where she stood. “Yes.”

The Operator made herself look away from it. The frame holding the cases had a mechanism built into it, rails and arms made to move them, and the whole framework ran back to a door on the far wall, a big one, built for cargo and not for people. Whatever was behind it, that was where the cases came from.

“There’s a system in here for moving those cases. And a big door over in that wall. Help me get it open.”

[Technological Sense activated]

Lines ran back from the mechanism to a console that sat apart from the dead ones, still drawing power, still warm.

“That one.” She dropped the sense and pointed Dan toward it. “That computer runs the mechanism. Go.”

“I’m sealing the door we came in through,” she said.

She crossed to the panel beside it and brought up the locks. The heavy bolts locked into the frame one after another, sealing the door against anything that might come down after them.

“That’ll keep those things off us for a while,” she said. “These doors are thicker than the ones up top. Figures, with what they’re keeping down here.”

A small hand closed around hers and pulled. She looked down to find the girl, who had crossed the entire floor without a sound, pulling now, trying to lead her somewhere.

“Not now, kid. I need to find out what this place is.”

The girl pulled harder. Far harder than a child that size had any business pulling, throwing her whole weight back against the Operator’s arm, and her free hand came up and pointed up at the second level.

That grip is off for a child.

She filed it away and let it go for the moment. “Dan. How are we doing?”

“A couple of minutes,” he called. “I’m close. I can get the door open.”

“All right, kid. Show me where you want to take me.”

The girl led her to a run of open metal stairs that climbed to a second floor. No walls up there, none along the stairs either, more of a catwalk than a floor, and from it she could still see Dan at the console below, Lessa beside him, the bodies hanging in the air between them.

A voice came up from below. Dan.

“Ma’am.”

“Call me Operator.”

“Operator. The doors are opening in a few seconds.”

An alarm started up across the whole level, and over it a flat, machine voice spoke.

Opening central cryostorage.

The immense door in the far wall began to move, grinding open down the middle, and as the gap widened the cold pushed through harder, a wind off the other side spilling into the room. This time it reached her too, faint, just a touch of it, nothing like what it did to the others. Still, she felt it. The change hadn’t made her untouchable after all. Below her, Dan and Lessa pulled coats off a row of hooks, gear left behind by whoever used to work this place, and dragged them on. The doors opened the rest of the way, and she saw it.

“Oh, by the great eye,” Lessa said. “What is that?”

There had been hundreds in this room. Behind the doors, there were millions. Crystal cases packed back into a space she couldn’t find the end of, a body in every one, naked, every age there was, old men, children, infants. The rows ran back and back and dropped off into the black where the lights gave out, and past that there was only the shape of more.

“Tera. God. How many do you think are in there?” Her eyes moved across the rows and found no end to them. “I can’t even see where it stops.”

Millions. Maybe more.

“How do you build something to hold this many?” Her voice had gone thin. She turned toward the two below her, the question climbing. “And you two had no idea? People gone by the millions, and nobody on the whole planet notices?”

Dan’s mouth was shaking. “We didn’t. We didn’t know.” Lessa crossed to Dan and took his hand. The machine voice spoke again.

Beginning mutation trials.

Above them the mechanism woke. All down the rows the arms and rails came alive, and a mechanical claw swung in, closed on the first case in a line of about twelve, lifted it free of the rack, and carried it to a glass tube, where it slid the case in and locked it down.

Initiating cryogenic revival.

A woman in her seventies. The process ran fast, frost clearing off the glass in seconds, color coming back into skin that had gone gray.

Testing mutation formula. T4-98768445.

“Dan, shut it down!” the Operator shouted. “Now!”

He and Lessa spun to the console, hands flying over it. Lessa hit key after key, then slammed her palm against it. “It’s not letting me. The system’s locked while it’s running, none of it’s going through.” She tried again. “It won’t take the stop command.”

The old woman’s eyes opened. Glass on every side, no way out, and she started screaming.

I took hits from a giant and lived. A jump from the second floor is nothing.

Without thinking, she went over the railing, left the girl up top, and dropped to the main floor. She landed as if it were nothing, no pain, no shock up her legs, but she was too focused on the woman to give it a second thought. She came running up to the console to kill the process herself.

She glanced back at the woman as she ran. Cables shot out of the tube and drove into her, punching through skin and sinking deep, no care taken, as if she were a slab of meat and not a living person.

That looks like what you did to your Living Prototype.

Too late. It’s already in her.

The old woman screamed and didn’t stop, the same word over and over, torn open.

“It hurts. It hurts. It hurts. Somebody.”

Then her body began to change. Her skin pulled tight and went red, then darker, black veins rising across her arms and face and swelling like something underneath was filling them past what they could hold. Her stomach pushed outward. Her spine bent back against the glass until the joints gave, and her screaming climbed higher and higher, then broke into a choking gurgle. The skin split along her arms first, then her chest, the tears racing across the rest of her.

Then she burst. The inside of the tube went red from top to bottom in the same instant, pieces of her hitting the glass and sliding down, and what had been a living woman a breath ago was a heap at the bottom of the tube.

Below her, Lessa had both hands clamped over her mouth, then she reached for Dan’s hand again. “Dan, what is this place? I knew they ran experiments here. But what is all this?”

The Operator reached the console. A line of text sat waiting on the screen.

Continue with the next test subject?

She pressed No.

What kind of planet is this? Millions of bodies down here, and not one person up top sees it.

The floor opened beneath the tube. A hatch slid back, and a furnace sat below it, sealed, waiting, and the alarm gave one short tone before the tube tipped and emptied what was left of the old woman down into it. The hatch shut, and light glowed up through the seams before it died. The cycle finished on its own, whatever she had been gone before anyone in the room had a say in it. Standing over it, she watched the seam in the floor go dark where the furnace had closed.

“Operator, ma’am.” Dan’s voice was careful, respectful. “That bag on your shoulder. It’s empty now.”

She looked down. The pouch hung flat against her, the last of the formula gone into her arm somewhere back on the stairs. She pulled the needle out of the scar and let the bag drop, and she didn’t think twice about it, even with her mutation bar sitting at 20 percent.

Her eyes went to Dan first, then Lessa, then back to the millions hanging in the cold behind the open doors. “Tell me about your world. All of it. I need to know what I walked into.”

Dan and Lessa traded a look. It was the way she said it, your world, like it was something she stood outside of, like she had come from somewhere it wasn’t. “Our world?” Dan said slowly. “You mean... the facility?”

“No.” The Operator kept her eyes on the bodies. “I mean all of it.”