Insurrection: A Space Opera Harem Adventure (The Lost Fleet Book 2), page 31
“There’s definitely a team here,” I said over my helmet com, a wave of relief crashing over me. “I’ll make contact and—”
“Zeris?”
I froze when a familiar male voice broke in over a different com channel. A black shadow emerged from inside the cave—one without any thermal imprint whatsoever.
“Arneson?”
“Son of a bitch,” the other Immortal said, stepping all the way into view on the dusty terrace and lowering his rifle. “Techs swore they picked up something. Where the hell did you come from? And why didn’t you signal?”
I grunted and lowered mine. Of all the fucking teams that could have possibly been assigned here…
“We came in completely blind,” I said. “Didn’t want to give away our position with a transmission.”
“Blind?” Arneson asked. “What are you talking about? We left a buoy in orbit.”
I sighed as I started jogging to meet him. My armor’s HUD still wasn’t registering his presence. If nothing else, it was a pretty good demonstration of how effective the sensor-shielding and optical camo modules on my own NF-X armor could be in a pinch.
“And if we’d come in on the Stormrider, it probably would have hit us with a data packet,” I told him once I’d crossed the thirty-odd-meter gap between us. “But we were in a cloaked Yarasi ship.”
I couldn’t see his jenny face behind his red visor—something I would normally be quite happy about—but I could imagine his frown quite well. “What?”
I suppressed another sigh. I wouldn’t have been surprised if Ellis hadn’t shared all the details with Command, but I also wouldn’t be surprised if Lochlan hadn’t shared everything with her team on the Firehawk, either. Their rivalry was usually merely annoying, but now that people’s lives were on the line, it had the potential to be a real problem.
“Long story we can cover later,” I said. “But you were told about our Yarasi guest, right?”
Arneson nodded. “Yeah, but no one said anything about having one of their ships.”
I glanced back up the cliff face and signaled to the girls to come down. “A small one. Anyway, it’s doesn’t matter. How long have you been here? What the fuck is going on?”
“We got in the system almost six hours ago and touched down about three later,” he said. “I went in solo to see what we were up against, but it didn’t take long to figure out there was no one here.”
“No one?” I asked, my heart sinking. “You mean they abandoned it?”
“No, that’s the weird thing. There is a metric shit-ton of scientific equipment in this place. It’s like a DSD lab in the middle of a mountain.”
A warning tingle crawled down the back of my neck. “They have Science Directorate equipment?”
“You’ll have to see it to believe it. We locked the place down, and I have the techs trying to pull any data they can find.” His head turned to watch as Ash zipped down the line only slightly slower than I had. “But I’ll tell you this, Zeris: I’ve seen terrorist bases before, and none of them were like this. Place gives me the fuckin’ creeps.”
I turned as Velarys slid down in Ash’s wake. The girls then headed to join us. weapons in hand and eyes on Arneson.
“You know Nashira,” I said, wincing as I said the words. I could practically feel the old wounds reopening from our time on New Praxius all those years ago. “This is Velarys.”
I genuinely had no idea how Arneson would respond. He had made his feelings about Ash and her “mutt blood” quite clear in the past, and Velarys was an alien soldier of a hostile empire. There was a genuine risk that this could get real nasty, real quick.
“I’m glad you’re here,” Arneson said instead, unlocking his helmet and taking it off. He wiped the sweat from his brow and focused on Ash. “Captain Ellis said you’re pretty good at that psychometry stuff—that you’re the one who found this place.”
“Uh…yeah,” Ash managed, clearly surprised at this attitude—or lack thereof. “That’s right.”
Arneson nodded and glanced back at the cave mouth. “Then maybe you can get another reading inside. Figure out where the hell the Column went or why they left in the first place.”
“I…I can try.”
She looked at me questioningly with her green eyes, but I didn’t have an answer for her. At least, not one that I could properly vocalize. It wasn’t until Arneson turned back to look at us, his gaze hard and his jaw set in stone, that I belatedly understood. This was the same man I had physically and verbally battled more times than I could count over the past six years, but here, in this moment, none of the petty bickering made a difference. We weren’t old rivals; we weren’t a jenny and natty.
We were soldiers on a mission, and we had a job to do.
“Ellis said you’re here as a liaison for your government,” Arneson said, now looking at Velarys. “Well, they only gave us a single trooper squad and one tech team—no Seraphim support at all. A telepath might be able to sense something we can’t.”
“Very likely,” Velarys said matter-of-factly, her eyes narrowing slightly as she gazed into the cavern. “I sense many lifeforms within. Most of them…are not human.”
“No, they aren’t,” Arneson said grimly. “Come on inside—this will be a lot easier if I just show you what we’re dealing with.”
***
The cavern ran deeper than I expected; the base lay at least forty meters down a wide passage. Arneson had disabled the static defenses about as gracefully as I would have, which was to say that he’d shot out both of the autocannons concealed within the walls and the laser tripwire grid on the floor. Of course, the lack of scorch marks suggested they hadn’t been powered when he’d come through, but he’d still blasted them in case.
I approved.
The interior chamber was beyond an open set of thick, starship-grade doors, almost like someone had dragged part of a bulkhead down here and welded it into the rock. I could already hear the echoing voices of the technicians on the other side, and I cautiously stepped through…into a cavernous chamber so large it felt like we had walked into the heart of a volcano.
“You see what I mean,” Arneson murmured.
I nodded in quiet amazement. The giant, cylindrical facility was about a hundred meters across and probably double that straight down, as if a frigate-sized mining drone had speared its conical drill into the mountain and burrowed out a place for it to land. But it wasn’t just the size that was so awe-inspiring; there may have been more equipment in here than in the jenny labs back on the mothership.
The walls of the chamber were packed with human-sized stasis tubes arrayed in concentric circles spiraling all the way down. Each circle had its own narrow walkway, with an open lift car directly across from us that could be used to move up and down. The control center, consisting of a large, centralized computer with half a dozen smaller terminals and workstations, was directly to our left in a cleared space here on the uppermost level.
Arneson had been right. This wasn’t a terrorist base—it was a research facility.
“Those almost look like the flash-learning tubes from the labs on the mothership,” I breathed, taking off my own helmet as I moved to the railing and peered over the side. The sheer size combined with the spiraling design were a dangerous vertigo trigger, and the dim lighting certainly wasn’t helping. “What’s inside them?”
Arneson’s face tightened. “Dowd.”
My stomach folded in half. I swept my gaze up and down the levels, noting the scattered tech teams below who appeared to be examining individual tubes. It would have been disturbing enough if they’d been filled with human beings, though it would at least have made a degree of sense considering the ideology of the Column.
“What the fuck?” Ash breathed, moving to the edge next to me. “You’re telling me that these psychopaths are growing Dowd?”
“Not growing—holding,” Arneson said. “The equipment isn’t configured for cloning or genetic alteration or anything like that. The techs only just started their analysis, but the pods seem designed for long-term life support. Only about ten percent of them are full right now, and the Dowd inside are—”
“Trapped,” Velarys put in. Her eyes were closed, and she was gripping the rail so tightly I could see her hand shaking. “Caught between slumber and consciousness while their minds are assailed…”
Arneson eyed her curiously, and I half-expected him to fire off a sarcastic quip about alien soldiers. “They’re in some kind of chemical stasis,” he said instead. “But like I said, the techs are still trying to learn the details.”
Velarys inhaled sharply and leaned away, her eyes fluttering back open. “It is abominable. This facility must be annihilated—now.”
I reached out and placed a steadying hand on her arm. She shot me an angry look—probably reflexive annoyance at a male trying to soothe her—but it faded as she recomposed herself.
“I apologize,” she whispered. “But touching their minds is…disturbing. It is difficult to ignore.”
“I can only imagine,” I said, wondering if Miranda would feel the same way when she finally arrived. This was one of those times when I wasn’t at all envious of telepaths.
“If it helps, I know how you feel,” Arneson said. “A part of me wanted to signal the Firehawk and have them come in and vape the whole mountain. But we can’t trash this equipment until we’ve studied it. We have a lot of work ahead of us before we can figure out what’s going on. And I’m sure your government will want the information.”
“Yes, they will,” Velarys said.
Arneson seemed to size her up, his dark eyes lingering on the falquan on her back. “Ellis briefed us on what happened out there in the nebula. For what it’s worth, I want to find and punish the bastards responsible as much as you do. Murdering civilians, working with the Dowd…”
He trailed off in disgust.
I gave him a wary, measuring look. I probably shouldn’t have been so surprised that a jenny would find treason unthinkable, given the indoctrination they all went through, but I wondered if it had even occurred to him that he hadn’t exactly treated aliens well over the years. Maybe he’d had an epiphany recently…or maybe people just saw what they wanted to see.
“Is this the whole facility?” I asked, turning back to the railing. I gestured down about four levels to one of the catwalks where there appeared to be another bulkhead-style door.
“Most of it,” Arneson said. “We haven’t been able to get that door open—probably going to take some explosives, since there doesn’t seem to be any keypad or access panel. The mineral deposits make it hard to get accurate readings, but as far as we can tell, it leads to another passage heading deeper into the mountain.”
“You mean there could be more of these tube things somewhere?” Ash asked, her face almost ghostly.
“It’s possible, but I doubt it. If I had to guess, I’d say it probably leads to the living quarters of the researchers and whoever else was staffed here. There’s nowhere for them to stay out here.”
My jaw clenched. “So we don’t know if we’re alone.”
“No, but we haven’t exactly been quiet—if someone was back there, you’d think they’d come out and say hello.” Arneson pointed to the six soldiers near the door and the sentry gun emplacement they had set up nearby. “If anyone does come through, they’ll get a nasty surprise.”
I nodded. Without blasting open the door, it was probably the best we could do with the forces we had available. And if the Column did have an army somewhere in the mountain, it didn’t make any sense that they would allow a Dominion team to work in here for hours unopposed.
Still…
“Do you sense anything back there?” I asked Velarys.
“No,” she said, rubbing at her temples. “But it is difficult to concentrate. The minds of these Dowd are…alien.”
I wasn’t sure I even wanted to know what she meant. But the thoughts and emotions of any species as misanthropic as theirs must have been nightmarish to behold.
“Let me show you the control area,” Arneson said. “The techs are trying their best to pull whatever data they can, but the encryption is pretty sophisticated. I have a feeling we’re going to need a whole lot more equipment.”
We followed him across the walkway to the control center. The area was arrayed more or less like the science lab on the Stormrider. And every piece of equipment, from the consoles to the projectors to the padded chairs, could have been ripped right off the bridge of a Dominion cruiser. Perhaps they had been.
A team of seven technicians was currently trying to access the computers. Six of them were human, but the seventh was a Kali man I hadn’t seen in almost two years.
“Vrisk?” I asked, smiling as I approached the spindly serpentine man. “It’s been a while, buddy.”
“So it has, Major Zeris,” he replied in his typical modulated voice, though a faint shimmer of pleased purple rippled across his neck scales. “I am pleased to see that you are well, despite the unpleasant circumstances.”
I resisted the urge to give him a handshake. His people weren’t big on that particular gesture for whatever reason. Of course, they weren’t big on hugs, either, but that didn’t stop Ash from giving him one.
“Vrisk!” she said, rushing past me and wrapping her arms around his slender body. “How in the Seraph’s name did you end up here?”
He awkwardly placed his hands on her back and patted her gently, a brief flash of embarrassed red mixing with the purple. “A temporary assignment,” he told her. “I was on New Praxius when the Firehawk received special orders, and I volunteered to serve as chief technician for the mission.”
I grinned knowingly. The truth, I imagined, was probably a lot more complicated. Vrisk had long been a member of Saleya’s organization, and I had a feeling that she had been working hard behind the scenes these last few weeks shuffling her people around to places where they would be more useful in a crisis—and where they could gather more information about whatever was really going on.
“This is Velarys, our Yarasi representative,” I said. “I assume you were briefed.”
“Yes,” Vrisk replied, eyeing the woman behind me. “I offer you greetings.”
She had an odd expression on her face, which I initially assumed was a lingering discomfort at the sensations she was feeling from the Dowd. But then I belatedly remembered that Kali were one of the only species in the Cluster with a natural resistance to psionic attacks—his mind was probably an empty void to her.
“The Executrix will be eager to analyze any data you are able to recover,” she said.
“How is that going?” I asked, glancing between the workstations.
“Slowly,” Vrisk said. “We will not be able to decipher most of the data without additional equipment.”
“Right,” I said, looking over the workstations again. If a tech team could get into those files, it would hopefully be exactly what we needed to get the Assembly on our side.
“We are attempting to download the data as well as remove the physical drives, but the process could take several hours,” Vrisk added. “In the meantime, I was able to isolate some of the most frequently accessed files stored in the data cache. My personal decryption algorithm has had some success deciphering them.”
I smiled. I had met plenty of people over the years who assumed that the Kali reputation for technical brilliance was exaggerated. They were very mistaken.
“What have you found?” Arneson asked.
Vrisk called up a display on his holopad. “This facility has been in operation for some time—at least five years.”
“Five years?” I breathed, sharing a stunned look with Ash. But as strange and haunting as it was to think of our homeworld as a terrorist base of operations, the proof was all around us. A facility this vast couldn’t be built overnight.
“During that time, the researchers here have been storing numerous Dowd subjects,” the Kali said. “And using flash-learning modules to train them while they are in stasis.”
“Train them?” Velarys asked. “For what?”
“That remains unclear,” Vrisk replied, a shimmer of apologetic red rippling down his scales. “However, the learning modules have been connected to Seraphim data crystals rather than traditional, neural implant-based uploading hardware, suggesting that the information is psionic in origin.”
A pit opened in my chest. “Psionic information…you mean like teaching someone how to use their powers?”
A cautious orange ripple cascaded down his neck. “I reiterate that this is currently pure speculation,” he hedged. “We do not yet have sufficient data for a complete analysis.”
“I understand,” I told him. “But I trust your speculation more than most people’s conclusions.”
The shimmer faded. “I believe your supposition is correct, Major. The pods have been used to rapidly educate the specimens in the use of psionic abilities.”
“That cannot be possible,” Velarys said firmly. “The Dowd never demonstrated psionic potential in the past. How could so many of them have developed the gift now?”
“I do not know,” Vrisk admitted. “But the files I accessed contain numerous references to ‘Veilborn Dowd.’ Taken in the context of recent reports of non-human species developing psionic gifts in the Lethian Traverse—”
“Exposure to the Veil,” I finished, the pit in my chest becoming a black hole. “Everyone thought the survivors retreated into it after the war. It must have…changed them.”
His neck rippled with a yellowish splash. “That is a plausible theory.”
I glanced back over my shoulder to the vast facility behind us. Storing a bunch of Dowd in creepy pods was bad enough, but teaching them psionic abilities…that was the stuff of nightmares.
“Seraph save us,” Arneson breathed. “Do you have any idea how many of them have passed through here?”
“Once again, there is no way to know for certain without additional information,” Vrisk hedged. He swiveled his slender neck to look around, thoughts moving behind his amber reptilian eyes. “But based on the wear of the equipment, the standard time frame for telepathic flash-learning techniques, and the size of the facility, I would hazard a guess that the number could be anywhere between fifty and two hundred thousand.”
