Opening the door, the marines pressed on down the stairs, emerging on a similar landing on the next level down. More stairs led on downwards to another level.
They paused to check commo links. While the depth underground was having an adverse effect on signal strength, the filters and extrapolation programs in the combat armour battlecomputers was able to "clean" the signals sufficiently to get intelligible speech. Good enough!
The two doors from this landing were marked "Communications" and Laboratories". Once again, Jacques repeated his manoeuvre with the lightsabre and opened a hole in each door to allow observation. An idea occurred, and one of the three remaining sensor balls was sent through and guided down the corridor of "Communications".
At the end of the corridor, it found a steel-walled chamber, lined with sleek metal missiles. There were places for ten; three were missing. A computer workstation was just inside the door; an alcove at the far end had some sort of lift machinery inside, and looked like a launch tube. There was automated machinery for loading the torpedoes into the tube. This, then, was where the Jump Torpedo had been launched from.
The other door led into a small antechamber, where two human bodies lay sprawled on the floor. Both wore lab coats, and had been shot in the head once with a snub pistol, which lay on the floor next to them. Searching them, the marines found assorted personal stuff, a slim glass specimen cylinder with a single Snake spine in it, and two ID badge/swipe cards, in the names of Dr. Ken Amber and Dr. Morgan Wallace.
The door beyond that opened into the laboratories proper. The first periscopic view through showed a light source; a dull, pale green glow. Once again the sensor ball was sent in.
It was a large, high ceilinged area, with a wide central aisle and seperate bays attached to either side. These bays appeared to be laboratories or workshops of some kind, filled with equipment and workbenches. The furthest one on the left had some sort of glass cylinder standing in the centre; this was illuminated and had blinking status lights on the side. In the bay opposite this was a dead and dessicated Leaper. Overhead was a gantry or catwalk running along the edge of the room and disapearing into the back wall through archways; the ball couldn't see any way up at this end. Two doors marked "Security" and "Research" opened off the gantry into the walls on either side.
Sending the ball through the archway, the marines discovered a similar room on the other side of the wall, with similar bays and equipment. Confident there were no active hostiles inside, the platoon entered and started exploring.
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The illuminated cylinder turned out to be a laboratory stasis tube - a scientist's Low Berth - independently powered, and containing a peculiar, strangely repulsive leathery egg-like object. Reagan's alien-skin-matching program proclaimed it made of the same stuff as the other forms they'd encountered. No-one was in the least keen to open the cylinder... |
Stasis Tube (click for larger image!) |
Jacques noticed some odd devices attached to the walls of the bays ad went to investigate. He found some compact EM generators of a type he vaguely recognized from descriptions, though he'd never seen one before; forcefield door generators. All were on, tending to indicate that the Leaper dead across the way had been imprisoned there and had died before the power failed...
Passing onwards into the second section, the marines found two more specemins. On a bench, in a dissecting dish lay an unpleasant-looking lifeform. About 2' long, it was segmented and vaguely caterpillar-like. Multiple legs lined the undersurface, and two beady black eyes were mounted at the head end. It had no mouth as such; just a set of powerful gripping mandibles. The body cavity was laid open, and the creature was packed with some of the oddest internal organs any of them had ever seen.
Ultramarine (click for larger image!) |
On the other side, on a surgical table, was an even more disquieting discovery. Sprawled on it was a very peculiar looking creature. Obviously once human, it had undergone some drastic alterations. Its' skin was now a strange, scaly hide, very similar to that of the Snakes, Leapers and Missiles; Reagan's program indicated a close match, but not an exact one. Its' eyes were an unpleasant purple colour. Seemingly bonded to its's limbs were peculiar pieces of armour, obviously biomechanical in nature. The creature was quite dead; a surgeon's bone-cutting knife had been driven into its' chest several times and still stood in the last wound. |
Reagan moved around the corpse, scanning it carefully to add to his detection program. As he did so, a strange pattern in the integument caught his eye. Bending closer, he realized that it was a tattoo, marked on the original human skin and still visible through whatever had been grafted on. With a jolt of horror he realized that he recognized this tattoo... Mucky Miranda was a popular favourite... among Imperial Marines.
This was - or had once been - a fellow Imperial Marine...
Over the radio link, the troopers could hear Lieutenant Stalker stuttering with incredulity as he monitored the pictures. His disbelief that an apparently Imperial research facility could be involved in such experimentation on Corps personnel was perfectly understandable.
Climbing the ladders to the gantries, the platoon examined and then opened the door marked "Security". A corridor was behind, leading to a room lined with electronics, all of a surveillance nature, all powered down. A dead body lay in the middle of the floor; human, and dressed in tshirt and shorts only; he'd been shot in the chest with a snub pistol. Along the back wall of the room were two heavy security doors. Once these were breached, they were found to contain a lift each, descending 20' and opening onto four narrow passages each.
Between the two central monitors was a third door, less formidable than the others. This gave onto a narrow corridor, with a glazed wall along the far long side, looking down into eight cells, set 20' below current floor level. Each had a pallet bed, toilet and chair. Four of them had a dead body in them, some lying on the bed, others twisted as if trying desperately to escape. All were dressed in the same basic t and shorts as the body in the previous room, but all were unwounded and painfully thin; they seemed to have died of starvation. One of the hatches on the empty cells was broken open.
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Closer examination revealed several of the bodies to have similar IM tattoos to the ones on the "experiment" above. It seemed clear that this was where the unfortunate marines destined to be the experimental subjects were kept. "What's the worst duty assignment you ever had?" joked Dead Ted, but it was black humour and few people laughed. |
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Returning to the gantries, the platoon examined the door marked "Research". The sensitive audio pickups of the combat armour picked up quite easily the sounds of slithering from behind it, so the peephole was made with extra caution.
Snake! |
On the other side was a large round room, high-ceilinged and decorated with ornamental trees and a pool. The trees had long since died, and the pool was now filled with dark, stagnant water. Two dead scientists, riddled with Snake spines, lay on the floor, and no fewer than five snakes were waiting in various places around the room. The room was too large for Jacques' flamethrower to fill, so he cautiously made several more holes in the door, keyhole-shaped this time, to allow weapons to fire through. Then Verral, Uriah and Reagan fitted their rifles to the apertures and fired. |
The soft flutter of gauss fire was followed a nanosecond later by the sharp ping! of ricochets from the tough snake armour, and the meaty slaps as rounds penetrated to flesh. Reagan's x-laser needle-beam was silent and invisible, but just as deadly. A single return volley of snake-spines hammered into the steel door, and then the room was cleared.
Doors opened on all three of the other sides of the rotunda, and Uriah chose the one on the right first; it was marked "Reference". Once it was drilled, Jacques went on to do the others ("Conference" and "Laboratories") while Uriah examined what was inside.
He saw another Snake lurking in the dimness inside. Once again, he sent a volley of gauss rounds through the peep-hole, but was amazed to see them whip straight through the alien and smack into the rear wall. Belatedly he realized that this was a hologram.
Entering the room, they discovered a display chamber, with all the alien types they'd already seen, plus several new ones, displayed by independent holoprojectors. Each had notes attached, and the marines carefully collected the contents of these notes. (Click here for the species notes)
"Laboratories" led to a set of smaller research labs; whereas the one downstairs had been more obviously surgeries and workshops, these were for more delicate work; more computers, microscopes and precision equipment were here. There were also hand-written notes; all seemed to centre on analysys and investigation of the alien creatures - referred to throughout as "exotics". This gave the lie to the theory evolved by some of the Marines that the work of Elbane Base had somehow created them. Three more dead scientists lay in here, clawed but not consumed in any way. It seemed that the Snakes and Leapers had no interest in Humaniti as food, in any case.
The corridor marked "Conference" led to a large room with whiteboards on all four walls. All were covered in equations, formulae, molecular diagrams and engineering drawings, and all were connected with the creature they'd found on the slab below. Here, for the first time, they learned that the creature the scientists were trying to create from a blasphemous combination of human Marine and vile Alien was called an Ultramarine.
Among the sketches were some of a custom suit of battledress designed especially for the creature. In one corner stood a half-built prototype; several of the marines examined it covetously, but one glance at the needle-sharp medullary probes inside the helmet, waiting to plunge into the grotesquely modified brain of the Ultramarine, was enough to put them off permanently.
So they pressed on down to the third and -as it turned out- lowest level. This proved to be the accommodation and research office level, with individual rooms for the personnel, many showing signs of a hasty departure. At one end was the power plant, door locked and controls irreparably blown up, with a maintenance room right next door. At the other was the master computer room, undamaged but powered down.
Uriah started ransacking the maintenace room for a power supply, while Jacques investigated Director Sullivan's office. In it, he found a small steel safe of quite old-fashioned manufacture, with a lock on it of ultra-modern quality that he knew at a glance his slicer computer couldn't handle. He plugged it into his armour, requesting a commo uplink to the ship's systems to help crack the codes, and settled back to wait.
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Uriah, meanwhile, had located a portable fusion power plant, and lugged it single-handed down the corridor to the computer room, no mean feat of strength. The connections for the computer system baffled him, however, so he went and fetched LZ, who was able to point out the correct places to feed power. |
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The computer came to life, and demanded a password. Uriah was flummoxed for a moment, and then Verral, with one of those lucky thoughts of his, remembered a tiny scribbled word from the bottom corner of Director Sullivan's notepad. He reminded Uriah, who duly tapped in "carolingian".
Uriah and Verral get the main computer running; note the Snake hologram! (click for larger image!) |
The computer came online, a massively complex holographic interface appearing. Uriah stared at it; it seemed to make absolutely no sense. A guess was the best they could do; Verral touched a 3d figure, and abruptly the two found themselves looking at a complete schematic and project documentation of the Ultramarine. Arranging an upload to the computers aboard the Brazos, Uriah also dumped the lot onto a data slug as a backup. |
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Back in the office, the safe had opened. Inside was an encryption computer, the sort of device very important people used for encoding very important data to send via J-Mail or Jump Torpedo. Not expecting much, he powered it on, and was amazed to see the last displayed screen still active. It showed the destination for the Ultramarine status reports; the jump torp was to arrive surreptitiously in the Bremerton system - the sector capital, four parsecs away - and beam the information direct into the sector Duke's office.... |
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