Coven's Rebellion Chapter 27

Incoming heavy stuff

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Rosa

Descending to the next floor down, we should have encountered the rest of the prison — Recreation areas, a cafeteria, facilities like that. Instead, we found dozens of what we guessed were empty hospital rooms. They were only identifiable as hospital rooms because of the hygienic cladding that was still present on the walls. No other equipment remained from whatever had been done in those rooms.

Alongside the hospital rooms were a whole series of larger elevators that were capable of going to floors below us, but not to those above us. We theorised that, given the hospital rooms and the larger size of the elevators, they were for transporting gurneys between floors. There was nothing else to find on that floor, besides the door back into the panopticon, so we went back to the stairwell and carefully made our way to the next floor down. As I’d been doing since we entered the UN’s secret tunnel into this place, I kept my sensors sweeping for anything that stood out.

Ame peered through the small window to the next floor we would investigate, then ducked back quickly and hissed, “Guard. He’s asleep on the lobby sofa, though. If you get the cameras, Rosa, I can take care of him.”

The angle from the stairwell door was awkward, but I’d already done this process twice. I was more worried about waking the man than I was about missing my shot with the little wrist-gun drones. As soon as Rusti confirmed the cameras were neutralised, Amelia rushed silently across the lobby towards the guard. In her hand was a capsule, which she placed delicately on the hat he’d placed over his face.

The capsule wasn't the most reliable piece of kit for keeping a man asleep, because most chemicals that could do that were also dangerous to administer without extensive training. The capsules had been created with the idea that anyone we didn’t want to kill, we’d also want them not to suffer any permanent damage. After the Axile Industries break-in and the warzone in Austria I was a little hesitant to do anything… drastic.

We waited five minutes to be sure the vapour capsule had time to take effect, then moved past with eerily silent android steps.

Beyond the lobby was a short hallway, with heavy dark metal panelling that sat between heavy concrete pillars. At the end of the hallway, a thick circular door dominated the space like the closed eye of a dead god. Suspecting that we weren’t seeing everything, I ran my eyes over every detail. Small components in my eyes clicked and whirred as I cycled between every band of the electromagnetic spectrum that they could give me.

“Two cameras up in the corners,” I said, gesturing in their direction. “I’m more concerned about some of the panels on the walls, though. On either side, one particular panel has scrape marks around it. I think they might slide out to allow gun turrets sight of the hallway and lobby.”

“Rusti, you’re up,” Ame said, nudging him. It was odd, seeing the digital communication be accompanied by a physical interaction.

“I swear, I’m not even that good with computer systems,” he grumbled as he knelt down to put something on the ground.

From his palm, a little insectoid robot scuttled down and into an air vent. Our currently tall and hunky, genderfluid menace went still as they took control of the little bot. A minute passed by, then two.

Abruptly, a slight shiver in the floor heralded their success. The massive vault-style door was opening.

“Cameras are getting generated images, turrets are disabled, and door is open,” he said smugly. “You’re welcome.”

“Thank you,” I said, offering wry but genuine sincerity.

Together, the three of us moved through the now open door. A very similar hallway lay beyond it, but this one terminated in a room that shared its dark, gunmetal aesthetic. My scans detected no cameras or any other type of surveillance equipment, so we pressed cautiously into the room. Computer screens dominated the walls to the left and right, almost crowding each other they were packed so tightly.

Any attention we might have paid to the screens and their myriad readouts and scrolling feeds of text was stolen by the floor to ceiling glass window opposite us. There was a room— no, a room was much too mundane of a word to describe the space beyond the glass. It was like something out of a science fiction movie. One of the old ones, where the massive facilities had yawning chasms of metal and a distinct lack of health and safety oversight.

The enormous space took a lot from the visual design exhibited in those movies, with dark metal panelling and gently blinking lights. The size was where it most resembled the sets in those old movies though. It had to be at least a dozen floors deep and a hundred metres wide.

In the middle were three pillars that took up the majority of the room, and down those pillars were hundreds of deeply recessed alcoves. Every single one of those alcoves held a… a box. From here, it was difficult to tell how long they were, but the short ends that we could see were about eighty by fifty centimetres.

“That… looks suspiciously like the mother of all morgues,” Ame murmured, keeping her voice low despite the fact that all our communication was virtual.

As soon as she said it, I couldn’t see it as anything other than that.

Almost fearfully, I shifted my attention to a nearby console and stepped towards it. There was no security on it, so I was easily able to navigate to what it called its ‘primary database’. Thousands of entries populated the screen, and I hesitated as a wave of cold fear ran through me. Did I want to know? Did I want to burden my future self with the knowledge contained within this terminal?

I almost listened to that voice of doubt, that whispering of dread that maliciously teased the back of my mind. Then, I reluctantly remembered that I was here to do a job, and clicked on an entry.

A detailed scan of a human body filled the right-hand side of the screen. On the left, was an extensive array of statistics, followed by a field with what looked like shorthand notes. At the bottom in large, bold letters, were the words, ‘Integrated and Archived’.

Slowly, I looked back up to the room. The location of the person whose file I was viewing listed their location within the ‘archive’ beyond the window. The stats on the body showed no life signs, or even fields where life signs would be displayed. Ame was right. This was a morgue. We’d found the prisoners.

“Are we sure we want to keep digging into this place?” My girlfriend asked, voice quavering slightly.

“We have to,” I said, but I felt about as confident about that statement as she sounded.

A message came in from Desmonia. “This place is connected to R.A.I.D.S. Finding thousands of dead humans just reiterates how serious the matter is.”

“Fuck,” Ame said, without any conviction.

Rusti, who’d been silent while they processed the morgue, looked deeply haunted. Still, they stepped towards the console and plugged in to download the data. When they were done, none of their usually playful nature was present. “Next floor?”

“Yes,” I said, and turned back in the direction of the stairwell and the almost idyllic sense of safety it held in my mind now.

Being as patient and diligent as we could, we retraced our steps back, removing Rusti’s insect hacker in the process. The whole time, my mind spun, thinking about two words. Integrated. Archived.

How were these people integrated, and into what? I could see their bodies being stored as an interpretation of the word ‘archived’, but there was no indication about the former of the two words.

I was mulling that over all through the next floors, which contained a variety of support facilities and nondescript computer labs. The latter intrigued us initially, until we realised that the computers were all basically blank slates. Rusti surmised that they were using some sort of virtual machine setup. I wasn’t entirely sure what they meant until they likened it to how we used to have personal logins in school that would work on any of the computers. Thus, unless the researchers had been sloppy with security, we needed to find their servers.

So, we kept looking. Progress was agonisingly slow, and as time went on, I began to worry that we might not find our objective before the facility began to wake for the day. Our contingency plan for if this operation took multiple days required that we retrace our steps and recall our surveillance tampering drones. We needed to start that task soon if we wanted to complete it with time to spare. Then, we'd hide in the UN’s infiltration tunnel and wait for the next night.

I was close to making that call when we arrived at another large, heavy door. Would we have time to open it? I'd already taken care of the surveillance devices here.

“I want to try,” Rusti said after a moment where they were probably thinking the same thoughts that I was. “The authentication system is old. I think I can get us in.”

“That won't help us if someone is in there,” Amelia pointed out. “I don't know why they didn't have anyone locked in the morgue. Maybe the guy outside it was lazy and decided to spend his watch on that sofa instead of the cold control room? Anyway, if we're opening it, let's be ready to clobber whatever poor asshole we find behind that hunk of slag.”

“Slag? You're disparaging the door?” I asked incredulously, and with perhaps a touch of amusement. “Now it's going to be upset and yell to all its friends when we open it.”

“It doesn't have any friends,” she said wryly. “Otherwise, it'd have pulled some strings so it didn't get this shitty assignment. Nobody wants to be stuck doing useless guard duty at the bottom of an underground facility that hasn't had a detected breach in like, ever.”

I frowned, but there was a smile on my face due to the banter. I was enjoying myself. “Ame, we are actively forcing entry. It's not useless guard—”

“Got it,” Rusti said, their tone conveying the eyeroll we couldn't see because they'd crouched down in front of the authentication console.

Instantly, my girlfriend and I at the ready, with all levity discarded. Ame moved up to the side of the door that would crack first, while I hovered behind and to the side. We couldn't afford to carefully breach this door if someone was in there with an alarm button.

“Three, two, one, now,” Rusti said, and the door began to creak as it rolled sideways into the wall on well-oiled tracks.

I saw the following events in a sort of panicked bullet-time. A man sat on a cheap plastic chair, eating a sandwich while he watched something on his phone. His eyes rose slowly, then widened when he came face-to-face with the barrel of Ame’s weapon. His scrambling saved him from the snapping bark of her suppressed rifle. The low velocity bullet shattered the back of the chair, sending shards of white plastic spinning in all directions.

Her second bullet hit him in the arm, spraying blood and… other things out onto the console he was rushing for. The force of the bullet winging him was enough to throw him stumbling towards his target, and he slapped his hand down on a large red button just before Ame's third bullet took him in the back, and he dropped lifeless to the ground.

Rusti and I stood there in shock for a second, staring at the dead man. Ame continued onward, swinging her rifle left to right as she scanned the room.

“Clear,” she called curtly. “He got the alarm triggered. Silent, though. Rusti, Rosa, get to work searching the place. Better hope what we need is on this level, because I'm not sure we're going to get a shot at the others.”

I took a shuddering breath to get the shock of the sudden violence out of my system, then nodded and rushed in, scanning the room. How long did we have? Would they be here in moments, or minutes? Either way, we wouldn't have to wait long for that question to gain an answer.