(Part 1)
“I swear to God.”
Jared Bismuth held a tightly closed dull-metal fist up to the mouth of his helmet, and flicked out his armored index finger with enough force to kill a dog. He was wearing the company suit, charcoal black and about as lustrous, a bulky and buff looking deal with a blockiness about it that made it look like a hazmat getup on steroids. The helmet was a funky swept-back geometrical kind of thing, like the top off a stealth fighter. The sensor band — optical, infrared, the works — had a matte finish that couldn’t quite make it blend in smoothly, but it looked fine anyway and it gave you eyes, make that equivalent, to look at when you were talking.
Edward Gallium was grinning ear to ear, wearing an identical company suit to Jared’s, and even though Jared couldn’t see it, he knew it was there. You knew Ed long enough, you’d get to know when something amused him. The topic at hand almost set him rolling.
The pair of them, armed with fancy new guns called “railrifles” were doing damage control on a building that had a very nasty piece of artificial biology unleashed upon it. Most of it was underground, so it was inconspicous aside from the logo.
Vril Energies Research Lab. Yeah, like that Vril. What they were doing was anyone’s guess, even though Jared and Ed had been extensively briefed about the situation (which mattered fuck all to Jared since he’d forget it by tomorrow morning).
The rifles were high powered, bayonetted weapons that could bust a tank into three billion pieces with a full powered shot, so they were ordered to keep them at half-power and away from each other, because the company suits were a little less than a tank in terms of armor.
So, there they were, leaning up against the wall of this tiny little building in a blocked off section of town, Jared shushing Ed, the only noise being the hissing of the many blue-white barrel-sized canisters that were planted all along the road and on the side walk spraying a fine mist of disinfectant.
“Just don’t say it.”
“Say what.”
“Goddammit Ed, we’re both thinking it, just don’t say it.”
“Fine, fine. Heh, well, we gonna jump in there or what?”
“On my mark.”
Jared touched his left hand to his right arm, where he had the railrifle latched and mounted. He poked at the air, would have said the unassuming bystander, but in reality pressed a button rendered on his digital contacts as a wire-frame hologram that activated the railrifle, tightened the mechanical muscles in the company suit to combat readiness, and shot a dose of chemicals into his bloodstream that brought his muscles to combat readiness. Ed aped him, and checked to make sure the munition can for the rifle was fastened right.
“Mark!”
Jared and Ed backed up from the wall and vaulted themselves at the windows. Incidentally, it was bulletproof, and rated nearly as high as the sensor band on their helmets, and neither of them bothered to check. Luckily, the wall around the windows wasn’t nearly so durable, and the frames were torn right off. The pair slid with and bounced off their respective pane of material as they attempted to right themselves. Ed destroyed a row of chairs and a coffee table, and Jared plowed through a counter and into several durable cabinets that never the less dented underneath the force of a man in armor, leaving a comically shaped imprint behind.
“Ahh, hell. Alright there, J?”
“Next time, let’s make sure the window’ll give before we charge it,” said Jared.
They nodded at each other and spun themselves around slowly, letting the on-board computers suck in the layout of the building and figure out how to breach the lower levels. Eventually a bright red arrow appeared and hovered around a spot on the floor before shooting down and becoming a translucent handle hidden below the tile. The outline of a hatch flared up a second after. Ed started moving over to it when Jared told him to “Hold.”
“What?”
Jared poked through the air and turned around. Ed suddenly saw an elevator was hidden behind one of the racks, which Jared kicked out of the way. He called it and pointed at the door.
“Cover the elevator, I’m going to drag in one of those gas-cans.”
Jared moved briskly at what an olympic athlete would consider a sprint and pulled one of the big gas-cans easily over his shoulder and brought it in, where it quickly began filling the room with a light mist. It was mostly aerosolized bleach but it had a little extra chemical mix in it that would kill the unpleasantness extra dead. Ed was still aiming at the door when it opened, calm and collected.
“Help! Help!”
A blond, frazzled woman in business attire came out and stopped in terror before the long rail sticking out of Ed’s arm. She looked up at him, and instinctively looked at the sensor band. Everyone looked at the sensor band, even if they couldn’t make it out to well. Instincts.
“Oh god. Don’t kill me.”
Ed tapped the raised collar on the suit, unveiling the speaker hidden under it.
“Ma’am, are there any more survivors down there?” asked Ed.
“No, no, god no. They’re all contaminated. All of them, oh god.”
She broke down weeping. Jared stepped forward and put his hand on her head, which felt unsettlingly hot underneath his tactile sensors. This data was visually transferred to Ed, who understood.
“Ma’am, how long have you been down there?”
“I worked in the breach area, I saw it happen.”
“Ma’am, this is important: how did you make it out?”
“I had a service revolver in my office. I tried to make it out the service shaft but there was no way I could climb that, so I took the elevator. It locked because of the breach.”
Jared turned around and saw Ed nodding. She didn’t say anything about escaping infection, or putting on a respirator. She was definitely an queen-type, according to the brief. Jared opened up his speakers.
“Ma’am, how did you escape infection?”
She looked up at Jared through his palm. Her eyes dilated and then she spoke in a monotone.
“I held my breath.”
The company suit gave you one hell of a strength factor, so much so that snapping a neck was no harder than opening a pickle jar. Jared had snapped necks before though and they didn’t feel like this one. Images of the briefing appeared into his mind and gave him goosebumps. Focus, move on. They tapped their speakers shut and Ed stepped into the elevator.
It could take one of them, barely. Ed knocked a part of the roof out, got it moving down, jumped up, and grabbed on. The elevator didn’t move very fast and he kicked out doors quickly. Jared tossed the corpse down into the elevator, and then followed with the gas-can. The combined weight of the corpse, company suits, and the gas-can made the elevator groan and shudder for a second before it went into free fall as the cables snapped. Their displays ticked an altitude meter that said “Prepare to Jump.”
Jump!
They came down with all the grace you’d expect, crushing the remains of the elevator underfoot. Jared made a hole to plant the gas-can and jammed it in there.
“Ok, that should hold.”
“You sound nervous, Jared. Ease up. Just a bunch of-”
“Don’t say it.”
Cordyceps unilateralis is a funny little fungus from China that infects insects, controls their mind, and makes them climb up somewhere nice and fresh so the insect can die and the fungus can sprout out of it’s head. Morbidity aside, the genus as a whole is very medicinally interesting, but Jared Bismuth and Edward Gallium are not men you send in to clean up spilled medicine. After some very hard work and much tampering, the good men and women down here in the lab had managed to create a new species of Cordyceps.
“Mark.”
They rammed through the elevator door easily, followed by the mist from the gas-can. It was a long corridor, so they went into a kneeling slide helped along by the nigh frictionless material on their shins and the little wheels put there to facilitate such a maneuver. They went all the way down, and not a soul was found. Pity, Ed thought. He’d really wanted to shoot one of them. They got up and walked carefully to the double-door airlock where they let their suits do the talking. They went in, got a spray of something like the stuff in the cans but much more potent, dried, and then cheerfully let out.
The air was noticeably green like the pollen haze you see in the middle of an arboreal spoogefest.