A Time Of Plague And Death

Posted on Thu Nov 7th, 2019 @ 5:00am by Client The Narrator

Mission: The Forgotten Arm
Location: Blue Falcon Hotel, Copper Ward, Eros Station
Timeline: Eros Incident T-minus 15 Hours.

Commander Jansen remembered where he had smelled something close to what was assailing his nose in the confines of the hotel. It had been in his younger days when he’d worked for the United Nations Marine Corp. A village in the Autonomous Economic Region Eurasia, some nowhere place with a name only known to the locals. What had it been? Some new synthetic cell culture, meant to revolutionise the antiaging rejuvenation treatments? A new-fangled yeast culture that produced twice the yield of other brands?

It had had a jingle. Something tinny with a k-pop beat and energy to it. Everything had a jingle it seemed these days.

Of course, like most startups, the money was the problem, and testing costs money. So they’d tested the stuff on the villagers, all of whom were living on Basic and knowing even a marginal vocational gig like human guineapig might get them on the ladder to success. It all counted towards something, especially when you were at the bottom of the pile.

But something had gone wrong, or right. Whatever magic goop the start-up was testing went semi-autonomous before the Corpo rep’s had a chance to don their biohazard gear. When the death toll reached the near 100% mark, the Marines were sent in to sterilise the area. Burn everything to ash, and then bleach the ashes into concrete blocks to be buried somewhere out of the public eye. At the time Jansen had wondered why the brass hadn’t just dropped a thermobaric on the site, or even a low-density kinetic round from a UNN ship in geo sync. Just enough to glass the area, remove the stain, and not put dust on the solar panels in Nairobi.

But with that rotting meat smell in his nose, coupled with the tang of ozone, he remembered the revelation he’d had as a young man. You sent men into situations like that to find the ones with the spirit to do what needed to be done. A long peace just meant when the balloon went up you’d have well-trained soldiers, not killers.

Of course, that was before the psych eval’s began to peg him as a risk. All those years of training. 14 million UN Dollars invested in making him into a soldier. Thrown away because he liked his vocation. That made working for Protogen a nice change of pace.

After all, do a job you like and you’ll never work a day in your life.

And so he was happy to stand in the bedroom of room 214 of the Blue Flacon Hotel. Watching as the tech’s gingerly stepped over smashed light fixtures and fluid stained bedsheets. Mr Dresden had said it wasn’t airborne, and Jansen knew that Mr Dresden never lied. There was no profit in lying, no rationale worthy of the subterfuge. And yet every breath he took in felt like it was clogging his lungs with something foreign. Something truly terrifying.

“Do you have children?” Mr Dresden asked, as he gently pressed the extractor against the skin of the....well calling it a woman now would be an understatement. What had one of the tech’s called it? The Seed Crystal? As good a name as any, he supposed and watched as more of the congealed brown gel filled the vial on the extractor. Flecks of azure blue danced and flitted through the fluid, like lightning bugs seeking an exit. Like hornets in a shook nest.

“Not that I’m aware of Sir,” Jansen replied, keeping an eye on one of the techs as they set up a radiation generator. Little more than the business end of a particle accelerator crammed into something as big as a backpack. And like the two others set up in the cramp shower stall where the Seed Crystal had crawled to die, it was aimed at her.

“Huum. They only disappoint you. But this one, Julie Mao...she touched something extraordinary,” Dresden said, holding up the extractor and admiring the fluid within. He then carefully unscrewed it and placed it into the secure sample case. “And in return, was touched by it. She has become something beyond our understanding, and it is our job to see that it is not squandered. She is a precious gift to the project, and to the greater human diaspora.”

Tendrils of back filament growths lay dead like the desiccated remains of burnt forest, radiating out from the body of Julie Andromeda Mao. If you looked you could see they had been going for the door, not to escape but to drink up the spill of light coming through the bottom of the door. Hungry for energy in whatever form it could find, one of the techs had said.

Dresden closed the case, peeled his gloves off and threw them into the shower stall.

“I need to get these samples back to Thoth Station, to continue the work. I’ll be leaving now,” he said and turned back to Jansen. “The honour of beginning the great experiment I leave to you and your men. I am...envious of you that honour. To begin the greatest achievement since the first primate sparked flint against a rock to make fire. You’ll be here to see it begin, to light that fire.”

Jansen just nodded and watched as the chief Protogen scientist walked out carrying his case of blue-green sludge. Jansen couldn’t say if he really cared overly much about what that case might contain, or to what end it might be used.

Sometimes a man just wanted to watch the world burn.

“Have the tech’s go through a final rundown of all of the shelters. Radiation generators, chemical misters, and the station override program,” Jansen said to one of his men as he stepped out of the grave of Julie Andromeda Mao. “We only get to get this right once.”

He looked at his wrist terminal as the count down timer advanced ever slowly towards zero.

Soon.