[Pioneer Dominique Reynolds]
After hours of trekking through the progressively denser jungle, even having to cut down walls of trees to continue forward, we came across a clearing featuring a concrete square in the center with a metal track leading off to a massive circular vault door in the side of a cliff face. This must have been the ‘cargo’ drop-off and transportation system. The door didn’t have any external access features, it was just a flat steel disk embedded deep into the rock. Any scans I made simply bounced back, the entire area must have shielding meaning we would be going in blind. Avalon decided to take this opportunity to tell me things that I already knew.
“Dominique, the facility is entirely enclosed, I won’t be able to reach you as long as you are in there.”
Yeah, good riddance.
“Well Dok, here we are. Are you ready to be a hero?”
Dokchara had an uneasy attitude, gripping his stolen rifle tightly and never standing still. He’d been getting progressively anxious as we approached the destination. I had chalked it up to him getting stage fright after trying to reach this moment for so long, but I wasn’t a xeno-psychologist by any stretch. I couldn’t have him freaking out on me when we were in there.
“I don’t know what we’re going to find in there, Dom, but we made an agreement… No Graht is leaving alive, right?”
I walked over to him and placed a hand on his shoulder, getting him to face me directly for the first time in a while. Looking into his eyes, I realized that the behavior I’d been seeing in him wasn’t stress or apprehensiveness, it was eagerness. A fire was raging in him and he wanted to burn people with it. It wasn’t my position to intervene in his revenge.
“Alright, I get it, Dok. Camera’s off for this one.”
Walking back towards the vault door, I began about gaining access the good ol’ fashioned way. I placed my hands at the seams of the door and started wriggling my fingers through, trying to get a good hold on the other side. 5…10…15 inches of pure steel before reaching the other side, needing to prop myself on the stone wall to actually pull the door out instead of embedding myself into it. Popping the seal, I was met with a cold draft and a diagonal open elevator shaft with minimal lighting, just enough to see the edge of the platform. Going by the lack of railings, it seems like the architects of this place weren’t too worried with safety conventions.
The elevator was inoperable from here so we instead went over the edge and started sliding down the shaft, our path illuminated by the light fixtures attached to our guns. The lack of guards so far was strange, but I suppose that there were no defensible positions in the entryway for them to be stationed at. The shaft ended at a large concrete hallway with only a pair of metal doors at the end and that same track stretching across the length of it. From the little that I could see, behind the doors was a massive room that I couldn’t scan the end of, likely our goal.
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After exchanging nods with Dokchara, I gave the doors a hearty kick, blowing them off the hinges and revealing a gargantuan metal chamber similar to a city block in length and width while only reaching around 20 feet in height. The room was completely filled with a grid of massive metal tubes coming up from the ground, about 2 feet in radius and 10 feet in height. The roof was lined with tracks for a giant crane arm which was currently idle in a corner. The dotted strips of light across the floor cast a sickly green glow over the entire area.
Straight ahead were two Grahtonians in white lab coats near a large terminal jutting from the floor. Before they even had the chance to turn around, Dokchara was already letting rounds loose, turning their heads into fine murals of crimson on the tubes ahead of them. As for the guards in the room… none. It’s like they weren’t even aware that we had broken through the entrance. I could see a few doors dotted around the perimeter of the room, but the tubes offered plenty of cover if anyone came rushing through.
I walked over to the terminal and wiped off the slurry with a generously provided lab coat before getting to work. The interface was pretty straight forward, a grid of blue circles with a few missing at the bottom, denoting our current location in relation to the display. I pressed on one of the circles near us and heard a mechanical whirring come to life from below me before the tube to my left started descending into the ground, revealing another glass tube hidden by the metal covering.
What was contained in the tube had a generally humanoid shape. I was able to make out where the arms and legs were, but the familiarity ended there. Swells of exposed flesh cascaded over each other in recursion, melding the limbs together and smothering any features originally borne by the body. Patterned gashes exposed ingrown bones covered in twisted spurs, the wounds seemingly forgotten and deemed unworthy of recovery. Where joints would have normally been, sickly yellow protrusions of bone and tough cartilage pierced the surface and snaked out, colliding with other parts of the mass and perpetually tearing chunks of sore flesh out.
An array of plastic tubes started from the bottom of the tube and disappeared into the being suspended in liquid, some of them injecting a green liquid and others receiving a red one. It was the blood of this… person, the entire product of this operation.
“...What the f-fuck is this?”
“Envelope disease.”
That caused me to spin towards Dokchara. He had a blank expression on his face, his gun hanging on his side and shoulders slouched. I couldn’t get a read on him, but was that really necessary in this scenario?
“It was the leading cause of death for our people before we developed a cure… but I’ve never seen it this bad…”
I stepped back and looked around the room before looking back at the terminal. There were thousands of these tubes, were they all filled with people that looked like this?!
“Dok, these people still have vital signs… maybe they could be saved!”
I heard a clattering behind me. Dokchara had dropped his gun and fell down to his knees, hugging himself and speaking between short breaths.
“Y-you don’t get it, Dom… The brain is the first thing to go. These aren’t people anymore, they’re machines.”
There had to be something here, something we could do… The recent shipment! If this is a disease, those people probably are still fine! I just needed to find out which tubes they were in… Looking through the message logs, the most recent is one week ago…
LC-13-2: The floor is overcrowded, expansion is still under construction. We don’t have accommodations for the new assets.
OVS-13: There was a logistical error, take the excess assets to the butcher for liquidation. Make sure not to let anything go to waste, demand is high at the moment.