|
|
Chapter 77 – SilicideGraham Miller looked at his team. He knew Jo Lupo was reliable, but it was too damn soon for her to be back out in the field. Unfortunately, he didn’t have a lot of choice. He’d wanted a command, and he had one. Only he hadn’t been on a field op with any of them except Lupo. He’d done training and field exercises with his other people, but that didn’t mean these guys would hold up when they ran into something completely unnatural. Sergeant Carlson had serious battle experience with plenty of medals to show for it, plus the guy was built like a weightlifter. But Lieutenants Marshall and Bailey had less real battle experience. That could make all the difference, as Graham had seen in Russia and the Ukraine. Still, Bailey had serious computer skills in addition to military training, and Marshall had a huge bioscience background on top of going through the Naval Academy. Having a hacker and a biophysicist on-site without introducing civilians into danger zones should be a good thing, if he could get it to work.
He finished explaining the situation to them and said, “Any questions?”
Lieutenant Lupo looked over at the three fingies and waited for one of them to ask something. When they didn’t, she asked, “Several questions, sir. Do we know if the lab has started the experiments? Do we know if the lab has adequate protections to keep intruders out? Do we know if the lab has biowarfare protocols anywhere? Do we know if the police have been notified, and if so, if they’ll have enough sense not to barge in and give these things a way to get out and attack the general population? And do we know if Terawatt was able to kill any of these things?”
He nodded as he grappled for answers. Lupo was a lot smarter than most army ell tees. She was going to be a general someday if she didn’t get killed on one of these ops. He was so glad he’d asked her to be his 2IC. He didn’t care that she was walking around with a molded plastic boot up to her knee to protect her still-healing leg. She was still someone he wanted on his six. He said, “For most of those questions we’ll have to wait until we hear from Walter and their DHS contact. But we know it’s supposed to be a pharmaceutical research lab, so there should be no biowarfare rooms and there should be enough security to keep PETA out. It’s not quite noon in Tokyo now, so someone at the lab should be answering phone calls. If they’re not, then we have to assume the worst.”
The sat phone rang, and he flipped it to speakerphone. An Autotuned voice said in a ‘smiling’ tone, “Hi, Graham!”
How did the colonel get Acid Burn on this so fast? He said, “Acid Burn. You’re on speakerphone. I have Lieutenant Lupo and three new faces. Sergeant Mark Carlson, Lieutenant Hank Marshall who you already met, and Lieutenant Pete Bailey.”
“Hi, Jo! Hi, guys! Okay, I checked their website and their webpages are down, but I went and accessed some sites that are mirrors that maintain ‘time capsules’ of the state of the internet, and then I translated the pages since they’re all in Japanese.”
“You read Japanese, too?” Lupo asked.
“Oh, no, I speak a little bit, but I’m totally no with the written comprehension, but I’ve got translator programs for katakana and hiragana and kanji and romaji …”
Carlson and Bailey were looking at each other like ‘who the hell is this woman?’ but Graham needed to stay on task.
“… So anyway, they specialize in studies on cancers and lymphomas, along with heart disease, cerebrovascular disease — that means strokes mainly — and pneumonia, along with diabetes and — get this — athlete’s foot, which is way bigger in Japan than here because of the whole communal bath thing there. It looks like they focus on the main Japanese health issues, which totally makes sense to me. So there shouldn’t be any dangerous viruses or bacteria loose anywhere except maybe in the pneumonia research labs, but there are going to be some pretty toxic chemicals on hand.”
Lupo snarked, “We’ll try not to drink anything in open beakers, okay?”
Willow giggled. “And you watch it with that leg! If you injure it, I’m telling Janet, and you know what that means. The BIG needles!”
Graham just said, “Burn, I assume you have more intel.”
“Oh, yeah, sure. I can’t get at their intranet because their firewall is totally dead, so I can’t check their internal security or their security cams or anything, but I figure if their phone system is down and their computer system is down and no one’s even putting a ‘sorry please wait’ message up, then they’re in big trouble and their IT staff is maybe already silicate lunch or someone would’ve yelled for help. But there are city traffic cams and stuff in the area, and the protection on that sub-network is pretty weak, so I’m scanning the surrounding area and it looks like nothing’s going on outside the building, at least for now. So you may be in luck, as much as this is lucky, because I’m pretty sure you’ve got man-eating silicates loose in that lab building and it’s not like Jo is Florence Griffith-Joyner right this second, but you should be able to outrun these things anyway.
“So Walter said he got hold of the DHS liaisons at the Ministry of Defense and the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications, and they’ll make sure the police and the army put up a blockade around the building and don’t open the doors to let monsters out. And the Agency for Natural Resources and Energy will have a buttload of strontium 90 and radium 228 for you to load up your darts with. And Terawatt says these things divide every six hours, and while they’re dividing they’re stationary and maybe harmless if you don’t touch them, so it would be good to know when the six hour timepoint is. And she said she managed to electrocute several with a huge jolt right in the soupy part in the middle of their mitosis, but other than that and the radioisotopes they were pretty much indestructible. Oh, and I asked Walter to pass on a message to the police to check on whether the lab people all went home last night like normal, because if so, these things have been on the loose for less than four hours, but if not they could have been loose for over twenty-four hours and you could have beaucoup badness in there.”
Graham said, “Thanks, Burn. Anything else?”
“Well, not yet but I have a little hope that I might be able to boot that firewall remotely if I can figure the right command set and beat the password protection, unless it has totally no power going to it now, so we’ll see. So that means over and out.”
Sergeant Carlson asked, “Sir? Doesn’t she need to breathe?”
Lieutenant Lupo laughed delightedly. She said, “I asked pretty much the same thing. And she’s like that in person.”
Graham said, “She’s an auxiliary. She’s Terawatt’s personal master hacker. Do not piss her off. If she’s unhappy, bad things will happen to you through the internet. And if she’s unhappy, Terawatt will be unhappy with you, and the colonel will be exceptionally unhappy with you.”
“Roger that, sir.”
Bailey asked, “Sir, can she really just walk through firewalls like that? I mean, if she already hacked through the Tokyo police department’s firewalls to look through their traffic cam footage …”
Graham admitted, “As far as I know, there is not a firewall on Earth that can stop her if she wants to go visiting. She is the H-bomb of network cracker threats.”
Then Bailey asked, “Sir, does she really use the handle Acid Burn? Because there’s a movie called ‘Hackers’ and in it, Angelina Jolie played a hacker codenamed Acid Burn.”
Graham smirked. “She’s using that as a handle for our ops. She has other handles for real life and business and such. But don’t expect that Angelina Jolie is on the other end of the line, and don’t make inappropriate comments even when there’s nothing around except a sat phone or a computer, because she can be anywhere she chooses to be.”
Lupo added, “And you will meet her sooner or later, if you stay in the Initiative. Be nice, and don’t hit on her.”
Carlson stiffly said, “Sir, I’m married.”
Graham told him, “When you see her, you’ll still think about hitting on her. Don’t.”
Marshall smirked. “Sexy, around twenty-five, redheaded, gorgeous girl next door look, perky and bubbly … Oh, you’ll be thinking about it.”
* * *
Alex was glad Ron had been hungry, so she hadn’t felt bad about eating a bunch of the field rations stored in the jet. And also four of her energy bars in her gym bag. And she was glad there was a sat phone so she could get a call from Acid Burn. And she was glad Hermione changed into military camo and combat boots, instead of walking around in that pantsuit and those flats, which were cute but totally not a good idea for dealing with this kind of stuff. And she was glad the jet was big enough that she could leave the radium-filled injector at the tail end of the jet and not worry about irradiating Hermione and Ron and Harry.
And she was really glad that when they landed at the NATO base just outside Rome, the guys who met them spoke really good English. With sexy Italian accents. Although one of them spoke perfect English with a real English accent, so she guessed she could figure out where he went to school, or maybe where his teachers grew up.
But there was also a pompous Italian army guy with lots of medals who insisted on being in charge. Hermione argued at him in Italian for like a minute, but he pretty much ignored her. Alex worried that he was going to be a lot of trouble.
So Colonel Leonetti, as he turned out to be, snapped, “We have already sent teams in to cordon off the area and search for threats, so we are well ahead of you. And do not treat us like idiots! You English always assume that no one can fight except yourselves and the Germans.”
Alex gave him her best Terawatt tones. “I’m not English. And I don’t make that assumption. But I do assume that most of the problems I face are not suitable for ordinary policemen or soldiers unless they have proper training and appropriate weaponry. These things are bulletproof. You can’t run over them with a truck. You can’t firebomb them or throw grenades at them. And you most definitely can’t fight them in hand-to-hand.”
They climbed into a military vehicle with the colonel, who had his driver take them to the laboratory. Alex just used her telekinesis to hold the injector on the roof. The colonel smugly told her, “Do not worry. We have considerably more on hand than a few grenades and handguns.”
Hermione said, “Well, I hope your people at least have enough training not to break into any sealed areas or open any fire doors without checking interiors first, because these things are also strong enough to burst through regular interior doors.”
Harry added, “So far they’ve killed one commando team and almost half of another. Along with everyone at the Phillips Laboratories, maybe a dozen villagers, and who knows how many farm animals. And that was on a small, relatively unpopulated island. If they get loose in your city, they could kill millions in a couple of days.”
Hermione continued, “With a food source, they double in numbers every six hours. That means they multiply by sixteen every twenty-four hours they’re loose. If we don’t stop them immediately, they could wipe out everyone in Italy in a week or two.”
But the colonel waved away Hermione’s arguments. Alex could see Ron getting really red in the face with the way the guy was treating Hermione.
When they got to the command post outside the lab, Alex was sort of discouraged. She was expecting to see a big, fancy military tent with tons of fancy military equipment. There was a truck with a satellite dish on top, an armored personnel carrier with the back door open, a truck with an open side panel that was serving food and beverages to maybe a dozen soldiers, and a couple of trucks with canvas tops and sides that probably had benches along the insides. On second thought, that was a pretty decent way to keep everything ready for quick movement, but it just seemed sort of … well, not-as-awesome-as-Colonel-O’Neill.
Colonel Leonetti marched over to the communications truck and asked, “What is the update on our progress? And use English for our visitors.”
Hermione said something angry in Italian that made the colonel frown at her. Maybe it was just something like ‘not all Brits are language morons’. But it sounded to Alex’s Spanish-exposed ear more like she was telling them to stop being so patronizing to an EU liaison or she would report them to some generals.
Alex asked, “Have any teams broken the quarantine?”
The colonel took two steps to the open back doors of the armored personnel carrier, where there were two officers studying a map and a bunch of papers. He asked them for a report.
One of them said, “Yes, colonel. Six minutes ago, teams one through four made a standard entry. We have not —”
Alex flinched as she heard the sound of squealing. That horrid, icky, rubbery squealing that nothing but silicates made. And it was coming their way. She leapt straight up to see over the trucks. At thirty feet up, she had a view of everything.
The double doors at the front of the building were swinging wide open, and a stream of silicates was heading right for them. Soldiers were opening fire on the silicates from the sides, and some of the silicates were branching off toward the soldiers. And the soldiers weren’t backing up!
Oh, crud, this was so bad!
She dropped down to about five feet above the street. “We have silicates heading this way! Get in the trucks and lock them tight! Get the tranq rifles prepped! Order the soldiers to retreat before they get eaten!”
She had the injector still sitting on the roof of the vehicle they arrived in, and she pulled it toward her. Then she headed toward the silicates. What she really wanted to do was save the soldiers. What she really needed to do was make sure none of the silicates got away.
She couldn’t believe that she was even considering letting some of these guys get killed, even if it would save hundreds, maybe millions, in the long run.
She injected the front four silicates that were heading at the trucks. Then she made a judgment call. It looked like the silicates on her right might be closer to tackling the soldiers and then making an escape and getting around that corner. She headed for the silicates over there, leaving the soldiers on her left to fend for themselves. She hated having to make a choice like that, but there were too many of the icky things, and they were spreading out of the building too fast, and there were too many soldiers to protect! How did Jack live with doing this all the time?
She couldn’t land on the ground, because of the silicates everywhere. So she had to make do with the injector.
A soldier had backed up and tripped over something, and a silicate was about to grab him with a tentacle. She stabbed that one first. The injector plunged into its armored hide, pumped in one dose, and flew back toward her. She telekinetically hung onto the silicate’s tentacle long enough for the soldier to get to his feet and scramble to safety.
She flew past the soldiers and landed in a clear spot that would only be clear for a few seconds. She stabbed two more silicates with the injector while she shoved two other silicates together so she could tie their tentacles in a knot. She stabbed two more, and then slammed another silicate to the side to make another tentacle square knot. She stabbed three more while she moved to the side and got out of the way of panicky soldiers. She pushed the last two together and tied another square knot with their tentacles. She yelled out, “Don’t touch these things! Wait for the Brits, they have weapons!”
She leapt into the air and flew back toward the left side of the battle.
That was when she saw four or five of the soldiers with grenades. She yelled, “No! No no no!”
It didn’t do any good. The soldiers threw the grenades at the silicates. That meant they also threw the grenades at her.
* * *
Jack used a Starlight scope to look down on the Hillman-Klein ‘campus’ from the chopper. Not a bad-looking little place. Big fence to keep out annoying PETA people, closed security gate with lighted guard shack beside it, parking lot between the guard shack and the buildings, and a guard walking around the four lab buildings that were set in a square so there was a little courtyard in between them.
He spoke, going for the casual I’m-not-worried routine that seemed to work on the fingies. “Good news. There’s a live guard walking around down there, so we don’t have a level three infestation. Yet. Bad news. That chain link fence isn’t going to stop a three-hundred-pound super-strong bowling ball. More bad news? The police decided to park in the parking lot instead of outside the gate. And our DHS and National Guard support aren’t here yet, except for one truck. Must be that cross-town traffic I keep hearing about. We’ll land outside the fence by that lone DHS truck, which had better have our radioisotopes. Everybody? Starlight scopes, because night ops against things that hunt in the dark are less than fun. Tranq rifles with full tranq gear. Don’t bother with the usual.”
“Roger that, sir,” said Finn for the whole team.
They touched down. Finn and Action Girl were out and standing guard before Jack could even say ‘move’. The sergeants moved straight to the heavy DHS truck with a case of empty tranq darts.
And the police came trotting over. Jack strode forward, Finn and Hanna at his back, moving to his sides as wingmen. He introduced himself, “Colonel Jack O’Neill, DHS.”
The lead guy, who was actually wearing an actual cowboy hat and an expensive bolo tie and a Western jacket in the middle of New York City, said, “Howdy. Marshal Sam McCloud, and this is my partner Sergeant Joe Broadhurst. Chief of Detectives Peter B. Clifford sent us personally, because we’ve already had dealings with the DHS and we already signed a whole mesa full of NDAs that time.”
Jack glanced at Finn, who touched his earjack and started relaying a message to Acid Burn and Jack’s IT people.
Broadhurst sourly added, “Meaning, we’re probably already on you guys’ shit-list, and the chief didn’t want to get new detectives in trouble.”
Jack said, “Well, you might want to get your car out here on the street, so you can make a hasty retreat if this goes south.”
McCloud drawled, “Just how far south is this likely to go? Are we talkin’ South Brooklyn, or Perth Amboy?”
Funny guy. Jack said, “If it goes as far south as it just did in Ireland, we’re talking South Florida. Maybe Brazil.”
“Ireland?” Broadhurst asked suspiciously.
Jack noticed the way McCloud was sizing everyone up while acting like he hadn’t noticed anything. This guy probably lived on the ‘make everyone underestimate you’ principle. Not that Jack knew anything about that strategy.
Jack’s earjack buzzed, and he tapped it, trying to make it look like he was scratching his ear. Finn’s voice whispered, “DHS case here over a year ago. A chemical warfare bomber. Colonel Roger McNamara filed a complaint against Marshal Sam McCloud, but the case is officially listed as McCloud arresting the real bomber and disarming an explosive charge on a tank of sarin gas in the mayor’s office and getting an award for it. Burn says McCloud has a girlfriend who wrote a big story on the bomber for the local papers. So McCloud walked on the complaint.”
Jack said, “Okay. My people tell me you seriously pissed off one Colonel McNamara of the DHS.” He watched as Broadhurst winced and McCloud just casually put a matchstick in his mouth. “So that means you’re okay in my books.”
McCloud smiled. “There ya go.”
Jack recognized that little bit of ‘I’m too folksy for my shirt’. It wasn’t like he hadn’t pulled it himself, although not this intensely. He smiled back and said, “Yah, sure, you betcha.”
McCloud nodded at him, recognizing that Jack was on to him, and then explained, “So we followed the DHS directives like you wanted, and we already checked with the security people here. No one stayed late yesterday. In fact, the chief of the security team said that Hillman-Klein doesn’t like people putting in ridiculously late hours. They have a standing policy that getting enough sleep and eating right makes for fewer accidents and errors in the lab. But tonight, no one has left floor two of Building C. Their cars are all still here, and none of them checked out.”
Broadhurst said, “I went over the gate guard’s log. Everybody who checked in this morning is out, except for fourteen people, all of them floor two staff. We asked the security people not to move the elevators in the building, not to open any doors, and to check all security camera footage.”
McCloud asked, “Do we get to ask what’s goin’ on?”
Jack said, “No. But I’m going to tell you anyway, and you’ll be signing NDAs afterward.”
Finn said, “Sir, I’ve got NDAs in the chopper.”
Jack told him, “It’ll wait.”
Broadhurst grumped, “If you don’t mind, I’d just as soon get those things signed right now. That way, we’re covered when inevitably we do something that gets us in trouble with the Chief.”
“Now, Joe,” McCloud drawled.
Broadhurst insisted, “Remember the explosion in the bullpen? Remember the firehose, the detergent, and the expensive marble floor? Remember the deputy mayor and that false arrest problem?”
McCloud smiled. “Now, Joe, what makes you think anything’s gonna go wrong?”
“Because something ALWAYS goes wrong!” Broadhurst complained.
Jack smiled to himself. If this wasn’t a critical op, he would have enjoyed just sitting around and watching these two guys banter back and forth, and maybe seeing them get yelled at by this Chief Clifford.
Sergeant Scott came running over with Riley’s valise. Finn quickly leafed through a bunch of tabbed separators and pulled out two NDA sheets. The two detectives quickly signed. McCloud with a flourish, and Broadhurst after a careful reading of just what he was getting himself into.
Jack told them, “Great. Now you get to know stuff you can’t tell anyone. Not even McCloud’s girlfriend the reporter.”
“She’s a writer, not a reporter,” McCloud put in.
Jack ignored that. He started explaining, as four DHS cars and half a dozen National Guard trucks came roaring up the street toward him. “A couple of days ago, a cancer research lab in Ireland tried a new experiment. They didn’t get a cancer treatment. They got several artificial silicon-based lifeforms that eat calcium. Only they eat it right out of your body.” Both detectives flinched. “Yep. If they touch you, their skin injects some sort of enzyme or something that breaks down your calcium so they can pull it right out of you. Apparently, it only takes a few seconds, during which you scream in agony, and after which you are extremely dead. These things look like a three-hundred-pound glob of armored silicon with an extremely strong tentacle that’s six feet or so long. They’re proof against bullets, grenades, dynamite, firebombs, electricity, running over ’em with a car, and pretty much everything except an injection of certain radioisotopes. We’ll be going in with tranq rifles and darts loaded with strontium-90. Oh, and they double in number every six hours. If the scientists made two of them at nine this morning, then there are probably eight creatures right now. With enough food, in twenty-four hours, we’d be looking at a hundred twenty-eight of ’em. In a week, we’d have half a billion, and we’d need to nuke New York to stop them from spreading across the entire country.”
Broadhurst grumbled, “I knew you shouldn’t have asked.”
Jack tried not to snicker. “If it hadn’t been for Terawatt, these things would’ve wiped out everyone and everything on a small island off the Irish coast. Only we don’t get lucky enough to have things stop there. We have these nimrods getting people in other labs around the world to do the same experiments. This team is trying to contain the problem here in Building C. Terawatt is leading a team trying to save Rome, Italy. And we have another team winging its way off to try and save Tokyo. If it turns out there are other labs doing this, we’re in BIG trouble.”
Broadhurst muttered, “I knew it …”
McCloud looked over at Hanna and casually asked, “So if Terawatt’s in Rome, and you’ve got a girl way too young to be in the armed forces, I guess we’re lookin’ at another real, live, superhero?”
Broadhurst sighed. “I knew you’d get me in more trouble.”
Jack said, “You’re not going to get in more trouble. But you are going to get invited to step up from Double A ball to the major leagues.”
Broadhurst groaned. “You see? If we’d parked the cruiser out here, I could turn around and bang my forehead on it.”
“Now Joe, he’s bein’ real nice about all this. And I don’t see what the problem is.”
Broadhurst insisted, “I like being a cop. I like living in New York City. I don’t want to get drafted into the army and be stuck flying off to West Armpit, Wyoming to track down monsters!”
Jack smiled. “Actually, I was thinking more about you just doing what you already do, but being able to give us a heads-up if you see something you think is more in our ballpark than yours.”
“There ya go, Joe,” grinned McCloud.
Broadhurst complained, “I just know this is going to end badly.”
The two sergeants marched over, along with a couple of DHS guys and four National Guard officers. Sergeant Scott said, “Sir, Colonel Harrison, Agent Peters, and Agent Sands of the DHS. Colonel Hathaway, Major Waters, Major Preston, and Captain Parris of the National Guard. Our darts are loaded and ready to go. Do we have floorplans and an entry plan?”
Jack told him, “I suspect that Marshal McCloud has a set of floorplans tucked away in his coat pocket, maybe with a building key.”
Hanna asked, “Sir, is that his first name, or is he a marshal like in the Wild West?”
“Don’t have marshals where you come from in Europe, little lady?”
Well, it wasn’t as if Hanna had no accent, unless she was doing one of her ‘covert role’ voices. Jack said to her, “You don’t need to answer that. The marshal’s just fishing for intel now. But if he keeps bugging you, you have my permission to rip the engine block out of his squad car and throw it at him.”
Hanna smiled. “Yes, sir.”
Jack was just glad Hanna wasn’t really strong enough to rip the engine block out of a car. He figured that a cop car like that one would probably have a heavy V8 engine that would run maybe six or seven hundred pounds. Hanna might be able to lift that much, but the engine would be bolted down, and even if it wasn’t, it would be too bulky for her to get a good grip on. Not that he was going to tell Marshal McCowboy.
The marshal smiled. “Ya don’t have to be like that. Now I had a nice little chat with Marv, the night security chief, and he loaned me these.” McCloud pulled out a keycard and a folded building plan.
Broadhurst interjected, “That’s ‘McCloud’ for ‘I conned him out of this stuff but that’s my story and I’m sticking to it.’ ”
“Now Joe, don’t be like that.” He turned back to Jack and unfolded the blueprint. “Now it looks like this place could be a mite hard to bust into, without an inside man.”
Jack said, “Right now, we’re worried about busting out of it. These things can go right through a standard interior door. They can also climb walls and punch through ordinary glass like it’s tissue paper.”
He turned to the DHS and National Guard people and explained about the silicates. Then he said, “I’m going to use my people and these nice policemen as my immediate patrol around the building. I need your people outside the fence on all sides, and teams securing all openings into the city stormwater runoff system, with your biggest truck blocking that security gate so nothing goes out unless we want it to.”
Broadhurst murmured to McCloud, “Well, I guess we can write off another squad car.”
Jack continued, “Fun part? Conventional weaponry up to and including grenades and mortars will be useless against these things. Dole out the remaining tranq dart rifles to your best shooters, get your darts loaded up with the radioisotopes in that DHS truck over there, and station the shooters equidistant around the perimeter. If anything gets out of that building and past our first defensive perimeter, just put one dart into it. It’ll be dead in thirty seconds. But we cannot let these things out. They double in numbers every six hours. That means if even one gets away, we have a hundred thousand in a few days, and half a billion in a week. And instruct your people. Do not let these things get within ten feet. They have a tentacle they like to use, and it’s a hell of a lot stronger than it looks, and if it gets a grip on you, it’s agonizing, and it’s fatal in a few seconds. Understood?”
“Understood, colonel.” The National Guard officers trotted off to get their men in position around the perimeter, and the DHS men did the same.
He looked over the plans. One elevator access. One stairway door. Both presumably needed the keycard McCloud had to operate them. Both had the potential for releasing the silicates into the rest of the building if handled improperly. And there was one emergency exit on each upper floor that was a security door with no stairs up to it, just an inflatable emergency slide secured on the inside. He could see that second-floor door from where they were. It opened up into thin air and had no exterior lock or handle. He really hoped there wasn’t a simple bar to press on the inside to open it, or he’d have silicates raining down over there. On the other hand, the interior looked simple: one hallway running from the stairway door past the elevator to the emergency exit door, with two labs on each side of the hallway.
Jack said, “Okay, boys and girls, let’s …” He glanced over at McCloud. “… saddle up. We need to know if there are security cams we can monitor before we go in.”
Broadhurst glowered. “They have security cams in the hallways and on the main doors into each building, but they lost the floor two cam around noon today.”
Jack grimaced. “And no one thought that needed to be investigated?”
Broadhurst frowned back. “That’s what we said.”
McCloud drawled, “Marv told us these things have been goin’ out about one or two a week ever since they got installed back in March, and now they pretty much just wait until they have half a dozen or so that need to be repaired all at once before they call the company who put the system in. Seems they don’t like these guys, and there’s a lawsuit goin’ on.”
Jack said, “Great. So we probably had silicates loose in one lab room, and that’s when they got out.”
Finn suggested, “It was around noon, so they could have been penned in within that lab without an easy exit, until someone dropped by to ask if someone else was going to go to lunch, and got a nasty surprise.”
Jack nodded. “Pretty much what I was thinking. So we figure the silicates started between eight and twelve this morning. If it was at eight, they’ve divided twice. So they’ve gone up to four times as many as they started with. If it was twelve, they’ve divided once and they’ll be dividing again in under an hour. Word is the Ireland lab started with two, but had tanks for more, so we could have a starting point of anywhere from one to maybe six or so.”
McCloud drawled, “So we got between two and twenty-four hungry critters, right?”
“Right.”
Jack said, “Sergeant Walters, you have your vid gear with you, right?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Then let’s go do this bug hunt before we have twice as many things to kill.” He looked at the cops. “Can either of you hit the broad side of a barn?”
Broadhurst pointed at his partner. “McCloud can shoot like nobody’s business.”
Jack ordered, “Sergeant Scott, load up the marshal and the sergeant, and make sure they know how to operate the weapon and clear a jam when they’ve got a radioisotope instead of a tranquilizer in their dart. Marshal, do not shoot anything that looks remotely human.”
McCloud smiled at him and drawled, “I think I can manage that.”
Broadhurst grumbled, “Can I shoot McCloud?”
“Now, Joe …”
Jack ignored the byplay and warned them, “And under no circumstances let these things within ten feet of you. Even if you duck into your car, that won’t keep them from smashing in the windows and eating you.”
As they moved through the security gate and across the parking lot, Finn pointed out, “Visual verification, sir.”
Jack had to look hard to spot it through the frosted windows on the second floor, but that was definitely a tentacle waving around. He said, “McCloud, Broadhurst, and Scott. I need you three staying outside the building and patrolling, keeping an eye for any escapees. These things may bust out a window and come down the side of the building.”
The marshal drawled, “Or maybe they’ll just use the emergency door for the floor. It’s got no stairs, just an evacuation slide like in a jet.” He pointed at a marked doorway on the floorplan, at the far end of the hall from the stairway door.
Yeah, Jack was already worrying about that. He took the floorplan and the keycard from McCloud, and had Sergeant Walters move up to the front door with his gear. The vid gear included an optical fiber you could shove under a door or through a vent to get a look in places the enemy did not want you to look, without the enemy knowing you were even there yet.
Walters threaded the optical fiber under the door and wiggled it around. “Clear, sir.”
Jack was taking the other approach. He had a stethoscope he was using to listen for ‘rubbery squealing’ or whatever these things sounded like. There wasn’t any sound, either.
He used the keycard, and the door unlocked with a distinct clack. Great, always let the enemy know you’re coming. That never ends badly.
Hanna and Finn did a fast building entry, with him and Walters moving in after they made sure the ground floor entry area was clear. He notified Sergeant Scott that they were in, and he made sure the door was shut behind them. He was less worried about getting backup than about risking letting these things outside. But the door was a heavy steel security door in a security frame, with a simple quick-release bar on the inside. He let Finn use his multi-tool to lock the bar in place. Without a working quick-release bar, even Hanna would have a hell of a time busting that thing open. These silicates weren’t getting out that way.
He split the team into pairs — him with Hanna, Finn with Walters — to check that the ground floor was indeed clear, and there was no easy way into sub-grade levels. Check and check. The door to the basement was another heavy steel security door with a keycard lock. Jack wondered if PETA was really a big enough problem for this much security. This was New York City, after all, so maybe they had to protect the place against guys who just wanted to bust in and steal everything that wasn’t nailed down.
The elevator was locked off at the first floor, and Jack wanted it to stay there. The last thing he needed was silicates getting to ride up and down to any floor they wanted. The stairs had a security door at the ground floor, with a quick release bar on the inside. Finn pulled out his multi-tool and quickly locked that sucker down so the bar wouldn’t work. They moved up the concrete stairs to the second floor.
The second floor landing was concrete, and the door was another steel security door. There was also a concrete wall between the flights of stairs. So far, so okay. He put the stethoscope to the door.
Crap. There was a chorus of rubbery squeaks going on just the other side of the door. Walters cursed under his breath, too.
Jack looked at the monitor screen on Walters’ little display system. Those were ugly suckers. And they had to be surprisingly strong and tough, if they could wave those tentacles in the air like that. As Walters moved the optical fiber, Jack got a count.
He signaled a retreat, and they moved back down to the ground floor. He said, “Okay, there’s four of us, and we all have one-shot tranq rifles. There are seven of these things in the hallway and probably more in the labs off the hall. It takes ten to twenty seconds to reload your rifle, and a lot longer if you have to put in a new gas cartridge or clear a jam. As soon as we open that door, we’ll have silicates coming at us. So here’s what we do. I pop the door. We shoot. Heller, you take the closest. Watch out for that tentacle. Walters, you take next closest. I take the one after that, and Finn takes the fourth. We close that door and lock it if we can, but we do not risk getting swiped by a tentacle. If we get the door closed, we reload and then repeat. If we can’t get the door closed, we retreat up the stairs to the next landing, reload there, and pick off everything trying to get at us. Then we move back to the door, close it, and pick off everything that tried to get down to the ground level. Once we have the entry point clear, we move through, lock the door behind us, and follow modified room-to-room procedures to clear these labs one by one. Understood?”
He got three nods. He moved back up the stairs, let his team get into position, and he popped the lock before yanking the door open.
The things were just waiting for them.