|
|
Chapter 78 – SilicoticGraham flipped the sat phone to speaker. “Miller.”
Willow’s voice came through. “Oh, this is bad. The Japanese just lost containment on the lab building. They put a mike on the front door, and I’ve been eavesdropping because their comms aren’t really encrypted much, and my Japanese isn’t so great but it’s just barely good enough, so they got a dead silence for several minutes, and then the noise picked up even louder, so I think that means they just divided again, and then the things broke out a couple windows and the back door, and they’re out of the building now. Walter and I gave them all the information we had, and I used up pretty much every bit of my conversational Japanese except ‘can you direct me to the bathroom’ and ‘this dinner is very good, you are a most impressive cook.’ So they’ve got barricades up a block out from the lab, and they’re injecting radioisotopes in a bunch of live animals they grabbed from a nearby market and putting ’em inside the barricade and hoping the monsters eat the little animals before they bust out of the barricades. And I gave ’em half a dozen things to try, and maybe some of ’em will work.”
Graham refused to wince in front of his people, but they were still hours out from the air force base where they would land, and they would still need more than an hour’s drive to get to the op site. By the time they got there, the crisis could have spread across … He glanced at Lupo. “Lieutenant. If they can’t stop these things, and we need another six hours to get to the op site, and it’s in the middle of Tokyo, and these things can move at three miles an hour, how much of Tokyo could be in the crisis range?”
Jo Lupo frowned in thought. “Let me think … Tokyo’s something like 1300 or 1400 square miles. At the speed and time you gave me, they could go eighteen miles in any direction. A circle with an eighteen mile radius is about … a thousand and twenty square miles. We’d already have lost maybe three quarters of the city.”
Willow’s voice chimed in, “That’s a little higher than the number I came up with, sixty-one percent, since the lab’s not quite dead center and the area of Tokyo is right about 1359 square miles, and it’s not a circle, and I just went ahead and ran it through my GIS proggie and assumed the things would have to stick to the streets to get around town so no cutting down the diagonals. But the police have these concrete barriers that are like the things in the medians on interstates, and those ought to be strong enough to hold the things in, so I told them to spray Teflon all over the insides of the barriers, and maybe that’ll make it a lot tougher for the things to climb up the sides. And they’ve got this spray foam stuff I read about that turns rigid pretty quickly in air, and they’re gonna try it and see if they can trap the things or at least make the barriers five times higher. And they’re bringing in their own tranq dart guns and the DHS contact agencies are supposed to already have the radioisotopes on-site, so maybe they can keep things under control.”
“Maybe,” Graham replied. “You’d better ask them to go ahead and evac a wider area and clear out all the live animals from the markets and pet stores. If we can deny them food for long enough, they at least won’t have the energy to move very far or divide. I hope.”
Willow said, “Walter’s already on it. The Japanese are pretty freaked, because they know the Chinese just had to nuke a city, and nobody knows why but maybe it was these things, and they really don’t want to have to nuke Tokyo. There’s already one guy in the Diet talking about spraying strontium-90 over the whole containment area and just writing it off as permanently contaminated. It’s really a good thing Terawatt got that call from Hermione and Hermione found the addresses and the first lab was on a tiny island, and I wish I had time to go check how the Rome thing is going.”
Graham told her, “Just keep doing what you’re doing, Burn.”
He hung up, and Lieutenant Bailey asked, “So Acid Burn can just casually walk through every firewall she sees, and break encryption like she’s the NSA, and she speaks enough languages that she just happens to know the one language we need this time? Does she fly and shoot laser beams out of her eyes, too?” Lupo snorted to herself.
Graham tried not to grin. “She happens to be one of the most powerful white hat hackers in the industry. And according to the colonel, she knows over seventy computer languages, and speaks or reads over a dozen human languages.”
“Human languages, sir?” Sergeant Carlson wondered.
Graham admitted, “A source tells me she also knows Klingon and the Elvish languages from ‘Lord of the Rings’. I have no idea what else she knows, but apparently she’s one hell of a tough gamer, too.”
Lieutenant Bailey looked down at his laptop and said, “I’m feeling a little out of my league, sir.”
Graham just sat back and smiled. “I feel like that all the time, lieutenant.”
* * *
Alex watched as the grenades went flying through the air at the silicates. And at her. She went silvery and jetted straight up.
She could have tried grabbing all the grenades, but she had nowhere to throw them, since they were already about to blow up. And she sure couldn’t knock them back at the soldiers. That would be mega-bad.
She was maybe sixty or eighty feet up when the grenades went off in a fast series of loud bangs. Stuff was whizzing through the air around her, and something sliced into her from underneath. Ouch, that really hurt.
But she’d been hurt enough times that she managed to handle this one without losing her concentration and falling. She carefully dropped back down to the street, squeezing out the metal fragment that had punched into her silvery morph. Man, if she had still been normal, that would have been mega-icky.
Oh, crud. She could see that two of the soldiers hadn’t been far enough back from one of the grenades, and they were down. Down, and already screaming as silicates ate them. The other soldiers weren’t panicking, but they didn’t know what to do. They tried firing more rounds into the silicates, and that sure wasn’t going to work.
She flew over the battle. She injected radium into the silicates on her right, while she flew over the heads of the soldiers. She landed behind them and yelled, “Bullets will not work!”
One of them shouted something in Italian that sounded desperate and frightened. She couldn’t blame them. But she was standing on the street now, so she could use more telekinesis.
The men backed up, ignoring where she was, so first she used her telekinesis to push a couple of guys to the sides so they wouldn’t back up right into her and knock her down. Then she strode forward at the silicates. She slammed one into the thing right in front of her and tied their tentacles in a knot. Then she injected two more over on what was now her left flank. She slammed two more together and tied a tentacle knot. Then two more injections, and …
Oh, crud, the injector wasn’t injecting anymore! Had she bent a needle or something? She hastily did the slam-together-and-tie-a-knot trick three more times, as she pulled the injector over to her.
The reservoir was empty. She had no more radioisotope until she could reload her injector. Assuming there really was more, since the colonel hadn’t impressed her very much so far.
She did her slam-and-knot trick on four more pairs over on her left and in the middle, while she kept backing up. Then she pointed at the remaining ones over on her right. She insisted, “Fire at them a little and walk slowly, so they’ll follow you. Then lead them in a big arc to the base over there, where they should have some weapons that will stop these things.” She just didn’t have time to stop all these things, because more silicates were coming out of the still-open front doors.
The armored personnel carrier came rolling across the street right at the front doors. Its horn honked twice to get her attention.
Oh! Right! She flew straight at the doors and tried to push them closed. Crud, one of the silicates was trying to push it open, and it was stronger than her.
She flew up to the roof over the entry and landed, so she could use all her telekinesis, even if she couldn’t see what she was doing. She shoved the silicate back inside, and then pushed the doors closed. She didn’t manage to get them all the way closed, but they were nearly closed. For a few seconds. Until another silicate would come along and start pushing against the doors, too, and then they would overwhelm the two hundred pounds or so of push she could manage.
The armored personnel carrier drove over several silicates and up the steps to the front doors. Then it slowed down and nosed the doors closed. Once the silicates couldn’t possibly get those doors open, it stopped. The engine made a noise like the driver had just shifted into park.
Alex noticed that the vehicle was conveniently parked on top of two of the silicates, while ones that had been run over by the massive thing seemed to be moving slower than normal. At least the ones under the tires couldn’t budge, although they were flailing their tentacles angrily. But there were still about nine over behind her, being led by the soldiers over to the base area where the tranq rifles were. And about seven were now behind the carrier and moving at the base. And another four were moving off to the other side, where soldiers were standing past the dead and tied silicates, firing at the new threats.
Was this some soldier rule she didn’t know about? If firing a bunch of bullets doesn’t work, just keep shooting until you run out of bullets?
She flew over to the foursome moving at the soldiers, and she landed off to the side, where the soldiers wouldn’t accidentally shoot her full of holes. Important Buffy-rule: ‘friendly fire’ wasn’t. Then she did her slam-and-tie move twice, and she had them. She flew up high to avoid the gunfire, and she dived down toward the base camp. She landed on top of the satellite truck and started doing the slam-and-knot on every pair that wasn’t already dead or dying. Meanwhile, Hermione was on top of the food truck, carefully firing tranq darts, and Harry was on top of the cab of one of the other trucks, doing the same.
There was no sign of Ron. She gulped.
And there were a lot of bodies on the ground. It looked like most of the soldiers who hadn’t already been in the trucks had tried shooting at the things and had been eaten. It was sickening. Mega-sickening. But none of the bodies she could see was in a black camo commando outfit, like Ron had been wearing.
All she could do for the moment was help deal with the crisis. She flew over to where the soldiers were doing what she told them and leading all the live, untied silicates toward the base camp. She landed behind the silicates and did her slam-and-knot move until only one was left. She flew to the middle of the street in front of the carrier and walked toward the remaining things, doing more slam-and-knot moves until the remaining untied ones were being shot by Hermione or Harry. But that still left the two under the carrier that were making it impossible for the driver to get out without getting a lethal tentacle around the leg or the waist.
She flew over to Hermione, who was carefully firing darts at the last moving silicates. She asked, “Where’s Ron? Where’s Colonel Stupidetti? Where’s more radioisotope, ’cause I’m all out?”
Hermione reloaded and took her time aiming, before putting a dart in the side of one of the last creatures. “Ron’s in the APC. The colonel’s in the comm truck calling for backup. The radioisotope’s here with me in case I need to fill my last dozen tranq darts.”
“Oh. That reminds me of something I should do,” Alex told her. She flew around the base camp, retrieving used darts from the dead silicates. It was pretty easy, since the dead ones just sort of melted into goo and the darts came right out with just a small tug. She brought about twenty darts back to Hermione and said, “We probably need to wipe them clean first, but now you have more darts.”
Alex then flew way off to the side and a hundred feet into the air to open the container of radioisotope and refill her injector. She didn’t want to expose anyone to that stuff if she didn’t have to. Then she sealed the container again, dropped it off next to Hermione, and flew over to the armored personnel carrier. She injected the things that were still stuck under the truck and lashing their tentacles about, and she took a look under the truck to make sure there wasn’t another one of the things lurking about waiting for a tasty morsel to hop out of the carrier.
Once the silicates under the truck collapsed and died, she flew in front of the windshield and gave Ron a thumbs-up. Man, if he hadn’t blocked those doors really well, they’d be up to their ears in silicates by now.
Well, up to their shins, anyway.
She flew over to inject every pair of tied-together silicates. Then she flew back to the base camp. She used her telekinesis to swing open the rear door of the communications truck, while she hovered six feet in the air.
The colonel was in the truck, yelling into the radio set-up. She put her hands on her hips and glared at him. “Colonel, your incompetence and refusal to listen to the experts on the situation have just endangered all of Italy. You have also managed to get a huge number of your men killed. And we still have to find a way to clear that lab building before they burst out of the windows. I am extremely upset about the loss of life, since it all could have been avoided.”
The colonel just glared back. “And what do you know about it? You do not know these men. You will not be the one writing letters to their loved ones. You are not defending your home city.”
She had to admit, she was really glad she wasn’t the one who had to write letters explaining why people under her command were dead. Still, she’d defended her hometown plenty of times! She just snapped at him, “Then perhaps you should listen to the experts, because we now have a radioactive contamination problem in the streets here, and we still have a building full of silicates that need to be eliminated as soon as possible, and if even one of these things gets loose, it could mean the death of every single person in Rome.”
He frowned. “And how do you propose to enter a building full of man-eating monsters? How do you plan to keep them all inside while you enter? And how do you plan to deal with these killers?”
She stalled, “I will first …” Oh! Right! “… have Hermione Granger assess your entry plan and see if she can determine where it went wrong. Then I will examine the plans for the building. Then I will check the building for alternative entry points. If there is a roof entry, it may be the safest way into the building.”
The colonel growled, “I do not understand how someone like Miss Granger got a post so important as your liaison staff, when the rest of us have many years in the military or the diplomatic corps of our countries. I find that deeply suspicious. She is probably some royal’s bit of fluff, as the English say —”
Alex tried not to sound angry, even if she was angry. “She is on the liaison staff because I requested it. She’s the best data analyst in Europe.”
The colonel nodded knowingly. “Ahh. Nepotism. Now I understand.”
Boy, and she thought Jack was good at getting people to want to punch him in the face.
She flew over to Hermione and Harry. If she stayed and talked to that jerkhead one more minute, she’d do something she’d regret later. Like giving him a radioactive jab in the butt with her injector.
Harry and Hermione were looking over a chart with Ron and two Italian soldiers she hadn’t met yet.
Hermione was pointing out, “We can’t enter anywhere other than the front doors without blowing a hole in a wall or a ceiling, and that would give these things another egress point. Now if we get a squadron of men with tranq rifles, we can back up the APC, let the silicates come out, and shoot them fast enough to keep them from getting any farther than the front steps. Then we can start with building entry teams again.”
Alex asked, “Is there a roof entry?”
“No.”
Boy, what was wrong with people that they couldn’t put a nice door on the roof? She asked, “Is there an air conditioning system on the roof with ductwork through the building?”
“Yes, but the ducts are too small for anything bigger than a rat, and the three floors have separate systems, in case of contamination problems.”
She smiled. “In that case, I just need my injector refilled, and I can tackle the building myself.”
* * *
Jack refused to flinch as over half a dozen silicates all came toward them. Hanna already had her dart dead center in the first silicate before it had a chance to move more than a few inches. He nailed the third silicate. Finn already had a dart in the fourth one, and Walters wasn’t far behind the pace.
But one of the dying silicates was already in the doorway, and thrashing its tentacle. He spotted Hanna preparing to tackle the door, and he snapped, “Heller! Retreat!”
She actually listened. He knew from watching her react in training exercises that she had briefly considered not following orders, but she had still stepped back at least as quickly as a regular soldier would have managed.
“Up the stairs, people!”
He backed up the stairs, while his team hastily moved to the landing behind him and started reloading their weapons. But he wanted as many of the things following him as he could manage.
Three silicates followed him and struggled up the steps after him. Two others went down the other flight of stairs, where they would be stuck against that security door.
When he reached the landing, he said, “Team, fire. Same order as before.”
Hanna and Finn put darts into their targets before he’d hardly finished speaking. Walters followed a second after that. Jack stopped and reloaded his rifle. He had two lead-lined pouches, one for the live darts, and one for the used darts if any of them jammed in the breech or were recovered. He didn’t want to leave radioactive crap all over the place if it wasn’t necessary. And he definitely didn’t want to have any radioactive crap in his pants pockets.
The four around the doorway were dead and melting in a really disgusting manner. The three coming up the stairs were getting slower and slower, so they didn’t have long.
By the time his team had all reloaded, the silicates on the stairs in front of them were history. Very goopy history. And two more silicates were moving into the hallway from the labs.
He warned everyone, “Try not to step in this crap if you don’t have to. It’s radioactive, it may have unknown effects on your shoes or your feet, and it’ll ruin your traction.”
“Roger that, sir,” said Finn.
Jack went on, “Advance to the door again. Finn and Heller, you have the two downstairs. Walters, you and I have the ones in the hallway. We fire, and we retreat to the landing to reload, just in case.”
“Yes, sir.”
He used the railings to hop over each of the ex-silicates, and he could hear his team following. He took his shot and hit the second silicate. Then Walters took his shot and nailed the first one. Meanwhile, he heard Hanna and Finn firing their rifles.
Finn requested, “Sir, nothing’s going to be able to reach us before we reload. Can we stay here?”
Jack looked down the stairs, where the two other silicates were still pressing against that security door, and would be dead before they managed to turn around and get halfway up the stairs. “Good plan, Major. Let’s do that.”
By the time he had his rifle reloaded, the two newest targets in the hallway were most of the way towards the entry door, but their tentacles were down and they were starting to deflate.
He said, “Finn, shove the hallway door all the way closed, if you can. If you need help, use Action Girl. I want to be able to close that door behind us and keep the remaining threats penned in.”
Just then, he heard the sound of heavy glass shattering.
A voice came over his comms. “Scott to Leader. Scott to leader. Lab B just lost containment. We have two silicates out and moving toward us. No, make that three.”
Jack gestured for the team to follow him, and he moved down the hall. He could still hear squealing, so he knew there were more of the things. But the first door on his right would be the ‘Lab B’ that Sergeant Scott just reported on, and it was opposite another doorway. Both were potential threats, and he had to stop any more silicates from getting out that window.
* * *
Alex flew into the air conditioning intake. She was a silvery puddle, and she had the injector in her morph with her, even if she was kind of afraid of what bringing radioactive material along with her like this could do to her. But she scooted two filters out of the way, stopped a spinning fan for long enough to squeeze through, and headed down the ducts to the top floor. She flowed out through a ceiling vent and pulled the injector out of her morph. She jabbed everything in the room before they even knew she was there. Then she flew into the hall and the other labs, injecting every silicate. She tried not to look at all the dead, rubbery, boneless scientists all over the place.
The stairway door was smashed open from the other side, so she knew the silicates were from floor one or floor two. Or ‘ground floor and first floor’ as Hermione kept calling them, which was just confusing. Why couldn’t everyone speak English with the same words?
She stayed silvery and flew down to floor two. That door was smashed open from the stairway side, too, so that told her the silicates were created on floor one. She flew into the hallway and jabbed the few silicates that were scuttling around looking for food now that all the scientists on the floor were de-calcified or whatever you should call it.
She flew down to the ground floor. The squealing was heaviest coming from the front of the building, where they were probably piled up trying to get out the front doors. So she started at the other end of the building, where the stairs were. She injected everything in the hall, then moved into each lab by turn and stabbed all the silicates she found.
In the biggest lab, she found paydirt. It was the lab that looked like that lab back on the island. This one had six big fishtanks side by side, and only one was busted open. She swung over and looked at the lab notebooks open on one counter. She couldn’t read Italian, but she didn’t need to.
She felt really creeped out at the idea of six times as many silicates loose in Rome if these guys had been just a lot more ‘successful’ at their experiment.
None of the silicates were in that lab. Maybe there was a smell or something that they didn’t like. She worked her way to the entry area, where there were maybe ten of the squealing, scuttling things. Ick. She quickly stabbed all ten, since they were all facing the other way. Then she flew back up to the top floor and exited the way she came in.
When she landed, they were moving vehicles to set up a new base camp away from all the dead soldiers and melted silicates, which were probably radioactive, too. She handed the injector to the guy handling the radioisotopes, and she flew over to where Hermione was working with a detail map of the area.
Hermione pointed at two soldiers. “How many in your quadrants?”
“Seven.”
“Eleven.”
Hermione made notes on the map, and nodded to herself. She turned and asked Alex, “How many still in the building?”
Alex said, “Thirty-three, counting the ten in the front trying to get out the front doors.”
Hermione broke out in a big smile. “And how many tanks were broken? One or two?”
“One. And the notes on the lab notebooks stopped around 9:15, but I couldn’t read the notes.”
Hermione relaxed. “Perfect. Colonel, there could only be a maximum of 128, and that’s the number we killed. So Rome is safe.”
Alex muttered, “I wish I could say the same thing about New York. And Tokyo. Or even that little island.”
Harry tried to reassure her. “They’re going to be doing full-scale searches across the whole island as soon as they’re organized, and they’re staking out goats at a dozen places around the island. If there are any silicates left, they’ll find them.”
Alex told them, “Well, I need to call my computer support and find out what’s happening everywhere else.”
She pulled out her cellphone. She didn’t want to think what the roaming charges would be for a call from Rome, Italy. And, as usual, it took like fifteen or twenty seconds to connect. “Acid Burn?”
Willow’s AutoTuned voice came through clearly. “Tera! I was really worried! How’s Rome look?”
Alex sighed. “Still in one piece. Hermione thinks we got every one of them. What’s the status elsewhere?”
Willow said, “Looks good on Petrie’s Island. No new silicates found. New York? They’ve got it confined to a single floor as of a couple minutes ago. Tokyo? Miller’s team is still a couple hours out, and they’ve already lost containment on the lab. Police and army have barricades up and they’re feeding the silicates irradiated animals to kill them off before they bust loose all over the city. They’re evacuating everything within ten blocks of the lab, just in case.”
Alex asked, “How long would it take for me to get to Tokyo in the Blackbird?”
Willow said, “Let me check … Takeoff … Great circle distance of 6850 miles … If you bail out over Tokyo instead of waiting for a landing and transport, you can get there in 2.9 hours.”
“Okay. Vector me to the airbase where the Blackbird is, and get me a flightpath to Tokyo.”
Alex could hear the smile in Willow’s voice as she said in her best Jo Lupo imitation, “Roger that. Over and out.”
Alex flew back to Hermione. “I need my injector topped up, and then I have to fly. Literally. Tokyo is not going well.”
Hermione winced. “Can you get there soon enough to help?”
Alex glanced at her phone. It had a message with a compass heading and a note that it would take seven minutes to fly to the Blackbird. Alex said, “I can get there in about three hours. I have to try.”
Hermione told her, “Good luck.”
Alex gave her a hug, even though she was Terawatt and in public. And Hermione had a really shocked look on her face, too. She flew over and got her reloaded injector from the radioisotope guy, flew to where her gym bag was still sitting in that vehicle, and went silvery. She pulled the gym bag into her morph and held the injector a good sixty feet behind her. Then she headed as fast as she could in the direction her phone told her to go.
* * *
Graham answered the phone again. “Miller speaking.”
“Captain, it’s Sergeant Harriman.”
“I hope you have some good news.”
Walter said, “Yes, sir, I was able to get you a Super Huey with rappelling points. And your source for the strontium-90 will be onboard waiting for you. You can land as planned, hop onto the chopper, load up your darts in transit, and rappel down into the street outside the barricades, all in under ten minutes.”
“That’s great news,” Graham smiled.
“And Acid Burn says Terawatt has saved Rome and is coming to Tokyo as your support. She should be arriving in a little over three hours.”
Graham really smiled then. “Sergeant, I would say ‘eggggcellent’ but we know that’s a reserved word.”
* * *
Jack moved swiftly down the hall, stepping or leaping over the melted silicate carcasses as necessary. He stopped at the doorway and pulled out a spec ops periscope to get a look inside the lab. Without being told, Finn stepped over and did the same for the lab doorway across the hall.
Jack said, “One in sight, trying to get out the window.”
Finn said, “None in sight.”
Jack said, “Walters, with me. Heller, you have point. Finn, you stay here and keep everything out of our hair.”
Hanna leapt into the lab. Literally. She didn’t jump a couple of feet into the room. She jumped three feet straight up and landed on top of a lab table beside the doorway.
Walters hissed, “Damn!”
Jack asked Hanna, “Clear?”
“Clear.” Hanna put a dart in the backside of the silicate trying to get out the shattered window, then quickly reloaded.
Jack and Walters moved in swiftly, protecting each other’s flank while Hanna reloaded and then leapt onto another lab table.
“Wow, that really puts the ‘bound’ into bounding overwatch,” Jack snarked.
The lab was decent-sized, but it was lab tables all around the edges of the room, with only two lab tables in the center. So as soon as Hanna was on top of one of the center lab tables, she could check the entire room for more silicates. And Jack could hear that there wasn’t any more of that rubbery squealing in the room. No, there was some coming from down the hall, but not in here.
Once Jack was sure the silicate on the windowsill was dead, they moved back to the hallway.
Finn reported, “No activity and no sound inside the lab. All activity’s apparently coming from the back labs.”
Jack nodded. “Fine. You have the hallway. Heller, reload, then take point again, only try not to make leaps that will put your ankles in range of a concealed tentacle.”
“Yes, sir.”
It only took seconds to clear the lab, since there was nothing moving. No silicates, at any rate. Unfortunately, there were six bodies, one of which was right by the door where he had probably walked in to ask someone to go have lunch with him, and instead had become lunch. That went with the two corpses in the front right lab to leave six people unaccounted for. He knew their corpses would be lying on the floor in the other two labs.
But there were seven fishtanks along one counter, with five of them busted open from the inside. That meant either ten or twenty silicates, depending on whether they’d had one or two divisions. Since he could count, he knew it was twenty. They’d taken down twelve already, with three escaping out the window. That left …
“We have five more in the last two labs.” He touched his earjack and alerted Sergeant Scott, “Leader to Scott. Twelve down, five left up here, and your three.”
Scott replied, “Scott to Leader. Our three are dead, although I had a jammed rifle barrel and the marshal played bait to get the last one to follow him until I could get my rifle reloaded and dart it.”
Jack closed the doors into the two just-searched labs and listened to the eerie squealing. He looked down the hall. One elevator door. Two lab doors, both open, and opposite each other like the first pair. And the emergency exit door which thankfully needed two levers pulled down to unlock it, and had that plastic inflatable emergency slide hooked to clips on the floor in front of it.
He said, “Okay. Two labs left to go, and five silicates. First, we make sure the elevator’s still closed, or at least empty. Then we move to the lab doors. For recon, Finn takes left, I take right, like before. If either looks clear around the door, we close that door and clear the other lab room first. We have five threats and only four darts ready, so if they rush us, we retreat to our first lab room to reload. Understood?”
“Yes, sir,” Finn said for the team.
Jack moved to the side of the hall opposite the elevator, so he could check that the doors were still shut. It looked like you needed a keycard to open it. Good.
He led the team past the elevator, and toward the squealing noises. He thought he was ready.
But he was completely caught by surprise when the drop ceiling gave way over his head, and two silicates fell through.
Jack watched the things falling down toward him, and he knew he was about to be extremely dead.