Crystal Choice: The Second Novel in the Projector War Saga Read online

  “If there’s anyone here, they’re in the room in the center. It’s the only place I can’t get into.”

  Tolden’s jaw tensed. “No one in confinement?”

  I shook my head. “They’re either gone or dead. Or, just maybe, in that central room.”

  “Have everyone meet us there.” He set off down the corridor, cradling the energy-rifle as he jogged towards the room in the center of the compound. I sent the instructions to the other teams, then jogged after Tolden.

  As I moved through the compound, a chill settled into my bones. Glass shards from shattered windows littered the floor like jagged gems, forgotten in all the horror. They reflected the electric lights as we passed, taunting us with unanswered questions. Smashed electronics, overturned chairs, bullets lodged in the ceiling, and a coffee maker half melted from what could only have been a plasma blast smeared pieces of the story on canvas. It wasn’t a painting, so much as scattered bursts of color gleaned from scorch marks on the walls and blood spatter found far too occasionally. I could almost see the person with the fully automatic weapon firing at an unknown enemy. No veteran in her right mind would waste precious bullets on the ceiling.

  As Tolden turned the last corner before the room, his weapon came up at a sound in the corridor.

  “Wait!” I shouted as the imminent danger pulled me away from reconstructing what had happened. “It’s Steele!”

  He pulled his finger off the trigger just as Steele’s face came into his sights. “Get your head in the game, Farina!” he snarled, lowering his weapon. “You were supposed to tell me when the first group reached the meeting point.”

  I ran a search for any such instructions, but it came up blank. I didn’t have any record of him saying anything—but it was best to not point that out. Ms. King had said in Social History that one should never correct a superior officer.

  “Sir, I was trying to reconstruct what happened here,” I said.

  Steele’s eyebrows rose. “How?”

  I brushed off the question. It wasn’t important. “Whatever happened here, it happened quickly, and violently. I’m sure you saw the blood spatters and fire marks, but they seem to be more erratic than someone in regular combat would have fired. These people were terrified—off their game. They weren’t repelling an attack, they were trying to get away from whatever it was that attacked them. There is no question about their success. Sir, I think they’re all dead or taken.”

  Tolden’s eyes narrowed. “Taken by who?”

  I searched through the half-baked analyses to find any clue to the answer to that question, but came up with nothing. “I don’t know. Only whoever they are, they’re ruthless and terrifying.”

  Black came around the corner with 92 in tow. His energy rifle was slung over his shoulder, and his hand rested easily on his handgun. 92 had obviously warned him much better than I had warned Tolden. “We’ve got signs of a struggle, but no bodies. Some blood spatter, but not enough to explain where all the personnel went. Cell blocks are clean. No inmates, no bodies, and the supply of sedatives is down by half. Whatever happened here wasn’t good,” he said.

  Tolden accepted it with a nod and turned to Steele. “Can you access the cameras? See what happened here?”

  Steele shook his head. “Cameras were all wiped. It’s like a ghost just came in and took everyone.”

  Tolden’s fist clenched. “It wasn’t a ghost. Something real did this, and we’re going to figure out how and why before the convoy gets here.” He evaluated the ceiling high steel door with a critical eye. “What’s it going to take to get this door open?”

  Steele ran a practiced eye over it. “This door was designed to withstand a small nuclear explosion, but I think I might know its unlock codes. Unless they’ve been changed.”

  92 pushed past him. “The system changed all codes but the outside ones when the distress signal wasn’t canceled. The base I’m assigned to got the data dump. Are you ready?”

  Black and Tolden readied their weapons, while Smith and I pressed our backs against the wall, out of the line of fire.

  ::3, 2, 1:: 92 projected into each of our heads. The lock clicked, I hauled the door open, while Black and Tolden charged inside. Steele followed them quickly, and 92 brought up the rear. He stopped in the doorway, staring at the sight. “Well, we can safely say it wasn’t a ghost.”

  There was a stunned silence. I could feel rage pour off of them in varying combinations.

  “Whoever did this is going to pay. I’ll rip them limb from limb with my own two hands,” someone growled.

  Steele excused himself. “I’m going to keep watch.” When he emerged from the doorway he looked as if someone had poured a pint of coke down his throat, popped in a few mentos, and shaken him five times.

  “32,” Black’s voice was clipped as he called for me. His anger evaporated in an instant, so he was perfectly calm. So calm it was terrifying. My hand crept to the semiautomatic at my hip as I stepped past 92. Even bracing myself for a sight that could make a grown, trained, tactical officer green, the gorge rose in my throat and I froze in the doorway. My eyes flicked over the scene, greedily soaking up details even as I struggled to breathe.

  A boy, maybe fifteen, with a missing eye and ripped out throat was pressed against the far corner of the room. He had dyed the once-blonde hair of the woman below him red. Her fingers were splayed on either side, as if she’d been trying to shield him as their attacker had slit her open. Her chest was a gel of ruptured organs and smashed ribs. Her heart was missing a chunk that looked as if it had been chewed off by a beast. Her eyes were frozen open, and salt still stained her cheeks as she stared; pleading, even in death.

  Black was kneeling over a man whose stomach had been clawed open and its contents arrayed artfully around him. Each of his intestines was still connected as they spiralled around his dead body. His entire thigh was scraped away to reveal a bone that had been gouged by a wild beast.

  “What did this?”

  I jumped as Tolden touched my shoulder to get my attention.

  “Can you tell?”

  His eyes were filled with fury that beat at my already strained mind, and I shied away, my lips forming words over and over again.

  “T—too much.” I couldn’t put any volume behind the words as the sight and smell of spoiled blood battered my mind. I couldn’t process this—I didn’t want to remember these things!

  His lips tightened. “That was an order. Tell me what did this.”

  I looked back at the scene, throat dry with horror. Every face screamed out in agony. Every corpse pleaded with me for mercy, but there was nothing I could do. I stepped back, away from the scene once. Twice. I pressed my eyes closed against the onslaught of images, but it didn’t help. Blood coated the insides of my eyelids. Blood and fear. I turned and tried to run, but someone blocked my way. I opened my eyes to find 92 staring at me with a carefully blank face.

  “I’m s-sorry. I can’t.” I didn’t know who I was apologizing to. The weight of all those lives pressed on my stomach like Houston’s boot the moment before he’d shot me, and it was all I could do not to gag.

  Something grabbed my wrist, and I spun around to find Black’s angry eyes boring into me.

  “Pull yourself together, Farina.”

  The words echoed uselessly outside my head as I watched his eyes. They were cold. Every motion, every thought even, was deliberate. He was the perfect soldier.

  Tolden said something I couldn’t process, and Black’s hand came up. It smashed into the side of my face with enough force to send me stumbling, but there was no pain. I looked back to find his lips.

  “You’re an Agent, Farina. You can’t freeze up like this. Now get your head out of Neverland and do your job!”

  Everyone was watching me, adding to the weight that threatened to crush me. My knees tried to give way, but I caught myself
before I hit the floor. I closed my eyes again and tried to fight past the raw emotion. These people deserved to be avenged. Yes? To do that, I had to be able to tell them who did it. I couldn’t just freeze. Black was right about that.

  I opened my eyes and tried to pull the blue lines to the surface of my vision, but they didn’t emerge. I swallowed the bile down. I reached for the WATCH module, but my mental fingers slipped through it, like I was suddenly a ghost. “I can’t do it. They won’t come.”

  “What won’t come?” Black asked, but Tolden just stared with disgust written on his face.

  “The—” the lines? That wouldn’t make any sense to him. “In order to—” No, that explanation would take too long. I turned away, trying to figure out how to tell them.

  I saw something arc toward my head out of the corner of my eye and ducked Tolden’s fist just in time. He dropped to the ground and swung a leg out to trip me, but I jumped just seconds before his leg made contact. He frowned and pulled his energy pistol.

  “Whoa!” Black exclaimed. One meaningful glance from Tolden made him stand down.

  That did it. When Black stepped back, and I was totally alone staring down a weapon, the blue lines came back to calculate trajectory. The weapon wasn’t aimed at me. Not really. If he fired, it would hit my right shoulder. It certainly wouldn’t be fatal. I pulled a bit of myself together. Pushed the cluttered notifications to the back of my mind for later. The rest could wait.

  “Fine.” The word was bleached of all emotion.

  He jerked his weapon at the bloody mass in front of me and I turned. The lines flicked over the mass of death.

  The first thing to stand out was one injury style that was repeated on every victim. It was a slash made by the same dimension of claws. If there had been multiple attackers, they all had claws that looked the same. I set to work rebuilding the shape of the claw as I pulled the next thing in the evaluation queue. There were a number of post-mortem injuries in the center of the room. I took a few quick steps to get a closer look. Claws, again. This time it looked like there were three. They dug in further towards the tip, and I could just make out the muddied shape of a heel. Whatever had attacked these people had claws in their feet. This was the track they’d used to travel from the door to…where? I lit up the track of foot-prints. There was a hairline crack in the far wall. I marked it in red for later evaluation and went back to my work. I pulled the most complete footprint I could and placed it below the claw.

  The next thing in the queue was a woman with the top right part of her skull and brain missing. There were scraps of hair and bone dust scattered around her. I noted the pattern. There was a slight amount of the white dust on the victim’s right hand. She had been drugged, somehow, before the beast had started attacking her, but she most certainly hadn’t been dead. She hadn’t died until the brain-damage was too much. The blue lines flicked over the teeth marks in her skull and I began to reconstruct the beast’s jaw structure.

  A line lit up purple in the middle of a mass of bodies in the center. It was on the bottom of the mound, so I requisitioned gloves from Black and pulled them on as I walked over to the pile.

  In a few moments, the other bodies had been moved and I examined the body in the center. This one’s back had been severely damaged, but the shatter pattern was strange. I ran my fingers over the victim’s back to try to find what I was missing. It was as if an object had been propelled into its back with enough force to shatter—not just the spine, the way I’d first thought—but parts of the hips and ribs as well. There. The simulation formed in my mind. The person was standing in front of me, sideways so I could see the interplay between the victim and the attacker. The basic skeleton of the attacker with claws in its fingers and toes stood directly behind the victim. Its knees were shaped irregularly with kneecaps that protruded slightly. Its hands grasped the victim’s neck, and pulled him backwards into the attacker’s knee that jerked up. It contacted the victim’s spine just above the small of the back, creating the same shatter pattern as on the body. I checked the force reading. 4,819 pounds. Interesting, but impossible with the current model. I started re-working the problem. There was no way anything with standard musculature could unleash that much force at one point like what I’d just seen.

  It took me three more tries to get the problem right. At that point, the sketches of the feet and claws were ready. I applied them to the dummy attacker and frowned. I’d seen this musculature model before, at the fundraiser. I’d only had time to build a partial model of the man with the badly tied bowtie, but it matched. Another match pinged for my attention, but I waved it away.

  Now that I had the data, I could finish analyzing it later.

  The basic form of the attacker established, I looked up. There were no more lights beckoning for attention, so I returned to the other agents, who were circled up, talking in hushed whispers. Tabitha had entered the room, and Steele was back too. Both their faces were still pale, but no longer green. I checked the time. I’d only been working for ten minutes.

  “I have a preliminary analysis, sir.” I said. My voice wasn’t quite steady—I could still see the image of him standing there, blank with a gun pointed at me. I understood why he’d done it. Ms. King had probably given him reports that told him my lines always kicked in when I was in immediate danger. He’d needed me to use that tool, so he’d pulled a gun. That trick would only work once, but it had worked.

  Tolden turned around. “I’m listening.”

  I took a deep breath and launched in. “The attacker wasn’t human. It has claws in its hands and feet, a slightly varied bone structure, and almost three times the muscle mass of a normal human. Because of the stronger muscles, I’m assuming the bone structure is also varied, but I don’t have enough information to figure out how varied. I would need a sample of some sort. There were more than one. I’m guessing five or six. Maybe even seven. I’ll keep working on getting an exact number, but because they are all built nearly identically, I’d need a lot more time to identify and reconstruct prints for each one.”

  “Six?” Tolden asked, eyes wide. “Six of these things did this? To two hundred fully trained personnel?”

  “It could have been seven, but yes. It’s some sort of beast. It was eating these people to kill, or after it killed them. Part of one man’s heart is missing, and I pulled the jaw structure off of a woman whose brain was gnawed on.”

  Steele blanched and ran out of the room.

  “I can pull more examples for the report, but you get the point.”

  The part of my brain that was still hiding behind my blue lines, too horrified to show its face, wondered why Tolden let Steele run away, but had pulled a gun on me when I tried to do the same.

  Tolden was frowning at me. I could tell that he hadn’t wanted to point that gun at me, but he’d done what he had to in order to get the results he needed. “Did you find anything else?”

  “There’s another room.”

  Black’s hand strayed to the energy pistol he wore on his left hip. “That’s the sort of thing you tell us first.”

  92 was nodding. “Probably one of Medina’s hidey-holes. He likes his secret rooms.”

  “It’s concealed in the far wall,” I said. “There was a lot of traffic between the back room and the rest of the facility by the creatures. If they are still here in the facility, that’s where they would be.”

  Tolden pursed his lips. “Black’s right. You should have told us this the second you found out. If there is something down there, they know we’re here now. We could be walking into a trap. Still, there are people unaccounted for. They could be over there.”

  I counted the bodies in the room quickly. “There are forty-seven corpses here. That means we’re missing over three-fourths of the people from this facility, and all the prisoners.”

  Tolden nodded. “That’s what we were just talking about.”

&nb
sp; I pulled up the plans of the building. “I hate to disappoint you, but there’s maybe three feet unaccounted for in the blueprints, and that’s if the hallway on the other side is shorter than it should be. You can’t fit 150 people in a room that small. It’s just not possible.”

  Tabitha nodded. “From the humming coming from that side of the building, the room’s probably a secure server room. The computers sound normal—that is, they’re running normally. There can’t be that many people in there.”

  Steele nodded. “If any fluid touched the electronics, they wouldn’t be running normally.”

  So not a lot of blood. Right.

  Tolden sighed. “Regardless of what’s inside the room, we should move. Now.”

  Black pulled the energy rifle over his shoulder and cradled it as he walked. Tolden copied him, and the whole group made their way over to the false wall.

  “Don’t harm the computers.” Steele whispered. “Just because they wiped the cameras doesn’t mean they’d scrapped everything valuable.”

  Tolden nodded, “Make an effort not to harm the electronics, but not if you get a glimpse of the things that attacked the base. If any of those things are still here, we make an orderly retreat and call for that strike team Ms. Green promised us. Understood?”

  Everyone voiced their comprehension and Tolden let Steele past. “I don’t see a way to enter the codes.”

  92 ran a hand along the wall to the left of the door and pressed a button I hadn’t seen earlier. Abruptly, a palm scanner emerged from the wall. It was sticky with blood. Steele pulled a pair of gloves from his tac suit and put them on.

  “Whatever attacked them used one of the hands of the agents here to gain access. The residue is still on the scanner, though. The blood acts like baby-powder, or cornstarch, and boosts the prints. I should be able to just—”

  He pressed his hand squarely on the pad and the lights blinked green. I pulled the door open, and Black was the first one inside.