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

  “The room’s empty.”

  I pushed past the others to enter the room next. Over 150 people couldn’t just disappear, and the beasts wouldn’t have come and gone from here so often if it was empty. The computers hadn’t been touched, so that wasn’t why they’d come. I studied the ground. There were traces of blood where it had caught in the beast’s claws and been tracked over the wooden floor. The tracks led to the middle of the room and then vanished.

  “There!” I found a lever with black specks around the grip. It looked like it was hooked into a computer, but that had to be camouflage. I pulled the lever and watched as a panel on the floor slid back.

  Steele whistled silently. “Gotta hand it to you, 32, you’re good.”

  Tolden nodded in agreement. “Can you get a good read down there?”

  I felt my way down the stairs and into a large, cavernous room. I swept back and forth along the walls laced with dampener technology. There wasn’t anything alive larger than the bacteria, so I couldn’t get a visual. I returned to myself and shook my head. “The largest thing alive down there are a couple trillion microorganisms. The stairs let out into a really big room. It probably spans a third of the base under there. That’s all I can tell you.”

  Tolden nodded to Black, who beckoned to Steele and descended the stairs. “Keep scanning. Any bit of information helps.” He turned and jogged after the first two team-members. I followed more slowly. The stairs were uneven, and I was starting to develop a headache. The last thing I needed was to fall down the stairs before we figured out what had done this.

  At the bottom of the stairs, I blanched.

  The room was shaped like a long rectangle, measuring twenty feet on the ends, and sixty feet down the center. Bodies were piled on either side of the hallway, and they were mauled even more severely than the ones in the previous rooms. Towards the center were bodies sitting in chairs. Their wrists were tied to the armrests, and their ankles to the legs of the chair. I pulled the blue lines to my vision—partially to evaluate the scene, but mostly to separate myself from the agony etched into every single face.

  “It’s just more of the same.” Black said. “Let’s keep moving. There’s another door.”

  “No. It’s not.” I said. Even after a cursory analysis, this was markedly different. Each of these victims had some sort of injury from the battle. I crouched over the nearest body to confirm my hypothesis. Sure enough, the skin of its thigh was blackened and peeling away from the bone. This one had received an indirect hit from a plasma weapon, but that wasn’t how it died. No. The cause of death was obvious on this one. Two millimeters of hard, silver metal had been inserted into the cornea of the victim’s eye and jerked around until he had died from severe brain damage. The pattern of death by torture after an incapacitating wound seemed to be repeated in every single one of the bodies piled against the side.

  Tolden and the others were staring at me as I put the body back. “How are these different? They just look like more deaths.”

  I shook my head. “They were eaten up there, and some of the damage was post-mortem. Cruel, certainly, but impersonally so. They were food that was available, so the creatures took what they wanted and left the rest. In contrast, every single person here was tortured to death. They were looking for something, or they took glee in torturing people and just had time to kill. Frankly, given their skill, it could be both. One thing is for sure. We aren’t just dealing with beasts. They have a measure of intelligence—I’m just not sure how much, yet.”

  Tolden pursed his lips. “Finish your analysis quickly. We need to move on, and I don’t feel comfortable leaving you behind when those beasts could still be around.”

  I nodded and walked over to the first of the bodies tied to the chair. This one was more or less untouched but, upon closer examination, there was a slight discoloration in the major veins and arteries. In the crux of each elbow were three puncture marks—mostly healed, but still present. The victim’s eye had a popped blood vessel, but instead of red, the discoloration was black. I closed my eyes to try and wrap my head around the problem. The puncture marks were almost closed, which meant that they were administered before death. The discoloration of the blood could have been caused by any combination of chemicals injected into the bloodstream. Still, there was no puncture in the eye itself, which meant that the blood had circulated, probably multiple times, before death. Also, the way the vessel in the victim’s eye had popped suggested a lot of pressure buildup. It couldn’t have been in the blood vessel itself caused by the chemicals, or the discolored veins would have popped, or at least swelled, and that hadn’t happened. No, that was a separate issue.

  It took a few minutes, but I finally managed to work up a more complete picture. The victim had been injected multiple times, left for a few minutes, and then subjected to some sort of pressure inducing device. Maybe Steele could figure out what kind of device.

  I explained my analysis to him, then watched as he examined the body. Finally, he shook his head. “I’m at a loss. There’s not another mark on this body, so if there was such a device, it wasn’t hooked up physically. That’s about all I can tell you. Still, it would be much more advanced technology than we’ve seen from them this far.”

  I moved on without another word. He didn’t believe me about the device, but that wasn’t important. R&D would figure it out, or they wouldn’t. It wasn’t my problem. The important part was that these creatures had access to technology more advanced than the Agency had seen, and that was very bad.

  The next two victims had bled out from a series of shallow cuts on their bare chests and arms. It was a quick evaluation. The fourth was different. She lay nearly straight in the center of the hallway, naked, with skin that more closely resembled meat than human flesh. Her arms still weeped blood from where they’d used knives, and her breasts bore teeth marks. Salt stain covered her cheeks, and the agony from her thoughts still whispered to me—like a ghost.

  Zach’s face appeared in my vision and I froze. Memories clawed at my mind. Hands that trapped my wrists when I tried to get away. His lips on mine again, and again, and again.

  “Farina?”

  The blue lines snapped up over the memory and I shoved Zach out of my mind. He had no place here anymore.

  I moved on. I could finish that evaluation on the chopper ride home.

  The sixth and last chair contained another woman. This one wasn’t naked, though. The sleeves of her clothes were melted into her skin for the entire length of her forearms, and her upper arms were covered in a series of slashes caused by a very sharp knife. Her face was mauled by two sets of slashes from the beasts’ claws. The blouse she wore was slit down the middle, and the skin of her chest had been peeled back and nailed to the extreme sides of her ribcage. Through the bones, I could see her still beating heart. There was an electronic chip attached to the outside of the muscle that flashed every time her heart contracted.

  Rods of metal had been drilled through her knees and through the center of her feet that attached her to the floor. Her face drooped defeatedly, and her face was stained with tears. A black coagulation of blood filled her mouth where she’d bit her tongue off.

  “Doe!”

  I jumped at the sound and whirled around. It was 92. His face was pale. “No agent could have withstood that.” His words were barely a whisper.

  “You recognize her?” Tolden asked.

  92 nodded. “This is Jane Doe, assigned to D.C. Primary. Or, at least she was. She was reassigned two days ago—we didn’t know where. Now she’s—” He broke off as the full consequences washed over him. He swore under his breath. “This is probably the biggest security breach in ten years. Sir, I’ll be outside. I’ve got to make some calls.”

  Tolden nodded in understanding, and 92 headed back at a dead run. I could hear him wishing for a working comms unit as he retreated.

  “Farina,
are you done?” Tolden asked. I nodded. What analysis wasn’t already completed could be done on the chopper ride back. “Good. Steele, Black, get that door open.”

  Tabitha gasped as Black touched the handle. “Sir, there’s someone alive in there. I can hear it.”

  Blood was everywhere, covering even most of the ceiling. But there, in the center of the room, was the prone form of an agent.

  His head moved slightly as he heard us moving. “He…help …m-me.” His lips moved, but no sound emerged.

  Tabitha shook her head. “I-I don’t understand.”

  Black moved to touch him, but I held out a hand. ::Wait,:: Then, to Tolden, ::Sir, this doesn’t feel right. Let me do an evaluation first. It’ll take sixty seconds, tops and then we can get him out of here.::

  Tolden nodded in acquiescence, and I rushed to the agent’s side. “What’s your agent designation?” I asked as I looked over his wounds.

  “3-281.” His lips moved, but he still didn’t make a sound. Was something wrong with his lungs? His voice box? Or was he just too weak? If something was wrong with his lungs, he wouldn’t be able to breathe, though. His breaths were shallow, but present.

  His bare chest had an invisible line running through it, like the bullet scars I had from where Houston had shot me. A moment later, I saw the glow at his sternum. More technology like they’d used to keep Doe alive while they tortured her? But why stitch him up and then leave him?

  I gripped his wrist to check his pulse. Nothing. I tried to find it again on his neck, but it still wasn’t there. His heart wasn’t beating.

  “How long have you been here, Agent?” I asked, but he just stared blankly into space. The muscles in his face still moved to form words. His eyes still stared at some invisible place in the stars. There was no mind behind his eyes.

  “He…help…m-me.” I sighed and closed my eyes. He was already dead, whether he seemed to know it or not. We couldn’t risk taking him. The beasts had planted some sort of technology in him, probably a trojan horse of some kind. But what kind?

  I stripped off my gloves and placed a bare hand on his abdomen. It pulsed slowly, once, twice, and then the interval decreased—very much like the magnetic timer on the bomb earlier. I stood and turned back to the rest of the team. “We need to get out of here. Now.”

  Black set his jaw. “We aren’t leaving without this agent.”

  “He’s already dead, he just doesn’t know it yet, and we’re all going to be dead if we don’t get out of here now!”

  Black looked at Tolden.

  “Look, we don’t have time!” I tried to project urgency, only to be met with more throbbing in my head. Tolden looked thoughtful.

  Thoughtful wasn’t fast enough. I caught Tabitha’s gaze. “Do you hear that?”

  If I could feel the timer pulsing in his chest, then it probably made some sort of sound.

  Tabitha nodded.

  “How much time between pulses?”

  Tabitha closed her eyes. “.89 of a second.”

  “And the acceleration rate?”

  “The rate is increasing by .3, each time.” She answered. I did the math in my head. That didn’t leave much time until it went boom.

  A timer appeared on my vision. At zero, the bomb would go off. “Tolden.” He didn’t look at me. I grit my teeth. “Sir, there is a bomb, like in the hotel. I don’t know how big. We have to get beyond the blast doors before it goes off or we could all be dead.”

  Tolden’s head jerked up. “How do you know?”

  “It doesn’t matter how I know!” I yelled. “We’re all going to die for nothing if we don’t get out of here!”

  That stirred everyone to action. They bolted through the first door, Tolden in the lead, Tabitha following him, Steele next, and Black right in front of me. The timer counted down as they climbed the stairs and dashed through the next door. With three seconds left, Tolden. Tabitha, and Steele passed through the blast-shielded door. Black stopped to look back. I could feel the regret in his surface thoughts.

  Two seconds left.

  There wasn’t time to tell him to move, so I did the only thing I could think of. I barreled through his walls, grabbed the centers in his brain that made his feet move, and forced him around the corner. His muscles still remembered how to run. They carried him the final two feet and pressed him against the wall on the other side. He was safe. I returned to myself as the world exploded.

  I saw the wall coming towards me and tried to brace for impact, but it didn’t help. My vision went black.

  Chapter eleven

  Someone was shaking my shoulder.

  I groaned and tried to sit up. “Is everyone okay?”

  That earned a laugh from whoever was talking—I still hadn’t opened my eyes to find out. “The reinforced door and walls protected everyone but you. We’re fine.”

  I peeled my eyes open and fought through the blur of color. As soon as I could tell Steele’s extended hand from the background, I let him help me up. A moment later, the world stopped spinning, and I evaluated myself.

  By some miracle of fate, most of the debris had missed, and I was relatively unharmed. That didn’t keep my head from screaming, or every single muscle from protesting when I tried to move—but alive was alive. Everything else could heal later.

  I picked my way through debris from the blast—slowly to avoid stepping on splinters of wood or tripping over shorn rebar sticking out of concrete chunks—until I could lay eyes on the rest of my team. Tolden crouched by Tabitha, radiating unshielded concern. Something was wrong with her?

  I sorted through my disordered mind until I could find the WATCH module, then jury-rigged some program to make it work while the rest of my blue lines tried to fix what the blast had shaken up.

  I winced as the module engaged and my already disordered vision crowded with damage reports. I fought through the noise to find the analysis tools I needed, then shoved the WATCH module out of the way. It landed in a heap of other damaged programs that my blue lines were trying desperately to repair, but I ignored it. This was nothing a good night of sleep wouldn’t fix.

  With the analysis tools in hand, I focused on Tabitha’s huddled form. She had no visible injuries, and it would take an entirely different suit of analysis tools to figure out if she was bleeding internally. I sighed. My mind and the tools my blue lines used for analysis were the product of an entire childhood of programming my own brain for small, individual tasks that could work together to complete the analysis I needed. The benefit of such a large machine was that I could take it apart and rearrange it to do almost anything I needed it to do. The disadvantage was that I couldn’t do much if those machines weren’t exactly where I expected them to be.

  I reached out to Tabitha’s mind as carefully as I could, then jerked back as I felt the sheer terror pouring from her.

  Tolden looked up at me. His thoughts were a mess, too, but a mess of a different kind. He was arguing with himself about—my abilities? Finally, his jaw tightened. “Farina, you caught the brunt of the blast. Are you alright?”

  I nodded. “I’m more worried for Smith, right now. What’s wrong?”

  “She’s an Auditory. The ringing from the blast is agony.”

  I squinted at him, unsure if I’d heard him correctly. What ringing? I focused for a moment, and then I understood. I’d dismissed that hollow, echoing sound that muffled everything the moment I’d woken up. The machinery that meant I could hear as well as I did had been destroyed—either by the blast, or the impact when I was thrown into the wall. I’d dismissed the ringing in my ears, and muffled hearing was the least of my worries. I was too busy picking up the pieces of the machinery that made my mind work so my eyes would do what they were supposed to. For Tabitha, though? This lack of hearing would be like if I’d woken up blind.

  “What can I do?” I tried to yell the word
s so Tolden would be able to hear me. If this was impacting Tabitha’s ears, it had to be making it harder for him to hear, too. He couldn’t read my lips the way I could read his.

  “See if you can calm her down. Once she’s out of overload, she knows enough to try and fix herself.”

  I took a deep breath to brace myself from the waves of terror Tabitha was throwing off, and then I slipped inside her walls. ::It’s going to be alright, Tabitha. Your hearing will return, I promise.::

  Tabitha shook her head. I can’t— the thought broke off helplessly. It won’t stop! I can’t make it stop! She was trapped inside the echoes of her own mind, crying, and pounding at the walls as sound suffocated her. Every time she screamed, the sound only fed into her overload.

  ::Focus on something else.:: I suggested. Everyone had to learn to deal with overload in their own way, so there wasn’t much else I could do unless—

  I pulled what blue lines I had access to, and started calculating odds. If this was being caused by injury to her eardrum, it wouldn’t stop anytime soon. But what if I could cushion it somehow?

  I reached inside Tabitha’s head again and listened through her ears. Then, delicately, calmed the screaming nerves. Tabitha would have to report to the med department when we got back, but she would be able to function until then.

  All at once, the storm in her mind calmed. I scanned it again, and smiled. She was going to be just fine.

  Tabitha was looking at me with wide eyes when I returned to my own mind. “What did you do?”

  I shrugged. “I didn’t fix the problem, you’ll still have to report to MedDep, and sooner will be better than later.”

  The other girl seemed to accept that not-quite-an-answer to her question. “Thank you.”

  I stood with a sigh and looked around. The essential machinery in my mind was starting to come back together—although I would be busy picking up debris for the next few hours. At least I could think again.