Firebreak

Firebreak

"Well, let's get to it then, Diane." The man said, placing his ID badge up against the card reader on the wall. It beeped once flashing green repeatedly.

"Do you have any idea of what it is, Paul?" The woman placed her ID badge up to an identical reader on the other side of the door. It beeped as well, flashing green. Then both readers beeped twice, stayed green and with a tangible sound the locks released on the massive door before them and began to swing in slowly.

"They've been keeping it quiet. It came in a sealed system and nobody has laid eyes on it since it was packed up." Paul shrugged sounding dubious, "Whatever it is, we were brought in to take a look at it, which means it's Xenos whatever the hell it is."

Diane sighed and shook her head and stepped through the massive portal having to stretch her stride awkwardly to make it across the meter-thick border that contained the Hazardous Specimen area of the laboratory. Paul didn't bother to take that kind of effort and simply stepped on the ring, raised one hand to steady himself on the top curve and ducked inside.

Once inside they moved to the side room and began to don their protective safety equipment. The atypically brief documentation that they had been given for this project was that all possible precautions were to be taken. It was being considered a Level-6 biological specimen. That meant hard suits, not just the normal soft-biohazard suits.

Most of the lab never experienced anything beyond a Level-2 and out of a staff of thousands there was only about six people in the entire sprawling complex that were authorized to handle a Level-6. Paul and Diane went climbed into the hard-suits, which were essentially the same design of powered exo-armor that the military with a lot more technology. The design was self-contained and was designed for long-term exposure to every environment experienced by humanity.

It was a little awkward at first for both scientists after climbing into the suits. They needed to be fully powered before they could walk comfortably and the micro-fusion system in the bulky suit's back needed a moment to come to full power. Lights on the heads-up display on the screen inside the closed system blinked to life one at a time, the suit vibrating as the small sun pushed the suit to life. Paul looked down across the HUD and touched the comms system with his chin while flexing first one hand, then the other through the control systems.

"Comm check?" Paul asked, his voice a little hollow in the helmet.

"Check, check." Diane responded, shifting her torso and taking a step backwards to turn and face him. Her voice coming through clearly.

"Check." Paul confirmed to his partner.

Diane walked over to the massive door and placed her suit's palm against a panel in the middle of the door. The panel blinked yellow twice, then the door slowly swung closed. The panel blinked red twice this time then glowed a steady red. An electronic voice called through their comm systems, "Condition Red engaged. Level-6 Biological Specimen contained." Another series of tangible sounds reverberated through the room, muffled both audibly and physically because of the hard suits. Panels slid to the side at each of the four corners of the room. Small, but threatening-looking weapon systems dropped from the now open portals. "Firebreak protocols engaged. Please acknowledge."

Paul couldn't see her, but he could almost feel Diane's raised eyebrows at this turn of events.

"Firebreak protocols engaged. Acknowledge." The electronic, but vaguely feminine voice repeatedly. Two of the weapons systems training on each of the scientists.

"Gibson, Paul D-145302" Paul told the comm system, a light sweat touching his forehead even as his HUD was registering a spike in his heart rate.

"Angelesa, Diane, D-145301" Diane acknowledged. "Firebreak? What the hell did they bring us?"

Firebreak was only used in the most extreme of cases. Simply put Paul and Diane were locked in to this containment area under absolute quarantine procedures. There was no coming in, and no going out until both Paul and Diane gave the correct counter-sign to the system as well as providing blood samples through their hard suits to the station to ensure no contaminants were present. They would be required to stay in this part of the station for no less than three months inside the hard-suits being essentially drip-fed nutrients through the suits as well as recycling waste for water. It sounds far more disgusting than it was, and the suits were comfortable enough once you got used to them that sleeping was possible, even standing up, thanks to a full suite of narcotics on board.

If, for whatever reason, they attempted to leave before that time period or if one of them did not provide their portion of the counter-sign then they would be killed without question by the system AI. Those weapons were not just there for show, they were a reminder that this was considered extreme priority.

"Fuck sake," Paul whispered while exhaling. Slowing his breathing and adjusting the temperature control on his suit, "Well, I guess it's time to get comfortable. We're not going anywhere for a bit. Firebreak? Really? They couldn't have put that in the file?" Paul turned subvocalizing curses to that the comm system didn't activate.

The pair walked carefully in their suits as they got used to wearing them again. Careful steps at first but increasingly normal as they grew used to the changes in height, bulk, and reach as they stopped consciously acknowledging the suits and their brains adapted.

Down a short hall and in a large circular chamber dotted with a wild array of medical equipment was a large black cube in the center.

As they stepped into the examination room the wall sealed behind them locking them into the room with the storage container. "Reminder: Firebreak protocols are engaged." The station reminded them through the comms system.

Paul rolled his eyes at the computer, as if it was possible to forget.

"Thanks, AIda." Diane responded and moved over to one of the tables on the edges of the circular theater and picked up fist-sized circular key and went to the black cube. "Paul, ready?"

"Not like we have much of a choice, right?" Paul acknowledged, "Go for it. Crack it."

On one of the walls of the cube was a slot set into the matte metal, into which Diane slid the key. With a hushed whisper of equalizing air pressure, the key absorbed the nanotechnology that made up the containment cube into itself. Diane almost didn't have time to grasp the key as it floated in the air on a brief repulsor field, she was too startled by what she was looking at.

"What in the Hell is that?" She whispered, reaching out to grab the key before it fell.

Containment fields like this formed around the object being contained after a brief scan to determine size and shape. This was intended to include at least a half-meter of the surrounding area around the specimen. This preserved both the state of the specimen as well as everything around it. In the sealed environment they would have air samples as well as ground samples because the nanites formed into a cuboidal shape if at all possible.

It was, put simply, a creature from a nightmare. The most immediately noticeable features were teeth. Followed by claws. Followed by spines. Not necessarily in that order.

Paul's brain essentially shutdown and he began to move around the specimen taking in details in as detached and scientific manner as he could manage. "Begin recording. File XA-192922, examiners Gibson, Paul and Angelesa, Diane. Title: Specimen X-4330z."

Diane had managed to put the containment key in the management field to the side, it floated in the field and slowly trickled charge into the system as well as scanning the nanites for any possibility of contamination and purging as necessary. She strode around the specimen examining things as she went, obviously in the same kind of stunned and terrified detachment as Paul.

"Specimen was delivered according to Level-6 containment protocols. Initial observation upon release of nano-containment: The specimen is a light-brown in coloring, mottled with purple or black in places. Estimated length appears to be three meters. Estimated mass to be two-hundred and fifty kilos." Paul paused for a moment to collect himself as he continued to circle the... creature... before him, "Specimen arrived laying on what appears to be granite or some type of igneous rock. A thin layer of light-purple or grayish material is layered on top of the stone. There appears to be fibers, possibly a root structure, from the material into the stone beneath, these structures can be seen extending the full length of the containment sample."

Another pause and deep breath, "The specimen does not have any legs. It appears to be non-pedal in nature. Without moving the specimen there are two arms, each ending with a series long, hooked, bladed claws. The longest of these claws appears to be at least a full meter in length and getting progressively smaller. There appears to be a total of three such claws on each arm."

"Observational addendum," Diane broke in to the report, "It appears that the progression of size is consistent with The Golden Ratio."

Paul didn't stop moving around the creature, looking up and down the creature as he did, "The head is extremely large, almost a meter and a half long. The skull flares into a broad crest to the back and is layered in a series tiers of over-lapping plates. Two eyes are visible. Yellow-orange in color with a t-shaped pupil. The mouth is large with a large number of sharp teeth. There appears to be a layered mandible structure, the external mandibles spread horizontally and the second opens vertically. The first mandible structure has much longer teeth and with two teeth at the central point of the mandible being both longer and thicker than all of the others."

"Observational addendum," Diane added once more, "Could this mandibular structure be used as a mating or intimidation display, or could it be used as a defensive system in place to defend the facial structure as a whole?"

Paul continued, "The specimen has been shot, multiple times, across the entirety of the body," Paul paused in the middle of floor and counted, "Initial counts show a total of thirty-eight visible wounds in the specimen."

"Pause recording." Diane commanded and their HUDs blinked slowly, in acknowledgement, holding the recording, "Thirty-eight? Are you kidding?"

"That's what I count, and that's without moving this thing at all. There could be more"

"Jesus..." Diane whispered softly, looking up and down the length of the monster, after a moment she said "Continue recording."

"Observational addendum," Diane said immediately, crouching down and looking at the creature's claws, "There appears to be blood on the specimen's claws as well as it's torso. This will need to be typed to determine, but there is a strong possibility of it being human."

"This concludes initial assessment of X-4330z. End recording and attach to file."

An alert popped up in the scientist's HUD acknowledging the recording and file. They both moved away from the specimen, trying to get as far away from it as physically possible. It was a psychological necessity to move away and be in a corner for them, to have the sensation of conferring privately. They couldn't open their suits to actually speak, but it was comforting to have the chance to speak like this.

Diane's face popped up on Paul's HUD. "Paul, what is this thing? What can take that many gunshots and keep going?"

Paul's face was on Diane's HUD as well and there was visible sweat on his brow. He looked like he was struggling to not vomit. "I don't know. I've never seen anything like this in my life." He admitted, looking paler and glancing back to the creature as if he was afraid it would move. "I've seen a lot of xeno-biology but this thing is something else. I've seen some truly bizarre evolutionary branches, but they always make sense eventually. This thing though... it's giving me a vibe."

Diane screwed up her forehead at that. Paul was known to be psionically sensitive. He barely even registered on the scale, little more than an advanced sense of intuition, but it was there and after their years working together Diane had understood that Paul's "vibes" were never wrong. "What kind of... vibe?"

Paul looked back over Diane's shoulder again, looking at the specimen. "I've never felt anything like this, it's strong. It's like it's radiating off the body. Hunger. Barely restrained violence. Something else too... just a really sick feeling that's making me a little sick to my stomach."

Diane glanced back over her shoulder at the creature, "Well... We're stuck with it for a while now so we might as well find out what we can. Deep breaths, keep it together."

Paul closed his eyes. Focused on his breathing and coded in for a mild sedative be administered through the suit's systems.

"AIda, bring up the repulsor field, one-point-five meters. Separate the specimen from the containment plate. Retain the containment plate in a separate field at coordinate J-35."

Paul opened his eyes to watch the computer system bring up the light-blue field around the specimen and work on the process of separating the specimen from the rock it was laying on.

"Observational addendum," Diane said while she watched as well, but from closer, "Filament structure seen connecting from the specimen to the containment plate. Structures stretched before breaking and returning to unidentified bio-mass layering the top of the containment plate."

Paul got closer and looked at the slowly rotating containment plate and saw the filaments in question. They continued to move, waving in the air like cilia.

"Observational addendum," Paul said this time, "It appears that the biomass on the containment plate was consuming on the specimen. Potentially a fungal mass."

The containment plate floated off towards one edge of the room, isolated and alone from all of the workstations and rotated to the vertical for further observation and begin a slow clockwise spin. The cilia structure on the bio-form, however kept pointing in the direction of the specimen as it turned.

The specimen was lifted as well and brought to the vertical as well. Held off the floor of the theater by the repulsor field at the requested meter and a half above the scientists.

Vertical it was somehow even more terrifying to look at. It had broad, muscular shoulders with a strongly hunched back leading to a bird-like forward point to its long skull.

"AIda, perform a skeletal-muscular scan of the specimen. Adjust it to your best approximation of a resting position." A blue laser grid appeared across the specimen, then rotated around it breaking into a series of fractal grid scans of various colors to perform the scan. Without sound the repulsor field adjusted small changes in the posture and position of various points of the creature to bring it to a resting position.

The arms were similar in position to a human resting at an office chair. Elbows were bent at right angles and straight to the body, but unlike a human the forearm was broken into what appeared to be a series of wrist-joints. That caused the scythe-like claws to curl inwards to the forearm a little.

The lower body was certainly serpentine appearance but obviously strongly muscled as it seemed designed to be able to hold the massive upper body in a vertical position. Looking closer there was evidence of spikes or vestigial legs or claws along the sides of the tail portion of the creature.

The upper body itself was extremely broad and thickly muscled. The hunched back was even more pronounced and it was even more apparent now from the way the skull sat, apparently comfortably into a groove between the massively oversized shoulders.

The mandible structure was closed over the face and the eyes stared sightlessly forward. The outer-mandible indeed formed a strange sort of face-shield over the entire facial structure with the four over-sized teeth meeting at the middle of the face and stretching up and between the forward-facing eyes.

Paul shook in his suit just looking at the creature suspended in the field. "Hell..." he whispered.

"No, they kicked this thing out for playing up its part too much." Diane responded, stepping closer to the creature. "AIda, drop the repulsor to half a meter. Rotate specimen to forty-five degrees to me. I need to see something."

The creature drifted slowly down and rotated as Diane had requested. She reached up to one of the massive shoulders. Paul looked closer to what she was looking at and saw it: a thick plate above the shoulder hid a flap of some sort, "Paul, could you lift that up?"

Paul nodded and reached up and pushed the plate up, and up, and up. It extended up and over the creature almost as if it were a vestigial wing of sorts, but inside was all muscle and tissue. Inside there was a series of gauss rounds that had buried themselves inside the thick muscle mass. "There's something inside here." Diane announced and reached inside the now open flap and grasped something long, and hard and pulled it out. It was about twenty-centimeters long, flat and broad like an arrow-head with reverse curved spines on both sides. It glistened with iridescence and shone in the light of the theater.

"AIda, analyze." Diane commanded after releasing the object into the repulsor field.

The grid descended across and around the newly discovered object. Changes in the repulsor field caused it to rotate and spin in the grid for a full three-hundred-and-sixty scan.

"Object Scanned." The AI reported.

The report popped up on both their HUD's and scrolled rapidly as the information was fed to Paul and Diane.

They both immediately jumped backwards in their suits, a loud clang resounding through the chamber. "No. That's- that's absolutely impossible. That's biologically not possible." Diane shouted in her helmet.

"That can't be right. There's no way. AIda has to be wrong." Paul agreed.

Diane then stared at her gauntlet in terror and held up her hand for Paul to examine. "She's... she's not wrong. It's impossible, but she's not wrong. Paul, look."

Paul got closer to his partner and looked closely at her gauntlet. There were a number of thin scratches across the metal of the metal. They were extremely thin, almost impossibly thin, but the number clustered together in such a small space made it easier to see them.

"What the absolute fuck is this thing? That... spine... has a monomolecular edge. How is it possible for a biological process to create a monomolecular edge without killing itself in the process? This thing should be in the process of slicing itself to death from the inside at all times. That's ignoring the toxins on that spine! Fifty-seven different types of toxin." Paul stared at the creature his heart hammering in his chest.

Diane had gotten closer to the monster, there was no other way to describe it at this point. It was a monster. She glanced across the creature's form and then stopped. Counting, silently to herself, fear mounting slowly.

"Paul, there was thirty-eight gunshots, right?"

Paul looked over to Diane, confused, "Yeah, that's what I counted during the walk-around. Why?"

"Because I count only twenty-three right now." Her voice rising slowly in panic and she flicked her hand in the repulsor field and had the creature spin slowly. "Twenty-three. That's all I count, Paul. That's not possible. That can't be. It was dead. It was dead. It was dead."

Paul stepped closer to the monster and Diane and stopped the rotation of the repulsor field and looked up. Suddenly the pupils dilated, widening and acknowledging the world around it. Flicking from side to side. Then locked on to Paul's eyes. Even through the visor of the sealed suit he could feel it looking at him. The pupils contracted, dilated, contracted and then fully focused on Paul and there was a sudden, massive pressure on his skull.

He screamed even as the creature turned its head and looked at him closer, the outer-set of lower jaws opening impossibly wide and the inner set dropping open in a hiss that was picked up by the audio pickups on his hard suit. Diane cursed through the comms and stumbled back, and fell to the floor. She cursed again and kicked backwards towards the now sealed door system to the entry chamber. She screamed Paul's name, and he could hear her but he couldn't understand the words, not through the sensation of his skull being torn in half like an under-ripe melon.

He screamed. It wasn't physical, but it was mental, all in his brain. He tried to remain aloof and analytical, his retreat. It was a psychic attack. He didn't think it was coming from the monster itself though, it was simply a conduit, something much bigger. Infinitely bigger. Something that humanity had never experienced before.

A sensation in his head, greasy, oily, smooth as fresh-water but foul as raw sewage slithered into his brain from the creature. From whatever unfathomable consciousness guided it. It was agony, it rummaged through his brain almost without effort. He was sitting on the floor. He didn't even remember sitting down. He stared into the eyes of the creature, fell into those eyes really, and he kept falling, deeper and deeper as if here hypnotized. "AIda..." he muttered half-aware, "...release repulsor field."

The creature was released and in a lightning flash it leapt upon Paul and lashed out with those terrible scythes for hands. Diane tried to scream but her voice and throat didn't work. She was nearly frozen with fear until Paul released the repulsor and then her training kicked in, Level-6, Firebreak. Blood gushed out of Paul's armor and spattered across the ceiling in a crimson rain. How did this thing get through the suit? That shouldn't be possible. That shouldn't be possible. That was impossible. These suits were military-grade hardware. That's impossible.

"AIda! Engage Firebreak protocols! Solo auth!" This was a fail-safe protocol that was only possible when the life-signs of one of the members of a Level-6 team were terminated. This is assumed because of a violent biological contagion, infection, or aggressive specimen that was not properly subdued or otherwise sedated. Combining voice-print identification with the member of the team as well as constant monitoring of the contained environment for abnormal activity and biological keys for both members.

Diane was fully aware this meant her death, but it was her and Paul or potentially the entire station.

Immediately after Paul's heart stopped a series of events happened in rapid succession. The first was an extremely powerful nerve agent designed to halt functioning of most known biological species poured into the chamber. The second was a corrosive that began to eat away at Diane's faceplate immediately, while it wasn't designed specifically to terminate the team inside the secure chamber that needed to be ensured. Third was a powerful sedative administered directly into Diane's bloodstream through the hard suit. It was one of the few kindnesses allowed to Level-6 operatives, Firebreak wasn't something anyone wanted to be aware of.

She was unconscious before the final step of Firebreak. The chamber was flooded with a potent biochemical cocktail that began to combust violently when it came in contact with the previous agents. It burned white hot and cooked rapidly through Paul and Diane's suit systems. The unknown biological specimen stood even less of a chance than they did and burst into flame, shrieking in threat and firing off dozens of those spikes into wall and door in its death throes thrashing and scratching at the tiled floor before finally succumbing to its collected wounds and dying.

File Report XA-192922

Station AI, codenamed AIda, reporting on behalf of Level-6 team Gibson, Paul and Angelesa, Diane. Reported K.I.A during investigation into specimen labeled X-4330z.

Firebreak protocols engaged per Solo-Auth command code provided by Angelesa, Diane.

Specimen destroyed.

Recorded observations uploaded to system for further examination. Audio and visual communications uploaded for further study.

Observations sealed under Auth Code X-O 000001a, Eyes Only - General Aurora, T. Danielle.

Biological details from scan have been uploaded to Secure Storage then purged from local systems.

Specimen labeled: Highly Dangerous. Caution Recommended. Psionic Potential beyond current measurable standards.

End File Report XA-192922.