Page 40 of Wrath
“Thank you, brother,” I said embracing him. He returned the gesture, and I tapped his back twice before letting go. “I’m still kicking your ass later.”
He laughed, bowing his head in submission.
A quick look at the door confirmed it would be as impossible to hack as the one that had kept the team from fleeing through the elevators during our first venture inside the base. A scan didn’t detect any life on the other side, but we couldn’t be certain with all the disrupters the Kryptids loved embedding in their constructions.
The base was carved directly into the stone. The walls of the storage room were roughly polished. A quick analysis of the rock indicated it would be faster to pierce through it than to try and cut through the reinforced metal doors. Therefore, we set up the excavation bot Varnog had brought down for us so that its multiple arms equipped with lasers would focus their efforts on a single spot where the stone wall appeared to be the thinnest between here and the main hallway.
The machine went to work, quickly carving out a hole the size of an orange. It was way too small for any creature to even consider attempting to come at us through it and wouldn’t let much oxygen inside the base. It took about five minutes to complete the task. Dread immediately placed our little probe inside the hole. I turned on the holographic display linked to its camera and forwarded the feed to my team at the surface. Using the remote control, I flew the probe through the opening into the hallway so that we could assess the current state of the base. Dread plugged the hole with a soft, plasticine-like material to prevent more oxygen from entering the base.
I navigated the probe, a triumphant smile stretching my face as our assumptions proved accurate. At least two dozen Jadozors lay on the ground in various parts of the base. One still partially hung from the opening through which the team had escaped the stasis chamber. It appeared to have lost consciousness before it could entirely make it out. Thankfully, there was enough space left around it for the probe to squeeze past the creature and enter the stasis chamber.
I cringed at the sight of the complete mayhem my bombs had caused. Nevertheless, the fact that the entire room hadn’t collapsed testified of its impressive sturdiness. Still, parts of the wall had caved in, and the stacked rows of stasis chambers had toppled to the middle of the room in a chaos of broken glass, twisted metal, and large fragments of rock. Here and there through the rubble, a limb or a wing protruded. However, judging by the height of the rubble against the reinforced doors, we would need to drill through the debris at least one meter down to drop our canisters and make sure we caught all the creatures in the room.
“We’re good to go,”I mind-spoke to Varnog.“You can bring the canisters and bombs. Then seal the place down.”
“On my way,”Varnog responded.
I nodded at Dread who took flight to go help Varnog bring everything down. In the meantime, I brought back the probe to the main hallway, setting it in a position that would give me the widest view of both the main hallway and the access into the stasis room. Once that was done, I traced on the wall the section that the excavator would carve out, then set the machine to work.
It would take a while for the machine to make a wide enough opening for Dread and me to go through. Linette had suggested that she goes in instead if the camera showed the base to be safe. Carving an opening to accommodate her petite size would have been much faster. As she also possessed wings, she would have easily accessed the stasis room. But I had fallen victim to Murphy’s law one too many times to take that gamble on her life. Varnog had not been amused by his mate’s suggestion.
It surprised me when she didn’t argue. However, I had begun to suspect that Linette was in the very early stages of her first pregnancy. In the past couple of days, the color of her aura had shifted slightly, reminding me of the shades Myriam’s and Tabitha’s had taken during their own pregnancies. It was different from the colors displayed by the women who had mated with a Xian Warrior. I suspected that the fact that the Dragons and Scelks had far more Kryptid blood than we did cast this similarity in hue.
I couldn’t say for sure that it was a fact, but I suspected that she wondered as well. What a blessing that would be! Naturally, that meant I would be even more of a pain in the ass as far as acting like the overprotective big brother.
As soon as my two teammates finished bringing down the necessary equipment, Dread and I put on our helmets. Varnog sealed the opening of the air vent right at the level of the ceiling inside the room. This way, it would take a lot less time draining oxygen in the room before filling it with carbon dioxide.
While waiting for the excavator to open a path for us, Dread and I filled a few bags with virus canisters and incendiary bombs from the crates he and Varnog had brought down. It took a little over an hour for the excavator to pierce a large enough opening for us to pass through. Then again, we did help it along by stabbing at the rock with my scythed limbs and Dread’s chitin lances. The whole time, we kept an eye on the feed from the probe to make sure the creatures remained unconscious.
I went through the hole first. Dread passed on each of the bags we had filled, which I lined up against the wall. He then crossed over. Picking up a couple of bags, and armed with a drill stick, Dread immediately flew to the opening leading to the stasis room. I shouldered three bags of canisters and held a fourth in my hand before heading towards the entrance of the base.
It would be a lie to say that walking around all those unconscious Jadozors didn’t make me extremely uneasy. I could still feel their claws and serrated tails shredding me to pieces. I distractedly rubbed my chest with my free hand, right where a tail had impaled me before one of those wretched creatures quite literally bit my head off. I could really do without a repeat of that experience.
Making haste, I started dropping the virus canisters near the sealed doors blocking the access to the elevator, then inside the first lab where Myriam had downloaded all the research data from the Kryptids. In the distance, I could hear the muffled sound of Dread’s drill punching holes through the debris for him to drop his canisters as close as possible to the buried Jadozors. One by one, I canvassed each of the rooms, immediately releasing the virus from those canisters. By the time I reached what had once been the nursery, the creatures lying in the hallway near the entrance had already collapsed, their bones all but getting liquefied by Myriam’s enhanced nanobots.
The sound of flapping wings drew my attention. I stepped out into the hallway to see Dread picking up another couple of bags.
“How’s it coming along?” I asked through the com of my suit.
“Better than I expected,” he said with relief. “Looks like you might even avoid getting carried again by yours truly,” he added teasingly.
“Really?”
“I’m almost done with the virus. I’ll be able to start placing the incendiary bombs shortly,” Dread explained. “The rock has already been made more fragile by the initial explosion. It’s a lot easier to drill through than it was piercing through the wall. I’ll be able to handle the entire room on my own. Once you’re done with the canisters here, you might as well start laying the bombs. And we can be out of this damn place as soon as possible. Feels like a fucking tomb in here.”
“I hear you brother,” I replied. “Let’s get to it.”
We got back to work. It took another half hour for us to be done. In truth, we had gone into overkill mode between the number of virus canisters and incendiary bombs. The whole time, I kept waiting for the Jadozors to suddenly wake up and swarm us in a vicious attack. Just to be on the extra safe side, I split open the head of two random Jadozors and found the same goo from our earlier test where the hard pituitary gland should have been.
By the time Dread joined me in the main hallway and we both crawled through the opening back into the storage room, I was almost feeling anxious by the absence of any trouble. Things never went so smoothly, no matter how perfectly we had planned or strategized. Dread and I sealed the opening with some of the cut-out stone and more of the plasticine. Once our scans confirmed there was no air seeping in between the storage room and the rest of the base, we exchanged a look, the same disbelief plastered all over his face.
“Nothing is ever that easy,” Dread said. “That freaks me the fuck out.”
“Ditto,” I said. “And yet, we’re done.”
“And yet, we’re done,” Dread repeated. “Let’s get out of here.”
I nodded and started folding the excavator while Dread and Varnog opened the passage back into the air vent. The two quickly hauled out our equipment. In the meantime, I used the remote control to fly the probe back to the stasis chamber, which had a significantly higher ceiling than all the other rooms. I parked the probe flush against the ceiling, its camera looking down at the room. Its high-density thermal casing had a slim chance of surviving the explosion and of giving us a final glimpse of the mayhem the incendiary grenades would cause.