MBryO: The Escape (9 page)

He allowed himself a brief glance at the heavens.

Thankfully, Terra’s closest moon was hidden by clouds tonight, cloaking their entry. Elias had deliberately timed their raid to coincide with the fickleness of the glowing silver rock. However, Wasit always lit Nyla 6’s sky, once a year it even waned to a murky twilight. The lack of a natural light source unnerved Pax a bit.

Pax knew that the Terran government had at one time established a mining colony on their moon. When the rocks and minerals had failed to make a profit, they had abandoned the colony. The same way they had abandoned Nyla 6. It always seemed to come down to profit margins for the bureaucrats.

Pax pushed his angst aside and let his eyes feast on the city lights twinkling at the edge of the horizon. It was his first glimpse of civilization and he was filled with awe at the sight of the city skyline.

Suddenly, his chest felt tight and he was gasping for air. He hadn’t realized that he had been holding his breath at the beauty spread before him. He sucked in Terra’s thin oxygen like a fish out of water. His head spun in circles, reminding him of a drunken man he had once seen on the library vid-screen.

“Relax!” It was Elias’ voice he heard in his mind. The gentle coaxing provided a lifeline he needed in that moment of uncertainty. “Take it slow. Don’t force it! You will get use to the difference in the atmosphere soon. Just don’t fight it.”

At first, Pax found the taste of Terran oxygen overpowering and metallic in comparison to the somewhat heavier, but unsullied, atmosphere on Nyla 6. Trying not to hyperventilate, he obeyed Elias and deliberately slowed his breathing, inhaling and exhaling shallowly at first and then more deeply. Before long his breathing was almost normal as he adjusting to the consistency of the air.

Pax spared the man a glance through his goggles. Not taking his hands from the handles in front of him, he nodded to let Elias know he was alright. Elias nodded in return to show he understood and accelerated ahead of the group toward the forest floor below.

By mutual agreement, they had decided to erect shields around their psy-talent before they landed on the ground. They couldn’t take the chance that anyone in the vicinity could intercept their thoughts and warn Maxim Bryant.

On the ground they would have to communicate the old fashioned way and since Joshua and William were not equipped with verbal communication that meant they would use hand signals.

The trees rose up to meet them very quickly. Elias and Joshua surged ahead, aiming for

a small clearing in the middle of the woods. Pax and William followed more slowly.

MBryO UNIX owned the private park; a platoon of maintenance workers kept it up each day, as well as the manicured grounds embracing the facility. Since the company lay ten miles outside the city, it encouraged its employees to use the park or the canteen during the day for their scheduled breaks. The rural isolation would work on their behalf tonight.

The park was illuminated by square boxes mounted on tall light poles which were placed discreetly around the area. Pax noticed several picnic tables and a carefully tended play ground for small children. Thankfully the place was deserted.

Pax’s booted feet landed easily in the springy grass. He wasted no time in shedding the weight of the jet pack from his shoulders. Silently, Elias motioned for them to stash them in a covered dumpster beside one of the picnic tables.

Pax paused to look around. He absorbed his surroundings; making note of the layout for future use. Motioning again, Elias led them into the dense underbrush and away from the concrete pathway leading toward the compound. In the dark the trees stretched eerily upward and out of sight.

It took them twice as long as it should have to circumvent the property, due to the fact that Elias chose to stop every so often to lower his shields, sending out psy-feelers, probing for other entities moving around in the darkness. When the cautious group finally emerged at the edge of the forest, they were directly in front of the DOD’s ongoing construction project.

Elias carefully examined the area between them and the building. Two very bored guards were standing outside the front doors of the building. Their rifles were slung across their backs and they seemed to be discussing the local high school football team; a team they both had played on at some point.

Elias hoped the subject was engrossing enough that they didn’t pay any attention to the dark figures entering the turbine shaft.

Taking a deep breath, he crept out of the woods and running close to the ground, he made his way into through the obstacle course that was the construction site. Using piles of concrete and the shadows of heavy machinery spread out across the compound as cover, the three young men followed his lead.

The massive turbines were at least twice the width and breadth of an averaged sized man. The huge fans were just a blur; they whirled so fast inside the metal tube. Made of twelve inch steel, similar to those used in the blades of space-hoppers, they would cut to ribbons anything unlucky enough to get in their way.

Pax couldn’t help it! His mind screamed that the tunnel was a death trap! He breathed a small gasp at the thought of entering the turbine shaft! Puzzled and wary, he leaned into the shadows beside the tunnel. He had no idea how they were going to get inside.

But he had forgotten the psy-talent of the young men accompanying them.

He felt the gentle feelers pushing against the wall he had placed around his mind. He recognized the subtle knocking as belonging to Joshua.

Lowering his defenses just a bit, Pax also acknowledged the added presence of William. Somehow linked together, he found himself becoming a conduit for the combined telekinetic energy pulsing through the three of them.

Reeling from the weight of their psy-power, they focused on the large fan blades. The sound of the whirling turbines gradually slowed, and after a few minutes, eventually ground to a halt.

Do to the kinks in the system; the cessation of the turbines wasn’t unusual. Everyone knew the project was a long way from being finished, with frequent interruptions. So, luckily the guards didn’t come to investigate or they would have been discovered sidling around the tunnel and into the metal tube. Recessed lighting glowed from the walls as they made their way hurriedly to the access door at the rear of the shaft.

The minute the group was safely inside they slowly doused their psy-talent. The huge turbines immediately roared to life once again. The sound was almost deafening to their ears as wind hurtled through the shaft and into the grated ductwork fitted in the sides.

Pulling the access door closed behind them, Pax found himself in a dimly lit room similar to the docking bays on Nyla 6. Equipment and tools were organized and stowed in row upon row of free standing shelves. Several dismantled engines lay in various states of disrepair on work counters with metal stools attached to them.

Elias made his way through the maze of metal to a doorway at the front of the room. Pushing it slightly ajar, he glanced into the hallway, made sure it was empty and stepped outside.

Joshua and William followed him. Pax brought up the rear as they slipped down the long white hallway.

The hallway disappeared around a corner in one direction and ended at a pair of elevator doors in the other. There were several doors to office suites up and down the corridor. The sound of a vacuum could be heard coming from the door closest to the elevator, testifying to the fact they were not alone on the floor.

Elias lifted his hand in the air to get their attention and pointed for Joshua and William to head down the hall to the corner. Nodding, both young men did as he directed. Pax watched as the duo paused with their backs against the wall and peered around the corner. The ventilation shaft to the chem-lab and caging area was about twenty yards down that corridor.

Elias gestured for Pax to follow him. The cloning area was in the basement. The Old One was being kept in a private cell, away from the other specimens. Taking the elevator was the only sure way to gain access to Maxim Bryant’s secret laboratory.

They were almost to the elevator when the sound of the vacuum motor was extinguished. The door knob of the room on the right turned and opened ominously. Pax froze in place.

They would have been discovered if Elias hadn’t acted quickly. His hand hadn’t shot out and dragged him into the room across the way. Closing the door of the darkened office as quietly as possible, they waited with bated breath as a turbaned cleaning woman, humming tunelessly, hauled her cleaning cart into the hall with one hand, and a bulky industrial sized vacuum with the other.

Elias opened the door a crack, watching as the woman noisily entered the office directly across from them. Somewhat harried and behind schedule, she left the door ajar behind her, more occupied with moving her bulky equipment than making sure it was shut.

Elias watched her carefully. When she turned her back and kicked on the big vacuum once more, he put his fingers to his lips and signaled Pax to follow him. As silently as possible, they made their way to the elevator.

It was on the top floor. Impatiently, Elias summoned it with a hurried finger. More than a little anxious, Pax watched the green arrow counting down as it descended.

The elevator glided to a stop and chimed opened. The sound echoed loudly in his ears. Stepping quickly inside, Elias reached out and pushed the basement button. Pax released his breath in a loud whoosh of relief when the doors shut and they were finally headed down into the bowels of the building.

In their haste to leave the floor they did not know that the cleaning lady had switched off the big vacuum in time to also hear the chime of the elevator. Somewhat concerned, and thinking herself alone on the floor, she went to the door with a curious frown on her tired face. Looking toward the end of the hall she was just in time to see the green arrow above the doors pointing downward.

With a puzzled look on her face, she turned back into the room and approached the modern looking black and chrome desk. With work roughened fingers, she reached for the shiny black phone sitting in the middle of it.

William scrambled into the ventilation shaft after his brother Joshua. It was too dark to see anything at first. Luckily, they had come prepared. Pulling the small head set from the belt at his waist, William slipped it on. In the combined beams from his and Joshua’s headsets, William was able to get a good look at the shaft ahead.

The square tunnel slanted upwards at a forty-five degree angle before teeing into the vertical ductwork leading to a central junction box located in a central spot on each floor. Approximately four feet by four feet, the shaft was not big enough to stand up in, so they crawled through the tight space on their knees. It was tough at first, but got much better when the shaft leveled out.

Since Joshua was the oldest, William allowed him to take the lead through the metal tube. The duct work lined the walls and was interspersed with grates leading into the hallways and private rooms. Before crawling past the openings, Joshua would pause and glance through the grids to make sure the coast was clear.

Only once was the room occupied.

Joshua paused against the side of the metal tube. A security guard was using a couch in a private office to take a nap. Once he was sure they wouldn’t be discovered, Joshua carefully manipulated his way past the grate. William followed behind him just as quietly.

They had found the junction room leading down into the bowels of the building exactly where Elias had said it would be. The junction room had just enough room for an average sized man to stand upright. They took advantage of the standing room to stretch their cramped muscles. Two sets of ductwork led away from the junction room. One inclined upwards at the same forty-five degree angle as the one they had just traveled through and another was nothing more than a small black hole in the floor.

Smiling, Joshua sat down at the edge of the hole and allowed himself to slide into the dark tube. William waited, listening for any indication that Joshua hadn’t met with an obstacle of some sort at the end of his slide downwards. When he didn’t hear any signs of trouble, he followed suit. His knees were skinned and aching from the recent crawl through the ductwork. The tube was angled almost perfectly and it carried him to the bottom very quickly.

Joshua was waiting at the bottom with a boyish grin at the unexpected treat. They were standing in the junction room leading along to the chem-labs. William knew they were underground now, with the rest of the building above them. It was familiar territory to the boys. They had lived in this basement their entire lives.

Until the day Melara had spirited them away.

They were standing in front of the four-by-four laboratory return vent. Four bolts attached affixed the grate to the wall. Carefully they peered through the tiny squares into the dimly lit hallway beyond. The chem-lab was directly across the way. The room was paneled half-way up, with large square windows providing a clear view of the laboratory equipment inside.

Sometimes the lab-techs worked late at night. And if Maxim Bryant was in the middle of one of his evil procedures, the place could be a literal hive of activity. Thankfully, tonight the place seemed to be deserted.

Patiently the boys waited; listening for any indication the security guards were in the middle of their rounds. They checked the doors leading to the chem-labs every half-hour. Hearing nothing, Joshua slid his fingers into the upper right corner of squares lining the grate. William did likewise on the other side of the grate.

Nodding briefly, Joshua focused his psy-talent on the screws holding the grate on the wall. One at a time, the metal tabs fell to the carpeted hallway with a dull thud.

When the heavy grate was resting fully on their hands, Joshua and William physically slid it to the floor. Together they slid it over enough to leave a hole just big enough for them to slide through into the hallway.

William experienced an instant of what he suspected was hatred and fear at the familiar sights and smells of the hallway. He wasn’t sure, since feelings had not been built into his DNA signature.

Elias had forbid all but the use of psy-talent inside the MBryO building, unless it was an absolute necessity. Opening the grate had fallen under that heading. But it had opened up the firewalls they had put in place, announcing their arrival to other sentient beings in the immediate area.

Gentle feelers touched the barriers they had put back in place around their minds.

“
Familiar…”
cooed a birdlike voice.

“
St-strong-g
…” purred another in cat-like satisfaction.

“
Spread the word! Our brothers have returned!”

This directive came from an older, male and somewhat more human voice reminiscent of Dogg.

And yet, not Dogg!

All of the sentient beings inside the warehouse were linked telepathically. Though they recognized the psy-signature of their brothers, they could not get past the firewall protecting the minds of the four intruders making their way through the building.

Immune to the chatter circulating among the residents of the basement, Joshua and William hurried past the lighted windows of the laboratories to the end of the carpeted hallway.

Two huge elevator type doors filled the wall. A numbered control panel was attached to the wall beside them. The doors could only be opened with the correct sequence of numbers punched into the key pad. If the sequence was incorrect, a deafening alarm would erupt throughout the building, summoning a squadron of armed guards.

Luckily, Elias had provided them with the master code to override this feature. Their plan depended on secrecy and speed. Any alarms would seriously endanger the success of their plan, not to mention the lives of those they were there to rescue, and possibly their own lives as well.

Working quickly, Joshua punched in the combination on the key pad. Silently, the massive doors slid open to expose a darkened room that resembled a huge warehouse.

Recessed lighting shone dimly from the walls and roof. Metal shelving, stacked high with brown cardboard boxes, rose toward the domed ceiling.

From memory the two teenagers wound their way through the twisting maze of shelves. It was a route they had traveled, mentally, many times before, as one by one the residents had been fetched by the lab-techs for Maxim’s experiments. Later there would be an all-consuming blackness as they were returned, still recovering from the effects of the anesthesia. That was if they returned at all.

Both of them could remember the nervous waiting that consumed those that waited inside the holding pens when one of them was selected for one of their father’s procedures. There was never any guarantee that the victim would return with the same mental or physical ability that they had left the warehouse with.

Truthfully, viewed through Maxim’s eyes, the residents were not sentient individuals, or living beings in their own right. They were supply houses for the MBryO project, and therefore expendable.

Joshua and William found their way to the back of the warehouse. They paused in front of an innocuous looking door. It was ajar, as if the last person to exit had considered it unnecessary to close it. Getting through this particular door way was almost impossible in light of the building’s security protocols. The open door beckoned them onward.

Cautiously, Joshua stepped into the room beyond. He was greeted by a cacophony of shrill cries and howls. Instead of brown boxes, metal cages in all sizes and shapes now occupied the rows of shelves lining the room.

The growls and catcalls echoing through the noisy cavernous room sounded similar to that of a Terran petting zoo. But the occupants bore no resemblance whatsoever to the gentle menagerie that children would flock to see, let alone want to stroke or feed.

The first few rows of metal cages and glass aquariums housed multitudes of hybrid birds and amphibians. There were turtles with alligator heads and birds with gaping holes where their beaks should be. Three headed snakes writhed in glass boxes, while yellow and black bumble bees the size of a man’s fist worked on building a giant honey comb. None of these were sentient beings, however.

With childlike curiosity, William and Ian had often spent their nights exploring the labs and rooms housed on the basement floor. William had never sensed any psy-talent among this particular level of cage denizens during any of their forays into the cage room. The animals kept here were on the lowest level of the mutant food chain.

The farther back they traveled, the more advanced the cloned mutations became, however. William examined a cage filled with a dozen or so furry, purple rats boasting three webbed feet and one eye each. They were intent on devouring one of their own. He must have been the runt of the litter because the bloody carcass was smaller than the others.

On the other side of the aisle was an enclosed pen housing a four-legged, gray wolf with soulful black eyes, and ebony wings? His bared his pointy incisors in a warning snarl as the boys walked by, careful not to get to close to the fence. A seething anger and innate need to destroy oozed from his psy-pores. The critter was new to the warehouse and judging by the sleek glossiness of his coat, very young.

Joshua and Will navigated the cages by memory, eventually coming to a reception desk set about two-thirds of the way into the room.

The desk was a demarcation line. It was a symbol of how far Maxim had come in his cloning process. Until now, the shelves and cages had been filled with examples of mutated genetic experiments.

Maxim Bryant had crossed the line when he began to clone the Xenaclon race again. It broke every RMB law ever written. If his actions were discovered, it was just cause for execution.

Behind the desk were the ‘others’.

MBryO had spent many years experimenting in the combining of genetic strands, both animal and human. The results were the mutants he kept inside the cages and pens in the front part of the warehouse.

When Maxim had grown frustrated and bored with that project he had moved on to bigger and better things. He had become obsessed with the MBryO project and perfecting his evil cloning process. He kept the results of those procedures locked up and hidden in the cubicles behind the desk.

No one monitored the desk at night. It was a useless waste of manpower since the residents were all caged and also due to the fact that the natives got restless after dark. More than one lab-tech had resigned after an excruciatingly tense night spent amid what they fondly called, the ‘freak show’.

As quietly as possible, William and Joshua approached the desk. Behind the desk was a wide corridor, lined with small private cells. The white rooms were locked, but like the chem-labs you could see into the room through the glass windows placed strategically on either side of the door. The windows were made of one-way glass. This enabled the laboratory technicians to tend to the mutants inside, without ever having to come into direct contact with them.

As usual, the lights inside the cubicles had been partially dimmed for the night. Their handlers hoped the recessed lighting would encourage the room’s occupants to sleep. But tonight, the psy-talented creatures behind those windows were far from sleep. Their senses had been on high alert since the four newcomers had entered the turbine shaft.

William and Joshua’s mental cloaking devices prevented the security guards and the psy-talented creatures inside the building from intercepting their thoughts. But it didn’t keep the prisoners of those cubicles from communicating with one another.

The chatter between the creatures, like white-noise, was at an all time high. In spite of his firewall, William found himself intercepting some of the conversation.

“Father…
wh-i-ill-ll
…not be pleased,” twittered a shrill birdlike cry.

“Father is never
p-ul-eased,”
returned the cat-like purr. “I do not care. I long to be released from this
p-r-r-ison,”
indifference to Maxim’s wishes marked the tone.

“Janus?” probed a much younger, female voice from deeper inside the cavernous basement.

“Yes?” the reply came instantly.

“Are you fearful?”

“No, Jenasus, I am not afraid of our brothers! If anything, I am afraid that they will decide to leave without taking us with them. I long for the freedom to be found outside this dungeon.”

Joshua paused long enough by the desk to retrieve the cubicle keys from the middle drawer. Mercifully, the keys were numbered accordingly. Moving as quickly as possible, he and William moved into the corridor behind the desk.

Working quickly they unlocked the doors to the cubicles lining both sides of the hallway. Some of the rooms held multiple occupants; usually siblings created from the same DNA, or mutated mistakes made by their father.

Within minutes, the hallway was filled with an odd looking menagerie of semi-humanoid beings. Fear and excitement trembled through them.

William smiled at the unusual looking fraternal twins called Jenasus and Janus. They were the same age as Ian and had often played with his brother after the nervous guards had locked the warehouse doors at night. Janus looked at him with a combination of excitement and relief.

The twin’s genetic strands had been manipulated in different ways. Oddly enough, they were the exact opposite of one another. Telepathically linked, their expressions mirrored the actions and feelings of the other. However, Janus was fair and Jenasus was dark, like Pax Vitar.