The Pandora Directive: A Tex Murphy Novel (23 page)

The first three doors on the right had nameplates affixed to the wall with the descriptions Security, Communications, and Records. The last door on that side had no nameplate. On the left were the Administration Office and the data storage room. The last door seemed to be entrance for a large room, which sported the obvious moniker of War Room. Halfway up and to the right of each door was a scanning device. It seemed like I’d need an identification badge of some sort to get into these rooms. After checking all the doors in the area and verifying that none of them would be easy to get into, I returned to the light purple area.

I had a hunch that the room I needed to get into was the Records Room. It seemed a likely place to find some kind of cataloguing system, which might give me the specific location of the power cell. I was also intrigued by the War Room, but being in the complex was starting to make the hair on the back of my neck stand up. All I wanted to do was find the power cell and get the hell out of Dodge.

I needed to find an identification badge that would get me into the Records room. My first thought was to see if any of the dead men were wearing badges. None of them were. There probably weren’t many people who worked in the complex and had high-level security clearances, but there had to be one somewhere. I spent the next hour searching every nook of Level Two.

There were for work areas in all: the Biology Laboratory, the Metallurgy Laboratory, a Computer Science Lab, and a Linguistics Research Office. Identification badges were in short supply, but I did stumble across several things of interest. In the Metallurgy Lab, I found samples of a strange material resembling aluminium foil. Maybe fifty pieces of varying size were lying around the work area. I picked up one of them. It felt cold to the touch had had an odd cloth-like feel to it. I folded it and set it back on the counter. Within seconds, it unfolded into its original position with no visible crease.

On one part of the counter, a Bunsen burner was surrounded by swatches of the material. I pulled the book of matches from my pocket and held a flame up to one of the pieces. It had no effect whatsoever.

In another part of the lab, I found a box full of objects that looked like miniature I beams, about a quarter inch thick and ranging in length from half an inch to more than four feet. I couldn’t tell what they were made of, but I guessed it was some kind of plastic. I picked up one of the longer pieces. It was absolutely weightless. Closing my eyes, I couldn’t even tell that there was something in my hand. I figured material that light must be extremely fragile, so I tried to snap it in half. I couldn’t bend it even a millimetre.

In the Biology Lab, I found yet another strange material. It was black, shiny, and almost as thin as tin foil. Since it could have been a cousin to Bakelite, the material wouldn’t have appeared to be anything out of the ordinary, if it hadn’t had an unusual density and been staggeringly strong. I also recognised additional samples of the miniature I beams floating in various solutions. In every case, the object hadn’t decomposed in any way.

Looking around the Linguistics Research Office, I recalled my conversation with Malloy. I was probably standing in the very place where he did his work on the cryptic alien symbols. After some searching, I found several boxes of the I-beam structures. These, however, had symbols on them. The symbols were very small, less than a fingernail wide, and a shiny purple colour. There were many different characters, primarily consisting of geomet-ric shapes, leaf-like figures, and variations on circles. Other characters could have been Chinese in origin, to my highly untrained eye. The writing was beautiful and mesmerising. I suddenly understood Malloy’s lifelong obsession with finding the meanings behind the symbols.

Throughout my search, I felt increasingly that I was not alone. It wasn’t so much that someone was watching me as that there was another presence close by. I heard nothing, saw nothing, and couldn’t pin down any apparent reason for the feeling. I hadn’t seen any other corpses, though I tightened up every time I opened a door or turned a corner.

Only one accessible area was left to comb on Level Two: the Computer Science Lab. My first impression of the area was that it looked like a typical customer-service office, with dozens of cubicles, each containing a standard-looking, if old-fashioned, workstation. Further exploration confirmed that no identification badges were lying around.

Toward the back of the room, I saw a door cracked open a couple of inches. I walked over and tried to push it open farther, but it wouldn’t budge. Putting my eye to the opening, I was shocked by what I saw. It looked as if a battle had erupted on the other side of the door. The door connected to the Computer Science Lab with a much larger area that had blast holes everywhere. It looked as though a fire had broken out, charring sections of the walls. I couldn’t get an accurate count of the dead bodies, but there were at least two dozen. Seeing all the devastation, I decided that something must have been dislodged in the battle that prevented the door from swinging open.

I put my shoulder into the door, but it didn’t budge. Then I put my eye back to the crack, and to my excitement, caught sight of an identification badge.

A corpse lay about five feet beyond the door, his back turned toward me, a plastic-encased badge clipped to the belt of his trousers. All I had to do was reach out and grab it. Of course, the body was out of reach, and the door wouldn’t open enough for me to get my arm in anyway. I leaned against the door, focused on the badge and, for several minutes, tried to figure out a solution. I considered giving up on it, but I’d already gone through the entire level and come up empty. Jury-rigging was in order.

I went to the elevator and returned to Level One. In the recreation area, I picked up a pool cue and removed a dart from the dartboard. Now that I had the two pieces of my salvaging device, I just needed to find something to hold them together. I remembered seeing the familiar silver sheen of a roll of duct tape in one of the storage rooms. God, I loved duct tape. Very few problems couldn’t be solved with duct tape and/or a coat hanger.

With the duct tape, I attached the dart firmly to the end of the pool cue. Returning to the door at the back of the Computer Science Lab, I soon pulled the identification badge through the narrow opening. Flushed with my success, I hurried back to the Restricted Area and waved the badge in front of the sensor by the door to the Records Room. With a barely audible click, the door opened.

I stepped into the room, and my expectations fell. It was much larger than I’d hoped it would be. Rows and rows of file cabinets stared back at me dauntingly. Time to smoke. I’d been hunting feverishly for several hours and suddenly realised that I needed a rest. A chair sat by a desk near the door. I collapsed into it and lit my cigarette.

After my second smoke, I decided to start looking. For three and a half hours, I went through drawers , files, and boxes, hoping to randomly stumble across a reference to the power cell and where I could find it. Then I caught a lucky break. In one drawer of a file cabinet, I caught sight of a label marked simply #186. inside the file were several photographs of the power cell. The slide I’d seen was a drawing, so I had no reference to determine how large it was. For all I knew, it could have been as big as a punchbag or as small as a fuse. In the photograph, several objects were visible in the background. The power cell looked to be no more than eighteen inches in height and as big around as a coffee mug. The file also held a number of papers, including a description submitted by whoever had originally catalogued the object. Several addenda were seemingly contributed by various researchers who had performed tests on the power cell. The last document was a receipt, indicating that the item had been placed into storage. Area G, Level 3.

Leaving everything behind but the receipt, I hurried to the elevator. I inserted the blue card one more time and pressed the button for Level Three. A warning light appeared on the LCD: Access Denied. Oh, great. The red and green cards brought the same result. It still wouldn’t let me go down. I stuck the cards back into my pocket and considered what options I had, if any. Research of Level Two hadn’t turned up any alternative routes. It was the elevator or nothing.

I thought it over. Whatever had killed the people here had either originated on Level Three or in the room behind the Computer Science Lab. I was more inclined to think that it had come from below. Malloy had said that almost everyone had been killed before the military sealed off the area. So far, I’d only seen twenty-five or thirty corpses. The base must have had several hundred people working here at the time. Where were the other bodies? They had sh to be on Level Three.

That had to be the reason why the elevator was denying me access. The first step in containment would have been to seal off the source. The security office! That’s where they would put a lock on access to Level Three.

I exited the elevator and hurried back to the door for the security office. I waved the identification badge over the sensor outside the security-office door. With a click, the door opened, and I walked in. The place was disorganised, as though a pack of four year olds had gone through it. There were no signs of laser blasts or anything similar, but the floor was littered with notebooks, computer discs, and overturned chairs. Around the perimeter were surveillance camera displays, showing literally hundreds of locations within the complex. One set was labelled Level Three. In most of the shots, I saw extensive laser damage… and bodies. Hundreds of bodies. Whatever they’d let loose here, it had definitely originated on the lower level. Right where I needed to go.

I explored the room until I found the console that regulated the elevator. It button was labelled Level Three Access. I pressed it. A message appeared on the console screen: Please enter confirmation code. Damn it. I got down on my hands and knees and started sorting through the notebooks, papers, and handbooks scattered around on the floor. After several minutes, I found a manual titled Security Protocol. I flipped it opened the table of contents. One of the chapters was titled Codes. I read through it, but no specific codes were given. The basic principle outlined in the chapter was that security should change the confirmation codes on a daily basis. As I was about to toss the hand it back on to the pile on the floor, a 3 by 5 card fell out. On it were seven or eight numbers, all but one of which were crossed out. It was worth a try.

I pushed the button, and the message appeared again on the console screen. There was a ten-key pad on the console. I punched in the numbers from the 3 by 5 cards. The message disappeared, and a button lit up.

I ran back to the elevator and stuck the blue card into the blue access slot. This time, pressing the Level Three button presented no problem. With a shudder, the elevator came to life and began to descend. I was seriously doubting whether I was up to this. Maybe the creature, or whatever it was, was dead now, but I wasn’t going to bank on it. After a wait twice as long as between Levels One and Two, the elevator came to a thumping halt. The door separated, and I stepped out into pitch darkness. My flashlight was on, but I had an overwhelming need to turn on the light. I ran the beam over the wall to the right of the elevator doors until I found a switch. As I flipped the switch, a hiccup of light flared like lightning, and then a network of dim fluorescent bulbs awoke.

I was standing on the edge of a slaughter. Dead bodies were everywhere. Seeing them on the monitors in the security office had prepared me somewhat, but I’d never been at the scene of the massacre before. The air in the room was unbearably thick. I opened my backpack, pulled out my rebreather, and strapped it on. Now I was breathing normally, though the sight of at least forty corpses had my heart racing. I checked the bodies nearest me. They were in the same condition as those I’d seen on Level Two: looking mummified, with rubbery eyes and mouths open.

The room could have been the interior of the world’s largest garage. Piles of components and shards of strange alien materials were scattered everywhere. In the very centre was what must have been the fairly intact remains of the spacecraft that had crashed at Roswell. It wasn’t entirely dismantled, and I could still see the basic shape. The ship looked to be in excellent condition, considering that it had crash-landed. It wasn’t saucer-shaped at all, but looked more like a big, metal boomerang. I took a walk around the ship, not seeing anything particularly overwhelming — except, of course, for the fact that it had come from another world.

As I looked around, I had the same sensation I always felt around snakes, except now I couldn’t see or hear it. I just knew it was there somewhere, waiting. Out of the corner of my eye, I swore I saw something move. I spun around and stared at one of the corpses. Had it twitched? I must have imagined it. God, I had the creeps.

With just a hint of panic, I picked up speed. Referring to the receipt, I quickly located the storage area where the power cell was supposedly kept. But the door to it was padlocked, and even a good-sized laser blast in the door hadn’t penetrated into the area beyond. I opened my backpack and pulled out my bolt cutters. Without much effort, I slipped through the padlock bars, pulled the padlock off, and opened the door.

Inside the room, two walls looked like big, metal library-card catalogue cabinets, each numbered individually. On a third wall was what looked like a display case — the kind you see at museums. There were several shelves behind the Plexiglas. The objects stored there ranged from bizarre to banal, but I had no inclination to examine them. I turned to the metal cabinets and followed the numbers around the room until I reached number 186. I pulled the drawer open, expecting to find nothing inside. I was wrong. There was the power cell.

Then, I heard the noise.

I extracted the power cell and walked quietly back to the storage-area door. Barely opening it, I took a peek outside. I waited for several moments before deciding I’d just been hearing things, and went through the door. I looked around, but didn’t see anything dangerous or threatening. Then I caught the movement out of the corner of my eye. I turned and focused.