Gaia, Sprague, and a Clydesdale

[Karin Mays]

The rubber gloves produced a satisfying snap as Karin stretched them over her skin, feeling the cool clamminess of powdered latex. It was a uniquely serendipitous sensation, her body had attuned to it, and thereof the science would follow. A smile flashed across her face as she shoved on a lab coat and affixed a silencer to her pistol. She used a rare weapon, which loaded only metal bullets. Illegal in almost every state except for Gallia, gunpowder weapons were banned as a result of the need for ignition, and for their untraceable nature, unlike plasma weapons, which were coded to each have a unique blast. It was an exceedingly rare piece, one she had picked up from a Junker peddling Black Market Munitions on Trafalgar.

Dr. Foley moved quickly through the laboratory, walking up behind a lab coated tech. He turned and greeted her with a dazed smile, clearly struck by her striking appearance.

“Hello there, my info sheet states you are an expert in Xenobiology, Ms….?”

“Dr. Mays. I’m here from the Cambridge Research Institute.”

“Ah, the Cryer Researcher, welcome aboard. Here’s your master key to the research site, it’ll give you full clearance to our data logs. ”

She rolled her eyes internally at another dazed smile and gave a flirty smile back instead, forcing herself to blush. She pocketed the key card.

“The Genetic testing rooms are on the east wing, and the sleeping quarters are on the west wing. Do you need me to show you to the dig site?”

He approached her as if to take her hand, and she stepped forward too, giving off the signal of some kind of mutual attraction. She grasped her pistol slowly from the inside of her lab coat.

“No, I think I’ll make it fine on my own,” She said, dead quiet, as she shot him twice in the chest. Their proximity contained the blood spatter, only covering her lab coat. He crumpled, eyes rolling back in his head. Karin dragged the body away, stowing him and her soiled lab coat in one of the lab’s cold drawers. She locked the hatch, and changed her gloves; the sticky warmth of the blood had made her hands sweat unpleasantly.

Karin was a contractor, a mix of scientist and agent, and the Gaians had hired her to steal the Dom Kavaash experiments that Planetform had moved to Sprague. She flipped through the documents uploading to her datapad. Lots of archaeological dig information, mostly stuff she had already intercepted while staying on the Bowex Station in orbit. The documents she was looking for appeared almost immediately, as they were the most recent. They detailed the research of a Dr. Gustav Wald, a Rheinland biologist who seemed to think that the Dom Kavaash Ruins had some kind of connection to the organisms on Gaia. This was his lab. He had brought nearly 4000 unique micro-organisms to Sprague in an attempt to discover the connection between them and the dig site. He had eliminated most of them at this point, but there were twenty or so that he thought might work. That was what she was looking for. She found its index number and headed to a cold room door, marked with a large bio hazard sign.

As her eyes glossed over the documents, she came across several suspicious transmissions, which seemed to have originated from inside the dig site. Connected to this were annotations on the strange nature of the transmissions, which referred to concepts unfamiliar to Karin, “Proteus Tome,” “Dyson Sphere,” and even more cryptic, “the Artifact.” She understood one of them though “genetic engineered organism.” A good deal of documents marked with that were encrypted, but there were a couple unredacted.

With a swipe of her key card she stepped into the chilly air of the fridge. Rows of petri dishes rose up on either side of her. However, when she went to look at the spot where the samples were supposed to be, there was nothing but an empty shelf. Grimacing in consternation, Karin discarded her latex gloves and pulled out her datapad again.

According to shipping records, the samples had just been moved out of the facility, onto a BIS ship that had launched only a day ago. She cursed her bad luck, and set her datapad to start decrypting the files.

Her datapad flickered a red alert as it detected a new distress transmission. It was from the BIS ship. It hadn’t responded in hours, and Sprague was about to send rescue teams to sweep for it. Karin knew she had to get there first.

---

As Mays pulled out of Sprague’s orbit, she relished the warm hum of her X-Shuttle as it kicked on its cruise engines. She had cleared air control without issue, sliding by with her fake credentials, rock solid after her almost two month stay planet side. She strapped herself in and gave more juice to the engine burn; she would most likely have less than thirty minutes to board the ship and get off, if she could even find it in the first place.

Even though she had a good half hour of down time until she got into the zone of the emergency transmitter. Until then she would prepare for a spacewalk. She left the cockpit and headed back to the equipment bay. She passed the rows of weapons she had stacked across the walls. She stripped to her underwear, gooseflesh popping up all over her arms. Karin shivered unpleasantly and reached into a locker, retrieving a leather jumpsuit, and slid it up over her legs, shimmying the cool material over her clammy skin. She wrapped a belt around it and reached for the carbon fiber sealed spacewalk suit, hanging on the adjacent wall. The dark grey material was light weight and extremely effective at creating a strong, stable barrier against the elements, while still retaining its ability to move and blow open the docking bay on the Clydesdale.

After struggling with the zipper for several moments, she finally had it in place. Through her gloves she checked the pressure of the suit. Her datapad read green across the board, full integrity of all systems.

She glanced at her plan of attack, from underneath the freighter, where the airlock would give her direct access to the cargo, and the microorganisms from Gaia. As she collected the materials she would need, an alert flickered up, as a new file had been decrypted. It was a few notes made by Dr. Wald on the correlation between the micro-organism, specifically UF-08. A direct quote “It appears that the origins of the Slomon K’Hara, or “keepers” of the Dom Kavaash dominion in the Sirius Sector. The alien DNA covering the dig site is presumed to be K’Hara, as it does not match the known sequencing we have of the Dom Kavaash DNA, picked up from Dr. Sinclair’s lab on the far side of Sprague. It appears that the DNA shows striking similarities in the non-coding regions of their DNA, whereas the active regions are completely different. It appears that when the Dom Kavaash created the “Nomads” they combined the possessive and telepathic properties of UF-08 with another larger, sentient organism. There is significant activity… “ Karin’s reading was interrupted by an alert from this ships sensors. It had found the freighter.

---

Karin stepped into the cargo hold and double checked the buckling on her suit, and triple checked the pressure monitors. She set the cargo bay to start pressurizing, and slipped her helmet over tied back, auburn hair, and was eased by the satisfying hiss of the seal. She strode over to a weapons locker and heaved out an assault rifle, and strapped it to her back, and holstered her pistol. Although it would be completely ineffective in zero atmosphere, it was still reassuring to have it at hand.

“That’s better. Initiate cargo door opening.” She paced over to the bulkhead and braced herself against the atmosphere decompression.

In response to her voice the ship reacted, and the ship vibrated with the grinding of the motors. The crack in the doors brought sunlight streaming through. Her suit controls flashed in response to the unfiltered ultraviolet and gamma radiation bearing down on her. The Clydesdale could be seen now, floating with its engines barely active, but still showing some sign of mechanical life. Scans showed that the life support systems were still operational. Planet Sprague lay in murky eclipse at a slight angle to the distant sun. The targeted freighter grew steadily larger and larger, and suddenly there was the grind as the X-Shuttle cabled to the cargo bay doors. Karin balanced and pistoned her legs against the flight deck.

The temporary vertigo hit her hard as she careened through the emptiness and managed to plant herself squarely onto the Clydesdale’s hatch. It took her almost 5 minutes, but after carefully wiring four charges, she pushed off again to land on the X-Shuttle’s cargo bay. Flicking the switch on the detonator, she gripped the hull hard as the hatch blew outward, pieces of suspended shrapnel careening off her Kevlar suit. She double check her suit integrity. Still green, at least that was good. The Clydesdale had responded to the hull breach, and put up a light particle shield to retain air pressure. Easy enough to slip through, she gauged as she jumped back and scrambled through the hole she had created. A timer clicked on in her HUD, 30:00.

Inside the ship it was all quiet, and quite peaceful. There was no one in sight. She checked the ship manifest. Five crew members, it read. Puzzled, she assumed they must be dead, or would have heard the explosion and come running. But that wasn’t quite right, a banging was coming from around the corner.

Under the glowing sign read ‘INFIRMARY’ in wide font, the banging like a sordid drum against the metal plating. There was heavy denting on paneling, as if something had tried to get in, blood was pooled on the floor, as if something had been dragged through. Karin checked the manifest. No large Gaian life forms. Using her fake credentials, She opened the lock easily She wished she could feel something about the infirmary, but all she felt was cold.

Eyes wide, the five crew members sat in a comatose state, slung over the overturned medical equipment. One was was clearly dead, missing a limb; he had bled out. The last crewmember was covered in the blood of his ship mate, and raving madly on the floor, mumbling incoherently about the colors purple and pink. She attempted to talk to the stuttering man.

“Hey!” He didn’t answer.

She slapped him again, “What happened?”
“…out of nowhere… purple light… pink flashes…” He screamed. The hull suddenly reverberated with some kind of pulse. Karin rose and drew her pistol out of reflex. She gave the raving crew member two in the head and stalked out, checking her corners. Nothing.

Get the UF-08. Get out. Now.

That was all that was racing through her head. She busted through into the storage container, a gray walled room lined with shelves. The hull shuddered again, scratching in the air vents now. She whirled, pointing her weapon.
A cry. Something hit the back of her neck. She stumbled backward, and toppled, hitting the back of her head, another cry. Darkness.

---

The blinding light of the sun, filtering through the cockpit of the X-Shuttle awakened Karin quite suddenly, her hands numbly grasping the flight controls. Her blurred vision was scattered with flecks of blood, but gradually cleared, giving way to a raw, splitting headache at the back of her skull. The hull of the X-Shuttle turned slowly, and the hulking body of a templar slid by. She panicked at it’s sight, but relaxed once again, recognizing the large gash running under its port wing, ending at cold, dead engines. More templars floated by. Peeling her hands away from the controls of the X-Shuttle, she touch the back of her head, still tender from its impact with the ground. As soon as her fingers made contact her consciousness shook violently, and she cried out in agony.

It seems I have lost control, something brooded quietly in her mind. For now that is. The voice felt like that of an internal monologue, but somehow sickeningly wrong. Every time it spoke, there was a spike of pain in the back of her neck.

“How did I get here, and who killed these ships?” She didn’t know why she said it out loud.

You did. The voice was getting stronger, and so was the pain.

“You didn’t answer my first question.”

We took over for a bit, but i assure you, your body and mind was doing all the work. Her feet went numb, a tingling sensation moving up her body. Humans are powerful machines, you just need the proper programmer.

“Then you killed those soldiers.”

Not exactly. Your subconscious made the decision to help me, but it required little persuasion on my part. Believe me, we only have the best intentions for your well being. Your void of emotion is quite suiting for our needs. Cold, calculating… precise. Her arms had gone numb now, her fingers floating aimlessly. She felt her muscles flex, and her arms move. She stretched her arms out and made fists, then wrung them, but not out of her own accord. Such interesting appendages, more fluid and graceful than ours. Her lips went numb. And now we're back in control. Such a pleasant conversation, wasn’t it. We assure you, we will make quite good friends. A pause. Have a nice nap. Her vision flashed brightly with flecks of bloods and a purple light shone beneath their lids. Then the darkness returned.