The Siren Project (25 page)

“Train,” Gunter radioed.

Mitch thumbed his mike. “Mouse, shut it down!”

Silence.

“Mouse, are you reading me?”

Still no response.

“Whatever the tunnel is made of,” Gunter
called from the rear, “It is cutting off the radio signal.” Mitch heard furious
scuffling from behind as Gunter started scrambling quickly back down the tunnel
toward the outbuilding.

“No time to get back,” Mitch said, pushing
his backpack onto the track in front him.

Out of the gloom a shiny metal square box
appeared, rolling towards them on small diameter wheels. It fitted snugly into
the tunnel, with barely an inch all round clearance from the sides and the roof.

“It’s robotic,” Christa said. “No one’s
inside.”

The gleaming metal square of the front of
the carriage slid towards them, then hit Mitch’s backpack with a thud, and kept
coming, barely slowed. It pushed the backpack into Mitch, forcing him along the
tracks towards Christa. He drove his feet down onto one of the sleepers beneath
the track, and threw his back against the pack, straining to take the weight. He
grunted as his legs threatened to buckle under him, and the carriage wheels
began to whine as they spun on the tracks.

“Get out,” he groaned at Christa, knowing
he could only hold it for a few more seconds. “Now.”

Christa looked back down the tunnel, seeing
Gunter still scrambling back to the entrance. She clambered forward, throwing
her back against the carriage beside Mitch and dug her feet into the sleepers.

“I told you . . . to get . . . out!” Mitch
forced the words out under the strain of the machine, pushing blindly against
the backpack.

“It’s too far . . . I wouldn’t make it.”

Christa looked over her shoulder at the
silver box, then reached up hoping to find a control panel. She made contact
with the top of the carriage for only a moment, then whipped her fingers back quickly.
“It’s hot!”

Mitch lost his footing as the miniature
train pushed them both backward, sliding over concrete sleepers separated by
gravel. Suddenly, the carriage jerked to a halt. It’s engine whirring with
increasing speed. Mitch couldn’t see what was happening, his back and shoulders
were pinned against the backpack, but the sound told him something had affected
the train.

“What’s happening?”

Christa rolled sideways, trying to see the
wheels. “It’s snagged on one of the backpack’s straps.”

The train started to overcome the strap,
wrapped around its wheel. It inched forward again, crushing them against the
sleeper, forcing them to slide across the gravel to the next sleeper. Suddenly,
the engine cut out, and they both relaxed, breathing hard.

“Did the engine burn out?” Christa
wondered.

Gunter’s voice sounded over the radio. “No,
Mouse switched it off.” At the far end of the tunnel, he crouched with his
flashlight beneath the vertical shaft, where he'd managed to radio Mouse.

“About time,” Mitch said. “Tell him to back
it up.”

Gunter stood to transmit the instruction. A
minute later the tiny train’s engine started up again. It began reversing back
along the tunnel, pulling the backpack with it. Mitch started crawling quickly
after it, calling back to Gunter over the radio, “Not too fast, it’s got my pack.”

A few seconds later, the train slowed to a
crawl, allowing Mitch to follow it to the end of the tunnel, where another
vertical shaft rose up beneath a second robotic gantry. He stood in the shaft,
and took a quick look around. The room was deserted, so he cut his backpack free
of the carriage, and pushed it up onto the floor above. When Christa reached
the shaft, she studied the machine that had nearly crushed them in the tunnel. While
all its sides were shiny metal, the top of the metal box had two rectangular
doors for receiving the glass components. Now that they were looking down onto
the train, they could feel the heat radiating up from it.

“Why's it so hot?” Christa asked.

Mitch used his knife to lever open one of
the rectangular doors, releasing a wave of heat from inside, and revealing
glowing red elements lining the sides of the box. “That’s our infrared signal,”
he said as he stepped back away from the uncomfortable heat. “It looks like a
dryer, or sterilizer. The robot cranes move the glass tubes in and out of the
acid baths into this thing. By the time it gets here, the acid has evaporated.”

Gunter’s backpack appeared at their feet,
then Gunter crawled out of the tunnel. He looked at the radiating heat elements
in the train and shook his head. “Not evaporation. Baking. The acid bath coats
the glass with a substance that this oven bakes hard.”

“Why bake it here?” Mitch asked. “Why not
prefabricate it?”

“Perhaps the coating degrades quickly on
contact with the air,” Gunter said. “Or they are still experimenting with the
ingredients, and need to make frequent changes.”

Mitch pulled himself up, onto the landing
surrounding the shaft, then swept his flashlight around the room. “You reading
me now, Mouse?”

“Loud and clear.”

“We’re inside. You got a count on how many
guards there are yet?”

“I’ve been watching the security cameras. There's
at least twenty armed guards patrolling the corridors and parked in a room
behind the reception area.”

“Can we do it from here?”

“Yep. I can manipulate the ventilation
system fans to get an even spread.”

“Good. We’ll be up in a couple of minutes. How
about some light in here.”

A few seconds later, the lights in the room
flicked on, and Mouse’s voice sounded in their ears. “Let there be light.”

They were in a rectangular room, with a
metal bench along one wall fitted with cradles identical to the ones in the
chemical bath, but these were used to hold the glass tubes as they were
assembled. Several white coated machines were mounted on the benches, along
with padded circular gripping tools for holding the glass.

Gunter produced three gas masks from his
pack, pulled one on himself and handed the others to Mitch and Christa. They
checked each other's gas masks were properly fitted, then drew four gas
cylinders from the backpacks, attached hoses to them, and fed the other ends of
the hoses into the air conditioning vents. When they turned the valves on,
hissing filled the room as gas escaped at high pressure into the vents and
began spreading through the Institute.

“Start pumping,” Mitch said over the radio.

“Roger that. Fans are on. Sit tight guys,”
Mouse said.

Gunter used the time to inspect the
assembly machines, while Mitch studied the room. He stopped at a telephone,
with a series of neatly labeled buttons listing more than a dozen departments,
and wondered if they'd have time to check them all.

When fifteen minutes had elapsed, Mouse’s
voice crackled in their ears. “Everyone is snoring their heads off in there. Only
the guard at the gate is still awake, and he hasn't got a clue what’s going on.”

“Mouse,” Mitch said, “Open all the doors on
both floors, I don’t want to waste time picking locks.”

Mitch and Gunter pulled on their backpacks,
each now with just a single cylinder of sleeping gas. A flexible hose connected
the cylinder to a metal tube fitted with a spray nozzle.

“I thought the guards were asleep,” Christa
said.

“Can’t hurt to be careful. We’ll dust each
room before entering.”

Mitch opened the door cautiously, and looked
outside. At the end of the corridor a uniformed guard lay on the floor, asleep.
He and Christa started toward the sleeping guard, while Gunter moved off in the
opposite direction, towards the security room. The first door they came to had
a neatly typed plaque affixed to it: Cool Room.  

Mitch thumbed his mike. “G, you find
security yet?”

“Ya, everyone is asleep there. Mouse, the
elevator in the lobby is locked.”

“Not anymore,” Mouse replied as he released
the elevator.

“Let me know if anyone approaches the
building,” Mitch said as he pushed the Cool Room door open. “And keep an eye on
that guard on the gate.”

A wave of freezing air washed over them as
they stepped inside. Christa took one look at the two rows of bench tops that
stretched along either wall and let out an involuntary murmur of disgust. Mounted
on each bench top was a row of clear cylinders filled with translucent green
liquid. Each cylinder’s glass was crusted in a thin frost and had a brain
floating in it.

“They should have called this place the
brain room,” Mitch said as he moved along one side of the room, studying each
suspended brain in turn. Each cylinder was labeled, identifying the donor of
the brain specimen. “Chimpanzee brains,” Mitch concluded after a quick review.

“Not all of them,” Christa corrected,
pointing to a larger brain floating in a cylinder labeled, ‘Human Subject 24’. She
searched the other cylinders quickly. “There are more than a dozen human brains
here.”

Mitch gazed thoughtfully at the brain of
‘Human Subject 4’. “I wonder if the donors were dead before they took their
brains?”

“You can’t conduct mind control experiments
if the victim is dead,” Christa replied with certainty. “These must be the
failures. They took the brains to figure out what went wrong, why they died.”

“I’ve seen enough. Next room.”

He led Christa out of the Cool Room, glad
to leave the rows of chimpanzee and human brains behind and headed down the
hall.

Gunter’s voice crackled over the radio. “I
am on the top floor. One guard sleeping in the corridor.”

At the end of the corridor was a conference
room. Mitch took only a moment to glance in at the long polished table
surrounded by black leather chairs before continuing around the corner. Down
the second corridor were more doors, the first marked Data Storage. Inside the
fire proof room were rows of metal shelves filled with black plastic boxes
containing numerically coded computer tapes.

“There might be something here. Look for an
index.” Mitch said as he left Christa to search the Data Storage room. He found
a large computer inside a glass encased, temperature controlled environment,
flanked by six workstations. “What’s the guard on the gate doing, Mouse?”

“Reading.”

Mitch pulled the copy of the building’s
blueprint from a pocket. “The computer room is at map reference B-twelve. Bring
the van to the fence, then come on in. Knightly stays in the van with Peter.”

“Affirmative. ETA five minutes.”

“Think you can handle security alone,
Knightly?” Mitch asked.

“Of course,” he replied indignantly.

Mitch checked the other doors connecting
the corridor. One opened into a long room full of robotic machinery, half
laboratory, half factory. A cursory examination revealed it was where unique
components were manufactured for the equipment being developed at the Institute.
The last door opened into the cavernous energy lab, where the four prototype
particle accelerators were sited. Mitch took a few steps into the lab, then
heard muffled screaming and a voice distorted by static. He ran back down the
hall toward the sounds coming from the data storage room where he'd left
Christa.

“What was that?” Knightly asked anxiously.

“Christa!” Mitch yelled into the radio as
he ran toward the storage room.

“Should I come down?” Gunter asked, hearing
the screams over his radio.

“Standby.”

Again, screams filled the deserted
corridor. Mitch burst into the storage room, spraying knockout gas ahead of him.
Christa sat watching a recording on a television at the far end of the room. Mitch
relaxed and thumbed his mike, “All okay.” He stood behind Christa and watched
the screen. A woman, perhaps fifty five years old, was being strapped to a
metal table in front of the same particle accelerator they'd seen used on the
chimpanzee. The technicians gave her an injection that quickly rendered her
silent and motionless, then the conditioning process began. Even through the
hood of his gas mask, Mitch heard Christa crying softly.

“You knew her?”

“She was . . . the Deputy Director of our
organization,” Christa’s voice was fragile, barely a whisper.

“So she wasn’t dead, just . . .”

“Conditioned, yes.”

He read the label on the empty plastic
storage box in front of Christa: Monitor #7. “You’ve lost seven people?”

“Seven conditioned. The rest were killed.”

Mitch watched for a minute before switching
the TV off. “Let’s go.”

Christa ejected the disc from the player
and placed it in her pocket.

“Leave it. We don’t-”

“No!” Christa cut him off, then pushed past
him.

He followed her out. Mouse was outside
wearing his gas mask and carrying some equipment, waiting uncertainly. “What’s
going on?”

“The computer's in there,” Mitch said,