Nova (53 page)

It was a loveliness that easily transcended her undeniable
physical presence, encapsulated the very essence of each distinct element that
comprised the totality of
who
she was. 

 Without thought or censure, Avara swiftly closed the
distance between them and after pulling K’llan to her heart in a single, quick maneuver,
crushed the Vosaia’s lips with her own, hard.

For one, shining moment, Avara held the pose, allowing the
depth of her regard to be communicated, allowing herself to fully experience
K’llan’s unfettered response before releasing the kiss.

With her palms locked to Avara’s head and gaze rippling with
intensity, K’llan whispered passionately, “This is
not
goodbye, Avara
Serros. Do you understand? This is not goodbye.”

“I understand, K’llan Z’arr.” Avara answered, her normally
smooth alto rough with emotion.

“Be sure that you do.” K’llan’s tone both challenge and
promise.

With a nod, Avara silently stepped away from K’llan. When
she’d mastered herself enough to speak once more, Captain Serros, switching
gears, brusquely uttered “Maintain communication on our closed channel. If not
before, we will meet outside with the prisoners and gain control of the starfighters.”

“Yes. Stay safe.”

“You too.” Avara responded, and then having once more activated
her DSA, shot off down the corridor’s left hallway. Her target was laid bare
before her: the unnamed room that housed the entrance to the army that Karukai
scientists had bred to wreak destruction and despair upon the peoples and
worlds she had sworn no less than three separate oaths to protect until her
last, spent breath.

 * * * * *

Continuing her pace, Avara reached the door to the room that
she and K’llan had determined to be the entrance to the tank sublevel in less
than a minute after parting ways from Z’arr. The white door was plain,
featuring a single plaque that designated the space as "Storage."

Yet in stark contrast to the room’s supposedly innocuous
purpose, a detachment of four Karukai soldiers stood smartly to attention,
barring access. Deciding the time for subtly was well over, Avara re–clipped
her Karukai pistol and drew both DZR assault rifles right before cornering the
hallway and then Arca speeding down the long–corridor towards the guards and
her goal.

Streams of controlled bursts of rife–fire mercilessly slashed
into the hallway and Karukai flesh alike as the soldiers tried but failed to
respond in time. Moving low to the ground, Avara was able to avoid the few
shots the quartet had been able to reply with before she stood over their fallen
forms.

Two were still alive, their moans of pain gurgling between
blood–frothed lips. One was attempting to move towards her abandoned rifle,
tracking a bloody smear along the once–pristine, snow hued floor. Tamping down
the part of her soul that even after all of these years as a solider and
operative still shrieked at the taking of life, Avara efficiently fired two
more short bursts, ending their misery.

Serros replaced the rifles at her back and quickly scanning
the dead, added a few more K–Grenades to her growing supply then moved to the
portal. It had been locked down, but with the code Lieutenant Z’arr had
crafted, Avara was able to gain entry in fairly short order.

The interior of the room was entirely unremarkable. Precisely
labeled, steel–colored metal crates stood neatly stacked throughout, organized
so as to create walkways in–between the piles. Though nothing appeared out of
the ordinary and certainly no entryway to a massive underground complex was
visible, after actuating her Arca TXL Enhancement and converting her visual
range to X–Ray mode, Captain Serros was just able to make out the half–blurred
outline of a double–door inset
into
the floor.

Careful to keep her back to the wall, Avara quickly knelt
down and, after finding a secreted lever behind a crate, suddenly the entire
back center floor began to shift and reorganize itself. Taking stacks of crates
with it, the floor split into three segments and pushed upward and then outward,
each unfolding like an accordion.

When the floor sections had ceased their transformation, an
open portal the size of an air–car was center–positioned in the back half of
the storage room. A straight coursed yet multi–flight, open–slatted staircase
of white durexium plunged into the faint gloom beyond.

Nadir DZR held at the ready, Avara took a deep breath and
began the decent, opting for silence rather than speed. Time seemed to crawl as
she made her way down the clock–wise turning stairs. After she’d exhausted forty
or so feet of movement, Avara came to a platform that continued left, right,
and forward of her position.

Yet it wasn’t reaching the main level of her destination
that immediately gave pause to Captain Avara Serros, but instead, it was the
unbelievable sight that greeted her.

Rows upon rows of loaded Cloning–Tanks affixed to hydraulic–lift
trees filled the entirety of the massive, subterranean complex for acre after
acre, as far as the natural eye could see. Each tank held what appeared to be
post–pubescent yet still adolescent, entirely hairless, gray–skinned female
clones. Every still developing clone was peacefully sleeping in pale blue,
viscous life–sustaining liquid, a sort of advanced amniotic fluid.

They were all connected to numerous wires and tubes while
faces were covered by firmly affixed masks. Serros knew that the light in the
warehouse was deliberately kept dim to not tax sensitive eyes unready for the
harsh illumination of free–moving life. Each tree was multi–level, spanning
some twenty feet from floor to ceiling and, issuing a rough calculation, Serros
guessed that respectively, every tree sustained and housed some five hundred or
more clones.

And there were
thousands
of them.

The ramifications were simply staggering and for a moment,
the Quorum Shield Operative had to work hard to break the data down into manageable
compartments, rather than an overwhelming mass. She needed level–headed clarity
just as she needed more information and a way to shut this humanoid assembly
line down.

Serros carefully noted that the main travel–ways of the room
were comprised of a tri–level series of durexium walk–ways, some fifteen feet
in width and set into a cross pattern. Each thoroughfare was connected to numerous
smaller walkways shooting off from the main branches. Peering throughout the
warehouse, Avara could spy only a few Karukai at work, most scientists or
medical staff based on the lack of armor and weapons. Not to mention the fact
that they were almost uniformly attired in tight fitting, red and white lab–suits
and coats. She marked no guards.

Decision made, Avara cautiously yet quickly stalked along
the length of the centermost, wide–railed walkway. Her goal was what was
obviously, based on the number of console stations, the cloning warehouse’s
central tank Control Hub.

Reaching her destination, only a single Karukai Scientist
was present, scanning some readings, her brow furrowed in concentration and
hands occupied with one of the central console’s orange, holo–projected
keyboards. Her pale skin seemed especially stark in the reflected blue–white
light of the cloning tanks.

Looking quickly to ensure that they were entirely out of
sight, Avara quietly came up behind the doctor and expertly slammed the butt of
her rifle to the scientist’s temple. With a faint groan stifled by Serros’s
gauntleted hand, the woman quickly lapsed into unconsciousness and with
Serros’s assistance, crumpled to the ground. Serros then tucked the body
underneath and into the recesses of the console.

It took only a quick scan of the current status readings of
the tank occupants to ascertain that the Greys were close to maturation,
probably only a few weeks out until they would be ready for harvesting. Harvest
would be followed by six months of training and conditioning and then deployment
to whatever strategic military ends the Triarchy intended.

Moving rapidly to confirm the method employed to supply the
rather vast quantities of power required to support and manage the tanks, Avara
poured over the data like a drowning person desperately sucking in air.

There
!

There were six main power cores where energy was conducted from
all of those outside generators K’llan and she had taken note of while surveying
the Outpost’s premises. If Avara could overload those power cores, not only would
the critical maintenance of tank life–systems be interrupted and result in the
death of each developing clone, but the back–feed from the power increase
should
fry the regulators and actually result in the destruction of the clone tank–trees
as well.

Not to mention most of the entire facility.

If the Karukai wanted to continue their work at Outpost J2,
they’d have to practically start from scratch. It was an unlikely scenario due
to the now irrefutable reality of compromised secrecy. Avara hurriedly crafted
and then sent a hack initiating the energy–flow change, priming the system to
overload.

For good measure, she added no less than three security
layers that would take even an experienced hacker at least an hour or more to
disable. Now Avara would have to manually set each power core to overload, making
sure that the changes could not be reversed.

Considering, she figured that once set, the entire tank–house
would be blown to mere memory in less than twelve minutes.

At most.

With the technical details answered and means determined,
for the first time since learning of the tank–bred army, Avara let the
emotional implication of what she intended to do fully rise to the fore. She
felt her intellect, her very soul, scream with the realization of what this deed
would mean: nothing short of mass homicide. An act of contained genocide.

Every slumbering clone was a person, a sentient, thinking
and feeling person, no matter what the Karukai would claim. And Avara intended
to do everything in her power to ensure that each individual clone drew her
last breath in less than a quarter of an hour.

Yet if she didn’t stop the Greys here, before they were
awoken, how many hundreds of thousands, how many
millions
would suffer,
would
die
?

The psychological programming that each clone was bred and
designed with was just as strong as the physical hardening of body and the tempering
of reflexes. The programming forced each Grey to follow Karukai orders with an
absolutism that verged on fanaticism.

And what was even worse, if, just
if
, a Grey could
ever conceive of rebelling against her Karukai masters, of refusing an order,
every Karukai Clone was embedded with a microscopic, bio–tech chip that not
only allowed for tracking, but was also an atomic–sized explosive. When the
command was keyed, the explosive immediately detonated, taking away life more
easily than it had been granted.

At the thought, the unforgettable image of the unmasked
Karukai agent on Ophere in the Adrenix processing center came to mind, and the
explosion that all but atomized her in death.

No, despite the ache in her heart, the bitter taste of ash
in her mouth that spoke of the evil, and it
was
an evil
she was
about to commit, Captain Serros knew what her duty was to the literally trillions
of people and hundreds of systems she had sworn to protect, what her oath demanded.

So engrossed was she in her soul–searching, that it was only
after
Serros heard the unmistakable
blam––blam–blam
of kobalt–powered
pistol fire, that she comprehended she was no longer alone and that her presence
had been discovered.

Saved from certain death by experience and Arca forged
precognition, Avara shot out over the central control console and side–railing
to the floor some twelve feet below, noting as she landed that just for a
moment, her left leg threatened to give. Casting a cursory scan, she realized
that at least two bullets had managed to graze across her thigh, singeing into
armor and synth–skin alike, yet fortunately, not taking up residence within her
dermis.

Activating her Arca speed, Avara launched forward on the
lower center platform level in a zig–zag pattern towards the origin of the
pistol fire, all the while fiercely casting her gaze to catch sight of her
enemies. Just above her, about forty–paces away from her original position, were
two Karukai females. They were attired in blood–red and black elite armor,
chevrons of gold and onyx lanced by a jagged slash of lightning visible on each
Karukai’s shoulder and right pectoral.

“
Varda
!” Serros spat the name like the curse it was,
knowing she would have to adapt her strategy accordingly.

As she ran, a hail of fire dogged her every step, sparking
off the durexium grating and rails like campfire sparks gone wild after a
recklessly stoked fire flew into rebellion. Around her, the sound of shattered
glass permeated the building again and again as the two Varda shot and only
fractionally missed.

Just as she was about to come directly under her enemies, Serros
flexed her leg muscles and, excising complete control of movement, veered to
the left and launched upward twenty–five feet to the top of a mid–point
positioned clone tank. Having twisted in air, the Shield Operative gracefully landed
front–first and immediately opened fire with determined ruthlessness. Now on the
defensive, the Varda split and dove to the flooring of the wide cat–walk,
returning fire as they again found their feet.

Yet Avara was no longer in the same position. Instead, she
had leapt once more, this time behind both Varda and onto the same walkway, Stingers
out and popping shot after shot.

With great skill and matching Arca enhanced speed and
agility, the two Karukai, one slender and pale as a birch tree, the other of
shorter stature and somewhat bulky in build who in appearance reminded Serros of
a miniature, snow covered oak, worked to take her down.