Umbrella Corporation's CEO of the Bio-Sciences Division stood in Laboratory 42 and frowned. He was the CEO, for christ sakes, why was he anywhere near these god forsaken labs? Because Mr. Wesker 'asked' him to, Carl Hurst reminded himself. He ran his fingers down the lapel of his very expensive suit, a nervous habit he had to admit, and deepened his frown. "What do you mean you haven't stabilized the new strain yet?" He spoke in a low and even tone to convey his displeasure.
"I'm sorry, Mr. Hurst," Friedman said with a pleading look. "The alien is still mutating. The mutation rate is slowing and I expect to have the new strain ready for animal trials in the next twelve hours."
Hurst leaned toward the doctor with a glare that would have torn through Friedman's skull if glares could do such a thing. "You have six." Without waiting for a response, he stormed out of the lab.
Friedman opened his mouth to protest, but promptly closed it. "Yes, sir," he said and silently cursed Hurst as the demanding CEO finally left him in peace. With a sigh and shake of the head, he returned to the computer and continued pouring over the initial analysis of the new virus strain.
Yes, he lied to Hurst when he said the alien was still mutating. He just wanted more time to study the new virus. He was rather taken by it, a perverted fascination of its beauty. Indeed, injecting the G-virus into the alien has progressed the strain in ways no one could have imagined, but in ways everyone wanted.
Besides, he knew how to work the system in his favor. He tells the higher ups its not ready, they give him an impossible time frame, which is actually plenty of time for him, and at the last hour produce a satisfactory result. That's how he became such a respected scientist for Umbrella.
With a grin, he set to work preparing the new virus for intravenous injection. A task that did not take long as a handful of minutes later, he held a container with a pair of spiraled glass tubes filled with a vibrant blue liquid that shined when he held it up to the light. He smiled. Now all he needed were a few test subjects.
He remembered the chimp incident during the first G-virus trial and decided to start small this time. No need to repeat that disaster. With several animals at his disposal, Friedman pulled a white mouse out of its tiny plexiglass cage and injected it with a small amount of the new virus.
Quickly, Friedman dropped the mouse back in its cage and locked the cage lid tight. Taking a step back, he leaned over and watched with the same gleeful look in his eye as a child at Christmas.
The poor little mouse almost immediately began to convulse, its mouth opening and closing in silence as its beady black eyes turned a sickly yellow. Then, its small form rippled from head to tail as its muscles bulged and contorted under its soft fur. Finally, the fur split open and peeled away revealing blood and flesh underneath, all the while the mouse emitted a shrill high pitched squeal. In a matter of seconds, the mouse had doubled in size.
Friedman was speechless as he watched the grotesque transformation, but a smile grew across his haggard features when he realized the implications of this new virus.
The mouse, for its part, turned its bloodshot yellow eyes toward the human that stared at it, and leaped at the fresh meat on the other side of the glass. Unfortunately for the mouse, the glass held fast and the mouse slammed into it with enough force to break its muzzle. That did little to deter the mouse. It scratched and clawed at the confines of the cage in a futile attempt to reach its prey despite the blood it smeared across at the glass with its broken face.
At first, Friedman jumped at the sudden and gruesome violence of the horrid little creature, but his apprehension melted away as his calculating mind raced with all the implications the mouse's transformation held. He leaned over and smiled at the mutant mouse. "You are quite the little tyrant, aren't you?" He chuckled at his own bit of cleverness.
He placed his fingers on a covered switch at the bottom of the cage. Lifting the plastic cover, he flipped the switch and watched as a deadly white gas hissed into the small cage.
The mouse convulsed and gasped for life, but in a matter of seconds, it was dead.
Turning the poisonous gas off, he flipped another switch that promptly sucked the gas out of the cage. He looked down at the small corpse with a maintained grin. He unlocked the cage lid and froze.
The mouse twitched.
Impossible, Friedman thought. Halon gas was the most deadly and efficient gas at killing any living organism. The fact that the Umbrella Corporation produces and manufactures it stood as a testament of its efficiency and effectiveness.
Still, the small mutant rolled over and stood on its haunches as it fixed its clouded eyes on Friedman. It opened its mouth and screeched as it launched itself at the scientist's face. Once again, it slammed into the glass and hissed at being denied its prey.
Friedman could not believe his eyes. The new virus had not only mutated the mouse, but made it immune to the Halon gas. But as he continued to observe the mouse, he noticed that its body began to decay at a rapid rate. So rapid that after several minutes, the mouse's skeletal corpse held only a few shreds of flesh and sinew as it continued its assault on its cage.
He realized that the gas did kill the mouse, but the virus resurrected it. He felt as giddy as schoolboy in a toy store at this fascinating new discovery. With a some unusually lively steps, he moved to the intercom and pressed a button. "Doctor Bolt, please collect another sample of the new virus from the alien and bring it to my lab. I think you will be quite interested in the results."
The Tyrant project can finally be called a success thanks to the T-virus made possible by the Doctor.
.
.
Eric Hauff rested on his knees on the grated floor near the TARDIS console. He held his head in his hands as he feverishly tried to figure out just what exactly he was going to do about the dangerous situation he was in. Peeking through his fingers, he dared another glance at the control console and cringed.
The console was in pieces. The only part of the console that remained intact aside from the structural base was the glass tubing that rose from the center. Nothing else remained connected and all the parts Hauff had just removed lay strewn all over the console room floor.
He hadn't even felt the presence, the entity that resided in the time machine. Ever since the Doctor was shot and taken away, the ship remained eerily silent and he feared that he had killed her, just as the Doctor had warned.
Worse still was the fact that he was not any closer to understanding how the time ship worked. No, he was quite far from it. Even though he was Umbrella's expert in engineering and mechanics, he had never seen anything like this ship before and he had no idea how to operate it. Not even the work opening the back rooms have yielded anything helpful.
"Working hard, I see."
Hauff whipped his head around to the source of the dark male voice and turned cold. "M-mr. Hurst," he said with a stammer that did well to convey his surprise... and fear. He jumped to his feet and nervously ran his fingers through his hair.
"Well, you've taken it apart," Hurst said and let his hard features display the fact he was well aware of Hauff's fear. "Can you tell me how it works? Or how we can mass produce it?"
"Umm." Hauff didn't want to answer those questions, but he couldn't lie to Hurst. Somehow that man could tell when someone was lying and the consequences were not desirable. "No." Not missing Hurst's hardening expression, Hauff took a pleading step forward. "This machine isn't like anything I have ever seen before. I'm sorry, Mr. Hurst, but the only one that make this work is down in the dining hall mutating into god knows what."
Hurst made it a point to stare long and hard down at Hauff. He visibly clenched his jaw. "You have six hours to give me something I can use." He didn't bother waiting for a response, he simply turned around and strode out of the time ship.
"Six hours?" Hauff mumbled. Hurst had essentially just told him that he was a dead man and how long he had before he was dragged away. He would probably be injected with some virus. Maybe the new one from the Tyrant project. They were always looking for human test subjects, but he would be damned if he was going to become one of them.
He had six hours to plan his escape.
.
.
Bolt sighed. "Why the hell don't you ask Brown or Blue to get another sample, you old codger?" She grumbled her complaint under her breath and kept her displeasure to herself as she marched down the hall to the elevator, satchel in hand.
She knew that she was the only one in the Hive that Friedman trusted with new experiments. Not that she blamed the man. After all, she has been the only one not to back stab or sabotage Friedman's work, for whom she did hold a level of respect. Still, this almost crossed the line.
The elevator door slid open and she stepped inside. Pressing the button labeled 'Dining Hall B', she shuddered. Truth be told, she absolutely hated going down into that so called dining hall. Some of the most dangerous bio-organism weapons to date were contained down there and if it were up to her, only the Umbrella Biohazard Countermeasure teams would be allowed in.
But that wasn't up to her and when the elevator door opened, she entered Dining Hall B.
The dining hall perhaps once served as an actual dining hall, but with its bottom level location, the place was merely a cover for a storage of dangerous experiments. Several rows of black painted steel containers, just large enough to hold a human-sized creature, took up most of the floor space. Hoses, ducting, and cables of various sizes were stacked haphazardly and ran on the floor alongside the containers branching off and connecting the containers to fluids, gases and electricity. There was just enough space on the floor to walk.
Bolt headed down the second row and stopped in front of a container labeled 'Tyrant Sierra - Laboratory 42 - Doctor Friedman'. She glanced at the indicator sign next to the door and was quite relieved that the sign glowed green indicating that the contents within were stable.
Stepping up on a ledge at the base of the container, she peered into a small window and nodded in satisfaction.
As expected, the alien remained shackled with 'U' shaped metal clasps around its wrists and ankles bolted directly to the floor. Forced in position on its hand and knees, the alien leaned unmoving against the cold steel wall of the container with its shoulders sagged and head rested on the floor. It still wore the front and back cloth sheets from the initial injection, but those did little to cover the alien's otherwise naked body.
Observing that the alien did not appear to have outwardly mutated any further than the slight increase of muscle bulk right after the injection, Bolt also noted that all the tubes pumping in sedatives were still securely lodged into the alien's veins. It was clearly sedated with the slight and steady chest expansion and collapse of its breathing being the only movement it made.
She wanted to make damn sure that the alien was safely out cold, especially after what happened in the lab. She remembered how the alien's glowing golden eyes filled not with hate, but anger and... sadness, bore straight into her head. Her mind suddenly filled with memories that were not her own, memories that she didn't understand. With the haunting sound of an ancient bell tolling somewhere in her mind, she felt compelled to help.
Then, as suddenly as it happened, the sensation vanished and all around her was the terrible clanging of every loose item in the room as they crashed to the floor.
Friedman had to explain to her that the alien's brain scans went off the charts and everything in the room floated up in the air as she lunged forward to unbuckle the alien's restraints. Friedman had realized what was happening and stabbed the alien full of sedatives. How he was not affected by the alien's controlling power, Friedman didn't know, but one thing was clear, the alien had to be kept under sedation.
While there was a definite potential for the use of the alien as a weapon, it had to be kept unconscious until tests could be done. The power it obtained after only a few moments of G-virus injection was surprising and impressive. Who knew what it could do with that kind of mental power. Who knew how powerful it could become.
Bolt stepped back from the window and collected the sample from the slotted panel on the door. As soon as the sample jar was filled, she closed the panel, spun on her heel and headed back to the elevator as quickly as she could. She sure as hell didn't want that thing taking control of her like that again.
She didn't release her breath until the elevator closed its doors and began the ascent away from Dining Hall B.
.
.
To be continued!