Chapter 26-Loose End
They arrived at Pragia in a rainstorm. The planet's atmosphere torn up by the emissions of refining Element Zero, the brief that Cyralius had read on the planet had reported that these storms were one of the many side effects of the process, along with unusually biotic mutations in the fauna and locals and incredibly fast plant growth. Considering this had happened in but twenty years, Cyralius had to hand it to the industry tycoons who ran Pragia; that sort of ecological devastation was on par with the Imperium's own efforts.
The rain pinged off the hull of the small shuttle that was taking them there, while the sky above was dark and heavy with cloud. Jack was sitting opposite the epistolary, fidgeting in her seat, before she looked up and said; "Let's not do this."
"What?" Cyralius asked.
"I changed my mind. Let's just go back and forget this ever happened. It was a bad idea. Something'll go wrong."
"It'll be fine, Jack," Cyralius said calmly.
"No, it won't, something'll happen, it'll all go to shit. I know it will, I do."
"Jack, I promise you nothing will happen," Cyralius said. "We will go in there, I have the bomb with me and we can destroy the complex."
Jack sighed quietly, before nodding.
"Okay," she said. "Let's just do this."
She'd been like this since Malleus had agreed to take them to Pragia's capital, a cloudy worm of grey doubtful fear crawling constricting the edges of her skull.
"Where do we need to land?" Cyralius asked.
"The pad's on the roof," Jack said. "They had to build it there or the vegetation would overgrow it in a couple of hours. Up high, it usually dies before it can reach."
"Well I suppose that makes getting in easier," Cyralius said.
"Hope so," Jack murmured.
There was a chiming noise, before the shuttle's onboard Virtual Intelligence announced; "We are arriving at our destination. Please prepare to disembark."
The shuttle landed with a gentle thud upon the rooftop, and they stepped out into the rain, Jack raising an arm in a vain attempt to try and shelter herself from the falling water.
"Down there!" she called over the wind, pointing to a walkway that wound downwards back into the wall of the building they had landed on. "That's it!"
They hurried through the rain, the shuttle's door sliding shut behind them, Cyralius slinging the small but weighty package of the Element-Zero powered bomb over one of the pauldrons of his armour, rain bouncing off its blue surface as he followed Jack. The walkway led to a door that, with a small shower of rust, slid open for them, and Jack stepped within the dark, dank room. Several large containers, banded and blocky, occupied most of the room, overshadowing it with their bulk.
"This where they brought the new kids in," Jack said. "They were messed up in the head and starving, but alive, usually. I think I was in a crate just like this one."
"It's certainly managed to endure the passage of time well," Cyralius remarked, looking around.
"Bastards built their stuff to last," Jack said. "I wonder how many years they had planned for me."
"No idea," Cyralius murmured, looking around with a furrow in his brow. "This is a grim place."
"What?"
"There is despair here," he said. "Fear too. So thick and so old I can taste it."
"I…I can get that that, yeah," Jack said.
She stepped through a door into a corridor, looking around warily as her boots splashed in puddles. Water dripped on tiles that had turned grey with age, wide stains on the walls marking its passage over time.
"Hold on a moment," Cyralius said. "What's that?"
Jack followed the direction of his gaze, over on the far side of the room they had entered. It was flickering hologram, clearly of great age, a man in some sort of lab coat, lips moving but no sound coming out. Jack approached the pedestal projecting it as the projection seemed to loop back, and pressed a button.
"…he's getting suspicious," a voice crackled out. Another voice replied; "When he gets results he won't care what we did. But if he finds out…"
"The Illusive man requested operation logs again; he's getting suspicious," the first voice said, jumping back to the start of the recording, the second saying once again; "When he gets results he won't care what we did. But if he finds out…The Illusive man requested-"
Jack pressed a button, and the hologram began to move more rapidly, before it said; "But if he finds out…"
She pressed another button.
"But if he finds out…but if he finds out…but if he finds out."
She flicked the ancient hologram off.
"It sounds like they went rogue here," Cyralius said.
"He didn't say what they were hiding," Jack said. "Could be anything."
Cyralius kept quiet, shaking his head before opening another door. Jack followed, looking around the much larger room with a vague hint of nostalgia on her face.
"I remember escaping to this room," she said quietly. "Fighting here. I saw sunlight for the first time through those skylights. All there was was a half-dead guard between me and that door. Bastard was begging for his life."
They headed through the room, skirting more of the large storage crates that were scattered around it. Old bullet holes pock-marked the walls, while patches of rust or plant growth covered many of the crates. Past one of the crates, near a door into the next room, was a circle of concrete barriers; there were bloodstains on some, old ones that had ingrained themselves into the crumbling stone.
"What was this?" Cyralius asked. "An arena?"
"Yeah," Jack said. "They used to pit me against other kids here. I loved it; the only time I was ever let out of my cell."
"Fights?" Cyralius asked. "What was their purpose?"
"Hell if I know," Jack said. "Maybe they weren't studying anything, maybe they just did it for kicks. All I knew is that they pumped me full of drugs and shocked me if I hesitated."
"So the others would die in this?" Cyralius asked, looking over the cracked and battered tiles of the makeshift arena.
"Sometimes," Jack said. "If I hurt them, killed them, they'd give a boost of stuff, get me higher. I still get a nice warm feeling when I kill people now."
"Making killing addictive; old, old piece of conditioning, that. Makes me think of the Crimson Angels," Cyralius muttered.
"What were they?"
"Another Astartes chapter," Cyralius said. "Barbaric cannibals, quite mad. Used combat drugs a great deal."
"Cannibals? Cool," Jack replied.
"You wouldn't necessarily say that if you met them," Cyralius said. "Their methods were considered extreme by even some in the Imperium. Anyway, let's go."
Jack nodded, stepping through the door and into another corridor. Part of the ceiling had fallen in here, and rain was pouring through, collecting in a puddle on the floor. One way only led to a cracked window and yet more of Pragia's rather hostile weather, but the other led down a corridor, in the same sorry state that the rest of the facility was in.
"Wait, what's this?" Cyralius asked, stopping at another holo-pedestal. He pressed the play button, and a hologram of an armoured security guard appeared.
"This is Officer Zemki," he was saying, finger near the ear of his helmet, presumably to active a vox-caster of some sort; the background, there was the sound of crashing, gunshots and yells of pain and fury and fear. "The subjects are out of their cells. They're tearing the place apart! Subject Zero is going to get loose; I need permission to terminate. Repeat, I need permission to terminate!"
"All subjects besides Zero are expendable," another voice said. "Keep Jack alive."
"Understood," the hologram of Zemki said. "I'll begin the-"
It was cut off as Jack turned the hologram off.
"That's not right," she said. "I broke out when my guards disappeared. I started that riot!"
"You were stuck in a cell, weren't you?" Cyralius asked. "There may have been more going on than you could see."
"Yeah, maybe," Jack said. "I don't know. Let's keep going."
The room they entered was a large, what looked to be oversized filing cabinets lining each wall.
"This looks like a morgue," Cyralius said as he looked around.
"That doesn't make sense," Jack replied. "This was supposed to be a small facility."
"Perhaps more children died here than you thought," Cyralius said. "In experiments and the like, and then the bodies were checked over for mistakes."
"Bullshit," Jack said. "I had the worst of it, and I'm still alive."
"I know, I know," Cyralius said soothingly, pressing the button by the nearest door and letting it slide open, following the set of steps that led downwards. He looked around at the cells that led off the on each side, before saying; "This must be where they kept the children."
The rooms were cramped and tiny, several ancient pallets squeezed into them, no other furniture. No overhead lighting; if the doors closed, they would have been kept in pitch darkness.
"The Black Ships," he murmured to himself. "Similar. Too similar."
"What was that?" Jack asked.
"Never mind," Cyralius said. "It's nothing."
"Right," Jack said. She stepped through the next door, onto a walkway; the floor below was nothing more than mud and mould, a tree having burst through the tiles and grown rapidly before finally dying, dozens of other plants leeching onto its husk and sprouting for that to make some bizarre hybrid of several dozen species. Along one was what looked to be a pane of blackened glass, and Jack stopped there for a moment, touching it gently with a look of confusion on her face.
"This…this was a two way mirror?" she asked. "My cell, it was on the other side. I could see all the other kids out here, and I'd yell at them but they'd just ignore me."
"I wonder why they did that," Cyralius asked. "Such actions strike me as simply being gratuitous."
"I think they were trying to see if pain could enhance biotic powers," Jack said. "I don't know if it did. I thought your Imperium was pretty nasty anyway; they didn't try anything like this with psykers?"
"A psyker is a great deal harder to control than a biotic," Cyralius said. "And a great deal less stable. Any attempts on experiment on psykers would risk a great deal more than just the researcher's life."
"Right," Jack said. "That Warp thing again, isn't it?"
Cyralius nodded.
"It's a complicated thing," he said. "Not even I understand it fully."
Jack declined to comment, stepping through the last door.
"We're near my cell," she said. "And we're…"
She trailed off as she looked around the room, biting her lip suddenly at the sight of an ancient surgical chair, rusted mechanical arms seeming to beckon with the promise of some needled, bladed embrace.
"Are you alright, Jack?" Cyralius asked, gently laying a gauntlet on her shoulder. She twitched as she felt, almost as if she were jerking away from the Epistolary, before she nodded.
"Yeah," she said hesitantly. "I'm fine. It's just…just that chair there. That's where a lot of the experiments happened."
She stepped away, biting her lip, towards another holo-pedestal, activating it.
"Entry ten fifty four, Teltin Facility," a man in what could be another lab coat, the same scientist they had seen near the entrance, said. The latest iteration of PergNim went poorly; subjects one, three and six died, and no biotic improvement amongst the survivors. We all tried lowering their core temperature, but this elicited no change. As a side effect, all subjects died, so I don't think we'll be trying that on Subject Zero. I hope our supply of biotic-potential subjects holds up; we're going through them fast."
"This is bullshit," Jack said, slamming a button on the console and cutting the hologram off. "They weren't experimenting on these kids for my safety."
"You can't blame yourself for what they did to the others," Cyralius said gently.
"No, no!" Jack said. "I survived because I was tougher than the others, because that's what I am. No other reason!"
"Clearly, that wasn't the case," Cyralius said.
"I said I survived because I was the toughest," Jack said. "That…that…that's natural selection, nothing else. I wasn't picked to survive, I survived because I'm better."
"Then what of all these records, the morgue, the tests?" Cyralius asked. "Denying it won't help you, Jack. If you want to actually overcome this, you have to accept that these things happened."
"No, no they didn't," Jack murmured, shaking her head. "They didn't!"
"It's the truth, Jack," Cyralius said, gently yet firmly. "It is harsh, and it is cruel and it may well hurt, but it's the truth."
"SHUT UP!" Jack suddenly screamed. She rushed hopelessly at Cyralius, pounding her fists against his chestplate futilely. "SHUT UP, SHUT UP, SHUT UP!"
Cyralius waited for her to stop, letting her vent her ire for a moment until she began to weep. Gently, the epistolary held her, letting her cry against his armour, saying nothing and knowing that right now, his silence was all that the young biotic needed. He looked down on her, pity on his face; Jack was young, that much he knew, tiny and frail despite the air of aggressive invulnerability she put so much effort into maintaining.
"I didn't want this," she said quietly. "I just…why? Why did this happen? What did I do? I didn't want these powers. I just wanted to be normal. I don't want to be angry and scared all the time."
"Fate can be a cruel mistress, Jack," Cyralius said. "It seems that every for every five fortunate soul there are there must be one to bear all their miseries and woes for them."
"Yeah," Jack said quietly. "Thanks, Cyril."
"Come on," Cyralius said. "Let's go and plant this bomb."
Jack nodded.
"My room's was just through here," she said, motioning over to a nearby door. "I don't think they liked me moving around; too much chance of me breaking free."
The corridor the door opened onto was a ruin, floor ruptured and shattered by what could have been a localised hurricane, an ancient bloodstain, twisted metal and a few bones marking what could have been a corpse.
"The first guard," Jack nodded. "Not the last, either."
She stepped through into a small room. On the far side was the window they had seen earlier, the walkway-lined room and the strange tree at its centre visible through it, a bed to one side and a small desk on the other.
"Here we are," she said. "This room, it was my whole childhood. Give me minute to look around."
"Of course," Cyralius said.
"It's all different," Jack said quietly, looking around her. "Yet it's all the same."
For a moment, she was silent, slowly walking around the room, seeming to survey it; she was still, Cyralius could see, the usual flickering hurricane that was her psyche seeming to have calmed.
"Alright," she said. "Let's plant that bomb and get out of here."
#
The shuttle left the rooftop with a whine of engines, rising upwards into the air above the derelict Cerberus facility. Upwards it rose, higher and higher into the sky, until the altimeter read eight hundred metres. The entire time, Jack had the detonator, flicking the safety cap on it up and down in agitation, a look of fierce concentration and slight worry on her face.
Cyralius nodded to her and pressed a button on the console next to him, the door of the shuttle sliding open. Jack gripped an overhead rail with her free hand as she stood up to look down at the facility below her. She flicked the cap open, glanced over at Cyralius for a moment, and the looked back at the facility before pressing the button.
The great ball of flame lit up the night sky with a wave of heat that was felt in the shuttle, and the vehicle rocked a few moments later as the shockwave hit them. Jack yelled in glee as the facility was obliterated, as the flames burned themselves out and a smouldering crater came into view as the rain drove back the smoke and dust. Cyralius stepped up next to her, looking down as well onto the ruins of the facility.
"It's done," Jack said quietly. "Finally, it's gone."
"Are we done here, then?" Cyralius asked.
"Yeah," Jack said, nodding quietly. "Come on, let's head back to the Normandy. I reckon Malleus' probably thought of some new way to get us killed by now."