Chapter Fourteen: The Extinction Agenda
"So, do you have a name?" Sky Captain casually asked, disregarding the sharp blade digging into his back. "Yeah," Polly snapped. "I'd hate to spend the rest of the day calling you Bitch That Will Not Die."
The woman in black stopped and faced her captives, her mouth curled into a nasty scowl. With lightning speed she delivered a back hand to Polly's face and sent her crashing to the ground. "You may call me Bai-Ling."
They walked in silence until Bai-Ling stopped in front of tall steel doors marked with an EX-097. "A slight detour," she insisted, waving them through with the barrel of her gun. The room was a gruesome atrocity born of science and murderous intent. Endlessly long and vertical, it looked like a disgusting mix between an automobile assembly plant and Dr. Frankenstein's lab. The grimy facility was bisected by a conveyor belt transporting missiles in various stages of production. On either side of the assembly line were rows of operating tables, all in use. Overhead, a barrage of blood-splattered scalpels, saws, and mallets mounted on automated appendages clicked and cracked like mutant insects.
Patients were strapped down to the gurneys, kicking and screaming in primal fear until syringe injections in their necks rendered them unconscious. The appendages swarmed over each subject like locusts, sawing an incision around the tops of their skulls before a three-fingered arm wrenched off the caps and extracted the brains.
Delicately, each brain was placed into a basin, filled with a syrupy liquid, in the center of the missile and a web of fine circuitry was fused over it. That done, the missiles were whisked away down the belt into unknown darkness. Disgusted beyond description, Polly bent over and gagged while Rock and Sky Captain looked on in grim silence.
"Working off theories I procured from Unit 11, I have designed a type of missile that uses a human brain as its targeting computer. Mad you say? Perhaps. But consider being able to utterly destroy a target not by its coordinates or location, but instead by the color of its skin, religion, or political affiliation. Genocide delivered with precision and prejudice. The Extinction Agenda, do you see?"
He was only half-listening. Mechanisms in her skull whirred hypnotically, creating a buzzing sound that he found distracting. She should be dead, he thought to himself. I killed her on the rocketship, didn't I? Bai-Ling approached one of the missiles and ran her gloved hand over it lovingly.
"Our first payload has been programmed with the brains of anarchists and revolutionaries. They will target and destroy the world's governments, allowing Blackbeard to install himself as Emperor of Mankind. At least, that it was I've allowed him to believe."
She walked back to Sky Captain until they stood face to face. Her face betrayed no emotion. "What he doesn't know is that I've used his considerable resources to develop a second arsenal, far more deadly than anything the world has ever seen."
Bai-Ling leaned over and pressed her cheek against his. Her skin felt like clammy rubber, and sent a chill down the base of his spine.
"One missile for every man, woman, and child on the planet, Sky Captain. Each missile programmed with murderers and rapists, nihilists and the insane. The Extinction Agenda."
He didn't want to believe her, but one look in Bai-Ling's dead eyes told him otherwise.
"Why are you showing me this?" He asked.
"These are the end of days," she whispered, pressing her cold, synthetic lips against his ear. "Humanity is not fit to survive. Totenkopf saw this, and now you will too."
Stay Tuned for Chapter Fifteen: The Way of the World