Chapter 16: The Biodome
The Biodome's main research facility was an immense, six-storey high hall. Walkways and ladders lined the metallic walls, which were covered under thick green tapestries of vines and foliage. An indoor forest of exotic trees and plants – including a few man-eating ones - grew as far as the eye could see. Butterflies of countless different species and colours fluttered around, adding to the Dome's idyllic look – which was ironic, considering the alliance of twisted psychopaths running this place.
Lara was wandering down one of the highest walkways of the Dome. The air was hot and humid. She could feel perspiration seeping out in her armpits and through the black fabric of her tank top.
At the end of the walkway, she found the corpse of a mutilated gardener. He was sprawled on the floor in front of a majestic plant with a two-feet thick stem and a strange, reddish flower. A security pass lay in the man's limp hand. Lara had already found two of these cards, and she needed three to unlock a gate below. The woman reached out to grab the pass, but the plant instantly bent its stem and thrust its 'head' down, fang-like prickles protruding from the thick petals. Lara's reflexes kicked in and she drew back. The plant hissed angrily at the escaped prey. "Great," Lara muttered. "Broccoli with attitude. Where's a good weedkiller when you need one?"
As if the plant could understand the rethorical question, it hissed even louder and rose to its full two-metre height.
Lara produced her Viper SMG and gingerly held the gun out. The plant remained motionless. It seemed aware of the fact that black steel wouldn't taste as good as human flesh. While Lara pondered how Muller had created the freakish flower, she used the SMG muzzle to pull the security pass out of the corpse's hand and away from the plant's territory. Pocketing the card, she sauntered back down the walkway …
… and froze as Eckhardt's voice echoed through the hall.
"There's chaos out there! Why has the power been cut off?"
Lara crept up to the edge of the walkway and crouched down behind the railing. She stared through the bars at the elevated platform under the ceiling, six storeys above the grassy floor. Muller had been sitting at a computer there, frantically trying to get the power back on. Now, Eckhardt was storming into the Biodome. Gunderson and Karel followed their leader down the short walkway to the central platform.
"Is this your doing, Muller?" Gunderson said, turning Muller's chair around to face him.
"No." Muller rose from the chair, shaking his head. "The power's down everywhere!"
Eckhardt shot Muller an irritated glare, as if to say "we know that, you idiot", then glanced back at Gunderson: "Just control things in the Dome then. Do it!" He turned to Muller again and asked: "Is everything locked down? We don't want anything getting loose."
Muller nodded fearfully.
Gunderson was sitting in front of the computer, pounding the keyboard. "It's under control, Master Eckhardt."
Karel stood silently at the far edge of the platform, leaned against the railing. He watched the whole scene unfold with a calm smile on his face.
The steel doors at the other end of the walkway slid aside, and Boaz burst into the Biodome. She seemed out of breath, as if she'd had to run a long way to find her colleagues. "Master Eckhardt," she said. "We have a problem down in the Sanatorium."
"What problem, Boaz?" Eckhardt had never been too interested in the comings and goings of the Argentine surgeon's sadistic prison. "Just have the guards deal with your inmates and pets."
Under normal circumstances, Boaz would have been angry at Eckhardt for referring to her patients as simple 'inmates'. But these circumstances were far from normal, and extremely dangerous. "I have a confession to make, Master Eckhardt," she said. "I didn't destroy the Proto-Nephilim."
"The Proto!" Gunderson walked up to Boaz and loomed over her, his eyes flashing with wrath. "You are kidding. Right, Boaz?" He walked on down the walkway. "I need to supervise this personally," he said and left the Biodome through the steel doors.
Eckhardt slowly turned around to face Boaz. "That experiment was to be eradicated. I expressly ordered it. It's far too dangerous to keep alive."
"I couldn't!" Boaz said. "It's half Nephilim. That makes it impossible to kill without your Periapt shard."
"You have ignored my orders for the last time, Boaz. Muller, I need the services of one of your little creations."
Muller's hands flew over the computer's keyboard, and something – a greenish-white shape – was slowly lowered from the ceiling.
Eckhardt dragged the woman up to the edge of the platform, where he grabbed her head and held her out over the railing. Boaz screamed and struggled in vain to escape. The greenish-white shape stopped its descent in front of the condemned woman. Eyes wide with horror, Lara saw that Muller's 'little creation' looked like a cross between a spider and a chrysalis. Eight insect-like legs stuck out from the pupa, wiggling hungrily. The creature hung from an organic cord connected to the ceiling.
"No, please, it wasn't my fault, I'm loyal!" Boaz whimpered. "Give me one more chance …"
"Your own incompetence has sentenced you, Boaz," Eckhardt said and pushed her over the railing.
"Not the pod! No! NO!" Boaz' voice trailed off to a bloodcurdling scream as she landed on the cocoon. The legs instantly pulled her into their body, muffling her scream. The pod was pulled up again and disappeared in a shadowy corner of the ceiling.
"I will be obeyed," Eckhardt hissed in the silence that followed. "Now, sort this mess out."
Lara stealthily made her way back down the walkways to the gate at the bottom level of the Dome. Although the 'pod' was probably a far more gruesome and pitiful fate than death, Lara was glad that Eckhardt had taken care of Boaz himself. "1 down – 4 to go."
One of those four remaining enemies was named Joachim Karel. While Lara used her three security cards to leave the main Biodome, this British Cabal member was following Eckhardt through the corridors of the Strahov fortress. 'Surveillance Office' read the plate on a wooden door at the end of the hallway.
The two Cabal members entered and sat down in front of the countless security monitors. Each screen displayed sharp, fluid, clear images of every single part of the complex, from tiny restrooms to enormous halls.
Karel pressed a few buttons on a keyboard, and all the screens immediately showed the same footage – Strahov's main security office at 19:00 PM, earlier that day. Two guards were having lunch in the lounge, while one stood at the control panel. "The power breakdown started a few minutes after this?" Eckhardt said.
Karel nodded. As they waited for the footage to answer their questions, he thought back at Boaz' death. He was glad she would no longer be slowing down the Cabal's great work with her incompetence, but the news she had delivered were truly unsettling. Karel had always known of the Proto-Nephilim's menacing existence, but he had never thought it could escape the containment area. Even Boaz had feared that monstrosity.
In the footage on the security monitors, an armed woman burst into the office and riddled the three guards with lead in the blink of an eye. She approached the control panel and contemplated the Strahov maps for half a minute, then switched off the power and hurried out of the room.
"Lara Croft," Karel stated, a hint of surprise in his voice. "How on earth did she get into the Strahov?"
"It seems I have been underestimating Miss Croft." Eckhardt knit his brows in irritation. "She should have been killed in Paris. But due to Bouchard's mistakes, we will have to finish the job here."
The last area of the Biodome facility was a rectangular hall, considerably smaller than the main Dome, where Lara had witnessed the murder of Boaz. The intruder walked down a broad marble stairway and down a path between the Babylon-esque gardens. She soon reached a round clearing of sorts in the middle of the hall. Muller stood on the other side of an ornate fountain, his back to Lara as he contemplated the lush indoor jungle. Lara crept up behind the gardener and pressed the muzzle of her Scorpion X against his bull neck. The man calmly turned around to face her. "Don't breathe," Lara admonished, "and definitely don't move."
Muller glared at her through his small sunglasses, which resembled the round, black eyes of a mole. "You're in big trouble, whoever you are. Intruders don't last long in the Strahov." His countless chins wobbled as he spoke.
"Just answer my questions."
Muller continued to glower at her with his mole eyes.
"Fine," Lara said. "First question: Who are you? Second question: What are you and your buddies up to in here?"
"You really don't know what the Cabal is? We are the beginning of a new order of life on earth."
"Well, I've never heard of you."
"Ignorant mortal! The Cabal!" Muller hissed. "We control everything here in Prague. It means that we are going to be immortal, and you are going to be dead, intruder!"
Lara raised an eyebrow. "Immortal? That is impressive. How are you going to manage that?"
Muller shook his head. "I can't tell you. It's more than my life's worth."
Lara pressed the Scorpion X up against the man's forehead. "Does that help?"
It did help. "Meister Eckhardt is about to return the Nephilim race to glory," Muller informed. "For our part in that triumph, he will grant us immortality."
Lara rolled her eyes. "If I had a coconut for every time some lunatic said something like that …"
"Your pathetic ignorance blinds you," Muller said. "We already have the last vital element from Turkey here in the Strahov."
"And that is …?"
"The only true remaining Nephilim. The Cubiculum Nephili, the Sleeper. The last of the extinct race, here in the Strahov."
Lara remained sceptical. "Surely the Nephilim are just a myth."
"You see! Ignorance!" Muller said. "With vital essences extracted from this precious specimen, Meister Eckhardt can breed the next generation of pure Nephilim. No more abomination to run amok, like Boaz' Proto-Nephilim. She deserved to pay for her stupidity."
"Yes," Lara sarcastically concurred, "highly inconvenient having abominations running around, isn't it?"
"You have no idea what you are mocking!" Muller said and pulled out a bottle of insecticide. Before Lara could react, the poisonous green puffs had invaded her nostrils and windpipe. Her eyes smarted, and warm tears streamed down her cheeks. She coughed and staggered backwards.
By the time she had recovered from the insecticide, Muller was nowhere to be seen. The butterflies fluttered peacefully around the exotic plants.
Karel and Eckhardt were still seated in front of the security monitors of the surveillance office, when Muller entered the room, out of breath from running. "What … the hell … is Croft … doing here?" he inquired while catching his breath.
"How should we know?" Karel shrugged. "We were just watching your little encounter in the Biodome."
Muller knew that not many of the building's security cameras contained microphones as well. Thus, Karel and Eckhardt had probably only seen, not heard his conversation with the intruder. "I told her nothing of the Cabal's plans," he lied.
"Good," Eckhardt said, but you could tell from his cold look in his eyes that he was perfectly aware of his minion's treachery. "You told her nothing – even when she held you at gunpoint?"
Muller nodded, sweat trickling down his forehead. "I would never betray the secrets of the great work."
"That was a rather long conversation," Karel said. "What were you really rattling on about, then?"
Muller's voice was brimming with panic. "I swear, I didn't … Who's that!" The corpulent gardener abruptly pointed to one of the security monitors, where a brown-haired man in his mid-thirties was sneaking down a corridor. He was armed with a 9mm pistol and a strange frisbee-like weapon with razorsharp blades.
"Kurtis Trent," Eckhardt said, while Muller sat down on a chair next to Karel. "He's at the airlocks between the Biodome and the Sanitarium."
Karel stared at the security monitors and gave a vaguely intrigued smile. "Miss Croft seems to be approaching that area, too. I wonder what will happen when the two of them meet?"
"I hope they kill each other off," Muller grumbled.
The airlocks were claustrophobia-inducing, round rooms, dimly lit by fluorescent tubes. The dark grey walls were made of a smooth, vinyl-like material. The doors opened automatically when you approached them, but as Lara walked through the last airlock before the Sanitarium, the doors in front of her wouldn't move one millimetre. "Splendid."
Lara spun around to backtrack, but with a soft hiss, the opposite doors slid out to block the other exit. Lara groaned with exasperation and tugged at their edges. The doors refused to budge. She was trapped in the airlock. "How utterly splendid." Lara rested her forehead on the large window in the door and glared at the hallway outside.
Suddenly, a figure moved out in front of the window. Lara instinctively pulled out her Scorpion X and trained the pistol on the man outside, although she couldn't possibly shoot through the thick plexiglass. But that didn't matter. The man was neither one of the Agency's guards nor a member of the Cabal. It was the strange guy who had frisked her and snatched the Obscura painting at the Louvre. "You really have made a mess of things, haven't you?" he said.
Lara holstered her gun. "Who for? The stalker who stole my painting! What do you need with the painting?"
"Maybe I'll explain later, Miss Croft, but for now I need to go and turn the power back on."
"Leaving me here."
"You've caused enough problems over the last two days. Safer for everyone if you stay in one place for a while. You'll be okay in there."
Lara reached into her backpack and produced the crystalline shard, which she had found in the alley outside the Louvre when Bouchard woke her up. "And this?" she said, slamming the dagger-like shard up against the pane.
The man's eyes widened with shock and frustration. "My Periapt shard! You …"
"… picked it up at the Louvre, yes," Lara finished his sentence. "After you stole my painting."
The man shook his head. "All this can wait. I know where you'll be." He started walking down the hallway. "Take a breather from damaging things, why don't ya?" He turned a corner and left the trapped woman's range of vision.
Lara instantly started pacing up and down the airlock, muttering every single swearword in her vocabulary.
A/N: Thanks for all the great suggestions. I'm definetely going to cover what happens to Kurtis while Lara's in the vault, and Karel also seems like an interesting character to dwell on.
