Just an idea I had. Probably a bad one.

Lab EORI-GB, one of many clandestine Cerberus research laboratories, had gone dark.

This was not an unusual set of circumstances for a Cerberus research facility. As well-hidden and well-protected as they were, the galaxy remained a dangerous place - often on account of the things those facilities were researching, and without even getting into the host of other threats that might come by to ruin the day of those working there.

Which is not to say that nothing was being done about it, of course.

After the mandated two-day cooling off period - the period in which it was felt technical problems could be fixed by those personnel on site and escaped experiments could calm down - a cleanup team was dispatched. Standard procedure was fairly well-worn for this sort of thing: get in, find out what had gone wrong, fix what had gone wrong if possible and pacify the situation enough for a better-equipped team to come and fix it properly later if not, report back. Simplicity itself.

Of course the details of what was meant by 'fixing' often varied. It was important to be flexible.

Sometimes fixing required shooting an escaped test subject, or shooting an escaped experiment, or shooting a rogue research team that was developing a test subject or experiment that might escape and require shooting. Sometimes a combination of all three. Sometimes grenades might also be involved.

And sometimes, on very rare occasions, it really was just a broken communication relay. In those cases it was just a simple case of fixing it and then shooting the ones responsible for failing to maintain it properly and failing to repair it inside the cooling-off period, as they knew they were supposed to have done.

No matter what happened, someone or something was getting shot. It was the only way to make sure, the only way to draw a line under these sorts of things, the only way to show you'd put the effort in. It meant fewer loose ends.

All of which is to say that at this point there isn't a lot that specialist Haines and his cleanup crew hadn't seen, hadn't shot and hadn't sorted out. They knew the drill, and as their Kodiak dropped down from their frigate and towards the discretely disguised entrance to lab EORI-GB, they weren't particularly worried about the work ahead of them.

Nervous, in the way even the experience can be nervous before the shooting starts, but not worried. This was quite literally just another day at the office for them.

Deployment was textbook, troopers fanning out to immediately secure the landing site in case of ambush, engineers following when everything was found to be secure, all as it should be, no surprises. Haines liked this a lot. Surprises had, for a little bit near the start of his career, been pleasantly refreshing. He had since learned to dislike them intensely. Surprises were no-one's friend.

With that done and the Kodiak lifting off to go await the call to come and retrieve them and possibly even some survivors (if they were lucky), the team moved quickly to the entrance and found that it was locked with no obvious signs of attempted entry or exit.

That, in their experience, meant that whatever had happened must have happened from the inside, and that the doors were still sealed and secure also meant that whatever had caused it to happen was still going to be inside and would need dealing with. Haines sighed.

"Naturally," he said, before nodding to the nearest engineer to get the thing open. They had to resort to opening it manually - all of its systems having failed or fused, apparently - but they did it, and in the squad went.

It was very quiet. Pretty standard. You always arrived after what happened had happened, never while it was happening. The airlock into which they'd walked was empty. More oddly, the inner door was open. Should have shut automatically, but it hadn't. Through it a corridor was visible and it was just as empty as the airlock. The lights were on, thankfully, but no-one looked to be home.

"Alright, on we go," Haines said, drawing his intimidatingly large pistol, gesturing for everyone else to form up and then taking point himself.

Almost from the get-go Haines could see evidence of their having been a firefight, but it was curiously limited. All the fire had been going one way, from the looks of things, and all of that fire being defensive, against someone or something that had been working its way down from the lab's entrance, despite their not having been anyone coming through the door given that it had been, as they'd just seen, locked, with no evidence of anyone having attempted to change this from the outside.

"Okay, squad splits here. Team one with me we're going to keep going down. Team two, engineers and escort to the security station and see if we can find anything on the feeds to see what might have happened," Haines said when they reached a fork in the corridor and in a flurry of acknowledgements this was executed, half the squad going one way, Haines and the remaining half going the other.

Again, this was pretty standard stuff, nothing they hadn't done before.

That the facility's main lift was out of commission was a little different. Not entirely unprecedented but unusual enough to be vaguely notable, particularly as they couldn't see any obvious reason why it shouldn't be working. It just wasn't. Of course this was also quite irritating - it meant that Haines and team one had to take a ladder to get down deeper.

Things continued to be very quiet. Barring the total absence of personnel and the occasional presence of small arms damage on a wall or waist-high crate left in the corridors (in contravention of Cerberus fire-safety regulations) you wouldn't have thought anything had gone wrong at all.

This was a touch unusual for Haines. By now they'd normally have seen something. A body at least, or at least several bodies. Or some maddened survivor. Sometimes - very rarely - they even encountered survivors who'd handled the problem all on their own. Almost never had they run into such an overwhelming absence of anything.

More, there was far too little gunfire, going by the damage, at least in Haines' professional opinion. Those little spatters on the walls and crates did not amount to very much at all. This was yet another thing, like the inner door of the airlock, that Haines had no explanation for.

The lab's security detail hadn't been trying hard enough? They had only missed a few dozen shots and then all decided to go out for a walk to celebrate? They'd decided they didn't actually like firing guns as much as they used to? Why wasn't there evidence of more resistance, and why wasn't there any evidence of the people who had put up what little resistance they could find evidence for? It didn't make much sense.

There was an answer, obviously, because everything always had an answer. Haines just couldn't imagine yet what it might be, which annoyed him. It should have leapt out at him. It should have been clear, his experience should have made it plain.

He supposed there was always more to learn.

In an effort to get things moving and in the hope of maybe learning something he opened a channel to the second team.

"What's the status on that security station? Footage? Anything?" He asked without preamble.

"It's all corrupted, sir, completely useless. Visual, audio - it's all just static and noise, and that's the bits that are working at all," came the response, slightly fuzzy at the edges. Odd. Might have been atmospheric.

"No chance of recovery?" Haines asked. There was a pause and the brief sound of a background conversation getting caught at the start of the response.

"Not in any good timeframe, and even then I doubt we'd get anything. It's fried, sir."

This was annoying. Difficult to know the best way to go about fixing a problem if there wasn't even an inkling of what the problem had been, how it might have started or what might have actually occurred.

Still, worse things had happened.

"How about the lab server? Any clue what they were doing here?"

In theory the engineers should have been able to access the main server from the security station. Not always possible and not always set up that way, but it paid to check.

"That's done in too, sir. Looks to be in even worse condition than the security system. Got some fragments of reports but nothing that tells us anything, and even those were a struggle. Never seen anything like it, sir. Seen deliberate wipes but this ain't that. Something else, no idea what."

"Damn. Keep at the footage for now, see if you can get anything out of it," Haines said, though he wasn't holding his breath.

"Sir," said the engineer, and the line cut off.

A moment of silence followed as Haines shared significant looks with the troopers around him. Even with their helmets on the significance of the looks was palpable.

"We're splitting up," Haines said. At least one trooper groaned. This was to be expected, and Haines waved it aside.

"Yeah yeah, look, I want this level searched double-quick because I want this done and I want us gone, right? Just check. We're looking for survivors first because they might be able to tell us what happened, but other than that just look for anything that might clue us in. Check ins every three minutes. Make it brief but do it. Something happened here, let's not let it happen to us, right? Go," he said.

He didn't like it, but he did want them out of there fast. This was all adding up to be something new and Haines didn't like new a hell of a lot more than he didn't like splitting up. Besides, they were all burly, heavily-armed individuals, they'd be fine.

Haines personally found himself investigating the facilities living quarters. Most of these places were built to the same layout so he knew what bits would be where and he worked systematically, moving room to room pistol-first, checking for signs of life and not finding any.

From what he could see there was nothing to really suggest anyone had left in a hurry or had been in a particular panic, so what had happened had probably happened during normal operation hours. Sometimes you found all the beds in disarray and could pretty quickly work out that everyone had had a rude awakening. Not this time, though.

This meant nothing though. Just more information that led him nowhere.

At length, Haines wound his way to the facility's mess hall and sat down. He had decided that there was very little to be gained from poking about anymore and so quickly recalled the rest of the squad - who had been checking in regularly as ordered and who had experienced nothing bad at all - who duly joined him in the mess.

He briefly considered removing his helmet but after a moment of consideration thought better of it. After having seen some of the things some of these labs were working on, he felt it best to err on the side of caution, despite there being no obvious evidence that there wasn't some airborne nasty floating around. No obvious evidence didn't mean it wasn't so, and Haines didn't want to be the one finding out for sure one way or the other.

"Anything?" Haines asked once the last trooper had returned, though he had a feeling he could guess at the answer given the answers all the others had given.

"No sign of survivors and no dead, sir. No sign of anyone. We did find evidence of an explosion in one of the labs but that was it. Looked deliberate, not accidentally, but not like an explosive - more like something had been made to explode that wasn't meant to. Lab equipment, best guess."

"Improvised?"

This was basically what the trooper had said, but Haines always felt it best to double-check these things. You never knew. The only truly stupid question was the one you didn't ask and which came back to bite you later.

"Most likely, sir," said the trooper.

"And no signs of injuries?" Haines asked.

Most explosions usually did something. Especially the ones that happened on purpose - that was rather the point. If your explosion didn't do anything to anyone then your explosion was wasted.

The trooper shook their head.

"Not that we could see, sir. Just an explosion, didn't look like it hurt anybody," they said.

Haines frowned.

"Hmm."

Presumably it had been intended to hurt someone, but who? Questions on questions. Haines wasn't liking this at all. It was all mystery with no payoff. Like a song building and building to a crescendo that always just seemed a beat away but never actually arrived. Like failing to sneeze. Only with the real possibility of death.

Haines wasn't a fan. What's more, something was nagging at him, just tugging on the edge of his attention, annoying him without announcing why. Something felt off. Well, a lot of things felt off, but that was why this particular off thing was proving so difficult to pin down.

"What now, sir?" A trooper asked and Haines irritably raised a hand for quiet.

That tipped it for him. Quiet. Why would he want them to be quiet unless he was listening for something?

That was it. He could hear something. Something sounded wrong. Tilting his head he rose from the seat he'd flopped into, picked his pistol back up off the table, and crept over to a wall.

Haines had spent enough time in these sorts of facilities to become intimately familiar with a lot of their infrastructure. Not only did he know the layouts like the back of his hand, he also knew just about everything it was possible to know about their plumbing, so to speak. No matter where Cerberus built a base, a lot of what went into those bases was the same - this was just basic cost-saving sense. Right then, what this meant was that Haines could tell that the air-circulation systems in this particular room sounded just that tiny bit off.

Like there was something in a duct that shouldn't be.

Knowing already that the troopers were watching him he put a finger to his lips (or at least the mouth-piece of his helmet) and then quickly signed as best he could one-handed:

"The vents."

He then tapped an ear and and nodded his head sideways towards the wall. They got the point. They noticed it too, now. Guns were readied, quietly, while Haines silently stepped along one side of the room, listening hard, then stopping.

"There," Haines signed, pointing with one flattened hand before delivering a quick sequence of signals that saw the troopers pair off to cover the two visible vents feeding air into the room while he himself went for the one in the middle.

Everyone got into position and everyone got ready. Haines raised a hand so everyone could see it and raised three fingers on that hand. They then started curling inward. Three. Two. One.

The two far vents were ripped open then, a second after that, Haines wrenched his away. Like magic, he found something the other side - found someone. Without wasting a second he reached in, grabbed, and hauled them out.

Out came a human. He wasn't happy.

"No! Oh God no!"

A lab tech, going by what he was wearing, shabby as it was, and clearly a little the worse for wear. He struggled against Haines and tried, inelegantly, to launch himself back into the duct. This didn't get him very far though as Haines' grip was strong and it wasn't especially difficult for him to drag the tech, kicking and wailing, across the room and sling him bodily into a wall.

That got his attention, and for the first time he seemed to actually notice and look at who it was who'd pulled him out of hiding.

"Wha-? You-?" He sputtered, his eyes then falling on the prominent Cerberus logo on Haines' armour. "Oh thank God! How many men did you bring? Oh that's not enough, that's not enough!" He wailed after having scanned the room, going from relief right back to panic and despair in the space of a breath.

Haines wasn't a fan of this. It didn't bode well.

"What happened here?" He asked.

"We need to go! We need to go right now! They might come back!"

Haines hated the pronoun game. 'They' this, 'they' that, 'they' the other.

"The sooner you explain what happened here the sooner we can go," he said.

"But-"

"The sooner you explain what happened here the sooner we can go," Haines said again.

The lab tech seemed to realise at this point that further protests - no matter how loud or how urgent - would not get him anywhere, and he forced himself to calm down.

"Fine! Fine! Just - fine!"

Haines stepped back and moved to the nearest table, righting a fallen chair and sitting in the one opposite.

"Sit," he said, gesturing to one of the troopers who moments later brought over a cup. "Have some water. Talk."

With obvious reluctance the lab tech perched on the seat provided, still looking ready to bolt at the first loud noise. At a gesture from Haines one of the troopers brought over a tiny cup of water which the lab tech drained immediately. He looked hopeful for another but one was apparently all he was getting.

"What happened?" Haines asked.

"What happened?! You can see what happened! They kill-"

"Explain. Start at the beginning," Haines said, loudly and firmly enough to stop the lab tech in his tracks. The man glared daggers at Haines but took a breath all the same.

"Fine. It was a normal day. Everything was peachy. Then we get the call that an asset recovery team is coming our way with something, fine, that's normal too, we get all sorts, whatever. They say it's urgent and we need to drop whatever we're doing and get ready but fine, they say that sometimes too, that's normal too. Got that?" He asked, mock-sweetly.

"I think I can follow that," Haines said. He wasn't rising to the sweetness of the lab tech.

This was all indeed perfectly normal for a Cerberus research facility, at least so far.

The lab tech licked his lips and continued:

"Good. So we drop what we're doing and we get ready and we wait and they arrive. They look all roughed up, been in the wars, about half of what a normal asset team is meant to be but that's fine too, recovering assets is dangerous. And they drop this casket thing off on us, and they bolt. Now that's not fine, that's not normal. They did not stick around one second longer than they had to. We should have known something was up then."

"What did they deliver?" Haines asked, slipping into the lab tech's flow and sticking to the point. The lab tech frowned, frustrated, and waved a hand.

"This fucking silver skeleton...thing, all shot to bits, barely in one piece," he said.

"Oh?"

"Look, can we go? We really need-"

"Silver skeleton?"

The lab tech's shoulders slumped. Worth a shot.

"Yeah," he sighed, then continuing: "No idea where it came from, obviously. We couldn't ask the team because they'd fucked off and we don't ask questions about providence anyway, that's not our job, our job is to just take the thing apart and write down how it works. The thing just looked like some sort of robot, mech, whatever. Infantry mech. Not like any mech we recognised but that's not that strange, just something prototype they must have swiped from somewhere and probably hot stuff to boot - would explain why most of the team wasn't there and would explain why it was in such poor nick. That's what we thought, anyway."

"So a mech?" Haines asked, the man's twitchy blabbering beginning to scratch at his professionalism. The lab tech frowned some more, plainly getting more agitated by the moment, eyes flicking to the mess's door every few seconds.

"Yeah, yeah, or something, I don't know, stop interrupting. Point is that's what we thought at first, just some prototype mech, but we figured out pretty quick there was something wrong and it wasn't right. Thing was fucking alive!"

Haines considered raising an eyebrow but felt that, on second thoughts, this wasn't worth it. Instead he just asked:

"Alive?"

"Why do you keep interrupting me?! Yes I said alive! Still a mech but it was fucking alive! I told you it was all shot up but in a few hours that shit was all gone, all gone! We thought we were imagining at first but no, it healed itself. We looked at the metal, it was healing up. How could it do that?! I've seen demonstrations and designs of, you know, smart materials that can sort of do that, but only limited and only in lab conditions, ideal conditions. Not like this! There wasn't an active power source anywhere on that thing! It was inert! Dead! And what's more we also found out the damn thing is over five million years old, at least! Couldn't get more precise than that before the damn metal was fucking alive, apparently, and kept messing with all our instruments, but that thing was old, OLD! And then it got even weirder!" The lab tech said, almost breathlessly.

He paused here as if waiting to be interrupted again, and looked honestly surprised when he wasn't. Haines was just watching him closely, quietly. So were the troopers, at least those not walking slow but steady circles of the room with their fingers hoving close to triggers.

Taking a second to recover himself the lab tech, getting a little absorbed now, carried on.

"It started to disappear! Or tried to. Kept quantum locking, or something. We couldn't work out what it was doing. One minute it was solid as anything the next it's fading away and we can't get any readings on it at all. But it must have had something properly broken inside because it just kept trying it over and over and couldn't ever manage it. Or maybe that's what it wanted to do? We didn't know. Then it just stopped. And that was it."

"That was it?"

"Well that's what we thought. Picked up some minor fluctuation in the monitors but it was so minor we wrote it as background, but that was it. We kept poking and prodding, didn't learn anything useful, my shift ended and so I turned in. Then it happened! That's when it happened!"

"What happened?"

"More of them showed up! Proper ones, working ones. When I woke up they'd already murdered their way halfway down towards the labs! Cut straight through security like it was barely there! Appeared in the airlock, started killing! Things were fucking unstoppable!"

"That so?"

"Do you see any other survivors here?!"

Haines couldn't argue with that.

"So they breached the airlock?" He asked. Having entered through a pristine, untouched airlock he could spot a few holes in the story if this was the case. The lab tech shook his head furiously.

"No! They just appeared there! Inside! One second nothing, then they were there! Out of thin fucking air! Killed the two men on guard, opened up the doors like we hadn't even locked them - we had! - and started working their way down!"

"They opened the doors?"

Bypassing Cerberus security protocols wasn't impossible, but it wasn't easy, either. Certainly it was noteworthy that these intruders had apparently been able to do it casually, from the sounds of things.

"The doors didn't do anything! Those things just make all the technology break! You've got someone looking at the footage, right? Some engineer on our security systems, picking through? We saw that, too! It fuzzed up! Same with the doors! Same with the guns! Same with everything! These things get close and everything stops working! The locks did nothing! Nothing did anything!"

Except the lights, apparently, which seemed to have been exempt from the effect. Haines didn't point this out though, he instead said:

"Calm down."

"I am calm! I'm the picture of fucking calm! I'm completely in con-"

Haines reached out and calmly but firmly slammed his fist down onto the table with a resounding BANG, making everything on it jump an inch off the surface and leaving a pretty impressive divot. The man stopped abruptly, mouth hanging open. He took a breath, closed his eyes for a second, and then continued, noticeably more restrained:

"We got one of them - one! Rigged up some of the lab equipment for when it came through the door. Hoped we'd get them all but only got one. Blew its arm off, sent it across the room. The others didn't so much as flinch. And then the one we'd blown up got back onto its feet anyway! Arm crawled right back over, went back on like nothing happened! You can't kill these things!"

"What about weapons? How were they armed?"

Haines asked because his eye and his experience told him that there was about half as much damage around the place as there should have been from a firefight. Less than what you'd see were an experiment to get loose - those tended not to have guns, so it tended to just be the lab security shooting - but certainly nowhere near anything close to what you'd expect if armed intruders had stormed the place.

At the mention of weapons the man went very pale. He looked away.

"Oh God! I don't even want to talk about it!" He said, gulping. Haines tapped an armoured finger on the table until he got the man's attention, then gestured that he should face forward again. Reluctantly, the man did so, though he was still very pale.

"Tell me," Haines said.

"Nothing I'd ever seen. None of us had ever seen anything like it. I don't - I don't know how to...explain…" the man said, squirming, wringing his hands.

"Try."

"Th-they - the guns did something to everyone. Didn't just shoot them, they weren't anything like that. They just ripped them apart. Everyone! Didn't matter who! Security, the techs, everyone! Peeled them open! Fucking flayed them! This beam came out and just tore them to nothing, made them disappear! Screaming! In a second! Armour, clothes, skin, bone, everything! All of it gone! Like that! What does that?!"

"A beam flayed them? To nothing?" Haines asked, unable to keep his naked disbelief hidden. Beams were not something you ran into that often, even in his line of work, and when you did they rarely flayed anyone. They generally just made things blow up, as and when you did encounter them, and that was not that often anyway.

"I'm telling you what I saw, damnit! Trip over any bodies on the way down here?! No?!" The lab tech practically squawked.

This was a point. There had indeed been no bodies and no blood, either, alongside the distinct dearth of small-arms damage. Normally Haines would have assumed the bodies either to be eaten by whatever had escaped or removed by whoever had broken in, but eaten meant blood and if they'd been removed where to and how?

And as open-minded as Haines liked to be (and had to be, in his line of work) this was still something he had difficulty buying. Or normally would have.

Haines fancied himself very good at reading people, good at telling when they were hiding things, when they were lying. He wasn't perfect he'd be the first to admit, but he was good and he was consistently good, and he could tell when people were making something up or omitting something or otherwise just trying to mess him around.

He wasn't getting that this time. The lab tech was a babbling wreck, sure, and was spouting out a bunch of mostly useless information, but he wasn't lying. He wasn't trying to mislead Haines. He believed what he said. Whether it was actually true or not was another matter, the point was he believed it.

He was scared of something. Terrified.

Haines tapped the table some more, thinking.

"I think that's all I need to hear for now," he said after a few seconds.

"Are we leaving?" The lab tech asked.

"We are leaving."

"Oh thank GOD!"

"Keep it down," Haines said before raising his hand to his ear. "Shuttle? Get prepped, we're coming out and I want to get in the air as soon as we're outside."

No response. Haines was bemused by this, then considered how deep into the lab they'd gone. A lot of rock, a lot of metal. Might be interfering. Wouldn't be the first time.

"Team two, we're coming back. See if you can use the lab's comm systems to call the shuttle, I can't get through to them from here," he said, hand still on his ear.

Nothing. Then a brief snarl of static. Then nothing again.

"Team two?" Haines asked, frowning. A few more tries yielded much the same result. It was strange - they weren't down, it was just that no-one was answering. Which made no sense. Haines then turned to the trooper next to him.

"Are your comms working?" He asked and the trooper took a second to try only to then shake their head.

"Working but no-one's picking up, sir," they said.

Cursing under his breath Haines tried raising the frigate again, which should have still been somewhere overhead. Even through all the layers of rock and metal he was currently standing under he was able to get a weak signal but, again, that was it.

The lab tech, watching and listening to all of this, immediately went to pieces.

"Oh God! They're back! I told you they'd come back! Oh God!"

"Shut up," Haines said, giving up on trying to reach the frigate and turning to point at two nearby troopers. "You, you, go and see what the issue is."

Both troopers gave short nods and set off at a jog. The one in the lead opened up the door to the mess and found themselves blocked by a silver skeleton with a leering, grinning face and a gleaming black gun-like thing clutched in its hands.

This came as something of a shock. So much of a shock, in fact, that the trooper stood dumbfounded and frozen to the spot as the skeleton raised the gun-thing right at him point-blank and opened fire.

Or at least Haines assumed that's what it did.

There came a sound like someone had opened up a room full of a thousand screeching, boiling kettles and then realised their mistake and quickly shut it off again. A second-long, ear-piercing scream and violent rush of air that cut off into stillness and silence that was almost equally painful by comparison.

And that time and that sound was all it took for the trooper to vanish.

Not that their disappearing had looked easy or comfortable. It had looked agonising. Layers of armour and undersuit and clothing and skin and meat and fat and muscle and bone stripped away one by one until there was nothing at all left, all in moments, a heartbeat.

A heartbeat during which it was painfully, painfully obvious the trooper had stayed alive until the very last second.

Haines was up and firing before he'd thought twice, mostly as a reflex. Years of doing this had meant the response came naturally, like squinting into the sun. When nasty things happened on a mission, you started shooting. Later, you might get told off for shooting the wrong thing, but the important thing was shooting first. So shoot Haines did, heavy pistol out and firing, every shot on target.

And doing absolutely nothing.

He saw it, in the horrible, slow-motion way you often saw things in combat, in the way you could notice details and not do anything to change them. His shots were placed perfectly, not a single one wasted, but they were having no effect at all. They glanced off the metal skin of the machines as they strode into the room one after the other. They didn't even rock, they didn't even slow down, they didn't even seem to notice.

Haines could have sworn that the twin divots he'd made between the eyes of the leading machine - a beautiful pair of shots, a beautiful grouping - filled out almost as soon as they'd appeared, not even a trace of damage remaining. Could have been his imagination. How else could have seen it so clearly? But he was sure he had. The metal really was alive.

His pistol then stopped working, refusing to fire another shot.

One of the metal things was turning towards him, eyes a flat, dull red.

On another reflex he lashed out with a foot and flipped the table he'd been standing behind. This saved his life, as no sooner had he done it then the weapon of the machine staring him down fired, another blinding beam and another screaming burst of noise. Most of the table disappeared, seared away and leaving behind a single, sad leg that skittered off to somewhere safer, but by then Haines had already moved.

It looked like he was the last one alive. He had no idea what had happened to everyone else, but there wasn't anyone else, now. No troopers, no lab tech. Just him.

Maybe someone had got out, but he doubted it.

"Fuck," Haines said, reflexively slinging a grenade that he didn't expect to detonate and which duly failed to detonate, just bouncing off the forehead of one of the machines and rolling off to some corner of the room, inert. He tried getting his omnitool up to maybe overload them, too, but his omnitool wasn't working either. Nothing was working. His barriers had shut off as well. Everything had just given up.

Except for him. Haines wasn't going out like this. He refused to accept it. Even as he saw the metal things bringing those weapons of theirs around and even as he ran out of places to run he refused. Hurling his pistol at the gun of the nearest machine and knocking its aim aside he lunged, throwing himself forward and rolling, chased by screaming, searing beams that carved through the air he'd been occupying just seconds before, leaving trails carved on the walls and floor.

Lethal they might have been but fast they were not, these metal things. This Haines noted, and this Haines made use of. He just ran past them, dodging a swipe from a silver, skeletal hand and sprinting for all his worth from the mess hall and back to the main lift, where the ladder was.

He made it to the end of the corridor before his helmet's optics - which had already been faltering - finally gave up the ghost, his view winking to black. Spitting curses he threw himself flat just in case something had been drawing a bead on him and all-but wrenched the helmet off his head, rolling aside and pushing back up again with all his might.

Behind him, he could hear metal feet on metal flooring. He didn't look back.

Never before in his life had Haines climbed a ladder so fast. It was only when he reached the top that the glaring holes in his plan started making themselves obvious to him. With none of his gear working, how was he meant to contact the shuttle? Without his helmet, how was he meant to leave the facility? Holding his breath would only get him so far.

And those were just the most pressing problems.

Cursing more, Haines ignored the creeping sense of panic and decided to think of solutions instead. There'd be emergency equipment he could get so he could go outside Backup helmets and whatever, stuff like that. It'd be in the airlock. That'd be easy, that was one less problem. Calling the shuttle? Bit harder.

His gear was shot - and why?! What was happening?! - but maybe the facility still had something working? Maybe in the security station? Something robust, built for emergencies when everything else had failed? Worth a try.

If nothing else there might be more weapons there, or maybe even just a flare, a sharp stick, something, anything.

So that's where Haines went, at a jog now, eyes and ears peeled. He didn't see any more silver skeletons - he didn't see anyone - but that didn't mean he dropped his guard. If anything, it just made him more paranoid. Those things really had come from nowhere, like the guy had said. Out of thin fucking air.

He followed the line that led to the security station, tracing it across the walls and around corners, ears pricked. The other team was obviously dead, too, he assumed as much, so he wasn't surprised when he finally arrived and didn't find them there.

Finding another one of the metal skeletons was a bit of a shock though. Especially as there was something different about this one.

This one didn't have a gun. This one moved faster, too. More fluidly. When Haines came into the room this one just swivelled about from where it had been standing, like a person might, smooth as anything. As it swivelled the cloak of metallic scales it had draped across its shoulders utterly failed to clatter or clink or indeed make any noise at all.

There was a moment where nothing happened and that moment felt like a really, really long time to Haines.

Once the moment was up though he threw himself forward. He'd worked it out in his head that the distance between him and it was enough that he could cover it in one good lunge but too much to really do anything else with. He could have run away, sure, but this one didn't have a gun that he could see, and this one was on its own. Haines figured he could probably do something with it. Maybe knock it over, sweep the leg.

Maybe try and take that staff the skeleton thing had. The shining staff topped with…

…something.

The shining staff that, before Haines had even taken so much as a step forward, flashed so brightly that Haines was blinded, raising his arms on reflex to shield his face - his arms which then seared with absolute, piercing agony.

Squinting, blinking, eyes watering, Haines struggled to see what had happened and was surprised to find - in a stupified, stunned sort of a way - that his arms had apparently been completely frozen solid. Totally. Not just a little frostbitten, not just clad in ice, absolutely frozen.

He tried to move a finger and his left arm fell off, catching the right on its way down and knocking that one off, too. This left him two arms short.

Haines looked with blank astonishment at where his arms used to be. His brain fizzed. HIs arms were meant to be there, he wasn't meant to have these peculiar, jagged, frozen stumps. None of this made sense. None of this was meant to be happening. Maybe none of it was happening. Maybe this was a mistake.

He was still staring at them dumbly when there was another flash, this one hitting him squarely in the chest. Haines died instantly, frozen through. Having the thing reach out with the staff and ever-so-gently nudge him over so he toppled and shattered was just overkill.

Once the last piece of what had been Haines came rattling to a standstill, all was silent.

The machine stood stock-still for a moment, then slowly cocked its head, just a bit. Through the door that had Haines had entered through came the other machines, striding in to stand in a row. There wasn't a sound. They all stood quietly, unmoving.

Then they all left.

Later - much later - when the cleanup crew failed to respond, the frigate still waiting in orbit sent back up the line for instructions on what to do. The instructions, when they came, were to leave, which the frigate did.

Later still a second, more substantial cleanup crew was dispatched. It found nothing, and left without a clue as to what might have happened to the lab initially or the first crew that went in. Not a trace. Signs of damage, but no signs of what might have caused it.

At this point the whole situation was deemed to be a lost cause. The site was destroyed.

And has not been visited since.

Obviously these would be the super, super old "We don't even have a codex we just exist as rules in White Dwarf" Necrons, hence the tech disruption. I think I remembered what a staff of light was meant to do...

Anyway. Dumb idea.