Once the Maximus fire team had neutralized their targets, settling down to the other half of their jobs, the massive cargo bay doors of the conquered Versailles began anew its descent. Part of the small wing of Servitors drones that had been patiently waiting outside in the vacuum filed in, deploying their arms to carry the decommissioned source of raw metal out of the freighter. Travelling at a moderate speed, the drones looked like workers of some hive creature bringing a fresh kill back to the nest.
On the Alia Minora's surface, the three-story high defensive barrier, which was formed of plasticrete and constituting the enclosure of the research facilities many acres of land, began stirring into life. They could not risk an incursion from the hostile fauna at this crucial moment.
The magnetized metal track running along the middle of the walls hummed, vibrating as mobile gauss turrets mounted on small platforms easily manipulated by electromagnetism moved across them, barrels retracted in the cannon's housing. The respective platforms toward the back of the various lines of turrets moving around caused the track to shake in places as they reached the area they were directed to be in, magnetically securing themselves to the track. The barrels extended as the power grid re-established connection to the guns.
On the top towers half again as tall as the outer walls spread around the grounds, and much wider, mass drivers that dwarfed that of the Maximus submarine's ascended, the firing chamber pointed straight up. As the anchors deployed, the mass drivers began scanning the skies. The hammers were released once, twice, deafening clangs assaulting the air. The first was to stress the hydraulics in a sort of maintenance check-up, the second to apply a new friction-reducing coat of gel along the length of the huge cylinder. Some firing chambers were then loaded with flak flechette, others with spheres of pure metallic mass that took advantage of both the hammer mechanism and the gauss rail that assisted the firing chamber with ejecting the "platform" that held whatever ordnance was loaded.
In short, nothing would be able to interfere with the arrival of the Professor's newest protégé.
The klaxons around the landing pad sounded, the field rumbling a short time later as the underground hangar opened its mouth. Though aircraft and drones were stored in this part of the facility, it also afforded access to a complex system of rails that extended through the entire campus, and quite a ways down into the bowels of the installation. The only things kept on the surface were the munitions and land vehicles, and the odd small barracks for the infrequently needed human patrollers, as well as an immense matter processor, currently configured to receive metal and metalloid elements for the purpose of replenishing the local resource stores.
It was safe to say that Maximus Corporation tended to rely more on artificial precision than the questionable efficiency of organics, as not one being was in sight during these proceedings.
Of course, Maximus did find most of its employees from the criminal underground slow enough to have been put on the immediate capital punishment lists on their respective planets. The recruiting of convicts was an easy, cheap way to keep manpower at full strength in all circumstances. Some of the mercenaries, for lack of a better term at that point, did have a tendency to make a break for freedom from Maximus's leash. They did not realize until their last moments that that same leash had been surgically implanted during their enlistment, a failsafe implemented after the first month of hiring due to the numerous instances of convicts disappearing in transit while at spaceports or making a dash for the escape pods. The function was to track and, if need be, terminate stray links of the perfect chain that was the Maximus community of thugs, murderers, rapists, and sometimes the criminally insane, should they lose their way.
This, of course, is not to say that all elements of the company consisted of embodiments of shot ethics and questionable moral character; a little more than a quarter were legitimately, somewhat, recruited. People of this caliber were mainly scientists, though sometimes disillusioned security personnel and government-affiliated peacekeepers, even a few ex-military types.
One rear admiral Antaeus, now sub-captain, had been one of the latter. Disgraced by a commanding officer slightly above his pay-grade, the blame of a mistake that cost thousands of civilian lives was shifted to him as the subordinate; the dishonorably discharged USCN officer was a gem to have been picked up, quickly rising through the ranks until he had just recently regained some semblance of his previous, hard-earned commission.
The Professor's story, however, was not as clear-cut as the former colonel's. His is a tale of greater strife and sorrow.
/ / / /
From an office window looking into the hangar, Mr. Paik'ri observed the Servitor drones perform a perfectly orchestrated ballet in the air above to cut a section of the hulk away to obtain the strange white compartment, quite out of place considering the hulks great age.
His mandibles clicked as he watched the drones lower the compartment onto the magnetic strip along the bottom floor. It did not crash to the floor, instead hovering half a foot above for a few seconds before slowly moving in the direction of the myriad tunnels snaking through the facility. Paik'ri's concern was not with what Alexander did unto his own kind. He was here to fulfill a contract; nothing more, nothing less.
The eight-foot badblood turned at the sound of the door softly gliding open, revealing the nearly seven foot frame of Maximus Corporation's clandestine leader himself. Paik'ri would have claimed his skull then and there, save for the semblance of honor he still retained; that, and he was not entire confident that he would best this particular human. Even without the enhanced vision of his hunting mask, he could see the man's icy black mass where a heart should have been radiate a chilling aura. Alexander was not one to be trifled with.
Clicking and growling a coarse greeting in his native tongue, the translator in his wrist computer spat out in a rough computerized voice, "May your hunt have been fruitful."
"And your future endeavors plentiful," Alexander responded in kind. He walked to the yautja without fear to clasp hands in a ritual of mutual respect and truce, a large sword with a diamond pommel and a silvery blade emblazoned with a twisting red-and-yellow fire swinging from his waist. The man allowed a terse smile to play along his lips and regal features for a fraction of a moment, piercing gunmetal gray eyes meeting that of where he knew the hunter's to be behind the mask. No, Paik'ri would not get a chance to take Alexander's skull today; he relaxed from the subtle fighting stance he had went into as the door opened.
"I have already given the biometrics you requested to your machine-spirit," Paik'ri said. He hated AIs, ever since his first encounter with a USCM squad he had hunted in his youth, of which a pair of combat synthetics were attached.
At being referenced, SPARTAN's avatar materialized in the corner of the room, bowed to Alexander, and disappeared as fast he had appeared.
"Good." Alexander walked to a raised dais, his desk levitating down from the ceiling and a chair rising from the floor to accommodate him. "Your payment is awaiting you. A Servitor is loading it into your ship as we speak."
Paik'ri erupted into a slow laugh. "I hope it is not in the same fashion as the hapless oomans you lured here." Now, Alexander did let out a genuine chuckle at the thought.
"No, Mr. Paik'ri, I would never be so underhanded to dispose of you. I would at least give you the fighting chance in a duel, my friend." Paik'ri scoffed at the running joke between the two tigers on this particular hill. He would only escape the fate shared by his compatriots that day six years ago by remaining useful to Alexander. The hunter went beyond all of his normal comfort zones in order to retain his pulse in the condition it was now. "Now, on to business: I have another contract for you. A deep space excavation team in search of trans-uranium elements recently uncovered what appears to be an old Pilot outpost in almost pristine condition. My sources indicate that they have not yet realized what they have found, and as such have forgone contact with the United Systems for the time being."
Alexander waved his hand across his desk, which had been gathering the necessary information pertaining to what he had just described. A hologram representing data appeared towards the right of the desk in a sphere. Alexander picked it up, extending it to Mr. Paik'ri.
The badblood nodded, pressing a button on his wrist computer. A panel shifted to the side on its top. Alexander flicked the ball of data at the opening it made.
"Consider it done."
"Thank you. You never disappoint, Mr. Paik'ri, unlike some elements of my company. Allow me to escort you to your vessel. I would like to inspect how the upgrades have been holding up." Alexander stood up, the desk and chair returning to their resting positions. The two clasped hands, the human gesturing for the hunter to take the lead.
/ / / /
"-upgrades have been holding up."
The man wearing a white lab coat fringed with Maximus red-and-gold outside Alexander's office was startled by the door's sudden opening, nearly dropping the pen and holopad he had been writing with at the sight of a predator in full hunting garb stepping out first. That did not stop himself from slipping down onto the floor before the hunter, it barely avoiding stepping on him.
He bobbed his head multiple times in its general direction as he got up, then meeting Alexander's cold, almost sad-looking eyes. The hapless tech's eyes widened as far as they could, being a simple handyman in the wrong place at the wrong time. He fully realized the part of his contract iterating his expendability at the moment Alexander snapped his fingers.
The hunter roared. The tech let out a high pitch scream. In one fluid motion, it grabbed the man's head, shoved down hard, and pulled up harder, ripping the man's head and spine from his body. The sound had stopped, but the emotions flickered for a brief moment before his visage was frozen in place.
"Pity. He had such potential," Alexander commented.
The hunter harrumphed, casually tossing the severed dead some ways further down another hallway they did not need to travel. A group of other lab coats did their best to not notice the grim sight roll past them.
Miniature Arachnica drones dropped from the ventilation shaft that also served as their highway in the facility, and promptly began disposing of the matter staining the whitewash and gray hall.
/ / / /
On a level further below, Robert Koening busied himself with the necessary preparations for the next trial for the Compound. Others bustled around him with their own tasks. He was responsible for the actual calibration of the latest sample to be injected into the subject, the object in question having just arrived. Koening looked around with the casual, ordinary-looking survey of a trained professional, making sure no one was focused on him. Not even one of those damned Beholder drones and their thrice-damned eyes were supervising these proceedings.
The technician put two fingers in one of his lab coat's pockets, drawing it up with a small gray band. His orders were simple: obtain information on Maximus's highest profile projects, and sabotage as many as possible. Today would be the start of phase two. He then carefully undid the seals on the container, gingerly picking up the Compound's serum vial.
As he loaded the serum into an open panel on the side of the medtank that would soon be filled with a human body and a cocktail of stabilizing and restorative fluids, he slipped the band onto the top of the vial, situated around the compound in its stabilizing medium itself. It cinched tightly into place, the microscopic needles penetrating into the Compound itself yet being too fine to trigger any containment breach protocols.
A piece of metal locked over the serum, obscuring the band within a myriad variety of other parts. The spy closed the panel, touched a few buttons, and sealed the medtank, his tasks, both of them, finished.
Slowly, surely, the band began pumping a super-saturated solution of an unknown metal element obtained some months ago from a member of the local fauna. Preliminary testing indicated the metal's nearly one-hundred-percent electrically conductivity, amazingly at normal temperatures. The initial batch, however, had been misfiled. Alexander had ordered Koening's team to fix their mistake and procure a new supply, electing for them to do it themselves instead of lending SPARTAN's invaluable aid; it was all the better for the spy to not have that hound sniffing at things it should not.
No one would have been able to discern, buried within the complex mechanisms of the medtank and ready for injection, the solution gradually shifting from a dull black to a muted gray, striations of shiny silver arcing through the Compound.