Bravo Fleet
She hated the artefact. It gave her the creeps with its… well, Sarissa couldn’t say the thing had a dead-eyed stare, because it didn’t have eyes. It had, once, before assimilation and then the neurolytic pathogen. Now it just sat there, looking at her even though she turned her back and carried on with her work.
“Sarissa?” Her grandfather called out from the other lab. He had another of the artefacts in there and was dissecting it. She refused to go in there. That one had been younger, possibly around her own age. It gave her the shivers.
“Yeah?” she called out, with as much teen boredom as she could muster. Like everything was just too much effort. If she could prompt her grandfather into one of his ‘you’re so ungrateful’ lectures, perhaps he would send her to her room and she wouldn’t have to carry on matching these hated samples.
“Did you take your medication yet?”
Shit. She grabbed for her wrist-comp, and turned it around to look at the screen. The timer was in the red. She was supposed to wear it all the time to monitor her bio-systems and notify her when she was due for meds, but it was just too big and bulky when she was working, so she always took it off.
“Doing it now!” she called out, strapping the thing back on and heading over to the meds cabinet. She skirted around the head on the counter, ignoring the artefact as much as she could. Halfway there, she paused and half turned, looking back.
“Grandfather…” she called out warily, not taking her eyes off the artefact. “Are you running tests on 201?”
She held her breath as she waited for an answer, watching the lights flicker softly across the implants that snaked across the skull. Most of the flesh was long gone, the rest damaged by bad attempts to preserve it, something her grandfather often moaned about. But, if given the sources he got the artefacts from, they were lucky to get them even in this condition.
“On 201?” He called back absently. “No, I have 206 in here. Why?”
Her eyes widened. If her grandfather wasn’t running tests on 201, that meant that there was no external power to the artefact…
“You…” her voice squeaked and she swallowed. “You need to come in here and see this.”
“I’m a little busy, Sarissa. This is a very difficult part of the extraction process,” he snapped. “For god’s sake, your mother was just like this. Couldn’t do a thing on her own. Just deal with whatever it is.”
She nodded even though he couldn’t see her, sliding to the side, her back against the cool panel of the meds cabinet as she reached for the fire extinguisher on the wall. It was a cryo-foam one, designed for labs in case experiments went wrong. She was terrified of touching them after grandfather had demonstrated what they did to living flesh on a lab rat, but she was more scared of 201 as more and more lights flashed across the implants.
Then it moved and she squeaked, grabbing for the extinguisher. Not, that was wrong. It couldn’t move, it was bolted into the holding plate on the counter. It couldn’t move… definitely couldn’t move. Her eyes were deceiving her into thinking it was.
She flicked the guard clip out of the extinguisher by feel as she crept forward, both trying to give the artefact a wide berth and get close enough with the nozzle of the extinguisher at the same time.
She edged around the counter, her heart pounding violently at the cage of her ribs, like a bird desperate to be free. She should have taken her meds, her heart wasn’t as strong as a normal person’s thanks to her condition.
201 turned, lifting itself free of the mounting plate on tentacles and she screamed, hitting the trigger on the fire extinguisher at the same time something stabbed deep into her ankle…
