Tarn
According to the briefing an Agartan re-sequencing was an attempt to introduce plasticity to the human body structure, altering the species’ basic physiognomy through genetic and psychological adjustments. In other words it melted a person into a semi-sentient puddle of ooze. Highly disturbing, highly illegal stuff. Of course no one had ever heard of Agartan re-sequencing until some egghead at Essene University tried it and turned half his grad students into bubbling piles of deranged goo.
The University had a reputation to protect so they reached out to the Shran to help them keep it quiet. The Shran sent Tarn. As one of the ninety percent of humans born without an etheric sense it took him a few days to arrange passage from Yshron to Effratha and another day once there to acquire an untraceable lancer, flechettes and explosives then smuggle them onto the University’s massive campus. By that point the nameless patrons that hired him were growing impatient. The disaster their rogue professor had caused was getting harder and harder to keep quiet.
The primary genetic laboratory on campus was essentially an upside down ferrocrete bowl with double layered sterile quarantine doors and several layers of biometric security measures. The administration doubtless thought the building was very secure. In fairness it did take almost twenty minutes for Tarn to bypass the security then create a set of credentials that would let him crack any lock in the building. Once he was inside finding the professor took another five minutes.
Like most academics who encountered an unexpected situation he’d locked himself in his office and was rummaging through libraries and data in an attempt to come up with a solution. Tarn knew where his office was thanks to maps his employer had provided. It was a simple matter to get in the building, reseal the entrance, find the office and kill the professor. The problem, now that he was in the offices, was that there were still huge piles of research to destroy, crazy ooze people to hunt and a site sterilization process to begin.
There might also be other survivors to deal with.
Tarn heaved a sigh and shoved Professor Trake’s body out of his chair and sat down at his desk, mopping some splatter off of his console reader with the back of his glove. Right now the display was a lot of meaningless techtalk. After determining that he couldn’t understand any of it, making it useless, Tarn deleted it all and closed the program the professor had been running. He wasted five minutes more sifting the computer’s logs and taking stock of the situation in the laboratory as Trake had understood it. Once he was done he put together a list of priorities.
First, destroy all the professor’s personal research devices. Not a big problem, that’s why he’d brought enough detonite and sequencers to level the laboratory on his own. Setting up the charges was barely another ten minutes’ work.
With the Trake’s research burning the next step was clearing the lab itself, which was going to be a much more complicated task. He’d chosen a snub nosed lancer for indoor work and brought a one handed knifer as a backup. Given the nature of the Agartan experiment he’d loaded both with incendiaries. It was time to hunt.
Trake logged four assistants in his laboratory at the time of the accident with a fifth working on the secondary gene sequencer in the basement. All five of these loose ends should still be in the building. Based on what Trake reported when his experiment went haywire the four from the lab should have undergone the re-sequencing, meaning he was looking for four piles of protoplasm at a minimum. The fifth may have been effected as well but Tarn found it unlikely. The professor had remained normal after all.
There was a sixth loose end to account for as well. Professor Trake and company hadn’t tested their new genetic procedure on themselves. They weren’t suicidal after all. They’d intended to apply it to a canine test subject but for some reason when exposed to the retrovirus it didn’t undergone the re-sequencing. The reason for that was unknown. So was the dog’s current location.
So the second order of business was to climb into one of several special clean suits the labs kept in their security rooms. Hopefully it would do a better job of keeping Tarn’s skeleton intact than what the assistants had worn. Once he was sealed in he proceeded to the laboratory and bypassed the lock. As soon as the door slid open he was greeted by the test subject, a nervous, excitable canine that was jumping and whimpering around Tarn’s ankles with the enthusiasm of a creature that longed for company.
Tarn’s lancer spat flechettes with a soft, rapid thumping sound. The small, blade-like projectiles sank deep into the dog’s chest and stomach with all the force the weapon’s magnetic launch tube could give them. Then the chemicals in the spine of the flechettes mixed and burst into flame. The creature’s whines turned to pained yelps as it burned and Tarn spared it the briefest wince. He’d fired on reflex and hit the center of mass. He adjusted slightly and added another shot to the dog’s head, putting the creature down cleanly, then sighed. “Shameful. You should have just injected yourself, Trake.”
The laboratory was full of strange equipment in tall, white ceramic cabinets with rounded corners, none of which he knew the purpose of. There were more familiar things scattered here and there. Sample kits. Medical beds for humans and animals. A full scale etheric analysis module add-on for a medical diagnostic scanner. It didn’t look like a place for evil genetic experiments investigating the warping of humanity into horrifying offenses to nature.
Well, other than the University logos on everything.
The lab was about ten meters deep by twenty five wide and after carefully pacing up and down the whole thing Tarn didn’t find any other signs of the Agartan experiment anywhere. He went back to the entrance and dragged the dog’s corpse to the center of the lab. There was a two meter dome in the ceiling there. Tarn was in the process of positioning the canine’s remains underneath it when he heard the sound in the hallway. He reached up to pull down his helmet’s dataveil. Instead his fingers hit the faceplate of his borrowed clean suit. Cursing under his breath Tarn pressed himself against the wall and began working his way towards the lab’s entrance, his lancer trained on the base of the door.
The Agartan re-sequencing was reportedly conducted four days before Tarn’s arrival. His nameless employer had strongly believed no one who underwent the re-sequencing would be able to do more than drag their new, amorphous bodies along the floor for at least a week. So Tarn was expecting to see a puddle of ooze come through the door at ankle height.
What he saw instead was the yellow ankles of another clean suit.
Tarn snapped the barrel of his lancer up on reflex, almost putting a trio of flechettes into the woman before he recognized who she was. For her part, Trake’s assistant put her hands up, waving them in panic. “Don’t shoot, don’t shoot! Are you from the Faculty? Professor Trake thought Dr. Schuyler might send someone to check on us eventually.”
“That’s me,” Tarn said evenly, lowering his lancer halfway and studying the woman in the suit. It was hard to make out many details but he got the impression of a young woman who was very tired and very scared. “Where are the rest of Trake’s assistants?”
“Something went wrong with the experiment we were doing and I had to hook them up to the DNA sequencers downstairs.” She clasped her hands in front of her and fidgeted nervously. “Have you seen Professor Trake? I haven’t seen him since yesterday afternoon and his office was locked last time I checked it so I assume he’s there but he wouldn’t answer me when I pinged his comms.”
“The Professor is dead.” Tarn gestured back towards the door. “Can you show me where that other sequencer is? I’d like to take a look.”
“Sure.” She started to turn then hesitated and looked back at him, her expression unreadable behind her clean suit’s faceplate. “Wait, what killed Professor Trake? He should have been-”
Flechettes shredded her suit and torso then the researcher collapsed in a smoldering heap. Tarn was no more inclined to leave her to suffer than the dog. A novice Shran might have felt a twinge of remorse about having to finish the job, especially once they saw how young she was beneath that faceplate. Tarn just moved her over to the dome with the canine. Young or old, anyone who signed up with the Universities knew what they were getting into and that went double when you decided to help your professor with illegal gene resequencing experiments.
He honestly felt more revulsion when he found the four researchers who’d been exposed to the Agartan procedure. They were exactly what the briefing suggested they’d be. Piles of jelly with a vaguely human color palate, shot through with veins and the occasional recognizable organ. They’d been herded into clear plastic tanks and hooked up to some kind of machine in the basement, just like he’d been told, but whatever that machine was doing left them alive.
Given how horrific they looked Tarn felt the least remorse over killing them. Except for the puddle of protoplasm that had one obvious human eye floating at one end, an eye still functional enough to turn and focus on him when he approached. That one did bother him. A lot.
A dozen flechettes still killed it, though.
The remains of all four Agartan test subjects fit in just one of those plastic tanks and that tank went right up the elevator and into the main lab under the dome. Tarn piled Professor Trake’s body there, just to be sure. Then he stepped out and triggered the lab’s sterilization sequence. The dome lowered down over the corpses and discharged some kind of chemicals that melted the detritus into loose amino acids that were then burned to ash.
He’d been sent with a custom record destroying computer worm that he installed on the building’s mainframe. It would ferret out any computational evidence of his presence and deal with it. He also sicced it on Trake’s files, although the chances a Professor with an off the books research project stored any of that info on Campus computers were slim to none. The computer worm was the best Yshron’s Lurn-caste minds could come up with. That was enough for Tarn to trust it’s efficacy.
He left it to its work and slipped out of the building. His work on the main contract was over and done with but he’d heard enough to seek out a secondary contract. Not typical for the Shran, but Tarn was ranked sel so he had some leeway. The local Dean of Essene University was familiar with Yshron and their protocols so it wasn’t hard to get his attention.
Less than a day after Tarn finished his main job he met the Dean at a standing table in a small food court just off Campus. A brief negotiation and a second contract was established.
The Gol-caste typically handled direct negotiations for all of Yshron’s castes of artisans and masters so Tarn had never met the person who hired him for the initial cover-up. He didn’t know it was Dr. Shuyler for certain. So he didn’t feel particularly bad when he tied up that loose end for the University either. Leaving Schuyler’s hovercar burning on the street wasn’t part of the second contract but Essene didn’t want more rogue genetic experiments creeping up any time soon and Tarn figured the added drama might help impress that notion on the rest of the faculty.
That kind of subtlety, such as it was, was probably lost on the student body, unfortunately.
With two contracts concluded in as many days, Tarn sel-Shran headed back to the jump port hotel feeling quite satisfied with himself. If all went well he could be back on Yshron in another day or two. He stopped in his hotel room long enough to pick up his own helmet and access it’s datafeed, in case his Gol had already sent him a new contract to work on.
No such luck. However he did have a message from one of the handful of clients he’d entrusted with his direct contact details. Lucy Luck wanted to know if he’d be interested in helping her with another little errand. Tarn hadn’t been born the day before. He had a sharp nose for liars and frauds and the woman who went by Lucy Luck was definitely both of those things. But she paid well and her jobs were usually pretty simple. He’d update Yshron on his plans then see what the shortest route to find her was. It was going to take at least a couple of days to make the jumps, to say nothing of finding a ship headed that way, so short was going to be a relative term in this case. Tarn had never even heard of the planet before.
So he sat down at his computer and started searching for passage he could book to a place called Wireburn.
Nate Chen Publications 