“Send one fire team in first,” she told Mooren. “That way, we can break them out if something goes wrong.”
“On it,” Andrews agreed. “It’s just glass, after all.”
Roslyn held her peace on that—transmutation Mages were quite capable of making a lot of very tough materials transparent—and watched the first three Marines go into the decon room.
The transparent barriers slammed shut on either side, scanners beeped, and several different systems activated at once.
“Knight?” Roslyn murmured.
“Antiseptic spray and several radiation purges,” the Marine told her. “Not sure I’d want to be in there in regular scrubs, but everyone’s armor should be fine.”
After thirty seconds, the airlock cycled, releasing Andrews’s fire team into the next area.
“Team by team,” Roslyn ordered. “Let’s be careful.”
Three by three, her team made their way past the decontamination room into a more stereotypically medical portion of the underground complex. Walls had been painted sterile white. Doors were clear glass but heavily secured.
“Sir, you need to see this,” Andrews announced, gesturing Roslyn forward to join them.
She joined the lead team next to a clear glass wall as they pointed into it. It took her a moment to register what she was looking at, and then a hard, cold shiver ran down her spine.
The room had four fully articulated beds designed to hold patients and adjust them for examination. Blinking arrays of computers and sensors walled the room—but what drew Roslyn’s gaze were the iron-bar restraints positioned to hold patients against the beds.
As the Marines’ lights filled the room, the beds became more clearly visible. All four had seen heavy use, with visible damage to the fabric where the occupants had struggled against the iron bars.
“Fuck me,” Mooren whispered. “What the hell is this place?”
“Somewhere several hundred people came to die,” Roslyn said grimly. “That’s not news, even if it’s horrifying to see the evidence of that.”
“Yeah,” Killough agreed, his voice very quiet. “Turn around, Commander.”
She did, following his gaze to see what had drawn the MISS spy’s attention. There was only one bed in the room on the other side of the hallway, but Roslyn recognized the equipment in it. She’d never seen it in person, but every Mage in the Protectorate had seen pictures of the brain-extraction equipment at the heart of Project Prometheus.
She just hadn’t expected to see it here, even knowing that the lab was run by Mages from that project.
“Is that what I think it is?” Mooren asked.
“Yes,” Roslyn said shortly. “I should have expected it, but I didn’t. This place is a fucking nightmare.”
“We knew that,” Killough said. “We should keep moving. There isn’t anyone here.”
“Knight, can we get into those computers?” Roslyn asked, gesturing to the blinking machinery around the medical horror show.
“Let me see,” the Marine replied. An exosuit gauntlet demonstrated that while the transparent material wasn’t glass, it wasn’t tough enough to stand up to the powered muscles of Marine battle armor. A drone zipped through the gap and clicked on to the computers.
A few seconds passed and Knight cursed.
“Different network,” she told them. “Same encryption. I might leave the drone here and see if some of our software can break through over time.”
“Do it. We need to keep moving,” Roslyn ordered. “We’re not going to end this horror show without finding the people behind it.”
The Marines slowly got moving again, but everyone had seen the restraints and the damage. The beds had been heavily used. Roslyn suspected that if their targets had been any less fastidious, there would have been blood on the beds.
But that probably would have contaminated the experiments.
“Fuckers,” she muttered.
“Sir?” Mooren asked.
“Just…these fuckers,” Roslyn repeated. “We need them alive, Sergeant. But we can’t lose your Marines, either. I trust your judgments, all of you.”
“I know,” the Marine Sergeant replied. “We are going to get them, sir. I promise.”
“Sir, Sergeant…” Andrews’s voice came through the channel again, but this time, they sounded actively ill. “You need… You need to see this.”
At first glance, Roslyn thought that Andrews had just found another storage unit and wondered what it was doing in the sterile medical section. Then she recognized the side of the square sixty-centimeter-by-sixty-centimeter doors that lined the walls of the room in even rows.
“Open the fucking door, Corporal,” Roslyn ordered.
Gauntleted fists smashed glass door and wall alike, clearing the path for everyone to step into the morgue. Roslyn looked around as she followed the Marines in, counting and estimating.
There were at least a hundred cadaver drawers in the room, and she suspected this wasn’t the only one.
Worst, though, was the far wall. A section large enough for a dozen drawers instead held a single large door. Roslyn couldn’t stop herself. She crossed the morgue and pulled the door open with a flash of power augmenting her muscles.
Even through her armor and hazmat helmet, she felt the heat wash up out of the open door. A conveyor belt started as she stared at the slanted surface leading away and down toward a secured hatch.
“Plasma flue from the reactor core,” Andrews said quietly. “At least a thousand degrees. Instant incineration.”
“Corpse disposal,” Roslyn said. “When they learn everything they can from their victims, they burn them away so there’s no evidence of what happened. They just…disappear. And then they die. And then they are incinerated.”
Anger burned through her and she glared at the disposal conveyor belt. Her magic slammed the door shut and she turned back to face her team.
“This isn’t working,” she told them. “This place is too big, and we don’t know enough about what we’re looking for. I hate it, but we have to split up. Andrews, Knight, your fire teams are with me.”
She stepped outside the morgue and looked around her.
“Mooren, take the rest and Killough. You sweep right,” she ordered. “I’ll sweep left. Use the drones as relays and keep in touch, but the priority is finding Ulla Lafrenz and Connor ad Aaron.
“Do not engage either unless you are certain you have complete surprise,” she told them. “You know how to
