Green Light
It could have been the fact that he'd been demoted to Cylco-tech; he'd helped build the damn prototype, but a falling out with station higher-ups meant he was the one riding the chair and watching the samples get purified. If anyone off-station asked, he told them he was working “hands-on” with the Cycloatomizer, but that was a stretch of the truth to say the least. From his control panel, he could manipulate the three arms inside the Cyclo's chamber, but was never allowed inside.
That rankled more than he was willing to admit, at least to any of his colleagues. For the other two hundred idiots on the station, he put on a smiling face, since at least half of them were higher-ranked than he was and could make his life even more miserable. The nature of the agreement he'd signed to come work abroad IS-1 meant that if his superiors wanted to, they could send him to clean bathrooms all day, every day, and there wouldn't be a thing he could do about it except quit. Since the shuttle to earth only came around every six months or so, even that wasn't a viable solution unless he wanted to have a meltdown just before it docked so he'd have an escape route.
Shaking his head, Bo triple-checked the scanner results. The green light stared at him from beyond the quad-glass, but there was something about this particular sample that had him on edge. It wasn't as though they hadn't tested alien rocks before; he'd seen all kinds from the farthest corners of the three known solar systems, but this one felt different. Partially it was the look of the thing – as big as his palm, flat and wide, it had a number of raised markings that he was sure were not naturally occurring. Of course, his expertise lay in chemical analysis, not archeology, and coupled with his current position meant no one gave a damn about what he was sure about.
Again, the scanner said the rock was clean. Ninety-eight percent of it was composed of familiar materials, things found on just about every planet humanity had visited, and three percent was “unknown”. That was actually low - most of what he tested pushed ten or fifteen percent. In some cases, it was the density of the rock or its structure that made the Cyclo unable to determine what all of its component parts were. He'd been ecstatic the first few times it came back with an unknown reading, even going so far as to call the station commander down, but it had always turned out to be something simple, like carbon in a new formation. That in itself was worth something, but not to the commander who'd been roused out of bed three hours before an early-morning shift. Bo had quickly learned to be very sparing about when he called the higher-ups.
He swung the spindly manipulator arm down and into place, carefully twisting the Cyclo's first hatch dial. They'd found that three backup doors was not only the most cost-efficient but gave the highest possible security for the lowest budget, something the number-crunchers that came by every few years liked to see. Putting the Cyclo behind quad-glass was their idea; Bo knew the glass wouldn't do much good against anything alien that came crawling out of the Cyclo, but it made the boys who held the purse-strings feel better, so he'd had it installed. Right now, he was glad it was there, however ineffective it might actually be.
It took him the better part of half an hour to get all three hatches open, and another ten to work up the nerve and break the seal on the inner chamber. All real-time reports showed that the material he'd put inside – 321B-6 – hadn't even moved since the process began, and had lost almost none of its mass. More than likely, he'd open the chamber and find nothing of consequence.
Slamming his hand down harder than necessary on the controls, he set the two unlocking arms to work. Thinking about it would do no good – now that the arms were in motion the process would happen by itself.
A soft dinging sound let him know the chamber had been successfully breached, and a glance at the readouts told him nothing had changed. Smiling, he began to retract the thin arm when it was suddenly flung against the chamber wall, slamming into the quad-glass and dropping to the ground. The second arm followed a moment later, and Bo quickly locked the last arm safely away. Turning on the Cyclo's speaker, he could hear a low snuffling sound, something he knew should be familiar, but that he couldn't quite place. It was the rapid pace of his inhales and exhales that finally clued in his thought process – something in the chamber was breathing. Bo flipped the security switch; this was no time to be a lone hero-scientist. He needed backup, and he needed it now.
The Cyclo began to shake, and he could see the green light on its top waver and then begin to pulse a bright yellow. Red followed quickly, a strobed warning that would tell anyone in the control room they should not, under any circumstances, open the hatches.
Bo cursed under his breath as he saw the machine start to shake. Fear shook him, but he refused to move, curiosity overcoming his basic instinct to run. Security would arrive soon – he had to know what was going to happen.
With a sharp hiss, the small object in the Cyclo came rocketing out; Bo had enough time to see it pierce the glass and come streaking for him before everything went black.
…
“Bo!” Patrolman Lance Biggs shook the thin scientist hard.
“What?” Bo's eyes fluttered open, and he slumped forward in his chair.
“Are you alright, Bo? You hit the alarm – what's wrong?” Looking around, Lance couldn't see anything out of order in the lab – the quad-glass was still intact, and the machine looked as normal as weird scientific junk ever could, but he wouldn't put it past Bo to pull station security down to the Cyclo just for fun.
“I'm...” Bo hesitated. “Fine. One of the arms broke loose and smashed into the glass. I thought for a second we were going to have a breach with a sample still inside.”
Lance nodded, then leaned in closer. “You sure you're alright? You've got some blood just above your eyebrow. Anything get out of that chamber?”
“No, of course not,” Bo said with an odd half-smile. “The green light was on.”
- D
No comments:
Post a Comment