Chapter 42.3: Containment

Kikka and her companion continued toward them, and there was literally nowhere to go but past them. Even if there had been another side room to drop into, Minkus wasn’t certain Wepp could manage lateral movement; it was taking everything in him just to put one foot in front of the other. Wepp was doing a good job of keeping his eyes off Kikka, though, letting them wander from point to point on the ceiling or along the glossy floor-stones. Minkus too avoided too much eye contact with the pair. Jinkke, or even Penny would have chided him for shying away from eye contact with someone who didn’t even know him, but Minkus could feel Wepp’s anxiety creeping in beneath his own skin.

Step by nervous step, Minkus tried to keep his mind on Ventyr and Yissa, the friends he had to reach—the friends he had to pass these people in order to reach. He only had to—

With a reflexive grunt, Minkus felt his shoulder rebound off something moving in an opposite direction and snapped out of his thoughtful haze. He jumped back a step, losing contact with Wepp as he realized what had happened.

“My ears!” Minkus yipped, blinking dumbly. He was face to face with the male asura at Kikka’s side, the male asura he’d just navigated Wepp past, only to run into him himself.

“Your ears?” the other asura demanded, reeling back and rubbing the side of his head. He hit Minkus in the arm with the back of his data pad. “It’s my ear you just ran your gargantuan frame into.”

Minkus blushed, trying to slide himself around the pair and in front of Wepp as he stammered out an explanation. “My apologies. It— it’s just a saying— ‘my ears,’ I mean. It’s a—”

“I know that!” the bald male barked. Glaring up at Minkus, his oblong face was pinched with a tension that Minkus thought he’d more triggered than caused.

“Comakk,” Kikka broke in, yanking her associate aside, “shut your hypothesis hole!” Her sharp gaze moved between Comakk and Minkus. “If you and this bumbling moron want to both keep your ears, I suggest you continue listening to me. And you,” she snapped at Minkus, “get back to your assignment, unless you’d like an assignment more useful and infinitely more painful.”

Minkus stepped past and away from the two as he pushed Wepp along behind him. “I— well, yes,” he stammered. “Yes, certainly. We’ll just— be on our—”

Kikka shoved Comakk farther aside and took a step toward Minkus, looking intently past him. Slender and even more petite than Jinkke, the little female barely came up to Minkus’ collarbone, but the sharp cut of her coat and the gleam in those icy eyes made her as large as the norn Minkus knew was waiting outside the complex. It was an eerie effect, and he shivered meeting her eyes. She wasn’t looking at him, though. No, she now scowled fiercely at Wepp, whose sweating continued and shivering returned. Minkus had a very bad feeling.

“What’s wrong with this idiot?” Kikka demanded.

Minkus blinked, looking back and forth between Kikka and Wepp, no idea what, if anything, he should say. He threw a silent prayer into the ether, begging the deep magics and whatever might be behind them to bring Wepp back to some degree, any degree of intelligent thought. But the closer Kikka leaned, the deeper Wepp’s shiver grew. Her eyes narrowed, and Wepp said nothing.

Minkus tightened his posture to absorb his partner’s fearful vibration, and he opened his mouth. Words came out—sort of. “He— uh— He and I— We were— just— Well, he was testing…”

More words fell out of his mouth, and Minkus genuinely had no idea what they were. With each one, the female’s focus shifted from Wepp’s mute stupor to Minkus’ babbling explanations. She let his mouth run until he ran out of breath, finishing on some note about going to subject-containment, a statement he immediately regretted. He was so bad at lying, and something knowing had sparkled violently in Kikka’s eyes at the mention.

Minkus took a deep gulp of air as Kikka’s lips curled back, somewhere between a snarl and the start of a response. Jinkke would have known exactly what to expect from the krewe-leader’s mouth; Minkus only knew it would be bad, probably very bad. And with Wepp in his current condition, Minkus would certainly be out-thought and out-spoken. This was not good, not good at all.

“Mistress,” Comakk interrupted, raising his tablet. He cast a short glare at Minkus before re-attending to his leader, who’d only just opened her mouth to unleash whatever tirade waited behind her taut lips. “We have a timetable to meet, assuming you still wish to destabilize the central structure of—”

Her ire flared at her subordinate, twin braids snapping with the motion of her spinning head. “Of course I still wish to, Comakk. Watch your tone, you insubordinate beaker-scrub.” She jerked back toward Minkus and Wepp. “The future of this facility, of the Inquest as a whole, is on a clock, and I suggest you keep that ever in mind. Get out of my way and return to your work, you and your tottering imbecile of a krewemate. But know I will have my eyes on you in subject-containment.” She bit off the last words, studying them as much as she threatened.

Abruptly she broke her attention and snapped back to Comakk’s side, a whip cracking from one point in space to another. Quickly passing her lieutenant, she pressed on down the hallway, wordlessly demanding that he keep up with her.

She glanced back at them only once, but that was enough.

Minkus found himself moving as well, in the opposite direction, following the female’s instruction without even thinking about it, and driving Wepp along before him as best he could. He looked back over his shoulder several times, making sure the other two were still moving toward the courtyard farther down the hall. They were. Each time he looked, they were farther and farther away, and finally he stopped, drawing a deep breath. The encounter had not gone particularly well, but they had managed to get by.

What was more, now Minkus understood what everyone had been saying about this complex’s chief. Something was deeply wrong with that female: greed, fear, menace—maybe even genuine malice. She held them all as tightly as Minkus held to kindness or mercy. She seemed to be everything anyone had implied about her.

Minkus came back to himself and found Wepp looking up at him, his face pinched in horror. “That just happened, did it not?”

Minkus nodded, feeling his own eyes still wide. “It did.”

“It feels unnatural to say, but thank you. I am very thankful you were here.” Blood returned to Wepp’s face as he said it. “I froze. Thoroughly.”

Minkus scratched his head, feeling for the first time the sweat collected at his own hairline. “I— well, I didn’t do very well.” He’d told Kikka precisely where they were going. “Not very well at all.”

“No, perhaps not,” Wepp agreed, “but we are still standing.” He shook his stupor away and glanced down the hall. Neither of them could see Kikka or Comakk any longer, but a cold fury seemed to settle over Wepp now that his nerves had settled.

“Did you understand what she said about a clock?” Minkus asked, suddenly recalling new bits of the stressful conversation.

Wepp shook his head, turning back to Minkus with that same pinched focus all over his round face. “I do not, though I hypothesize it has something to do with the crates on that wagon outside. Whatever the circumstance, I would prefer it if Kikka did not attain whatever her objective may be.” He was shaking again, though not with fear this time. “We should find your friends quickly.”

————————————————————————————————————

The two continued exploring the interior of the complex for longer than Minkus knew. The network of corridors and chambers didn’t seem to go all that deeply into the plateau, but Wepp surmised that its convoluted arrangement had been intended to maximize its usable space, not to make the system navigable. Every long hallway crossed three others, creating a grid that should have been easy to map, were it not for the varying distances between them and the room entrances branching off them in irregular patterns. One corridor might have only two doorways into attached chambers, while the next had seven. One room had entrances along three different halls, and the next would have only one way in and out. Everything was just uniform enough to appear familiar without actually being so.

Each intersection and doorway Minkus and Wepp approached then posed a new challenge: there was no way of knowing how many Inquest members might be on the other side. They’d expected that problem, of course, but with the activity out in the courtyard drawing one inquest agent toward it and driving two more away from it at all times, traffic in the halls was both more constant and more erratic than even Wepp had ventured to guess. Though a small handful of labs housed no one at all—no engineers, guards, or even golems—most revealed krewe-members working in shifting groups of two or three, with one or all of them only moments from scurrying out into the hall and off to some task somewhere else. That, however, proved to be more of a boon than a complication, as everywhere Minkus and Wepp went, other asura were brushing past them without a trace of thought. Each one so focused on what he or she was doing that Minkus and Wepp could have been minotaurs, and Minkus doubted it would have made any difference to anyone; they still would have blended into the sporadic shuffle of it all. It all made their lengthy exploration simpler, but it sure felt strange.

Minkus knew that Wepp was doing a better job than he was at mentally mapping their progress, so he set his focus on scanning each room for evidence of test subjects as quickly as he could. Open doors were of course the easiest to simply peak into, but even when steel, sliding doors shut Minkus out of a space, he just had to wait for someone to pass in or out, giving them just enough time to glance in. Most of the spaces were small enough for that to be sufficient.

Of course, many of the sterile, stonework chambers also held data terminals. Wepp seemed genuinely surprised at their frequency, but it didn’t stop him from wanting to examine each one, checking for the same alarm protocols, which he found, repeatedly. Minkus wasn’t sure how he’d recognized the pattern faster than Wepp—maybe he’d only accepted it faster—but after examining the eighth terminal, Wepp agreed.

He turned back from the screen, almost beaming. “I believe it is now safe to conclude,” he said,  “that they’ve programmed the alarm protocols in every terminal here. Kikka may be arrogant, treacherous, and unsettling, but she isn’t incautious.”

Though his mind was still on their unfulfilled task, Minkus forced a grin as well. It was nice to see the other asura glad for something.

Still, he cast a glance over his shoulder, waiting for a technician or guard to enter. They’d blended in so far, but Minkus really didn’t want to push their luck. “We still need to—”

“Find the Sergeant?” Wepp interjected. “Of course, you’re correct.” He backed away from the screen still covered in flickering glyphs and following Minkus to the doorway. “It is worth my noting, though, that this revelation may prove critical to the success of our task.”

Minkus rounded the doorway back into the hall. There were three of them out of this lab, so he made certain he was exiting the same one they’d entered through. “I am not sure— what do you mean?” he asked.

“Oh, of course,” Wepp snorted. “My apologies for assuming.”

Minkus peered in through the next doorway, listening as he went.

“If the hypothesis holds true, and every terminal here accesses those protocols, it necessarily means that we can trigger the fire protocol from any terminal in the complex; we have no need to return to any specific terminal we’ve already discovered. Wherever we find the sergeant and the scholar, we ought to be able to trigger the protocol directly from that point—or somewhere nearby. At least hypothetically. Do you comprehend?”

Minkus nodded. That actually did make a lot of sense, and in hindsight, he felt he should have grasped the logic of it sooner.

“That would be very helpful,” he agreed, finishing his scan of what appeared to be a storage room and taking a step farther on down the hall.

“Yes, quite,” Wepp echoed again. “The key is identifying the proper protocols for our desired outcome, which I am almost certain I’ve done—interface navigations do not seem to have changed much in my time away from lab facilities. Colors still appear to indicate the type of emergency, in a fashion simple enough for even a norn to comprehend, and each sector of the facility has a numerical designation, from north to south. That actually affords us an additional benefit: if we select a number just lower than our actual location, we can not only send the krewe fleeing northward at the outset of our fictionalized disaster, but we can also misdirect them upon their subsequent investigation. It’s simple but ingenious, if I do say so.”

They ran into another intersection, and Minkus stopped to look at Wepp, who was now dancing with what looked like a mixture of thrill and anxiety. Minkus tried to work out their position while also storing the details of Wepp’s plan in his mind. Colors and numbers, he thought, one like the emergency and the other low, not high. He had. He thought he had it.

“Yes, I— I think I understand. But what I am not sure of—”

“That direction,” Wepp interjected, pointing. He already knew what Minkus would say. “We have not yet gone that direction.”

With most asura, Minkus felt that familiar embarrassment at the need for direction, but he’d not with Wepp. In truth, he’d become oddly comfortable around the Inquest agent. No, he didn’t always know how to handle Minkus’ inabilities, but neither was he dismissive of Minkus because of them, not anymore. Among their people, that said a lot.

Together the two rounded the intersection and started down the new hall. An asura passed them, leading a golem that carried one of those crates, and for just a moment, Minkus stopped to watch. He had a bad feeling about whatever these people were so anxious to move. He shivered and turned back to his course.

Just ahead Wepp stood at yet another set of sliding, steel doors. He poked the control panel, and the two sides slid apart, revealing a change beyond them that was larger than any they’d encountered so far.

Wepp stepped through, onto a landing only a few stairs above the main floor, and Minkus followed him. Both recognized what the guard outside the complex had sent them in search of.

“This is it!” Minkus chirped. But he trailed off as the details of the scene came into focus. 

Under the dim overhead light of too few illumination cells, a broad, rectangular room, only just longer than it was wide, stretched out before him. Even aside from the rows of poison-green, cylindrical, containment chambers, there was something oily and dark about the atmosphere, despite the room’s surgical cleanliness. With those chambers, though, the space was sickening. Internally lit, they were full of rocking, moaning, raging, and dismembered creatures—and that was only the first couple of rows that he could see. Honestly, he couldn’t even make out what sorts of creatures they all were.

During his education, Minkus had been exposed to experimentation on living things (insects, amphibians, and the like), and he’d never liked it. But this was at a level that even Dynamics wouldn’t permit.

“My ears,” he wheezed, almost gagging. “What are they doing?”

“Research,” Wepp said flatly.

Minkus choked back his horror and shifted his attention to Wepp, inspecting the plump asura for any signs of weakness or fainting. “Are you alright?” he asked. “Seeing this kind of thing, I mean— Well, you aren’t feeling— unwell?”

Uncertainty flashed past Wepp’s face, disappearing almost instantly. “Oh. Woozy? Weak? Faint?”

Minkus nodded.

“No, none of those. But thank you.” He very nearly smiled. “The circumstances of these creatures may be severe, but technically it’s still only research. Thank the alchemy, I am not in one of those chambers.”

Minkus frowned as the sentiment washed past him. His friends were probably in those chambers, a knowledge that almost made him sick again. But Wepp, who fainted at even the threat of personal harm, was unaffected by it.

This rescue, Minkus realized, had nothing to do with Wepp. Whatever his involvement, Wepp did not share Minkus’ objective.

Still, Wepp surveyed the room, though not strictly in the direction of the test cells. “If you find your friends, I can locate a terminal. There is almost zero probability they operate this room without one.”

Something itched at the back of Minkus’ mind, an unease. “Are you sure? I mean, is it a good idea that we separate? What I mean is, I am here to keep you—”

“Conscious?” Wepp said. “Yes, I know, and I thank you for that.” He glanced over his shoulders. “But there do not appear to be any immediate threats—aside from the creatures inside those cylinders, which I have no interest in freeing.”

Minkus supposed he had a point, but something still didn’t settle with him.

“Minkus,” Wepp said, putting a hand up on his shoulder. He spoke more slowly than usual. “Please go find your friends. We quite literally have no time to waste.”

Minkus nodded.