“What—” she began, but stopped when she saw the look of hatred and loathing on Doc’s face. He didn’t need to tell her, but spoke anyway.
“This, my dear Doctor, is the fourth Emile Taschen, the obscene blank slate, cloned for a purpose that no longer exists, with nothing to give him identity. Please, put him out of his misery.”
The clone turned in the tank, eyes opening and focusing blankly on the two people on the outside of the tank.
Mildred swallowed the bile that rose in her throat and leveled her blaster. “Why didn’t you do it, Doc?” she asked before firing.
“Strange as it may seem, I cannot face it. The poor creature is ultimately, at this stage, an innocent…”
The clone’s expression remained blank, its eyes fixed on Mildred.
“Maybe,” she said gently, “but we can’t let it live.”
Unleashing a blast of fire, she shattered the tank, the nutrient fluid flowing across the floor, steaming with the heat absorbed from the laser. The clone fetus opened its mouth and screamed, a formless, wordless sound as it was burned by the laser, its life ending before it had even truly begun.
Doc stepped back from the fluid flowing around his feet and vomited again as the corpse fried.
“You okay?” Mildred asked. “We need to get the hell out of here. There’s been too much noise, and we need to try and get to the others.”
Doc smiled crookedly. “My dear woman, I shall be only too glad to get the hell out of here—or to get out of hell, as I feel the eternal fires themselves could not be worse than this.”
“That’s something we’ll really have to see,” Mildred mused. “I just hope they got down to the bottom level without too much trouble in the way.”
Chapter Seventeen
For Ryan and the rest of the companions, the journey back to free the Gate had been a little more difficult. Unlike Mildred and Doc, they had, of necessity, had to traverse areas of the redoubt that had a much denser population. It made caution a triple-red necessity, and meant that progress was slower than any of them would have liked.
It was a balancing act. If they sped down the levels, chilling any who got in their way, then it was a certainty that they would arouse the full forces of the Illuminated Ones. With the Gate free, Ryan would still have risked this…but with just the five of them, the numbers meant that it would be unlikely that the Gate would ever get free. It would also alert the Illuminated Ones to whatever Mildred and Doc were doing, and possibly scupper their actions.
So the companions continued down the levels of the redoubt, taking cover and sending scouts ahead to assess the territory. Krysty mostly took this role, as her Illuminated uniform was the least damaged of all of them, so it would be easier for her to blend in with the rest of the redoubt.
Each corridor on each level was scouted by the woman, and—when the way was clear—the rest of the party would follow her in tight formation, Ryan in the lead and J.B. at the rear.
The corridors themselves were surprisingly free of personnel for some time. Whatever Taschen had them working on besides his biological warfare campaign, he kept them hard at their tasks, as they rarely seemed to leave their admin and science bays. On the rare occasions that an Illuminated One walked out of a room and into the corridor, they were able to take cover easily. All itched to take out the enemy and reduce their numbers, rather than skulk in hiding. It went against the grain of their being for all five of them. But they all knew that it was the right way. Get the Gate free, and the cleaning up could begin.
As they progressed, J.B. kept checking his wrist chron.
“What’s up?” Ryan asked of his old friend, noticing this for the seventh or eighth time.
“Been a while since they left us. It’s hard when you don’t know how much time they need.”
“Harder still when you have to do things this way,” Ryan muttered.