Chapter 18
Remy crept cautiously through the corridors, each step placed carefully to the floor to avoid the clanging of his metal boots on the metal floor. It was damning enough sneaking around in a combat suit when he had Anders by his side, it would be more difficult explaining why he was out in such a manner without his escort.
He felt the eyes of the ship were on him, waiting around the next corner to pounce. Colonel Freedom would pull him to the office demanding to know why he interfered with his XO’s campaign. Or perhaps Pittman would take him by the neck and threaten his life for messing with his girlfriend. The evidence certainly had been left behind in his quarters for that scenario.
Instead, it was only Murillo, eyeing him suspiciously, though his hands shook with fright as they ceased their work behind another stray panel. Remy fought to remain calm himself, remembering his fellow lieutenants’ assessment of this strange young man.
“Aren’t you supposed to be in the engine room,” Remy asked, remembering that got rid of the guy last time they caught him in their way.
“That’s none of your business,” he snapped back, obviously not scared off as easily this time. Remy noticed his irises twitching towards his hands in the panel, no doubt trying to figure out if he should return to his work, or turn this into a proper staring match. A compromise directed them to the grease-smeared armor hanging on his body.
“You’ve already been down there, haven’t you?”
It was more than a shock to hear this simpleton already knew his secrets. Remy feared if Murillo had found out about his adventure on the planet, then it was already all over the ship. Still, he couldn’t take the chance this strange man had found out merely by spying on them, so he decided to play it cool.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about. Lieutenant Anders and I were re-enacting the French Revolution.”
Murillo eyed the armored suit up and down, then leaned in and hushed his voice as if the bridge was listening in. “I know everything, Dr. Duval. I know you went down to the planet. I know you have their data. And I know you’re in grave danger.”
“You don’t know anything,” Remy snapped derisively. He had convince Murillo of that to keep him from sharing his perceived knowledge with anyone else. “That’s why you won’t tell me anything more than some made-up stories.”
“I’m not allowed to talk with you. Even if I wanted to, I can’t. I’m taking a huge chance just telling you to watch your back.”
“From who?”
Murillo ignored his attempt for more information. “Go meet Anders before you’re caught out here in that.”
Despite Remy’s attempt to pry more information from the mysterious Murillo, the Lieutenant had returned to his panel ignoring him while he continued his work. Remy simply gave up and continued on his way to the medical bay.
“He doesn’t know anything,” Remy told himself. He figured the guy was just trying to get attention. Overhearing bits and pieces as he lurked the corridors, he could weave some tale like before to fool the simple minded into believing he was an all-seeing mystic. Even though Murillo was right about his need to be careful, Remy wasn’t going to let himself believe the act.
He turned another corner to find Anders standing outside the medical bay, distraught.
“There you are! We’ve got a problem.” Remy’s mind raced to all the dark possibilities of discovery. He thought of the ways each man on the senior staff would deal with them should they be the ones to uncover this plot. He wondered what horrors the doctor had cooked up for invading his domain.
Instead, Anders scrambled the door to show him a different horror: a dead boy. Sadile was dead, lying face down in the middle of the examination room. There was no blood, and no obvious wound. According to Anders, he had been bludgeoned to death.
“It was the only way,” the Lieutenant explained. “He saw me in the suit and figured what I was up to. He was about to page the bridge, so I hit him with my helmet. It was the only way to keep him quiet.”
Remy shoved him into the room and materialized the door behind him. He didn’t see it as the tragedy he should have since someone would simply scramble a new doctor from his saved pattern. The only concern was hiding the body before someone else found it.
“We can’t scramble it with the inhibitors up,” Anders explained. “What should we do?”
It was funny he should look to the UN on how to get rid of a body, as if they were the ones experienced in covering up these kinds of crimes. Then again, he had experience in finding hidden bodies, so maybe it wasn’t a farfetched notion. He thought for a moment, realizing it would be discovered anywhere on the ship. Then it hit him. The secret room they were here to find would make the perfect spot.
Remy began searching Sadile’s desk for the remote device. “See if he has any kind of remote control on him. We’re looking for a tiny box with a single button.”
Anders set the device on the desk before him. “I already did. He wore this around his wrist like a watch.”
“Ah!”
Remy secured his helmet and gestured for Anders to do the same. When he had tested the radio to make sure they could communicate, he grabbed his friend’s hand and told him to take the body with his other. When the three were connected, Remy pressed the button and bathed them all in a white light, similar to that of the scrambler, but a less intense and shorter burst.
“Whatever you do, Lieutenant, do not remove your helmet until we’re sure we’re inside the room. This other dimension has no atmosphere. It should be no different than if we went on a spacewalk.”
Both men found this other dimension a little disconcerting. The floor beneath them was solid, though it was like walking in sand. Light passed through the walls and objects from their original reality with some difficulty, allowing them to see faint images behind. Remy turned to look at the private rooms, when he noticed nothing passing through the wall to Room 1.
“I think that’s it!” He walked over to the door with a little struggle against the not entirely solid floor. When he felt for the door controls, it was apparent there were none in this dimension. Where the door existed outside this reality, it was a solid wall inside.
They had missed the room, but Remy was confident now. It would be a simple matter of returning to their dimension, entering Room 1, and returning to this realm. As a bonus, he figured they could leave Sadile’s corpse on this side of the room since there was no need for anyone to cross over within sight of it.
When the flash took them to the secret room within Room 1, they looked around at everything within. All the objects from the room had been recreated here in the same exact space: the bed, the night stands with the addition of trays containing medical tools, and a bureau of sorts to store whatever Sadile wanted to hide. The only serious addition to this secret room, was a workstation along the wall with its own computer and scrambler dish. It looked like a Class 5, but Anders admitted it may have been a Class 6 in case the doctor needed something bigger than a person.
The sheets on the bed had been disturbed, as if there had been a patient in this room recently.
“Major Sadile was coming out of this room when I entered medical. Maybe he was working with a patient and scrambled him before confronting me.”
That was an interesting thought, Remy realized. If the inhibitors couldn’t disrupt the scramblers across the dimensional planes, it gave him a new way to sneak on and off the ship. Perhaps at the next port of call, he might be able to sneak Roxanne away without anyone finding out. It had to be tested first.
He fired up the computer and searched through the file directory. The scrambler patterns were easy to find, and interestingly enough, the Doctor had the dimensional button on file. Even after helping him get to the planet, and killing Sadile to cover their tracks, Remy still had doubts concerning Anders’ loyalties. There was too much he found convenient with this guy, and it would be too easy to expl
ain away the murder when no one was really dead in space. It was true these actions would earn him no less than a reprimand if they were caught, yet Remy couldn’t leave things to chance in case Anders was compromised. When the Lieutenant had his back turned studying the tools in the trays, Remy replicated a second controller and slipped it into his suit’s gauntlet.
At least the inhibitor theory had been confirmed. When Anders returned to check his work, Remy shut down the scrambler files and found a batch of medical logs. He opened a random log and the pair read through it together. Inside their helmets, the looks of disgust mirrored each other as a tale of genetic splicing unfolded on the screen. They read the details of an attempt to splice foreign DNA with that of a human being within a scrambler pattern, then materializing the resultant being and watching as the graft failed to take. Sadile’s report documented the agony the person went through as organs failed and the individual died from their own genes; and it was all in cold, technical detail.
“They’re experimenting on people!”
Remy opened another report to read a similar experiment. Report after report after report all detailing attempts at tweaking genetic grafts to merge two beings into a single genetic pattern. Thanks to the molecular scrambler, Dr. Sadile had an endless supply of test subjects. He could run the experiments indefinitely until he produced a successful blending.
It was so disturbing and disgusting, Remy wanted nothing more than to find the Doctor’s own pattern within the files and delete it. He never before wished another human being dead, but the experiments conducted within these walls were so inhumane, Sadile deserved that fate more than all the monsters of history combined. It was finally clear why the miners on the planet below were so determined to take on the entire Space Force of the Republic.
Remy’s own morals kept control of his actions, preventing another crime. He looked to Anders to give him some support, some confirmation that he wasn’t the only one to find this room to be pure evil.
“I had no idea,” was all the Lieutenant could muster. And that was enough for Remy. He shut down the computer and returned the two of them to their own dimension.
“Those miners are fighting pure evil,” Remy told his partner. “How can they hold out against a government that would do this to its own people?”
Anders knew how. There was but one thing they could do. “Fight.”