Chương 299: 126.Naked Malice 2

[Hoshino Shimo's Perspective] The corridor was colder than the medical bay. Not ordinary climate-control cold — the kind where a whole facility is running on its last scraps of power and still fighting, out of pure stubbornness, to keep one specific zone chilled. The floor was dark, anti-slip material, marked with wide stains that had dried and then softened again under humidity, somewhere between the color of rust and the color of blood. Honestly, I had no intention of crouching down to analyze the recipe.

Every few meters, a frame was bolted to the wall — dual-labeled in Imperial script and Federation common code, some kind of transport rig built for large biological specimens. Restraint straps. Joint hooks. Several metal anchor points that had clearly been torn through by force. One frame near the floor still had a strip of semi-transparent membrane stuck to it, like a shed snakeskin, but thicker, wetter, and something I had zero interest in asking what it had once been wrapped around.

"Perfect," I muttered.

"We came here to mine ore, and we've upgraded straight into the Imperial edition of a deep-space survival horror game. Next I'm probably supposed to find a keycard labeled DO NOT OPEN." The flashlight beam swept forward. A portrait on the wall. Friedman III again — the face I'd had shoved into my head hundreds of times growing up, in Federation propaganda, wartime curricula, political satire reels. Under this dead blue light, he somehow managed to look even more like a corpse than usual.

"Why the hell are you everywhere," I said under my breath.

"Even haunted basements hang the boss's photo. Imperial corporate culture really is reliably disgusting." Deeper in, the medical sector branched. Isolation wards on the left. Sample storage on the right. Straight ahead, a heavy airlock demanding higher clearance. The panel beside it was half-shattered, but the core still lived.

I peeled the housing off, jacked in a portable adapter, and the terminal spat out a string of access errors before — like a dying bureaucrat determined to keep its airs right to the end — grudgingly coughed up a directory. I'd only come here for a map. The first thing I saw wasn't a map. It was the project index.

Thermal Zone Adaptation Program VII Biological Weaponization Assessment Host Neural Domestication Log High-Heat Environment Parasite Sample Vault Human Compatibility Trials — Military Clearance Only I stared at those lines, and felt the back of my neck go cold, one degree at a time. Not cold, exactly. More like the specific sensation of your reasoning brain understanding something is very wrong a half-beat before the rest of you catches up.

I'd assumed, at worst, this was an Imperial fringe outpost doing illegal biological research. The Empire doing something depraved isn't news. The Empire developing a conscience would be. But these categories weren't ordinary "research." This was treating organisms, soldiers, environment, and battlefield as segments of one single, integrated supply chain. To put it plainly: This wasn't a place studying monsters.

This was a place studying how to turn monsters into weapons, how to make those weapons comfortable on a planet like this one, and how to deliver them safely onto an enemy. I took a breath and got disinfectant, metallic rust, and something sweeter and rotten drifting up from somewhere deeper inside. Faint. But I recognized it. Anyone who's read too many medical incident reports, watched too much field triage footage, eventually learns that smell.

It's what's left behind when organic matter is kept alive, against its own interest, for longer than it should have been — and finally gives up. I went to the sample storage room first. A poor decision. But standing still and letting my imagination run felt worse, so I let my eyes take the hit instead. The door slid open. Cold air cut out from inside like a blade. Three neat rows of large cultivation tanks filled the room.

Most had lost power, the fluid inside gone black and cloudy, only the emergency blue light at each base throwing the shapes floating within into blurred, swollen, stomach-turning silhouettes. A handful still ran on weak life support, fluid crawling slowly through the tubing — like something behind the glass, breathing, very lightly. I didn't want to look closer. But the fatal flaw in human wiring is that the more you know you shouldn't look, the more you need to.

First tank: the dissected remains of a six-legged, silicon-based organism — probably one of this planet's small native species, the kind that could operate near the lava edges, cut open and reassembled with neural bundles and glandular sacs that had never belonged to its original body. Second tank: something larger, soft fleshy folds grown along the inside of an exoskeleton, like something else had been quietly stuffed inside a hard shell. Third tank— I stopped. The label was still lit.

HR-09 / High-Heat Environment Constrictor-Type Specimen Status: Disposal Pending Approval Notes: Strong positive neural response in human targets. High risk if released in groups. Unsealing outside controlled zones not recommended. I stared at the empty silhouette in the tank for two seconds. Then, very calmly:"Ah."

"So the disgusting thing from earlier was just not recommended. The Empire's disaster-management standards keep finding new ways to lower the floor." The side of the tank showed obvious impact fractures. They ran outward from the inside. Which meant the thing that had grabbed Jess hadn't simply escaped because the facility lost power. Someone — or some protocol — had still been keeping it contained right up until this place fell apart. My stomach went colder.

If something like that was just one of the samples, what did the main project actually look like? I photographed the data, dumped it into my portable module, and kept going. The next room was an observation chamber. The glass had shattered long ago. Scattered across the floor: monitoring slates, medical restraints, broken syringes, an overturned chair. A few sheets of hardcopy still hung on the wall. I could only read part of the Imperial text, but the key terms were enough to reconstruct the meaning.

Thermal Stability Host Rejection Brainstem Synchronization Compliance Theater Deployment Cost Theater deployment cost. Standing in front of those pages, I almost wanted to laugh. Not because anything was funny. Because people are sometimes far too good at writing hell out as an administrative flowchart. One column for parasitization success rate. The next for recommended weapons configuration. The next for estimated cost per unit deployed.

As long as the formatting is clean enough, corpses and monsters both quietly become a line item in a budget proposal. Is this only something the Empire could do?... No. Give anyone enough power, enough distance, and a cheap enough conscience, and any government could do this. The Empire's just had more practice. It looks like a family trade by now. I followed the maintenance corridor behind the observation room downward. Past this point, the facility stopped looking like anywhere meant for ordinary people.

The passage narrowed. Wall markers shifted from medical white to warning yellow, then vanished halfway under some dark viscous coating. Drag marks multiplied on the floor — not just biological slime, but the scrapes of something heavy hauled in a hurry. The pipes overhead let out an occasional contracting groan, like a fist slowly closing somewhere inside the walls. I cracked another terminal, trying to pull a deeper layout. This time the system threw a warning.

Core Growth Sector — Maximum Clearance Required Primary Containment Status: Unconfirmed WARNING: Do not initiate Wake Protocol during loss of pressure, thermal control failure, or main power fluctuation. I stared at the words Wake Protocol and felt a vein start throbbing at my temple.

"Who would even want to wake something like that up—" I shut my own mouth before I finished. The answer was obvious. The Empire. Or, more precisely: some particular genius inside the Empire who'd decided that if it bites, we might as well point it at our enemies first. Unauthorized duplication: this narrative has been taken without consent. Report sightings. I was about to scroll further when a very faint sound brushed my ear. Not comms.

More like the tremor metal makes when a large piece of equipment briefly bites back into current after a long silence. Bzzt. Then, under my boots, a very faint vibration. Faint enough that if this place hadn't been so dead quiet, I might have written it off as imagination. I slowly looked up. The corridor ahead was black. Only far down at the end, a single emergency light blinked at long intervals, like an eye about to close for good. Then I saw it. Not the whole thing. Just a detail.

Under a half-open quarantine door on the right, a wet, gleaming trace was slowly seeping out from the gap — some kind of viscous fluid. The line it left was fresh, not yet fully set. Something had moved through here recently. I raised the beam. The door plate had been half scraped off. Only a few words survived.... PRIMARY...... NEURAL...... STILL ACTIVE... I stood there, and it felt like even the air in this hallway was holding its breath. Jess's voice came through my earpiece. Weak, but clear.

"Shimo... you still alive?"

"For now," I said, eyes on the door, keeping my voice low.

"How's your end?"

"Foot hurts. Mood's terrible. Thinking about filing a formal complaint against the medical professional who abandoned her patient."

"Good. That means your mental state's stable." She was quiet for a second, then asked:"You ran into something you shouldn't have again, didn't you." I looked at the wet trace slowly widening under the door, and at that glaring STILL ACTIVE still sitting in the corner of my visor. Then I heard a sound from behind the door. Not footsteps. Not an impact. More like something very large, in a very tight space, slowly taking a different breath. I tightened my grip on the combat knife. My throat had gone a little dry.

"... Jess," I said.

"If I'm not back in five minutes, start yelling at me."

"Just yelling?"

"What else did you have in mind?" She actually laughed.

"I'll think about it." I almost laughed too. Then the sound came again from behind the door. This time, considerably clearer. I eased the door open a little further, turned sideways, and looked through the pathetically narrow gap. No fanged monster. No fresh horror crawling out of a cultivation tank.... Good. What wasn't good was that what was in there was more trouble than either of those things. People. And not ordinary people. Imperial soldiers.

One glance and I could already count four or five in plain sight, not counting whoever was standing in the blind spots. Standard high-heat combat gear. The guns weren't for decoration. In a normal setting, this configuration is called a security detail. In an Imperial underground bio-weapons facility, it's called today is not my day. I reached one very calm conclusion. Can't win this fight. Not right now.

Which meant the rational choice was to pretend I hadn't seen any of it, back away quietly, and go find a route that looked slightly less like suicide. The step I took backward never made it across that line. Something hard and hot pressed against the back of my head. Light. Precise. Thermal sidearm. Every hair on my body stood up at once. My spine felt like someone had traced an ice needle straight down it. Outside was a planet that could dry a person to jerky.

In here was cold enough to be an Imperial-funded haunted house. And in that exact second, an entirely unreasonable chill ran down the back of my neck anyway. The person behind me stood close enough that I could smell the suit — sweat, machine oil, stale cheap tobacco baked into the fabric.

"Miss," he said, unhurried, almost polite, like he was giving directions at a train station.

"Lost?" Perfect. Today's scenario had officially been upgraded from deep-space survival horror to field study: Imperial human garbage. I took a breath, crushed the urge to throw a backward elbow and find out whether I'd get vaporized or shot through the skull first, and said, with complete honesty:"I was looking for the bathroom. You buying that?" He laughed, low. Not the laugh of a normal person hearing a joke. The laugh of a cat that's caught its mouse and isn't in any rush to finish it.

"Sure," he said, nudging the barrel forward another inch.

"With your luck, you really do seem like the type who finds the one place she shouldn't." Then he shoved me through the door at gunpoint. I stepped inside whether I wanted to or not, and the moment I did, I understood this was worse than what I'd glimpsed through the gap. This wasn't a few patrol soldiers gathered to smoke and complain. It was a converted control room, turned into a temporary nest. Military supply crates stacked along the walls. Two terminal stations still lit.

A corner cluttered with half-stripped weapon parts and half-eaten field rations. Under the disinfectant and rust, the air carried the specific, ripened funk that only builds up after people have been packed into a sealed space too long — sweat, dust, smoke, can-grease, cheap alcohol, unwashed hands, all fermenting together into one very specific sentence: There's a pack of bastards in here.

"Yo, Scott, what took you so—" The one walking toward me was tall and thin, his face the joint investment of malnutrition and a foul mouth. He'd been wearing a lazy grin — the second he saw me, it curdled.

"... You went for a leak and came back with a woman?" It was like someone had hit a keyword trigger in the room. Every soldier who'd been talking among themselves turned their heads at once. I swear, the temperature in that room didn't rise or fall. It just got dirtier. I'd seen that look before. War zones. Black ports. Refugee transit hubs. Anywhere discipline and order had already given up on itself. That look is like flies on a garbage heap — you never fully clear them out.

Greed, curiosity, vulgarity, calculation, and a particular, sleazy heat that only shows up when someone's pricing a person like an object. Helmet, armor, and all, my stomach still turned. Sick enough to cramp. I quietly memorized every one of their faces. If I walked out of here alive, I wouldn't mind knocking these bastards' bones into anatomy models, one at a time.

"Nice, Scott."

"Didn't know this rock could grow a Fed girl."

"Commander's gonna—" The sentence never finished. The facility PA cracked to life with a burst of static. The room went still. Then a male voice, thick with interference and impatience, dropped through the speaker.

"Quit dragging your feet up there and get down to Level One." The bad feeling already sitting in my gut grew teeth. Because I knew exactly what trash like this didn't get called down for. Not a book club. The man holding the gun on me swore and shoved me forward.

"Move." They marched me down. The stairwell ran darker than the level above — most of the emergency lights dead, the few survivors flickering weakly. The white coating on the walls peeled like dead skin, unidentified drag marks staining the lower sections. The further down, the heavier the rot-and-chemical smell got, until the whole facility felt like it was running a slow fever. By the time I actually stepped into the ground-floor hall, I had to admit this planet really did love me.

It just kept mailing surprises straight to my face. Because I saw Jess. She was pinned against a half-tipped metal chair, a man's knife at her throat. Her injured leg had been lashed roughly to the floor. Her face looked terrible, sweat beading at her hairline — but her eyes were still infuriatingly bright. Bright like a blade that hadn't broken. The second she saw me, her expression didn't crack. Didn't panic. She just gave me one fast, sweeping look. I gave her back the smallest shake of my head I could manage.

The meaning was simple. Not yet. Anything stupid right now, and we'd both just die with even less dignity than we currently had.

"B-boss," a short, heavyset man said nearby, his voice so saturated with something disgusting it practically dripped off the end of the sentence.

"There's a woman." His face was round the way faces get when they're fed poorly for too long, but his eyes were as filthy as anything you'd find floating up out of a storm drain. He stared at Jess and me while he said it, wearing the exact expression that made me want to press his skull directly into the facility's waste line, just to see whether Imperial sewage could get him even slightly cleaner.

"Shut it," the man out front said, not even turning around.

"That's why you're still a virgin." The soldiers around him snickered. Low, rotten laughter, like a pack of strays that had just dug half a spoiled steak out of a dumpster. The one they called boss had a goatee. Clearly the head of this pack — a little older than the rest, armor in better shape, holding his knife with the ease of long habit. The particular, rotten confidence in his eyes was especially irritating. Not the kind of man who simply snaps and gets violent.

The kind who's spent years leaning on whatever scrap of power he holds to grind down anyone weaker, until his conscience wore flat from the repetition. He walked toward me, looking me over the way you'd size up merchandise at a stall, wondering whether it was worth marking up.

"Two Federal soldiers," he said, letting out a short laugh.

"All the way out here in this godforsaken hole. Care to tell me why?" I looked at him. Inside, I was already running the math at full speed. Distance. Headcount. My condition and Jess's. They had guns, knives, position. If I forced it now, best case I dropped one. Jess's leg was ruined — she couldn't run. Outside was a three-hundred-degree storm. No idea how many more Imperial soldiers were still up top. If the Yukikaze had received the signal, in theory, they'd be trying to find me. In theory.

And everyone who's ever bet their life on "in theory" on a battlefield usually dies in a way that reads very educationally to whoever's left. So all I could do was keep stalling.

"Why don't you go ask your mother." The slap landed hard and clean. My head rang. My vision blurred. My mouth filled instantly with the taste of rust — not a figure of speech, actual blood. Half my face burned. The dull echo of the swing still hummed in my ear. I turned my head aside and spat the blood onto the floor. Red. Blindingly red.

"That all you've got?" I looked up at him. The boss raised an eyebrow.

"Interesting." He stood, turned, and walked toward Jess. Every nerve in my body went tight at once.

"Wonder if this mouth's just as tough." Damn it. He'd done it on purpose. He knew exactly which leg was hurt, and he planted his boot on it anyway. At first Jess just breathed through clenched teeth, shoulders locked and shaking, sweat rolling down her temple drop by drop. She kept even the sound of it pressed down — like she'd rather die than let this trash hear her in pain. But the boss ground his heel in harder, like he was making a point of grinding through whatever endurance she had left.

In the end, it tore out of her anyway. Short. Low. It still felt like someone had driven a knife straight into my skull.

"Motherfucker — come at me if you've got the guts!" I screamed at him. Only then did the boss lift his foot and turn to look at me. Whatever last scrap of humanity had been sitting in his eyes finished falling away, exposing nothing underneath but rotten meat.

"Fatty. Hold her down." The short, heavyset one lunged at me like he'd just won a prize, grabbed my wrist, and slammed me hard into the corner of the table. I fought it — all it got me was the feeling that my shoulder and arm were about to come apart at the joint. Between the mess upstairs, that slap, and everything this garbage planet's gravity and heat had already wrung out of me, whatever strength I had left was probably only enough to file a complaint with fate.

And fate clearly wasn't taking appointments today. It was only in that moment that I truly understood what they meant to do. Not because I was naive. Because even at the worst of it, some instinct in a person still hopes things won't go quite that far. Hopes the other side only wants to hit, question, threaten, humiliate. Hopes that even if the world is rotten, at least it's rotten with some kind of logic to it.

But the single greatest talent belonging to this pack of Imperial trash is proving exactly how wasted that hope really is. I snapped my knee up and drove it hard toward the boss. It didn't land clean — just grazed his side — but it was enough to make him curse and stagger back half a step.

"You fucking animal!" My breath was coming in ragged pulls, my wrist gone numb where it was pinned, the edges of my vision starting to darken. Jess struggled once beside me, but the knife at her throat kept her from moving further; all she could do was glare at the lot of them. Her eyes looked like fire. But between the leg and the angle pinning her down, that fire looked more likely to burn herself up first. In that one second, I actually started running the worst case in my head.

If I stall thirty more seconds, what does that buy us. If I fake giving in, can Jess find her opening. If someone comes from outside, which way will they come from. And if nobody comes— BOOM!! The impact shattered every thought in my head at once. Not an explosion. More like a massive slab of metal had driven itself into the room with exactly the attitude of today I'm taking your front door and your face down, both at once.

First the main doors — already half-wrecked once by that mutant bug — blew clean off, frame and shattered insulation panels and a wall of dust exploding inward together. Then the front half of a lander, torn to pieces and still sparking at the edges, drove into the hall like someone had thrown a steel javelin the size of a building. The floor shook hard enough that I nearly bit through my own tongue. The Imperial soldiers were half a beat slow to react. No — to be accurate, it wasn't that they were slow.

Nobody expects a breach method like this. Neither did I. Normal people breach a door with explosives, cutters, or a hack. Our side, apparently, just rams half a lander straight through it. No class whatsoever. Completely effective. Through the churning dust and the strobing red alarm lights, a heavy silhouette stepped out of the wreckage. The powered armor still carried char marks from the storm outside, dark red scratches ground into the shoulder and leg plating by metallic dust.

In her right hand she carried something that looked nothing like a tool for reasoning with anyone — a battle axe. The armor made the whole frame stand taller, harder, more like an execution machine that had learned to breathe on its own. One look was all I needed. Maki Kushima. The moment she stepped through, the whole hall felt like it had been pinned under something more dangerous than anything else in the room. Not the heat. Not the gravity. Not the monster.

It was the sound the air makes when someone who normally keeps her emotions locked down tight finally tears the whole lock off at once. She saw Jess first. Then me. Then the hand pinning me down, and the blood on the floor. And I watched, very clearly, as she went still for half a second. Just half a second. But it was more frightening than the entire storm outside. When she finally spoke, her voice came out hoarse enough that it barely sounded like her own.

"You..." She took one more step forward. The battle axe shifted angle, faintly, under the armor's power assist, its edge catching the alarm light's cold red glare.

"... What did you do to her?"