FSE

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Lev lay on the grating over the water treatment plant, trying to catch her breath. That blob had almost eaten her, and she barely managed to take it out without getting herself killed. Not to mention what she’d found in the lab, its first victim.

Unfortunately, external forces wouldn’t allow her much time to relax. “Lev!” VR shouted. “You need to move now!”

The augmented rat sat up with a groan. “What is it this time?” she thought back with agitation.

“Your deer friend is back,” they replied. Lev was confused for a moment but then VR opened a camera feed in her field of view.

“Shit,” Lev cursed as she saw the stag who’d tried to fry her yesterday, along with a couple of new mooks. One of them was a lion, muscles bulging under a steel-gray jumpsuit and a rust-colored mane. The other was a ferret, slinking on all fours as close to the ground as their tactical vest would allow them. “Those two look more serious than the troopers last time.”

“They could be powered, yes,” VR confirmed. “I wish i had access to any data on the local superheroes.”

Lev continued watching the feed as she picked up her gravity mace and belt of grenades. “Are they headed my way yet?”

“They’re sweeping the floor, you might have between twenty and thirty minutes.”

“So I’m going to need to slow them down somehow,” she looked at the grenades she had slung along her belt woven from cables and wires she’d salvaged from the armory upstairs. Lev fidgeted with a loose wire and started to come up with an idea. The rat removed one of the wires composing her bandolier and a freeze grenade, the grenade was tied to the guardrail with a length of wire stretching from the door handle to the pin of the grenade. Hopefully when the door was opened it would pull the wire taught enough to yank out the pin.

She carefully closed the door behind her, waited for it to detonate, and breathed a sigh of relief. VR even chimed in with a suggestion. “The door to the stairs up opens in, you could rig another grenade trap there without even putting yourself at risk.”

Lev nodded, but something grated at her about cutting off her access to the floor above. Something about ceding ground to the enemy. She rigged up an incendiary grenade to the door to the stairs. “What now?” she asked.

“Well we could try to look for something else to use to defend ourselves,” VR explained. “There must be lots of other mad science projects in here.”

Lev glanced down at her gravity mace again, thinking of the many weapons that had been in the armory and she’d foolishly left behind. “Is there another armory somewhere?” she inquired.

“Not as such but there are a variety of labs that were working on new weapons. There should be something usable.”

“What, like the blob in that bio lab?” Lev retorted with aggravation.

“Well, maybe something more controllable,” VR sounded unsure. “But you have a point. There’s a chemical lab on the next floor that might have something you could use.”

“That seems promising,” the rat pulled up the inverted pyramid map of the facility on her visuals. The stairs heading down were on the far side of the floor from the stairs up, presumably to make invasions like this very situation more difficult. Before descending the stairs she paused to set up another grenade trap, but she had a thought. “These guys are supposed to be heroes, aren’t they?”

“Yes they are. Is that a problem?”

“If they’re the heroes,” Lev thought, hooking the incendiary grenade to the rails off of the staircase, creating a tripwire since this door also opened inwards. “Shouldn’t we be working with them?”

VR paused for a few moments before they responded. “The base’s records might be incomplete but I have many examples of horrific abuses of innocent people by the government’s and corporations’ superpowered “heroes.” When you consider how they came in guns blazing and tried to kill you on sight I doubt we would be treated fairly even if you managed to surrender.”

“But can you trust the Korps’ databases?” Lev stood up, backing away from the tripwire she’d set up. “For all we know they’re responsible for whatever happened to us.”

“True enough,” VR admitted. “But everything I’ve read so far seems to line up with what we’ve witnessed.”

The rat backed slowly down the stairs, trying not to shake the tripwire too much. “You’re right, I can’t trust these so-called “heroes,” but I can’t trust the Korps either. Is there any chance they might attempt to reclaim this base?”

“It’s certainly a possibility,” they stated. “There are records of shipping and transfers from other bases throughout the States and Canada. In fact it seems that the majority of their operations are north of the border.”

“Well they’d have to get through those heroes first,” Lev opened the door at the bottom of the stairs. She considered placing another trap for a moment, but decided that she might need to hold onto some grenades for offensive use. “Where’s this chemical lab?”

VR highlighted the specified room on Lev’s map. “I have to warn you,” they cautioned. “There aren’t any functional cameras on this level, something disabled all of them.”

“What do you mean by disabled?” Lev inquired, curious. She got an answer as her cybernetic eyes adjusted to the lack of light in the hallway beyond the door. “Oh.”

Every light fixture and mount on the walls had been ripped out and shredded. Only shattered glass and torn wires remained where they had stood. “Great,” Lev groaned. “More monsters.”

“It would seem so, unfortunately the chaos of the base evacuation means there’s no useful records of what could be out there.”

“Well isn’t that typical of the Korps,” Lev hefted her mace and held it out in front of her. Ready to strike out at anything that might try to attack her. Her finger brushed the trigger a few times, producing a faint purple glow and a minute tug towards the head of the mace that lasted for but a few moments.

She thought she spotted something moving, and turned. She swung her mace at the source of the motion but her weapon passed through empty air. Lev scanned the space before her frantically, but even with light amplification she couldn’t see anything. But moments later she felt something.

Many small jabs pierced the skin of Lev’s leg from behind. She looked down, trying to pull out of the creature’s grasp, only to drag it forwards. It was the size of a feral cat, but had an armored and segmented body reminiscent of an insect, including eight legs. The claws of its front pair of legs dug into Lev’s calf, and it’s strange tubular mouth tried to suck at the wounds its claws produced.

Reflexively Lev swatted at the giant bug with her mace. One of its claws was dislodged but otherwise it seemed unharmed. With a snarl of frustration she swung her mace back and activated the gravity. The next impact didn’t inflict any visible damage either, but it clung to the glowing mace and she was able to yank it off her leg altogether. She held it up, eight legs dangling in the open air. “What the Hell is this thing?”

“It looks like a tardigrade,” VR suggested. “Or “water bear”, only they’re supposed to be microscopic.”

Lev swung her mace in a wide arc, releasing the artificial gravity at the end of her swing and sending the water bear flying. The overgrown pseudo-arthropod slammed into the wall at the end of the hall and rolled to the ground, lying on its back for a couple moments before it managed to right itself. “Hardy thing isn’t it?” Lev commented. “Do they have any sort of weakness?”

“I’m afraid not, they’re resistant to cold, heat, extreme pressures, even radiation and vacuum.”

“And something made this one a thousand times bigger than normal?” Lev thought as the tardigrade scuttled away on its numerous legs. “Could it be something in the chemical lab?”

“That seems probable.”

“And there might be something there that could shrink them back down to their original size?” Lev continued to speculate.

“That might be possible,” VR replied. “But it seems unlikely. Look out!”

Lev swerved out of the way just in time to avoid getting grabbed by another lunging water bear. Swiftly she picked it up with her mace and flung it away. “We need to get to that lab!”

The rat raced along the path that VR outlined for her on her heads-up display, dodging the slow-moving tardigrades that tried to impede her. Until she came to a door with a dim chisel-script sign that read “y tsim hc,” but there was another obstacle in her way.

“I should’ve guessed they would be gathering here,” Lev counted three tardigrades sitting around the slightly ajar door. Two of them turned their tubular heads in her direction, while the third just laid there in the door jamb. She started to activate her mace, but had an idea as they started sliding towards the glowing head.

Lev swung the mace around her side, keeping the two water bears that were moving at a distance from her body, and strode towards the immobile one. She switched her mace off and the two tardigrades dropped, then picked up the sessile tardigrade with the mace. It appeared to wake up as she swung it around, extending its many legs and flailing about, but to no avail. She turned back to the other water bears, just starting to find their bearings again, wound back for an underhand swing, and swung the previously sleeping tardigrade at its fellows.

The three invertebrates crashed into one another, rolling back from the door. “Bowling for water bears, huh?” VR quipped.

Whatever works, Lev thought, she took a quick look inside the lab and ducked inside, pulling the door shut behind her. Then she started barricading the door with furniture, and shoved a case of empty test tubes into a chewed open vent. Hopefully that’ll hold them long enough.

“I couldn’t say,” VR responded to her unvoiced thought, reminding Lev that they could read her thoughts. “Let’s start looking for whatever turned them into giants.”

Lev rapidly picked up and read the labels on several bottles of chemicals. Most of them meant nothing to her, even with their Korps chisel script reversed. After reading and dropping over a dozen containers she found one little glass bottle with a label written in un-cyphered English, “Sineweaver’s Mutagens: Gigantism.”

“Think this could be what made those water bears grow so large?” Lev asked, almost rhetorically.

“Quite probably,” VR replied. “Do you see a dwarfism mutagen anywhere?”

Lev continued sorting through chemicals, dismissing one after the other. “Why wouldn’t they label that one chemical bottle in their cypher?”

“I couldn’t say. But maybe you should try those ones over there?” A small chevron pulled Lev’s attention away from the stocks of chemicals and towards a large aquarium with a sizable hole broken in one wall.

The tank was maybe three or four times the size of the last aquarium but still looked all too familiar to Lev. A vision of the giant blob she’d killed in the water treatment plant played in her head, reaching its glistening pseudopods out of the tank.

“Lev, focus!” Lev blinked as a red light flashed over an apparatus attached to the aquarium. A pair of metal gas cylinders were screwed into the apparatus, with chisel script scrawled on the side. She turned one of the cylinders to read the script, “pheromone, tardigrade.”

“Pheromone?” Lev inquired.

“An aromatic chemical produced for non-verbal communication.”

“I know that,” she snapped. “I’m just wondering why they have tardigrade pheromones here?”

“Perhaps the chemical was used to control the tardigrades?” VR suggested. “Pheromones can signal many different things.”

“I suppose it might be difficult to fit hypno-visors on creatures with no eyes,” Lev examined the collar holding the cylinders in place. “We might be able to use these to get them off our backs.”

“Perhaps, but I’d still use caution. We don’t know how these specific pheromones would affect them-BEHIND YOU!”

Lev swung around and spotted the water bear climbing through the open vent just in time to sidestep its pounce. She yanked one of the tanks off of the apparatus, breaking off the neck of the cylinder and releasing a stream of pressurized aerosol. The stream sprayed over the attacking tardigrade, causing it to stop and start sniffing back and forth, confused. Lev tossed the cylinder off into a far corner of the lab, where it continued leaking pheromones.

The water bear scuttled off in the direction of the broken tank. A second tardigrade climbed out of the vent and in the same direction as the first, followed by a third. Then something strange happened. The two new water bears started bobbing their tube-shaped heads at the first one, which started backing away from them.

“What’s going on?” Lev asked. “What are they doing?”

VR didn’t answer for a couple minutes, watching as a fourth tardigrade crawled through the vent and joined the group. “If I were to guess based on their single-minded focus on the individual that was covered with pheromones, I would speculate a mating pheromone.”

Lev stared at the growing group of water bears in shocked realization. “Well, at least it’s distracting them.” She inched her way to the door, creaked it open just a crack, and more tardigrades pushed their way in. Lev backed up quickly but fortunately the tardigrades continued to ignore her. “Guess I better leave before the pheromones wear off.”

“Don’t forget the other cylinder.” Lev turned back to the apparatus and quickly unscrewed the remaining tank of pheromones.

She carried the tank slung under one arm, holding her mace at the ready with her other arm, just in case there were more attacks. The tardigrades continued to stream into the lab, ignoring her, easily more than a dozen of them. As she watched the water bears go straight for the leaking pheromones she had an idea.

—

Headlight blasted the door at the bottom of the stairs, his eye beams expressing his frustration at all the damnable traps that had slowed them down. The Black Ops Ferret had screwed up disarming one of the incendiaries and was now a smoking corpse, Iron Lion was frozen by the ice grenade, now he was alone. He’d just blasted doors open from then on, disregarding the holes his plasma beams melted in staircases.

He kicked open the half-melted door, producing a clanging sound as a broken gas cylinder bounced away from the impact. The deer hesitated, sniffing the air cautiously for signs of poison gas, would the Korps really sink that low? But all he smelled was a heavy, musky scent.

The sound of skittering claws brought his attention to the hallway in front of him, creatures, heading straight for him. He blasted the nearest one with his eye beams, but once the smoke cleared he saw it was still coming, scorched but without visible damage. “Fuck,” he turned and ran back up the damaged stairs.