Adult-FanFiction.org : Inuyasha / Yashahime

The Ark
By : Dunkelgelb
Category: InuYasha > General
Views: 2034 -:- Recommendations : 0 -:- Currently Reading : 0
Disclaimer: I do not own InuYasha, nor make money from this story.
Chapter List
- 31
- 32
- 33
This is all current material, and will become Chapter Two of Reroute to Remain
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
The human blood is far too thin
The life in it much too fragile
DNA code twisted into form
An ancient dream will now be reborn!
Save the best - strip away the rest
Every weakness, every bleakness will be erased
New flesh...for a new world!
Men in white clothes performing the ultimate test!
Demonic...Science!
A high price for a passion so intense
Demonic...Science!
This world no longer makes any sense!
This is the era!
This is the time!
A new dawn arrives!
- Arch Enemy, Demonic Science
A.D. 2068
Deep down inside of the south-western Russian Federation's Stavropol province and nestled between the frigid waters of the Caspian and Black seas, the beautiful reds and oranges of an extremely brief autumn's foliage had all but rotted away and winter had just begun to tighten its uncompromising stranglehold upon the flat and nearly-featureless land, transforming the once-healthy grass into empty husks of withered fiber and the trees into twisted skeletons of barren wood. Any animals that hadn't migrated to warmer, less meager areas had already dug in for the season, taking cover from the weather by burrowing deep down underground and hoping that a tiny alcove of cold dirt would be better survivable than bare, bone-freezing air. Even though the dusk temperature had fallen below the metric freezing point of water, this bitter freeze had only begun to spread itself, and frigid murder lay in wait - Russian winters were characteristically brutal.
The dark, angular outlines of a small city loomed deceptively high on one horizon of this grayed-out and lifeless steppe, brooding and monolithic in its eerie silence. It exercised such silence through sheer practice; Achikulak had been abandoned, empty, and completely devoid of indigenous population for well over one year, thrust into total disuse by its residents' fear of war with neighboring Chechnya. The fuming, often violent anti-Russian sentiment there - such anger as a whole dating back more than a century - had come to drive away the residents of the most closely bordering Russian cities, and none of the refugees possessed any particular inclination to return.
In the past, Chechnyan incursions that leapt across the border and punched deep into Russian territory were not a totally unheard occurence, and though Chechnya itself had long been officially separated from the Russian Federation for several decades, few dared to take up continued residence in such an inhospitable, potentially-dangerous location; the ones that did were none other than the soldiers of the Russian Army themselves, each and every man well-protected from any impromptu assault by the steel-reinforced walls of their concrete fortress, a hardened stronghold entrenched three meters down into the earth, two kilometers southeast of the dead city's outskirts. On this night, anticipation of a Chechnyan attack in this buffer zone ran higher than usual, and each and every member of the base garrison had been placed on a correspondingly-high state of alert, their fully-automatic assault weapons ready for battle, sights zeroed precisely and charging handles slapped hard forward. The night's atmosphere oozed thickly with tension, and trigger fingers twitched absent-mindedly across the board.
Something wicked this way comes.
Reroute to Remain
Prologue: Out of the Silent Planet
Chapter One: Fortress Achikulak - Let the Nightmare Begin!
A man named Vladimir Andropov, the base's commanding officer, a middle-aged Bryansk native and decorated colonel in the Russian Third Army, stood high up in one of the base's woefully-unheated but thankfully-enclosed corner watch towers, his binoculars clamped firmly between gloved hands and his magnified gaze sweeping uneasily through the retracted armor slats of the hexagonal structure's southern windows, fanning out over the quiet fields of dead grass that lay to the southeast. Grunting in disconcertion, he allowed his binoculars to drop down roughly to his chest, held there by the canvas strap that encompassed his neck. He then slid the right sleeve of his heavy, canvas parka up his arm and glanced at his wristwatch, frowning as he read the hour. As a commissioned officer, it was his task to ensure that all military operations within his jurisdiction ran smoothly and on time; it was tremendously difficult to do so when the core talent of such operations did not strive to be as prompt. By the colonel's watch, Doctor Iskendervich Gero was already running nearly three hours late for the surgical procedure that he was designated to execute, and his glaring lack of punctuality continued to make great strides toward throwing the entire schedule of Operation Shadows Fall into total disarray.
Worse, Andropov himself was an unwilling participant in the ordeal; had he gotten his way, he would have ditched the whole project right from the start. Personally, though, he would have set up a tac-nuke in the below-ground ammunition dump and
high-tailed it, given the chance. When the general scheme of things boiled down to no-holds-barred, front-line ground combat, he didn't trust any weapon that wasn't equipped with either a set of wheels or a charging handle, and the "jean-so-min-get", or whatever incomprehensible, impossible-to-pronounce word Gero had been using to describe his project, was anything but.
In the colonel's eyes, the intended final product, a supposedly Grail-like superweapon and the thesis of the clandestine scientific operation churning silently beneath his feet, was a thinly-veiled perversion - Gero's perversion - of the human body. The good "doctor" had been reducing the very essence of life itself to a set of cold, indifferent numbers, variables, and equations, trying to square the proverbial circle and antidifferentiate human consciousness with his own corrupt brand of unrecognizably-mutated calculus, and by God, it looked like he was about to succeed. The most damning thing to Andropov, though, was the fact that, evidently, he had permission to do it.
Gero had the bureaucratical entirety of the damned Kremlin itself running at his beckon call, wooing its military officials with the promise of a certain rebel Chechnyan government crushed and broken forevermore.
Thus, High Command had ordered Shadows Fall to be carried out with the utmost priority, and Andropov could do nothing else but abide by their word. As an Army colonel, he was under constant watch and scrutiny by the highest echelons of Russian military regulation; actively disobeying orders could get him thrown out of the ranks and exiled to Siberia, or worse, dragged out into some dark, dingy Moscow alleyway and shot, left alone and dead inside of a filthy, rusting dumpster. Knowing that, he tried to stay ignorant of most everything that transpired in the secret research laboratory far below him, minding his own business wherever and whenever possible. His own rank betrayed him, though, and plausible deniability had long been fundamentally infeasible for him. His position forced him to pay close attention to the nature of Gero's work.
Too close. Andropov couldn't identify positively what exactly had disturbed him so deftly; it might have been the lifeless, soulless, and damnedly haunting look in that strange, young man's jade-green eyes, or it might have been the way that even without anaesthesia, that very same fellow didn't thrash or scream, didn't jerk, didn't even twitch when Gero's surgical saw came down upon his flesh, his hot, red blood spattering out onto the vinyl coating of the silver-haired scientist's lab coat. Either way, the base commander had come to the stark, damning realization that he was caught up in the dead, wrenching center of something twisted, and a something that he harbored the whole-hearted intention of bailing out from, if his prognosis of the general situation ever struck him correctly.
Andropov turned away from his observation window and glanced at a lamp-lit road map splayed out on a metal table to his right, clasping the hazel length of his wiry beard in one hand as he pored over it. Gero's most probable route of travel ran nearly parallel with the northern Chechnyan border, coming as close as two-hundred meters to it, in some places. Two-hundred meters, Andropov calculated, was the ideal operational distance for a shoulder-launched, rocket-propelled grenade, and he found himself hoping, almost praying, even, that a few Chechnyan rebels were feeling up for a "stroll" on this night, at least one of them being thoughtful enough to take his rocket launcher along with him.
The base commander would be enjoying no such luck, however - the hazed arc of a small automobile's halogen headlights had just crested the edge of a far-off hill, causing the army colonel to perk up from his subversional reverie. Snagging up his binoculars once again, he zeroed in closely on the vehicle's outline; short and slender, it appeared to be an army staff car, consistent with Gero's usual choice of transport. It ambled along at an unhurried, leisurely velocity, making no attempt to speed up or weave from side to side, even though Andropov determined it to be well within the firing angle of five, perhaps six heavy, anti-aircraft-grade automatic cannons. Few men were cocky - or stupid - enough to approach a Russian military installation unannounced with such blatant disregard for the danger inherent to such an act, and little doubt remained in Andropov's mind as to the identity of the driver, at that moment; it was most definitely Gero, and Shadows Fall would continue, after all.
Grudgingly, the colonel drew his radio handset from his belt, switched it on, then spoke a simple order into it. "Open the gates," he growled distractedly, plopping the black fur of his ushanka onto his heavy-haired head, exiting his watch post, and descending the steel frame of its stairway with hasty gait.
At once, two soldiers received the command and unlocked the chain-link fence that acted as the base's outermost entrance, pushing it open and allowing Iskendervich Gero's car to enter. It hardly slowed down at all, rolling right on through the sudden opening with considerable velocity as it navigated its way into the depths of the Achikulak base. Gero's brainchild, the product of Operation Shadows Fall and the culmination of the most lurid and most grisly of his dark, sinister research awaited him, lying dormant deep underground and just waiting to be brought to life.
Six circular, concentric rings of solid concrete armor separated Gero from his goal; each of them had been erected with the precise purpose of protecting the nuclear missile silo situated at the exact center of the compound, and they grew progressively more tenacious in their defensive capability as the cyberneticist and his entourage ventured further inward. Long range anti-tank cannons and heavy-caliber, water-cooled machine guns lined the perimeter of these walls, the separation between weapons shortest at the final barrier, capable of stemming the tide even the most bitter and insane assault. Ordinarily, the steel blast doors that marked the southernmost point of each divide would be stem-bolted shut, but Andropov had sent advance word to the barrier overwatches, and all doors had been parted wide open to allow Gero's ingress.
A giant, metal hangar loomed large ahead at long last, built directly over the mouth of the ballistic missile silo that the surrounding fortress had been built to operate and defend. Presently, no rocket-powered weapon existed within; the silo had been defunct for many decades, one of the first to be decommissioned during the disarmament craze earlier in the century. Empty and dormant, it had been converted into a cargo elevator for the transport of supplies and equipment to the underground sections of the base, serving its new purpose with a fair amount of practicality, although at fifteen meters in width, its size was decidedly excessive for moving a mere handful of crates and men, its usual payload at any given time.
Gero's personal vehicle slowed to a halt in front of the silo hangar's towering front doors, its engines humming idle in wait. From somewhere deep within the cavernous building and without any discernable, external impulse, a poorly-oiled, electrically-driven gearbox whirred to sluggish life, and the wall-like gates groaned open, steel sliding past steel with a terrible, grating screech to reveal the inky darkness behind. As they opened, the staff car's headlights cut a brilliant, photonic swath across the bare dirt that lay underneath the hangar's roof, the grass that had once grown from it long since killed off by the complete lack of real sunlight. It then rolled forward slowly, finally coming to rest side by side near the rusted, steel railing that marked the edge of the missile silo's muzzle, its engine falling silent and lighting clicking off.

Abruptly, the hangar doors shuddered loudly as they halted for a moment, resumed their wailing screech as they reversed direction, and closed up completely, enveloping the small, Russian automobile in total darkness. The doctor, so to speak, was in.
In the void-like expanse of the hangar's enclosure, a human body shuffled in its clothing and metal grated on metal, those noises punctuated by a loud clank as a power switchbox's toggle lever pivoted upward, every lightbulb in the building exploding into glowing life. However, even with all lighting operating at maximum capacity, illumination remained relatively poor; the hangar hadn't been cleaned in years, and every square centimeter of the steel walls and the lightbulbs themselves had become caked over with a filthy buildup of dust, dirt, and dangling cobwebs. Instead of emitting clean, white light, each putrid light fixture bathed the hangar walls and the oil-slicked soil below in a dim, sickly-yellow haze, its bleak hue reflecting all too well the mood of one Colonel Vladimir Andropov.
The colonel had beaten Gero to the hangar by a considerable margin of time, leaning up against the bare, steel wall next to the power switchbox, arms refolded and brows furrowed as his eyes adjusted to the lighting that he had activated. He looked the staff car over dispassionately
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Somewhat expectant of a confrontation with the just-arrived SPETSNAZ troops, fistfight or otherwise, he had brought a thirty-man platoon of the base regulars along with him, just in case the special forces didn't have a social call in mind. Three groups of these soldiers, ten well-armed men to a group, had surrounded Gero's entourage as it entered the hangar, ready to repel any potential hostility with lethal force, if necessary.
The driver-side door of the staff car opened up and out stepped the veritable man of the hour: Doctor Iskendervich Gero. Andropov and his men watched him intently as he rose, and the colonel noted absent-mindedly how the car seemed to spring up on its suspension as Gero lifted himself away. He knew that the army never spent much on car repair, but for a man as thin and haggard as Gero, the shocks would have had to be in dire need for replacement to have bowed so visibly under such seemingly-light weight.
Andropov grimaced as he looked upon the man before him - time had not been kind to the doctor. Gero himself was a withered, decaying husk of a human being, his face gaunt and irreversibly-craggled from the eroding brutality of sheer age. His skin pitted and wrinkled and his heavy brows completely devoid of any kind of hair, some sort of invisible force appeared to be sucking his face inward, the leathery hide of his cheeks pulled taut over the sharp crests of his deathly-defined cheekbones. Gero's piercing, calculating eyes, his corneas nearly-colorless save for an almost-imperceptible tinge of ice-blue, had grown narrow and sullen over his years, each one recessed deep underneath his brow like spiders hiding deep inside of their dark nest. As he rose, those eyes cut an intense swath across the breadth of the whole building, sweeping between the soldiers that had surrounded him like some sort of radar array, finally coming to rest on Andropov.
Ever so slightly, the Russian colonel cocked his head to one side and unfolded one arm, pressing the rim of his ushanka up his forehead by a few centimeters with one gloved finger and narrowing a hazel eye as he and the doctor regarded one another. Andropov didn't know whether to squirm or burst out laughing, Gero's unwavering, robotic stare fighting for dominance over his bizarre sense of fashion. For a such an old man and for one in possession such a thick mustache, he certainly wore his hair long. The man's sported nothing less than a damned mane, nearly a meter's worth of coarse, ivory hair spilling down his back to touch the back of his knees.
By far, though, Gero's mode of dress struck Andropov as the most peculiar. The man seemed to wear something stranger and stranger every single time he came round. With those shin-length boots, overtly-baggy trousers, striped yellow tunic, polished leather vest, and that nigh-on silly cylindrical hat of his, he bore little resemblance to Andropov's mental image of the average researcher, looking more like rejected villager extra Number Three from a terrible Army Choir stage production. The base commander simply couldn't help but anticipate Gero breaking out into a little jig, dancing around the hangar like a drunken fool while reciting some cheery Ukrainian folk song. The colonel wished that Gero would - anything to take his mind off of Shadows Fall would have been welcome, at that moment.
The passenger side door of Gero's car clicked open - Andropov would be having no such reprieve.
"Goodness me!" a soft, yet creaking voice cooed. "You gentlemen have certainly extended quite the welcoming party for us!" The source of that voice stood up from his seat and plopped onto his feet, the man's military visor hat tucked underneath one neatly-uniformed arm as he pivoted slowly on one boot heel, adjusting the circular edges of his metal-rimmed glasses and peering through the poorly-lit gloom to glance around at the various,
heavily-armed men that served as his greeting.
Like Gero, this fellow had walked the earth for many, many years, though the effects of human aging had not eroded his body quite to the extent that they had the doctor's. His hairline had receded somewhat, but the ample, consistent thickness and dull-grey sheen of his remaining, neatly slicked-back hair lent him an air of distinguishment, whereas less well-preserved men would have been simply unattractive. To Andropov, he was a far, far more agreeable sight than Gero, at least, and he didn't dress like an idiot, either.
After all, the base commander expected no less from a General.
The man's shin-length jackboots, dark olive-drab trousers and woolen officer's jacket, combined with his ridiculous chest full of gleaming medals screamed command, and the metal pips plus the lapel pin of a howling timber wolf affixed to his collar indicated his rank - SPETSNAZ Brigadier General. The soldiers in the troop transports behind him were his men.
The general smoothed his hair back with one craggled hand and slipped his visor hat onto his head with the other, then straightened out the wrinkles in his uniform as he peered over both shoulders, searching the faces of the Russian soldiers around him. "All right!" he called, his voice echoing off the walls of the hangar. "Which one of you is the senior officer, here?"
Huffing resignantly through his nose, Andropov thrust his shoulders backward against the wall that he had been leaning up against and slung his rifle over behind his back, correcting his posture and stepping forward into the general's view. "That would be me, sir," he said.
"Ah - good!" the general harped, clapping his hands together and striding over to Andropov, bowing curtly for him. He then raised the tips of his right hand's fingers to his corresponding eyebrow in salute. "Colonel Andropov, correct? I am Brigadier General Sergei Niska, at your service."
Reluctantly, Andropov returned the acknowledging gesture to the superior officer, swallowing a bit of his pride in the process, then gestured to his men to lower their rifles. "Welcome to Achikulak, sir," he said, donning his nearly emotionless militaristic facade. "However, no one told me that a General would be paying me a visit. I was under the impression that only Gero would be coming."
Niska planted a hand on one of his hips and shrugged. "Yes, I apologize for my lack of advance notice, but I've heard so many exciting things about our good doctor's project that I simply couldn't help but come down and have a look for myself!"
"Just a look, huh?" Andropov posed, his tone tinged with a nearly imperceptible amount of suspicion as he folded his arms loosely across his chest. He then dipped his brow torwards the SPETSNAZ transports behind Niska, the uniformed men beginning to pile out of them, in particular. "Would you mind telling me what they are doing here?"
The general glanced over his shoulder and pinched one of his corrective lenses between two fingers, surveying his milling troops for a moment before turning back to the colonel. "Oh, my men? I've brought them along for added security. In the event that something, anything goes wrong, tonight, they ought to be able to handle it."
"What could possibly go wrong with a simple tour?"
Niska's gray eyes narrowed behind the slight magnification of his glasses and the corners of his thin lips curled upward in a dark, menacing grin, the age lines on his face baring themselves to Andropov. "Well, I am a general, as I'm sure you've noticed," he leered, picking a piece of lint off of one of his sleeves. "Command is anxious for news of progress, so they've sent me down here to report on the operation's status. And since I am a ranking officer in one of the spec-ops divisions slated to become operational with the very first of Doctor Gero's new 'jinzo-ningen', I wouldn't mind seeing some results myself, while I'm here, a test run, preferably. Doctor Gero, at least one unit is ready for evaluation, no?"
The ivory-haired cyberneticist in question had not moved a single nanometer in any direction since he exited the staff car resting just behind him, his hands clasped neatly behind his back and his heels tucked together tightly as he stood in place with deathly, inanimate patience. At Niska's call of his name, he slinked out of his stillness and strode with a strange fluidity to the general's side. "That is correct," Gero answered, confirming Niska's query in a strange, unsettlingly lifeless tone. "The first of series Number Seventeen is indeed ready for evaluation, and after its surgical processing is complete, the second shall be ready, as well."
"See, Colonel?" the aging general quipped to the colonel before him, nodding an ear torwards Gero. "I have not, in fact, wasted any of my time by coming here or by bringing extra security along with me, but I would be wasting my time if I were to stand here any longer and continue explaining myself to you. I am quite eager to see what Doctor Gero here has cooked up, the trip here was lengthy and uncomfortable, and any further delay will make me an unhappy, unhappy man. Now, where is your research facility?"
Andropov huffed in displeasure. He didn't exactly enjoy being pushed around by senior officers, ones affiliated with entirely separate army divisions, especially, but he knew that standing between Niska and the underground labs would serve no real, useful purpose, immediate or otherwise. Wisely, the colonel reasoned that it would be better to stay off of the general's back for the duration of his visit, lest he run off and start whining to some silly review board, bringing a veritable Kursk's worth of trouble down onto his unkempt-haired head. Therefore, he acquiesced, pointing a thumb torwards the bleak, gaping maw of the vacant missile silo. "The labs are set up in a bunker buried several stories underground, and we're standing directly above the main offices, at the moment. The entrance is at the bottom of that silo, there."
Niska eyed the empty, vertical tunnel approvingly. "Good! Why don't you show Gero and myself down there, then?"
"All right, but they will stay topside and away from this hangar, for the time being," Andropov countered, pointing widely at the SPETSNAZ men behind Niska.
The general frowned and cocked his head, glancing at his men and then at Andropov, looking him over for a bit, then rolled his eyes and shrugged in agreement. "Very well, fair enough," Niska conceded, turning around and cupping his hands around his mouth for a shout. "All squads, listen up!" he called, fanning his voice around. "Set up positions on the outer base perimeter and await further instructions!"
Immediately, each of Niska's squad leaders saluted the general and gestured silently to their own subordinates, and every SPETSNAZ soldier in the hangar fell into tight formation, filing out of the building neatly through a small side door. Colonel Andropov waved his own troops off, and they departed in a similar manner, leaving him all alone with his two "guests". He then turned away from his Gero and Niska and made his way torwards the silo's safety rail, a small control console mounted on it, in particular. At the push of a single button, a series of powerful halogen floodlights, each one mounted along the great length of the missile tube, clicked easily into flawless operation, erasing the silo's darkness and illuminating its riveted innards to Andropov.
The cubic, cage-like frame of the cargo elevator stood at rest at the bottom of its guide track, a rectangular, wall-mounted frame of steel girders, nearly ninety meters straight down from where the colonel stood. He thumbed the appropriate button on the control panel, and the gear assembly bolted onto the hangar ceiling above groaned out once again, steel chains clinking and electric motors whirring as the elevator began its upward ascent. A short minute later, it arrived at Andropov's feet and locked into place with an impressive clunk.

Andropov unlatched the meshed wire gate of the elevator platform and slid it upward, standing off to one side and holding it open as Gero and Niska stepped through. Niska boarded the elevator with no small amount of enthusiasm, causing a slight, momentary warble in the lift's floor as he applied his weight to it. However, as Gero sidled into his position beside the general, the entire elevator assembly recoiled significantly, both that movement and the ominous shudder that it created gaining Andropov's undivided attention quite rapidly.
Niska gripped a nearby metal girder and surveyed the metal plating beneath his feet with intense scrutiny. "My, this thing is rather rickety, isn't it?" he pointed out, gently bobbing himself up and down on the polished tips of his leather boots, testing out the lift cabin's structural integrity.
"Well, it shouldn't be," Andropov shot back, tilting his head upward and peering over the edge of the lift frame, eyeing the main support cable and the pulley system it was threaded through. "The troops and I were moving a few barrels of water up from down below just last week - everything was working just fine, back then. Besides, this elevator is rated for nearly one thousand kilos - Gero, how much could you possibly weigh, anyway?"
The ivory-haired scientist reclasped his hands behind his back, his ice-blue eyes snapping to Niska and then over to Andropov. "My current body mass measures sixty-eight and
four-tenths kilograms," he droned, his odd tone bordering on outright roboticism.
Andropov furled his brow for a moment, disconcert then shook his head. Sixty-eight kilos certainly did sound about right for a man of Gero's stature, but for a split-second, something intangible and elusive nagged at his mind. He blew it off, however, dismissing the elevator's - and the staff car suspension's - behavior as the result of simple mechanical wear, nothing more. Matter-of-factly, quite a few pieces of machinery on-base had a history of breaking down at odd times, the ancient, rust-bucket T-72 battle tanks, in particular - their drive transmissions often shunted many a gear tooth under the strain of "normal" operation. Carefully, the colonel himself eased himself onto the elevator, watching and listening for the telltale signs of structural failure. Discovering none, he slid the mesh gate closed and yanked down on the lift's directional control lever, reversing the above gearbox's direction and lowering the caging downward.
As the three men rode their evidently strained transport downward, the curved,
floodlight-lit walls of the missile silo underwent an odd metamorphosis. The curved surfaces of the vertical tunnel nearest the muzzle were indeed elderly, dating backward in time by at least seventy years and covered with a heavy layer of iron oxide - rust. However, as the trio reached the halfway mark of their descent, the corroded steel gave sudden way to neatly-riveted aluminum sheeting and tightly-bundled electrical cables, the fringes of an advanced, costly research facility and the proverbial crucible of Operation Shadows Fall. In the preparation phases for the project, any scheduled changes to the surface of the Achikulak base, and any other base in the area, for that matter, had taken a backseat to the development of the underground labs, both the construction of their housing bunker and the importation of their equipment. The schizophrenic result: a state-of-the-art scientific nexus nestled within the bowels of a dilapidated military outpost, one guarding a deserted city, no less.
It was certainly good cover against satellite surveillance, at least.
Finally, the elevator came to a halt, touching down heavily on the concrete floor that marked the silo's bottom. Such flooring hadn't always existed there, its space once occupied by a ceramic-coated funnel connected to a fan-driven ventilation duct, the system designed to vector off the blast flame and exhaust gases that resulted from the various training launches and engine tests conducted over the years. It was no longer the focus of such extraordinary heat, though. Instead, it had been transformed into a temporary storage area, and it's circumference had become littered with metal crates and cargo containers, each waiting to be moved further below or taken to the surface via the cargo lift.
A single, solid, and heat-treated cast iron slab of a door broke the featureless continuity of the sterile aluminum walls, one able to absorb the intense blast from several pounds' worth of plastic explosive or a comparable destructive force and remain practically unscathed. This truth, combined with the fact that it was the only entrance to the areas beyond made the Achikulak research facility extremely defensible, all but impregnable, and a fortress in its own right, the one situated high above notwithstanding. The only hope that anyone could possibly harbor in regards to entering the lab bunker came through the guise of a laser-based retinal scanner affixed to the wall at the door's left. Encased in a nearly-indestructible titanium shell fuse-welded directly to the door frame, the scanner itself would be highly difficult for most intruders to tamper with, let alone circumvent, due to the resilience of its mount and the fact that its most crucial circuitry had been emplaced behind the door that it served to open.
Consequently, the security device would yield to only one man. Said fellow stepped off of the elevator platform and strode across the diameter of the tunnel to the great, iron door, followed closely by Iskendervich Gero and Sergei Niska. Before tilting his black ushanka back and melding his brow with the rubber liner of the retinal scanner, Andropov turned and looked to the Russian officer just behind him. "It is late, so the science team is off duty, right now," he warned. "Therefore, the labs will be almost completely empty, except for two night guards posted on the bottom floor. I hope that you like your tours boring, General.
Andropov then pressed a blue, plastic button on the scanner's metal body and he opened his eyes wide as a small, low-powered, and completely harmless laser beam streaked from a crystal diode recessed into the wall. Instantaneously, it swept through the colonel's irises, analyzing the geometric configuration of his retinas and checking it against the one stored in accompanying computer's digital memory. Determining both sets to a perfect, one-to-one match, the laser cut off abruptly, several spacecraft-grade deadbolts retracted from locking wells machined into the iron blast door's thick sides with a compounded, whirring clack, and the stoic metal slab rumbled upward, propelled along by giant gears built into the very walls.
Total darkness greeted the colonel as the door raised up. Stepping just past the door frame, he reached out with one arm along the rightmost wall, groping blindly for the elevated plate that marked a series of light switches. With a bit of effort, he located it at last and drove the heel of his hand up against the plastic lip of each switch. Overhead track lighting then flickered intermittently as electricity coursed through their mercury-filled tubes, peeling the darkness away with bluish light and revealing the main, tiled hallway of the lab bunker's adminstrative offices.
The base commander stepped away from the door and turned to his silver-haired shadow. The research facility was Gero's territory. "Lead on, Doctor - we can't keep our general waiting, can we?" he said with a faint hint of petulance.
Niska adjusted his glasses with interest as Gero nodded in silent acceptance and strode through the recently-opened portal of steel. He himself and the Russian colonel beside him then followed the doctor inside and entered the lengthy hall. Wire-reinforced windows lined both bare, concrete walls of this passageway, the darkened rooms beyond crisscrossed with plywood office dividers and the desks bracketed by them piled high with various papers and documents, each sheet covered with incomprehensible numbers and scientific gibberish. To the SPETSNAZ general, none of this seemed to be anything out of the ordinary - the layout and contents of the underground building appeared to have more in common with any one of the countless business offices around the world than a hub of clandestine Russian weapons development.
That sentiment would soon change, however.

The axial support column of a spiral staircase, one which led to the lower levels of the bunker, marked the hall's end, and Gero descended it quickly, both Niska and Andropov following suit. As they traversed it, Niska noticed the gradual change in decor as the office cubicles and cluttered workspaces of the uppermost floors gave way to great, open spaces of flooring occupied by endless rows of computer towers and clumps of networking cables, which, in turn, gave way to the test tubes, distillation flasks, and the bizarre, poisonous compounds of the facility's chemical handling center.
The staircase broke away from its curve and straightened out as the three men reached the bottom floor. At that point, the innocuous ceramic tile and blank drywall that marked the other levels stripped away to bare, titanium-reinforced concrete and a thrice-hinged metal door, one that bore a simple warning upon it: "WARNING: BIOHAZARD."
Niska stopped suddenly, nearly causing Andropov to trip on him in the cramped,
concrete-lined space of the stairwell's landing. "A biohazard zone?" he asked, abruptly beginning to worry about his personal safety, as he often caught a "bug" or two during the late fall and early wintertimes.
"There is no cause for concern," Gero stated, wrapping his wrinkled hands around the door's two, pinion-connected handles. "All unused mutagenic compounds and nutrient baths have been sealed away in cryogenic deep freeze. Protective clothing is not necessary, at this time."
With that, the cyberneticist yanked hard on the door's operating gear, undoing its mechanical latches and pushing it inward. At that very moment, the colonel and general behind him heard it, the ominous, rhythmic beat of a life support machine's electronic monitor, one tracking the heartbeat of a living, breathing being. Niska followed Gero through the newly opened door and into the darkened antechamber with great curiousity, but Andropov hesitated for a moment, fearing of the horrible sights that lay in the laboratory beyond.
Gleaming, razor-sharp blades of metal, spatters and pools of fresh, human blood, torn, vivisected flesh, vital organs lifted away and discarded like so much trash - these are just a few of the things that Vladimir Andropov had born witness to as the military coordinator of Operation Shadows Fall. For a moment, he wondered why he had let himself get caught up in such an ungodly project and all of a sudden, the Siberian coastal guard didn't seem like such a bad outfit to him.
Gero reached underneath the polished leather of his vest with one hand and withdrew a small, hand-held remote control, pressing a series of plastic buttons on it. At the signal of an infrared light beam, the ceiling lights switched on and the entirety of the laboratory's contents became visible. A gloomy, foreboding place, this dungeon-like architectural enclave had been walled with solid steel and framed with trapezoidal structural supports, both features designed to withstand the immense, crushing force of the surrounding earth and the floors above, and hopefully absorb the impact of whatever bunker-defeat munition an enemy military might choose to deploy upon it.

Together, the three Russians stood upon a long, metal gantryway, one both suspended from the ceiling and held upright by the floor through an array of high-tension support struts and a concrete dividing wall. This wall split the lab into two halves, the left half being a sort of machine shop, its floor crisscrossed with high-voltage power cables and marked further by an odd combination of mills, lathes and sewing machines, the sewing machines themselves surrounded by various scraps and pieces of a smooth, luminous black fabric.

To the Russian colonel, though, the second half of the lab communicated a decidedly more sinister intent through its appearance. Its tiled floor and stainless steel surfaces sterilized both chemically and thermally on a regular basis and extremely well-lit by a large bundle of
inward-canted surgery lights affixed to a swivel mount bolted to the ceiling, the entire room has been designed from its very first cubic centimeter onward to be the ideal site to conduct live-body surgery in total, military secrecy, well away from the prying eyes of foreign and domestic medical regulation. No one outside of Iskendervich Gero, his lab assistants, a select few in the upper Army ranks, and Andropov himself were privy to what transpired within that carefully-controlled chamber, which, in the opinion of the Achikulak base commander, was probably a blessing relative to those not "in the know." Ignorance did, in fact, seem to be bliss.
As Doctor Gero made his way down the length of the laboratory-overlooking steel gantry, the sudden, grating groan of two chairs scraping backward on bare cement, the loud crash of a table overturning and toppling to the hard floor, and the chattering, metallic clack of two assault rifle charging handles yanking hard backward and springing forward again echoed out from the left side of the walkway, emanating from somewhere within the mire of metals processing machinery.
Out in the machine shop, two Russian soldiers, each wearing a uniform similar to that of Colonel Andropov's, had just come barrelling out of the small back room that served as the machine shop's office, abandoning their seats hastily in favor of a one-knee crouched position behind the excellent ballistic protection offered by the cast-iron motor casing of two
floor-standing engine lathes, their rifles shouldered, gripped tightly, and at combat ready. "Halt - stop right there!" one yelled, training the steel apex of his weapon's sights on Gero's head while his counterpart, kneeling behind his own emplacement of cover, took similar aim. "Identify yourself!"
With curious, mechanical fluidity, Gero halted his forward advance in a sudden burst of backward impulse, as if every single molecule in his body had unified themselves and exerted a collective, all-permeating stillness between one other. He then turned his head quickly yet calmly to his left, gazing out over the gantry's handrailing and assessing each of the Russian guards and their respective armament with a quick, unimpressed glance.
Whenever high-powered firearms entered into the equation of situational hostility and whenever Doctor Iskendervich Gero came within the firing angle of such weapons, one could rest assured that almost certain disaster lay in lurking, looming wait. Before anyone could pull a trigger or engage any other offensive action, however, Andropov sidled his way past Niska roughly and hurriedly and waved down the two alarmed guards, soldiers that he had assigned to watch the temporarily vacant research laboratory overnight.
"Wait! Wait, damn it! Hold your fire!" Andropov roared, gripping a nearby support strut hard with one hand as he leaned heavily over the gantry's horizontal safety rail, flailing his other arm wildly in a desperate attempt to gain the attention of his subordinates. This violent action was not born out of any real concern for Gero's safety, however; Andropov wouldn't have minded in the very least if the ivory-haired bastard simply dropped dead or somehow disappeared off of the planet's face, but letting the strangely-animated idiot get gunned down by his men and on his base would funnel all basic responsibility and the doubtlessly ensuing punishment right back to him. More importantly, though, Andropov judged himself to be standing at single arm's length away from Gero, and this close proximity, combined with the relative inaccuracy of his men's Kalashnikov rifles, their likely usage of automatic fire, and the dubious, full-spectrum quality of their marksmanship made it entirely possible that he himself would catch more than his fair share of supersonic, copper-jacketed lead should they choose to open fire.
Thankfully, though, the roar of gunfire remained tightly muzzled by the wisely-timed relaxation of two trigger fingers, and Andropov's guards recognized their commander immediately, setting the safety toggles on their rifles before lowering them away from Gero's standing form. "Oh, sorry, sir!" one guard prostrated himself, rising up from his kneel. "We didn't see you there - honest to God, we thought the lab had been broken into!"
Andropov opened his mouth to speak and therefore curse at his overly-jumpy charges, but at the same time, he simply felt Gero's eyes come upon him, each unfaltering cornea burning an imaginary hole through his head with their laser-like intensity. Relieved that he hadn't been shot accidentally by his own troops, the colonel turned to Gero, tensed an eyebrow as he made direct and rather uncomfortable eye contact with him, then sighed heavily through his nose, shrugging his shoulders. "I just put those two on duty last night. Give them a break, they're new," he said.
Gero simply turned away and looked the pair of soldiers down in the machine shop over briefly once more before continuing on his way. "A most undesirable circumstance, Colonel. Do avoid it in the future," he suggested. "General Niska, the weapon prototype is located in the holding room just below. Follow me, if you will."

Niska shot his Third Army junior an annoyed glare and stepped past him, trailing Gero down the remainder of the steel walkway and through a wide opening cut into the adjoining wall. At that point, the single, narrow path that had been the gantry's length widened into a more spacious atrium, a chamber which diverged and forked into two separate passages. The one to the left followed a gentle, downward-canted curve, transitioning into a short stairwell that tapered outward as it melded to the area of the machine shop's floor. The one to the right behaved in a similar, but mathematically opposite manner, curving around a separate center axis and leading down to the operating room's metal double-doors.
The so-called emergency room was strangely unsettling place, the ancient darkness of one man's tyranny and the grief of another's forgotten suffering veiled by the bright gleam of the halogen-based overhead lighting and the polished, pharmeceutically-clean surfaces of the surgical tools lain out neatly on the cart next to the metal operating table, each tiny, razor-sharp blade and drill bit saluting Gero silently as he and Niska entered. The doctor paid them no heed, though, instead making his way torwards a windowed door built into the far wall.
Beyond that single door, the darkness of a narrow, almost closet-like hallway thrummed with the cacophonic drone of small electric fans and power cables as if it were some sort of malevolent nexus, the calm, central eye of an invisible, yet undeniably-raging maelstrom. Gero braved its gloom unhindered, though; he was right at home in its midst. Niska followed the white-haired scientist in with a fair amount of tepidation, his sudden inkling of claustrophobia allayed little by the sudden activation of the overhead lighting.
Cylindrical, waterproof holding tanks made of transparent plexiglass and bolted to what appeared to be oversized hotplates lined the concrete wall to Niska's left, and small, ovoid capsules that bore disconcerting resemblances to funeral caskets, save for the small glass viewports lain into the top of their lids, stood propped up against the wall on crude stands made from welded iron tubing. At that moment, all of these containers were empty, devoid of any content.
All except for two.
At the very end of the hall, Gero stopped, his boots scuffling grainily on concrete as he turned to face a white curtain to his left. The cotton sheet glowed with an eerie, neon-green hue, illuminated from behind by some hidden source of light.
- 31
- 32
- 33
You need to be logged in to leave a review for this story.You need to be logged in to leave a review for this story.
Report Story

The Ark	By : Dunkelgelb Category: InuYasha > General Views: 2034 -:- Recommendations : 0 -:- Currently Reading : 0
Disclaimer: I do not own InuYasha, nor make money from this story.

The Ark