Doctor Who_ Transit - Ben Aaronovitch [59]
Francine got there just in time.
Three weeks later the Brigadier walked into the foyer of Imogen's R&D centre in Leipzig wearing his full combat rig, and gave its occupants thirty seconds to evacuate. Security took one look at the yellow and black trefoil stencilled on his chest and complied.
He walked down sterile corridors and through rooms lit with computer-regulated UV lamps. He found a room full of mechanical wombs filled with baby monsters. Engineered nightmares in the shape of human foetuses. The Brigadier terminated their life support without breaking step.
The final room was painted a soothing pink and filled by three rows of ten cots made from white ballistic plastic. The floor was made of interlocking planks of commercial pine lacquered for ease of cleaning. Only one of the cots was occupied. The Brigadier's boots cracked the floor as he walked over. A pastel-coloured LCD mounted on the end of the cot displayed the child's statistics in primary red alphanumerics.
The monster was three months old and showing the accelerated growth of motor co-ordination that had been predicted in the initial studies. Imogen had taken the genetic code of the Ubersoldaten, all those crazy boys and girls that had fought for humanity on Mars and spun out the perfect warrior. Violence woven into its DNA, Someone, a nurse perhaps, had tucked a stuffed bunny rabbit into the covers beside it.
'Kill it,' Francine had said. 'Kill it before they turn the world into drones and soldiers.' And the Brigadier had agreed. 'Kill it before it breeds.'
He stretched out his gauntleted hand: a single blow to the forehead into the brain, painless and quick. He had to damp the feedback to the armour's servomotors to stop his hand from shaking.
The monster opened its black eyes and smiled up at him. A tiny hand reached out to close around his index finger.
'Dada,' said the monster.
The Stop
Kadiatu Lethbridge-Stewart had never hit anybody before.
There was a breaking sensation and a cracking sound like shattered pottery. The creature fell back, a section of its forehead driven into its brain, blood spurting from its nose. It had been so easy: the force of the blow had seemed to flow up from her hips across her back and down her arm.
Strange how it fell down so slowly, like an object falling in micro gravity or a dream. She felt surrounded by a stillness as if she had passed through the gaps between noise. The cavern had a sharp stratospheric brilliance.
To the left, from the comer of her eye, she saw Blondie swing again at the creature in front of him, the rifle passing through its arc with lazy momentum. The creature was ducking; Kadiatu could see the movement starting in its thighs, trying to get under Blondie's reach so it could close with its talons. It wasn't going to make it though; she saw where the rifle would intersect with its head just below the ear.
To her right another creature was in midair - the ballistic portion of a jump that had started a long time ago. This one might have been female once; there was a hint of breasts beneath the homy carapace of its chest. Its mouth was open, its outstretched arms were sweeping forward with needle-sharp claws on the end of its fingers.
Kadiatu felt herself twisting almost before she was aware of what she was doing. She let herself go with the flow of her body, feeling the momentum of her turn translate into kinetic energy as her foot lashed out at head height. Her heel caught the creature in the solar plexus, and there was another pottery crack. She fell backwards to absorb the momentum and rolled over her shoulder.
She came to her feet in time to see Old Sam return to the cavern. In the strange slow universe Kadiatu was inhabiting the pulse rifle made a deep zipping sound each time it fired.
Old Sam didn't waste his shots. The tracers burned their way through the air and exploded on impact. Within moments the remaining creatures were dead.
Kadiatu felt the world crank back up to normal speed. A sudden spasm of pain across the knuckles of her right hand made her gasp.