Logan Harrison's Arc

Chapter 4 of 9

The vault air hung cold and still. Logan led the group past the dead ghoul into a wide room lined with steel desks. A dormant medical robot rolled ahead of them, its treads grinding old dust. It answered only to Sarah Burks now, and she walked beside it, tapping her fingers against her leg. Sarah was the Rangers' data analyst, the one who cracked prewar systems when everyone else gave up. Logan had worked with her before. She read code the way he read broken machines. Now she stopped at a medical desk where an old terminal still glowed green. "Give me a second," Sarah said. Her claws moved fast over the keys. "This thing's older than dirt. Come on. Come on." The screen flickered. Files scrolled up. She leaned close, then went quiet. Mary Long set her folder on the desk and pulled samples from a case. She and Sarah bent over the tissue vials, matching them against numbers on the screen. Logan checked the machine himself. He looked for what was missing. The robot's chest panel had a slot, empty, meant for a credential card. Sarah had the physician code that filled it. Good. He moved to a second terminal and started pulling stored files. "Christ," Sarah whispered. She pointed at a black-and-red dossier icon on the screen. "F.E.V. research. This whole lab was running it. The samples we pulled? They came from these experiments." Logan opened the file. Biohazard symbols filled the header. Lab notes described the lower level. "There's more of this below us," he said. "Storage. And it's contaminated." Mary looked up, worried. "We can't go down there. Not like this." "No," Logan agreed. "We need hazmat gear. Full suits. The lower level's hot." He read the screen again. Nothing on it said the air up here was safe for long. "And we need this room locked down before anyone else wanders in." Danials stood at the door, machine gun braced, eyes on the black hall. "I'll hold the entrance," she said. "But I'm one gun." Logan keyed his radio. Zelda answered from the garage above. He told her what they found. The F.E.V. files. The contaminated storeroom. The gear they needed. Zelda didn't hesitate. "Sit tight. I'm sending hazmat suits and three security guards down to you. Nobody moves lower without them." Within minutes boots sounded in the hall. Three guards filed in and spread across the room. Danials pointed them to the exits. Logan turned to Warrant Officer Danials. "Secure the lab. This terminal stays with us." She nodded and posted a guard beside the desk. Sarah copied the last of the files to a data spool and yanked it free. "Got it all," she said. "Every page." The pc lab was theirs. The room was locked, the files were saved, and the gear was coming. But the server cores Logan wanted lay past the contaminated storeroom below. To reach them, he'd have to seal himself in a suit and walk into the hot dark.