Chapter 53 - Operation: Crowded Tank (2)
I take a deep breath and pause as I assess my targets.
There are rows of neat racks filled with tiny plants in jars, each no larger than the length of my finger and half filled with milky nutrient gels. Calling them plants is probably giving them too much credit. They’re tissue cultures, clones from a mother plant from so many generations back she has been lost to time. The banks of samples are behind a hanging transparent plastic wall, bulging outwards towards me as evidence of the positive pressure maintained within.
Pooka butts his head into my hand, and I dig my fingers into his fur. As I do so, his mass slips beneath my fingers, leaving me grasping something less like flesh and blood and more like a thick fog that quickly chills the tips of my fingers. I wave my hand free of him, turning instead to inspect the benches. I draw a pair of clean nitrile gloves from a box at one end, slipping one on each hand, then finally unzip the plastic sheeting to step into the rows of tissue cultures beyond.
The puff of air blows my silvery hair back from my face as I step within, and I scan the jars. Most of them are labelled by hand in black pen ink. I tap my lip as I consider how to make the best of my one opportunity.
I drop my backpack. Then, with a sweep of my arm, I scoop up the glass jars. A handful of every variety goes into my backpack, padded here and there as I fuss with my underwear around them. Several jars crash onto the ground in my rush, splintering glass shattering on tile floors, gel splattering across white floors, speckled with remnants of the plants within and rolling plastic screw top lids.
I ignore my mess, they will know I was here by tomorrow. In some ways, making a mess obscures easily identifying what exactly went missing, which is to my advantage. I move to the next rack and begin filling my backpack with more jars. My list has three target species, and I grab every sample from each of them while shattering a good mix of others to confuse the space.
Pooka sits in the doorway of the plastic sheets, his ears rotating around his head as he listens outside. Completed with my raid, I zip my backpack closed and heft it over my shoulder again. As I pass the benches, something catches my eye.
A small metal device, a comfortable size to fit within the palm of a hand. I pick it up, and flip the hinged lid open, revealing a small metal nozzle fitted with a flint wheel. I spend a moment observing the mechanism, then give the flint wheel a quick spin with my thumb, striking up an open flame. What a strange little luxury device. It even seems to have a reservoir of hydrocarbon fuel. I tip the lid closed, extinguishing the flame, then bounce it in my palm and enjoying the weight of it. I then glance around me, almost unconsciously flipping the lid again and feeling how it moves in my hand, sparking the flame to life again.
The flint is an interesting little resource you don’t see often. The box is otherwise plain and has a yellowish tinge to the metal, brass maybe. Someone with real money bought this.
As I push my way out of the lab unit’s doors, the lighter fails to find its way back onto the bench where I picked it up. We still have a part two to the mission.
Pooka pads behind me as we move back through the greenhouse, his whiskers twitching as he snorts the rich soup of nutrient broths and chlorinated water from his nose. I make my way strategically between the units, working towards where I already know the adult parents of the experimental species we’ve just raided are growing. The door is locked as we approach, and I pause just out of view of the cameras, attention trained on the entry.
Time to hunt?
Yes, time to hunt. Let’s get out of here.
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Pooka bristles, his mane of black hair down his back standing on end, and faint sparks jump between his hairs in the darkness. His eyes glow vibrant red, illuminating everything in a bloody light. Electricity cracks outwards from his muzzle with a snarl, then the lights flicker one by one, plunging the facility into darkness. The camera status LEDs blink out.
I dive forward, withdrawing a utility knife from a holster around my wrist and jam it into the back of the number pad lock outside of the facility - snapping the entire casing from the wall and exposing a few tiny wires behind it. I fumble with a few of them, reforming a circuit, then call on Pooka’s powers down my bond with him.
His body is mine; my body is his. We are indistinct when we overlap. When my heart beats, so does his.
And I’ve been learning new tricks.
A spark jumps between my fingertips as I miss my focus the first time. Then I get it right the second time, energizing the circuit and releasing the electronic lock with a click.
Pooka sniffs behind me, a satisfied little thought drifting my way before he smothers it. This next bit is you, I say to him.
I’m only able to summon little sparks of his power, nothing sustained. His mastery of energy and pure elements is awe-inspiring. I love the rush of power and adrenaline that fills my blood when he unleashes his power. We are what has been forgotten, a relic of neglected nature incarnate.
We are falling water. We are blooming buds. We are wildfire. We are so many things Pooka carries as memories and that I desperately yearn for, driven by some dormant ancestral instinct. And only as two do we work. He is the crashing ocean, a wild fury with memories of grey skies illuminated with crackling lightning and turbulent white foam below. I am the rocks at the shore, gleaming like black obsidian and unmoved by his vast rage and deep love.
And yet somehow he is still capable of boredom.
As we step within the locked greenhouse, his body sublimates in the black fog that weaves between the plants. They are all small, sterile-looking things, with thin stems and drooping leaves. The only features of note are their copious yellow buds, ripe and ready to produce the fruits that feed us, the results of simian care and generations of human cultivation. These plants do not differ from humans or symbionts, their bodies co-opted for our own systematic use and adapted to our needs.
I will be as a mercy for these creatures. I will grant them freedom from their fates.
They’re plants. They don’t think or feel like you and I, Pooka. But maybe that doesn’t really matter.
Who are you to know what they feel?
We drift between the stems, as indistinct as mist. As we touch them, we drain. They surrender their energies to our call. Leaves wither and fall from stems; green vigor passes instead to dried, silent, death. The wave of extermination propagates outwards, carried by Pooka’s drifting form until when I look over the entire facility not a single green leaf remains.
Our time is up. The power outage will definitely attract attention. The Vespa on my ear, Adrian no longer paying attention at the other end, buzzes its wings with an insistent drone that almost feels like an alarm. Espah, the name of the single collective consciousness of Adrian’s symbiont, does not have a forceful personality like Pooka does, but I know her tells when she is warning me in her own ways.
I break into a sprint down my pre-planned exit pathway. Pooka is behind me without my command, wings beating and talons clenched now as an Aquila. As he freewheels behind me, arcing white bolts jump from the pinions at the tips of his wings, frying cameras and alarms in our path as I run.
The path between the greenhouses leads to a single gated entry court, a few empty vehicles, and a flurry of activity at the security post. Floodlights are being deployed, officers in uniform run from the barracks while a red alarm flashes on each side of the gate. I pull a black balaclava I’d worn under my coveralls up over my face. Pooka splashes against the ground, rebounding up as rippling muscles and black hooves. We barely break stride as I scoop his mane into my hands, and with a motion we’ve practised now, I vault onto his back.
We are gone too fast for the guards to recognize us. Pooka bunches his hind-limbs beneath him as we thunder to the black bars of the cantilever gate across the front of the complex. He leaps, and we sail over, and without stopping we disappear between the buildings of the next business along the silent late-night concrete roads.
"This is Vespa dialogue"
We click our beak with dissatisfaction from so high above.
I could eat him.
Please stop suggesting you could eat everyone. You can't even eat.