Caufmann walks up the narrow, dimly lit hallway, until he gets to the CryoGen Industries chamber, Room V. He manually types in one the interchanging thirty-six digit codes from memory; a feat normally impossible for ordinary people. But the doctor is far from ordinary.
He steps into the freezer chamber where Nordoth and Straker are frozen.
Three of six pods are empty. That isn’t right.
He stands still, his mind racing, for a few moments wondering how this happened. Everyone is banned from CryoGen Room V. Yet the pods are empty. The three people still in stasis are Timothy Fowl, Warwick Balkan and Jonathon Holin, the blue illuminated nametags proclaim from the top of each cylindrical pod, their bodies frozen upright.
Caufmann has never been in Room V before. Seeing the name of the man who designed the HolinMech system genuinely surprises him. Straker, Nordoth and another person: Severn Mercer, are gone.
Caufmann knows of Mercer. He assisted Nordoth to design the first combat suit that aided in protection, as well as strength enhancement, prior to CryoGen’s experimentation with hybrid and cybrid technology. Caufmann always wondered what Nordoth and Straker would say if they knew how Van Gower has utilised their theories. Looking at their empty pods, he figures he’ll never know.
The life sign monitor has obviously been hacked. It still shows that their pods are inhabited. Who woke them from suspended animation? Where are they now? How did they do it? Van Gower could have unfrozen them and gotten rid of them, but he seemed genuinely worried when Caufmann suggested thawing them to answer his questions. Whoever or whatever took them out of stasis must have done it years ago. Thick clumps of dust have accumulated inside the empty pods.
Caufmann only ever discovered the pods as they are registered on the lab inventory. Godyssey must have wanted to keep Nordoth and Straker’s expertise on ice. Or prevent them from starting fresh elsewhere. Godyssey is, after all, the bastard son of CryoGen Industries.
Caufmann eyes Holin’s freeze pod with curiosity, but up until this moment he has done nothing against Van Gower’s wishes in any extreme way. He’s only willing to risk the chairman’s wrath for Straker and Nordoth’s information, which would be infinitely valuable. He doesn’t need anything from Holin that he can think of at this time.
He shuts the lights off in CryoGen Room V, his head spinning. Oh. If the life signs were hacked, then the bodies may have been stolen, not released.
If neither Van Gower nor myself know about this then who else could?
No one could get into the lab. Something has gone wrong. But he can’t think who could have bypassed the security, much less who would be able to mimic the life sign signal to mask their theft.
Later, he will be able to investigate. Now, his attention is required desperately elsewhere, so he proceeds further down the corridor to Room XVI. The door slides up into the bulkhead, allowing Caufmann to step inside the dark room beyond, where a shining pair of red eyes is all he can see. “Arca?”
The door slams down behind him, sealing him in. Blue LED lights flicker on, allowing enough light to see each other, turning the glowing eyes from red to purple.
Arca Drej, HolinMech Warrior deserter, stands in front of the doctor with wide eyes, hard Viking-like features, and unusually long white hair for a military android. His silvery grey HolinMech armour is still in pristine condition; Drej disappeared just before a mission.
An X-shaped scar in his forehead shows where Caufmann removed his tracker chip. He also removed the internal transponder, preventing the ability to trace his whereabouts.
Drej stole a shuttle and had escaped as far as Titan before the engines blew out. “Doctor Caufmann, I have to get out of here,” says Drej’s soft but deep resonant voice.
“Impossible at this time.”
“I can still hear it tapping! Sometimes I can feel it!” he shouts putting his hands to his chest. It looks like he is about to claw something out.
Caufmann steps forward, but the movement carries with it a definite threat. “You have to keep your voice down. You will always feel it tapping as long as you live, so you will just have to accept it.”
“And what is this?” he asks, showing Caufmann the back of his right hand, where a fleur-de-lis symbol protrudes.
“You know what it means.”
“But I’m not a traitor!” he yells, somehow keeping his voice to a whisper.
“To Godyssey you are.”
“They betrayed me!” he says, again in a fierce whisper. “Look what they did to me!” he pulls at his face with his left hand. The skin strains at first but soon tears revealing a pearlescent bone shell beneath. The ripped muscle fibres wriggle and writhe, struggling to reattach themselves, but Drej keeps pulling until Caufmann grips his wrist.
“You’re going to have to stop that,” states the doctor patiently.
Drej allows Caufmann to draw his hand away from his bleeding face, where the muscle fibres are already beginning to grasp each other, reconstructing. “I can’t stay here alone anymore, I’m going out of my mind and that’s supposed to be impossible.”
Caufmann pities Arca Drej wholeheartedly; he is suffering the worst binary decay and andronic psychosis he’s ever heard about. Perhaps not as bad as Valhara’s madness during the CryoZaiyon Wars, but Drej is deteriorating at an accelerated pace and being cooped up in this room isn’t doing his mind any good at all.
Valhara wasn’t the first android to suffer such a catastrophic break down, but it is the most well known. The first was Jonathon Holin’s very first HolinMech, before Drej’s kind, before they were military property. Though it seemed to have little difficulty killing the crew of the Montrialis. Alexandrite Talisman was its name. Drik Tally, for short.
Caufmann just doesn’t have enough time to come and talk with him to help him deal with all of these issues. Drej knows he was human. He possesses no information or evidence, he just knows. “Listen, Arca, you will be getting out of here but you just need to hang on a little longer.”
“I was better off on Titan.”
“You fried your ship’s engines trying to fire them loud enough to drown out the sound of your own insanity. You would have been alone to go completely mad and tear your face off all you wanted, but would you be happier?”
Drej eyes Caufmann carefully, revealing he is most definitely aware he’s being made fun of. “All I’ve done is switch one prison for another.”
Caufmann feels a fleeting moment of wanting to hit Drej. “I’m well aware of what you’ve been through.”
Drej scoffs out a derisive laugh. “Are you now?”
Caufmann rolls up his right sleeve revealing his embedded circuitry.
Drej isn’t impressed. “So you have a cybernetic arm.”
Caufmann removes his glasses, revealing his scarred shining eyes then he takes a scalpel out of his lab coat and slices his right cheek causing a small hiss of cold steam and a trickle of a red liquid that emits thin white mist. “Do you see now?” he asks, snapping the frozen scalpel like a stick.
Drej’s eyes are the only part of him that betray his utter shock. “CryoZaiyon blood…”
Caufmann nods once.
“You?” Drej chokes out. His mind is reeling and completely unable to process all this data.
“I’ve spent years in hiding,” his gaze turns distant. “So many years cutting into my flesh and removing what technology they placed into me. I had no choice as technology became evermore advanced and capable of finding me, and others like us who are still missing. Can you even fathom what it’s like for a self-aware being to have to cut into itself and remove more and more as the years go by? Do you care? Can you care? Sometimes I’m not even sure that I do.”