Page 21 of Wrath

“Only a handful,” Nathalie said, her eyes flicking in every direction to assess the empty spots. “It seems to match the number of tanks we recovered from the Nomad.”

I sighed in relief. “At least that’s a small blessing,” I mumbled.

Nevertheless, the sight of a few empty tanks made me uneasy. Were they empty because the Coalition rogues had taken out their contents or there never had been any creatures inside?

“Don’t rejoice too quickly,” Linette said in a grim tone. “There’s no way we can carry all of these back to Khepri. And frankly, that would be a really bad idea.”

We all nodded in agreement.

“We need to figure out how to destroy them right here,” I concurred, while observing Nathalie as she ran her handheld scan over the tanks.

She suddenly stiffened, an alarmed expression settling on her pretty face. By the look she gave me, if not for her brown skin, I believed Nathalie would have gone ghostly pale.

“What’s wrong?” I asked, all my senses going into high alert.

“I’m picking up a whole bunch of small organic signatures throughout the room,” Nathalie said nervously. “There’s something abnormal about them. But we shouldn’t pick up anything. The tanks should be sealed.”

“I had picked them up as well,” I said, “but I assumed they were just small bugs or some kind of vermin that dwells below.”

Nathalie’s brows furrowed. “I don’t know…”

“Let’s find out,” I said, running my scanner again.

I walked towards one of the locations indicated on the interface of my armband’s scanner. In between a couple of tanks, I noticed a pinkish shape, like some sort of fleshy growth. It wasn’t a membrane, although it could almost have been.

Just as I was about to convey that information, my gaze landed on a tiny device. It took me a moment to realize it was a Coalition motion detector. A cold shiver suddenly ran down my spine as an unexplainable sense of doom washed over me.

And then everything seemed to happen at once.

“Wrath, something weird is happening,”Kwan’s voice said, resonating in my head.“Marcelle is doing something with her artificial limb, but I can’t see what from this angle.”

“EVERYONE OUT!” Dread suddenly shouted before I could respond to Kwan. “Those are organic mines!”

At the same time, my armband beeped, indicating some high frequency radio signal was being broadcast inside the room. None of us managed to take more than a few steps before multiple explosions rocked the room. The force of the blast sent us all flying back. I crashed into one of the tanks in the middle of the room. It shattered, the adult Jadozor within spilling onto the floor.

Nathalie, who had been standing the closest to one of the organic mines, lay unconscious on the ground, blood trickling from her temple. The rest of my crew was painfully scrambling back to their feet. It had been a partial blessing that the mines had not actually caused a fiery explosion, or we would likely be looking at a first casualty. But the blast had done serious damage to the stasis chambers.

All around us cracks and fissures displayed on the tanks, and hissing sounds could be heard as the stasis gas started leaking. The ventilation system kicked into action. To my horror, the reinforced doors of the stasis room closed us inside, sealing themselves. As a red light blinked around the door, a synthetic Kryptid voice warned of a breach in the stasis room and declared a full lockdown of the base.

“No!” Myriam shouted, running to the door.

In the couple of seconds it took me to assess our situation, I realized the worst possible case scenario had just occurred.

“Dread! Get them out!” I ordered, gesturing with my chin at a small hole that had appeared in the wall next to the upper right corner of the doors.

Shifting into his battle form, he flew up that section and started stabbing at the hole with the lance-shaped limbs that grew out of his forearms.

“Varnog, take care of Nathalie,” I shouted while shifting into my full battle form as well.

The Jadozor that had fallen out of the shattered tank had begun twitching. Mid-shift, I swiped my scythed blade at its neck to behead it. To my dismay, it barely made a dent in the thick scales around it. It took multiple attempts before I finally made a bleeding cut. I spit some acid into it, which seemed to help me finish hacking its head off, which I kicked away from its corpse. It had only taken about a minute, but that was way too long as, all around us, the cracks on the other tanks were expanding with a sound akin to breaking ice.

Varnog had taken flight, carrying the still unconscious Nathalie, but was using the bladed tip of his serrated tail to help Dread expand the opening enough for them to get out. Thanks to her enhanced strength, Linette picked Myriam up into her arms and took flight with her, hovering near her mate.

Pulling out my own explosive devices from my weapons belt, I started placing them throughout the room. It wasn’t a permanent solution, but if we could at least bury these creatures alive, that would have to do for the time being.

My stomach knotted when I cast a glance at my teammates. They were taking too long widening that opening. One by one, the tanks’ thick glass shattered, dropping the unconscious Jadozors onto the floor. At first, I was able to behead them as they fell out, but soon, too many tanks broke simultaneously in different sections of the room. While Linette held her, Myriam shot the creatures that were awakening far too quickly.

To my horror, a shimmering foam bubbled around the butchered flesh of the beheaded Jadozors as their necks and bodies were growing back. Their former bodies were turning into some kind of particles, flowing back to their heads to help reshape them.

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