Black-Ops: Part Two

by Abyss

"Remove the carbonadium from the containment."

Men in lab coats and technicians in grey coveralls hurried to carry out the command. They moved with the co-ordination of workers who had rehearsed a procedure until it was second nature, and with the speed of those who knew the slightest misstep could cost them their lives. Spetsnaz, KGB elite troops, watched every action with eyes that held no emotion but confidence, no promise but death.

In sets of two, eight workers lifted shining steel boxes from large steel containers that steamed and hisses as they were open. With care beyond that of a mother holding her child, they moved towards a large mechanism in the center of the room. They kept their eyes on the crates, and carefully avoided even glancing at the huge figure suspended in a glass tank above the humming machines.

* * *

The basement level of the building was no more outwardly impressive than the exterior, except the it was about three levels deeper than any normal Moscow architecture. Aside from an excess of power lines, the room was dark, damp and cold. Mildew patterned grey stone and mortar walls. The hum of the furnace and power cables was the only sound. No lights were on. No one was there to need them. Had anyone actually been there, they would've heard the noise. The first instinct would be water dripping, then maybe mice. Then the scratching would grow louder and they would think perhaps some stones were loose in the floor, and then the small section of floor would fall out, and if their first thought wasn't to run, they would think nothing at all, ever again.

Victor Creed had entered the building.

* * *

The two from the roof made their way through the top floors of the building. They moved quickly and easily, never actually watching each other, because each knew instinctively what the other was doing.

The shorter, black-clad man went first. Low to the floor and scanning everywhere, he moved to a point in the corridor ahead, then paused. The second man, in the battle armour, covered each advance, his complex gun covering the space the first man moved through. They were fast, thorough and completely silent... until the first man stopped cold in the middle of a hallway, not yet at the split ten feet in front of him. He just stopped dead, gun held low and pointed up, free hand lingering near the knife at his hip. The second man paused only a moment, scanned the hallway before and behind, then moved next to the first.

" Logan, it's wrong."

" I know. This wasn't in the floor plan."

Their voices were low and intense. The exchange took seconds and they moved again. Both advanced towards the division in the hall, stopping just short of the corners. No looks were traded, no signals given, just a pause as long as a breath, then they glided forward in opposite directions into the corridors.

Logan heard the other's gun go off. Silenced as it was, the sound was like a baby coughing, once, twice. His own corridor empty, he whirled, gun up and tracking. The other man stood there, crouched, gun already dropping. Down the hallway from him, two figures lay prone on the floor. He wasn't surprised to see there were no telltale pools of blood on the floor, no brain matter on the walls. Two perfect head shots, and no mess.

" Low velocity ammo, North? "

Logan didn't look at the other as he stalked past. North covered the hall way as he dragged the bodies into the office they were walking out of. He tried not to look at the bodies either. One was a security guard, his uniform identifying him as Spetsnaz. The other had on the white coat of a lab worker. Logan wasn't sure what disturbed him more. Heavy opposition or...

What...innocent victims? No one here is innocent. Not even...

North's response interrupted Logan's thoughts.

"Yeah, and something new from the Major. Softpoints."

"Cute."

* * *

A panel of monitors and readouts lined the wall directly in the immobile figure's line of sight. If he were to open his eyes, he would see a woman standing in front of the panel, occasionally glancing up to study him.

Janice Hollenback consciously tried not to look at her watch. She was supposed to be a dutiful drone. A scientist from a soviet satellite country who had studied in America, but returned to serve the Rodina. Dutiful daughters didn't let anything distract them from their work.

They also don't have extraction teams coming to retrieve them either.

For the umpteenth time she cursed her luck. The project was not supposed to go into action this soon. As far as she knew a subject hadn't even been selected, the synthesizer hadn't been tested. She looked again at the muscular, blond figure suspended in fluid, floating over a machine that was supposed to make him at once something more and less then human. Various pipes and wires ran to and from his body, which was superbly built. She wouldn't have been surprised if he was one of the Spetsnaz troopers. Perhaps one of the guards here would know him. If not for the readouts, she'd be sure he was dead. His skin was a pale white, and badly patched gunshot wounds dotted his torso. Those could be traced, if she could remember the numbers...

No time for that. Where the hell are you, Logan?

* * *

Victor Creed was not in a good mood. First, he had drawn low-point-of entry for this mission. Solo, which was good, but basement, which stunk... less likely to be guards or anyone else that needed to be eliminated. Second, he had to crawl through a few hundred meters of sewer to get to the entrance point, because the building plans had been off by about three floors. And finally, he had been in the building almost six minutes, and hadn't killed anyone yet.

Maybe I'll get lucky and they'll actually have a early model super-soldier around.

Two stair cases up he stopped. His black body suit let his blend better into the shadows, the harness and helmet treated not to reflect light. No one could have seen him, but someone was ahead, and coming down.

One man, sounds like he's armed.

The usual clatter of weapons was muted though. Creed wasn't at all surprised when the heavily armed Spetsnaz came down the steps. The man was big, and though he wasn't on patrol, since all his guns were strapped away, Creed could tell in the way his eyes moved that he was always a step away from violence.

Creed respected that. He only broke the man's right collarbone when he stepped out of the shadows, twisted the 200-some pound man like a doll and slammed him into a wall. The soldier had a knife out in an instant, stabbing backwards in a motion to disembowel a nearby opponent. Creed shifted sideways and the knife passes by, then reached out and snapped the man's wrist, holding the nerve down so that the fingers tensed up and couldn't drop the knife to make a noise. The man barely gasped. Creed was impressed. He put his mouth close to the man's ear and whispered like steel wool on sandpaper.

" How many guards, and where? "

His Russian was flawless, of course. The man's reply, to his credit and Creed's surprise, was hardly affected by the pain he must have been in.

"Yob... Tovyu.... Maht."

" I was hopin' you'd say that."

* * *

"Distracted, my dear?"

In spite of herself, Janice jumped. The man's voice was so low, she almost thought she'd imagined it, but he was standing there all the same. She collected herself quickly, remembering to reply in Russian.

"No General Sabatnich. No. It's just... this is all so overwhelming. I never thought..."

The man cut her off abruptly.

"You are here to think, professor. See that you continue to do so. The weak are those who do not think, and they are inevitably supplanted by the strong."

He turned his back on her and walked towards the tank. Janice watched the large man walk away. As far as she knew, the man was a special military observer, yet she frequently saw him speaking to the scientist in charge of the project. Speaking, not directing or questioning, and that was unusual for any of the military in dealing with those who weren't.

His name had long since been committed to memory. She would find out more back in the states.

* * *

Four off duty Spetsnaz were in the room when Creed kicked in the door. Not surprisingly for the elite troopers they were, the commandos reacted instantly and without hesitation. It wasn't enough.

Even as the door splintered, the commando facing it was down with a knife through his throat. The others dived in different directions, smoothly grabbing at weapons that were near at hand. The figure at the door, a huge man all dressed in black, came in low, sweeping the room with his gun. Another trooper was propelled aginst a wall, twitching spastically. Yet another saw his own hand shatter before his eyes, then took two bullets in the face and didn't see anything. The last man reached his weapon, and in one motion grabbed it up and swung in the direction of the door. Creed was right in front of him. The rifle barrel was torn out of the commando's hands before he knew what happened, then Creed shot him in the forehead. Barely a sound had been made, but all the men were lying in pools of blood motionless. Creed scanned the room quickly. He approached the largest of the corpses, the one he had killed with the knife. There was a slight hint of blood around the collar, but hardly a problem. Real Spetsnaz would never allow it, but few ever looked directly at real Spetsnaz long enough to see something like that.

* * *

The observation room was empty, all non-essential personnel being reassigned before the Omega Project had been initiated. Logan saw this with slight relief, North without concern. Staying low and to the edges of the room. The two scanned quickly, then moved to the plate glass window.

"What took you?"

The voice was undeniably American, but the speaker wore a Spetsnaz uniform. Logan lunged forward, knife up even as North scanned the room, rifle tracking for other targets. Both stopped short within seconds, Logan a breath away from jamming a knife into Creed's chest.

"Ain't we high strung."

Even in the darkness, Logan was sure Creed was grinning.

The larger man pushed passed the smaller, still standing with a knife held out. Creed ripped away the Spetsnaz uniform as he crouched before the window. After a moment the other two joined him, North half watching the door.

In the huge room below them, people moved about like purposefull automatons, carrying out work they had obviously practiced long and hard at. Above it all, in a glass tank, watching like a gargoyle made sickly flesh, the huge, pale figure drifted in fluid. Blond hair formed a halo around his head. Tubes and cables crisscrossed the floor around the tank.

Logan only took in the scene for a moment before looking elsewhere. He spotted his goal easily.

"I see her. Over by that console."

If either of the others heard the catch in his voice, they ignored it. North knew Logan wouldn't let his past involvement with Janice interfere with the extraction. Creed didn't care.

North had a more pressing concern.

"If she's here, the project must be in it's final phase. They aren't suppose to be able to do that thing with the metal yet."

"Looks like Ops screwed up again. Guess we'll have to improvise."

Logan looked warily at Creed, waiting for more. North spoke first.

"Hey, we've survived worse scenarios than this."

"Maybe North, but none spring to mind. This mission is FUBAR from the word go."

Surpirsingly, Creed agreed with Logan.

" The runt is right. I'm for cuttin our loses. I say, screw the mole, let's grab that metalmakin tech they're using to finish the process. Never did trust double agents anyways."

Logan gritted his teeth and hissed at Creed.

"We got our orders, and geting Janice out of there is part of them."

"True, but the major couldn't have known the Russinas were this far along with their super-soldier program." North sounded resigned.

Creed on the other hand, sounded excited.

" Logan, you grab the doohickey. North's in charge of the dame. Me, I'm gonna wish Ivan there a big old happy birthday."

Creed snapped down the visor of his helmet.

"They're ready to activate the super-soldier. We're gonna stop that."

North was silent. Logan felt a cold knot form in his gut.

* * *

Janice faced the console, but here eyes were everywhere. For a moment, the idea of sabotaging the project herself crossed her mind, but she let it pass. She was here to observe and record, not to interfere. At least she had figured a few things out already. The large man in the tank wasn't supposed to be there, at least, not yet. She had watched earlier as technicians set up additional fluid packets and plasma, but had thought them just safety precautions. They were not. They were attached to the man, more obscene umbilical cords in a womb giving birth to...god only knew what. Pumping life into what had to be on the edge of death.

Activity around the tank was frantic now, commands being shouted and readings called out at an insane pace. Compensating, adjusting, feeding... the womb analogy was making more sense all the time, as the carbonadium feed began.

"The synthesizer is working. He isn't rejecting the grafts."

"Containment is reaching critical on the spoor filter, venting to secondary systems..."

"Life signs are stable, but still below normal."

Janice glanced over at the main feed lines, drawing the strange metal from storage and pumping it directly into the blood and marrow and flesh of the man. A part of her wanted to rejoice that the system worked. She had contributed to the final adjustments to the synthesizer, but had never expected to see it work. Another part of her cringed in horror, for the same reasons.

* * *

Pain, such pain, why is this happening why do I feel so much pain why do I feel at all I was deaddead dead, killed the girls, killed them all then the agentkilledmekilledmeshotmedead hot pain in the chest, and I finally now what death is like warm darkwhy am I feelingfloatingwhatwhytwhy who dies next...

* * *

"Life signs rising... good lord...they're spiking! Cardio off the scale, ECG twice normal, respiration increasing..."

"Initial carbonadium feed almost completed, synthesizer is ready for stabilization and integration..."

"What in the name of god...."

The last cry was not a reaction to the perversion of birth taking place, but from a technician who had glanced upwards at the observation deck. Spetznaz shouted commands and snapped out weapons, orders were shouted... Janice followed the man's gaze to the deck above. The room behind the window had been empty and dark, but now the lights were on, and a large figure was standing, there, waving at the crowd below and smiling.

Janice recognized the figure and crouched down behind the console, forcing her eyes to look away and at the ground. Creed didn't smile for many things....

[next part]

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