6

Kidnapping

While everyone else was visiting a recovering Agent Harris, Samantha was tracking down her new lab. She walked down the nearest corridor and found a terminal mounted on the wall. No keyboard, just a simple touchscreen displaying a map of the base.

“Hmm,” she muttered to herself, “I wonder if this thing is voice activated. Uh, Dr. Samantha Weiss. I’m looking for my lab and how to get there.”

Immediately the map changed, first indicating her current location with a large red dot, then expanding while a red line ran through the maze of displayed hallways until it reached a destination and another dot lit up. Everything else on the map then grayed out save the suggested route to her lab.

“Nice.”

She studied the map for a few moments, then tapped the screen, with a quick “Thank you,” whereupon the display returned to the general map display it had been before.

Samantha started walking again, this time making a right at the first intersection of corridors she came to, per the instructions from the display. Along the way she passed two lab-coated scientists engaged in their own discussion, one soldier who gave her a polite nod in passing, and a confused-looking technician reading the labels of the doors he passed, hoping to find the right one.

When the hallway ended at another hall perpendicular to hers, one wall of which sported an elevator, she went straight to the elevator, took out her ID card, and flashed it before the sensor. A moment later the doors opened and she was inside looking at a short panel of buttons. She pressed one of them, the doors closed, and she began to descend.

“I’ll admit, Lou’s kinda cute,” she said to herself. “And smart. I like a man with a brain. I wonder if he likes women with IQs of one hundred fifty.”

One level down the elevator came to a stop, the doors opened, and she was once again out in a fresh intersection. A glance up at the hallway labels to be certain and she took the direction ahead of her. The sign read, “L4.” A short walk later she was standing before a sliding security door with a sensor next to it. A sign above the door simply read, “Temporal Physics–4.”

“This must be the place.”

A flash of her badge across the sensor opened the door. She then stepped inside for a look at the new lab, the door easing shut behind her.

The room was festooned with lab benches and computer stations. The far right wall supported a couple of man-sized pieces of experimental equipment whose function might be known solely to herself and the other lab techs, while the left wall was adorned with a thick glass window that looked out over a large testing chamber. Fifty feet across to the other side of the room was an open passage into what she assumed to be the break room. The room was silent, the only sound being the occasional beep from one of the terminals.

She walked in, looking around for any sign of life, and called out, “Hello? I’m doctor Samantha Weiss, but you can call me Sam.” They must be in the break room.

She crossed the room, passing by one of the benches along the way, on which one of the terminals was blinking “Password Correct, Press to Continue.”

“That’s odd,” she muttered. “That could be a security breach, just walking away from an open terminal like that.”

For the moment she shrugged it off and kept walking, but once past the bench she saw something on the floor that caught her more suspicious glare: a spilled mug of juice, its contents pooling on the floor.

She immediately cast her gaze about, knees bending in a slight crouch. Carefully bending down, she picked up the mug. Then, holding it like a weapon, she rose back up and more carefully approached the break room, this time not saying a word, her steps silent.

The break room had no door, just an open partition in which she paused. She didn’t go in, but rather stepped first to the left side for a better angle, then the right. From the right she could see a couple of chairs, part of a table with a microwave and coffeemaker, and two sets of legs lying on the floor.

She backed one slow step away, turned very deliberately, then, eyeing her course, bolted into a run. She was halfway across the lab when she saw what looked like a roughly man-sized shimmering appear before the door. She immediately stopped.

“I think I’ve seen this movie.”

Taking the mug, she hurled it as hard as she could at the shimmering outline as she broke again into a run. The mug bounced off the air a couple of feet from the door, accompanied by a curse in a deep male voice, but the shimmering outline remained in place.

A few yards away from the door and the suspicious glimmering, and without warning, Samantha suddenly dropped to the floor on all fours, her back arched. Just as expected, she felt a moving weight slam into her side, letting out another male cry, as the invisible figure launched over her and into the one by the door, where it, too, briefly glimmered as the pair made contact.

“That’s what I thought,” she muttered as she leaped back up to her feet.

Wasting not a second, she swung around, grabbed the keyboard before the screen with the blinking cursor, then nearly pole-vaulted over to the other side, spilling papers and equipment along the way. Landing on her feet, she immediately began swinging the keyboard around like a weapon.

“I can’t see you, but I’m guessing you’re the same bunch that attacked us at Los Alamos. They had a way of vanishing before our eyes too.”

A slight noise directed her attention, and spinning around, she swung the keyboard hard just in time to intercept something whizzing through the air. Something like a bullet hit the keyboard, projecting an electric charge into it that earned a burnt electric odor from within it.

She couldn’t see where it had come from, but she could judge trajectories pretty well and immediately hurled the keyboard straight ahead of her. A few feet away it bounced off the air, earning a glittering display of light around a man-shaped figure. Samantha immediately charged forward, one fist flying, her other hand clawing across what she judged to be about head level. Her fist met hard flesh, while her open hand caught on to cloth, then yanked.

A hood tore loose, revealing the head of a man now seemingly afloat in the air. Samantha emitted a reflexive gasp and leaped back, her eyes darting from him to where the shimmering outlines by the door might now be.

“I guess that explains how you got in here in the first place, but what are you after? And why did you kill those two techs?”

She backed up against a table, one hand reaching back to brace herself and landing discreetly on a terminal keyboard.

“No one dead,” the one before her said in a thick Russian accent. “We don’t want to harm you.”

Behind her back her fingers started working the keys, but before she could even begin stalling for time, another electrified bullet hit the keyboard, sending sparks flying and a startled Samantha leaping quickly away. This was followed by a third round hitting her in the neck from behind, the bullet, which now looked like a dart, sending her body into brief convulsions before she dropped limply to the floor, the man’s hood dropping from her grip.

One of the shimmering figures that had been behind her now reached out a hand past the cloaking of invisibility and into full view. A hand holding a small round object that the figure reached down to place on the unconscious woman’s chest. It looked like little more than a disk with a single large red button in its center, which the hand now pressed before quickly drawing back.

A shimmering of a different sort now enveloped Samantha’s limp form. Rainbow lights outlined her more brightly by the instant, then were gone in an abrupt flash‍—along with Samantha herself.

The floating head muttered something in Russian, one of the other unseen figures responding with a chuckle; then he retrieved his hood from where Samantha had dropped it and put it back on, once again becoming for the most part unseen. A moment later the three shimmering figures were surrounded in their own auras of rainbow lights. A flash, then nothing remained behind.

Nothing save a pair of unconscious techs and signs of a struggle, including one fried keyboard with a strange bullet embedded in it.