Jenny Plague-Bringer(79)

Inside, the floor was cracked and full of dead weeds and scattered trash. A small, sleek structure of black steel, obviously much more recent, stood in the center of the room, with a pair of sunken double doors like an elevator. Ward stepped up to the circular lens beside it and let the security system scan his retina. There was loud thunk, and then the steel doors slid apart.

“After you.” Ward nodded at Tommy.

Tommy stepped forward. Inside the doors, a long escalator, activated by their arrival, flowed silently down a steep tunnel made of old concrete reinforced with bright steel ribs. Bars of fluorescent lights hung at evenly spaced intervals all the way down.

“What’s down there?” Tommy asked him.

“Your future,” Ward replied.

Tommy lifted his overstuffed duffel bag and stepped onto the escalator. It took them down, down, down...

“What is this place?” Tommy asked.

“A research base. Originally built by the Nazis before World War II, for the Yggdrasil Project...which, as far as we can tell, was about finding and breeding humans with ‘supernormal’ abilities, to create a race of super-soldiers.”

“Is that what you’re trying to do?” Tommy asked him.

“We’re not interested in breeding projects, only national defense,” Ward said. “This base fell into Soviet hands after the war, and they did God knows what with it until the 1980s, when they realized they were losing Germany, cleared the place out, and sealed it up. The modern German government has no use for it—they were going to demolish it, but now it’s under lease to the U.S. government. My agency, specifically.”

They reached the bottom of the escalator and stepped into a wide corridor with gleaming white tiles on the floor and walls. When Ward had first scouted the location, the walls had been either concrete or raw rock from the natural cave system. It had looked like an underground bunker, but with the new walls, floors, and lighting, it now felt more like a proper research center.

“How big is this place?” Tommy asked, clearly impressed.

“Several levels deep,” Ward said. “It had everything we could wish for—dormitories, huge reinforced laboratory bays, an independent supply of mountain spring water, ventilation, hydroelectric power from a couple of nearby waterfalls. German engineering. You have to hand it to the Nazis, they really knew what they were doing sometimes.”

Tommy snorted laughter and smirked.

“Here’s our observation deck.” Black double doors opened automatically at Ward’s approach. They entered a wide, dimly lit corridor lined with clear windows, which looked down into high-ceilinged concrete laboratories, some of them just bare bones with just fluorescent lights and huge steel sinks, others jammed with chemical testing or medical equipment. One had an MRI machine. The workday had ended, so the observation deck and the labs below were deserted.

A digital workstation sat in front of each window, allowing observers to monitor the lab from above. A long table with more workstations ran along the center of the corridor. Little square flags hung here and there, depicting the “union  ” of fifty white stars on a blue field from an American flag. As an agency with no official existence, ASTRIA had no official insignia or seal, either, but it had used the starry blue as its unofficial symbol since the 1950’s.

“This looks really familiar to me,” Tommy said. “Like I’ve been here before.”

“That’s because you made the right choice,” Ward said. “You belong here. This is where we’ll use the latest technology to unravel just how your power works, and how it can best be applied to national defense. It’s quiet now, so let’s go to your new room.”

Ward led him through more tunnels, toward the dormitory area for test subjects. Along the way, they passed a pair of security officers in black uniforms ribbed with light body armor. Their uniforms were blank, with no insignia, badges, or other designs to indicate what organization employed these men. Like all the security staff at the base, they were not soldiers, but specialists from Hale Security Group, a Virginia-based multinational that provided operatives under contract to the Defense and State Departments, the CIA, and other sensitive agencies, and they did similar work for an assortment of other national governments, including the UK and Saudi Arabia. These men were former Special Forces or intelligence agents from across the Western world, highly trained killers who knew how to keep a secret.

Because they were mercenaries and not soldiers, they did not salute Ward, but simply nodded their heads in recognition.

Ward opened the double doors to the short dormitory hall for male test subjects. Tommy gaped as he stepped into the first room, the largest on the hall.