The base slept. Beneath the moonlit night, it sat nestled within a canyon, deep enough to avoid alien scanners, wide enough to allow for an emergency take-off in case it didn't. Within its alien geometries and cavernous rooms, its massive power plant throbbed and hummed.
A few unlucky rookies on watch duty kept each other awake on the bridge with coffee and stories of missions both successful and failed. Everyone else was in bed, either sleeping or fucking. Everyone except for Christine Liu, that is, who was working alone in the engineering bay, in sore need of both.
"Think this'll do it," she commented to the small robot hovering beside her, who whirred affirmatively. "Alright, test it out. Just a quick blast."
The machine turned towards the articulated mannequin wearing a prototype power armor. The mannequin lifted its arm at a painted alien target and pulled the trigger for the wrist-mounted flamethrower.
After Christine had put out the fire from the explosion, she sighed deeply. "We've got a problem... Any ideas?"
The robot beeped and chirped. "You're right! I forgot about those. I don't think Dad ever got the chance to build one for real before... But I remember he had notes on powered armor that utilized flamethrower weaponry. With his notes, I bet I can get this thing working in time for that supply raid.
"Dad's notes...where did I leave them?"
The droid whistled. "Great..." The Zoo... The General would give her an earful if he caught her in there without an armed escort. The last soldier who had dared had been reassigned to a Siberian reconnaissance base indefinitely. It could
probably
wait until morning...
...But that would be half a day wasted. And that convoy could leave for Berlin any moment. Even a delay of a few hours could be the difference between the strike team having a new weapon or not.
"Disable the security cameras outside and inside the Zoo," she instructed, grabbing a pistol from its rack and her bag of tools. "Anyone asks, we're there to fix the cameras. And if we get caught in the Zoo...well, I'll come up with something."
* * * * *
Christine opened the door to the Zoo. "Stay here. Keep guard. I'll be right back," she instructed the robot. She walked inside. Unsleeping monitors bathed the room in an eldritch, amethyst glow. It was cold, far chillier than the rest of the base. Even at the best of times, the room was unsettling. Alone, at night? It was downright creepy. Not even the pistol on her hip gave her much comfort.
Of course, Christine mused, had she
actually
been alone, it would have been far preferable. But the room contained one other occupant: the reason why this room was nicknamed the Zoo. Sealed within a reinforced-glass cylinder in the center of the room was Subject Omega. His long, pallid body curled up within the container, his mazarine stripes and ebony spikes the only color on that ivory form.
The General has christened him the Snake King, but Christine personally disapproved of the name. She saw nothing kingly in that king's behavior. It was a monster, plain and simple, albeit one that represented the pinnacle of alien potential, both physical and mental. It had killed Sergeant Jones when they had first discovered his nest, and would have murdered the General, too, were it not for a lucky shot with a stungun that had stunned the monster long enough for it to be retrieved alive. As it was, it had broken two of the General's ribs. Keeping something so dangerous on board the ship just to satisfy the chief scientist's curiosity struck Chrstine as idiocy bordering on the suicidal, but the commander had assented to his bold undertaking, and that was that.
At the very least, Christine had ensured that the Zoo was well-equipped to hold the serpent. Sometimes she thought that she should find some Schadenfreude in the doctor's experiments on Omega, but despite its monstrosity, she could derive no joy from its pain and imprisonment. It should be euthanized and dissected. But if the doctor could save a single human's life or shorten the war by a single day through his studies, then it was for the greater good, she reasoned. Didn't mean she liked it.
Christine crept past the fogged glass. Within, Omega stirred lazily, its pallid body slithering over itself. Its black eyes watched Christine's movements closely. She shuddered. The beast looked like an enormous python, with two thin, reptilian arms, and a spiked, cobra-like hood. Without its armor, it looked like nothing more than a cryptid, a beast forgotten by man and science. But she knew that its mind was as dangerous as any other alien's, probably more so. If the chief scientist's recovered notes were correct, Omega was more intelligent than any species yet encountered, including humanity.
"Get in, grab the notes, get out," Christine whispered to herself. She didn't want to spend a moment longer near that thing than necessary. She spied the datapad on the shelf where she had left it, its contents more valuable than anyone or anything on the base, besides the General himself: the research notes of her late father.
It had been he who had resurrected the base, turned an abandoned wreck into a mobile resistance base. It had been he, with the help of the General, who had turned them from a pitiful bunch of vandals and vigilantes into an actual rebellion against the alien overlords who had conquered their planet. Ever since his passing, the base had felt...empty. Like its soul was missing, as unscientific as that sounded. It was a heavy burden to succeed her father, but a necessary one. She would complete what he had started and restore humanity's freedom, or she would die trying.
She grabbed the datapad and turned towards the door. A sudden creak froze her in her steps. The glass cylinder was now entirely opaque with frost. A loud, thunderous thwump shook the room as Omega's tail struck the glass, sending the room's assortment of display screens shivering. Again, the beast struck, and this time, as his tail vanished into the mist, it left behind a crack that slowly crawled across the glass, the tiny clinkling of its passage seeming to echo through the otherwise silent room.
Christine ran, but the final blow smashed through the weakened glass, and a chunk of Omega's former cage struck her leg, knocking her to the ground. The datapad clattered to the floor and slid under one of the tables.
With a speed that seemed impossible for his size, Omega slithered out of the chamber. It looked at Christine, then the door. It darted towards it.
"I hope this is worth it," Christine thought. She slammed her hand onto the nearby emergency door lock. Eight inches of door slammed down, trapping Omega inside. With her. Perfect...
