Isolation-#Wattys2015

Excerpt 15- Red Code

"So", Tyler asked, "what the hell do we do now?"

I sighed, "do we take our chances in trying to hike to the nearest base?"

"No way", James said, "there much worse outside than what's in this lab. Have you wondered why the lab is built like an artificial planet?"

"A little", I said, "but I mostly assumed it was to keep what's in here in."

"And keep all of the bullshit outside out", James said, "there are plants out there than could consume a grown man like a small fly. Sometimes I make rounds around the outside of the lab and find the bloody bones of security guards, there always laden with the same thing,hydrochloric acid. I did some testing of the plants in the area and discovered nearly everyone of them was carnivorous due to the horrible mineral content of the soil on Ios, it turned out that they use the acid as a digestive juice, a little like Spanish Head Vines."

I sighed, "so what do we do then? We have no ship, a madman who will kill us if we try to hoof it out, and a planet full of meat craving plants. I don't know about the rest of you, but I'm in no mood to get a 20mm through my skull."

No one said anything for a while after that, we all just kind of exchanged glances. Without a ship, we were stuck here until either we could get a distress beacon going or until someone decided that not having heard from the most famous bio lab in the universe for several months was suspicious.

"So hiking away is out of the question", Matt said changing his pose on the bean bag, "what about sending out a distress beacon?"

"To do that we'd need to restart the main generator and get to the top of the tower", James said, "we'd also have to find away around Dr. Loony Tunes."

"I could deal with Psycho man real easy", I said, "just let the High-Power do the talking."

James gave a dirty look, "Martin is the easy part. It's restarting the main generator that's the problem."

The way he said, "starting the main generator that's the problem" make my head hurt, just the tone of his voice made me wonder just how bad our situation really was.

"I'm gonna regret asking this", I said, "but how is restarting the main generator the hard part?"

"It's kept off site", James said, "in an old industrial complex, Ransol Industries, they manufactured steel for the longest time and as of recently they turned mostly to manufacture of heavy pumps, generators and fans. They also deal with experimental industrial equipment like hot water generators, air conditioning's and evaporators as well as furnaces that can cook the ore of heavy and light metals. The bad thing is that they've been dark since this whole mess started, so I'm kind of wondering if Chemical 240 managed to get over there and start fucking with people. If that's the case then who knows what kind of monsters that are hiding out over there."

I sighed, "there's a cold front coming in as well, will that complicate things?"

"It will make your hike safer", Mike said, "like I said, cold air makes the meat eating plants docile, so you probably wont have to worry about them, but in winter most of the planet freezes at night except for what we call Hotspots, places in the surface where the heat from the mantle wells up."

"The mantle?", I asked.

"The planet has a thin crust", James said, "the result is Geothermal heat penetrates almost directly to the top and destroys most of the nutrients in the soil, leaving it incapable of supporting life on it's own, that in turn lead to the death of most non carnivorous plants by starvation and left the carnivorous plants with room to grow."

"In other words the planet eats meat?", I asked.

"Essentially", James said.

"What kind of screw lose planet is this?", I asked again.