Descension

CHAPTER 6

Ben's head aches. The image of small holes and lead peeling away from the fourth shell had burned into his mind. Now, it is the sight of warpage on flesh. Ben's gaze bores down into the beaker, unmoving. Green and purple waves and holes consume his flesh as if they had been burned into the skin, infecting deep into the muscle, corroding and dissolving each atom of matter. It isn't rot. Nothing about it appears biological. It isn't like any kind of radiation damage Ben had ever seen either.

Quarks.

Ben's eyes widen. He takes a pair of old tongs and lifts a dish containing warped lead over to his microscope. He zooms in as close as he can, then retrieves a small stylus with an electric tip on the end from a tool cabinet. He returns to the microscope and begins to record the screen's display as he slowly moves the tip of the stylus towards a single atom. Ben's breath shakes. It had happened before he knew it- a small zap, bursting the atom apart, protons and neutrons splitting to reveal their quarks. Ben pulls away and sets the pen down, then transfers the footage from the microscope to his holopad. Once uploaded, Ben begins to scrub through the recording, stopping where the quarks are best visible. Unlike what he had usually seen and expected of quarks, a pale sphere, the quarks are dark and shift colors like an oil spill, moving in and out of themselves. Small pieces of them break off, orbit, and rejoin in the center of the mass. He had only seen this in diagrams and theoretical illustrations. Now, before his eyes is Strange Matter. Ben takes a snapshot of the image on the screen, then imports it to a text document, writing down every step of his experiment.

Ben sets down his holopad, his senses returning to him as the adrenaline clears. Shouting. Screaming. Ben turns around to the door. Gunshots. Marching. Ben rushes to the door and slams the button for it to slide open, aghast with the sight before him. Ordership soldiers swarm the hall, bodies littering the ground, veiled in smoke.

"No!" Ben shouts.

As he rushes forwards out of the lab, he slips, falling to his knees into a pool of blood. Tears well in his eyes from the terror of the sight. He blinks through the smoke and leans down to clutch the lab coat of an engineer's body, desperately trying to shake him awake. Ben gasps as the engineer reaches up to grab his arm, a pair of familiar blue eyes gazing up at him.

"Alex!" Ben screams.

He cradles Alex's body in his arms, desperately gathering him close to his chest in an anguished attempt to stop his bleeding.

"They're after you," Alex chokes out, squeezing Ben's arm, "Run." He wheezes out the word, the faintest hint of a hopeful gleam in his eye rapidly dwindling.

Ben sobs, "No, no, Alex, stay with me! Stay!"

Ben cups Alex's cheek with one hand, his heart shredding with agony. He feels Alex's body weaken in his arms, and his hand drops as his eyes gloss over.

Ben shakes in horror, hyperventilating as he stares down into Alex's eyes. Shaken out of reality, he stands up as if pulled by a force beyond himself. He stares at the handprint of blood embedded into the shoulder of his coat. I have to fight. His brows furrow in rage as he stares down at Alex's body, the urge to wreak vengeance flooding his entire system. As he scans the floor, he puts a name to every disfigured and bloodstained face. Bile rises in his throat, and he raises his gaze from the ground to look down the hall; left and right, the bodies only pile higher. Fueled by fury, Ben storms back into the lab and fastens a gas mask over his face before scouring through the entire lab's assortment of chemicals. He shatters glasses along the way, uncoordinated as he desperately rifles through his arsenal. He snatches two bottles and combines them haphazardly into a beaker, his actions sloppy as rage boils over his adrenaline-flooded system. Organophosphorus, the pesticide used for the facility's surrounding gardens, and isopropyl alcohol, the standard disinfectant. He shakily covers the top of the beaker before lifting his wristwatch to his face.

He presses the top and bottom of it with his thumb and forefinger, speaking as clearly as he could behind his mask and the warble of a repressed sob, "Code Orange! I repeat, Code Orange!" Ben howls, "Evacuate the facility! I volunteer myself for capture."

"He's given himself up," Antonov says, raising his fist to his troops, "Hold fire! We need him alive for trial." He turns to the man kneeling on his left, "Cody, you send the first shot when I say fire."

Cody nods, smirking behind his helmet, "Affirmative and with pleasure, Sir."

The troops await Ben's arrival. A few moments pass before a door closes off the hallway behind them. The troops look to Antonov.

"Automatic security measure." He waves the words off as if it was obvious.

The troops shift with unsteadiness. Minutes pass. Antonov checks his watch, clicking his tongue with impatience. Then, a figure emerges from the smoke. Ben stands before the troops, his eyes locked onto Antonov's.

"Gas mask... smoke too much for you, Anderson?" Antonov snickers, a few of his troops snorting.

Ben looks down at his watch, then presses a button. He raises his gaze back to Antonov's at the sound of a door sliding shut behind himself.

Antonov's eyes narrow, motioning for his troops to raise their weapons, "You got a gun on you?"

Ben drops the covered beaker from his hold, allowing it to smash it on the ground. The clear fluid spills out along the metal tile, and silence fills the room until Antonov begins bursting out into laughter.

"What a display!" Antonov cackles, clutching his stomach as he nearly doubles over. "God forbid, he's brought water!"

Ben says nothing.

Antonov wipes tears from his eyes, chuckling as he sets his hands on his hips, "Well..." He clears his throat, takes in a deep breath, though chokes halfway through.

The troops behind him begin to cough as well, clutching at their necks as their breaths turn to choked wheezes. Antonov struggles for breath, his eyes full of tears as he begins to convulse.

At that very moment, Ben snaps, faced with helpless eyes shining with pleads for mercy at his own hand. What have I done? Terror at his own actions consumes him. They took Omnicore. They killed Alex. They deserve this. The justifications begin in Ben's head as a means to soothe him, yet it only makes the guilt twist tighter around his gut. This isn't me.

"On your knees, now! Hands where I can see them!" a voice shouts from behind Ben.

The sound seems a manifestation of his own thoughts, and so Ben complies, tears pooling in his eyes as he's pushed to the ground. He feels conflicted; held down by hands that bind his own and drag him away from the scene that he felt was deserved, and yet the guilt inside him batters the hunger for revenge. Ben watches as he's dragged out through halls littered with bodies of men that weren't just slaves for his machine, but friends, brothers, and lovers. Every face has a name and owns a place in his heart, now slaughtered to feed the greed of The Ordership. Ben closes his eyes. He'd rather preserve the memory of their smiles as his last vision of them rather than the horrifically contorted expressions forever plastered onto their faces.