|
|
"How are we doing today?"
"Much better, thanks.."
Cassidy really was feeling much better. It had been days since the guards had done anything to her, and her aches and bruises were quickly healing. Raina had also brought her meals regularly.
"Think you can make it out of your cell today?" Raina asked with a smile.
Cassidy's face lit up with surprise, "You're letting me go?"
Raina's mouth twisted back down into a sort of frown, "I'm sorry.. but I can't let you go.."
Cassidy just looked back down at the food Raina had brought her, her expression fading back into complacency.
"I wish I could... but I'm doing the next best thing.. I'm doing what I can.."
Cassidy thought about the weeks she'd spent in her cell. She'd lost count of the days after a little more than a month..
She remembered how every time they'd hurt her.. every time she'd choked down a piece of hard stale bread.. she'd think about Butch, and she knew he would come to rescue her. She knew that once he was there, everything would be all right again..
Cassidy felt her eyes moisten; she wasn't sure if she should hope anymore..
"Come on Cassidy... the fresh air and sun will be good for you.." Raina laid a hand on her shoulder, "besides, you don't want to be all pale and skinny when Butch comes, do you?"
Cassidy just looked up at Raina's warm smile with an expression of shock.
"You know Butch?"
"We've met.."
Cassidy's heart jumped a little as she heard this..
"Don't worry.. he's on his way.."
"How do you know him?" Cassidy felt a slight tinge of Jealousy as Raina smiled at her.
"Come on Cassidy.. I'll tell you all about it.."
Raina stood up and extended her hand. Cassidy, however, stood up without Raina's help, and followed her out of the cell that had been her exclusive domain for so long..
Under the high-tech elevated roadways lay the old road system, and the slums where most of the industrial laborers lived.
Vector was the largest city in Trinity, and home to over ten million people.. Most of them didn't own a car.. they were either too poor, or too intelligent to own one.. Owning anything of value in a city like this meant having something to lose, and thieves waited in every shadow for the unsuspecting..
Butch stared up in wonder as the group passed by the feet of skyscrapers, and through the evening masses that flooded the cement jungle..
Neon signs edged the gloomy buildings, casting an erie glow of green and blue in the settling fog, and hostile faces lined the sidewalks everywhere Butch turned..
Team Rocket headquarters lay on the outskirts of this very city, and Butch had been there many times before. Although his awe of Vector never seemed to dwindle, he wondered how anyone could live there.. Butch had grown up in a city much smaller than this one.. Veradin had no skyscrapers.. no slum either.. just a beach that drew tourists in the summer, and plenty of good hard working type citizens.. Sometimes Butch wondered why he'd joined team rocket with Cassidy..
Butch knew it was the desperation of the surroundings that made things so easy for Giovanni here.. It was easy to recruit thugs out of the slums..
Butch kicked a newspaper that lay on the ground aside as the group approached the parking garage where the red mini van that it seemed they should own by now was waiting for them.
After the first day of dealing with exploding farm houses, car bombs, and interrupted funerals, team rocket had ceased to exist as far as their dealings with them.
"I guess your woman was telling the truth after all."
James grinned at Butch.
James' comment made Butch think about someone he'd caught a glimpse of in the crowds earlier.. He thought she looked like Raina, but she was gone without a trace before he could look twice.. But her eyes.. her green eyes seemed to stare right through him..
Butch drove the thought from his mind and went over the events of the last two days with himself:
Two days ago they'd broken into Meta-lab in Meta city and accessed a document from reports on pokemon genetic structures and how they correlated with the human genome.
Somehow they must have set off an alarm though.. They narrowly escaped the police by taking off in the lab's helicopter, Meta-1, and flying about 15 miles over dense forest. After abandoning the stolen chopper and swimming across a river to reach the next county, they'd called Mondo on the cell phone and rendezvoused at a waffle house on the outskirts of Teridon city.
They drove the three hours to Vector city that night. This was the one Butch had been waiting for.. lab34..
After reaching vector and renting a room, they'd paid a visit to the huge city library. (a large dark building with a charming gothic architecture and gargoyles on all of it's corners)
James and Butch dug through public records and microfilmed archives while Jessie and Mondo searched the internet for anything relating to the human/pokemon genetic amalgamation project..
All that Butch and James managed to locate was old newspaper articles from the 1970's commenting on the 'abomination' of genetic engineering.
Jessie and Mondo had slightly more luck, though nothing conclusive.. Jessie located a few old usenet posts referring to the "pokemon complete genome project," and a few documents relating to astounding similarities between what parts of the genomes had been mapped at the time of the articles.
However, Mondo did come up with one real nugget.. An MIT student named Anderson Viller's project regarding the notion of human/pokemon genetic engineering.
Anderson had proposed that if the correct DNA strands from certain pokemon were injected into a newly fertilized human embryo, the genes were compatible in such a way as they should indeed mature into a human/pokemon hybrid of some sort.. He couldn't postulate exactly what the results would be, however, or what effect the procedure would have on a human, if any notable ones at all.
Jessie, James, Mondo, Meowth, and Butch were now all sitting in the warm van peering out at their next target.. the high security lab34.. James held a map in his hands as he sat behind the driver's seat to make it look like they were simply lost tourists should anyone show up..
Butch didn't have fond memories of this lab at all..
Meowth sat next to him, looking over old blueprints of the building.
Meowth always kept important things like blueprints in safe deposit boxes. He also tended to horde more useless items in his closet..
He kept a stack of old shoe boxes in the closet back at the old team rocket headquarters, he also kept any unused lengths of wire he might happen across in his tool drawer. "You can never have enough wire," Meowth would say, much to everyone's confusion..
However, his miserly ways had saved them a lot of trouble recently: the laboratory schematics were a lifesaver..
The last time the team had 'broken' into lab34, they'd used a key card that had been provided for them by Giovanni. (no telling where he got it..) This time, however, they'd have to find another way.
"What kind of maintenance accesses do we have on this one?" Butch asked as Meowth continued to study the large schematic.
"Looks like the standard stuff: electrical, ventilation, water, and sewer.. However, the ventilation system is too small for a human to fit through."
"Big enough for a large mouthed pokemon?" James asked turning to Meowth, an evil grin on his face..
"Well... I suppose.." Meowth seemed rather nervous as he said this.
"This'll be a cinch then. You just go in through the vents and send the elevator up to the roof for us." James made a motion with his finger as if he were pushing an elevator button.
The police were hardly a concern on this mission, the only external alarm on the building was on the front and back doors. Once inside, the only thing to worry about were the building's internal defenses.. and Butch knew the internal defenses were at least as much to worry about as the police..
This was one of the biggest laboratories in the country, and it was all in one building, unlike Meta labs. Lab34 was eleven stories high, and about 200 yards long on each of it's four sides. It was, however, dwarfed by many of the factories that surrounded it.
Lab34's state of the art internal defenses, which might be worse now than the last time he'd visited, mainly had consisted of laser grids and defense androids.
The laser grids were designed to trap intruders. Anyone caught in one basically couldn't move without being killed.. Butch remembered stopping dead in his tracks as he saw the beams light up around him the last time he'd broken in.. This time he'd have to be more careful..
James started the engine, and the van pulled away as James U-turned in the now empty street and they headed back to the motel to prepare for the mission.
"Oh shut-up, Meowth, we're in just as much danger as you are!" Jessie was getting rather tired of hearing Meowth's whining about being in the line of fire again...
Everything was quiet as the four travelers walked up the dark street; a light wind blowing loose scraps of newspaper along the sidewalk. No one lived near the lab, it was in the highly polluted industrial sector of Vector... Sector 34. The only ones that spent their nights here were rats and a few of the forsaken homeless..
The group rounded an alley corner and stood in front of the north face of the building. Butch touched the transmit button on the earpiece of his small headset, "ok Mondo, we're going up. You know the drill."
"I've got ya, and be careful, guys.."
Butch looked up through the fog at the high cement wall in front of him and wondered if their hooks would propel that high... He'd never attempted to climb a building taller than about 85 feet, this one was about 110. Oh well.. they surely had to try..
Jessie, James, and Butch all pulled out their launchers and aimed them for the sky. There was about 150 feet of light titanium cord on the end of each of their small three pronged hooks. They one by one fired and watched as the titanium hooks sailed upwards, shimmering in the light fog, and landed over the edge of the building..
Butch yanked on his cord a few times until he was confident it was secure enough.
"Come on, Meowth," Butch said as he secured a sliding grip to the cord that would allow him to climb on such a thin wire.
"I've got a bad feeling about this.." Meowth said as he hopped into a small pouch that hung from Butch's back.
"You've always got a bad feeling, Meowth," Jessie retorted as they began their ascent.
Scaling a wall in the style they were employing requires an incredible amount of endurance, and they all were severely tired by the time they'd reached the roof. All of them but Meowth anyway..
"Ok Meowth.. it's really simple.. you just go down this air duct, find the elevator, then get in and bring it to the roof.."
James instructions were simple enough.. and they finally prodded Meowth into the air duct. Then they all sat down to take a break after the exhausting climb..
After about 15 minutes of waiting they began to wonder if Meowth was coming back. He didn't have a two way radio like they did, so until he returned, they wouldn't know what was happening to him.
Finally they heard the elevator carry to the top of the building, and saw Meowth as the doors opened.
"Ok, I'll just be waiting out here for you guys to get back..." Meowth began, but was quickly interrupted.
"Meowth.. we're going to need you to go to the control room just in case, and here, I forgot to give you this earlier." Butch handed Meowth a radio receiver so he could hear any transmissions.
Meowth reluctantly accepted it as they all stepped into the elevator with him and descended into the building..
They already knew that the files were kept on computers in this high-tech lab, but they also knew that they were only accessible from certain terminals. The only terminal they knew the access code to was on the fourth floor, in one of the director's offices.. if he hadn't changed it by now..
The defense control room was all the way down on the ground floor, and they went there first. Making sure Meowth found his way to the room full of monitors and control panels.
"Ok Meowth.. it's pretty simple.. if we radio you for help you just pull this lever and all of the defense systems will shut down.."
"Well why don't we just pull it now?" Meowth asked reaching for the handle.
"Because when you pull it the alarm is going to go off..." James said firmly gripping the handle before Meowth could move it.
"Oh.."
"If you have to pull it don't hesitate to, but we'll only have about 3 to 5 minutes before the cops start to arrive... so don't pull it unless we tell you to.. after all, you don't have a transmitter on your radio, so if you pull it without us knowing it, we'll be easily caught."
Jessie, James, and Butch turned to head back for the elevator.
"Ok.. watch out for anything on the walls that looks like a sensor.. I really don't want to get in the kind of trouble we did last time we were here.." Butch said as they walked down the darkened hall towards the elevator shaft.
The elevator seemed to be about the only thing inside the whole building that wasn't super high tech, and it even smelled bad.
Jessie stepped out first as they reached the fourth floor, and Butch laid a firm hand on her shoulder to halt her.
"Remember... caution.."
"You don't need to tell me again, Butch, I got it the first time.."
Butch just nodded and they walked down the hall at a conservative pace towards office 457.
When they finally reached it they easily recognized the nameplate on the small mailbox outside, 'Steinberg'.
They cautiously opened the door and stepped inside.
Although it was a high security facility, the security within the offices themselves was just about nonexistent. Jessie sat behind the terminal on the desk and moved the mouse. The screen slowly lit up and she entered the password as she remembered it, "r5nu3f9".. 'Incorrect password' came up..
Jessie gritted her teeth and growled
"Capitalize the n and the f," James suggested
Jessie re-entered the password using the correct capitals and they were accepted..
"Ok.. first off, lets see what they have on the human/pokemon genetic amalgamation project.."
Jessie's fingers quickly tapped along the keys and the file came up.
Butch read over it quickly and realized it was almost exactly what they had seen from the MIT student's report the day before in the library..
"Scroll it all the way down to the bottom, Jessie.."
Jessie complied, and then turned around to meet his gaze after she'd read the author of the project: Anderson Viller..
"Hm... looks like he's trying to make his dream a reality," James said..
"Look at this," Jessie said bringing their attention back to the screen as she traced a circle around a hyperlink in the document with her mouse pointer..
"Human cloning project.." Butch slowly read aloud.
Jessie turned back to face them again.
"Butch, put two and two together.. it's not just a cloning project, that link is there because the two projects are related.. they're not just trying to clone humans... they're cloning pokemon human hybrids.."
All of the blood seemed to drain from Butch's head as a chill ran down his back.
"I know what she meant..."
"Who?"
"Raina.."
Butch finally realized what had really happened to Cassidy, and how she was still alive.
"This is exactly what we were looking for, I'm sure of it.." then added, "Raina tried to tell me what was going on.. I just didn't know it."
Jessie, James, and Butch all stood there for a moment contemplating what they'd uncovered, but they were promptly pulled back to the moment by a muffled sound on their radios and several seconds of static. After that the radio went dead. They called for Mondo several times, but it was no use, there was no response.
"Looks like we've got trouble..."
Jessie flipped the power switch on the terminal as they all dashed out of the office and back down the hall towards the elevator.
"I wonder if Meowth heard that.."
Suddenly Butch felt a hard and heavy foot land square on his chest and was thrown against the wall to his left. He looked up to see a nightmarish figure dressed in black and wearing what appeared to be silver gauntlets rushing towards him.
Butch ducked and rolled to his side just in time to avoid the crushing blow that was delivered, leaving a large hole in the wall.
Butch immediately drew his gun, but it was kicked from his hand as he unholstered it.
The figure was about to attempt another blow when Butch saw Jessie fly in from behind, delivering a crushing jumpkick to the back of the attacker's masked head.
Butch was shocked to see the figures head lean forward slightly, and quickly snap back to normal as he quickly unleashed a wicked spin kick, hitting Jessie hard in the stomach and knocking her back against the wall. She fell sprawled out unconscious on the floor.
Butch also saw James quickly dodging blows and trying to counterattack a similar figure to the one that was confronting him. Butch was on his feet in an instant and delivered his strongest side kick to his attacker's stomach. Once again, the hard blow seemed to have almost no effect, merely knocking the assailant to his back heel.
'My god, it's hard as a rock' Butch thought to himself as he positioned himself for another strike.
Butch looked past his attacker for a moment and saw James get slammed into the wall, and fall against the floor also knocked out. Now both figures could focus on him..
Butch delivered a spinning back kick to the chest of his attacker, which once again, only seemed to slow it down. However, as Butch's foot hit, he used it's impact to push off and roll away from the attacker deftly picking up his handgun from the dark blue carpet. Butch quickly turned and unloading all eighteen rounds into the dark figures... who stood for a moment then silently fell over.. apparently dead..
Butch breathed a sigh of relief as he stood up and walked over to the bodies slumped over on the floor. 'My god.. what were those things?' Butch thought to himself.
Then he noticed a movement in the shadows to his right.
He instantly trained the empty gun in the direction it came from, then melted.. it was Raina..
"Raina! what are you doing here?" Butch stepped towards her as his empty gun lowered to his side.
Raina just stared at Butch with a look of sadness in her eye.
"What's wrong?"
Then Butch felt a hard blow on the back of his head and turned to see Zack's confident grin fading away as he fell to the floor..