“You’re here,” Alex says. “And you haven’t tried to kill me yet.”
“You must want something from me.”
He and Eli have a staring contest for about ten seconds before Eli says, “Yeah, the fan in the containment facility isn’t working and with Tanis and Zipper on a mission you’re the only one who can get close enough to fix it.”
“And you couldn’t get an intern and a ladder?”
“Do you want us to have to make the waiver longer when said intern gets their hand chopped off by a blade rotating too fast to even see it?”
“Yes, that fan, the only type of fan we even have in the containment facility. Come fix it.”
It’s a short walk, one that’s made in complete silence. Eli punches in various keycodes as they pass into higher security levels, but when they get to the palm scanner that opens the last door, the screen is dark.
Eli pushes the power button a few times. The screen stays dark. “Damn, not again.” Then he pulls out his phone. “Isaiah, do you have a minute? The palm scanner is broken— yeah, I know, I don’t think we can take apart the wiring though— okay.”
The edge of one of the sliding doors is dented in a little, as if someone had tried to wedge something very narrow in between the doors. Just a couple moments after Alex notices that, the door at the other end of the hall opens and Isaiah, savior of all machine-related messes, beelines for the palm scanner. They fiddle with the screen itself for a few moments before taking out the entire panel of the wall and tossing it on the floor.
“Told you we would have to take apart the wiring,” Isaiah says, backing up to stand in front of the door. “Blasting the door open in one, two, three.”
Once the door is off its hinges, thanks to the explosion courtesy of Isaiah’s blaster, it doesn’t take any of them long to spot someone in dark clothing crouched by one of the modules, halfway through opening it up.
“Well, it looks like this might be a little more complicated than I thought,” Eli says.
