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Another ONI Black File: Halo – We Got There First: Part 5
Posted By: Arthur Wellesly<arthur_wellesly@hotmail.com>
Date: 28 April 2003, 7:01 PM
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1133 Hours, September 23, 2525 (Military Calendar)/
Structure on Halo - Distance from Alpha Base: 8,251 km
Captain Griffin noticed the stench of blood almost immediately as he entered the large room. He had already received terrible news from Captain Young, and now he discovered that two of his Marines had been brutally slaughtered. The room was alive with activity, with about eighteen men bustling about, examining everything. He noticed with some distress that there was one pale Helljumper coated in a layer of blood. He reached the end of the room, and found out what all the fuss was about.
He felt bile in his stomach begin to rise as he saw the first corpse, a woman. Her stomach was sliced open vertically with a large cavity there and in her chest. It seemed oddly empty. The second was a man - he had a horizontal incision on his stomach and an interconnecting one from his chest. Both corpses were extremely gruesome, some of the worst cases he had seen in his thirteen years.
"Good morning, sir!" said a man behind him, disturbingly pleasant. "I'm doctor Lewis." He was dressed in a white lab coat of sorts with flecks of fresh red blood on it. He was slightly round in the stomach, and Griffin recognized his as the ship's doctor and pathologist. He noticed with a raised eyebrow the seemingly jovial smile the man wore. Although he did not know this man, he had met men like him. They had to put themselves in an entirely different mindset to deal with the awful things they did - such as the issue at hand. If he did not, he would probably go mad.
"Good morning, doctor," he said.
"Right, well, let's get right down to business, sir," he said, gesturing to the prostrate form of the dead woman. As a ship's doctor, he held no official military rank, however it was customary to address officers as "sir". "Her name was Ceilidh Weller, sir. Irish," he said as an afterthought, as though it were necessary. "One vertical incision down the middle of the torso. Her heart, stomach, intestines, right lung, part of her esophagus, and some of her ribs were all removed." He frowned. "As were her female reproductive organs, sir."
"Removed?" Griffin repeated, alarmed and horrified. He noticed with discomfort the woman's breasts had also been cut off.
"Hmm," he replied casually, "plucked out from the wound."
"Jesus Christ," the captain muttered to himself.
Doctor Lewis did not reply to the oath. "As you can see, there are two pinprick sized holes right on the small of her back." He turned the corpse over to show the captain.
"What the hell are they?" Griffin asked.
"That, sir, I will tell you in a moment." Lewis bustled quickly over to the second corpse, this one a man, with his hollowed out body propped against the back wall. "This man had two incisions that joined it the middle and made it peel out. All the same organs were removed. And as you can see," he lifted the dead man's limp right arm up from his body, "there are the two identical pinprick wounds."
Doctor Lewis removed a small hand held computer from on of his many pockets. Two small rectangular chips protruded from its top. "These are the two Marines' CNI transponder chips. The autopsies have obviously not been carried out yet, but I believe I can give you a pretty good idea as to what happened using these.
"I would conjecture that Lieutenant Edmund entered this room first. After all, his heart stopped beating before Ms. Weller's at approximately 0701 hours this morning. However, we also noticed something weird at about 0655. His heart rate spiked from eighty beats per minute to one hundred and twenty five beats per minute in about a second. After that it immediately plummeted to about thirty-eight beats per minute. That is consistent with some sort of debilitating chemical injected into the bloodstream. To test this we took a sample of his blood. About ten parts per million contained an unknown chemical substance. I believe it paralyzed him."
"Oh my God," Griffin whispered. "Are you saying this man was alive for six minutes as his organs were removed?"
Lewis nodded. "Yes, sir, it would seem so. You'd be surprised what the body can withstand... especially with chemical aid. Ms. Weller had the same chemical in her, however she died eleven seconds after the same heart rate symptoms experienced by Edmund at 0702. She barely suffered at all.
"Allow me to hypothesize, sir. The Marines split up an investigated both rooms separately. Edmund was paralyzed and eventually killed. Weller came to investigate and then she, too, was killed by whoever, or whatever, was in this room."
"You're even considering that one of my Marines was responsible for this," Griffin asked furiously after hearing the "whoever" part. He was already nauseous and angry at the loss of his soldiers in such a horrible and helpless fashion, and the smallest thing set him off.
Lewis shook his head. "Sorry, sir, allow me to rectify. I've seen many murders before and I can safely say none of them were alien. I'm not exactly experienced in that. Besides, we downloaded all CNI information from the Silent Night and the closest Marine to this position was five and a half thousand kilometers upspin."
Griffin did not apologize. He didn't see the need. "So we're not alone on this ring?"
"No, sir," Lewis responded, "no we're not."
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