This has got to be a first.  I got involved in a situation and it turned out less bloody.  I'd circle the day on my calender, if I had one that could keep up.  I shook the Captain's hand and gave him the radio.  "I'm glad to have been able to help.  I've got to be going now."

   I hit my communicator thingie to call Adam.  When he answered, I gave him an update.  "Medical is secure.  Three perps down, the rest of them surrendered.  Where do you need me next?"

Adam doesn't answer the line, and you don't hear a ring.

You look down at your communicator and try his contact again, but again there's nothing on the other end.

   I know where my quarters are from the medical bay.  I really need to stop by my room to gear up as quickly as I can.  I've had some practice, sometimes too much practice, at gearing up quickly.

You make it back to your quarters untouched. Where your quarters are, you see faces peeking out of their reinforced glass inside the doors, watching you from their rooms. Not every room has a face looking out at you.

   I take the couple of minutes that I need to strap on my weapon harness and put everything in place.  The snapstick and stunwand were in their thigh holsters.  My MP7 was riding in its belt rig.  My Glock was back riding under my left arm.  I tucked the blaster in its usual spot behind my right hip.  I added the extra three forty round mags for my chattergun to the belt, figuring that this was going to get really messy before this was over.

   I left the two little station pistols and their extra magazines in my pack.  They were nice, but I knew my own tools far better than I knew their tools.  As I was putting the station's scrooch guns away, I stole a moment to look at the pistol from the surrendering dupe.

You take a second and examine the dupe's pistol. It's a big brick for a pistol, heavy in your hands. You find the mechanism to release the magazine and find ammunition that is at least .45. It feels like it's all metal, and the pistol is thicker at its rounded barrel that contrasts sharply with the rectangles that favor the rest of the design.

From your examination, you conclude that it's a heavy weapon, probably packs one heck of a punch, and holds 15+1 rounds of ammunition.

   I tucked the heavy pistol into my pack.  I don't feel safe in taking an untested handgun with a limited ammunition supply into an unknown situation.  It's a character flaw which I'm not trying to work on at the moment.

   I extended the stock of the PDW, lowered the front hand grip, threaded the suppressor onto the barrel, and swapped out for a fresh forty round mag.  Then, finally dressed for the party, I headed out to the maintenance section.

You grab your equipment with disregard to Adam's earlier warning about carrying around weapons. In times of war...

Armed to the teeth, you march out and head for the Maintenance area, where you see on the primary way to maintenance, barriers have been established and about twenty security officers are guarding various ones or on communicators taking/giving orders for reinforcements.

You don't immediately see Adam, until you notice that he's bending over a shiny, steel...you're not quite sure what it is, but he's using it as a table and looking over a holographic map.

   I walk over to Adam, ignoring the stares I know that I have to be getting from the security guys.  I don't care if I'm not supposed to be carrying weapons.  I don't care that I'm carrying a quantity of firepower they've probably never seen before.  I don't even care that suppressors are probably as illegal now as they were when I left my home timeline.

   Once there, I clear my throat softly to get his attention.  "The Medical Bay hostages are free and most of the shooters surrendered to your security guys.  Where do you need me next?"

As you approach, you realize that you were mistaken a moment before. The man has Adam's rough build, sensible hair, and square jaw, but his eye cheekbones, acute nose, and intense eyes reveal that he's another man. Additionally, his insignia for rank is different, and matches that of the captain's you saw at Medical but with an additional silver stripe under it. He looks up at you, "Are you the merc?"

   The P.I Handbook has a chapter on maintaining working relationships with law enforcement types.  I remember seeing it in the index.  Next time, maybe I should read that chapter.  I'm not sure if I should do the snappy banter thing with Captain Silver here...  No...  Actually, I am sure.

   "The Merc?  I prefer to think of myself as a Minister without portfolio.  Two questions...  Where's Adam?  What do you need done?  Feel free to answer them in any order you want."

    On second thought, maybe I should have gone with merc.  Mercs get paid.

Keeping a serious face for a moment, he cracks a smile, "Minister without por...That's funny." He returns his eyes down to concentrate on the floor plan he's examining. "Honestly, I thought he'd be coming back with you. Before he left, he made it pretty clear he was meeting with you in the Research Division-the Science Wing. It was the oddest place that hostile dupes had been spotted, so he wanted to investigate it personally."

   Hmmm...  The fog of war?  "I can understand going to Research about the rogues.  I think Research is creating them.  Before we were cut off, Adam told me that he was jammed up in Maintenance.  Did he clear up the problem in Maintenance and go to Research?"

   I'm not really a big picture kind of girl.  I usually got hired by little people with problems caused by big people.  I never always knew why thugs were being thugs.  I just had to stop them from being thugs to my clients.  Times and places may change, but I'm still me.  It's all I know how to do.

   It's like what I'm doing here.  I'm not here to bust an illegal cloning operation.  I'm not here to stop some Corporate power play.  I'm just trying to put a family back together again.  Protecting the Mom...  Finding the Kid...  Rescuing the Dad...  These are the kinds of things I'm very good at doing.

OOC: ;) I know.

IC:

"Yeah, he was tied up here with us. This is definitely where the most dupes were stirring up trouble-not to mention the ramifications if they managed to enter some of the secure areas-like Power or Air Filtration. But he got clipped while he was on his com with you."

He recalls the events for you, "Chief Dividius got clipped in a skirmish; it destroyed his comm. After that, he finished out the fight and booked it to Research, letting me take over the operation here at Maintenance. It's always been only a matter of time. I don't know what they think they'd accomplish. And Research has more to lose than anyone, pulling a stunt like this. Imagine the headline, duplicates running wild and uncontrolled in space?"

He returns to his hologram, and picks up a comm, "Sanders, secure the exit ducts to make sure no more dupes sneak out that way. Jenkins, are there any signs they've broken through to fundamental operations yet? Good."

   I knew where I was going.  "What can you tell me about the Research situation?  I'm heading over to there to see if I can help."  What I would find is always something else.

"It's strange, actually." He pulls himself away from his comm for a moment. "That's a great question to ask Dividius. He lost his comm when he was shot and didn't grab another before running off on his own. When you reach him, get into contact with HQ and let them know what's going on."

   "Do you have a spare comm unit I can pass along to him?"  Once I have my answer and hopefully the comm, I head out toward the Research area.  I have as much information to work with as I usually have, as in almost nothing, and a full complement of weaponry, as in almost everything.  It's time to go back to work.

   I didn't get many strange looks from people as I moved through the station.  The reason was probably because there weren't many people about.  Everyone seemed to have gotten the word to keep their heads down.  If I were smarter, I'd probably be one of them.  If I were smarter, I'd probably be working for an insurance company trying to catch fraudulent claimers.  I'd have a classic sports car, a condo in the city with a mortgage, a steady boyfriend, and a really nice pair of sunglasses.  And...  I'd be bored out of my mind.

   Maybe I can find some sunglasses.  I kept walking, my PDW at the ready.

It's a ghost town all the way to the research station. Even the sassy woman at the counter is gone, and no one complains when you push the door open and step through. You don't see any signs of struggle in the crisp, white hallways that lead through the more public laboratory spaces and the offices, one of which you're already familiar with.

   I check each office as I walk by.  I don't want to leave anyone behind me.  That would be unwise.  I know that it will slow me down, but I don't want to leave here until I've seen this through.

There are a lot of offices, which makes your search excessively slow. After the third hallway and thirty-sixth office door you've opened, you get a feeling up your spine and feel excessively impatient about your progress, though you have been moving through them as quickly as you possibly can.

   As I moved through research, I got the feeling that I really needed to hurry.  That feeling was counterbalanced by my need to do as thorough a sweep as I could.  Even though I could have skipped some of the offices and probably not have missed anything, I was doing a job and that job needed to be done as well as I could do it.  Still, I tried to pick up the pace.

You're successful in speeding up the process as you still go door to door to make sure no one can sneak up on you. You use your sense of hearing actively too, to assess for dangers behind doors or in blind spots as you move, and then you find yourself in the hallway that you found Lucy on when she was talking to Dr. Farragut.

The only difference is that the high-security door that Farragut had gone through is open now. The hallway beyond, where you haven't been yet, is silent and there's a sense of something forbidden about it.

   I found myself muttering, "This setup stinks worse than dollar store perfume."  I admit that I am nervous.  Still, I have been a professional troubleshooter for a long time.  I tried to tell myself that this was just another case.  It wasn't working though.  These people were screwing around with genetics and making monsters.  I took a better grip of my PDW and continued on.

You enter the hallway, and from the entrance you see a white hall with a green stripe across the middle of the walls going on beyond. This hallway proceeds to a T intersection, which has a yellow stripe along its walls.

The paint is on the same level as the doors, and on this hallway, you see eight doors. Judging from the distance, each one is probably as large as a medium-sized hotel rooms. The paint on the doors is all green with white where the green stripe would be, and Green letters saying G-1 and G-2 on your left and right respectively. There are four doors on each side, odds on the left and evens on the right.

You hear nothing but feel a very, very slight breeze coming from in front of you down the hallway.

   "Offices...  Examination rooms...  Detainment cells..."  Those rooms could be anything.  There was no real way to tell without going to take a look.  Investigator is what the I in PI stands for, after all.  I decided to start with G-1 to see what it held.