“Fuck this shit,” Banks hissed. He pointed the handheld towards the base of the hatch, and pressed the eject button. A warped bit escaped its housing and arced through the frigid air, glinting in the moonlight as the threads that had so lately held it gave it a half rotation of spin. It landed in a pile of its gathered brethren, carbon tinkling on carbon as it settled in amongst its kin. The sound seemed to fit, somehow. Out here, alone, on a frozen mound of granite smack in the middle of unclaimed nowhere, with the crunch of the snow beneath our feet and the panoply of stars above. A perfect echo to their twinkle.

Banks listened for a moment, then tossed the handheld after it. The sound that made was less poetic.

“Gimme the chirp,” he said, and motioned with a gloved finger for Bergman to turn around so he could access the pack where it was stored. Then he went back to his grumbling, now more to himself the rest of us. “…had ‘nuff of this shit, goddammit. Three fuckin’ hours with that thing. Are you kidding me? Three fuckin’ hours with a goddam handheld, trying to reorganize mod-proof titanium, all to save a goddam hinge?” Bergman glanced briefly at Ramsay, unsure whether or not to oblige. Ramsay hesitated, dilemma plain on his Spartan features, then, through the visplate of his bio-suit, gave the barest hint of a nod. Banks tore into Bergman’s pack, reaching for the sonic torch they had brought along in case the hatch refused to yield. He pulled it out and clicked the starter, once, twice, three times, four, before he tapped at some of its circuitry. On the fifth strike it kicked alive with a high-pitched squeal, then faded to silence as he tuned the frequency.

“Just be careful,” Ramsay cautioned. “Try not to, ah…try not to scorch it.”

Banks shot him a dirty look. It’s a motherfuckin’ Chirp, that look seemed to say. How can I do anything but? But he set to work without a word. They all knew their orders. Enter, observe, document, report, all critical, yes…but above all, contain. The lab had gone dark four days ago. Nobody knew why, but, given the nature of the project, outbreak was the leading theory.

We all watched as Banks played the Chirp over the weak points at the edge of the hatch, and then, once those had disintegrated, over the tumblers of the deadbolt that must have been drawn from the inside. The blue-white sparks it emitted as its wake reacted with the titanium gave the field an eldritch glow. They skittered off the top of the hatch and down onto the snow beneath, reflected a dozen times over in beads of sweat that, despite the freezing air, began to form on Banks’s brow. Their fall was chaff in a field of wheat, zephyred by an unfelt breeze.

None of the rest of us said a word.

“Come on Palsie, just a little more…THERE!” Banks muttered to himself, working free the remains of the bolt. There was a soft sigh from somewhere inside as the metal lost its hold. He jiggled the lid with his opposite hand until he satisfied himself that it was free, then shook the Chirp twice in the air, activating its emergency shutoff. He wasn’t supposed to do it that way. There was a shutoff process I knew he knew that supposedly minimized the chance of damage. But I’d given up reminding him. To a guy like Banks the right way and the fast way were one and the same.

He and Ramsay grabbed the handle and, working carefully to keep from burning themselves on the parts still hot from the torch, heaved the lid up and aside, turning it on its edge like a giant manhole cover.

They almost didn’t send us, I reminded myself, thinking back to those first few hours, after the lab had gone dark and we’d been trying to figure out how to react. I’d been sitting in our emergency conference, representing as the project’s HQ champion, taking in as much as I could of the inside of the war room and trying to keep my fool mouth shut as more decorated members of the cabinet had it out. They almost left the damn thing sealed…