And so, we went. Why three days? I couldn’t say. The mods took hold in a matter of hours, so that wasn’t it. And that bit about the de-con systems was bullshit; if it was something they could handle, they’d handle it a lot faster than that. The pathologist tried to explain it at one point, but I don’t think even she believed her words. A nice, familiar number I suppose.

THUD!

The sound of the lid hitting ground brought me back to the present. Snow eddied in the air like dust. Ramsay immediately stuck his hand in a drift of the stuff, doing his best to ice it down. His side had apparently been the hotter.

We gathered round the gaping maw and all peered down the shaft, as if the answers to what had happened down there might be just that easy, that they might be right there, waiting, in the moonlight at the top of the hatch, twiddling their collective thumbs and wondering what took us so long, but we saw nothing. Just the top third of the shaft, lit by what little moonlight dared to venture in at all, then darkness, then the bottom third or so, lit by a pale light that could have been any number of holoscreens, or LCD’s, or other pieces of equipment that might or might not have still been functioning. It had an odd hue about it, that light…pale and blue, almost white, not that different from the glow of the Chirp. It didn’t crackle as the sparks had, but…it wasn’t constant either. It oscillated, like a broadcast tower, or a searchlight spinning on a dais. Pulsed, as if it was somehow alive.

“Any volunteers?” asked Ramsay. He reclaimed his hand and looked at each of us in turn, smirking at us through his visplate. Nobody said a word. We all knew he was joking, and he knew that we knew. He didn’t get the lead on this gig by letting his charges play canary. After a few seconds of silence he sighed, swung his legs down onto the ladder, and began to lower himself down rung by rung.

We followed.

I, being just the systems guy, and the HQ rep besides, went last. I was about three-quarters of the way down, just to the terminator between the darkness and that pulsing light, when I heard the gags.

“Good lord!” A quick glance between my legs saw Ramsay step off the ladder and hide his mask in his uniform. At first I thought he was shielding his eyes, but as I dropped a few more rungs I understood it was his nose he was guarding. The smell was a hodgepodge of conflicting aromas…urine and feces most obviously, and mixed with that the hot, charged scent of circuit boards. Beneath that the smell of flesh…not rotted flesh, exactly, but not healthy flesh either, the sick-sweet smell of meat left exposed in the icebox, and all laced with the antiseptic scent of the two layers of de-con systems – the local systems built into our biosuits and the emergency system of the lab itself, which must have been running non-stop the past four days. My skin tingled as the Sentinels breached the sterine and began to probe at the skin beneath. It was a strange sensation. Generally warm, but laced with pricks of ice, as if they’d sent in two at once, each to check a different mod. I tensed, waiting to see what they’d decide.

Don’t worry, I told myself, it’s safe. They triple-checked everything back at HQ, everything took like it was supposed to. Everything will be okay…

But it was a tough sell. We’d all seen it on the playbacks, times when they didn’t take, or times when they mutated afterwards. There was even one in the classified files where it was later confirmed that the Sentinels themselves had changed, and decided on a mismatch even though the mods were perfect. The result is always the same: one second the unfortunate soul is standing there, tensed, the way I was now, perhaps feeling the beginnings of something not quite right, perhaps as a prickly, tingly sensation not unlike the one I felt, and the next they were so much detritus floating in the air, deconstructed by the Sentinels at a sub-molecular level, without so much as a dying scream.

Then it subsided, leaving as fast as it had come. I let out the breath I’d held, feeling the tension bleed away, and my skin returned to its usual, no-sensation self. The Sentinels had found what they’d been looking for, and they stood down.

I advanced into the lab.