In the dark confines of storage bay four a green indicator light on a cryo-chamber stashed among nearly a hundred identical coffin sized boxes silently switches from green to amber and a soft beeping begins to shrill a warning to ears who cannot hear it. In the central control room of Mars Base Alpha the humanoid male ferret in a security uniform frowns at the flashing indicator on the digital map of the base.
Deadeye leans over the human female at the monitoring board and wiggles his nose in curiosity, "What we got here Jan?"
The young tech taps a few keys and brings the indicator up onto her screen, "Cryo-chamber in storage bay four is indicating an unusual event."
The male ferret frowns as he stands up and crosses his arms across his chest, "Another unexpected awakening?"
Jan shakes her head, "No, sir. The chamber indicates that all systems are working correctly, but the internal temperature is steadily rising, cause unknown."
Deadeye taps his headset and speaks into the mic, "Medical and security to storage bay four. We have a cryo-chamber reporting unusual activity. Medical is to ascertain the status of the individual, security to provide backup." Taking his hand away from the mic he hears the repeated confirmations in his headset.
The young woman in front of Deadeye looks up at him, "Sir, I think the person in the cryo-chamber just woke up. Listen to this."
She flips a switch on her board and the speaker on the console emits a quiet beep before a scream torn from a female throat rips through the room, "AIIIEEEE!!! IT HURTS!!! MAKE IT STOP!!!" She kills the speaker as the shrill voice becomes an inhuman scream and the other personnel staffing the command room look toward the ferret as he heads for the door at a rapid pace.
With a practiced move he snatches a rifle with a blue magazine from its rack by the portal to the rest of the base and charges the first round into the chamber, "Get ahold of the big guy. Tell him we might have a feral situation and I want some backup like we discussed."
Jan nods and taps a few keys on her pad before she taps the earpiece of her headset, "Lt. Wildcat to storage bay four, possible feral incident." She listens to the rumbling voice that responds to her summons before she calls after Deadeye, "He's en-route, sir."
Deadeye lets the command room's blast doors close behind him as he jogs down the hall and speaks into his headset, "Medical and security approach storage bay four with caution, possible feral event. Deadeye and specialists are en-route to provide backup."
Ten minutes of crowded corridors and Deadeye arrives at the cryo-chamber storage bays to find the security team just arriving and the hulking feline form of Goliath pressing his hand to the palm-lock on the door. With a whoosh the door slips open and cold fog rolls from the room. The large cougar crouches in the open and dark doorway as his tail flicks in agitation.
One of the medical team moves to pass the large feline into the room and is stopped by a large hand on his chest, "Don't... Something's not right here." Goliath looks around the dark room, "Why didn't the lights come on when we opened the door?"
Deadeye's brain snaps into high gear as the situation clicks into place, "He's right, team form up to hold the door!" As the security team forms up and braces the barrels of their stun rifles against the doorway the medical team backs out of the line of fire. Deadeye removes the combat sling which holds the assault rifle to his harness and holds it out to the much bigger feline, "Take this big guy."
The cougar shakes his head as he stands there without combat armor and only his uniform covering the muscles that bulge under his tawny fur, "Won't do any good, I smell blood and metal. This isn't a feral... but I'll be damned if I know what it is. The metal has a strange organic smell to it; it's like nothing I've ever smelled before. Do we know who was in the chamber that reported the malfunction, or what project they were a part of?"
Deadeye shakes his head, "This was one of those unlisted chambers, like yours. Only a bare minimum of data, like we know the subject is female, but not what her modifications are or what species she is." He again shoves the rifle at the large feline, "You shouldn't go in there unarmed, and where's your armor?"
Goliath looks at the gun again and shakes his head as he flexes a muscled arm, "Since the day they took my humanity, I've never been unarmed. Besides, you and Tiara training me in hand-to-hand combat has made weapons a secondary need."
Deadeye nods to the seriousness of the cougar's statement, "And your armor?"
Goliath smirks, "Was told this was an emergency, didn't have time to go back to my cabin for it."
Deadeye sighs and forms up next to the security team, "Visors to low light, watch your fire, and don't hit the big guy."
The two man team who had responded gives the slightest of nods as they cover the large cougar as he steps into the dark room. With all his senses at the peak of combat awareness Goliath steps carefully into the cold fog of the room.
His ears flick as something makes a sliding sound in the cold dark of the room. Stepping slowly through the racks of cryo-chambers he soon finds the one that reported the malfunction and is surprised to find it ripped apart from the inside with traces of blood both inside and out. Kneeling in the cold fog by the broken chamber he reaches out to run his hand through the blood that seems to shimmer with a metallic glint to it, "Deadeye, this is Goliath, chamber located. Looks like the occupant ripped her way out and caused herself a bit of harm in the process."
"Elaborate," comes Deadeye's voice from his headset.
"I've got blood here, but it's almost a metallic blood, has a strange glimmer to it." He finds a few large flakes of what appears to be skin scattered on the ground too, "And there's skin, looks like it was shed by the occupant." He again hears the hiss of a slithering on the bare metal of the deck, "Deadeye, I think she's trying to stalk me, but she doesn't know what I am. If it's anything like when I woke, she doesn't even know what she is." He looks around the room, his augmented eyes seeing it as a washed out series of grays without the bright light to distinguish color, "Come on out lady, we're not here to hurt you."
He slowly stands, his hands held out, palms open to show he carries no weapons as he notices a disturbance in the cold fog that freezes his feet and ankles. "What am I?" asks a weak and raspy female voice from the darkness.
Goliath scans the room with eye and ear to try and identify her location, but the low light, swirling fog, and echoing room do nothing to aid him, "I suspect you were kidnapped, like me. Given some experimental procedure to turn you into what they wanted, a weapon. Just like they did to many of us, some willingly, some illegally, and some accidentally. I was on the illegally side of things, I was taken from the streets, my family told I was dead, and given an injection to turn me into a perfect soldier." He smirks to himself, "Just not one that can exist in human society at current." He spins as he heads a slipping behind him, his thick tail whipping around like a furry bullwhip in nervous agitation, but he still can't find the source of the sounds in the fog, mist, and darkness.
"Why should I trust you?" the soft voice asks again, and still there is a hint of rawness in the tone. As if the individual speaking was screaming recently. "How do I know you're not one of the ones who kidnapped me?"
"Who else can you trust if not a fellow abductee?" he asks. A brief flash of green and gold draws his attention but it is gone before he can focus on that flash of color through the cold dark fog that hugs the ground.
"I don't know that I can trust anyone, let alone you," she responds, her voice fading to a whisper.
A metallic scrape is the only warning he has before a heavy weight barrels into him from behind and the voice from the fog raises into a high pitched, "YEEAAAA!!!" Sharps fingers dig into his sides and he feels short claws slice into his hide as sharp teeth latch onto his shoulder.
With a flash and low growl Goliath throws an elbow backwards and is rewarded with a sharp grunt and the feeling of his skin contacting a pliant metal surface. The feeling of the claws and teeth are ripped out of his flesh as the sound of a body crashing to the ground as the body is flung through the air. Spinning in place and bracing his legs he watches the flash of a yellow skinned form rolling into the shadows as he lowers his hand to check the minor wounds the claws had caused.
Finding the claw marks minor and the blood already starting to clot he dismisses the scratches, "Ok, I know you're scared, and I won't hold these scratches against you. I remember waking up myself, not knowing what had happened to me or where I was. It's disorienting."
She hisses from the darkness, "You know nothing about me."
"I know that I'm trying to help you, and so far no one else has tried to hurt you here since you've woken up."
"I have been in pain since I woke here, in this hell. What would you think if you woke in pain, feeling your flesh being replaced? For all I know you're the asshole who kidnapped me," she hisses from the shadows.
Goliath closes his eyes and sighs, "If you really think that..." His hand shoots up and snatches in reflex as he hears the scrabbling of claws on the metal deck to his right and he catches the female by her arm and slams her naked body into the wall, his other arm coming across her neck to hold her there while he twists her arm into a pain lock and finally gets a clear view of the female's shark like features as her feet dangle nearly two feet off the deck. Her skin is a tannish yellow with brown stripes and a thick mop of wild red hair frames her face where green eyes seem to glow with an inner light in the darkness. A soft bosom presses against the cold wall and a toned body struggles against his grip as he talks to her as if she was a child, "If you really think that, tell me why I haven't killed you yet?"
She grits her sharp teeth and snarls, "Maybe you want to keep your experiment. Unngh..." she grunts as she tries to break the massive feline's grip with little success in moving his much larger mass beyond pulling her own muscles.
His hands gripping her skin realize that they feel a metallic surface under his fingers, not the expected bare flesh, but there are more important questions, "What's your name girl?"
She snarls back at him, "You know my name! You people did this to me!"
He steps back and lessens the pressure on the back of her neck but doesn't let her free yet, "I only know you're female, and apparently now a shark of some type, but there's something odd about your skin."
"My skin is metal you nitwit!" she screams back at him. "I woke up with my skin slowly turning metallic and I want you to turn it back. I am a living person, not a thing! You can't imagine what it felt like to feel your skin transforming inch by inch until it covers you in metal that you can feel."
The large feline frowns as he explains the reality of life to her, "I'm an engineer by prior profession, but even I don't entirely understand how the things they do to us work beyond they use nanites to do what they want with us." He holds her with ease despite her struggles, surprised to feel that her strength isn't any higher than any of the other soldier morphs despite her speed and the toughness of her skin. "You notice how you can't fight my grip and how easily I knocked you off me a moment ago? Maybe you're surprised those teeth and claws of yours didn't do more damage to me?"
Her response is the slightest of nods as her struggles ease before he continues with an angry growl in his voice, "Artificial fibers have been woven not only into my muscles, bones, and skin, but my muscle mass has been doubled and my size augmented even more than the oversized human I already was before they then stripped my humanity from me to turn me into a furred walking nightmare. I mass about two or three times what I should from all the dense tissue in my body and the inorganic compounds that supplement the strength of my organic structure. They've tried to test the maximum of my strength, but they haven't been able to find a finite limit yet, I keep breaking their testing equipment. Why was it done to me? Not only to turn me into their example of a super soldier, but to allow me to use an experimental piece of technology that they couldn't get anyone else to use without harming them unless they gave them similar augmentations to what I received against my own will. And why was I chosen? Because of a genetic characteristic that made my DNA changeable with the alteration program they implanted in my cells."
He leans in and a growl builds from deep in his chest, "Grrrrrr..." His hot breath brushes against her cheek and she closes her eyes as he asks, "You understand now? They turned me into this so I can do nothing except kill others when they want me to. I don't use weapons, I am a weapon!"
Her throat bobs as she gulps nervously while her eyes open wide and green as they staring at him from the implied threat the massive male holding her as if she is only a child poses. His blue eyed gaze studies her as she looks back with one wide green glowing iris while he tilts his head to the side, "I think you might understand now that I could seriously hurt you if I wanted to, but I don't want to. I haven't wanted to since I walked in that door to help you."
He lets her go so quick that she falls to the ground where she stays, her right hand rubbing at her neck as she looks up at him through her red bangs with her unnerving glowing eyes. "I told you what they did to me not so you will fear me," he explains, "but to understand I will help you if I can. I would love to find a way to return to my original form, but if I can't then I will be what I want to be. Not what some assholes in a black operation command center back on Earth expect me to be."
He holds out a hand to her and she looks at the furred appendage with suspicion while he speaks with a soft voice with just a hint of a friendly feline purr to it, "I'm going to ask you again to trust me and we'll go down to medical together to find out what has been done to you."
She slowly extends her hand to take the big feline's extended hand and lets him pull her to her feet with ease. "I'll trust you for now," she whispers in a voice gone very quiet.
"Stay behind me," he instructs as he turns and starts guiding her through the rows of cryo-chambers and towards the door where the security team continues to cover the dark room with their stun rifles while the medical team waits behind them. He holds a hand out to the security team in a calming motion as he steps into the light from the doorway, "Put the guns down guys, she's harmless."
Deadeye glances to the blood smearing Goliath's side and shoulder but nods to the other two who lower their weapons with wary gazes. As the medical orderlies come forward to check the female over and escort her to medical the sharkette ducks behind the same person she had attacked only minutes before. She peeks out from behind Goliath as they step into the bright lights of the corridor. "I want you to take me," she whispers. "You said I could trust you."
Goliath pats her back and guides her in front of him and towards the medics, "It's ok, I'll be with you, but these two are medics, they can start trying to understand what has happened to you. As I said, I was an engineer before this was done to me."
With a moment of hesitation she lets the two medics guide her to a mobile gurney for her to lay on while they start attaching biometric sensors. Deadeye steps up next to the big feline and rub a finger over the scabbed over wound in his side, "Get this by tripping?"
The big cougar chuffs, "She was scared, didn't know what had happened to her. I remember waking up to the feline face Saber now wears and I almost wanted to punch him because to me it was alien." A large hand reaches up to make sure the shoulder wound had stopped bleeding and finding no fresh blood sighs, "I'll have to get another shirt is all. Her teeth are a bigger threat than her claws, but this is the first time I've seen a Gene-Morph with metallic skin. I wonder why they did that..."
Deadeye nods in agreement, "And what else can she do. Apparently she was stealthy enough to get the drop on you."
Goliath waves that off, "The fog and darkness helped her there. While my low light vision is good, it's not good enough to see through the freezing mists in that storage room."
The female otter medic steps up and snaps a brief salute to Goliath, "We're taking her to the sickbay, sir. You wanted to accompany the new recruit?"
Goliath nods, "Yes, let's go Fisher. Maybe the Doc can figure out what else was done to her."
* * *
In the medical bay the still nude female shark lies on the exam table as a portable scanner slowly works from her head to her toes and back again. The red and green beams of the scanner dance over the slightly reflective metallic sheen of her skin as they map her new physiology and cellular makeup. Doctor Stine stands by the screen showing what the scanner can diagnose of her structure and form but the data coming up is alien to both the sharkette and the massive cougar in the room. Goliath leans against the wall, his thick arms crossed over his wide chest as he waits for the young woman to hear the verdict of what had been done to her.
The older human turns to her as he transfers the data to his tablet and frowns, "I believe you said your name was Tori young woman?" She nods as she sits up on the exam table and the Doctor tries to use his friendly bedside manner to put her at ease. "I'm Doctor Stine, the head of the medical bay here at Mars Morph Corps Base Alpha." He taps the screen of the tablet and a different diagram appears on the screen behind him, "I wish I could explain this more, but I think Goliath here with his engineering background may be able to explain some of this more then I can."
He turns and points to an outline of her body with various colors spread across it, "The blue areas are mostly metallic, the red and yellow are primarily biologic, while the green is a mixture of biotech."
She frowns at the screen, "It's mostly green except for my nervous system and vital organs, what are those blue areas on my limbs?"
Goliath frowns at the familiar shapes, "Weapons."
She looks at him with a wide eyed stare, "What?"
The big feline steps forward and taps a few spots on the screen, "Enhance..." he orders and the medical bay's AI adjusts the image as specified. As the image clarifies she can see the clear outline of a blade between the twin bones of her left forearm and a collection of what appear to be wires and coils in her right that surround the bones in a lattice structure.
Tapping at the spaghetti mixture of wires in her right arm, "I'm going to say this is an energy based weapon system, possibly gravitic to remove the need for projectiles that would need to penetrate your skin. As for your left arm here," he taps the screen. I can see where some muscles link to this, I expect there's a way for you to tense and express about two feet of monomolecular blade from your arm." He smirks, "Remember my statement that I am a weapon?"
She nods with a concerned expression.
Shaking his head he leans against the wall again, "I think you are the weapon now."
"More right than you know Goliath," says a large gray timber wolf as he enters the medical examination room reading a folder. He looks to the sharkette and holds out a hand, "The name's Lupe, I'm the Commander of the Mars Morph Corps."
She takes his hand with a slight grip as if afraid she would blow him up from the news of weapons imbedded in her body.
Lupe puts the folder in her hand as he withdraws his own, "I got this from Earth when I announced that a malfunction in your cryo-chamber resulted in your awakening. They didn't give us your file until then, they never do unless they want us to wake someone."
She opens the folder and finds a photo of her human self looking back at her as she reads the words on the papers inside. As the words sink in she crumples the folder in her hands as hot tears start to pool from her glowing eyes, "I'm a thing..."
Goliath reaches out to put a hand on her shoulder which she tries to brush off but he holds tight, "No more than any of us are."
Doctor Stine coughs, "Actually my dear, you are very much alive. Your body will continue to need food, and your organs are all still organic. Even your skin, though appearing to be metal, is actually a bio-organic alloy that is stronger than titanium alloy." He brings another set of diagrams onto the large screen, "See here, you even still have your reproductive organs. You are far from being a machine, and you are very much alive."
She looks at the screen with her green eyes, "Why?"
The Doctor shakes his head, "Young lady, if I understood why the scientists on Earth did half of what they did I wouldn't now be here. I was sent here as a form of exile, I know too much about the technology they use to change people into the Gene-Morphs but refused to help them do it to unwilling participants." He raises a hand towards the room around them, "So they gassed me and sent me here to keep everyone healthy."
She looks at the crumpled folder in her hands, "I want to know why..."
Lupe nods in understanding, "We know what you mean lass. Many of the subjects in this little science fair are like you and Goliath, taken from your homes and lives. Some were volunteers because we wanted to serve the United Earth Defense Force. Still others were changed by accident during tests. But we all ask ourselves the same question after we wake from the cryo-chambers, why did they do this then keep us such a secret."
He looks at the large tan feline, "And I suspect one day the war will come that will explain everything." Lupe taps the folder in her hands, "That is who you used to be, Tori. We need a new name for you now." He thumps Goliath in the chest, "This big hairball wasn't always Goliath anymore than I was always Lupe."
She opens the folder again and stares at her human visage in the photograph, "Call me MechaTori."
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