Hunting Lodge, up-state NMK, about 9:00AM, Wednesday 10th March, 2055.

Hunting Lodge, up-state NMK, about 9:00AM, Wednesday 10th March, 2055.

Their investigation of the lab complete for the moment, Roland and Crash make their way out through the airlock, and find themselves in radio contact again. Picking up on the radio chatter, they quickly head for the ladder up into the garage.

Sykes re-enters the building, via reception, and cautiously approaches the open door with his weapon out. Shen meanwhile is descending in the lift. Yuki is still up in bedroom two, where she claims to be checking the sheets for DNA samples. Perhaps she should change her name to Yucky?!

As for me, I'm still taking cover, otherwise known as cowering, behind the rear door of the 4x4.

Roland starts up the ladder. Yuki heads into bedroom one, where she knows there's a window overlooking the garage. Shen has reached the ground floor and is slowly making his way towards the garage.

Reaching the door that no one could open, Sykes peers around it. He spots a figure crouched at the far end of the room. He quickly withdraws and has a narrow escape. A bullet strikes the door close to his hand as he pulls it closed. Hearing the exchange, Shen heads back in Sykes' direction.

Yuki opens the bedroom window and looks out onto the tiled slope of the garage roof. She considers climbing out, then pauses as she remembers what happened a few hours earlier, when she last tried to climb out onto a roof.

The side door into the garage slowly opens. A gun comes through the doorway, followed by a hand, then an arm. The rest of the guy cautiously follows, and he performs a quick visual scan of the garage. Fortunately, he hasn't spotted me yet, so I just hold my position and wait to see what will happen.

He takes a couple of small steps that take him further into the back corner of the garage. Most of his attention seems to be focused on the open garage door, which he continues to cover with his gun. A second guy also follows a gun into the garage. He starts to slowly make his way along the wall towards the front of the garage, also keeping a close eye on the open garage door.

He's only gone a few steps before Roland, who's started to move round the front of the 4x4, looses a round in their direction. The shot misses, and Roland calls out "Drop 'em or else". They choose "else". The first guy fires back at Roland, but his shot hits the bonnet of the 4x4. I manage to get two rounds into his right leg and he falls to the floor.

Unfortunately, the second guy has seen me and fires. I flinch as the window in the rear door of the 4x4 shatters as his bullet passes through it. Crash, who had climbed up the ladder behind Roland, and followed him to the front of the 4x4, fires at the second guy, hitting him in his right arm. The guy just shrugs it off though, so it can't have penetrated his armour jacket.

Roland also gets a shot off at the second guy, hitting him in his left arm. That one seems to have at least stung him a bit.

Shen has by now got back to Sykes. He asks Sykes where about the guy in the room was, before poking his gun and head round the door. Shen fires at the guy crouching in the lab and hits him in the head, sending a spray of neural matter over the wall behind him. We won't be needing Yuki to patch his wounds!

Back in the garage, Crash fires again at the only guy left standing, and hits his left arm close to where Roland shot him. That must really sting even if the armour is still holding. I squeeze a couple off and manage to hit the guy twice in the right leg, just like his pal.

At the sound of the gun fire, Yuki makes her move. She jumps out of the window, onto the garage roof and lands safely, but then slips as she makes her way across it. Finding herself rolling down the roof towards the rear of the garage, she picks her moment and makes a grab for the guttering as she reaches the edge.

Unfortunately she misses her grab and falls to the ground just outside the garage's rear door, with a thump that we hear from inside. Opening the door to find out how she is, I find her already picking herself up, and dusting down her clothing. She's either unhurt, or successfully trying to appear unhurt and unruffled by the experience.

The second guy is in a much worse way than the first, and Yuki sets about trying to stabilise him.

Following Shen's suppression of the resistance back in the main building, Sykes takes a look around the room we'd previously been unable to enter. The room must serve as some sort of control centre for the lodge. The security monitoring equipment is here, with various video screens showing parts of the lodge. However, a quick search fails to turn up anything useful.

Crash and Roland are trying to get information out of the first guy. By the time Yuki has stabilised his gun-toting pal, they've managed to find out that the guy that Shen shot in the head is the one who knew the most about what was going on. That's why he stayed behind when these two came to investigate. Didn't do him, or us, much good though, as Shen still killed him.

I decide it must be my turn to 'speak' to him. Grabbing a tool box from elsewhere in the garage, I drop it, loudly, in front of the guy and then proceed to look through it, assessing each pair of pliers and tin snips for their 'interrogation' potential. Of course, I've got no intention of using them for torture, but he doesn't know that.

I ask him who his employer is and he replies "The Lodge". Which isn't a great help. I try asking who owns the lodge, but he doesn't want to say. So I play my wild card. "Biotechnica?", I ask. "How'd you know that, it's supposed to be secret", he replies. Looks like I've struck pay dirt.

I don't tell him how I know or what I know, but he decides to tell us what happened. It seems that there was some sort of accident in the lab a week ago. The scientists began to panic, but stayed on working, until a couple of days ago. Two got out and sealed the others behind in the lab. They got into the 4x4 but didn't get out again. That's them in the front still.

Yuki comments that when she retrieved the keys earlier, she had to turn the ignition off. That leads to the suspicion that the escaping scientists knew what would happen and had sat in the 4x4, in the closed garage, with the engine running, and probably committed suicide. It's now impossible to know whether it was the carbon monoxide or blue goo that got to them first.

The other scientists, watched by the security guys on the internal surveillance monitors, suffered a grisly, dissolving fate. The security team had been in contact with Biotechnica, and were told to remain in their sealed room until it was safe to come out. Apparently they were still waiting to be told it was safe, when they received word to check us out. Obviously they're not some of Biotechnica's more valued employees.

I mention that I know we're not the first ones to 'visit' since the accident. He says that there were three guys on two bikes here. They found a sample of something amongst what remains of the scientist in the 4x4, but didn't go to the lab. The security team informed Biotechnica of their guests, and made them aware that they had the sample.

I describe the biker who we saw gunned down by the Biotechnica cops last night. They security guy confirms that that was one of the people he saw here. We show him the data that Crash got off the monitor in the lab, but he doesn't know it means.

It then occurs to me that if Biotechnica know we're here, and it took us only 40 minutes to get here from New Milton Keynes by road, it may not take them that long as they can probably find an AV-4 or two sitting in their corporate parking lot. It's probably a good idea to leave. Quickly.

Yuki slaps a patch on the guy's leg wounds, and we all high-tail it out of there; Shen and Crash on their bikes; Sykes and Roland in the car and me on the back of Yuki's Shiva. We arrange to split up and meet at Joe's Diner at 10:30.

Yuki and I are back in town around 10, so we kill a bit of time before heading off to meet the others. We walk into Joe's Diner, which is really more of an all-day club than a diner, say "Hi" to Joe who's cleaning glasses behind the bar and sit down.

The others arrive and we talk about what's happened. We think that it's no accident that we received the package, but we're not sure what we are supposed to do with it. Do we sell it to one of Biotechnica's competitors, or maybe take the story to the media?

We go back to examining the data from the lab screen. After a while it becomes clear that except for a small group of numbers, the data is meaningless. Once we focus on trying to understand just those numbers, we realise that they are a grid reference.

Checking the grid reference on the bar's Data Term™, we find it corresponds to the thirteenth support pier of the downtown bridge. A library search of the plans for the bridge, shows that that pier should be solid. We begin making tentative plans to go take a look tonight, but something far more important interrupts... breakfast!