Specimen M. By Moonrunner Hardbody faces danger in a secret genetics lab. It was shortly after 8 p.m. when Morwenna nosed her SUV down the ramp leading to the office block's basement garage. She parked near a rust mottled door that was marked as the entrance to the buildings Civil Defence Shelter. Perhaps it had been, once upon a time. As she walked towards it the door slid back, activated by the signal from her implanted RFID transponder, revealing a modern looking elevator. Most of the Corporation's employees believed the Advanced Research Facility, built below ground and accessed by elaborately concealed entrances around the city, to be nothing more than an urban myth. But it was the work done here in strict secrecy that ensured the Corporation continued to lead the field in nanotechnology and genetic engineering. Normally it wasn't manned overnight, the whole place ticking over under computer control. However, just as the facility was closing down for the evening a technician noticed a couple of error lights on a maintenance panel had started flashing, requiring a systems analyst with proper security clearance to go over and run a diagnostic. Morwenna drew the short straw. No biggie. She hadn't had any after work plans beyond a microwave dinner in front of the television and then bed. The door shutting behind her, the elevator descended of its own accord and moments later opened onto a corridor clad entirely in polished steel, with no carpeting or other decoration. Before her was an archway similar to an airport metal detector and beside it a locker into which she must put her clothes and personal effects. Security protocols insisted nothing from the outside world could be brought beyond this point. Morwenna kicked off her sneakers and placed them in the locker along with her phone and keys. Jeans, plaid work shirt and underwear followed. Only when she was completely nude did she pass through the arch, a pre-recorded voice verifying that she carried no prohibited items, then on down the corridor. Having a deep dislike for her own reflection, Morwenna was unnerved by the images of herself that kept pace with her on the highly polished floor, ceiling and walls as she made her way towards the decontamination room at the far end. She lengthened her stride to escape them sooner, bare feet leaving insubstantial prints on the gleaming surface like etchings on glass. She'd always felt her shoulders and back were too broad and muscular to be conventionally feminine. Heavy, teardrop shaped breasts overhung tightly packed abdominals. Her hips and ass were shapely but overgenerous, accentuating her powerful thighs. It was a body styled with strength rather than grace in mind, something that other girls had teased her for all through High School. While she had grown to accept that there must be something of the Amazon in her, the humiliation she'd felt in those days had never truly gone away. In Decontamination she was blasted with jets of chemical smelling water, afterwards lingering longer than necessary under the hot air vent to dry off, enjoying the sensation of the warm currents playing touch and run across her skin. There was no undue hurry. By now the place would be completely empty save for her. Reaching for a set of zip-up coveralls from the rack she carried them with her into the laboratory proper. Overhead fluorescents came on in the vast space, illuminating work- benches, computer terminals and freestanding equipment that could be mistaken for parts fallen off a flying saucer. The Facility was huge. It spread out under half a dozen mid-town properties, including a shopping arcade. All of them were owned outright by the Corporation. Morwenna was unfamiliar with this particular section but that didn't prevent her from quickly acknowledging something was wrong. To the left of her was a row of doors leading to the restricted areas. One of them stood wide open, quite probably forced. Sparks crackled from the electronic lock mechanism. Absently tossing her unworn coveralls onto a workstation Morwenna began threading her way around the floor clutter till she was close enough to look inside the room. Spherical containment tanks were ranked three a breast and four deep, separated by raised walkways. One of the nearer tanks was badly ruptured. Viscous liquid spilled out like the juices of an over-ripened fruit. Curiosity blinding her to any thoughts of personal danger she moved towards the spheres, carefully skirting the spreading pool of gunk on the floor. What she saw within those high-tech specimen jars would stay with her in nightmares. For they contained human bodies, each one hanging suspended in a sea of green chemical gunge. Their eyes were open, staring blankly at her over oxygen masks that concealed the lower half of their faces. Catheterised and plugged into IV tubes, their skin dappled with sensor pads; some with their heads thrown back to release a cry of anguish as they struggled to break free from their prisons. How long, she wondered, had these people been kept down here as the Corporation's scientific guinny- pigs? What lives had they been plucked from? A chill ran through Morwenna, causing her to quickly turn away. It was this single chance that saved her from a blow that would surely have severed her spine. As it was she became aware of the roundhouse kick in time to roll away from it, feeling the reverberation of its impact against the armoured glass behind her. Morwenna's response was to drive the point of her elbow hard into the meat of her attacker's still outstretched thigh, satisfied by the pained expression that momentarily contorted the other woman's face, quickly changing to one of raw hatred. She was as naked as Morwenna herself, with red hair shorn close to the scalp. While they were of equal height the redhead's physique was markedly more extreme, more densely muscled. Where the hell could she have come from? The wet and glistening gel coating her skin suggested she was the former occupant of the busted sphere, driven half-mad by the drugs pumped into her and the experiments performed against her will. Eyes locked, they circled each other for several seconds, neither uttering a sound. Then Morwenna jabbed the stiffened fingers of her right hand at the other woman's throat, but the attack was easily blocked. In return she received a knee strike to the gut, followed through with a vicious backhand. Whatever they'd done to this woman, it had enhanced her, made her exceptionally strong and fast. The blow carried sufficient violence to lift Morwenna into mid-air, flipping her over as if she were on wires, before landing her on the hard metal grating. It pretty much finished her. Dazed, she somehow managed to execute a leg sweep that knocked her enemy off balance long enough for Morwenna to regain her feet, though the effort drained the last of her reserves. She threw a haymaker that went tragically wild, affording the redhead an opportunity to jink behind her and slam the young technician's skull against one of the glass spheres. The effect was the same as being slugged in the head with a baseball bat. Her vision crazed into a billion tiny prisms, their colours gradually fading to black. Forty minutes later, and a dozen city blocks away, Morwenna's supervisor received the news that her insensate body had been discovered by Security Team Bravo. They'd left two medics in the tank farm to attend to her injuries while the rest continued their hunt for the redhead named 'Shamrock', who had fled into the lower levels of the Facility. (The codename was derived from a distinctive tattoo on the woman's right thigh. Any evidence of her real identity had been erased long ago, even from her own mind.) Thanking the team leader for his report, the supervisor then made a call of his own. Turning away from the bank of CCTV monitors filling one wall of his office he lifted a white handset and was connected automatically. ''I thought you ought to know; 'Shamrock' has broken out from containment. A security detail has been dispatched to the Facility to recapture her, but there's a problem.'' ''Isn't there always?'' sighed a voice at the other end of the phone. Biting back his irritation at the interruption, the supervisor continued. ''One of our technicians, a Morwenna Moore, was alone in the facility doing maintenance. She had an encounter with Shamrock. Took a lot of punishment.'' ''Will she survive?'' ''Sure - the girl's tough. What concerns me is how much she saw down there. . .the test subjects. . .what we're doing to them. I'm thinking we should have the lab guys do a memory-wipe on her.'' A long pause while he awaited his superior's answer. ''No. Let's not waste a golden opportunity. Patch her up and stick her in a containment tank. I want Ms. Moore healed in time for the next phase of nano-tech experiments. We're going to make a new woman out of her.'' With that the line went dead.