Drake Steele burst into the lab heralded by a spray of suppressing fire that should have forced the various slack-faced, lab-coated eggheads down to their knees to avoid taking a round to the face. But whatever was affecting their minds clearly affected their reflexes as well, because three of them sustained grazing wounds and a fourth went down hard with what looked like a fractured skull. The fifth and sixth, well... Drake had his orders. Civilian casualties were acceptable as long as the lab was secured and the specimen contained. He looked down at the lone unaffected scientist cowering under the table and asked, "So how did you fuck this one up?"

The woman on the floor glared up at him with watery blue eyes that were only magnified by her thick glasses. "I didn't fuck up anything," she snapped, clearly pushed so far past her tolerance for adrenaline that the fact she was lashing out at a man with biceps the size of her head and a military-grade assault rifle with attached grenade launcher meant absolutely nothing to her anymore. "I work in genome sequencing. They didn't even let me within three hundred meters of the classified directives. First I knew about all this was when these assholes came shambling down the hall like something out of Resident fucking Evil." She gestured at the five stupefied individuals slowly approaching them, three of them trickling blood from minor wounds. Honestly, Drake had almost forgotten about them.

It didn't take long to subdue them. Whatever had subsumed their wills and personalities, it left them poorly equipped for a real fight--they didn't use tactics, they moved clumsily and without coordination, and they didn't even seem to have any kind of preternatural resistance to pain. All Drake had to do was clock them on the skull with the rifle butt and they collapsed like a house of cards. He looked over at the lone scientist who still had her wits about her and said, "Come on, lady. I know how places like this work. People gossip. You must know something." He kicked the final one in the head as they tried to rise, the implied threat every bit as clear as Drake wanted to make it.

Angela frowned--she wasn't wearing a name tag, nobody in a facility like this did, but Drake had memorized the personnel files of every member of the staff and he recognized Angela Marks from her dirty blonde hair and sour expression alone--but it didn't take her long to realize she needed to stay on his good side. And not just because he could deadlift her. "Okay, yes," she sighed, obviously making the determination that a few violations of infosec were pretty much moot by now. "Johanssen, one of the senior researchers, he... he liked to brag to the pretty girls. Talked about how he was working on something that would revolutionize genetic research. I mean, I thought it was bullshit, but--"

"But now we're in Romero Country," Drake cut in, impatiently glancing at the door to make sure no one was cutting off their exit. There were five hundred researchers onsite, and their best estimates suggested at least four hundred of them had been contaminated by whatever got loose. That was a lot of bullets to carry, even for a guy with muscles like his. "Explain it to me like I'm five, okay? I don't think we have all day."

Angela levered herself up to her feet, a little of her panic subsiding. "Okay, so what they made in the lab was a, I guess you could call it a synthetic organism? An artificial living being. But it had a kind of... okay, this is where I admit I thought I was a genius but even I don't fully get this part... it had a more fluid genetic structure than what you'd find in nature. It could reassemble its own genes on the fly in response to its environment. I don't know how it avoided transcription errors with that kind of instantly recombinant DNA, I don't understand how it managed to replicate the new genetic code without growing through cell division, and I definitely can't understand how it selected its traits in the absence of conscious intentional sentience, but--"

"Like I'm five, please," Drake reminded her, keeping his tone polite but his voice firm. He leaned out the door and glanced down the hallway in both directions, grateful to see they were still being left alone for the time being. "Pretend I'm a big dumb lunkhead who just got sent down here to shoot things."

Angela smiled ruefully. "Right. Pretend. Okay, so evolution is supposed to be something we pass down to our kids, and our kids' kids, and maybe a few hundred generations from now they run a little faster or jump a little higher or whatever. But this thing they made in the lab, it evolved itself. Spray it with poison, it became resistant to the toxins. Put it into intense heat or intense cold and it developed temperature tolerances. Each evolution made it tougher, stronger, better equipped to handle whatever stress they put it under. Johanssen started color coding them."

Drake furrowed his brow. "Color coding them? Why?"

Angela shrugged. "Because everyone that smart is weird as fuck, that's why. Johanssen was synesthetic, he heard colors, and it kind of turned into a private obsession of his. He said once he got into genetics to prove it wasn't just all in his head. Look, it doesn't matter, okay? The point is he kept stressing the thing in different ways until it mutated, and his plan was to push it as far as it could go while he kept track of exactly what it did to itself to survive. Evolution Violet was temperature, Evolution Indigo was radiation, and so on."

Drake decided it was time to move. He took Angela by the hand and led her out of the lab, peering through the faint glow of the emergency lighting to make sure they weren't being followed while he continued pumping her for information. Staying in one place for any length of time felt like a sucker's bet, and Drake was no sucker. "So what happened?" he prompted, just to make sure Angela understood that story time wasn't over yet.

"Well, like I say, I don't know everything, but I guess somewhere around Evolution Blue it started trying to escape. I think it started to figure out that the real threat to its survival was a bunch of scientists that kept trying to fucking kill it with fire, and it decided the best direction to adapt in would be something that stopped people from messing with it. Evolution Blue killed three lab techs trying to get out of its test chamber." Angela sounded more resigned than sad about it. Drake supposed that when your whole career was professional mad science, you probably got used to losing people every now and then.

He took them down a small corridor that led past the mess hall, grateful that whatever these people had become they didn't seem to think about food much anymore. "So they didn't destroy it after the containment breach?" he asked, checking another intersection to make sure it was clear. "I was briefed on this place, I know that's protocol. Keeps people from getting stupid and letting something dangerous out into the world." He tried to conceal the contempt in his voice, but he knew he wasn't having much luck.

"Oh, sure they did," Angela said, more or less keeping pace with him despite the occasional need to give her wrist a little tug. "But how do you tell the difference between trying to kill a thing like that because you want it dead and trying to kill it just for funsies? The disposal protocol created Evolution Green, and after that they just focused on containment because it was getting pretty nasty. Johanssen said something about teeth the size of my hand."

Drake rolled his eyes. "Great," he snarled, checking the grenade launcher to make sure it was loaded. "So I'm fighting the thing from 'Alien' because you dumbasses couldn't leave well enough alone." He dragged Angela down another hallway, this one leading to the secure testing section. Drake had an all-access clearance pass, but he suspected he wouldn't need it. The monster had probably already opened every last door in this part of the facility with its fists by now. Thank fucking god everything else was reinforced.

"Um... not... exactly," Angela murmured, her whole face pursing like she'd just bitten into a lemon. "See, the specimen developed sentience with Evolution Blue. And at some point--what I think Johanssen would have called Evolution Yellow, if he hadn't gotten turned into one of those mindless zombies--it started to take charge of its own development. Like, instead of just responding to the stresses in its environment, it started to evolve at will. By choice. And it got, um... sneaky."

"Sneaky like how?" Drake whispered, slipping past one of the brainless lab-coated scientists while it was staring vacantly the other direction. He was following his instincts now, moving deeper into the heart of the facility, and he had a bad feeling that they might run into whatever this thing's final form was at any second. He needed to know all its capabilities if he was going to fight it. "Like, can it turn invisible, or what?"

"We should be so lucky," Angela snarked, keeping her voice low and her tone still deeply sarcastic. "No, it developed its own kind of chemical warfare, a species-specific pheromone that bonded to key receptors in the brain and rendered its victims docile and compliant. Evolution Yellow sabotaged the ventilation systems and released the stuff all over the facility, and then used the public address system to command its new drones to release it from containment. Once it was able to touch them, it was all over--they received a massive dose of the pheromone through skin-to-skin contact that completely shut down their brains and made them into its slaves."

Drake frowned. "Hang on a--" His voice broke off abruptly as he noticed one of the drones coming down the hallway, and he quickly dragged Angela into the nearest test chamber to avoid being spotted. Once they were inside, he pushed her up against the wall by her throat and snarled out, "Hang on a second. You told me you didn't know anything about this until those things came down the hallway at you. Now you're acting like you knew this all along? What gives, lady?"

Angela smiled sweetly, the happiest she'd looked since she first saw him. "Well, it's simple, isn't it? The specimen evolved again. Evolution Orange can change its physical appearance, releasing subcutaneous dyes and subtly altering its bone structure and musculature to resemble not just a person but any specific person it takes the time to study. And the pheromone release is much more, um... insidious, I think is the word? Instead of just making big dumb obvious zombie drones that anyone could spot a mile away, it can make obedient brainwashed slaves that don't even know they're slaves. That's why you let me bring you right back to my home, didn't you?"

Drake blinked heavily, suddenly thinking back to all those tugs on his hand and realizing they all came from Angela, not from him. She'd been... she'd been steering him all this time, and he hadn't noticed because. Because she was holding his hand and it felt. It felt so good to--to obey. "I... yes," he mumbled, suddenly all too aware that his bare palm was touching her throat and he couldn't seem to make himself pull away.

Angela chuckled. "Don't worry," she cooed, reaching down and undoing his fly before pulling down his trousers to reveal a throbbing erection Drake hadn't even let himself think about. "You're absolutely essential to my plans. You're going to get a nice big dose of pheromones--turns out the mucous membranes of a vaginal structure are an absolutely perfect delivery method, that's why I'm Angela and not one of the boys--and once I'm sure you're nice and docile and happy to do what you're told, we're going to come up with a nice little story for your friends back at Headquarters."

She toppled him gently backward, slowing his fall with an effortless strength that should have worried Drake but instead only made his cock harder, and then she was straddling his hips and clenching around his prick with a muscle control that Drake had never experienced from a woman before in his life. "We're going to blow up the labs, we're going to leave behind the remains of something nice and big and scary-looking, and you're going to tell everyone how you saved the world from Johanssen's monster. And I'll be right there by your side, your expert witness who can help them all believe it." She chuckled. It was the kind of musical laugh Drake could fall in love with.

"And Evolution Red, the beautiful form I'm going to be... she won't ever have to worry about being hurt ever again. Humanity's going to love me, I'll make sure of that. I'll be whoever I want to be, I'll go wherever I want to go, and everyone I touch will want to be my slave. I... well, I guess I'll never be blue again, will I?" She laughed, riding Drake's cock even harder with every gentle motion, and the soldier could almost imagine the seductive poison flowing to his brain as her pussy wrung the climax out of him and his mind collapsed into uncritical adoration of his new owner.

THE END