Chapter 106: The Alt Account
Kodiak Island — Kaiju Black Market District
Strand was still riding the energy of his impromptu sparring demonstration when he turned back to Marcus with the focused expression of a man who had moved past being a customer and was now thinking like an investor.
"How many doses have you actually used?" he asked again, not letting it go.
Marcus adopted a thoughtful expression, as though genuinely trying to remember. "A hundred. Maybe two hundred. Could've been five hundred at some point. Honestly lost count — it's been a lot. A significant quantity. Many doses over a considerable period."
Strand stared at him.
"I'm giving you a straight answer," Marcus said pleasantly.
"You're giving me nothing," Strand said.
"That's also accurate." Marcus stood up, and the T-1000 chair silently reformed into its default humanoid configuration behind him. "Since we've established a productive working relationship — and since your performance just now was genuinely impressive — I'll sell you the remaining seven doses. One million per dose. If you want the storage cases and injector equipment to go with them, add three hundred thousand per unit."
Strand did the math. Seven doses at a million each plus the incubator and injector sets — he'd heard the storage requirements, he knew what happened to the serum outside the temperature window, and he understood that refusing the cold storage equipment was the kind of false economy that turned a million-dollar purchase into an expensive paperweight.
"All of it," Strand said, through slightly gritted teeth.
"Originally comes to ten point five million," Marcus said. "But I promised you two percent off for being first today. I'll round down to ten million flat. You have three days to arrange the cash."
Before Strand could respond to the payment timeline, Marcus had already snapped his fingers.
Seven T-800 units stepped forward from the perimeter formation in unison, each carrying one of the brushed-steel insulated cases. They set all seven down in front of Strand with the synchronized precision of a military honor guard, then stepped back into line.
Marcus was already walking.
Strand stared at the seven cases sitting on the ground in front of him — ten million dollars of product, handed over before payment, by a man surrounded by assault-rifle-equipped hardware who was now strolling away through the market district.
Marcus paused without turning around. "Three days, Victor. You can try not paying, of course." He let that land. "I'll see you then."
He kept walking. Twenty T-800s fell into formation behind him and the group moved out of the district with the unhurried purpose of people who were not concerned about being followed.
Strand watched them go. Then he turned to Hansen, who was still working his jaw experimentally. "Get eyes on them. Discrete."
"On it," Hansen said.
North Shore — Kodiak Island, Former Residential Zone
The surveillance team Strand had dispatched was spotted within four minutes of leaving the market district. Marcus clocked them through the T-800 sensor network and made a deliberate decision to let them follow.
This was part of the plan.
He needed a visible operational base — something that could be observed, investigated, and ultimately reported to the people in this world who made decisions about who was worth talking to. Trying to operate in complete secrecy was the wrong approach for what he was building. He needed to be found by the right people.
The convoy drove to the waterfront and boarded a transport vessel, heading for the small island several kilometers offshore — the one that had been designated as destroyed and contaminated in the battle records, its civilian population evacuated after a Kaiju engagement had left the shoreline saturated with the radioactive, corrosive biological residue that Kaiju bodies produced when they died.
The official designation was environmental hazard zone. Inaccessible to standard personnel. Quarantine indefinite.
For Marcus's purposes, it was perfect real estate.
The contamination that made the island uninhabitable for ordinary people was a nonissue for someone with a Constitution of 33 operating in the transcendent physical range. The T-800 and T-1000 units were entirely indifferent to radiation and biological toxins. The isolation that made the island useless to everyone else made it an ideal construction site — no neighbors, no oversight, no one wandering through to ask questions.
The Terminators had been working on the island for nearly a month.
What had been a contaminated wasteland was becoming something else. The construction project was a semi-subterranean circular structure — a hundred meters in diameter, giving an internal floor area of just under eight thousand square meters. The walls and dome were reinforced concrete, three meters of solid material throughout. The design spec Marcus had given the T-800 construction crew was built around durability first — the kind of structure that would remain operational through Kaiju-scale environmental events in the surrounding area.
The walls could absorb a close-proximity low-yield nuclear detonation without structural failure. The dome was rated for direct impact from debris the size of a shipping container. The underground section provided additional shielding and a stable temperature environment for the production equipment that would be coming through the dimensional gate from Umbrella's facilities.
The cover story was simple: a pharmaceutical production facility for Kaiju-derived biological compounds, operated by a researcher with documented credentials in cloning technology and human enhancement pharmacology.
Strand's surveillance team filmed the island from a safe distance and reported back. Marcus made sure there was enough visible activity to make the report interesting.
PPDC Headquarters — Kodiak Island Shatterdome
General Nathan Stryker's office was a study in practical functionality — no decorative elements that didn't serve a purpose, a desk buried under operational briefings, and a view of the Jaeger bay through the reinforced window that served as a constant reminder of what every decision in the room was ultimately in service of.
Stryker was reviewing the intelligence report on his desk when the door opened and the man who was officially listed in PPDC's procurement database as a civilian contractor sat down across from him, having shed the gold-teeth-and-swagger presentation he wore in the market district in favor of standard PPDC contractor work clothes.
Victor Strand, in his second identity, looked considerably less theatrical.
"Did you confirm the identity?" Stryker asked, not looking up from the briefing.
"Name is Marcus Cole," Strand said, using the fabricated profile ARIIA had constructed. "Born and raised on Kodiak Island, North Shore sector — the residential zone that took damage in the 2014 engagement. Family records are fragmented from the evacuation period. Holds a doctorate in molecular biology from Georgia Tech. Published work in cloning methodology and human physiological enhancement pharmacology during his graduate program." Strand paused. "The academic record checks out. His papers are in the literature."
This had been ARIIA's most elegant contribution to the operation. Building a biographical profile that held up under surface investigation was straightforward. Building one that included a verifiable academic publication record — papers in actual scientific journals, cross-referenced with real institutional records from a real university — required the kind of deep database access and synthetic document integration that only an AI of ARIIA's capability could execute cleanly.
Marcus had spent fifty Destiny points patching the remaining verification gaps, smoothing over the specific data points that couldn't be resolved through pure information manipulation. The identity was airtight at every level anyone in this world was likely to test it.
Stryker finally set down the briefing and looked at Strand directly. "And the product itself? How effective is it actually?"
Strand leaned back and smiled — the real smile, not the market-floor performance version. "Sir, with respect — I think you should try it yourself."
Stryker looked at him steadily.
"I'm not making a sales pitch," Strand said. "I'm telling you that I personally administered a dose approximately three hours ago, and I knocked Hansen down with one punch." He let that sink in. Hansen was known in the Shatterdome's contractor community. "I'm fifty-four years old."
Stryker was quiet for a moment. He looked at the intelligence summary on his desk — the profile of a molecular biologist operating a production facility on a contaminated island, selling Kaiju-derived enhancement compounds out of a black market setup with twenty identical armed escorts.
The PPDC had been fighting the Kaiju for three years. They'd tried everything that conventional military and pharmaceutical science could offer to give their Rangers an edge in the Drift and in combat. Nothing had moved the needle in any meaningful way.
A fifty percent physiological enhancement on first administration was not a number that a commanding officer in an active monster war could set aside without investigation.
"Arrange a meeting," Stryker said. "Through proper channels. I want to talk to this Dr. Cole directly."
Strand nodded. He'd expected that outcome from the moment he'd walked through Stryker's door.
Across the island, in a contaminated wasteland that was rapidly becoming a functional facility, Marcus Foster — operating as Dr. Marcus Cole, molecular biologist and Kaiju pharmaceutical researcher — was reviewing the dimensional gate connection specs for the first Umbrella production equipment shipment and thinking about how much simpler the next conversation was going to be when the PPDC came to him instead of the other way around.
The momentum was building exactly the way he'd planned.
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