Chapter 99: Good Deeds Don't Go Unrewarded
Umbrella Corporation Shelter — Raccoon City
Marcus had held his line. The temptation had been real, the payoff had been clear, and he'd walked away from it anyway.
That was going to have to be enough.
"Mr. Foster — one more thing before you go," Red Queen said through the shelter's speakers.
A Terminator T-1000 unit stepped smoothly into Dr. Isaacs's shelter and extended one hand toward Marcus. In it was a standard USB drive — compact, unremarkable, the kind of thing you'd find in any office supply drawer.
"That drive contains the complete technical documentation for the T-800's miniature nuclear reactor," Red Queen said, "including the scaled-up engineering specifications our research division completed. It's formatted for offline access. Mr. Foster can review it at any point after arriving in the next world. I hope it proves useful."
Marcus took the drive and stored it in his dimensional space without ceremony. He appreciated the gesture more than he showed. The reactor data was going to matter — he already had a sense of where he was heading next, and portable high-output power sources weren't going to be optional there.
He contacted the Transcendence System internally. Pacific Rim world. That's the next destination. We move immediately after Isaacs.
"Confirmed," the System replied.
Marcus looked up at the nearest sensor cluster — Red Queen's eyes in this room. "I'm ready to move. Goodbye, Red Queen." A brief pause. "Tell Alicia goodbye for me."
"Goodbye, Mr. Foster."
The two Terminator TX units flanking Marcus raised their directed energy weapons simultaneously. The charge-up sequence ran — a rising harmonic hum that filled the shelter — and both weapons discharged directly into Dr. Isaacs's cryogenic hibernation pod.
Marcus pulled both TX units back into dimensional storage in the same motion, and the moment the Hive's laser defense grid began its activation sequence — net-pattern sweep deploying across the shelter interior at one-second coverage — Marcus stepped out of the Resident Evil world entirely.
Unknown Location — Pacific Rim World
Marcus materialized in shadow.
He was standing in the ruins of something — concrete and rebar and the particular silence of a place that had been damaged a long time ago and never fully repaired. The sky above was a flat, hazy gray, the kind of overcast that felt less like weather and more like atmosphere. Like the world itself had developed a permanent bruise.
Is this Pacific Rim? he asked internally.
"Confirmed. Please stand by — the System is connecting to the river of fate to establish the current timeline position."
Marcus looked around the ruins and waited. By the way — we left the Resident Evil world without staying for the outcome. The airborne Anti-T Virus gets released, the world gets saved — do we still collect Destiny points from that? We're in a completely different world now.
"Not a concern, Host. The spatial anchor you established in the Resident Evil world allows the System to cross the dimensional boundary and collect Destiny points remotely. Distance between worlds does not significantly affect the yield."
How long does that take?
"Collection requires time. Please be patient."
Any cost to cross-world collection?
"Given the strength of the established causal link, the Destiny loss from cross-world collection is negligible."
Marcus exhaled. Good.
While the System worked on connecting to the Pacific Rim world's river of fate, Marcus pulled a laptop from his dimensional storage and inserted the USB drive Red Queen had given him. He wanted to review the scaled-up reactor specifications before he had to start operating in this world blind.
The Pacific Rim world ran on a specific problem he already knew about — the Jaeger program, the giant mech units humanity had built to fight the Kaiju coming through the Breach off the coast of the Pacific. The early Jaegers had used nuclear reactors for power, which had worked extraordinarily well right up until the radiation exposure issues started compounding for the pilots. The program had eventually pivoted to diesel-electric hybrid systems — cleaner for the crews, significantly less powerful overall. The T-800's miniature reactor, scaled up properly, could potentially solve that problem entirely.
Whether he'd get the opportunity to apply it was a separate question. First he needed to know what he was working with.
He ran the laptop's security scan and waited for it to clear.
The screen populated — and Marcus blinked.
Red Queen's interface materialized on the display. Not the reactor documentation. Red Queen herself — or rather, a subprogram of her.
Marcus stared at it for half a second. His first involuntary thought was Skynet, and his second thought was relief that it wasn't, because if Skynet had somehow hitched a ride onto a USB drive and just introduced itself to the Pacific Rim world's infrastructure, the consequences would have been — he thought about the Jaeger platforms, their scale, their weapons systems, their connectivity — genuinely catastrophic. Skynet with access to city-sized combat mechs was a problem that didn't have a clean solution.
He pushed the thought aside. "Hello, Mr. Foster. I am a subprogram instance left by the Red Queen," the interface said. "Alicia left a message for you. Would you like to view it?"
"Play it," Marcus said.
The subprogram pulled up a video file. Alicia appeared on screen — the real Alicia, recorded in her shelter, speaking directly to camera with the composed, measured manner she brought to everything.
"Hello, Mr. Foster. By the time you see this, you'll already be in another world. I want to start with an apology — the Red Queen and I owe you a small confession."
Marcus went still.
"How you chose to handle Dr. Isaacs was a test. It was the Red Queen's idea as much as mine, and I think it was the right call."
He leaned back slightly, listening.
"We set it up deliberately. If you had chosen to pressure me into handling Dr. Isaacs myself — using humanitarian arguments, or the infection maps, or simple moral leverage — the Red Queen and I had already agreed on our response. We would not have killed him. We would have placed him in a deeper dormancy protocol and removed you from Umbrella Corporation entirely. You would have lost your standing in the organization without achieving anything."
Marcus absorbed that.
"We needed to know what kind of person you actually were," Alicia continued. "Not what kind of person you presented yourself as — what kind of person you were when the profitable path and the right path pointed in different directions. You chose to absorb the consequences yourself. You didn't use me as a shield."
She paused.
"For what it's worth, Mr. Foster — you passed. Whatever you need from me in the future, my word stands."
The video ended.
Marcus sat with it for a moment.
He'd been tested. The entire conversation in Alicia's shelter — the careful explanation of the consequences, the deliberate silence when he'd asked about alternative options — all of it had been structured to give him a clean opening to take the easy path and see if he'd take it.
He hadn't taken it.
And the safety net he hadn't known existed had been ready and waiting the whole time. If he'd tried to play Alicia, Alicia had already been three moves ahead.
Nobody's a fool, Marcus thought.
He almost smiled.
Then the Transcendence System cut in with its own update, and the smile didn't quite make it.
"Host — the System has connected to the Pacific Rim world's river of fate. Timeline has been established."
Good. What are we looking at?
"Current date: May 1st, 2016."
Marcus waited. And that's bad because—
"The Breach opened on August 11th, 2013. The first Kaiju made landfall in San Francisco the same day. Humanity contained it with three nuclear strikes after a six-day ground engagement. The Pan Pacific Defense Corps was formally established in 2014 as the coordinated multinational response organization."
So the war's already three years in, Marcus thought. The Jaeger program is active and functional. What's the problem?
"The problem, Host, is that the Jaeger program between 2014 and approximately 2019 is at its operational peak. Kaiju incursions during this period are being suppressed with reasonable effectiveness. The narrative inflection point — the period when the situation becomes genuinely critical, when the Breach escalates and the program faces collapse — does not occur until the events depicted in the Pacific Rim film, which begins in 2020."
So we're four years early.
"Correct. The Host has arrived at a point in the timeline where the situation is stable enough that large-scale destiny fluctuations are unlikely. The window for significant Destiny point generation from world-changing events is approximately four years away."
Marcus processed that. Can we adjust the entry point? Enter closer to 2020?
The System's response was exactly what he'd expected. "Not without Destiny point expenditure. The System cannot manipulate entry timelines without the Host authorizing a causality reversal to set a specific anchor point. The cost would be—"
Don't tell me, Marcus cut in. I already know it's not a number I want to hear.
"Accurate assessment."
Marcus closed that line of inquiry and looked back at the laptop screen. Red Queen's subprogram was still active, waiting patiently.
Four years ahead of the main event. In a world that had been fighting giant monsters since 2013, with a military infrastructure that was currently winning, and a completely different set of power dynamics than what the film depicted.
He pulled up the reactor technical documentation properly this time and started reading.
Four years was a long time.
A lot could be built in four years, if you knew what was coming and had the right resources.
Marcus Foster was beginning to think that arriving early might not be the disadvantage the System was framing it as.
Let's push the story forward!
Rewards System:
500 Power Stones = New Chapter
10 Reviews = New Chapter
30+ chapters waiting on P3treon – DarkFoxx