In the end, ironically, it was Zeck who found the entrance to Gero's lab, despite the fact that he had the smallest search area by a notable degree.
Since he didn't have a large enough telepathic range to contact Lynn and I directly, he gave the news to Tater, who called us as he flew over to Zeck's location.
By the time Lynn and I made it there, Tater and Zeck were silently hovering near the door, just waiting for us.
Sure enough, as I'd expected, the door had been built directly into the side of a mountain. If you weren't looking from the correct angle, you'd overlook it, thinking that it was just a small cave or something. There was foliage nearby to cover some of the most obvious angles, too. Whether from high in the atmosphere, or simply walking up to it on the ground, the door was covered.
But once you knew about it, or in our case, could fly precisely, just above the treeline, it was almost obvious.
"Think he knows we're here?" Lynn wondered.
"Well, the ki signature hasn't moved much, so even if he does, he's not smart enough to run." Tater replied.
I analyzed the doorway with my eyes, while I analyzed the inside of the building with my ki sense. "He's agitated. Worried… and heading deeper into the mountain with every second. I'll bet he's got a jet or something deep down in there." I noted.
"And a pretty impressive security system, too. Thick titanium doors, I count what, seventeen guns in those walls?" Zeck agreed.
"You missed that row there. Twenty-six."
"I don't care. Let's get the bastard before he gets in that jet." Tater declared, annoyed.
Before anyone else could agree or disagree, he dropped down toward the door.
With a shrug, I followed. "Experience before beauty."
"Then Tater definitely goes first." Lynn joked alongside me.
By the time Lynn dropped down to the hallway, Zeck had shot out each and every gun with precise ki waves, while Tater had already blown the door down with a casual wave of his hand.
The lab itself was fairly bare. There was a human-sized capsule leaning against the wall numbered 8, a massive power generator in the middle of the floor, and a large computer that took up the entire back wall of the room, but other than that, there really wasn't much of anything beyond cords and cables that ran all over the walls and ceilings.
Clearly, he did most of his work in the basement, which was where we could all sense that he was right now, but there weren't any other clear entrances or exits to the room.
"You know, I'm kind of glad that Pepper's not here. Zeck, pull the hard drive. I'll shut down the power. You two, look for the basement entrance." I ordered.
To my annoyance, Gero's lab had multiple anti-tampering safeguards on top of the thirty-five automatic machine guns we'd been attacked by so far. It took Zeck and I several minutes each to bypass them in order to prevent the lab from self-destructing when we tampered with the guy's computer and power supply.
Eventually, though, we managed. I even found the cord connecting the emergency power supply to the upper portion of the lab, and connected it directly to the original generator in order to overload it. If one sends enough electricity through the wires, anything can be made to overload. I wasn't entirely sure whether I'd simply overloaded the fuse for the upper portion of the lab, or the entire reserve unit, though.
The lab went dark, aside from the light of ki released by our auras in order to prevent total blindness.
Meanwhile, Tater and Lynn, aided by Tater's vast experience in raiding Red Ribbon bases like this one, quite easily found the entrance to the basement, vanishing into the open hole.
By the time Zeck and I were finished safely shutting Gero's lab down, our friends' auras had already converged on the other aura, deep below, and I could tell that whoever it was (I really, really hoped it was Dr. Gero himself) was already unconscious.
Once we finished up with our work upstairs, Zeck and I didn't bother using the ladder to get down. We just dropped, instead, slowing our fall at the end so that we didn't dent the floor below, when we finally made it to the basement level.
Sure enough, the basement level, whether on reserve power or on an entirely separate system, was still lit up and working perfectly well.
It was also much larger than the entrance level of the lab. When we landed, we were in a long hallway corridor. It seemed like this basement level was a massive lab that could also double as a residential area.
The Red Ribbons had apparently funded Gero rather well, for him to have a lab this large. And I had a suspicion that this wasn't his only lab, either, not that it particularly mattered.
Even if he did have other labs, the only place he'd consider secure enough to store the locational information was in his own mind, and I didn't even have to meet the crazy old man to tell that he'd never give that information up, even under torture or death. Even if we tried to use telepathy to rip the information out of his head, he'd just turn himself into a vegetable before we got anything useful, since we'd only managed to unlock telepathic abilities by being strong, and had zero finesse.
We took our time as we headed deeper into the lab to meet up with our friends. Only people like Zeck and I, who had the knowledge base required to call ourselves scientists, could truly appreciate how incredible this lab was.
And it was an incredible lab. The first room to the right was just a fabrication room. A gigantic, ultra-precise 3-D printer that used some sort of laser technology that I really wanted a look into the mechanics of, when we had the time.
Another room was home to a bunch of 'operation' tables, where half-assembled androids were sitting, waiting patiently to be finished. The next room was an office, with a desk, a computer, a small, half-made bed, and a mess of files and papers strewn all over the place. Clearly, this was where the evil doctor spent the majority of his time.
And the coup d'etat, the room where the hall opened out to.Even from here, I could see a tiny green pea-sized thing floating by itself in a tank in the middle of the room.
The bastard had already started making Cell.