The labcoat's eyes crawled towards the monitor on the UI. He picked it up and swiped until a strange inductive spike on all antenna probes was in the middle of the screen. This was the defibrillator discharge. He swiped further back. There was the noise rise from the X3 coming closer to the antennae, and because of the equipment's sensitivity he could almost see the communication signal it was transmitting. And about ten seconds before it was dropped by Edith, there was a sudden change of power output. He zoomed in - the change was too fast for the equipment to measure properly.

The mech's slow collapse, as if it was in a low-gravity environment, did not escape Chris. But the measurements weren't enough to indicate anything. He pushed his glasses up his nose and erased all records of this session. Illegal human experiments he was expecting - but murder? Not on his watch.

Edith got his attention, kneeling over the mech and holding its battery like an ancient barbarian who just ripped out her opponent's heart. It was believable in her movements, and she suddenly seemed horrible and frightening to him. He reeled slightly, then came around her carefully and pulled at the mech's rifle until it came out of its hip holster with an unwilling click.

He put the thing on the table. It was heavy and unbalanced, obviously made to be operated by robots. There was a touch-contact connector on the handle, interfacing with a similar one on the hands of the X series, for various telemetries and compensators. Still, the gun was mechanical at its base, meant to be used by human operators in emergencies. It was locked down, but Chris remembered studying this model's internal structure. There was a way to manually override the lockdown, and he was halfway into disassembling the technician panel when the air changed and there was a mermaid on the floor. He barely resisted a sudden urge to aim the gun at her.

[color=aqua]"Where did you come from."[/color] he said simply.