Eternal Enemy
Page 12
“On me.” Anders swung around to step inside the hallway, seeing how it was long and had a marble floor—characteristic Gene Seer opulence. Pillars of shining white stone stretched down on either side of the long entrance hall, partially obscuring the arched doorways that led deeper into this level. At the far end was a wide curve of a reception desk, with two sets of sweeping stairs leading up to a balcony.
And hanging over that balcony was the giant golden bust of a woman with flowing hair, looking proud and austere even when cast in stone.
“Frack her,” Anders muttered at the icon of the Eternal Empress. He didn’t need to ask Moriarty for directions, because his head throbbed every time he lifted it to look at that balcony above. His pain led the way toward Jake—and the LOHIU.
“Come on,” he said, bolting from the doorway and breaking into a run down the hall.
“Wait!” There was a shout from behind, and Anders skidded on his heels just as there was an angry, cat-like hiss from Dalia beside him…and a trio of purple-and-crimson meson bolts fired after them.
“Cover!” Anders shouted, leaping to slide around the nearest stone pillar. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Dalia and Patch do the same. One of the Throne Marines behind them must have had enough sense left to recognize that they were imposters here, but the Marine’s aim was still bad.
The bolts hit the floor and the next pillar to Anders, close enough for his suit to register the thermal impact, but not enough to do any damage.
Outcast Power Suit/Weapons Interface/ Heavy Marine Rifle…
>>Auto Targeting…
Anders slid around the far side of his pillared cover, firing a shot back through the open doors behind, which picked the Throne Marine off his feet and flung him backward into the daylight.
“Go!” Anders shouted. Dalia was already running ahead, already halfway down the hall with Patch behind her, toward the stairs…
ALERT! ALERT! INTRUDER ALERT!
Klaxons blared before Anders could get to his feet. The Throne Marine he had taken out had clearly not been sick or injured enough to not send a distress signal.
“Dammit!” Corsigon swore, firing another trio of shots back at the open doorway behind just to keep their heads down, before turning to run down the hallway after Dalia.
The Ilythian and the Void engineer had reached the end of the stairs, but even before their booted feet could reach the bottom steps, there was a series of clicking sounds from the vaulted roof and puffs of compressed gases as the Gene Temple’s auto-defenses activated.
“Defense lasers!” Anders shouted, his voice going into a tight growl as he saw the first couple of burning orange lights spear down and hit the floor, hissing and sparking as they did so.
The defense lasers were thin lines of burning particles, holding stationary for the briefest of moments before they started to move.
Two of them headed straight for Anders, and another three headed for Patch and Dalia.
“Sir?” Anders heard Moriarty’s voice the moment he moved.
“Not now!” He jumped, one hand grabbing and sliding the next curve of a pillar and spinning himself around as a gleaming line of fire cut through where he had been just a second ago.
Anders’s boots skidded across the marble as he slammed his back to the pillar to avoid the line of fire shot out in front of him. Ahead of him, he saw Dalia shove Patch backward down the stairs behind the reception booth before she jumped, somersaulting in mid-air as two laser-lines moved past her. The Ilythian’s boots hit the floor with barely a sound. Even with a borrowed power suit, the Ilythian’s alien reflexes showed.
But there was a dull thwack as another set of meson bolts fired down the hallway toward them. The Throne Marine—or another of his ilk—had returned to finish the job, and they were pinned down.
Just as far, far above the Gene Temple, there was a dull bruise of orange fire, quickly fading and spilling the blackened, smoking ruin of the Outcast fighter jet it had contained.
The next trio of Malady’s squad were a little luckier, managing to get past the planetary defense grid and releasing their deadly payload on their target before they, too, were picked off by the much larger defense lasers in low-orbit around Old Earth.
The heavy missiles that Senior Commander Malady had personally designed tumbled end over end before suddenly straightening. Flaring their traditional propulsion rockets, they shot downward toward the eaves, towers, and turrets of the Gene Temple, and all that it contained.
22
Unification Process
The red line of laser-light shot around in an arc toward the Ilythian in Anders’s vision as he watched her jump and pirouette first one way and then another. But she was never going to get away from this one. Not even with all of her alien grace…
“Dalia! Anders shouted, with a part of him already knowing it was useless.
Just as the entire hallway shook with a deafening explosion, and plumes of stone dust burst across the space.
“Boss!” he heard Patch cry out.
“Stay down!” Anders was shouting, breaking cover to run ahead as the two miniature defense lasers suddenly winked out of power, and the others shot away at odd angles—focusing on the movement of the pillars, two of which had cracked apart and were falling.
WARNING! INTRUDER ALERT! WARNING!
The Gene Temple’s klaxon continued to cry out as Anders skidded across the floor, then tripped as the entire floor buckled and rippled with another explosion.
“It’s Malady!” Anders shouted. It had to be. The necro-bot must have started his bombardment. Anders hit the edge of the stairs and sprang upward, scrambling past blocks on the stairs and the sudden sprays of sparks as wall panels broke apart. Dust and smoke were everywhere—as were the drunken sweeps of the two remaining defense lasers. Some essential bit of their internal targeting must have been damaged.
“Anders?” There was a groan, and Anders saw a shape moving a few steps ahead beside one of the collapsed panels. It was Dalia, but one shoulder and arm of her power suit was severely scorched.
“It got you?” Anders asked, for the Ilythian to shake her head and push herself up, with a hiss, from the wall. “Something did. I don’t know what…” She sounded a little distant. Not what Anders would have wanted from his best fighter, but at least she was alive.
A sudden shriek and a groan of metal caught Anders’s attention just in time to see the gigantic golden bust of the empress hit the reception desk where Patch had been sheltering.
No!
There was a sudden explosion of sparks and plumes of fire and smoke, as well as the crunch of metal panels and the fracturing of stone.
“Patch!” both Anders and Dalia called out, for there to be a cough from the far side of the statue as the small Voider emerged, wiggling out from a gap under the empress’s ear.
“She’s blooming well trying to kill me herself now!” Patch coughed. But there was no time for mirth, as there was a shout from the far end of the hall and more meson bolts from the Throne Marines out there.
Some of them must be very brave or very loyal, Anders thought as he ducked to one side. This entire facility was under attack, and they were committed to trying to fight off the intruders.
“Up!” Anders shouted over the suit-to-suit communicators. “Go! Go! Go!”
The two humans and the Ilythian scrambled up what was left of the stairs as the walls around them shook and the missiles of the Outcasts continued to fall above.
“Sir, multiple contacts ahead of your location.” The words of Anders’s simulated intelligence made its wearer hiss in alarm, but Moriarty remained, as ever, calm.
“Guard up!” Anders snarled as he raced down what must have been the main corridor toward the sanctum where the LOHIU and Jake were being held. Thick rivers of pale gray smoke were racing along the ceiling, and the environmental scanners on Anders’s suit were going mad.
But where are the Throne Marines? Anders thought, before—
“Aiii!”
They saw the terrified, perfectly handsome and beautiful faces of a corral of Gene Seers stumble into the corridor, their eyes already showing whites in their horror, which only got worse when they saw three armed figures with their guns pointing straight at them.
“Long live Commander-General Cread!” one of them burst out as he fell to his knees, putting his trembling hands together in an act of prayer.
“Who what now?” Patch said.
“Don’t kill us, please! We give up!” the one said, before there was a sudden shout from behind them.
“I said get out!” It was a magnified voice, followed by the sudden appearance of a bulky Throne Marine in full power armor with a heavy rifle leveled against the Gene Seers.
They’re terrified… Anders thought in a fraction of a second, just as Dalia shot the Marine, sending them spinning backward into the room.
“Get out of here!” Anders barked at the seers, not feeling particularly charitable toward them but realizing that he was running into the middle of some sort of occupation. The Gene Seers and the Throne Marines hate each other. Cread’s Marines must have taken over the Gene Temple... Why!?
“Ack!” He didn’t get much further than this, because a blast of meson fire hit his leg and sent him slamming into the wall.
>>Warning! Suit Impact! Right Calf Plate -60%
Stars! Anders felt the pain radiating up his leg, matching with the headache starting to throb inside his temples. They were getting close to the epicenter of the psychic power, and they were locked in a firefight.
THWAP! Another trio of bolts came from the Throne Marines trapped inside the laboratory. None of them hit Anders or his crew, but one of the seers met a sudden, grisly end as the rest of them scattered down the hall.
“Anders, move!” It was Dalia, hissing in her alien way in shock and annoyance from where she was crouched beside of the open door. Every time she tried to move, another volley of meson fire hit and buckled the doorframe.
There was a grunt of exertion, and Anders saw the Void engineer suddenly leap across the open door, which brought a scatter-shot of meson fire after his flying form. Several of the bolts punched into the wall beside where Anders was crouched, and he rolled to one side.
What the frack is he doing!? Anders thought, returning fire into the open laboratory room, but it was heavy with smoke in there. All he could see were strange, broken instruments and machines. The Throne Marines inside had too much cover.
And with every passing second, Anders’s headache was only getting worse.
“Hyagh!” Suddenly, with the slam of his fist against the door controls, Anders understood what Patch had done. The metal door hummed shut in a moment, bringing startled shouts of surprise from the Marines inside.
FZZT! Patch shot the control box to a spray of sparks, just as the door started to buckle under the bolts of energy being released against it from the inside.
“That won’t hold them long…” Patch was saying.
“Long enough. Good work,” Anders growled, turning instead to the double metal doors that surely led the way to the chamber of the LOHIU and Jake.
And to the form of Commander-General Cread, standing in the doorway with a brace of Throne Marines already at his side, heavy rifles lowered at Anders, Patch, and Dalia.
“Corsigon,” Cread sneered. “You’re already too late. The unification process has already begun. And the LOHIU-J14 answers to me now!”
23
Union
He’s barely keeping it together, Anders thought as he glared at the struggling, stuttering form of Commander-General Cread as he gestured for the Marines to move his new prisoners.
It was hardly surprising, however, as Anders himself could barely keep his eyes open from the constant pain. All their weapons had been taken from them, but Anders, Dalia, and Patch were left, huddled to one side under the wavering rifles of the Marines who appeared similarly affected.
“Sir... SHZZZT... Multiple…” Even Moriarty appeared to have trouble staying coherent under the constant waves of PK energy being thrown out from the unholy contraption at the far end of the room.
LOHIU-J14… Anders looked in horror at the twin objects on the raised dais. One was the same large, bulbous containment unit that he had seen on the video footage, with multiple pipes and valves leading to the much thinner isolation tube standing next to it. Both were girded with what appeared to be multiple shielding fields, different washes of blue that crackled and hissed as Anders guessed that even they were struggling to contain the power contained within.
And what was within them horrified Anders.
In the isolation tube, he saw the gaunt, seemingly comatose form of his friend Jake, his eyes deeply sunken and his suit clinging to his frail, almost emaciated form as he hung inside drifts of blue. Pipes and wires shot out from the back of his neck to the top of the tube.
And then there was the other unit, the larger one.
With a small girl inside.
No. The horror of the sight made Anders’s stomach turn over. It was insensible that anyone could do this to one so young. Not just insensible, but insane… The LOHIU could barely be fourteen perhaps—or had been barely fourteen whenever she was discovered and put into this permanent stasis. She wore a red service suit and her blonde bob of hair splayed out around a still slightly chubby face. Wires and pipes similarly sprang outward from behind her neck to the tops of her own containment.
“You...have…to...stop this!” Anders managed to hiss up at Cread, who was clutching at the control desk before the two psychics as if he was drowning.
“Fool!” the commander-general hissed. “You don’t understand. I’m so close now. So close!”
“You’ll kill us all!” screamed a new voice.
Anders realized that, other than themselves and the Marines, there was another huddled form in the room: a very large, rotund, and bald man in a silver-and-gold suit in the corner of the room, with a bloodied mark across his temples. Anders’s eyes widened in shock as he realized who he was.
The Architrex of the Gene Seers. The leader of one entire pillar of the Golden Throne.
“Listen, Cread! We’re under attack!” the Architrex shouted. “And you cannot contain such power!”
Both of which were true, Anders thought, as he could still hear the thumps and crashes from the explosions of Malady’s missiles.
“Shut up! Shut up!” Cread sagged against the desk, and then clutched at it again with renewed fervor. “Those wannabe Marines won’t be a problem with what I can do now.” One of his gloved hands slammed onto the control desk, turned a dial, and…
Jake’s eyes snapped open. And they were a solid black.
Far above the Gene Temple, Senior Commander Malady, last of the original complement of Outcast Marines that had once fought for the Confederated States of Earth, was turning his craft for his last attack dive.
He still had one of the starfire missiles in the belly of his modified craft, and he hoped it would be enough. The ancient soldier, kept alive by his own sort of cryogenic stasis-suit, already knew that this had to be his last attack run and that it had nothing to do with the fact that he only had one missile left.
Almost all of his squad had fallen to the defense lasers of the low-orbit Earth satellites. The gleaming spears of light would lance through the smoke-filled skies without any warning, taking out each ship with a cold, simulated intelligence precision.
Senior Commander Malady knew that this was a mission that he would not survive. He had known, and told, his Outcasts that probably none of them would survive, but each and every one of the volunteer soldiers had agreed all the same—because of the loyalty that they felt for him, the only other being who remembered the way that Earth was supposed to be.
And now that his young and fanatical comrades were lost, Malady
had no intention of their sacrifice going to waste.
“Attack vector…” his modulated, electronic voice informed the ship’s computer as the targeting triangle found the ripe heart of the Gene Temple and flashed once, twice, three times before stabilizing.
He had a lock. The other missiles had done enough damage to take down the temple’s shields and disruption fields. All it would take would be this one missile…
“Fire,” Malady said, feeling the slight judder as his ship released its deadly gift.
And just before the ship, under the pressure of vast PK forces, crumpled in a microsecond, as easily as Malady might crumple a plastic cup.
Senior Commander Malady, the oldest human save for the Eternal Empress, died instantly under Jake and the LOHIU’s directed force.
But his last missile lived on. It tumbled end over end before its rockets fired, and it shot down toward the reactors of the Gene Temple…
…to suddenly halt in mid-air, caught by the mind of the LOHIU-J14. A few thoughts of their deep consciousness rendered the missile inoperable, and it fell lifeless to the temple walls, clunking uselessly before hitting the dirt without so much as a bang, hiss, or whimper.
Cread was laughing manically from his control desk, while Anders felt his limbs start to spasm with the waves of pain.
He’s mad. He’s gone mad… Anders thought, wondering if at any moment he, too, would do the same. It was all he could do to concentrate on Dalia’s slender hand on his shoulder and struggle to remember what she had taught him.
To breathe. To remember who he was.
The waves of psychic energy battered against their minds as the commander-general shivered in unholy ecstasy.
“You see!? You see!?” he was screaming, although it was hard for Anders to pay attention to the man’s demented words.