by S. A. Lusher
One of the shots punched into her armor, not penetrating it but sending a wave of pain through her stomach and making her stumble back a few steps. Frustrated, gritting her teeth in anger and pain, Callie put four rounds through the thing’s twisted, hideous face. Keron capped his own and, after checking the area one more time, they turned and jogged back to the door. She just wanted this to be fucking done with.
“Cover me,” Callie said, letting her rifle hang by its sling and crouching.
“On it,” Keron replied, about-facing and standing guard.
Callie activated the torch and applied it to the metal after focusing the flame. Seconds began to go by as the metal ran and bled, then minutes. As she hit the halfway mark of cutting open a hole big enough for both of them to fit through, she heard Keron open fire behind her. Glancing over her shoulder, she saw a half dozen metal men coming her way.
“I’ve got it,” Keron said, keeping his broad body between her and the enemies as he opened fire. “Finish it up.”
She returned to her work, wishing she could go faster but knowing that this was as fast as she could go. In the end, it took several agonizingly long minutes and they endured two more attacks before the hole was finally finished. As she wrapped it up, Callie kicked the sheet of metal in and tossed aside the cutting tool.
“Let’s go!” she called, moving into the next room and securing it with a sweep of her rifle. This place was definitely bigger than the others. It was about thirty meters across and roughly circular in shape, sporting an impromptu second story of catwalks that ringed its peripheral, granting access to the higher up portions of the myriad of electronic equipment affixed to basically every available surface. Nodes of technology studded the floor as well, stuck to the deckplates, seeming to grow out of them like nodules.
“So now what?” Keron asked.
It was a good question. Callie wasn’t entirely sure how they were going to sever Erebus from its power without severing power from the entire base. She had some technical knowledge, enough that she figured she could wing it. She’d been able to decipher the information and the databases she’d looked into so far. With this thought in mind, she began to head for the nearest thing that looked like an access console, but froze as a loud thud reverberated through the room. Frowning, wondering what the fuck it could be, she raised her rifle.
There was another door, across the way, that was a good fifteen feet high.
When it burst open, flying out of its frame, the thing that stepped through needed to duck to get through the doorway.
“What the fuck...” Callie whispered in shocked horror.
It was an elemental, and from the blue-white tinge to it, an electric elemental, but it was immense. A titanic behemoth. Both hands were mounted in sharpened blade-like apparatuses that crackled with raw, blue-white energy. It had a narrowing metal cone for a head that was topped with a silver sphere and had two rings hovering around it, gently bobbing up and down. Callie felt shell-shocked, frozen with mind-numbing terror.
When Keron opened fire on it, that got her snapped back to reality. And just in time, too. The thing was discharging what appeared to be a concentrated bolt of energy. She grunted as hot agony washed over her right side as she strafed away, almost but not quite managing to sidestep the powerful bolt. Burning pain ripped across some of her skin and she wondered exactly how bad the damage was, but there was no time to focus on that. Shoving the pain as hard as she could outside her awareness, she emptied her rifle into the creature.
It didn’t seem to do nearly enough damage.
Callie fell back behind one of the nodes, her hands shaking as she ejected her spent magazine, snagged a new one and slapped it in. This was a bad one, and not what she’d hoped for. They weren’t looking to destroy the damned reactor, since they needed some power to the base. How in the hell was she going to deal with this one? Callie spotted Keron, who had taken cover like she had and was taking potshots at the creature.
Well, she really only had one approach to the situation: shoot it until it died. If that didn’t work, then...she’d have to get creative. With this in mind, Callie leaned out and took shots at the creature, managing to get through another half a magazine before it took aim at her and fired off another bolt of pure energy that blew her cover to smoking bits and sent another painful wash of electricity through her body, though nowhere near as painful as that first one. Callie moved quickly to the next bit of cover and emptied another magazine.
They were doing damage, she could see that much, as this robot hybrid bled as well, it was just that they weren’t doing enough to it. Cursing, first because of frustration, then because of agony, Callie dove to the side as her second piece of cover burst into glowing metal fragments. Too much damage was being done to the reactor. Was Erebus really this desperate? Insane? Apathetic? Or did it have some kind of backup plan?
Before she could come up with some kind of viable answer to this, or a solution to her problem, one presented itself, though not one that she had hoped for. As she shifted between nodes for cover, the creature fired off another bolt of energy at her. It sailed between the nodes and hit the far curved wall behind her.
And apparently the wall had had enough.
With a loud, groaning squeal, the metal gave way and suddenly water began streaming into the room. First dozens, the hundreds of gallons of chilled seawater sprayed into the room. Callie immediately began sprinting back towards the opening she had created. One way or the other, their objective was complete. This reactor was toast. She and Keron ended up being shoved through the opening via the water right before an emergency bulkhead slammed down over the opening, sealing it and the water behind it.
“Well, that’s done,” Callie muttered as she got to her feet. Although now she was worried about what was going to power the base-
Every single light went out and the base was plunged into darkness.
CHAPTER 11
–Escalation–
“Tell me the truth about why you joined up,” Drake said suddenly.
He and Stacker had been walking in relative silence for about five minutes now and the thought that had been nagging his brain for the past couple hours finally found its way out of the lockbox of his head and through his vocal cords.
“What?” Stacker sounded startled.
“You made a vague reference to money when I asked you why you signed up. But you also acknowledged the insane risks. Dead men don’t spend good money.”
Stacker looked over at him, his face pale and a little harrowed and gaunt behind the flat pane of glass that was his faceplate. He returned his gaze back to the room they were making their way slowly through, a long warehouse like area with stacks of crates and shelves full of haphazardly strewn equipment and hardware lining the peripheral of the huge room. He sighed quietly and seemed to be considering his answer, measuring it perhaps.
“If you don’t want to tell me, I’ll accept ‘fuck off and mind your own business’ as an answer,” Drake said.
Stacker let out a loud laugh that seemed to surprise him. “No, it’s fair enough. And I haven’t really had anyone to talk to for a while...I actually have a great career. A lot of people called my career stunning. During my decade in the Marines, I was actually loaned out to Search and Rescue for a couple of tours and ended up pulling off some pretty spectacular rescues. We got to an asteroid mine where their reactor was going critical. We found that out and had a decision. Either start trying to get people out right then and there, and probably lose half of them, or send someone into the reactor itself to sever a few key connections to kill the power, because the emergency shutoff was broken. I volunteered to do so while they started the evacuation. I went in there and just barely managed to do it. Got my arm blown off in the process, but I made it out and we didn’t lose a single person. And that was my first mission.
“I kept seeming to run into situations like that. When I was a Sergeant, my first mission out I was to lead a squad to help reinforce a
colony that was being attacked by a huge group of slavers. My ship got shot down. I was the only survivor, deep in enemy territory. I played guerrilla warfare with them, managed to personally kill a hundred troopers and keep them occupied long enough for reinforcements to arrive. Though I’d say about sixty of those I killed was because I got lucky. Right place, right time with a bomb. Then I was in the Spec Ops when the Systems Wars hit, did a lot of crazy shit there, too. That was my career.”
“So this was the next logical step?” Drake asked.
Stacker shook his head. “No. Well...yes, actually. But I didn’t want to take the next logical step, not back then. I wanted to fucking quit. I wanted to live with my family. Yeah, I had a family. A wife and two kids. We’d met about eight years into my Marine career, feel deeply in love. We agreed: two more years in the Marines, then I’d quit. And I did...for a year. By then we were married with one kid. During that year, I had enough money not to work for a while and we had another kid. And I...couldn’t do it. I couldn’t do the family life thing. I ended up getting a job with Security-Investigations, but it wasn’t enough and through it all my superiors had been requesting I make a transfer to Spec Ops. Eventually...I gave in.”
“Your wife didn’t take it well,” Drake murmured.
“No. But she knew I was miserable. To our credit, we made it work...for about five more years. But at that point she was basically a single parent. Don’t get me wrong, every R and R, every leave, every bit of spare time I got I went to be with them, I provided for my family. Spec Ops pays well. But in the end, it wasn’t the same as actually being there. We got a divorce. I still came to see the kids whenever I could, but...she remarried two years later and the kids...liked their new father more than they liked me. And one time she asked me to stop coming, and I...saw that she had a point. Nobody was getting anything out of my visits but pain, so I said my goodbyes, told her and the kids that I still loved them, and I haven’t seen them since. That was about nine years ago.”
“So you gave your life to your career,” Drake said.
He nodded. “Yep. Nothing else to give my life to. When I heard about this...well, by then it did seem like the next logical step. Higher stakes, more danger, bigger results. I have to say, I now have an immediate respect for you and your team.”
Drake laughed. “I’d be careful with that respect. You know I’m not even military? I’m a fucking mercenary. Or I was. Career mercenary. Eric was in Search and Rescue. Greg was Security-Investigations. So was Allan. Genevieve was a government contract assassin.”
“Doesn’t matter,” Stacker replied firmly. “What matters is what you do. I don’t care about your rank or your background. I care that you’re doing this. Facing down these bizarre, unique threats. Putting your life on the line in a very real way.”
“Well...that’s good to know, at least,” Drake said.
As they came to the end of their journey, or what they thought was the end of their journey, the conversation fell off. A huge door was closed firmly against them in the far wall. Drake walked slowly into the room, trying to feel the situation out. After he determined that they remained alone, he moved quickly across the room up to the door. After a couple moments of examination, he managed to determine that not only was it locked, but they weren’t getting in without some pretty annoying, roundabout legwork involved.
He sighed heavily. “This door is locked and isn’t getting unlocked unless we track down and take out a pair of power junctions that provide power to it. Once those are out, we should be able to get inside,” he explained.
“Great,” Stacker muttered.
“The good news, at least, is that they aren’t all that far away.” He pointed first to a door to their left, then another to their right. “Just at the end of each corridor.”
“Let’s get to it then,” Stacker replied, “the sooner the better.”
Drake nodded with agreement and the pair set off. They picked the left door first, moving across the room to it and opened it up. As soon as they did, however, Drake found himself scrambling for cover. A small army awaited him. There had to be a good twenty gun-toting meat machines, headed up by a quartet of elementals, two ice and two fire. Cursing, Drake hosed them down, emptying an entire magazine as he and Stacker quickly backpedaled. Between the two of them, as they fell back into the primary room, they managed to put down one of the elementals and close to a dozen of the meat machines.
But even as they slapped fresh magazines in, Drake heard another door open up behind them and saw that the door to the right was admitting another small army of hostiles. Calling for a fallback, he pulled out his second to last grenade, primed it and hurled it. Stacker did the same and both men used the opportunity to flee back into the corridor they’d originally come to...only to find a third army of machine puppets coming for them.
“Fuck! What do we do?!” Stacker called. They were cut off, nowhere to go, nowhere to run.
“Kill them all!” Drake screamed. It was all they could do. “Cover the rear!”
Trusting the Spec Ops warrior to cover his ass, Drake moved forward into the doorway, knowing he’d ultimately need to fall back again but wanting to be able to actually do that instead of starting the battle out that way and end up backed into a corner. He knew he had to be very fast. The enemies coming from the right were still recovering from the twin grenade blasts, so he switched to single shot, shouldered his fucking rifle and concentrated on the enemies coming from the left. This was going to be a close one.
Drake got things kicked off by zeroing his sights on one of the three remaining elementals. They’d taken out one of the fire elementals and he saw them as the deadlier opponents, so he took his opportunity to punch two holes through the head of the second elemental. As it fell, he adjusted his aim, moving the barrel quickly to the right and fired off another three shots. One of the ice elementals’ heads was partially ripped away in a spray of sparks and metal debris and dark fluids as he managed to nail it.
The remaining elemental opened fire as it finished lining up its shot. Drake dodged, barely managing to avoid the ice projectile by mere centimeters and kept up a spray of fire. The meat machines that had survived the initial attack were now spreading out, firing at him from a variety of positions.
This situation wasn’t tenable.
Especially as the second group from the right side opened fire on him as well. Furiously, Drake pulled the pin on his last grenade and tossed it towards the left group, hoping to finish them off, then whirled around to face the right. As the grenade exploded, he aimed and fired, punching holes in the chest and then head of another elemental. He dodged another pair of ice projectiles and then grunted as a trio of shots landed across his armor, sending him stumbling. Barely managing to stay on his feet, Drake aimed at the largest cluster of enemies, flipped to full auto and hosed them down. A trio of meat machines went down and more of them were staggered by their injuries. Glancing back to the left as he reloaded, Drake knew he had no other choice.
The enemies were converging on him near the center of the room, so he did the only thing he could think of.
He ran at them.
Letting his rifle hang by its sling, knowing it would be useless in such close quarters combat, he pulled out his pistol.
As he got in among them, he balled up his fist and punched the nearest meat machine as hard as he could and listened to something crack loudly and satisfyingly inside of its skull. Spinning, he placed the barrel of his pistol against another one’s forehead and squeezed the trigger, then snapped the pistol to the side and punched a hole through the eye of another one, and put two shots through the mouth of yet a third.
Abruptly, it became too hot, too fast.
Realizing what was happening, he sprinted away from the heat and spun around, pistol raised. Luck had favored him, sort of. The one remaining elemental out of the two groups, a fire elemental, had apparently decided it would be worth it to light all the remaining meat machines on fire if it meant
that Drake went down, too. Luckily, his suit of armor protected him from the worst of it. The meat machines were wilting and blackening and now that he was far enough away, he had time to aim and fire at the creature.
Emptying his magazine, he put the fucker down, then quickly holstered his pistol and grabbed his rifle as he scanned the area for enemies. None in here, he’d managed to get them all. Ignoring the warning alarms his suit was flaring at him, he ran back to the corridor. Stacker was doing well and he only had a few hostiles left. Drake quickly helped him put them down and the two men waited, breathing heavily, standing in rigid attack stances. Nothing else came. It seemed that the assault had failed…
For now.
“Jesus fuck,” Stacker whispered.
Drake nodded, sweat pouring down his body, which was starting to ache and hurt now. He realized the warning alarms hadn’t stopped. Checking them out, he saw that his suit had been compromised in a few areas. One from a bullet, three more from the burns.
“Damn, your suit looks like shit,” Stacker said.
“Yeah, gimme a minute,” Drake replied. He slapped some patches over the holes, knowing it was just a temporary fix. He was bruised and several patches of skin felt like they were sunburned now, but he was still functional, and so was his suit. It would have to hold for the time being. They didn’t have time for anything else.
“Come on,” he said once he was sure his suit would hold up. “Let’s get a move on.”
They both headed back into the main room and hit the left corridor, jogging down it until they reached the first power junction. The device was a fairly simple thing, a big metal shell fixed to a wall, housing a critical piece of machinery that routed power through the area, and thus the door. All it took to take down were a few well-placed shots. As Drake landed them, sparks shot out of the holes in the metal casing and some of the nearby lights flickered and died. The pair made their way quickly back to the main door and Drake confirmed that it had worked. They were halfway there. They jogged down the second corridor.