by S. A. Lusher
She and Keron came to the door that would help cut down their journey and she opened it up, then hesitated as she stepped inside. Another one of those conversion bays awaited her. It looked even more gruesome and ominous underneath the glow of the emergency lighting. There were a good dozen tech monsters in the room, all of them laying on the examination tables. There were none of the false surgeons hanging around and most of these things looked to be in mid-construction. They also all looked dead.
For a few seconds, Callie considered going around. She hated these things, hated them. Mainly because they terrified her and she loathed having to face that fear over and over again. It was getting more manageable, not necessarily easier. But no, they didn’t have time. From the way the shaking was worsening, she knew that the window of their survival was closing. So she made herself move forward, one step at a time. Keron moved silently at her back and she was glad that she didn’t have to do this alone.
As she passed by one of the examination tables, unable to stop eying the mostly skinless corpse that occupied it, she let out a sound of terror as the thing’s eyes snapped open and it reached up for her. Wrapping its fingers around her wrist, it opened its mouth and began to emit a horrible keening wail. Callie backed up on instinct and the thing slid along the table with her. She whipped out her combat knife and brought it down hard, her suit’s enhancements allowing her to cleave straight through the flesh and bone of the thing’s forearm.
While she occupied herself with getting the fingers unwrapped from around her wrist, she let out a fresh yell of fear as something grabbed her from behind. As she twisted around, trying to get it off of her, she saw that Keron was having his own problems, though he was handling them more stoically. Callie brought her knife up and around and drove it into something that let out a piercing shriek. It let go of her and fell away.
Dropping her knife, she pulled out her pistol and shot another thing that was sitting up on an examination table. Six shots later and she put down all the ones that Keron hadn’t managed to kill with his bare hands.
“Shit,” she whispered, getting her breath back. “Fucking hate these things,” she growled.
“I know how you feel,” Keron murmured.
“You do?” she asked as she finished peeling off the fingers of the first thing that had attacked her. She thought it might have been the first opinion Keron had offered the entire mission.
“Yes. These things are an insult to life,” he replied quietly, then he started walking, picking back up their trail.
Callie figured that was all she was going to get out of him and followed in his wake. As they left the conversion bay, Callie became aware of a cacophony of sounds. Both she and Keron hesitated. It sounded like...chaos. She heard shrieking, screaming, roaring, banging and the occasional gunshot. What the hell was going on? Whatever was going on, it was happening not too far away. Unfortunately, it was the way they needed to go. They both left the room and stepped slowly into the next passageway, which was short and terminated not far to the right in a closed doorway. This was where all the sound was coming from.
The pair approached it and Callie hesitated as she moved to open the door. The auxiliary generator was on the other side of the room beyond. They had to get through here, there was no other exit. For a moment, she lamented that there wasn’t some kind of ‘open partway’ option on these sliding doors. Then she hit the button. What awaited her was a scene of unmitigated chaos. At first, Callie didn’t even know what she was looking at.
There were just forms, lots of bloody forms, inside the large bay beyond. They were meat machines and elementals.
And they were killing each other.
Brutally, viscerally, horrifically, they were killing each other. Tearing each other limb from limb. Maiming, slaughtering, decapitating. And the noise...they were all shrieking and roaring as the tore into each other.
“Jesus,” Callie whispered.
“Erebus must be offline,” Keron murmured. “Control must be lost.”
That made enough sense. Callie was just beginning to suggest that they hang back and let the crowd whittle themselves down when one of them snapped its head over and saw the pair. It let out a new digitally-enhance shriek and began charging straight for them, barreling at them on all fours like some kind of maddened animal. The awareness spread like a virus through the others and they all turned and began sprinting towards them.
“Well they as hell sure remember to kill us!” Callie yelled as she leveled her rifle and started picking out targets from the rich field of them before her.
She and Keron began putting down hostiles. She punched a nasty hole through the head of the lead meat machine and sent it sprawling. Two others were tripped up by the sudden obstacle and she quickly ended their lives. Or what passed for it. Keron was doing well beside her, silently snapping between targets, always getting headshots. Callie was beginning to miss every now and then and she knew it was from exhaustion, both physical and mental. She hadn’t even had a real break after all the hell she’d gone through on the jungle world.
They managed to put down all but one of the creatures, which turned out to be an elemental. The good news was that apparently it had forgotten how to put its deadly, deadly fire to use. The bad news was that it was a runaway juggernaut. Before either of them could put it down, the seven and a half foot tall thing slammed into both of them, sending them both stumbling. Callie fell flat on her back and found herself staring up at the thing as it bore down on her. Her rifle had been knocked free of her grasp. She reached for her pistol as it descended on her. Before either of them could attack the other, Keron leaped bodily onto its back.
Straining, he wrapped both of his thick arms around the thing’s neck and pulled up. The creature began reaching back for him but before it could, he managed to tear its head off with all of his suit-enhanced strength.
A spray of dark black-red gore fountained out of the headless corpse as it took a few stumbling steps, then collapsed.
“Wow,” Callie said as she found her rifle and stood back up.
Keron was wiping blood from his visor. “We should hurry,” he replied.
She nodded and they went back the bay, moved through it and came at last to the tertiary generator. There was nothing waiting for them. Callie went about the procedure to bring it back online, working fast, as the rumbling and metallic groaning was getting worse around them. Within two minutes she had it functional and fired up.
The trembling subsided.
Letting out a heavy sigh, she activated her radio. “Greg, did you get your generator working?” she asked.
“Affirmative. It’s functional. We’re heading to our destination,” he replied.
“Good. Same here. Keep me updated.”
“Will do.”
Callie closed her eyes for a few seconds, feeling the exhaustion crowding in on her. She forced it away, calling on deep reserves of strength. The reserves were starting to run dry. She didn’t know how much longer she could keep this shit up. With a heavy sigh, she opened her eyes back up, turned around and stalked out of the room.
It was time to find Allan.
CHAPTER 13
–The Hard Choice–
They were going to kill Erebus.
Drake was looking forward to it.
After returning to the primary doors and getting them open the hard way, he and Stacker had slipped through and moved on to the inner sanctum of the facility. Though as far as inner sanctums went, it wasn’t all that impressive. It didn’t really seem all that different from the rest of the facility. Presently, they were making their way down a curved corridor bathed in a curious yellow light. So far, they hadn’t run into any hostiles.
“So what about you?” Stacker asked suddenly.
“What?” Drake replied.
“You asked me why I’m here, why are you here? How’d a merc get involved with a top secret government operation?”
“Oh...I suppose that’s fair enough. I used
to have a partner. We grew up together, spent pretty much our entire lives together, became mercs together. Last year, we got involved in a shady deal with a corporation that led us to a research facility overrun with alien monsters. We barely managed to get out but in doing so earned the ire of a rogue government black ops group. Turns out pretty much everyone else you’ve met so far also earned their ire separately. Hawkins found us, asked us to help him take them down, as he’d been assigned the job. When we survived, Anomalous Ops was formed from the ashes of that former branch. They asked me to stay, said I had a unique talent to survive crazy-ass situations,” he replied.
“Who’s your partner? Have I met him?” Stacker replied.
“No,” Drake said quietly. “His name was Trent. He died in the course taking down the rogue operation.”
“Oh...I’m sorry.”
“Yeah, me too. I’ve been getting along since then. I kind of...lost my mind after he died. He had been with me since...practically the beginning. I mean, when I say we did pretty much everything together, it wasn’t an exaggeration. I don’t think we had been apart for more than a week at most since we were sixteen. When he died, it was like...I was maimed. I stuck with Anomalous Ops because I didn’t really have anywhere else to go and there was nothing else I really wanted to do anymore. But as I’ve gotten better, I’ve really come to see the value of what we’re doing. So I decided to make this my life’s work,” he explained.
Stacker began to say something but he fell silent as they both passed through a junction and turned a corner, then came to a dead halt as they saw something waiting for them. It stood with perfect stillness, glowering at them with burning red eyes. The thing that Drake had, in his mind, named the hunter-killer.
The unstoppable, eight foot behemoth killing machine.
It began walking towards them.
“Oh fuck!” Stacker cried.
Drake had to concur. Both men opened fire as they backed up, but the bullets simply bounced off, pinging as they ricocheted off the walls.
“Fall back!” Drake snapped as he emptied his magazine. He about-faced and started running his ass off with Stacker in tow. With shaky hands he ejected the spent magazine and slapped a fresh one in. What the hell were they going to do? Last time they’d just run but as he looked over his shoulder, he saw the fucking thing was moving faster now and it was on their ass. They couldn’t run and he was running low on ammo as it was. No grenades, no explosives, nothing but his rifle, pistol and a dwindling reserve of bullets.
Maybe there was something they could use in the environment.
“Start opening doors!” Drake yelled.
“What?!”
“We don’t have the means to kill this thing on our own. Time for some good old fashioned, straight-up random bullshit good luck,” Drake replied.
He ran to the nearest door, opened it, found an empty room. Cursing, he sprinted to the next one in the corridor and opened it as well. Nothing but crates. A third door revealed an abandoned conversion bay. As he prepared to move on to a fourth one, keeping a sharp eye on the ever-advancing metal horror, Stacker gave a shout of triumph.
“Armory!” he cried and disappeared through one of the doors.
Drake sprinted across the hall and into the armory, slapping the close button as soon as he was inside. It wouldn’t give them much time, but it might be enough for them to find something that might give them a fighting chance against this living nightmare. It had once been another conversion bay where dead men and women were turned into twisted fusions of meat and machine, flesh and metal, but for whatever reason it had been abandoned. Luckily for them, along both sides of the room were racks upon racks of guns.
And not just the kind you’d outfit yourself with for regular warfare.
Drake raced off to the left while Stacker went to the right. He let his rifle hang by his sling as he looked along the racks and shelves for something useful. The first thing he found was a grenade launcher.
“Holy shit,” he muttered, grabbing it and several of the specialized grenades it could be loaded up with. Opening up the six-shooter style chambered cylinder, he loaded up whatever he could find, recognizing only a few of them. A loud bang reverberated through the room. The creature was coming in to finish them off.
Drake finished loading and turned around.
“Fall back!” he shouted as he aimed the launcher. Stacker glanced over, saw what he’d found and moved further back into the room, continuing his own search. Drake stared intently as metal fists punched holes in the door and literally ripped it open. As the creature was ducking into the room, he squeezed the trigger. A grenade sailed through the air and hit it directly in its flat face. There was a crack and a gout of flames and the robot disappeared behind them. Drake didn’t take any chances. He squeezed the trigger again, and again, and emptied the launcher through the hole in the door. Four of the grenades turned out to be fragmentation, one was incendiary and another turned out to be an acidic grenade.
Drake grabbed more of the grenade shells and loaded them up as he kept staring at the door, then pocketed whatever others he could find. As he began shoving magazines for his rifle and pistol into his pockets, his heart leaped into his throat as he saw the metallic horror come back in through the doorway. He was at least grateful to see that he’d done some damage to it, as it was shooting sparks from a few places now, but most of the damage seemed superficial. “You have got to be shitting me!” Stacker cried.
Continuing to back up, Drake hoped against hope as he raised the launcher again. But then Stacker rushed past him and leveled a brand new weapon at the thing. It was essentially a long, black triangular muzzle attached to a pair of small metal barrels. Drake realized what it was the man was wielding as a jet of white-hot flame erupted from the muzzle and coated the robot. That did it. Although it didn’t kill the damned thing, it did force it to retreat from the room and disappear down the corridor. Drake let out a long sigh of relief.
“Fucking shit,” he muttered. “I hate that thing.”
“Me too...hopefully it’ll fuck off long enough for us to kill Erebus and get the hell out of here,” Stacker replied.
Drake nodded in agreement and resumed shoving his pockets with grenades and bullets. “Let’s stock up and finish the damned job.”
* * * * *
Eric found himself, much against his will, cataloging all the things wrong with him at that moment as he and Porter stalked through the corridors of Erebus’ installation. Both of his ankles were sore, his ribs hurt, he had a number of cuts, bruises, scrapes and burns that somehow seemed to accumulate on him despite his armor. He was starving, filthy, thirsty as hell and exhausted. His lower back was killing him. On top of everything, he was working on a bad headache. Altogether, this was combining to put him in a really bad mood.
The fighting wasn’t really helping.
Trying not to lose his temper, Eric slammed a fresh magazine home, shouldered his rifle and popped off another four shots, putting down a pair of meat machines. The things seemed to be getting sharper. They were landing shots more often than not and his armor wasn’t going to hold up forever. He was going to be crisscrossed in bruises for the next month at this point. Porter was silent at his side, taking down the awful dead puppets with a cold proficiency. She hadn’t said much since he’d woken her in that conversion bay.
He supposed it was a bit chilling to have such a close brush with death. As they set off again, he found himself remembering that time he’d awoken to being dragged down a hallway by one of those Bandersnatches. God, he hated those things. He still saw them with their terrifying, idiot grins of alien cruelty in his dreams most nights. He was glad they were dead, but he always secretly feared that he would be forced to endure them once again. The malignant alien servants of some dark god. What if there were more?
Shaking off these feelings with an effort, he realized that they were nearly there. The place they were going to was its own room, separate from the base, connected
only by a long tunnel. He really wasn’t looking forward to going there. Places that had only one exit tended to freak him out nowadays, especially when in the middle of a situation like this. Not to mention, something just felt off about all of this.
But something had felt off this whole mission.
Nothing challenged them as they came to the end of the passageway they were moving down. It terminated in a large set of steel doors that reminded Eric of a vault. They felt ominous. Eric glanced over at Porter.
“You ready for this?”
“Not like we have a lot of choice, one way or the other,” she replied.
He nodded grimly. She did have a point. Moving forward, he found the control pad and hit the access button. The doors slid into their niches in the walls, disappearing from sight, admitting the pair of them access to a lengthy corridor. It had long, rectangular windows running its length and, consequently, was filled with a lethal red-orange light that set Eric even more on edge. He made himself take the first step into the passageway, then another, and a third. Before long, he and Porter were moving swiftly down the metal tunnel.
The doors at the other end were open, as if inviting them in.
Eric made sure his rifle was ready to go as they made their final approach. When they came up to the threshold, they each cleared half the room that was beyond, but it was immediately obvious that the only threat in the room was in plain sight and unmoving.
“What the fucking hell is that?” Porter whispered.
Eric wasn’t sure. It looked like another construction of the mad, rogue AI Erebus, and he was sure that that’s what it was, but it certainly wasn’t something normal. It lay on an enormous slab of steel, this thing of meat and steel and circuitry and blood. It was a behemoth, a twelve foot construction of thick, powerful limbs. It was the most intricately fused creation of meat and machinery that Eric had yet seen. Circuits of glowing green ran along its skin, up and down its limbs. Its massive chest was a molded piece of reinforced titanium. He could even see rows of metal teeth, like a shark’s, lining the inside of its mouth.