With Boss Taggart gone and Wynn Marsters being of the opinion that no soldier in Mag’s squad was ready for command, the Reaper command had transferred Aiken over to Tango Platoon. Talk around the mess hall was that Aiken had lost both of his former squads in the line of duty. Samuel put little faith in such rumors, but his experience with the turbines on Tetra Prime had illustrated to him the kind of military operation Grotto truly ran.
Perhaps all Bosses in the Bagrid Gamma fleet led the same way Aiken did, but this was a Baen Reaper platoon. Samuel hoped that Boss Marsters would take notice of how poorly Aiken ran the squad and remove him from command before anyone was needlessly killed.
The problem was that Squad Aiken hadn’t been in contact with the rest of Tango Platoon for nearly a week now as they moved deeper and deeper into the bowels of District 12.
Samuel knew that if he didn’t make a bold move Boss Aiken would end up doing something stupid like ordering his soldiers to move up and re-take the dock, despite the heavy casualties that such a tactic would incur.
Sighing and rolling, his eyes, the marine took advantage of brief shift in the gunner’s attention and rolled off of the dock and into the disgusting lake.
Samuel’s heavy armor carried him to the bottom of the lake, which was, thankfully, only seven or so feet deep. His helmet’s ocular sensors did their best to feed his eyes a modicum of vision in the murky water but it was still like looking through greenish brown clouds.
He had known from the briefings and his own experiences over the last several weeks that most of the bodies of “water” here were only a few feet deep, having been created by leaks or simple condensation and were contained within pre-designed chambers like the one he now stood inside.
This was a curious detail about sewer warfare that Samuel had learned from one of their ganger escorts, Vol, who was currently shouting boasts and cursing at the top of his lungs while shooting his heavy pistol at the enemy gangers.
Samuel smiled as he waded through the water, thinking that if that crazy ganger’s voice carried to his ears underwater, then it must be as loud as the guns above the water line.
The marine was forced to activate an orange light-stick as he worked his way through the water, knowing even as he did it, that it was going to give away his position. He had little choice in the matter. The murky lake was filled with heaps of refuse; some of it jagged metal, though most of it was mounds of organic matter, likely mold or some kind of toxic algae bloom. Regardless, Samuel had little interest in being impaled or otherwise entangled.
The marine knew that his only chance was to press forward and hope that the firefight raging above would keep the gunner occupied. Here and there errant rounds zipped through the liquid, most likely having ricocheted off of some part of the chamber.
Ahead, just at the outer range of his light stick, he saw movement under the surface. Samuel’s mouth went dry and he had a nauseous feeling deep in the pit of his stomach. Something was moving in on his position, and even though he hadn’t gotten a clear view of it, the primitive parts of his brain were screaming at him to flee.
Samuel had battled many deeply mutated and twisted human beings, but as he watched the slithering shadow move towards him in the half-light he knew that this was a true monster.
No human hybrid DNA was left in whatever crept through the foul lake and it was unlikely there had ever been. This abomination, whatever it was, had evolved within the cauldron of toxic waste and discarded refuse and he was the interloper in its domain.
Samuel still couldn’t make out exactly what it was, so despite the risk of alerting the gunner above he flicked on his gun-light just as the thing crossed between two heaps of underwater refuse that lay ahead of him.
Despite the light hitting the beast directly, Samuel’s brain could only detect a mass of undulating, rubbery, pink flesh. Primal instinct took over and he instantly toggled his weapon over to full-auto, squeezing the trigger without regard for the danger of discovery. His brain screamed at him that whatever this was must die, lest it kill him, eat him, or perhaps even lay eggs in his rotting flesh.
Samuel was yelling without realizing it, and continued to fire as his light tracked the nightmarish creature. He could see bright yellow liquid clouding in front of him from multiple ragged holes in the creature’s tentacled body.
His magazine clicked empty as the beast fled deeper into the darkness of the chamber, well out of the range of his lights. Samuel knew with certainty he’d wounded it, perhaps even mortally, but knew just as certainly that his position had been exposed to the gunner above.
Confirming his thoughts, a salvo of bullets streaked through the water. They would have punched several holes in him had Samuel not immediately thrown himself to the side, simultaneously shutting off his gun-light and dropping the light stick as he re-loaded. Samuel knew he was taking a huge risk moving so quickly through the murky darkness but it had to be done.
Samuel found that if he kept his eyes upwards he could just make out the intermittent muzzle flashes of the machine gun as it alternated between firing into the water around it and then toward the docks.
As he moved, the marine could see that the gunner was standing on some of some kind of grate. He decided this was as good a vantage point as he was going to get. Toggling his combat rifle back to semi-automatic, he began firing rounds up through the grate.
The marine expected many of his shots to be stopped or deflected by the grating, but as he had hoped, several seemed to find their mark and a body splashed into the water above him.
As Samuel moved aside to avoid the sinking corpse, several fleshy tentacles erupted from the darkness to attack him. They fastened to his armor with unbelievable strength using dozens of tiny suckers on the bottom side of the tentacle. In the half-light, Samuel could see that several tentacles had also attached themselves to the corpse. Despite his shock, he realized that if he did not disable that gun his comrades would be in continued peril as more hostiles rushed to operate the weapon, so he held his ground. Samuel felt the tentacles slither around his legs and torso. Apparently the creature wasn’t intelligent enough to differentiate between his weapon and his arm so his aim was unwavering.
Refusing to struggle against the tentacles wrapped around the rest of his body, he focused on his iron sights and the dim flash of the machine gun muzzle as he continued to fire. His clip went dry moments before more tentacles wrapped around his gun and wrenched it from his hands. The marine was very thankful in that moment, that command had deemed it allowable for those Reapers who wished to do so to carry their boarding knives.
Although meant for the close confines of shipboard combat, Samuel and many of the other marines had found them incredibly useful in downspire. Samuel slid his blade from the sheath on his forearm and began slashing wildly at the tentacles as they wrenched pieces of his armor loose from his body and began to ravage the thin body glove and flesh beneath.
Standard issue Reaper battle armor was cheap and overall considered low-tech when compared to the power suits of the Grotto Storm Troopers or elite mercenaries, though what it lacked in sophistication it made up for in overall stoutness.
When it came to small arms fire the armor would deflect all but the most precise or direct shots, however, no Grotto engineer had ever intended to protect the soldiers from an enemy attempting to tear the armor away. Samuel felt as if he were some crustacean being assaulted by the most macabre of cephalopods. In this case, reality was much more horrifying than anything his imagination could have conjured.
Now that the gun above wasn’t providing even temporary illumination, Samuel was unable to see much of anything. Even if he’d been able to get a light-stick ignited all he would have seen would be the billowing clouds of the creature’s yellow blood mixing with smaller clouds of his own red blood as he and the creature tore into each other.
Samuel was unsure how long he’d been unconscious, though he knew it could only have been a few seconds. He was in pitch dark
ness and could still feel that he was underwater through the holes in his suit. It was the thought of what nasty microbes and toxic materials that might be seeping into his body that galvanized him to action. The marine ignited several light-sticks one after the other and let them fall around him to illuminate several meters of submerged chamber.
At his feet Samuel could see the body of the ganger he’d shot slowly being sucked down into the thick muck that covered the chamber floor. There were chunks of tentacle everywhere, all slowly sinking down to join the ganger. Whether he’d killed the creature or not, Samuel couldn’t tell, but it had to be one tough monster to survive all the bullets and severed tentacles. He hoped it had crawled back to whatever hellhole it called home and died of its wounds. He couldn’t move much and was relieved when he saw the wake and shadow of a skiff making its way over to him from the grating area where the machine gun used to be.
Someone from the skiff lowered a gaff pole into the liquid and friend or foe, Samuel decided he’d rather be out of this murky mess than in it, regardless of who might be hauling him up.
“Prybar, you are one unkillable son of a bitch!” shouted Patrick as he hefted the marine’s armored bulk onto the small skiff.
Samuel struggled to find a witty response, though was simply too spent to vocalize much beyond a weak smile and a groan as his fellow marine helped him take off his helmet. Samuel’s armor was pitted and slimy from the toxic water, and the marine could already see the flesh of his wounds turning a sickly shade of white and green. Patrick followed his gaze and nodded as the skiff pilot; a marine recruit that Samuel seemed to recall was named Holland, cranked the motor and headed back to the shattered dock.
“We got lucky, old pal, if you hadn’t knocked out that shooter’s nest we would have been fragged,” Patrick said as he opened the squad med-kit and began dosing Samuel with vial after vial of antibiotics, anti-inflammatories and a few painkillers, “Those gangers with the big gun and those wall crawlers had us so busy we didn’t notice their backup.”
“There were four small access tunnels that they’d covered up with canvas painted to look like the walls,” explained Holland as he moved them closer to shore, taking care not to move too quickly to avoid hitting any partially submerged scrap metal. “Before we knew it, dozens of those hive scum are charging at us with everything from axes to clubs.”
“The others?” asked Samuel in a voice thick with painkillers as he struggled to maintain consciousness, “Are they…”
“Kade did just fine. Takeda got clipped early in the shootout, but we held our own, and no fatalities.” Patrick grinned as he patted Samuel’s shoulder before his face turned sour and he looked back at the oncoming docks, “Cor-sec got chewed to pieces though, sixty-percent casualties. Between us three, I don’t think cor-sec had any business being down here.”
“Agreed. It’s like they’re just everyday civilians who happen to have a gun and a badge and think that makes them hardcore enough for this kind of stuff,” grumbled Holland as the skiff reached the last section of the dock that was useable as a mooring. “They’re good at pushing around working stiffs, but these downspire gangers are out of their league.”
“Cor-sec is bringing up reinforcements to fortify this area so they can prep it as a salvage hub,” Patrick observed as he and Holland helped Samuel stagger off of the skiff and across the dock towards the beachhead.
“So, we’ll be moving on down the line, eh?” mumbled Samuel as his comrades lay him down on a stretcher next to Ben, who sat upright against a bullet-riddled flak board with his left arm in a pressure sleeve.
“Yeah, we’re getting rotated to that FOB we built in the metro hub two levels up for a few days of R & R while command decides which pit of hell they want us to clean out next,” laughed Ben as he looked over Samuel’s various wounds, “But I’m thinking you’re probably going to sleep through most of that.”
Samuel didn’t answer, the painkillers finally wrapping him in their warm embrace and ferrying him into a blank numbness, far from any tentacles or foul lakes.
FOB SPECTER
District 12 was one of the many uniform hab-blocks that circled the outer ring of the Vorhold spire city, which provided housing for commuters who worked at the various industrial complexes that comprised the inner circle of the spire.
Vorhold, like most other spire cities, was constructed like a giant teardrop, frozen upon impact with solid ground. The base of it was circular, made up of four concentric urban circles, with the buildings of each circle rising higher and higher towards the center. At the exact apex of the city was a gigantic spire, hence the name of the urban planning style across mapped space, where management and the elites worked and played. Most spire cities in mapped space were exceptionally old, and generally considered an archaic way of designing cities, as it created a physical and ever-present reminder for anyone in the city as to who held the power and who did not.
Spire cities were relics of a more brutal age, when the mega-corporations were still struggling to dominate their citizenry in a somewhat overt manner.
The general idea was that by witnessing the lavish lifestyles of the elites and living in the looming shadow of their mighty spires, the common citizenry would keep their heads down, keep their mouths shut, and work harder to achieve that distant dream.
While there were plenty of corporate worlds that contained spire cities, most of them, like Vorhold, were shadows of what they once were. They had been allowed to slowly degrade as more and more elites simply moved off world to distant resort planets or paradise ships, allowing their spires to be bought up by what passed for the middle class in their respective corporate cultures.
Most corporations in the modern age had realized that flaunting the wealth and power of the elites generated more resentment and dissent than it inspired compliance and increased productivity. The elites lived a life generally removed from the common citizenry, who now labored towards simpler goals.
Vorhold had been one of the last true spire cities. The elites of Vorhold Ventures had gambled the majority of their vast fortunes on a number of faulty investments and speculations, rapidly finding themselves with tremendous debts. Vorhold corporate culture was no different, in one respect, from the rest of the mega-corps. Common citizens were prevented by regulation and taxation from owning much in the way of private property. Their homes, vehicles, devices, services, and medical devices were all leased from their feudal corporate masters. Everything, even the grimy depths of downspire and the abyss of deepspire, were owned, according to the documentation, by Vorhold Ventures.
When the Vorhold elites began to fall behind on their debt repayments, many of the creditor corporations formed an alliance and waged a devastating economic war against Vorhold Ventures. Battle fleets created pickets to police the shipping lanes and enforce severe trade embargoes while they covertly encouraged and perhaps, even bribed Red List pirate ships to prey upon the handful of relief ships and smugglers who attempted to use the alternate routes.
It did not take long for Vorhold Ventures to accept defeat and begin selling off assets to cover the debts. The grim truth behind corporate culture was revealed as the elites bailed themselves out at the expense of the common citizens upon whose shoulders they had risen in the first place.
Grotto Corporation’s voracious appetite for raw materials was notorious throughout mapped space and they seized the opportunity Vorhold presented with savage intensity. Grotto Corporation was not a company that thrived on innovation, or speculation, but upon hard assets. This meant that Grotto rarely had the kind of liquid assets that many of the other mega- corporations held, though it was by far one of the most robust companies in existence.
Payment by Grotto to the elites of Vorhold was in the form of money, ships, and properties off world. The elites then turned and liquidated all of those hard assets in a matter of months, which allowed them to pay off their debts and leave Vorhold to its new master, Grotto Corporation.
Wit
h little more than a few boardroom meetings and some signatures, the entire future of the spire city and its entire population was sold off. The elites abandoned the city to take early retirement elsewhere while the common people and even the militant cor-sec awaited their fate.
Grotto Corporation now owned everything in the spire city, from the tallest building to the lowest sewage tunnel, and it meant to get a return on its investment. The entire city was to be depopulated, demolished, and what did not get re-used elsewhere in the Grotto empire would be sold as scrap.
The forward operations base was by no means comfortable, though when compared to the rotten shadows of the downspire sprawl that surrounded it, most of the soldiers stationed there had come to consider it rather pleasant. In the ledgers of Reaper Command, which led the joint action between the former cor-sec troops and the salvage marines, the FOB was logged as FOB D12/2. However, for the locals to whom this was now a home away from home, it was Specter.
Once the joint forces cleared the metro hub beneath District 12 they had found themselves inundated with refugees from downspire. All but the most ferocious and stubborn of the gangers and clansmen had been making their way upwards since news of the city’s takeover. Though cor-sec had warned Reaper Command that the population of downspire was unknown, no one was ready for just how many thousands had come streaming up from the depths all over the spire city.
They were the shadow population of the spire. Castaways from the corporate society that had, one way or the other, left them so desperate that they sought the underworld. To the Reapers, the refugees had seemed like ghosts, mere hollowed out shells of who they had once been. Life in downspire was hard, violent, and usually short.
Perhaps, thought Samuel, as he looked up from his drink to take in the crowded squalor of the base, this was why the slang name for the base had come so naturally. To walk the streets of District 12 one would never notice that just a few clicks downwards there was another world rotting beneath one’s feet.
Dead Worlds (Necrospace Book 2) Page 3