Fortress Purgatory (Helltroopers Book 2)

by Isaac Stone

“Did you like the dramatic entrance?” He asked. “I spent all day trying to figure out how to disable that light inside the lift. I hope you enjoyed my presentation. Oh, where are my manners? Permit me to introduce myself, I am Simon Haddo.”

  “We gathered that,” Ash told him as he leveled his impact rifle at the large man and thumbed off the safety.

  “So good to finally meet you all,” Haddo spoke. “I have looked forward to this moment for a long time.” He sighed and waited for their response.

  “I’ll bet you have,” Ash told him. “I am Ash Wednesday of Team Omega, acting on behalf of the Edward Aleister Crowley Intergalactic Corporation, and you are herein bound by law, though I doubt you’ll ever see the inside of a prison cell. More likely they’ll just open up your brain on some surgery table, either way, one less psychopath in the system. Stand down Simon Haddo.”

  “That is going to be problematic,” Simon told him with a large grin on his face. He seemed to know something and hid it well. “Good speech though.”

  “How so, big guy?” Makulah questioned. “Please don’t try anything stupid because the guns we carry can put a hole through Iridium armor and we won’t be paid as much unless you are delivered intact, but we’ll take what we can get.”

  “You might have some problems taking me to the surface,” he spoke. “Whilst we are under attack.” He grinned again.

  “Attack?” asked Ash.

  Then the alarms began to sound.

  All over the starship horns blared and red lights flashed. The instruments across from them and on all levels of the tier they could see sprang to life for a non-existent crew. The members of Team Omega whipped their guns out and began to look in all directions for an enemy that didn’t seem to exist.

  “What the hell is going on?” Jack demanded. “I don’t see anyone in here.” He took three steps away with his impact gun leveled and scanned the floor. Still nothing could be seen.

  “The attack is coming from outside the ship,” Simon pointed out. “Not from the inside, though I imagine at least some of the enemy will be attempting to follow the same path you took down, though I’m sure not all of them will survive the journey. Please look to those screens over there which show the exterior of the ship and inside this massive planetary crack where the builders of the fortress hid it. Oh, dear, they’ve come up with something more creative than I’d expected.”

  Ash spun to the screen Simon had indicated and saw the exterior of the starship. The crevice was fully illuminated by the rise of the sun. He could see tracks leading down to the ship from the surface. Why they were there, he had no idea, but, at this very moment, each track was occupied by an open train. Riding inside some of the train cars were men in armored environment suits, each armed with some kind of weapon.

  “Do those impact guns work in a vacuum?” Simon asked Ash, “As detestable as I find capture by agents of the EAC, I prefer it more at your hands than those of whomever these mercs owe allegiance to.”

  Ash ignored Haddo and turned to the rest of the crew. “Check your guns and get ready to defend this thing against that mob on its way down. I don’t if their pals who went in after us are going to join the party, but...”

  “Do kindly follow me,” said Barbara Ann as she snatched away Kris’s rifle and grabbed Jack by the shoulders and very nearly dragged the trooper behind her as effortlessly as an adult would a petulant child. The next thing they knew, Barbara Ann was on her way to a side room in the starship. She moved at a speed that seemed inhuman and neigher man had a chance to say a word.

  “Hey!” Ash called out to her. “Where are you going?” She didn’t answer and vanished inside a door that automatically closed behind her form.

  “Exterior access chamber,” Haddo explained. “They are all over this ship for maintenance. Doesn’t make any sense to me, but some designer thought it was a good idea, I suppose.”

  The exterior screen showed Barbara Ann leave the ship by an outside hatch. As they stood there in disbelief, the entire group watched the small woman drag Jack into the horrid Mercurian atmosphere and then lift them up and begin to climb up the side of the starship. Now that everyone, including the trooper in tow, could see where she was headed it was obvious what she had in mind but no one thought she could pull it off in time. The trains were almost at the same level of the ship.

  “Is there some way we can contact those trains?” Ash demanded from Haddo. “We’ve got to stop them before she opens fire, maybe try to cut a deal that buys us some time!” Before he could answer, Ash and the rest of the crew ran to the control panels and began to search them over for a transmitter.

  “I’ve found it!” Makulah shouted out as he began to make adjustments on the instruments in front of him, “All starships may not be built equal, but the engineering is pretty much universal. Physics is the same everywhere you go!”

  “…and I want that access to the ship or we open fire!” was the first, male voice from the audio system blasted across the starship. “Do you hear me? The ship better be handed over to us or we are going to blow a hole through it and board! Make us fight you and you will all die!”

  “Marvelous,” they heard Haddo comment as he looked at the exterior screen. “I think she’s going to shoot that thing.” They all turned to watch at the same time.”

  From the exterior screen, they watched as Barbara Ann gripped a catwalk with her legs and aimed the impact gun she’d taken from Kris. She focused her attention on the lead train, and though the audio was non-existant it looked as if Jack was following her instructions as he aimed his rifle also, and then they both squeezed the trigger. Ash looked on with awe as the guns were set on “Full Auto”.

  Barbara Ann and Jack held tight as their weapons began to spew explosive shells out at the train as it came down the track. The impact guns might have struggled against the thick hide of the various battle droids they had encountered, but they made short work of the cheap industrial vehicle. The first explosion was right in front of it and illuminated the dark part of the tracks as it came down them. The next ones raked across the track, hit the front of the train, ripping it open, and sent suited men to their death in the crevice below. The locomotive of the train was ripped free from the track as mechanisms were sheared away from each other by the concentrated fire. It fell down into the bottom of the gap, although the rest of the train stayed attached to the tracks that ran down the side of the opening.

  The team watched as Barbara Ann took one of the clips on Jack’s rig and slapped it into place insider her own weapon. Upon the ruined landscape of the remote planet she resembled an angel of death with her red hair that swarmed around her head, and Jack her loyal companion. She leaned back and attempted to sight on the next train headed down a parallel track.

  Once again, the automatic was set and the impact gun burst away in the silence of space, soon joined by Jack’s as he followed her lead. This time their focused fire ripped the second locomotive in half by tearing away the connectors midway up the length. These were small trains designed to carry supplies down to the bottom of the crevice and assist in the construction of the starship.

  The train locomotive flew apart as the shells exploded on it. It pulled a car behind it off and fell to the canyon below as the rest tumbled and followed it. Ash watched as she and Jack slipped another clip in, but he saw something else.

  In the third train headed down the track, Ash watched as the lead car’s side door opened and several of the mercs leaned out with lots of weapons he didn’t recognize and one very particular one he did. One of the mercs carried a plasma rifle, which could send a stream of super-heated particles toward a target four hundred yards away. These were the kind of guns regulated by interplanetary treaty since the end of the Mars Colonial Wars, his own being as illegal as they came, even if it hung on his belt, out of ammo and as useful as a paperweight until he could find a black market connection and buy more weaponized plasma. They were used extensively in the wars; no one wanted to see them on the
battlefield again. However, it appeared the mercs were from the same school of thought he was.

  Barbara Ann lashed out with one hand and pulled Jack off of the spaceship to hurl him away from her, sending the trooper tumbling down the side of the ship, Mercury’s slight gravity lessening his fall. The mysterous synth brought the impact gun up and fired off more shots at the third locomotive, but her move to get Jack out of the way was enough time for the plasma gunner on the train to line up a shot and send a stream of deadly particles right at her. The locomotive was blown apart just as the gunner opened up.

  Several things happened at once.

  The third locomotive joined the other two at the bottom of the crevice. The mercs on the car joined their vehicle in the darkness, and Barbara Ann was vaporized by the super-heated plasma rounds as they struck her in the leg, torso, and face.

  Ash turned and looked away as he realized she was gone. Whatever energy, divine or not, she had claimed was incorporated in her was freed as her physical form ceased to exist on this plane as anything but molten slag.

  16

  “A shame,” Ash heard Simon Haddo comment as they watched Barbara Ann’s form blasted into atoms. “That one was special.” He sighed as Jack found his way back into the ship from outside.

  “Let’s go,” Ash said with a bit of resignation in his voice. “Guess it will be another fight through those layers to the surface, but this time we know what we’re up against, and most of the mercs are dead at the bottom of that ravine anyway. Most of us are down to pistols now, but we do what have have to do.” He gestured to the door that led back to the connector to the bottom level. The rest of the team picked up there weapons and started to move around Haddo to ensure he wouldn’t run away.

  “Don’t you know why they want me?” Haddo asked them. He turned up one eye as he spoke, but stayed in the same place.

  “Something to do with you being a war criminal and what happened on the research station twenty years ago,” Ash replied. “I don’t really care at this point. We are going to haul you back and get paid. Don’t make me get mean about this.”

  “They want me dead because of what I know about them, yet what I know is too valuable to destroy, so who knows how they will dispose of me once I am in their ” he said. “You’ll never be paid. The moment their hands are on me, you all will cease to be of any use to them. At which point they will find a very quick and effective way to terminate all of you. You do understand they never expected you to get this far and hoped it would open a way up for one of their own teams, don’t you?” He folded his arms across his chest.

  “All I know is we don’t get paid unless you are delivered,” Ash replied. “As for the corporation, I have some of my own plans on how to deal with them.”

  “They’ll never work, Ash. Don’t think for a moment that Royce is on your side, even if he did authorize the destruction of Inferno Station. Whatever you have in mind has already been anticipated by the corporation. They know all they need to about you. They know about your background on Mars and how your mother disappeared. They know the backgrounds of all of you.”

  At the mention of his mother, Ash stopped. Just who was this man, Simon Haddo and what did he know?

  “Okay, tell us what your story,” Ash pronounced. “We’ve come this far, let’s hear it. Might as well let those mercs come to us for a change, this is as good a vantage point as any.” He put his gun down to the floor.

  Haddo made a small circuit around the control room with the team following behind him. He stopped to examine several of the panels, and then moved onto the next one. The large room was built for a huge staff; Ash estimated it would take close to a hundred people to run this ship when fully staffed, even though it could be run on a much smaller skeleton crew.

  “As for what happened on the research station” he began. “I take full responsibility for it. I was looking into the way certain…forces... I believe we should call them, worked on the human mind, body, and soul. I had in my possession a book from centuries ago which claimed it was possible to control them. I have since learned this is not the worst thing you can do. Corporate politics shifted even as my own goals moved in other directions, and I managed to escape before the corporate interests contaminated the entire facility, but it was too later for those poor souls. I’ve spent the last twenty years trying to find some way to put that genie back in the bottle, hence my return now.”

  He walked over to one of the panels and pointed it out. “All of these devices were made prior to the new generation of power packs which the EAC is distributing across the system. In a few years, they’ll be ready to make another version of them, which will be even more potent. As you may have guessed from your travels, those power packs have a nature that can be described as dubious at best. You’ve been through the plant where the slip stone crystals are made, I’m sure you noticed something odd about how they were manufactured.”

  “There was this chamber they went through with those funny elemental tablet symbols on them,” Ash pointed out. “Barbara Ann made some comment as to how they tied in with all those angelic symbols we’ve found in your wake.”

  “Some of them I left behind,” he explained. “Some of them were put there by the corporation. The Enochian tablets you saw on that chamber where there to power up the crystals.”

  “Power up?” Kris asked. “What? Those funny plates put some kind of electrical charge in them?”

  “No, they are there to bring Enochian demons into the crystals from the Other Side. Those crystals are powered by demons, which is how they provide the electrical energy to the power packs. Each crystal is possessed by a demonic being. This is what they’ve done all along.”

  The crew was silent. They’d heard strange things from Barbara Ann. What Haddo told them pushed the limits of belief. He’d just told them the corporation was using black magick to enhance their profit/ loss statement. No one said a word.

  “Okay, that is enough,” Costa said. “Ash, let’s get out of here, this man is insane. Get him to the corporation and collect our money. We’ll deal with EAC on the way. There has to be a way to protect us from what they can do. Money talks, guns shoot, right?”

  “Let him speak,” Kris disagreed. “I want to hear what he has to say. After Barbara Ann, I’m ready to believe a lot.”

  “Continue,” Ash said to Haddo. “This is no crazier than what I’ve seen since we started this mission. Tell us the rest. Why do they have to make another version? Shouldn’t the little beasties in those crystals work for all eternity or do they feed on fresh souls?”

  “Nothing so obvious,” Haddo replied. “The corporation wants to link the next generation power pack up with all the slip stone crystals they’ve created so they can activate a vast array of energy beacons, which would certainly be more aptly named ‘Hell Gates’ given their purpose. Once those beacons are active, it will be possible to bring over more creatures from the Other Side and seize control of this system. The corporation thinks it can use the demons to manipulate humanity and not have to worry about the lower classes or competing elites trying to outstrip their power.”

  “But what they don’t understand,” he continued, “is that the forces on the Other Side have their own game plan. They want to wipe out or dominate all sentient life in this system. They consider us a rival in the great scheme of things, to be subdued or destroyed. The corporation has given them a means and a method to do it. All they have to do is wait for the slip stones to be spread far enough to activate the beacons. Once the beacons are activated, the demons will home right in on them and cross over into this reality. Once that happens, there will nothing we can do.”

  “It’s why I made my way first to the Inferno Station and now the Fortress Purgatory. I needed to find the location of this starship, and without conventional database access, I had to use the Enochian ways, which required a journey not just of mind and soul, but of body. I had to venture through the nightmares that I had a hand in creating, to test myself
, to open the way. Once I knew where the ship was hidden, I made my way here. I needed to find this starship as it doesn’t rely at all on any of the slip stone crystals. It is completely free from their influence. I found out you were following me, so I did what I could to ensure that you successfully made your way here. And now we are in the same place, meeting as equals.”

  “But why us?” Costa asked him. “Couldn’t you get someone else to help? This assumes I believe any of what you’ve told me.”

  “I didn’t have a lot of time,” he explained. “I needed to find the location of the starship and that took me here. I found out you were in pursuit and I recognized the homunculus with you for what she was, a vessel for Babalon. A man in my position sees no coeincidences, only signs of destiny unfolding. This means we have to find those beacons and take them out. I know where they are, so this shouldn’t be too difficult. From what you’ve seen, can’t you agree this plot must be foiled?”

  “And how many are there?” Ash asked him.

  “I’m not certain, I need to check and make sure. There are at least seven, maybe ten. The interpritation of ancient lore and numerology is a rather subjective discipline. All of them have to be destroyed or there will always be possibility the Enochian creatures could manifest in this Reality. They exist right outside the circles of time, always trying to find a way inside. The EAC has made an opening and now they’ve found a way into this world. However, what they want to do next will be to turn a trickle into a tidal wave. Once these things show up in force, there will be no way to prevent them from destroying or subjugating all life inside this solar system, perhaps the whole of reality out beyond whatever our science can show us of the stars. We have a spark, a kind of light, and they want it for themselves. If they can’t own it or control it, they’ll snuff it out.”

  “You said something about Barbara Ann as the vessel for Babalon,” Makulah asked him. “Isn’t that supposed to be some kind of ancient empire?” He stood a few feet to the right of Haddo.