The operations room of the base was full of people. Patrick had a team watching all video cameras, but really focusing on the ones that showed the elevator and elevator shaft. Another group of his people was busy setting up explosives they could drop down the elevator shaft.
The final descent into the bottom landing field was through one hundred and twenty feet of damn near impregnable rock.
Patrick’s eyes narrowed and he hit the buttons to switch through the video streams from outside. So far, TQB had destroyed twelve of their cameras, but they still had another four in operation.
TQB had not brought along any devices to dig through rock as far as he could determine. He jerked a little when the video stream that he was watching suddenly went to static.
Make that three video cameras still in operation.
He gritted his teeth. They had defensive preparations up top, but not nearly enough down at the bottom. They were between a rock and a hard place and the final choice he had was to call in the US military.
But, if he did that, they would be screwed a second time. A few or even most of his people might get away from the human’s group. There was no way the experiments in section two could be allowed to leave.
Or even found.
Patrick was watching the video stream of the team working to booby-trap the elevator shaft when his brain could not…no, dared not believe what his eyes were telling him.
Etheric
“What…is this place?” Kiel asked when looking around the grey amorphous landscape. The light was bright enough, but with the fog in place he couldn’t see. The sensors of his mech suit were not helping, either.
“Follow me,” she told him and then answered over her shoulder. “This is the Etheric dimension. We can’t travel too far because between the two of us, the energy to transfer this much metal drains me every damned step we take.” Even now he could start to hear her breathing harder.
“Where are we going and how far is it?” Kiel asked, looked around him trying to get a sense of where he was.
“Fuck all if I know, but it had better not be too far.” She stopped and seemed to lean forward just a bit and then they continued, walking another five paces before she stopped and leaned forward again.
“What are you doing?” Kiel finally asked.
“Looking out from inside the elevator shaft to figure out if we are at a floor yet,” she answered and then resumed walking. She did this another three times before pausing longer. “Oh…well, that’s just fucking rude.”
“What?” Kiel asked, turning back around to watch her.
Bethany Anne looked up and around, wherever she was looking, before she reached back to him, “Hold my hand and walk three steps with me.”
Kiel gently grasped her mech suit’s hand and paced himself with her shorter strides. She continued holding his hand and leaned forward again, “Oh, this is going to be delicious,” she murmured.
“Are you planning on eating something?” Kiel asked.
“What?” she stood up, “No. At least, I hope not. I need you to go take care of some humans in the real world.” She looked around, “I’ve got to sit and rest for a few minutes and pull in energy. I’m sorry to say, but you are a real fuck-ton of energy-sucking alien to be yanking through the Etheric.” She turned to him, “Ready to be a scary alien mercenary and kill some people?
—
Eric and Darryl were standing near the elevator when both turned towards it, then looked up in unison.
“You heard that?” Eric asked and Darryl shook his head in agreement.
“Screaming, yelling and a few…” Darryl stopped speaking as a scream of terror seemed to be getting closer, fast.
Then, the sudden thump-splat was loud and clear to the both of them. Darryl made a face of unease.
Someone had just decided to fall down the elevator shaft.
Darryl called out over the comms, “Hey folks, I think Team Bethany Anne just let us know they are cleaning out the path up above us.”
Peter came up to the two men and sniffed the air, “Fresh dead. She isn’t leaving anyone for us,” he heaved a huge sigh of frustration, “Why didn’t I step forward?”
—
Kiel was trying to take all of these new experiences in stride, including when she told him to take a step forward and he went from being in the Etheric fog to inside a base in a hallway hewn out of rock.
With seven humans in front of him, splayed out around an opened elevator door. He could see the empty shaft beyond. He took a step and grabbed the right arm of a man with a rifle. Tossing him forward, the flying body knocked one guy near the elevator entrance out of the way. The body continued forward, slamming into the far wall of the elevator shaft. Kiel could hear his screams as he descended until his sudden stop ended any of his worries.
Forever.
Kiel cranked the power up. And, in seven point two human seconds, he had been shot with forty-two rounds of which three ended up ricocheting back around and hitting other humans. For him, it wasn’t a problem and three humans died of crushed skulls, two with crushed chests and one arm had come off when he forgot to adjust his suit’s power. He remembered a phrase one of Bethany Anne’s people had used, and he murmured it as he tossed the arm away. “Oopps, my bad.”
That human was screaming as he laid on the floor, so Kiel casually kicked his head to shut him up. Then, inside his helmet he made a face when he got brains on the end of his mech-suit’s foot.
“Gahh!” he took a step and felt the little organic matter between his boot and the floor for a couple of steps before it rubbed off, “I’ve got to remember that those heads are crunchy on the outside, but meaty on the inside.”
His eyes opened when an arm appeared from thin air in front of him and pushed him backwards.
He landed on his ass in the Etheric fog again.
“Nice job, now come along, I found their operations room.” She turned and started walking in a separate direction from before, her steps, he noticed, seemed a little slower.
Kiel got up and walked with her. He got a warning beep that his energy was down fifty percent.
It seemed her energy wasn’t the only thing the Etheric drained.
—
Patrick was staring at the video input when the back of a Yollin attacker appeared in the middle of his video feed.
“What the fuck?” He jerked back and saw the Yollin fighter grab Greg Humble and throw him into the elevator shaft. Greg disappeared down out of view.
The sounds of gunfire came through the speakers as well as screams from the men as they turned to fight the alien who had somehow snuck up behind them.
In seconds it was over. The Yollin kicked Jay Bier’s in his head and crushed his skull. As it took steps towards the video camera, an arm appeared and the alien started falling backwards, but disappeared and all Patrick could see was the dead bodies in the hallway outside the elevator.
“Kenny!” He yelled out, hearing Kenny’s ‘sir’ he ordered, “Lock down this room!” He opened the top drawer in his desk and then slammed it shut, opening the second in a rush. Reaching in, he pulled out a silver-grey metal container with a place for his thumb. Pressing the lock, it turned green and he used both
hands to open the box. Leaving the box in his right hand, he reached in and pulled out Ztopic’s gift to him.
His own Zeta weapon. Placing the box on the desk, he turned towards the door, keeping an eye on the video cameras in case the alien attacked somewhere else.
—
Bethany Anne was leaning forward, “Yeah, this is the place.” She pulled back and then sat down before finally laying down on the ground. She reached up and unhooked her helmet, taking it off.
Kiel was surprised to see her face had lost most of its color. Her skin was now almost the color of bones, bleached in the sun of many seasons.
“What can I do?” Kiel asked, concerned she was going to die and if she did, how was he going to explain this to the rest of the team?
Hell
, how was he going to get out of this dimension? He unlatched his helmet and took it off, sniffing the air.
“Give me a few more seconds, I am barely pulling in energy right now. If you can shut down your systems, do so. I need enough energy to push you through. Then, you need to stay alive long enough for me to get in and help you.”
“Why would I not be alive?” Kiel asked, shutting down his unnecessary systems in his suit.
“This is the operations room,” she told him, “There are a lot of people in there. Probably not as many rifles, but I’m sure lots of pistols and high ranking staff.”
She closed her eyes for a moment, took a deep breath and then stood up, “If anyone is going to have weapons we don’t like? It’s going to be them.”
Kiel considered his options, “How big is the room?” She told him. He turned off the ability to jump high and drained the energy back out of those capacitors into his plasma gun. “Do you need any of the machines in there?”
She was silent for a moment, “Yes, probably.”
The Yollins two mandible looking appendages both turned inward at the top, then straightened. He drained the energy from the plasma pistols and looked at his supply of kinetic rounds. “How many people?”
She paused, then leaned forward, pulling back she told him, “About forty-two.”
“I’ve got seventy kinetics left,” he told her and pulled that pistol, exchanging the magazine for a full load.
“Don’t waste your shots,” she told him.
Fortunately, Kiel was able to bite back his response. He wasn’t sure what the translation software would have told her, but in his language it was pretty damned disrespectful. So, he decided to nod in her general direction instead.
She placed her helmet back on her head and he followed placing his own back on. “Let’s do this,” she told him.
“One second,” he told her. He turned away from her, “Ok, I take a tiny step and you push, correct?”
“Yes,” she agreed. “You are coming out in a corner of the room where there are no people and no furniture. I’ll look right before I push you. Everyone is going to be in front and to your left, I think.”
“You think?” Kiel said, but then she barked.
“Step!”
—
The first person to die in Patrick’s vision was Michael Shanks. His head shattered, coating those near the door around him, in blood and brain matter.
Those shot, but not dead, started screaming as Patrick dropped down and turned around to see an alien in the back left corner of the room, calmly shooting his people.
Patrick flicked off the safety on his disintegrator and aimed it at the alien who was turning towards him.
There was only one chance to get this shot right.
“FUCK YOUUUU!” Patrick yelled and then it was his time to scream in pain when a sword cut through his arm, the disintegrator beam taking a chunk out of the solid ceiling between him and the alien.
Patrick barely had time to recognize his arm was gone before a metal kinetic round blew through his chest, tossing his now dead body like a rag-doll, toppling over the short desk that was behind him.
—-
“This is BA,” Bethany Anne’s voice came over the comm, “status?”
“Bored,” John answered, “You planning on letting us in there?”
“Damn, you lazy butt whale sniffing asshats haven’t found another way through tons of rock?” she replied to the men’s chuckles.
“No, but we are thinking that the elevator shaft might be haunted,” Darryl replied, “It’s raining dead people.”
She chuckled, “Kiel didn’t send him down dead.”
“Well, he finished dead,” Eric answered.
“We’ve got video and the elevator shaft is clear. They were setting up a loud boom for you when coming up the elevator and as far as I can tell, that is the only path up. Take it up one floor and you then have stairs that access the floor above. Seven floors total, I’m on three.”
“Anything else we should know?” John asked as he pointed to himself, Nathan and Scott for the first elevator test.
“Yeah,” she came back, voice calm. “There is another elevator shaft and I don’t have any video into that section.”
“Understood,” John replied and the connection went silent.
Darryl quipped, “That’s not like, ominous or anything.”
—
Ztopik watched as the humans died in the operations room, his little mouth pursed. The Yollin was calmly and efficiently shooting them. He noticed that he would not have to worry about dealing with Patrick, before a replacement was put in charge.
“Meehine,” he pointed towards the secondary exit, “Go to the research lab and prepare to release the fourth group.”
The little gray alien obediently turned and headed toward the research floor.
Now, how did the Yollin get through Patrick’s defenses?
—
John, Nathan and Scott stepped into the elevator, John pushed the button for level three.
The three men, two in human mech suits and one in a Pricolici suit stood there, waiting for the elevator to go up.
“Sure wish we had some music,” Scott said, “Hell, I’d even take some Barry Manilow right now.” Nathan chuckled behind him.
“Not exactly music to take over an alien base with,” John commented.
“Well, neither is this dead air,” Scott said when the elevator slowed to a stop.
“Wonnndeerrr hhhoowww wee finnddd herrr,” Nathan growled.
The doors opened and the men heard the sound of gunfire coming from down the hallway. John stabbed the button for the elevator to go back down to the lowest level, “follow the audio crumbs of destruction and chaos,” he said as the three of them started running down the hallway.
—
“Bethany Anne, I’m running out of ammunition!” Kiel called out.
“Don’t worry about it,” she told him.
“We don’t know if they have more of those weapons!” Kiel retorted. When the ceiling had lost a chunk Kiel realized he had almost become the Yollins Mercenary Companies first death.
“It’s not about that,” Bethany Anne told him, “It’s about…”
The roar reverberated down the hallway and poured into the Operations room. The gunshots coming into their room had stopped. But the gun shots continued, just aimed elsewhere.
Then, the screams of terror and bodies getting ripped apart, or slamming into walls started.
Bethany Anne put down her sword, “Ok guys, don’t say we didn’t save some for you.”
“FUCK!” Scott called back, “Did you have to get them all worked up?”
“Stttoppp Youourrr bitttchhhinggg!” Nathan growled, his laughter sounded pretty damned evil when it accompanied the dismemberment of humans, their cries suddenly silenced.
“Fine!” Scott yelled back, “Don’t say I wasn’t polite.”
Kiel had walked up to the doorway and peeked around and saw the huge Pricolici, a human in his left hand who was trying to beat his arm as he dangled in the air, Nathan squeezed his neck. The loud snap preceded Nathan dropping the dead body. Nathan’s right hand grabbed the face of another human. That one’s scream of pain ending suddenly with the shattering of his skull, “he he hee hehhhehhh.”
Soon, there were no more humans opposing them.
Bethany Anne walked out into the hallway and spoke to the guys, “Remind me to tell Ashur I’m sorry, I could have used his furry ass on this operation.”
“We need to look after the Queen, she is weak,” Kiel said as he came out of the room.
Bethany Anne turned around, “You just fucking ratted me out!” She bitched to Kiel, “Gott Verdammt! The alien mercenaries are stabbing me in the back!”
—
Ztopik watched the humans and the non-humans kill the Majestic-12 people. He considered options and then his tiny mouth turned up. He pressed three buttons and all of the computers in the ro
om shut down.
Turning around, he headed toward his research level.
There was no time, he considered, like the present to determine which of his creations was the deadliest.
—
It took the teams twenty minutes to run through the rest of the levels. Those humans which gave up, were rounded up and taken back to the caves.
If they fought, they were eliminated.
Bethany Anne and her team found the scientists shaking in their offices. Peter brought a female to the group, “this is the leeeaddd Doctorrr,” he told her.
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