Thank heavens, Dane was thinking. He didn’t want to have to tell Hopskirk to sit this one out or that he couldn’t be trusted to be a part of the team . . .
But what if he can’t? The rebellious thought popped up. What if bouts of uncontrollable anger and mood swings were the first sign of the infection taking hold?
“It looks like they went in here. Come on,” Dane grumbled, turning towards the darkened archway and stepping inside.
9
The Nursery
Dane went on point, and his suit lights illuminated a wide, arched tunnel leading into the black-blue rock. The entrance was scattered with leaf litter, the creep of vegetation, and the crunch of twisting, bulbous bodies of worms. But as soon as they got past the first couple of yards, the floor was almost completely smooth, except for the lines where the paving met, and made of the same dark black-blue rock.
“They went to a whole heap of effort with this place,” Dane muttered, stepping cautiously forward as he saw a shape ahead of him in the dark.
Exin!
Dane gasped, dropped to a knee, and fired—
The single shot of orange-yellow pulse fire from his rifle shot forward to strike the leaning Exin a direct hit on the head. It burst into a shower of sparks, striking the Exin’s head from the thing’s shoulders. It fell to the floor and smashed.
“That was a statue, wasn’t it?” Dane groaned, earning a snort from Bruce behind him.
“Nice shooting, though . . .”
It was indeed another statue, guarding another archway to the right. Although the stony alien was now headless, it still managed an air of fearsomeness as it lurched from the walls, carved to appear to be emerging through them.
Dane and the others peered past the headless sentinel. On the other side, the archway apparently opened out into a larger space with a series of stone benches. Dane saw something glinting in the dark and took another step forward.
Tchok!
There was the slightest of sounds, like a light tick, and then suddenly, the chamber ahead was brightening with lights.
“Shhh!” Dane hissed, slamming himself against the wall with his rifle up and ready.
But there was no other creature inside this room. Only dim floor lighting illuminated row after row of stone benches, each with deep depressions, or hollows, carved into them.
“What is this? An auditorium?” Dane asked.
“No, I don’t think so, Williams.” Bruce nodded up to the walls where they could see that giant pictures had been carved into the rock. Dane gasped at the work. Each relief had to be at least twenty feet or more high, and, as his suit lights moved from one side of the room to the other, he realized that they appeared to tell a story.
Not the kind of story that I want to think about, to be honest. Dane frowned when he saw that it appeared to be about Exin slaughtering each other with little more than swords and spiked clubs, until one emerged from the bloodbath, where another Exin granted them . . . an egg?
“What sort of doo-hickory-quack is this?” Hopskirk grumbled (and Dane, for once, entirely agreed with him).
But then Bruce pointed up to the side of the wall that hung over them. When they stepped out into the chamber and turned around, they could see the rest of the story. Those eggs were then held in chambers next to others such as this one. The final relief showed the eggs breaking open and the tiny Exin inside being lifted out by others.
Bruce pointed back to the benches behind, each with their circular hollows in them. “Those would make room for a pretty large egg, don’t you think?”
“Are we looking at . . .” Dane felt distantly sick. “Some kind of Exin nursery?”
“You’re guess is as good as the next guy’s,” Bruce murmured, turning back around to survey the chamber before stalking forward to the far end, where one of the stone benches was set apart and raised higher than all the others.
“And I guess that this was where the king baby crawdad sat, right?” Bruce started to chuckle as he went up the step towards it—
Blip.
And a green light flared behind the bench, striking Bruce full in the face.
“Bruce!” Dane was immediately running towards him. “Cheng!”
“Hey—hold up, I’m good! It was only a light!” Bruce was saying loudly as the green light winked out. The big Marine turned, held up his arms, and shrugged. “See?” he said.
Just as the entire room started to shake.
“It’s booby trapped!” Hopskirk was shouting.
“Bruce! What the hell?!” Dane shouted out, as the ground started to shake, and shrapnel of rock started to dislodge and fall from the ceiling, scattering over the benches and making noise like the fire of gunshots.
“What!? How was I supposed to know!?” Bruce shouted as they edged to the wall and then started back towards the archway to the main corridor.
Just as rocks the size of hands, then heads, then entire orbital AMP suits started to fall and crash into the floor around them. The boulders smashed benches. They cracked and split stone and fractured the paving slabs beneath them. If any of them were caught under them, then Dane knew that they would be lucky if they got out with just a broken limb.
“Run!” Dane shouted, and the three Marines turned for the short archway as the boulders fell at their heels.
Dane spun around the corner just in time, before he kicked himself back to the main corridor . . .
But there were boulders falling here too. They were crashing over the exit way and falling from the ceiling in a wave towards them.
“Come on, further in!” Dane shouted, seizing first Hopskirk and shoving him further down the main avenue and then Bruce, before Dane, too, went after them.
The boulders were crashing to the floor behind them, filling up the avenue in a fast flurry of stony rage. The ground beneath their feet shook and trembled as they lengthened their strides to desperately keep ahead of the falling rock.
But where are we running to!? Dane raised his head—to see that straight up ahead of them, an impossibly large slab of rock was lowering itself across their vision, cutting the corridor in half . . . and then three quarters.
It was too far away to run to in time.
They were going to get crushed here.
All of these thoughts surged through Dane’s head, but he knew that they had one thing that any other normal bipedal did not have.
“Thrusters!” Dane leapt forward as the twin cannisters of the pulse emitters on his back fired, and he was flung forwards as the other two ignited their own thrusters as well . . .
The three Marines half jumped, half flew down the corridor towards the slowly lowering stone doors, watching as the gap between door and floor grew ever smaller, and the boulders blocked off any chance of escape behind them.
“Argh!” Dane was shouting in frustration as he flung himself downwards, hitting the floor and rolling a fraction of a second before Bruce and Hopskirk did, and rolling through, underneath the stone door as it slammed home.
Behind them, the thunder of the falling boulders was muted and diminished, but it still carried on like a far-off storm for a long moment afterwards. From where Dane was lying, face up on the stone-flagged floor, he could feel the vibrations shaking upwards through him, until the final rock fell, and all was silence.
The Marines were trapped under the surface of the alien planet.
“Corsoni? Corsoni!?” Dane repeated, but all that he received in response was the stubborn and unchanging,
>Service unavailable!
>>Unable to connect to local area network (GLADIUS) . . .
“Dammit,” he whispered, pushing himself up from the cavern floor to sweep his suit lights over the others. They were on their own down here.
“It must be all that fracking rock above us,” Hopskirk muttered from where he was standing a few paces away. Bruce was already turning to examine the rest of the tunnel. It was large, with vaulted walls and ceiling, but there seemed to be a glimmer that c
aught the light down there.
“What is that?” Hopskirk said immediately, raising his pulse rifle to stride forward down the tunnel.
“. . . for frack’s sake . . .” Dane muttered, hurrying after the Marine. Hopskirk was behaving erratically, Dane knew. Too emotional. Uncontrolled. And Dane knew that if he had the power or the choice, then he would demand, by hook or crook or even a right hook if he had to, that Hopskirk wait this one out. Dane moved past Bruce, who was standing stock still.
“Bruce? You good?” he asked the big man.
“Fan-blinking-tastic,” Cheng grumbled, and Dane saw him heave a big sigh before breaking into a march after Hopskirk. Something was up, and Dane was once again about to put it down to the stress of the mission when he caught himself. No, they’d been on bad missions before, hadn’t they?
“Okay, Cheng—what is it?” Dane asked as he walked. They could see Hopskirk in front of them, having slowed down as they kept on towards the distant light. It was probably too much to hope for that it was a way out, Dane thought to himself.
“Kayla,” Bruce suddenly said, out of nowhere.
“Huh?” Dane asked.
“Her name is Kayla. We met in San Francisco before the attack,” Bruce admitted. “She studied environmental science, and I was doing a major in history, going to become a teacher, I thought,” the big man mumbled. “I was doing amateur-pro sumo in Tokyo for five years, but you know what the sports game is like, Williams,” Bruce muttered, and Dane nodded in agreement. It was one of the things that had first bonded them when they had arrived at Fort Mayweather Mechanized Infantry Boot Camp—that they had both done semi-pro fighting sports, Bruce with his sumo wrestling, and Dane with his Mech-Brawling.
“There’s no future in it,” Bruce continued. “You get a few years before your joints are too shot to compete anymore, so that was when I decided to retrain at the only other thing I was good at . . . history.” The big man paused for a moment. “My dad would finally be proud, I guess,” he muttered, and Dane could only agree with the feeling. His own father had been a boxer, and there had been little that Dane could have done to make his father proud of him.
“Anyway. It was at San Fran State that I met her. Kayla Lubowisc,” Bruce stated. “We had about two years together before we split, and then the next spring was when the Exin attacked . . .”
“Oh crap,” Dane muttered. “I’m sorry . . .”
“Well, you shouldn’t be,” Bruce quipped back quickly. “Kayla survived, and she was recruited by the government to study the Exin problem. I didn’t really keep in touch with her, but I found out just before this mission that she was on it. Kayla was one of the ones dispatched to Planet 892.”
Dane didn’t know what to say. No wonder Bruce had been acting out of character all day!
“Did you . . . I mean, you haven’t managed to get in touch with her at all?” Dane asked.
“Lashmeier told me via private message while sitting in the cockpit of the Gladius,” Bruce growled, sounded almost angry at what their Master Staff Sergeant had done. “But . . .” he added after a breath, “we haven’t found her body yet. Not yet.”
“Then there’s hope . . .” Dane was saying, just as Hopskirk let out a low whistle over the suit-to-suit channel.
“Guys, you really want to see this,” he was saying. When Dane and Bruce hurried ahead, they saw that Hopskirk had found the source of the light.
It was coming from the cavern that this tunnel led into. And inside of that cavern appeared to be a glowing white pyramid.
10
The Device
It was a pyramid, twice the size of any of the already-tall men in their orbital AMP suits. It was comprised of a silvered metal that appeared to give off its own glow like an effervescence, although Dane could not see any individual light source. It sat in the center of a large oval cavern, which contained other metal structures like pipes and machineries, each erupting from the walls and leading along the ground to the pyramid at the cavern’s heart.
It was clearly some kind of machine, although neither Dane nor any of the others could understand what.
“It appears to have markings on it,” Hopskirk was saying, and when Dane changed the light filter on his suit’s faceplate to dim the thing’s radiance, he saw that the Marine was right. The entire surface was scrawled with designs and geometric shapes like both the scrawls on the outside of the cave’s entrance—and the pictograms on the egg chamber.
Hopskirk stepped into the room warily, followed by Bruce, and then Dane.
“Be careful . . .” Dane warned, as Hopskirk interrupted him.
“I’m picking up massive energy outputs from the thing . . .” the Marine said. “Wait, aren’t these . . . ?”
Dane checked his own sensors to find that the radio frequencies were off the chart, along with subtle magnetic pulses and oscillating wave patterns . . . Before they suddenly clicked off.
“Huh?” It seemed to coincide with a dimming of the pyramid’s structure.
“Is that a good thing or a bad thing?” Hopskirk whispered, just as . . .
With a flare, the thing started to light up once more, along with all of the energy spikes. This cycle completed again, and again, like some sort of alien heartbeat. It reminded Dane of something, and he struggled to think of what . . .
“This has got to be what Professor Honshou and the others found,” Bruce whispered. “So . . . where are they?” And now that Dane knew the reason for the big man’s irritation, he could hear the pain and frustration in his voice.
“Hey, there’s something here,” Hopskirk said, moving to one side of the large alien machineries on the walls that looked like giant gas tubes. He started tapping the surface with the edge of one large metal gauntlet.
“. . . urk!” Dane’s sensors picked up the slightest sound coming from behind the pyramid. He rounded the corner, raised his rifle, and jumped over the ribbons of alien pipework that ran underfoot . . .
To see that there, wedged between more of the pipes and buttresses, were wide, terrified eyes, looking up at him.
It was a human.
Almost.
“Argk!” The figure stumbled forward out of his crouch, to catch the floor with his hands and shake. The man was small and wore the light blue-gray encounter suit of one of the expedition team, and a large, old-fashioned bubble helmet. But the figure was clearly not well, Dane could see from the way that his arms were quivering and shaking.
“Sir?” Dane knelt to one side as Bruce rounded the pyramid behind him.
The man crouched on all fours, head down, before suddenly lunging forward with an inhuman speed to grab onto the barrel of Dane’s pulse rifle.
“Ach!” Dane hissed in surprise, to find himself looking directly at the face of Professor Honshou, whose eyes were now a deep lambent amber, and the skin on his face blotched with the telltale alien virus.
“Get out!” The professor shouted, and when he opened his mouth, Dane saw that the teeth looked odd and yellowed. More like an animal’s teeth than a human’s . . .
“Professor!?” Dane struggled with the man for a moment, to find the professor almost inhumanly strong—even with the mechanical assists that Dane had in his suit, it was hard to wrench his own rifle back out of the man’s hands and shove him backwards—
Honshou hit the pipes, and Dane tensed, certain that the mutant who had once been a man would fling himself into another insensate attack. He watched as the professor’s hands scrabbled and held onto the pipes around him, appearing to be barely able to contain an inner rage.
“Professor, where’s Kayla?” Bruce said in a deep growl from where he stood above Dane.
“Bruce, now might not . . .” Dane started to say, watching the professor struggle to contain himself. The man was clearly infected, and he was only just keeping it together.
“She’s—she’s out there . . .” Honshou gasped, his hands moving to his chest.
Dane tensed. “Whoa there, Professor. Ju
st take it easy.”
“Out where? What do you mean, she’s out there!?” Bruce took a step forward.
“It’s not what you think! They were here before. The device . . .” the professor was shaking now, spitting each word as if it was the hardest thing that he had ever done. “The device is their Beacon!”
“What?” Dane said automatically, even though another part of his brain just as simply knew that what the professor was saying was true. That was why it pulsed in such regular and exact cycles, wasn’t it? Just like a radio buoy or a satellite or their very own Beacon that the Marines themselves had dropped onto Planet 892 . . .
“There’s a serum . . .” Dane heard the old man say as he scrabbled from his chest pocket a small phial of some clear liquid. “I don’t know if it works. I came to the source of the infection. To here. To try and synthesize a cure from the bodies of the watchers . . .”
“Watchers?” Dane asked, but Bruce was pushing past him.
“Where is she? Where is Kayla!?” Bruce leaned forward. Honshou’s head snapped up, looking past them both to where Hopskirk was still investigating the alien machinery.
“No! Get out!” Honshou cried, just as Hopskirk’s hands accidentally clinked and tapped against a skirt of metal—
For the Marine to be engulfed in a sudden release of high-pressure steam.
“Hopskirk!” Dane was already on his feet and moving, to see the Marine staggering out of the quickly-evaporating white cloud, waving his hands.
“I’m all right, Williams—it must have been some leak or something . . .” he was saying.
But it wasn’t. Behind the man, a section of the large, stone-like metal pipe was starting to shift and move, rolling downwards to the floor.
“What?” Hopskirk turned back around. Everyone in the room suddenly realized what it was. It wasn’t some gas or plasma tube that was feeding the strange, glowing pyramid device at all. It was a pressurized chamber—and from it leapt a creature that was like an Exin, but with altogether more claws and arms.
Metal Warrior: Precious Metal (Mech Fighter Book 5) Page 7