by M. R. Forbes
Whatever.
A short regroup, a pow-wow with the leaders of the expedition, and some well-placed explosives had gotten them past the introductory phase and quickly to the mission at hand. His Riders were lined up behind him, whispering to one another, trading banter like they were in the barracks. He didn’t care about that either. One of the grunts that had managed to survive the assault claimed there was no other way out of the underground facility, which meant his target had to be in here somewhere. The noise would alert her to their presence, but it would also force her to stay on the move. He had seen the bot mapping of the space, and he already had an idea of where he wanted to position his individuals. He was pretty sure he could box her in and cut her down without too much hassle, even if both Elivee and Koy seemed to think it would be easier said than done.
They told him Cage was a demon bitch, that she had cut Thraven’s throat and left him scarred, and that the two of them were worth a fragging army in a fight and still might struggle to contain her. He doubted their personal assessment of themselves, though he was rather impressed with Elivee’s assets. In any case, his Riders were the best there were, and Pallimo was paying him one hundred million to retrieve her head.
Money talked. Always. Loudly.
He spit on the ground, his left eye shifting over as Koy moved beside him.
“So, Colonel,” Koy said. “I don’t mean to be rude, but I’ve never heard of you or the Riders.”
“Nope,” Quark said. “We don’t need to advertise. The ones who need our services know who we are.”
“Like Don Pallimo?”
“Mostly. Done a few other jobs here and there for kicks. Haulers pay the best.”
“You didn’t seem surprised when Elivee toasted the former commander of our forces.”
Quark laughed. “I've seen more unbelievable shit than that. Don’t care how you did it, just don’t try it on me and mine. I’ll kill you first.”
Koy raised an eyebrow. “What kind of unbelievable shit?”
“If I said it, you wouldn’t believe me. That’s why it’s called unbelievable.”
“Try me.”
“Got hired for a job near the back of the Outworlds. Hauler made a drop, the ship never came back. Sent a second dropship in to find them. All they found was the dropship and a lot of blood. Crew was gone. Cargo was all there. Probably didn’t need me for it, but the pay was too good to say no. Me and Griff here, we did the job ourselves. You remember that, Griff?”
“Yes, Colonel,” Griff replied. “We tracked the blood back to an abandoned mine. There were,” Griff paused and tried to make a disgusted face. “Creatures, inside. They looked like Terrans at first, but when we approached to ask them about the missing crew, they changed.”
Quark could tell by Koy’s face that he knew what they were talking about.
“How many were there?” Koy asked.
“Dunno. A dozen. Two. Who cares. We killed them all.”
“Just the two of you?”
Quark smiled. “Frag, yeah. We didn’t just jump in the middle of them or anything. Not when we spotted the missing Haulers in the corner. What was left of them, anyway. We picked them off, one by one. We caught a couple and tortured them a while. Sent the vid back to the Don. He doubled our payment.”
Elivee had stopped moving as she listened in on the story. Now she turned to face them. Quark smiled. His filter worked just as well on the front as it did on the back. He should have turned it on sooner.
“I don’t believe you,” she said.
“Don’t care,” Quark replied. “I don’t need validation from you. There’s only one thing I want from you.” He winked at her.
She shook her head. “Keep dreaming, Colonel. And change your filter before I rip those eyes out of your head and shove them up your ass.”
Griff began cracking up beside him; his Atmo laugh a series of soft snorts. Quark started laughing too, switching his eyes back to normal view.
“I like what you’ve got,” he said. “And I like your spunk.”
“I don’t care,” Elivee said. “Cage has to be in here somewhere. Maybe we should go about finding her instead of chit-chatting and looking under my clothes? Believe me, Colonel, I’d kill you for that if I didn’t think Thraven would be mad at me for it.”
“I’d like to see you try,” Quark said. “I've seen others like you before.”
Elivee lifted her hand. Quark felt the force around his neck, and he met it, pushing back against it with a sudden flare of rage. His hand snapped out, grabbing her by the wrist hard enough that it cracked beneath his grip.
“Colonel,” Koy said.
He let go. “I know it’ll heal. Told you, I seen others like you. Killed a couple for the Don.”
“How are you resistant?” Elivee asked. “You have the Gift?”
“Don’t know what the Gift is. You try to hurt me; I get mad. Real mad. Always been like that, as far as I can remember. I had my first kill when I was seven. My father told me with a soul like mine, I was either going to die young or die rich. I’m not young anymore.”
“But we are quite rich,” Griff said.
“That we are,” Quark agreed.
“Why keep doing it?” Elivee asked. “If you already have all the money you could need?”
“Killing’s fun. Retribution is even more fun. Besides, I can’t imagine doing anything else. I’ve been a bounty hunter all my life. The day I retire is the day I die. But you’re right; we should be finding this Demon Queen or whatever you call her. Once we take her down, I can move on to the others.”
“You really think you’ll be able to catch them all?” Koy asked.
“We always do.” He turned to Griff. “Take Red and Green that way. Set Red up at the junction point Alfa, Green at Bravo, like we discussed.”
“Yes, Colonel,” Griff replied.
“Blue and Black, you’re with me,” Quark said. “Elivee, Koy, you’re welcome to go wherever you want.”
“I’ll go with Griff,” Koy said quickly, smiling at Elivee’s dismay.
Quark figured the two must’ve snogged one another a few times already, and by the way they argued, he figured they probably would again.
“Looks like it’s you and me, darlin’,” Quark said.
“Frag off,” Elivee replied.
“Eventually, but we might as well make the best of things while we’re stuck together, right?”
“No.”
“Suit yourself. You’ll come around. They always do.”
He moved past her, leading his squads through the corridors of the complex. He knew exactly where he wanted to position them.
He had just reached Checkpoint Charlie when he picked up a distant crash in his augmented ears. He quickly pulled the map of the place up on his HUD, locating himself and guessing at the position of the noise. Somewhere in the mess.
It figured the bitch was hungry.
“Vee, why don’t you come with me. I heard something.”
“Just the two of us? I’m not stupid.”
“And I think you’re gorgeous, but I’m not that desperate. Seriously, I heard something. You can stay or follow. I don’t care which.”
He started running through the corridors toward the mess. He heard another noise from there. It sounded like something sliding on the floor. He didn’t need to look back to know that Elivee was following him.
He reached the large, open room and came to a stop. He adjusted his filter, switching first to infrared and then to pattern matching. The second filter picked up the disturbed dust and air in the space, his TCU quickly reversing it until he had an outline of footprints leading toward the back of the room.
“This way,” he said, hearing the noise a third time. He had her already.
Too fragging easy.
“Quark, be careful,” Elivee said. “She’s dangerous, even without the Gift.”
“So am I.”
He reached the doorway, dropping to his knees as he slid into
the room, his rifle aimed up to where Cage’s head should have been. The room was a pantry or something, lined with shelves. He could tell they had been moved out of place and put back. That was the noise he had heard.
But the room was empty.
“What?” he said, bouncing to his feet. He switched filters again, immediately discovering a slight disturbance in the area beneath the wall in front of him. He laughed. “Fake. Can’t fool this old warrior.”
He primed the launcher in his custom rifle, backing toward the doorway.
“Don’t,” Elivee said, moving beside him.
She put up her hand and slid it to the side, and the wall moved with it, revealing a second small room behind it.
“Damn it,” she cursed.
Quark moved forward, into the room. A small device was resting in the center of it. It was round and almost flat, with a small light on the front of it. He picked it up. “I take it the red light is bad?”
“You have no idea.”
26
Abbey ran through the tunnel. She didn’t know where she was, or where the passage would lead. Away. That was enough.
She had seen them. In the moments before she fled, she had put her eyes on her enemies. An Evolent, or maybe a Venerant. It was hard to tell, though the woman’s lighter hair and more delicate bone structure suggested the latter.
The other one? She wasn’t sure. His armor was marked and well-used, he was carrying a rifle that had to be custom designed, and she was certain he had known she was close. How? She wished she could have seen his face, but the glare on his helmet made that impossible.
The important part was that he wasn’t one of Thraven’s soldiers. Not dressed like that. Thraven had gotten help from somewhere. A mercenary, sure. But the way he carried himself suggested he was arrogant, and arrogant soldiers were typically good soldiers. Plus he had seen her, and almost caught up to her. She had stepped through the teleporter only an instant ahead of his arrival, quickly turning off her end.
The tunnel was small, barely five feet in diameter. Abbey had to crouch to move through it, keeping her body low as she traveled its distance. Obviously, it was connected to the crater, and the incline led her to believe she was on her way to the surface. Where would she come out? Far from where she had started. Other than that, it didn’t matter.
It took nearly an hour to reach the top. It was covered over by a heavy alloy lid that she lifted easily with the help of the Gift. Moving that obstacle revealed a ladder, which led to a second cover, and then a third. She pushed each one out of the way, stretching across the gap to the next ladder and continuing to climb. The Ophanim hadn’t made it easy to get in or out this way, and she was certain there was a system somewhere in the complex that would be registering the movement of the barriers. She doubted Thraven’s forces could have hacked into that part of the network quickly enough to track her.
She knew when she was near the top because the ground around her became saturated, and water started dripping onto her head. She paused on the ladder and leaned back, opening her mouth and taking it in, thankful for the drink. Then she climbed the rest of the way to the top, again hidden by one final metal block.
She put her hand on it, reaching out with the Gift. It was flowing from her so much more easily now, responding to her will even without the intense anger that it had previously required. Her heartrate was still up, her adrenaline still pumping. She doubted she could have called on it if she were at rest and she wanted it to pass her a glass of wine or something. She smiled at the thought. She would love a glass of wine. A nice robe. Simple comforts. Hayley.
She had to keep fighting. Keep going. Hayley wasn’t the only one who needed her.
The cover shifted slightly, but it met with more resistance than she was expecting. She put her other hand up, balancing on her legs. She pushed, using the Gift to aid her. The lid started to give, shifting upward. Dirt started tumbling in through the gap, and she got the hatch all the way open on its hinges, she could tell she had moved nearly a foot of soil and vegetation from above it. This passage hadn’t been opened in a long time and had been very well hidden.
The rain poured down on her as she climbed out, closed the hatch, and did her best to replace the dirt on top of it. Only then did she look around, pulling the cowl over her face and using the filters to get a clearer view. She was at the top of the crater, in the center of the maelstrom that swirled endlessly above the pit and spread across a large portion of the planet. She could only see about twenty meters in any direction, and the wind and rain buffeted at her without end. The landscape was a mixture of low-lying plants and vines, moss-covered rocks, and mud, a natural cesspool that would do its best to make travel on foot more difficult.
“I never thought I would want the infected Seraphim back,” she said, thankful for the protection offered by the demonsuit.
She checked the TCU, hoping that it had a good enough sense of her position to give her some direction. It spit out warnings about poor signal strength and making estimations before helping to locate her nearly ten klicks from the edge of the crater. She had gone a long way, further than she had thought. She would have to go back, climb down, find a ship, steal it. There was no other way.
“Don’t complain, just do it,” she said to herself, steeling her resolve.
She started running again, her feet making sucking noises as they sank into the mud and were pulled free. She had to pay attention to where she stepped, careful to avoid the vines. Not only would they trip her up, but they had thick thorns that looked like they could cut right through the demonsuit.
It took her twenty minutes to travel the first kilometer. Nothing about the area changed in that time. The rain continued to blanket her, the wind kept its speed, and the ground didn’t become any easier to cross.
What did change was her TCU. A warning appeared in the corner of her HUD, an object detected in its sensors. It was half a klick away, airborne and coming from the direction of the crater.
“Frag,” she said softly.
If she could see it, then it could see her.
She looked around, searching for cover. She found a large outcropping of rock nearby and hurried over to it, crouching down and pushing herself through the mud to get below its lip. The green and purple moss that covered it had an awful odor, and she wrinkled her face to keep from breathing it in, at the same time she drew both of her pistols and pointed them out and away from her hiding spot.
She checked her HUD again. The object had vanished from it. That didn’t mean it was gone. The storm was fragging with the sensors. Had it even been there to begin with, or had the suit offered up a false positive?
She wasn’t going to risk it. She remained in place. She could feel the water sinking under the demonsuit and reaching her skin, making her cold. She kept her eyes split between the short view ahead and the HUD, waiting for it to confirm the target. Maybe the ship was a good thing. If she could take it, she could get off the planet and away.
She remained there for nearly an hour. The object never reappeared. She cursed as she pulled herself out of the muck. As if things weren’t bad enough, now she knew she couldn’t rely on the limited extra perception the demonsuit’s onboard systems provided either.
“What a shitty rock to be stuck on,” she said, her anger causing the Gift to tickle her skin. She used it to dry herself beneath the suit, thankful for the flare of warmth.
There was nothing to do but keep going.
27
It was dark by the time Abbey reached the edge of the crater and started making her way down. She had been forced to hide three times by false alarms from her suit, not willing to risk getting caught off-guard because she became complacent. She was covered in mud. She was dirty and tired.
She was also grateful she had made it.
The descent was difficult, but not too difficult. The side of the crater had plenty of places to put her hands and feet and help her climb down. She didn’t intend to go all the way,
just far enough to get past the clouds and get her eyes on the situation below. She had to be careful, extremely careful, if she was going to get past the Venerant without a fight. She wasn’t in love with the idea of turning into a monster and growing a fragging tail, and she was less in love with the idea of going insane. Stealth was preferable to blunt force.
Another hour found her finally at the edge of the clouds, sinking through the mist to the clear. The inside of the crater became visible almost immediately, the encampment easy to make out by the lights within it.
She paused at a small ledge, crouching on it and looking down. She found a dropship to the north; a design she didn’t recognize. It was resting beside a pair of smaller shuttles. She didn’t see any other ships.
Her eyes tracked south from there, to the main camp. It was in a state of semi-disarray, with a portion of the area having been demolished in the infected Seraphim’s attack. Two stacks of corpses rested there, the infected and Thraven’s dead. She wasn’t all that surprised they were being treated so callously, but it didn’t make her any less angry.
The rest of the site was littered with temporary barracks, though there was a clear separation between Thraven’s army and the mercenaries. One set of shelters was quiet and calm; the other was raucous. Individuals from around the galaxy were sitting outside of their barracks, laughing and drinking and carrying on like they were on a camping trip. She spotted an Atmo, two Trovers, a Fizzig and a handful of Terrans.
Thraven had hired these idiots to catch her? That didn’t seem right.
She scanned the other section of the camp, her eyes pausing when she noticed the soldier from the bunker. He was emerging from one of the other structures in plain civilian clothes. It was hard to make out details from the distance, but she knew it was him by his size and demeanor. He walked with an unmistakable swagger, heading back toward his group.