by Aaron Crash
Ian spat through comms, “You’re gonna pay for doing Jacob like that, you son of a bitch. You’re gonna fucking pay, Ramirez. I’m gonna rip off your head and shit down your neck.”
“Doesn’t sound very sanitary. And you’re gonna have to catch us first,” Blaze said. With Jacob down, and with the other wolves either wounded by the silver or tangling with Cali, Blaze, Ling, and the Clickers were able to retreat down the round corridor where Raziel still meowed.
Blaze knew that Cali would be fine, so leaving her behind wasn’t a big deal. Nothing but silver could hurt a werewolf, and those Astral Corps pricks didn’t have any on them.
Abandoning the ensorcelled Trina was harder. But in the end, she couldn’t die in the frozen water. She was already dead. No, she’d eventually come on comms and then they could rendezvous.
They pulled the Clickers down through the steel tunnels of the hamster-cage run. The wall opened to their left to reveal a conveyor belt, heading toward the control room and the main mine shafts in the core of the planet.
The cat ran and jumped on a different conveyor belt. It headed toward a wall with a two-foot-tall opening in the metal. Blaze and his team would fit, but not those werewolves.
Raziel sat comfortably on the moving belt, got bored, and then licked a paw and swiped it over her head like she was on Trina’s bed in the library on board the Lizzie Borden and not inside a flooding mine. She disappeared into the wall, through the opening in the metal.
Blaze helped Ling lay the Clickers on the belt and then he and the sloth got on. The werewolves raced up. Every wound had already healed. Onyx energy fueled them, and there was plenty to go around. While he climbed on the conveyor belt, his sister used the nanotech in his left arm to aim the empty shotgun at the wolves. They hesitated, fear in their eyes. It was long enough.
Cali howled from behind them, and they turned to fight her.
Blaze lay flat and disappeared into the opening. It was a tight fit. He closed his eyes. The conveyor belt rattled and rumbled underneath him, but it was all pitch-black. He started to get claustrophobic, under the metal, under the water, under the miles of ice.
His sister came on comms to distract him. “Blaze, the mine is flooding, and we don’t have enough time to blast through the ice to get to you. You’re heading toward the control room, but those werewolves are coming after you. Two are on the belt, as Humans, naked Humans, so they must be freezing their balls off. Two others are wolves racing toward another access point.”
Blaze glanced at the display. He saw the signatures of his team riding the belt. Trina was still in the elevator lobby, unmoving. Cali had broken free from the structure and was swimming outside. She didn’t need to breathe. The cold couldn’t hurt her. He had no idea how she was surviving the intense pressure, but her werewolf hide could withstand star energy, so what was a few tens of thousands of pounds per square inch?
“Sending your bitch to get me, Blaze?” Ian asked through comms. “Ha, I’m gonna bring her on board and ride her like you never could.”
“Good luck with that,” Blaze snipped. Then to his resident werewolf he said, “Cali, you heard what that bastard said. Make him pay.”
A growl filled comms.
“We’re coming for you, Ramon!” one of the naked marines called to him from down the conveyor belt. It was Logan.
“Yeah we are!” Chase echoed.
Tanner and Jared would be running the corridor toward another access point to the conveyor belt.
Blaze managed to raise his head, but it was absolute darkness on the conveyor belt. He deactivated his helmet and visor. Through comms, he contacted Ling. “Hey, buddy, hand me down a fusion pistol.”
“Yes, Gunny!” Ling said.
Ling was small enough, he could maneuver around. He plunked the pistol down on Blaze’s forehead. It hurt, but he snatched it from the Meelah’s paws and then lowered it and fired. Fusion energy erupted and streaked down the belt in the tight space.
“Bastard!” Chase screamed in pain. “You fucking bastard!”
Logan yelped. “Retreat, Chase. Let’s back off. You can heal your face when we wolf out again.”
Blaze grinned. He’d never liked Chase all that much. It was good that he’d melted off that pinche puta’s face.
Ling smacked him with two shotgun shells filled with metal shot. “Get ready,” Ling said.
“Nombre de Dios, Ling, you don’t have to slam shit in my face.”
“Sorry, Gunny!”
Blaze cracked open the shotgun’s action and plucked out the two spent shells. Working the new shells in, he reloaded the gun.
“Elle,” Blaze said, “since you can’t get through the ice, do you have a plan B? We’re trapped down here.”
Elle responded, “Yeah, Blaze, we do. Lizzie is talking to the Etrusca ruin. It’s, uh, weird.”
A shiver of fear spun down the back of Blaze’s neck. “What do you mean talking to it? You can’t talk to a ruin.”
“But I can, Blaze,” Lizzie’s breathless voice answered. “It’s coming. It wants us to activate it. Those who worshipped the Old Ones, the Onyx generator, all will return to the galaxy to feed their hhhunger. We will bear witness to hhhunger.”
“Lizzie,” Blaze said, “this doesn’t sound good. The old ones? I don’t think anything called the ‘old ones’ can possibly be a good thing for us. Are the old ones the Etrusca?”
“The initiator cubes are so swollen, so wanton, Blaze. They are ready to be licked by starlight so they can embrace all the worlds in their hhhungry embrace.”
“Elle?” Blaze didn’t need to finish the question. His sister would know.
“Yeah, this is every flavor of fucked. But we’re coming, Blaze,” she said. “See?”
She patched him into Lizzie’s telescopes. The massive square metal structure burst through Shenyang Prime’s rings, bashing through the ice there and careening down through the atmosphere, glowing red hot and leaking ice, which turned into water and then to mist from the heat of entry.
The Etrusca ruin plummeted through the clouds, down into the storm, and then it struck the massive ice fields south of the ski resort on a wide-open plane.
“It’ll kill the planet,” Blaze said.
“This planet is dead already,” Elle said. “But good news. Once you engaged Nauzea and the succubus, they had to relinquish control of the civilians down there. Ambassador Randi’s brother and nephews contacted us. They escaped in ships with most of the population. We didn’t save Hutchinson Prime, but we managed to save the fuckers on this ice cube.”
“Not all,” Blaze muttered. He remembered the families Nauzea had tortured. And he was going to make her pay for that.
It was why they had to close the Onyx Gate and stop things like this from happening. No matter what the Etrusca had been, they had to have been better than these pinche puta archdukes and archduchesses.
Ice, debris, and dust filled the air as the whole planet trembled at the impact of the continent-sized structure slamming through the crust and into the water. A shockwave went through the water, jarring the mine and slamming them around.
Emergency klaxons erupted. Red lights flashed, and alarm bells split their eardrums wide open. The mine was in trouble, and since they were in the mine, they were too.
Light was coming from ahead on the conveyor belt. It was the access point, another loading area for the belt.
“Ling, take the shotgun. It’s loaded. Use it.”
Ling knocked his face again, to show where his hand was, and Blaze shoved the shotgun into the Meelah’s paws. Ling scrambled over the inert Clickers. The conveyor belt rattled them to the access point where the two other werewolves were waiting to attack. Ling fired one shell into Tanner and another into Jared. Their fur smoked.
Jared went down. Tanner roared and reached for him with his talons. Blaze used the spikes on his ax to smack the hand away. The silver fried the flesh. The smell of burnt dog greeted him, and then he was taken away from the ac
cess point and back under the metal.
He checked his display and then contacted Ling. “The next opening is in the main staging area around the control room. If we can make it to the control room, there’s an emergency access tube to an underwater docking port. Whatever submarines the Clickers used for the mine are long gone, but I’m hoping the Lizzie Borden will meet us there.”
Blaze switched his display to show the Lizzie Borden streaking down through the ice clouds and chaos the Etrusca ruin had caused on the planet’s surface. The sun was blacked out by the debris. Things got even colder, and soon any exposed water would be flash-frozen since the already cold planet had lost all of its sunlight.
The Lizzie struck the ocean and streaked down through water awash in chunks of ice and debris. With miles of busted ice, icebergs the size of asteroids rolled in the frigid depths of the quickly freezing ocean.
Blaze was pulled back to the moment. The shaft opened. Ling sprang off the belt, pulling Fernando onto the floor. Blaze helped him get Bill and his heavy steel limbs off the conveyor. They stood on a steel platform that led to the control room.
Raziel was nowhere to be seen.
The area surrounding the control room was as large as an airplane hangar. Holes for corridors and conveyor belts were everywhere in the metal walls. The control room hung over a huge central mine shaft surrounded by smaller shafts. All dropped thousands upon thousands of feet down through the rock. Buckets and vertical conveyor chains rose and fell, moving in jerking movements from the blackness below at the planet’s core to the various horizontal conveyor belts disappearing into the walls.
The circular control room at the center of the platform flashed alarm lights. The control panels inside were going apeshit.
Water dripped down onto the roof of the circular building. The translucent glass dome a hundred feet above had cracked. Most of it was intact, but that dome wasn’t going to be able to hold long with the incredible forces at work and the containment systems failing.
Ice, dirt, and rocks swirled in the partially frozen ocean water, lit up by the glow of lights in the control room. They were six miles beneath the planet’s surface. They were deeper than Challenger Deep in the Mariana Trench, which was the deepest part of the oceans on Earth.
They couldn’t swim to the surface. The pressure would crush them. Cali might survive such vicious forces at work, but Trina would be smashed into a ball of skin and bones. How could they get back to her?
And when were she and the Clickers going to wake up?
Blaze grabbed Bill by his armor as Ling seized Fernando. They dragged them toward the open door of the control room in the flashing red lights and yowling alarms. There was an escape tunnel in the control room that would lead to an emergency access port. That was where they could rendezvous with the Lizzie.
Everything depended on them getting to the control room and out through that tunnel.
A hooded figure walked slowly into view, blocking the doorway to their escape. Her eyes and nose were hidden, but she had a scabbed mouth. Nauzea. When she raised her hands, Blaze got a glimpse. Every inch of skin was pierced with pins, needles, and nails of all sizes. Thumbtacks as well sixteen-penny nails impaled every part of her except for her neck, face, and head. All the flesh Blaze could see was red and swollen and oozing pus.
The scabbed wound of her mouth opened. Instead of teeth, she had nails, tacks, and needles jammed up into her gray gums. “Welcome to my hell, friends. You will come to know me as a lover, and when your cries of pain become cries of pleasure, I will be there to help you endure my complete victory.”
“Never liked the rough stuff,” Blaze said. “Pain and love don’t mix in my world.”
She cackled.
It was just Blaze and Ling going up against the archduchess of torture. She might not know it, but that puta was in trouble.
SEVEN_
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Blaze and Ling advanced toward Nauzea, who stood in the doorway of the control tower. Below them was the abyss of mine shafts and tunnels, impossibly deep. Above, the glass dome was cracking and saltwater dripped in.
The ocean smell mingled with the rot and decay and blood emanating from Nauzea. She reeked with the gangrenous stench of a wound that refused to heal.
The archduchess of torture made a fist.
Rusted chains streamed out of the metal walls, coiling in the air and reaching for Blaze and Ling. Six-inch, barbed, bloodstained hooks tipped the chains. Blaze had seen similar hooks in slaughterhouses.
At the same time, the Clicker brothers were coming around, gasping, coughing, and murmuring. It seemed Nauzea couldn’t make the hooked chains and keep them ensorcelled with her telepathic tortures. She was manipulating the very atomic particles in the metal walls and platform to bring the abattoir chains to life, and that took a lot of mojo.
Ling ignited his fusion nunchakus, both of them. He whirled and danced and cut through every hook and every chain that came within three feet of him.
Blaze snapped down his ax’s silver spikes and activated the fusion blades. He let some of the hooks hit the crescents of star-fire light and they melted away. Others he hacked through. One hook slammed through his armor and into the meat of his chest.
Fernando leapt to his feet and cut through the chain with his fusion spear.
Bill’s big left arm transformed into a fusion cannon, and he sent a ball of energy crackling through the air at Nauzea. His smaller left arm changed into a plasma pistol and peppered her as well.
Chains erupted from the floor, writhing like snakes, and deflected every one of Bill’s shots. They were like hook-headed cobras protecting the archduchess of torture who had summoned them.
The four remaining werewolves dashed into the room. Eight-feet-long and weighing several tons each, they created a massive animal stink. The wolfed-out creatures headed straight for Blaze, Ling, Bill, and Fernando, who were working to keep the abattoir chains out of their flesh.
Nauzea cackled through her scabby mouth hole.
Ian’s voice from the SuperCobra outside in the ocean howled in Blaze’s ear. “You killed Jacob, and you’re gonna pay for that, Ramon. As for your little girl, she’s giving me the time of my life. I can’t shake her, ’cause damn, that bitch can swim.”
Blaze growled, “Cali is a lot of things, but she’s not a bitch and she’s not a little girl. You’ll find that out once she gets her claws into you.”
Cali’s snarls echoed his sentiments.
“Goddamn,” Ian cursed. “Fusion claws? Blue-fire boots? Well, that’s new. Okay, hard right.”
The gunny could picture Cali, fusion claws glowing yellow, boots glowing blue, as she chased Ian in the SuperCobra through the water. But Ian’s buddies had come at the worst possible time to harass them.
“Elle, give me good news!” Blaze said, severing an abattoir chain. He still had a hook in his chest, but he couldn’t worry about a little thing like that. He, Ling, and Fernando were back-to-back, around Bill, who was continuing his barrage on the archduchess of torture standing between them and the control room and freedom.
Video from Elle lit up his display and he saw two twin fusion torpedoes racing into the Etrusca structure. At least one of those fusion torpedoes would hit the initiator cube. The initiator cube would be a collection of frozen tentacles and frozen alien faces attached to various fish bodies. Once light hit that cube, the whole structure would come alive with tentacles big and small, mindless and grasping, with those alien-faced fish things swimming among the tendrils like clownfish among sea anemone.
“Help is on the way!” Elle cried through comms.
Swiveling his display, he watched the Etrusca structure dive toward them, the tentacles already unraveling. The wiggling shadow of the massive thing dwarfed the tiny mine underneath it. Blaze knew the entire surface of the planet was fucked, tore up from the floor up, by that continent-sized structure striking the surface.
The IPC was gonna lose a buttload of mone
y on the ski resort paradise they’d built over the underwater Clicker mine. As for the loss of the life, the IPC would blame it on some sort of bizarre solar ice-storm bullshit. No way would they say the archduchess of torture had wiped out hundreds of people on the planet. Blaze was just glad most of the population had escaped.
A chain wrapped itself around Fernando’s fusion spear. The abattoir chain threatened to pull it out of his two main hands, but his side arms plucked fusion pistols out of holsters in his armor. The two pistols worked to blow away that chain and several other chains as well.
The talons of the werewolves clacked on the metal platform as they charged toward Blaze and his crew.
More and more of the hooked chains flashed around them in the jingling and jangling of the links unraveling. The platform floor buckled as the atoms of the metal were transformed into chains and hooks.
A hook slammed into Blaze’s back, lifting him from the floor. Another chain pierced his leg, driving a hook into the flesh of his calf. He was already on painkillers for his shoulder, so he hardly felt the fresh agony. A chain from the ceiling circled his right arm. A hook ripped into his back. He dropped his ax to the floor and it struck blade first, fusion crackling.
He hung suspended. At least he was upright. Adrenaline poured into his system, making him lightheaded, but still, a rage filled him. Another ceiling hook dug into his right arm. A hooked chain from the wall pierced his side.
Damn, but he was royally screwed. They all were.
The first of the werewolves, Tanner, leapt toward them, talons outstretched.
“Ling!” Elle’s voice slammed into their ears. “Toss Blaze one of your nunchakus!”
Ling somersaulted over an abattoir chain trying to snag him, plucked the silver-loaded shotgun off his back, unloaded one barrel into Tanner, flung a nunchaku still lit up with power at Blaze, then had his other nunchaku in his other hand to slice through a chain. He fought like a goddamn ballerina on fast-forward.