“Christ, you and the woman are Marines?” Quinn asked, incredulous, gesturing at Riot.
“Yes, ma’am,” Nate answered.
“We don’t have time to conduct a rescue operation, Quinn,” Milo said, nudging her.
“Those two are Marines,” Quinn replied.
“Yeah and besides, who said anything about being rescued?” Kaylin asked. “Just open the cage and we’ll help you fight our way off of this prison ship.”
Quinn glanced at the others.
“We’re running out of time,” Hayden growled. “Besides, we don’t leave anybody behind and the more the fucking merrier.”
Quinn turned again to the decking. “We’ve got no weapons or armor for you and you’ll likely die if I let you out.”
“‘Likely’ sounds better than ‘definitely,’” Kaylin said. “We don't mind facing death, as long as we get the chance to fight it.”
Quinn leaned down and traced the outline of a joint in the metal, a section of grating around which a massive lock hung. It appeared to be the only thing keeping Kaylin and the others in place. She angled her rifle down and shot the lock off.
The blast from her gun echoed off the walls, bringing immediate return fire from the Syndicate position.
“Now you’ve done it!” Milo shouted.
Against the staccato firing coming from the Syndicate soldiers, Kaylin, Riot, and Nate pushed a section of the grating open. Quinn eased a hand down and pulled Kaylin out and then she helped Riot and Nate up. Kaylin dropped to the ground next to Quinn. “Okay, so now would probably be a good time to tell you that there are others down in the cell,” Kaylin said.
Quinn looked down again. “But I only saw the three of you.”
“Did I forget to mention that the entire floor underneath us is one huge prison cell?”
Quinn nodded. “Yep, you failed to mention that.” She pointed down. “So, me opening the cell….”
“Means you just let all the others out,” said Kaylin.
“Are the others like you?”
“Sure, if by 'like us,' you mean prisoners,” Kaylin replied.
“Cos if you meant human like us, then absolutely not,” added Riot.
Quinn looked down a final time. She noticed things she hadn’t seen before, principally that the walls of the cell underneath were opening to reveal other cells and other doors, everything slowly being pushed open by arms and various alien appendages. Next she saw forms, some slithering, others standing, some small, others colossal in size … and finally she saw eyes … a shitload of hungry, alien eyes.
“Jesus God,” Quinn muttered to herself.
She glanced at Kaylin who smiled. “So we’re kinda about to be in the middle of an alien prison uprising.”
“I love it,” Renner said. “Perfect cover for our assault.”
Quinn watched him stand and fire out a grenade launcher, then charge forward. She cursed, grabbed her helmet and rolled out of her hiding place, firing her rifle as the aliens and whatever else were imprisoned under the decking emerged, screaming bloody murder.
28
Absolute bedlam ensued as Quinn led everyone on a ragged charge across the room, dozens, possibly hundreds of alien prisoners stampeding behind them. She looked back only once and bit back a scream. For a moment she witnessed the mob of alien prisoners and they were a terrifying lot. Some were less than half the size of an average man, others twelve feet tall, some multi-limbed, others without any appendages at all.
She saw scaled beasts hidden under rows of spikes and others with what, on a human, would be their internal organs, on the outside of their skin. Most were darkly hued but a few were albino white, jarringly so when juxtaposed against the sooty blackness of the interior of the ship. They were flailing their arms and ripping pieces off anything in sight to use as crude weapons.
“Real smooth move letting those assholes out,” Milo said, diving to the ground next to Quinn.
“They’re on our side,” Kaylin said, belly-crawling over with Riot and Nate. “I mean every one of them except for Zer.”
“What the hell is a Zer?” Quinn asked.
“Zer’s the biggest of them all,” Riot said. “He’s a Monocacy.”
Nate nodded. “And he’s had it in for me ever since I kinda had sexual relations with this female alien.”
“You did?” asked Quinn.
“Well, replace ‘kinda’ with ‘repeatedly’ and ‘female alien’ with ‘his wife,” and you sorta get the picture,” Nate replied.
Nate pointed and Quinn watched an immense form with the muscled, lower body of a bear and the upper body of a squid, rise up in the distance.
“What in the holy hell is that?!” Quinn asked.
“That’s Zer,” Nate said.
Zer wrenched its head up and pointed directly at Nate. The monster opened its beaked mouth and shrieked like a sinner in hell. Nate tensed, looked to Riot who whispered, “I’m pretty sure he didn’t see you.”
Quinn shot a look at him. Then she glanced at Milo who shrugged. “We’re all gonna die some time,” he said. “I s’pose you could do worse than now.”
Grabbing her rifle, Quinn rose and fired at the Syndicate positions. She clambered forward, screaming, adrenaline surging as she weaved between the incoming Syndicate rounds which stitched the ground and wavered the air just over her head. One of the aliens chucked an illumination grenade that air burst fifteen feet out in front of her. Even with the protection of her helmet, the light was blinding, like liquid fire inside her eye sockets. She juked to the left and fell behind a giant turbine.
Her eyes recaged and she checked her weapon, listening to the screams of the aliens and the Syndicate soldiers. It was all chaos, the THUMP, THUMP, THUMP of heavy weapons and the shouts of Hayden and the others as they barked out orders, visibility dropping. On her HUD, she watched a pack of enemy soldiers moving into place and decided to risk everything by running right at them.
Spinning to her left, she charged forward, surprising four Syndicate soldiers and a battle drone the size of a washing machine.
Quinn stopped and planted her feet and vaulted over the battle drone.
WHAM!
She hit the ground a few feet beyond it and came up ready to deal out some death.
BRAT! BRAT! BRAT!
She hip-fired her gun, strafing the Syndicate soldiers.
Two dropped dead, a third was wounded, and the fourth was unharmed and bum-rushed her.
The big alien blitzed forward and before Quinn could fire again—
WHAM!
The bastard grabbed the end of her rifle and slammed it back into her chest, flipping her onto her back.
The rifle was wrenched from her hands as she slammed hard into the decking.
Pushing herself up, Quinn felt the soldier’s boot meet her midsection.
The armor absorbed much of the blow, but the impact propelled her five feet back through the air. She slammed into the decking again, watching the alien aim the rifle at her. Rounds from the gun ricocheted off the decking as she rolled left, then right, yelping as a bullet pinged off her helmet.
The alien stopped to reload and Quinn reached to her side and pulled around the only weapon she had left, a pistol. She jumped to her feet and began firing the pistol, running headlong at the soldier who dropped the rifle and began swinging a long, black blade.
Quinn hit the ground on her knees and slid under the blade as it took the top off her helmet.
She could see daylight where the helmet had been bisected.
Her hand instinctively reached to the top.
Somehow she was still in one piece.
The blade had missed her skull by a few millimeters.
Enraged, Quinn turned and jump-kicked the soldier. He dropped the blade and fell to one knee and Quinn emptied her pistol into him. The bullets thudded into the soldier’s armor, falling harmlessly to the ground, but the impact drove the alien back.
The pistol rolled over empty.
The rifle came up, but Quinn was already swinging the blade like a baseball bat.
There was a flash of metal as Quinn’s blade sliced through the alien’s neck, lopping off his head in one clean stroke.
The soldier’s corpse fell one way, his head went another. Before she could fully process this, rounds from a gun wavered the air over Quinn’s head. She dropped to her knees and peripherally spotted the battle drone. Damn! She’d forgotten all about it!
The drone was motoring toward her, twin cannons bolted on either side of its frame spinning, laying down a wall of slugs. Quinn fell to the ground next to the headless alien soldier. She grabbed the alien’s body and used it as a shield, powering toward the drone as it continued to fire, its rounds tearing the alien’s corpse to pieces. Quinn tossed what was left of the alien at the drone and then daggered the blade and stabbed the drone through its CPU, silencing it forever.
Turning, Quinn searched for and found her rifle. She slung the rifle over one shoulder, holding the blade over her head, signaling to the others, screaming, “LET’S GO!”
None of the others immediately responded. For a moment, she just stood there, transfixed by the battle that raged all around her. She saw the others fighting, watched Hayden as he clutched a pistol in each hand. He gunned down two Syndicate soldiers before grabbing up a third, wrestling with the alien before breaking it like a twig over his mighty knees.
Giovanni, Mackie, and Eli were advancing together, their assault rifles glowing orange in the murkiness as a horde of alien prisoners followed closely behind them. Even Kaylin, Riot, and Nate, the prisoners she’d released, had picked up some of the crude weapons dropped by the dead. Now they were taking the fight to the aliens, stabbing and hacking at any Syndicate soldier in sight.
The Syndicate soldiers continued to attack, however, and Quinn watched the rounds from their guns tear into those newly released alien prisoners who were still unarmored. She saw spurts of red and yellow and white blood, heard the screams of the monsters even as many more of them sprung into the breach to attack their Syndicate enemies.
The alien prisoners did great violence to their ex-captors, tearing them apart, wrapping them up in their impossibly-long, tentacled limbs, or simply overwhelming them in a flourish of snapping jaws and razor-sharp claws. The inmates didn’t want to run the asylum, she thought. They wanted to tear the fucking place to the ground!
In seconds, it was impossible to determine who was friend and who was foe, the fighting was so intense.
Consulting what was left of her HUD, Quinn urged the others to regroup and follow her. She ran forward, guiding the way, hacking and slashing at anything foolish enough to try and stop her. She cleaved a startled Syndicate soldier in two, hacked off the legs of two more, and gut-stabbed a fourth before he could toss a grenade at her.
Kicking the dead alien back off the end of her blade, she spotted an archway near an adjacent wall. She was shocked, but relieved to find that they’d managed to fight to the other side of the room! Looking back one final time, Quinn signaled for the others to follow her. She darted forward down under the archway and into a passageway where she pressed herself against a wall, chest heaving, fighting to catch her breath. A glance back showed, remarkably, the figures of all the others appearing. They were, to a person, splotched with alien blood and gore, but very much alive, even Kaylin and Nate.
“Somehow, some way, we are all accounted for,” Milo said.
Quinn consulted her HUD and saw dozens of orange dots closing rapidly from up ahead, in the direction she hoped to go. She realized that the path forward and through the bridge was likely impossible now. There were simply too many Syndicate soldiers between them and the destination. They’d need an alternate route to the area where the time travel mechanism was.
“The scuds are sending in reinforcements,” Hayden said.
“I like close quarters as much as the next man,” Renner offered, pointing down the narrow passageway, “but this is too fucking close.”
“We need an alternative plan to get to the area near the bridge,” Quinn said. “They’ve got more aliens than we can kill.”
“What’s on the bridge?” Kaylin asked. “I mean … besides the bridge.”
“It’s what we came for,” Quinn said.
“You came all this way for a … bridge?”
“Do you have an alternate plan or not?” Quinn hissed.
Kaylin smiled and pointed up.
Quinn and the others looked up to see … nothing. Just more murkiness.
“Wow. Complete and utter blackness. Helluva plan, Kaylin,” Milo said.
“Look closer, dick.”
Quinn squinted then tapped her HUD to zoom up. Her gaze followed a metal ladder on the wall up higher and higher, and that’s when she saw it. Water droplets along what looked like a section of venting.
“I see venting,” Quinn said.
“No, you see a portion of venting,” Kaylin corrected her. “When I was first interrogated, I saw three entry and exit points for the vents. The entrance into the prison room for one. The engine room, but that’s too far away from the bridge. And an antechamber right below the bridge which is near where the bastards slapped me around. From what I could see, it was the most heavily guarded section of the ship. I figure that was for a reason.”
Recognition washed over Quinn. If Kaylin was right, the venting ductwork might be their only hope. They could use it to slip past the aliens and come up near the area where the time travel mechanism was housed. She double-checked the imagery on her HUD, able to trace a route through the venting that led to the area in question.
Milo held up a hand. “Um, guys. We’ve got a thousand pissed off aliens headed directly toward us in either direction. Let’s cut the chit-chat if at all possible.”
Kaylin traded looks with Quinn and pointed up again. “We either go that way or wait for him.”
She pointed to the other end of the passageway where Zer, the octopus-like alien monster was visible, screaming, pointing at Nate.
Quinn shot Nate a look. “What the hell did you do to that thing’s wife?!”
Nate shrugged as Kaylin jumped and grabbed hold of the metal ladder, pulling herself up. She was followed by Quinn and the others and within seconds, everyone was up and entering the venting ductwork near the ceiling.
The ductwork was large enough for a grown man to climb down and buffeted by gusts of a strong breeze every few seconds that reeked of ozone. Quinn overtook Kaylin, crawling forward as the ductwork jogged left, then right, then began dropping down. Her HUD was no longer functioning, but Quinn had memorized the path forward. They were only a hundred feet from a section that dipped under the bridge.
She smiled to herself. They’d done it. They’d fought their way through a Syndicate ambush and an alien prisoner uprising and lived to tell about it. The gods were definitely smiling on them. They were gonna do this. They would find the way back into the past and set everything right. Mommy’s coming, Sam, Quinn thought to herself. And she’s gonna change the future and kick some alien ass. Quinn planted a hand on the ductwork and the entire section of venting folded down.
Quinn blinked and then she found herself sliding forward.
“Shit!” she yelled.
Her hands sprung out, but there was nothing to hold onto, the ductwork was unbelievably smooth.
The air began rushing past as Quinn slid straight down, the others following directly behind her.
The ductwork was like a slide at a water park, zipping left, then right, following down over a hump that made Quinn’s stomach tighten in knots and then all was dark and without form and Quinn felt that the end was near as—
WHAM!
She smashed feet-first through a section of grating and went flying through the air into the inky nothingness of what she assumed was the bottom of the time ship.
29
Q uinn screamed a
s she fell through the air, the darkness giving way to ambient light and a pool of azure water that she crashed down into. Frigid water plunged in around Quinn as she hit the bottom pushed herself up again. She came up, throwing aside her helmet and taking a deep breath. Bobbing, she watched the others catapulted out of the end of the ductwork, everyone falling in what seemed like slow-motion before they hit the water.
Quinn glanced around and noted that they were in what looked like a vast immersion tank of some kind, a circular space the size of a medium pool constructed of what looked like glass. The tank was situated in an expansive hall that was dimly lit at the outer edges by what Quinn thought looked like electronic votives of some kind.
Grabbing the edge of the tank, Quinn pulled herself up and onto a promenade of silver alloy that seemed to be at the very center of the room. The others followed, nobody uttering a word. Quinn strolled down the promenade, which allowed her to see the entirety of the cavern they found themselves in.
The promenade rose over what looked like the end result of an engineer’s fever dream, the entire floor underneath covered with parts pried from some vast, disassembled machine. The parts were bronze in color and lay silently, one aside another, as if waiting for their maker to return and slot them back together. She could see now that tubing ran from the immersion tank, slithering between the pieces. A cooling mechanism she thought to herself.
A terrible thought hit her and her resolve began to ebb. Whatever machine might have once existed, was apparently now inoperable. Had they come this entire way for nothing?
“What is this place?” Giovanni asked.
Quinn looked back. “This is what we came for. This is the machine that controls everything.”
“What kind of machine?” Kaylin asked.
“None of your business,” Milo replied.
Kaylin wheeled on him. “I’m the one that got us here, pal, so how ‘bout a little respect.”
Quinn held up a hand for silence. “It’s a time machine.”
Riot whistled, examining the dormant machinery. “Looks like a broke ass time machine to me.”
Syndicate Wars: False Dawn (Seppukarian Book 4) Page 18