There was a sudden psychic pressure that pushed down on Loki, and he looked up to see the eight-legged terror that was Hel slowly descending from the ceiling. He no longer controlled her, though honestly, he had begun to wonder if the influence he'd had over the likes of Jormungandr and Fenrir was him or just the Usurper using him like a puppet.
She must have sense his growing concern, for her stance was a defensive one, a subtle message that even he was less important than her clutch.
He reached out to her with his mind, and found Ajax already heavy upon her. The warriors of humanity were coming.
Time to put the final pieces into play.
UNDERWORLD
Deputy Springer did his best not to stare, though that was proving more difficult than he'd expected. When the leadership element of the Einherjar warriors had first entered the precinct he had stared then, too. What more could one expect of a man who was but a child when the extinction fleet first appeared on the fringes of human space?
He remembered the terror in his parent's voices when they told him of the wolves at the gate. His father was swept up by the planetary tithe, as Tankrid was not spared participation in the war effort. They were a working-class family, with no money to avoid the tithe, and so his father was pressed into service. Springer's father died, of course, like most of the millions of soldiers hurled into battle against the swarms in the early years of this terrible war.
When the Einherjar were created they seemed like gods striding across display screens large and small as the citizens of Tankrid, just like every other human city he assumed, marveled at the warrior’s humanity had created to fight the alien menace. That was over a decade ago, and as not a soul on Tankrid had ever seen one in person, the might and glory of the Einherjar had faded.
It reminded him of something Deputy Stratton had told him once, when Springer was a rookie on his first purge, that humanity had forgotten the danger.
That was easy to do on Tankrid, thought Springer, as life in the mega-city was a busy one, indeed. If you were rich you had to hustle to stay that way, and if you were poor you had to struggle just to survive. This was a society in decline. Springer had come to agree with Stratton, and it was no wonder that the community officers of generations past had been replaced with militarized deputy forces.
Not that Deputy Springer felt all that militarized in the presence of these near mythic warriors from the frontlines. He was strapped into a mag-rail that was in the process of taking several companies of Einherjar across the mega-city towards their destination. They were armored from head to toe and carried wicked looking rifles the likes of which Springer had only read about or seen in still life. Compared to these warriors, the dozen deputies under Springer's command seemed like glorified security guards, not hardened sewer cops, though each man among them had served his time in the underworld.
Their service record, and Springer's, was the reason the prescient had chosen them to accompany this Einherjar force. One hundred deputies from across Tankrid had been summoned at the behest of the man who sat across from Springer, one Skald Omar, operating with the full authority of something called Task Force Grendel. These were grim men indeed, and from what he gathered, listening to their small talk these warriors had been hunting a particularly difficult enemy force.
The thought that the garm had somehow broken through the Einherjar battle lines and infested Tankrid sent chills up Springer's spine, and he flexed his hands open and closed to give himself something to do with his excess nervous energy.
He noticed the man named Omar and a warrior sitting next to him with the name Ajax stenciled across his chest, both looking at him, though they at least did him the courtesy of not saying anything.
Everyone had been told, even if they'd forgotten, that facing the garm would do strange things to a man's mind. In fact there were rumors that the Hive Mind actually played psychic tricks on humanity in general, pushing civilization into a siege mentality. He didn't know much about that, but what he did know was that he was a solid sewer cop, even if that slang term was somewhat derogatory, as it applied to the men who policed all of the lower city levels, not just the stinking tunnels beneath the streets. Just one more way for the elites to lord over them he supposed, though, in that moment, he was just glad to have these strange warriors at his side.
He could not have imagined facing a garm infestation with just deputies. His father may have died for humanity, but Springer very much wished to survive for humanity. He did, after all, have a wife and a baby on the way. It seemed cruel that he be called to serve on such a mission considering his pending fatherhood, and yet without the will to make such sacrifices, what hope did humanity have? At least, that's what his father had said before he shipped out.
Soon the mag-rail came to a halt, and Deputy Springer knew it was time.
In less than ten minutes Springer and his men, along with the Einherjar, had left the relative safety of the mag-rail and descended into the sewers below. Apparently, the commanders of this task force were eager to avoid contact or even notice by the general population. Partly, he assumed, because they didn’t want to complicate an already delicate military operation within civilian territory, though now that he'd spent several hours in their company he had another opinion.
The Einherjar were terrifying.
These armored men were clones of the warriors they used to be, having died and returned to life over and over in their seemingly endless war with the garm. They spoke only of war and tactics, and the banter of normal men was something they seemed to have forgotten. They seemed as alien to him as the garm, though at least these warriors appeared human. Perhaps that was what he found most disturbing, after all, was that they were not quite men, but something else.
War on two legs and death with a familiar face.
Deputy Springer fell in step with the rest of his deputies as they, along with the Einherjar, walked down the concrete steps that led into the tunnel system. His men were at the head of the procession of soldiers, as other deputies would be across this quadrant, leading other warriors into the tunnel system. The Einherjar were looking for something, a garm organism that they expected to attempt escape over conflict, and the plan was to encircle the beast and its brood before pulling the noose tight.
"When they come, stay behind us," Skald Omar said to the deputies as he followed close by, "Do not allow your pride to press you towards heroics better left to others. You can but die the once."
If the man's words were meant to be uplifting, Deputy Springer thought to himself, they were not. Yet again, these men were so used to fighting such terrors that even the thought of death was of little consequence. Springer tightened his grip on the sub-machine gun and continued sloshing through the murk and the muck, glad at least to have a weapon in his hands.
As Springer nodded at Skald Omar, the warrior's head suddenly rocked forward as a bolt round bashed into the back of his helmet. The skald stumbled and turned just in time fall face first into the muck. Another marine rushed to help him and the super-heated rounds of another salvo shattered his armor and blew out most of his mid-section. The other marines shouted and the deputy ducked as several marines opened fire upon the darkness, watching helplessly as another marine was gunned down by the unseen assailant.
He was about to rise when an explosion rocked the tunnels and everything devolved into bloody chaos.
Deputy Springer saw marines shooting in all directions, from the collapsed hole in the tunnel wall another warrior emerged. He was armored liked the Einherjar, and had the name Fagan stenciled upon his chest, but most of him was covered in gore and caked sewage, as if he'd been living and killing down here for a long time. This new warrior blasted a marine off his feet with short bursts from a compact pulse rifle, tossed what appeared to be a grenade into the formation of soldiers and everyone scattered.
The explosion knocked Deputy Springer to his knees. When he looked up, the enemy warrior was leveling a pulse rifle at his face. Before
the enemy could squeeze the trigger Skald Omar, his helmet gone, leapt upon the enemy warrior. Their struggle brought them splashing and thrashing to the ground as both of them slid wicked looking blades, more like spikes really, out of sheathes, and began stabbing at each other.
Deputy Springer tried to get a clean shot, but he knew he would hit Omar. As he waited for an opening, another marine leapt into the fray. The new marine smashed the stock of his rifle into the back of the enemy warrior's head, and while the warrior was stunned the marine shoved him to the side wall of the tunnel and pinned him with a boot to the shoulder. The marine fired his pulse rifle twice, shattering the enemy warrior's armor and spraying the tunnel, himself, and Deputy Springer with gouts of smoldering blood and gore.
Springer got to his feet and wiped his eyes, taking in the sight of Omar still laying on the tunnel floor. His eyes were open and Springer could see where he'd been stabbed several times. The tunnels were still again, save for the sounds of wounded men. This pause in the violence was the calm before the storm.
He actually smelled them before he heard them, a rotting meat odor that wafted over him and nearly made him gag, even through his standard issue breather.
Then he heard them.
The scuttling sound of their claws on concrete and the clicking of mandibles matched only by the clatter of combat armor as the marines shouldered their way past the deputies to form a firing line.
When he saw them, their alien faces a horrendous blend of insect and reptile, it threatened to loosen his bowels.
He fired on them before he understood them. A ripper drone, if he recalled the briefing correctly, came screaming out of a pipe above the formation.
Springer's sub-machine gun roared in the darkness, the pulse rifles of the marines began to bark and spit death at the others. The range was close, and his spray of bullets tore the drone to pieces and gravity continued to bring it down. Springer leapt out of the way and splashed to the ground hard, as the corpse landed in the fetid water where he'd been standing. More drones dropped down from the ceiling while others charged the marine firing line.
He heard the marines shouting something about rapid evolution, but such was lost in the cacophony of violence that filled the tunnels. He watched with gut-churning horror as a drone slid down through a pipe so small he doubted a child could have come through there. As the beast landed on the ground its body rapidly expanded, as if the hardened chitin of the standard ripper drones had been replaced by a more flexible cartilage. That would certainly explain why neither the deputies nor the Einherjar noticed the flank attack at first.
Springer fired again, but his hands were shaking and his salvo did little but ricochet off the walls. The now fully expanded ripper drone snarled at him and charged. As Springer fumbled for another magazine, he cursed his fingers for not working faster, then he dropped the magazine in the dark water. He crouched to grab frantically for it, looking up in time to see the ripper drone live up to its name as it tore apart Deputy Watson with a flurry of claws and blades and teeth. His hands wrapped around the magazine and he slammed it into the slot, managing to rack the slide and cut loose on full-auto just as the creature was upon him.
The close-up fire riddled the monster with holes and sent it stumbling backwards, falling onto its back in the stinking water. Deputy Springer screamed as he kept firing, bearing down on the beast. Something had awoken inside him, and a primitive fury burned in his chest. He reloaded as fast as he could but saw that while he had managed to conduct himself, the majority of his deputies had not.
He watched as one of the garm organisms he'd learned was called a gorehound fired a bio-weapon at Deputy Lorne. Hundreds of tiny grubs flew through the half-light of the tunnel and pounded into the deputy's body. Those that did not splatter against her standard issue body armor chewed through her flesh and appeared to explode deep inside her. A marine blew the creature's head apart and then gestured at Springer.
"This way Deputy, we have to press on!" shouted the marine with the name Ajax on his chest, and Deputy Springer ran towards him, yelling for his men to follow.
As they rushed in to follow the marine down a side tunnel Deputy Springer looked back and to see that what had begun as a tight formation of marines had devolved into a chaotic free-for-all. The enemy was coming at them from all directions.
Springer swallowed hard and then turned to follow Ajax deeper into the tunnels.
DEATH AND DARKNESS
The marine never saw it coming.
He stalked his way down one of the many tunnels in the Tankrid underworld, the barrel of his pulse rifle still hot to the touch from furious use. The rest of his fire team lay dead in pieces somewhere behind him in the darkness. Fighting gorehounds face to face was indeed a messy affair, and the marine knew that it was by luck alone that he'd survived at all.
Communications were unreliable, and truth be told, the radio chatter was just a distraction at this point. The entire Einherjar front had devolved into a wild melee and it didn't seem like anyone knew what was going on. The marines were still getting used to being on the offensive, and fresh as he was in the role of aggressor, the marine knew they'd been drawn into a trap. The garm wanted them to come down here in full force, and waited until they were fully committed before attacking from all sides.
The strangeness of it was that the garm were just as bloodied by this fight as the marines, and if they were actually protecting a hive, this was the worst way to do so. The garm forces were just as smashed and disorganized as the marines. Where they should have been clustering together and protecting a central hive they were careening down the tunnels in a frenzy to find marine flesh. It made no sense.
So caught up in the madness of it, the marine did not notice the giant armored figure that slid upwards from the bottom of a sluice pit. Raw sewage ran down the monster's armor as it slowly stood to its full height. Movement to his left gave the marine cause to raise his rifle and follow it. In his sights he saw a wounded ripper drone limping down the tunnel, alone and berserk. It was dying, yet it came at him all the same. The marine lined up his shot and took the beast, yet before he could fully register his accomplishment a clawed hand gripped his helmet from above.
The hand wretched his face upwards to expose his throat, and another claw dug in between the seams in his armor. In seconds his esophagus was torn out and his veins sprayed arterial blood across the sewer walls. The armored figure let the marine's body fall to the ground, and then strode back down the passage from which the ripper drone had come. Soon the armored killer discovered evidence of the firefight that had left the drone wounded and alone.
Loki moved silently among the dead, his seven eyes taking in the sight of the slaughtered masses. He had known all along that it would come to this, but that foreknowledge brought him no comfort. Not unlike Odin himself, thought Loki as he picked his way over the ravaged corpses of marine and drone alike, who gained the awareness of all things. It brought the one-eyed god not a single measure of peace, Loki recalled as he knelt down and carefully observed the mandibles of a dead drone before slowly lifting them out of the punctured armor and flesh of a dead marine, and though it made the god Odin powerful, so too, did it make him the grimmest and most alone of his kind.
The wild uprising had done its job, and now the vast tunnel network had descended into bloody chaos. There were no battle lines now, only pockets of warriors fighting to survive against clutches of garm.
Loki was relieved not to have the burden of guiding the swarms upon his psychic shoulders. He now understood with perfect clarity just how great a task it was for the WarGarm to lead. Cut loose from the leash of his influence, the swarms of ripper drones and gorehounds rampaged through the underworld, their suicidal fury preventing the human forces from re-grouping, so focused were they on pure survival.
His keen senses warned him that several marines, a fire team, were moving down a tunnel close to the intersection ahead and Loki quickly thumbed the safety off his combo wea
pon. He reached up and grasped a pipe embedded into the ceiling and hefted himself upwards pressing flat against the ceiling. He used his powerful legs to hold himself in place, pushing against either end of the passage wall, using one hand to keep himself steady.
The Einherjar emerged from the tunnel and swept into the intersection, their armor covered in ichor and viscera from a previous conflict. Gorehounds by the stench of it. There were five of them in all, moving with tactical precision as they secured the intersection. The man nearest Loki looked up and saw the traitor who was partially hidden in the shadows. He raised his rifle, but before it was to his shoulder, Loki squeezed his own trigger, and spat several conventional rounds at the marine. The high velocity rounds would do little against the robust bodies of the garm, which was why they'd been replaced by the pulse rifles of the Einherjar. The rounds were, however, terribly effective in shattering the perpetually recycled combat armor of the marines.
The marine jerked backwards and fell with a splash into the knee-deep sewage at the bottom of the tunnel. For all their adaptations to combat against the garm, the marines had left themselves vulnerable to conventional weapons. No warrior could be perfectly suited for combat against all enemies, this much any man knew, and as the saviors of humanity, it had never entered their minds that they might have to battle their own.
The other marines fired on Loki's position, though he'd anticipated their counter-attack and let go of his hold on the walls. The warrior landed gracefully on the floor of the tunnel and drilled another marine with three tight bursts of fire from his combo weapon. As the marines adjusted their aim, the bolts from their weapons tore chunks of concrete and metal out of the walls, ceiling, and floor of the subterranean environment.
They were fast, each a consummate soldier, but they did not have the power of the garm, so as swiftly as they could adjust their aim, more easily was Loki able to evade their deadly salvos. The traitor leapt from the floor and drove a claw through the metal of a girder above so that he could twist his torso while swinging his legs around, bringing his weapon to bear as he avoided another burst of fire. This time, he pumped bolts from his pulse rifle into the half-light of the intersection. The first of the super-heated rounds crushed the marine’s armor and the rounds that followed blew apart his left thigh.
Space Marine Loki (Extinction Fleet Book 2) Page 13