by S. A. Lusher
This wasn’t going to be easy.
Allan grabbed two of his grenades, primed them both and tossed them out, one after the other, in different directions. He could hear Shaw and Hernandez plinking away at the enemy’s position somewhere nearby too.
As soon as the twin explosions went off, Allan leaned out the same side, figuring they’d probably expect him to lean out the opposite side and took aim. This time he managed to put down four of the fuckers, and he could see that his other two squadmates were doing a lot of killing as well. But there were more of the meat puppets coming out of the tower, reinforcing the others. Allan kept at it, emptying his current magazine, pulling back into cover and slapping a fresh one in. As he leaned out to resume fire, he felt a few rounds punch into his chest. His armor held up but the impacts knocked the breath out of him, nonetheless.
Cursing and coughing, he fell back and waited. His tree was being shredded. It was thick, but how long would it hold up before it was no longer useful as cover? Looking around, Allan spied another tree nearby. He waited a few seconds, then dove at it, scrambling to get behind cover. Another few shots punched lances of pain into his legs as more bullets connected. He got behind the tree, waited, then leaned out and opened fire again.
The gun-play seemed to go on forever.
He went through three more magazines and another grenade before, abruptly, the gunfire stopped. Silence just began to fall when it was interrupted by a series of metal snaps. What the hell? That didn’t sound good.
“They’ve locked down the tower!” Hernandez called.
Cursing again, Allan poked his head out and looked around. He saw nothing now but bullet-riddled shacks and a big, inert block of gunmetal gray steel with a big dish sticking out the top. He moved cautiously into the opening, weapon at ready, wary of the corpses and the shacks. All the windows and doors on the tower had snapped closed with metal shutters. Suddenly, it didn’t seem quite as old and worn-down as it once had.
The three of them met at the tower and tried the front door.
“We’re not getting in here without some serious cutting tools, either digital cutting or physical cutting, and we have neither,” Shaw reported grimly.
“Fuck. Let’s see if there’s another way in,” Allan replied.
They made a slow circle of the tower, ever wary of a surprise attack, but there were no other entrances or exits. Once that was confirmed, they were briefly stymied. Allan looked around, trying to come up with an answer, there was always an answer, and his eyes fell upon a nearby shack. Well...maybe there was something in there. Cutting tools or explosives or something, anything they could be using.
“Split up, search the shacks for something useful,” he said.
Both women nodded and got to it. They spent fifteen minutes hunting through the half-dozen shacks that occupied the open space in the clearing before Shaw found something. She called to them over the comms channel.
They converged on her location and found her standing over a hole in the floor of one of the more intact shacks. Well, a hole with a hatch raised over it.
“Looks like we found a back door,” Hernandez said.
“I’ll go first,” Allan replied.
He let his rifle hang by its sling, looked dubiously down the hole, using his faceplate filter to cut through the darkness. Nothing but grainy green concrete and a ladder and, some twenty feet down, a dirty floor.
Great. Sighing, Allan began the climb down. He tried to keep looking down but there just wasn’t room. Of course. He loved descending blindly into dark holes. After hitting bottom, Allan dropped down, brought his weapon into play and looked around. Nothing but a wall behind him, ahead of him was a low concrete tunnel with rounded edges. Even with his vision filters, he saw only darkness after about ten feet.
But it was leading off in the direction of the comms tower, at least.
“Clear,” he said into his radio link.
He moved forward a little bit, both wanting to get out of their way and to scout the tunnel a little bit more. There could be anything down here, he realized all at once. His mind whipped through the things he had seen so far: the meat machines with their jerking limbs and glowing eyes, the eight foot horror with blades for arms, and finally the assassin creature. What else was out there? What other techno terrors were they dreaming up and putting together on bloody metal assembly lines? It was a question he kept coming back to.
Hernandez landed behind with a grunt.
“Well, this place sucks,” she muttered as she moved to join him.
“Yep,” Allan replied.
Shaw joined them a little bit later and they set off down the passageway, moving through the gloom, tensions slowly rising. Allan took point, his eyes constantly scanning their environment. More of the tunnel was slowly revealed as they walked forward, sliding in out of the darkness. It looked like the tunnel hadn’t been used in quite some time. He found himself wondering who even had built it or why, what purpose it served.
Not that it mattered now. It was serving them just fine.
They reached the other end without incident and some of the tension went out of him. He saw the corresponding ladder at the other end.
“I’ll go first,” he said.
Allan stepped up to the ladder, then suddenly threw himself backwards with a scream of furious terror as he heard a soft sound overhead.
His instincts had been correct.
Another one of the assassins dropped down onto the ground with soft unreality, landing so gently that it almost didn’t make a sound.
The trio opened fire. Allan thought the thing would have been easier to put down, it didn’t have nearly as much space to work with as the previous one, but it was like magic. As he fired from his position on the floor, the creature leaped up onto the ceiling and stuck to it. Then it began to crawl towards them like a giant spider. Swallowing his fear, Allan maintained his stream of fire, tracking the creature with his barrel. Shaw and Hernandez were backing up, pouring their own bullets into the mix, but none of them could hit it.
Allan rolled aside and scrambled to his feet as the assassin neared him. As he stood up, it dropped down in front of him. He reacted on pure, mindless instinct, shoving the barrel of his rifle into the thing’s face and squeezing the trigger.
The gun let out a hollow click.
Empty.
“Fuck!” he snapped.
The blade came up between them and sliced the gun in half like it was made of butter. He dropped the back half and backed away as quickly as he could. The assassin sliced at him and he felt the tip of the blade sheer down his armor, digging in a few centimeters. What the fuck was that thing made out of!?
“Allan! Drop!” Shaw called.
Allan let his legs go, falling backwards, and a whole hail of gunfire began ripping through the air. The assassin, who had been focused on him, suddenly found itself dancing the jerky jig of death as bullets ripped through its body. Several dozen of them smashed through flesh and bone and armor alike, and it collapsed to the floor.
“Thanks,” Allan said weakly, getting back up. He looked morosely at the two halves of his rifle, sighed and pulled out his pistol.
Like before, he put a shot through the thing’s creepy head.
“Not a problem,” Hernandez replied. She sounded more than a little on edge now.
They approached the ladder again, slowly, their apprehension much more obvious this time, but nothing leaped down at them. Allan took point once more and climbed up, staring as up as he could the whole time, which wasn’t much at all. He got to the top without incident and poked his head out. Nothing but an empty metal room.
“Looks clear,” he said, and hauled himself up out of the hole.
A moment later, Hernandez and Shaw were up there with him. They moved through the tower after that, slowly at first but picking up speed as they encountered no resistance. Eventually, they cleared the entire tower, finding nothing and no one. Apparently that assassin had been the last ma
n standing. Allan felt some relief, but not much.
Those things must be really good at hiding.
They took control of the communications system and after about five minutes, had everything set up. Allan stood before a large workstation taller than he was, staring at the various screens. Behind it was a huge metal shutter, covering a big window. Hernandez hung out near the back of the room, standing guard, and Shaw sat the controls.
“You’ve cut them off?” he asked.
She nodded tightly. “Yes, they’re cut off. And I’ve opened a line to your ship. It will take a little while to get there, though. This is old gear.”
“That’s fine, we’ve still got a lot of work ahead of us. It’ll be over one way or the other by the time they get here,” Allan replied.
Shaw got up and let him take the seat. He did so and recorded a quick report to Hawkins, updating him about the downed ship, the dead pilot and the fact that they’d need a ride out of here more than likely. He kept it brief, then sent it out.
“All right, let’s smash this shit so they can’t reactivate it,” Allan said.
They got to work.
CHAPTER 08
–The Only Good Defense–
They’d been walking for what seemed like a long time now.
Callie didn’t like the slow, insidious sensation that was slithering into her psyche as she pressed on and on and on through the alien jungle. It was a strange kind of feeling, a terrifying one, that she sometimes got when she’d been doing something pretty miserable for a long time. Other people got it, too, so she at least knew that she wasn’t alone in it.
It was the clear conviction that she would always be doing this.
That the alien jungle was never-ending, an emerald eternity, an infinite green hell where paranoia had a sharp, constant edge because there could be anything behind those trees or lurking up in the canopy or around the next bend in the natural paths they were following. If it went on for long enough, (who knew how long ‘long enough’ was), then Callie would begin to, in the more primal parts of her mind, question reality itself.
Why was she here?
Was her destination in a completely different direction? Or had she imagined it entirely? It was crazy, obviously, but the human mind was a crazy-ass place and it seemed to have a will of its own that took a perverse pleasure in mental torture. Callie had learned, over her career, to just ignore these thoughts and get the job done, and that always helped get her through it. But there were, she had learned, hedges against the darker thoughts.
Having other people with her, professional soldiers no less, helped a great deal.
Conversation went a long way towards helping as well.
Han was watching the rear guard, hanging a little ways back from her and Pendleton. Whenever she glanced back at Han, she always felt briefly startled. Even in power armor, there was something about the man that made him seem to disappear.
“How did you fall into your ‘jack-of-all-trades’ deal?” Callie asked.
Pendleton glanced over, his dark face largely unreadable behind the plate of glass. But he seemed to decide something, maybe that her question and interest were genuine, or at the very least polite, and he offered a small smile.
“I noticed, early on, that my brain is wired different from most other peoples’,” he replied.
“How so?”
“Most people, I think, although this is more true of men than of women, have...let’s say, linear minds. People tend to focus on one problem at a time. And they often take this linear nature to its logical end: a career. You see it in the military: medics, technicians, snipers, scouts, commanders. People tend to find what they are good at and get better at it. But it never quite worked that way for me. My brain tends to run on different tracks. It took a good...twenty five years or so, but I eventually realized that and began to bend it to my will. You see, I was a bit of a fuck-up in my youth. My mind tended to wander, it wandered everywhere, and it was difficult for me to focus on any one thing. So, naturally, my peers believed me stupid.”
“That’s gotta suck,” Callie muttered.
“Indeed. I managed to scrape my way through high school, and by then I realized that I had to do something. I liked computers a lot, so I took one of those tests to chart my intelligence in the field, you know, when the government or, really more honestly, the corporations are scouting for talent. I pretty much scored off the charts and several corporations basically threw scholarships at me. I took some medication to get my focus under control but...it sucked. I managed to get through college, grabbed a degree and went to work.
“But my mind kept wandering...well, eventually I lost my first job, then got another one, then lost it...this pattern kept up for a while. I’d let deadlines pass me by, let my work duties slip as I got into other things. Eventually, I decided that I needed myself some iron will. What better place for that than in the military? Long story short, I eventually managed to bend my mind to my will. Trained up in technology, medicine, demolitions, sniping, infiltration, piloting...”
“That’s a shitload of specialties.”
He nodded. “Well, I’ve had a while to learn. I was in the Marines for twenty years and I’ve been in Spec Ops for five now.”
Callie began to reply, but froze as she heard a familiar, deep, electronic growling. She raised her shotgun and swung left, towards the sound, but noticed that Pendleton had swung right. There were more than one, and they were attacking from multiple sides.
“What is it?” Pendleton asked softly.
“Metal dogs,” Callie whispered.
Pendleton began to respond but was cut off as the attack dogs sprang their trap. Callie watched as a red and silver construction of long, lithe horror burst from the foliage directly in front of her, its jaws open wide, paws up, claws out. It jumped right into her line of fire, all she had to do was squeeze the trigger, and she did.
Half the thing’s head disappeared in a plume of red-black gore that sprayed the surrounding area, standing out brilliantly on the green plant life. She wanted to simply side-step the beast, which was still flying at her, but then it would just slam into Pendleton, who was right behind her, having his own problems. Instead, she stepped forward and twisted, using her shoulder and her extra strength granted by the power armor to bash the corpse aside, changing its trajectory. She stumbled back a few steps, and then went down entirely as another one of them leaped onto her. She let out a sound of surprised terror as she found herself staring directly up into the meat-metal maw of the dog creature. It drooled black, oily saliva onto her faceplate.
Then a round punched through its skull, neatly and cleanly killing it in an instant. Yet again, Callie violently shoved the corpse off of her and scrambled to her feet. She caught sight of Han standing some ten feet away, two dead dog-things at his feet, a smoking rifle in hand. She turned and saw Pendleton finishing off another one.
“Dogs indeed,” he muttered, staring at the corpses he’d produced.
“Come on, we’re almost there,” Han said. Callie started slightly. She hadn’t heard him get any closer to them.
She nodded in agreement, cast one more uneasy glance at the metal-dog corpses strewn out across the dirt, the metal reflecting the brilliant bleached sunshine, the exposed red meat glistening wetly. She turned away and began walking.
* * * * *
They reached the valley floor a little while later.
Surprisingly, they didn’t run into anything else, though Callie felt sure that there was something out there. The tension was making her miserable. She was actually relieved when she began to see gunmetal gray through the trees up ahead.
They reached the perimeter of the base, which was in far, far better condition than anything else they’d come across so far. Definitely serious business. She supposed that made enough sense, given how important this installation was.
The plan was simple and very similar to the one she and Allan had pulled with the others back on that snowy moo
n.
Get in, plant bombs, get out. Morris had managed to salvage some explosives from the ship, since he’d already packed his pockets with them before hitting the pod, and they found some old explosive in that base they’d taken over. Morris had declared it useable, so he’d split the explosives up as much as he could between his group and Callie’s group. Unfortunately, Allan and his own pair of soldiers would have to get inventive.
The explosives were evenly distributed amongst them: they each had three of the little yellow bricks, and they were all keyed to a detonator.
“Okay, let’s split up and get inside,” Callie whispered softly.
Both Han and Pendleton responded affirmatively and disappeared into the dense foliage. Callie looked ahead of her, studying the structure. It was surrounded by a sturdy chain-link fence. The space within that fence was dominated by a three story brick of inert metal, no doubt the central nervous system of the defense network. Luckily for her there were about two dozen other structures sprinkled about in the no man’s land between the edge of that building and the chain-link. Plenty of places to play hide and seek.
She made her way up to the fence, pulled out a pair of mini bolt cutters she’d placed into her usual kit of equipment and quickly began snapping the links. It took about sixty seconds, but she cut a hole in the fence big enough for her to fit through and pushed herself past the chainlink. Once she was up, she put all her stealth skills to work, slowly making her way through the base. She slipped between a pair of buildings, moved down the alleyway and waited in the shadows. She switched to her SMG, it had a silence function that was going to be useful.
She made her way across an open area and into a building, where a pair of techno-things were hard at work unloading some crates. Callie lurked in the shadows, waiting to see if they would notice her or if anyone else would come in. At the count of thirty, she put them both down as quickly as she could, first one headshot, then another. They slumped to the floor. After another twenty seconds, she planted an explosive on the wall in the shadows where she’d been hidden, then moved forward, staring at the stuff they’d been unloading.