by S. A. Lusher
It was like cancer, waiting to happen.
It was a bad place, and a lot of bad things had happened there. Or maybe that was just her imagination.
“Silencers,” she said quietly. “The longer they don’t know we’re here, the better.”
With that in mind, she slipped in between a pair of houses and started working her way towards the center of the city. Her radio suddenly jolted to life.
“Callie, I’ve been thinking...” Allan murmured.
“Yeah?” she replied.
“There’s something wrong here. I mean, like, more than the obvious, more than the psycho-fuck meat machines we’ve been fighting so far. It’s little things.”
“Like what?” But she knew what he meant.
“Well...like the design of the things, for instance. There’s no rhyme or reason to it. It’s like someone just went nuts with a construction kit, slapping shit together without really thinking about it. There’s no...uniformity to anything. Or the fact that these guys don’t seem all that competent, but then, it’s like, sometimes they are. Sometimes they’re bumbling idiots, other times they’re lethal killing machines. And it’s just the general feeling. I mean, how the fuck did this situation even happen? Where’s this ReSequez been for the past hundred years, and why’s he back now? And why is he doing this!?”
“You have a lot of good points,” Callie replied. “I’m getting the same feeling. I don’t know what it is, but yeah, something is fucked here...you don’t have any ideas, do you?”
“No. Nothing. I mean, I guess it would make sense if ReSequez really was as crazy as they made him seem. If he cracked, then this would make more sense. A lot of sense, actually, in the sense that none of it would make sense because it’s fucking crazy. It’s almost like this whole operation is being run by someone who is really competent and skilled at doing something like this, but they’re crazy half the time, so it all gets fucked up.”
“Yeah...only...shit, I don’t know. I guess we’ll find out when we breach the castle, huh?”
“Yep.”
“And I bet it’s going to be ugly, whatever it is.”
“Yep.”
Callie paused. She heard movement somewhere up ahead. “Gotta go. Killing time.”
“Good luck.”
They’d made their way through several rows of what looked like really basic, tenement housing and now, as they crouched in the shadows of another pair of them, Callie saw that they were approaching the threshold into a different section of the city. From what little she could see, it seemed like there was a row of factories up ahead. There were also a trio of technos up there, walking in their jerky motions down the road.
“Come on,” Callie whispered.
She and the others moved quickly to the mouth of the alleyway, glanced around, saw only the three-man patrol and took aim.
“Drop them,” Callie murmured.
Three gunshots whispered out and made contact. Three headshots, three sprays of red-black gore. The bodies became corpses as what passed for life was knocked right out of them and they collapsed to the street.
“Let’s move.”
They crossed the street and slipped in between another pair of structures, these ones much, much larger. They were huge, monolithic things of corroded steel with very few windows. Callie peered briefly inside through one of the slit windows and saw only huge, complex pieces of machinery. It seemed to be a factory. How many of these were there? What were they planning on producing with all these factories?
Callie carefully approached the edge of the alleyway and peered out, left, then right. Another pair of technos were patrolling her way. She raised her rifle and capped one, then the other, dropping them as quickly as the others before them. They had to pick up the pace. One of the big rules she’d learned about stealth and infiltration right off the bat was the second you had to take someone out, a clock with an unknown timer began, a clock counting down the time until someone realized that a guard was missing, or found a corpse, or noticed something was wrong and raised the alarm. And the longer you went, the riskier it became.
She led her squad in between the factories as quickly as she could, taking down technos where she found them and when she was able. Somehow, by some miracle, they managed to reach the command center in the middle of town without incident. It occupied a structure like a big brick stood on end, a cold monolith that looked much cleaner and slicker than everything else in the abandoned settlement. A couple of dozen technos patrolled in the streets surrounding control building. Callie began picking out targets of opportunity automatically as she crouched behind an old trash receptacle. Hernandez was at her side, Shaw and Pendleton were elsewhere, Pendleton having gone into one of the nearby buildings to get onto the roof.
“We’re in position, ready when you are,” Allan said softly ten seconds later.
“We’re ready. Go.”
“Going.”
Whispering gunshots suddenly opened up from seven different directions. Immediately, meat machines began to drop, one by one, as all seven of them opened fire, switching quickly between targets. Nearly two dozen were dead before they began to react. But they did react, in force. Callie ducked down as some began to return fire. She leaned around the other side and began picking out new targets. Unfortunately, as she did this, she spied the front doors to the command center slide open. A dozen technos poured out, then two dozen.
“Backup is coming in from behind us!” Pendleton warned from his high up position.
Callie cursed and turned around just in time to spy a trio of technos coming into the alleyway behind her. She aimed and fired, popping off four shots and getting three headshots. She waited and, when no more came, she turned back around and began taking down as many of the fuckers as she could in as short a time as possible. One went down, then two, three, four. The bullets slammed in and their red-black blood sprayed out, popping their ugly, tech-ridden heads, causing them to snap back and collapse into a heap of sparking limbs.
As Callie ducked down to reload, she glanced back the way they’d come and her eyes nearly bulged out of her skull. Four more enemies were rounding the corner. Almost without thinking about it, she snagged a grenade, activated it and hurled it their way. They began to open fire as it sailed for them and her position was peppered with gunfire. As Callie began to raise her rifle and return fire, the grenade hit its mark and exploded.
The four technos disappeared in fire, metal fragments and gushing sprays of shredded gore. Callie waited for a few seconds, saw that nothing else was coming that way, at least for now, and got back into the action. As she came up from behind the trash receptacle again, Hernandez still rattling away at her side, taking down everything in sight, Callie saw that there were a good fifty or sixty bodies out there now, and the tide seemed to be stopping.
Was this battle almost over?
Even as the thought passed through her mind, she began to hear as much as feel a low thudding sound. It was getting closer. Quickly.
What now?
“Uh, guys...holy shit!” Pendleton called out.
His sentence was punctuated by a great, thunderous eruption. Callie only had a view of the immediate area beyond the mouth of the alley. From her perspective, suddenly, a great geyser of metal and other debris exploded from the left.
Something had arrived.
“What is it?!” she called up to him.
“It’s a big fucking spider!” Pendleton screamed back at her. He was so loud she could actually hear him from up top.
“Take it down! Take it down!” Allan was shouting.
The first huge leg appeared in her field of vision, slamming down in the mouth of the alleyway. Cold terror flooded her body, but her muscles wouldn’t let her panic. She felt her arms raise up, felt her finger tighten on the trigger as she drew a bead on the thing and opened fire. Callie pelted it with round after round, and beside her, Hernandez was screaming and spraying it down as well, putting as many armor-piercing rounds i
nto the immense leg as possible. Then the leg shifted, and the spider moved forward, bringing its full body into view.
It was huge.
It had to be a good twenty feet tall. It was a horrific construction of flesh and metal, and like the other things occupying this miserable jungle world, it was built seemingly without coherency, beyond the simple desire by the builder to make it resemble a giant fucking spider. While her brain was trying to comprehend this house-sized menace of bloody steel and raw, exposed meat and wiring and blinking lights, the spider was reacting to her and Hernandez’s assault with an assault of its own. It flicked one leg out into the trash receptacle.
Callie barely had time to throw herself out of the way.
Hernandez didn’t.
Callie didn’t have time to see if she was alive or dead as both her and the receptacle went flying back down the alleyway. Stumbling to her feet, she raised her rifle, aimed for the central mass and squeezed the trigger, emptying the rest of the current magazine and slapping a fresh one in. She saw an opportunity to get out of the alleyway as the spider took more interest in Pendleton, who was opening fire on it from up above, (although it was more like eye-level for the spider), and took it, rushing out of the alleyway and sprinting to the left, from where the spider had originally come from. She spied the smoking remains of two structures through which it had burst out of. As soon as she was away, she spun around.
For a few seconds, she simply stood there and stared at the big beast, stymied, wondering how the fuck they were going to take it down. They were pouring rounds into it and it didn’t seem to be slowing it down, all they had on them were rifles and grenades-
“Pendleton! Get a grenade on it! Hit something sensitive!” she shouted.
Pendleton chose to respond by doing. Four seconds later, an explosion ruptured atop the spider, causing it to stumble and issue a shockingly loud, electronic roar of pain and fury. Okay, so apparently that worked.
“More grenades!” Callie called.
She pulled out one of her own, activated it, cooked it for a couple seconds and then threw it directly up at the underside of the spider. She clenched her fist and grinned viciously as she saw that her aim and timing had been perfect. A brilliant red-orange burst of fire and metal shrapnel tore into the underbelly of the spider creature. A rain of blood and twisted metal fell from it and it staggered, screaming again.
It suddenly brought one leg up and around, and took out the entire third story of the building Pendleton had been standing atop. He screamed as he fell into the collapsing structure. Cursing, Callie took out her second to last grenade and repeated the process at the same time that Allan, Han, Hollis and Shaw were throwing theirs.
The resulting chain of explosions overwhelmed the spider and by the time the smoke cleared, the thing was nothing more than a twitching, sparking heap taking up most of the road. Almost as soon as they confirmed it was dead, everyone was converging on the collapsing building. “Go get Hernandez!” Hollis called as he, Allan and Han went into the ruins of the structure. “We’ll get Pendleton!” Callie and Shaw headed for Hernandez.
It took ten minutes, but they managed to dig both of them out of the rubble. They were basically unharmed, although Hernandez took a little while before her eyes were tracking properly again, as she’d taken a pretty hard hit to the head. She’d wanted to keep moving, but Shaw had forced her to take a seat and get her breath back. After they were sure both of them were healthy and breathing, the group moved into central command.
It took another twenty minutes to clear the structure, and once it was clear, they gathered in what appeared to be the main nerve center. Pendleton sat down before a huge bank of monitors attached to a large workstation. Callie found herself in a dazed state as she kept watch on the street below them. It was a miracle that none of them had been killed or seriously injured by that giant monster. But the more the seconds ticked by, the stronger the conviction grew that they were using up their good luck, and soon their bad luck would catch up to them.
“Okay,” Pendleton said. “More news that you’re just going to love. We’ve got three ways into the castle and I think we should exploit every single one of them.” He had called up a representation of the castle and the immediate area on the screen wall. “The first one is up top. Whoever goes up there will have to make their way up through a cave system and then take a cart across a chasm to get onto the roof. The other two are underground. One is an old mine and the other is a maintenance access hatch. How do we want to do this?”
Allan sighed. “I’ll take the roof. Who’s best with long-range warfare?” he asked.
“I am,” Han replied quietly, stepping forward.
“Then you’re with me.”
“I guess I’ll hit the mine area. Who wants to be my backup?” Callie asked.
“I’ll go with you,” Hernandez replied.
“Then I guess that leaves us with the maintenance hatchway,” Hollis said, glancing at Shaw and Pendleton.
“Raid this place for whatever guns and ammo you can find, then we’ll split up. Whoever gets into the castle first is to hack into whatever passes for a local network, find a map and piece together the most likely locations for ReSequez, then we take his ass out,” Allan said.
There were a string of affirmative replies and they started preparing for the last leg of this journey.
CHAPTER 11
–Infiltration–
It was darker.
Allan had hardly even noticed, but now it was so obvious that he couldn’t ignore it. It was definitely darker. Was day just really short on this planet? No, he thought, looking up as he and Han made their way carefully out of the ruined city, it was just getting ready to rain. Storm clouds were rolling in smoothly, swallowing the sun and the sky in dead silence. It was definitely going to rain. Even on the heels of this thought, thunder rumbled somewhere in the distance, growing closer. Lightning forked the sky beyond the mountain range.
He and Han had been keeping a low profile after that fight with the giant spider and the small army that had been guarding the command center. So far, it had been working, probably mainly because Han was so fucking quiet. Allan wasn’t sure if he’d ever heard anyone who moved so silently, so dexterously, in a suit of power armor. It was kind of creepy, but Allan was more than grateful to have someone like him backing him up.
He realized that they were nearing the edge of the settlement. Up ahead, at the end of the street they were slinking along, the cityscape gave way to nature once more. He spied a sloping landscape that would lead the pair of them up and into the cave system that would ultimately take them to the roof of the castle. He paused at the base of the natural incline as he came to it, staring up. Dead ahead, maybe fifty meters up, he could see the dark maw that represented the entrance to those very cave systems.
Fantastic, he just loved walking into pitch black caves.
He took a moment to check the immediate area for signs of life, found none and started the next leg of his journey.
“So, Han, you ever fight anything this weird before?” Allan asked. It was the only thing he could think of to say and he needed to say something to break up the tension that was beginning to smother him as they approached the cave.
“No, nothing like this,” Han replied quietly.
“Anything really interesting in your career?”
“A few things. I suppose the closest I’ve ever come to fighting something like this was what appeared to be some kind of battle android. I was stationed as security in a top secret research facility about five years ago. The military had discovered an old Cyr cache while setting up an outpost on a distant moon. They converted the outpost into a research site and called in Spec Ops to run security. For about two months, there was nothing. Then, one night, they managed to turn it on...and couldn’t figure out how to turn the damned thing off. It killed almost everyone in that base. We tried a lot to kill it, nothing seemed to work.”
“So how did you stop it?�
�� Allan asked.
“Well, they hit it with EMPs right away, and it didn’t stop the thing, so they gave up on that, but I tried a few myself and I noticed that it seemed to slow the thing down. In fact, it was slower with each EMP burst, so it was really just a matter of hitting it with enough EMP grenades. We didn’t find that out until near the end, and by then most of the base personnel were dead.”
“Jesus...sorry.”
“As am I. It was tragic, but I can safely say that it was certainly an interesting creature. How about yourself? What else have you faced down in your strange career?”
“Well...the strangest thing I ever faced were these shadow creatures. They were like...well, honestly, they were basically just shadows. If they touched you, even through armor, you would become a skeleton. All of your meat, flesh, hair, organs...all of it, gone in a nanosecond. That was a pretty bad time.”
“I...see. I have to admit, if we weren’t working together in such a capacity as we are now, I probably wouldn’t believe that. It’s...”
“Extremely farfetched, believe me, I know. I still have a hard time believing it myself. I also have a hard time believing I made it out alive. That was one seriously creepy situation. Still have no idea what they were or why they were.”
“It would be very interesting to find out,” Han replied.
Allan nodded. They were at the entrance of the cave now. Pausing, he turned to look back the way they had come, and was given a broad view of the vast vista below them. The dense, violently green foliage spread out away from them like a sea for seemingly infinite miles, stretching from horizon to horizon, broken only by the mountains and the settlement. Despite all the horror that had occurred so far, all the blood shed in this miserable place, Allan couldn’t help but feel that it really was a beautiful place, in a grim kind of way.