by S. A. Lusher
And, of course, she kept catching glimpses of the bodies around her. Exposed intestines. Lidless eyes. Great, bloody wounds. Severed limbs.
Other, worse things.
It seemed to take ages, but she finally made it across the warehouse-sized room. She could hear the squelching noises of blood on her boots. She opened a door at the far end and stepped through it, grateful that the small room beyond looked like a simple transitional chamber. But who knew how many more chambers of horror they would have to endure? Callie steeled herself, trying to draw on her own inner strength and willpower she’d had to grow and harness and harden for years. If there was ever a time for it, it was now.
She saw an old terminal hooked into the wall in front of her and, after clearing the area, moved quickly over to it and booted it up. The others covered her as she spent a little while trying to navigate the menus and figure out what meant what. Eventually, she managed to get a working map of the underground system they currently found themselves within. She shuddered briefly when she saw how many huge rooms there were similar to the one they’d just passed through. There had to be a couple of dozen of them.
“There,” she said suddenly, latching onto it when she saw it. “There’s a central power nexus deeper in, not all that far from here. We get there, we kill it.” Part of her knew that that wouldn’t really put a definitive end to the atrocities committed here, a real end would happen when they killed the leader and probably blew this fucking place to hell. Although the more rational part of her hesitated at that thought. How many dead bodies were here to be identified? How many corpses could be shipped back to give families some peace?
Well, either way, she felt on fire right now, like her blood was boiling and she needed to fucking do something or she’d flip out.
“Study the map,” she said after she had memorized not only the path to the power core but from there to a way up and into the castle overhead.
Callie waited until they had all studied up, then led them out of the room and back into the horror of the meat machines.
* * * * *
“I see four,” Han murmured.
“Same...wait, there’s a fifth one.”
“I see it.”
The tram was surprisingly silent for how crappy it looked. They were crossing a hundred meter chasm between the rocky outcropping and the top of the castle. Han was on one knee, rifle raised, tracking targets.
They were maybe twenty five meters out.
“Eliminate them,” Allan said quietly.
Silenced shots began to whisper out. Allan let Han captain this particular part of the mission. He was a good shot, but Han was much better. At this distance, with the gentle swaying and constant movement of the tram, combined with the wind and the rain, Allan knew that he’d only screw it up. Han, on the other hand, landed five perfect headshots. Then a sixth and seventh one as two more techno-things came into view.
“Clear,” he murmured after another five silent seconds.
“Perfect. Let’s hope the rest of our infiltration goes so smoothly,” Allan replied.
The tram continued along its path and after another minute or so, came to rest at the station platform built for receiving it. Carefully, the pair slipped off the tram and onto the platform. Allan moved up to its edge and surveyed the area. The castle was pretty fucking huge and, as a result, had a massive roof of courtyards and towers and bridges, all sorts of fun places to play a deadly game of hide and seek in.
“I see an entrance,” Han said. He pointed.
Allan saw it too, and it was the only obvious entrance in sight. It was a good fifty meters away, across a pair of bridges and three open courtyards, the first of which was directly below them. Why a fucking castle? He wondered suddenly as he and Han made their way down from the platform into the first courtyard. He’d fought in all sorts of crazy ass environments, to be sure, many of them stranger than this, but there was something just so flat-out fucking weird about an old school, medieval castle. Especially staffed by these meat machines.
Keeping a sharp eye out as they hit the courtyard, Allan thought he saw movement somewhere high up and to the right.
“I think-”
A round seared past his faceplate, missing him by mere centimeters.
“Sniper!” Han snapped as he fired off a round. “Move!”
Allan thought it sounded strange to hear strain in his otherwise cultured and calm voice as they both scrambled for cover among the rooftop. He saw more movement and realized that Han had put a round through a techno’s forehead and it was toppling from its position on one of the towers. They found refuge behind a large, strange metalwork statue of what might have been an angel. It had wings, whatever it was.
“There’s more,” Han said, calmer now. He fired twice and two more bodies fell from places that Allan hadn’t even noticed, recessed niches hidden in shadows. He heard footfalls, lots of them, and peered around the statue.
There were a good dozen techno foot soldiers making their way across the bridge they had to cross. Perfect.
“I’ll get the troops, you get the snipers,” Allan said as he flipped to single-shot and leaned out from around the statue.
“Affirmative,” Han replied, and fired twice more.
Allan picked out the leader of the group, an ugly, malformed man in the tattered remains of some dark uniform, then squeezed the trigger. The armor-piercing round sliced through the open space at supersonic speeds, punched into the leader’s right eye and erupted out of the back in a plume of shredded red-black gore that sprayed the others behind it. The first one fell flat to the rooftop, as it had just cleared the bridge, and tripped up the one behind it. Perfect. Allan selected his next target and fired once more, felling it like a tree. And the one behind it, and the one behind the next one as well. Then a sniper’s round buried itself in the metal statue next to him and caused him to pull back, cursing. He waited, heard Han fire and a body fall, then resumed his assault.
But the remainder of the technos had gotten in now and were taking up positions among the places of opportunity in the courtyard. Cursing again, Allan began to take them out as quickly as he could. It fast became a game of duck-and-shoot, something he particularly hated playing because of how fucking dangerous it was, and after putting down four of the unfeeling, dead bastards he got frustrated and threw a grenade towards the largest concentration of them after cooking it for a couple of seconds. It hit dead on.
The blast sent shrapnel and pieces of meat and technology flying every which way. The remainder of them were scattered and dazed by the blast, and he and Han mopped them up. As the last corpse fell, they waited for twenty seconds, then stepped out from behind their cover. No more bullets came their way.
“I think we’re clear,” Allan said, heading for the first bridge.
“I will tentatively agree with this assessment,” Han replied.
Allan glanced at him. He could not yet tell if the man was making a joke or not. If he was, he was absolutely great at playing it deadpan.
They continued their journey.
* * * * *
Callie felt like they were making progress.
They’d cleared through more warehouse-sized rooms, blasting away about forty of the monstrous med-technos, the silent, dead men and women driven by power and mechanisms with surgical instruments attached to the stumps of their wrists, with cold, dead eyes fill of awful light and inhuman precision.
There were also more fighter meat machines showing up now. They were onto Callie and her squad of troublemakers. They’d put down somewhere north of twenty warriors now and she kept worrying that they were pushing their luck. How long until they ended up running into one of those big, mean ugly fuckers with a flamethrower? But based on the map she’d memorized, she knew that they were close to the power core, and also not all that far from a way up into the castle. In fact, it was just through this next doorway.
“You ready?” Callie asked, looking back at the others.
; They’d all gathered in another transitional room. Hollis, Pendleton, Hernandez and Shaw looked back at her, all of them ready for the killing fields again. Ready to complete their grim task. They all looked like hell, even Hernandez’s lust for bloodshed seemed dulled and muted in the face of such horrific atrocities.
“Then let’s get to it.”
Callie opened up the door and moved into the room, sweeping the area with her rifle. This room was another large, open space, not quite as big as the other areas they’d passed through, but it seemed larger because it wasn’t cluttered with rows upon rows of examination tables. It was an open area, the floors made of rusted, scraped metal, the ceiling a good twenty feet high. The whole area was dominated by a cylinder covered in glowing green lights that pulse slowly. The power core. It was waiting for them.
“Let’s take it out,” Callie said. “Anyone got an explosives left-”
She was interrupted as four doors spread out along the peripheral of the room suddenly snapped open. Out of each door stepped an elite guard. Callie took them in with quick glances, raising her rifle. She noticed that almost all of them were subtly different and at first, staring at them as they slowly began to advance on the squad, she didn’t know what those differences were. Then she had it. They were slightly different colors.
Two of them had a slight red hue to them, one was blue and the fourth and final one was a sickly green color.
What the hell did that mean?
What had the first one been? She thought it might have been red.
She and the others opened fire immediately, five streams of bullets stabbing out, shrieking through open air, trying to find their marks. Several of them connected, but didn’t seem to do enough damage at all. Well, at least Callie knew how to take these things down.
“Split up! Get around behind them! Shoot the tanks!” she called, running straight towards the nearest one, the one that had a blue tinge to it. She trusted the others to get the job done and hoped that she would have the luck and skill to do it herself without getting fried. Except, as she prepared to leap out of the way, when the elite guard raised its arms and aimed those black as midnight barrels straight at her, what came out wasn’t fire.
It was a thin blue-white mist that she instinctively knew was cold, colder than cold. Cold in the way subzero, polar regions in the dead of night with a windchill that shaved a good twenty or thirty degrees off were.
Colder than that, perhaps.
She began to feel the chill immediately through her suit as she dodged and opened fire, trying to knock the thing off balance. She could feel it sapping her strength. Tucking and rolling, Callie barely managed to get behind the creature and scramble to her feet before it could face her again. Seeing her opening, she opened fire on the twin tanks on the thing’s back. The bullets pierced it and they erupted, instantly freezing the creature into place and releasing waves of frost around it that made the floor slick with ice.
Callie shot it once more and it shattered, falling into a million pieces.
Almost at the same time, she heard as much as felt another explosion, this one accompanied by a rolling wave of intense heat. Perfect. As she recovered and moved to help the others, she heard a second explosion and saw another red-tinged elite guard detonate in a gushing spray of flames and meat and metal.
Okay, so far, so-
That was when it went wrong.
That was when Callie heard screaming. Agonized screaming. The horrific shrieks of someone dying a very painful death. She saw that Hernandez had taken on the fourth and final elite guard, and she was suffering for it. Instead of ice or fire jetting out of those barrels, it instead packed an even deadlier arsenal.
Acid.
Green, glowing acid had sprayed all over Hernandez and it was eating through her armor. Before she could let herself think better of it, Callie raised her rifle and pumped three rounds into Hernandez’s head. The screaming cut off in an instant and her melting corpse slumped to the deckplates. The room suddenly filled with vengeful screaming and the rattling of four guns that converged on the final remaining elite guard.
It had nowhere to go, nowhere to dodge, and thus fell under the combined pressure of the four rifles. This one fell without popping.
Nobody moved or spoke for a long moment. They were simply staring at what remained of Hernandez, which wasn’t much. That acid was seriously nasty shit. Callie closed her eyes for a moment, felt herself trembling in sick horror and white hot fury and some kind of stark wonder at the insanity of it all.
“Come on,” she made herself say, forcing her eyes open. “Let’s get this over with. I’ve got an idea,” she added.
They ended up hauling the elite guard’s corpse over to the power core. They managed to come up with one final cube of explosive, Hollis had held onto one just in case, and planted it on the tanks of acid on the thing’s back. Once it was in place, they left the room and made their way through the rest of the underground section, pausing only once as they reached the stairwell that would take them up into the castle proper to hit the detonator button. As they did, the lights dimmed, flickered and then died within a few seconds.
Callie felt no satisfaction, nothing but remorse and horror.
She led the way upstairs.
* * * * *
“You have got to be shitting me,” Allan whispered.
He stood before an old terminal in a narrow corridor a little ways into the castle. They’d had to murder another dozen or so meat machines on their way inside, but it was nothing he and Han couldn’t handle. As soon as they’d gotten in, they’d spent about ten minutes hunting down a terminal, trying to figure out where the hell this glorious leader of theirs was and how the hell to get to him. Instead, Allan found something a lot worse.
“What is it?” Han asked from behind him, still standing watch.
“There’s a killswitch program in effect. It’s set the local power reactor to go critical. We’ve got half an hour to shut it down,” Allan replied simply. “Let me get in touch with the others.” He activated his radio. “Callie? Hollis? Anyone there? We’ve got a problem.”
There was a pause, then Callie’s voice came back. She didn’t sound too good. “I’m here, Allan. What’s the problem?”
“The castle’s going to blow up in thirty minutes unless we find the override and hit it. Right now, Han and I are inside, at the top of the castle.”
“Where’s the override?” Callie asked, she still sounded miserable.
“Second story of the castle, near the center. I’m sending over a map. I think we’re both about equal distance away from it. What’s your situation?”
“We’re coming up out of the underground. Hernandez is dead.”
“Oh...god, I’m sorry,” Allan whispered, feeling cold horror seep through him. Another one of them dead, just like fucking that.
Just like that.
“Yeah, me too. We’ll meet you there.”
“Got it...I love you.”
“I love you, too, Allan.”
He heard the channel click as it closed and finished memorizing the map. Then he had Han memorize it for safety’s sake and they headed out.
CHAPTER 13
–Shutdown: Part Two–
The stairwell didn’t actually take them to the ground floor of the castle.
Instead, it deposited them into a smaller intermediary level in between the basement and the ground floor. It looked to Callie like it was supposed to be just a lot of storage, as they came up into a decent-sized, rectangular area with shelves and stacks of ancient metal crates lining the bare, water-stained concrete walls.
Her stomach was still roiling with cold, sick horror and fury at what she’d been forced to do, at losing another ally, another good soldier. Another life thrown away to shut down this craziness. So when a quartet of techno-terrorists stepped into the room from a door across the way, she was all too ready to take them down. She snapped her rifle up and popped off four shots, dropping them like r
ocks to sputter and twitch on the cold concrete floor. She began making her way across the room, keeping her rifle trained on the doorway.
Two more technos came in and two more went to the floor as what passed for their brains left their head in red-black sprays.
Callie made it to the door before more of them came and paused to give one a swift, hard kick before stepping over them and through the next door. A round seared past her and she snapped to the left and sprayed the area with gunfire as she spied another half-dozen meat puppets making their way down towards her. She got a few steps closer, keeping up a consistent rate of fire, and dropped to one knee to let someone get behind her and fire over her head. Two seconds later someone was firing over her, and she heard more gunfire as the others got into the corridor and began firing in the opposite direction.
Ten seconds went by and Callie’s gun clicked empty.
The last techno dropped and the gunfire fell away. Callie ejected the spent magazine and slapped a fresh one home, then waited, gun tucked tight to her shoulder. Ten more seconds went by. Nothing else stepped into the corridor.
“Clear,” she said, rising.
“Clear,” Hollis said behind her.
“Let’s get going.”
The rudimentary map Callie had memorized meant they had to continue down the left portion of this corridor. At its end was a doorway that led to another large, open area that was supposed to hold the way up and out. She just wanted out of here, wanted this to be over, wanted to be back on the Dauntless sleeping after a big meal and a long shower. She led the squad to the end of the corridor and hit the access button that opened the double-doors. They slid open, squealing slightly as they disappeared into their niches in the walls, revealing another open room with crates and shelves and tables along its peripheral.
And two more elite guards waiting for them.
These ones were another new breed, another fresh horror loosed onto them. What the hell did these ones do? They had a stark white, almost glowing, tinge to their skin and their glowing eyes and the metal that studded their bodies.