by S. A. Lusher
“God, I’d kill for a fucking taco,” he muttered.
“Here, here,” Hollis said, and laughed. “Or at least a bottle of something strong.”
“We get out of here, I’m buying,” Allan replied.
“I’ve got something,” Pendleton said.
Allan began struggling to his feet and when Callie saw he really meant it, she leaned down and helped him instead of trying to keep him there. They all gathered around Pendleton at the other side of the room.
“What is it?” Allan asked.
“Based on a few different things, I’ve got two likely locations as to where their glorious leader might be, if he’s even still here. This system is old, fucked up and half-broken, so I’m doing the best I can here.”
“Where?” Allan asked impatiently.
“First likely location is here in the castle, up a level, on the west side. The other location is outside of the castle, out the back and down through a tunnel into a cavern, it looks like. I have no way to tell which is more likely.”
“Fuck it, we’ll split up,” Allan said. He turned, limped across the room, grabbed his helmet and pulled it on. “Hollis, you’re with me. We’ve got the exterior.” He looked directly at Callie. “Callie, you take Shaw and Pendleton, you’ve got the interior.”
She stared back at him. His expression was hard, grim and bleak. Reluctantly, she nodded. She didn’t want to let him out of her sight, she suddenly had the conviction that she shouldn’t, that she should argue with him, convince him to stay with her, or maybe, god forbid, even send the others to the exterior while he stayed with her. But that would be wrong, and they didn’t have time, and she was probably just being paranoid.
They had a job to do, and they were so close to finishing it.
Callie nodded tightly. “Let’s go,” she said.
They were so close.
CHAPTER 14
–Glorious Leader–
One more battle.
One last fight.
Or so Callie hoped. She had watched Allan leave the command center with Hollis, that feeling of slow horror and cold misery unabated, and made herself lead Shaw and Pendleton out of the room as well, intent on completing her own task as quickly as possible. She moved swiftly down a lengthy stonework corridor, passing several barred windows smeared with gray sunlight and rainwater, most of them leaking. She made herself slow down, made her mind clear. She needed to be sharp, focused and quicksilver for this last run.
The corridor she was in was coming to an end. She’d memorized the map to the first of the most likely locations. Down this corridor, through a couple of large, unmarked rooms, up a stairwell, down another two corridors and then she should be there, but the map had been more than a little strange. Well, when all else failed, improvise. She’d gotten fairly good at that. Callie came up to the door at the end of the hall, waited, listened. She heard nothing on the other side, though that didn’t necessarily mean there wasn’t anything there.
Well, they couldn’t wait around forever.
She opened the door and peered cautiously in gun-first. The room beyond was a strange configuration of long gray stonework with huge, interlocking cogs slowly grinding away along most of the walls and what appeared to be another one of those meat machine creation plants that they had begun to set up but abandoned midway for some reason. Tables were set in seemingly random locations across the broad room, their tops scattered with tools, parts and pieces of human beings. Hands, fingers, random chunks of flesh.
She thought she saw a heart at one point.
But the room was otherwise unoccupied, and the blood was long-dried. It looked like no one had been here for days at least, maybe longer. Why? Who cared? Callie began making her way through the haphazard mess of the surgical tables, ignoring the horror that covered them. All she had to do was get to the other side of the room and pass through the door there. Hopefully whatever was in the next room wouldn’t be like-
Callie heard a soft click from somewhere overhead.
Roughly a quarter of a second later, a powerful metallic whirring sounded that quickly doubled and grew louder.
“Contact!” Pendleton screamed.
Callie was already spinning around, having determined that whatever it was, it was coming down from the ceiling behind her. She stared up in numb horror as an impossible contraption finished its descent and landed among the tables and the pieces of corpses. It was very tall, easily nine feet high, and incredibly thin, spindly, with very long, multi-jointed limbs. And on the end of these limbs were large, gleaming metal buzzsaws. They had whirled to life and they were all Callie saw. She watched, even as she raised her gun to get the jump on this thing, as it extended one buzzsaw and whipped around in a blur.
The saw connected with Shaw’s neck and cut through armor, flesh and bone and came back out the other side in a tremendous spray of blood in less than two seconds. Callie heard herself scream as she watched Shaw’s head fly away from her body, which took a few stumbling steps backwards, limbs jerking crazily, a few shots going off as her nerves worked, and then the corpse collapsed as blood continued spraying from the stump of the neck. Callie kept screaming as she began throwing out rounds, hosing the tall thing down with hot lead.
Pendleton was screaming and firing too.
Both of them backed away, keeping out of the monster’s long reach. Even as she took a step back, the beast whipped back around and tried to decapitate her, too. The buzzsaw came within inches of her neck and she could hear its mad buzzing. She adjusted her aim and fired the remaining bullets in her magazine at the thing’s shoulder, trying to do some damage. The last three-round burst connected with its intended target.
Sparks and red-black fluid spurt from the wound she’d torn open with the armor-piercing rounds and the thing’s right arm abruptly went slack. This didn’t seem to bother it a bit, however, as it brought its left arm up and around towards Pendleton. He barely managed to dodge it and as he did, jerking back out of the way, he finished throwing the grenade he’d been priming and called out a warning. Callie fell back several steps, barely making it out of the blast radius as the grenade detonated and slapping a fresh magazine in. The resulting explosion sent the tall, spindly thing flying the whole length of the room. Callie tracked it with her rifle and as soon as it hit the far wall and slumped into a tangled pile of limbs on the floor, she opened fire again.
Pendleton joined her and soon the thing was jerking and twitching madly as fluid and sparks escaped its chromed and decayed body. They each emptied an entire magazine into it, ejected the spent magazines, slapped fresh ones in and waited. The techno-terror didn’t move an inch. Callie stared at it for another ten seconds before finally letting her barrel down slightly. What was it with these fucking things they always ran into and ceilings? And why hadn’t they learned to check the goddamned ceilings yet? She glanced up.
The ceiling was high, vaulted and hidden in shadows.
She sighed and began sluggishly moving over to what remained of Shaw. She looked first at the body, then at the head. As she knelt and began to pat the woman down for supplies, spare bullets and grenades, she thought of Greg. The technology did exist to reattach a severed head with a fairly high success rate. However, the conditions actually leading up to that were fairly unreasonable. You had to begin the procedure within a couple of minutes at most, and that was really pushing it. You also needed a great deal of equipment and supplies.
Wordlessly, she rose as she finished gathering what supplies Shaw had had left on her. She felt a cold lethargy beginning to slide over her as she and Pendleton left the makeshift slaughterhouse. She was exhausted, thirsty, starving and in a lot of pain, both physically and emotionally. Watching people die had never gotten easier, she’d only gotten incrementally better at dealing with it. She just wanted this to be fucking over.
Tiredly pushing aside all her thoughts and her emotions and her lethargy, Callie led the way into the next room.
She and Pendleto
n managed to make it across that room and partway into the next one before they fell under fire again. This time, they found themselves facing easily two dozen meat machines. Callie felt something come down like a hammer inside of her, some driving instinct, some primal, basic thing locking down hard over her mind and her body.
Raising her rifle, she took aim and put a three-round burst through the head of the nearest meat machine.
And then she did it again, and again, and again.
Callie entered a kind of haze as she moved, dodged, ducked, got behind cover, rose, fired, ducked, fired again, reloaded, kept going, gained ground and fell back. Meat machines fell before her, things of decayed flesh and gleaming chrome and glowing eyes, things that withered and died before her furious assault. Time seemed to lose meaning, everything seemed to fall away as she entered a red fugue, and there was only the killing and killing and killing. Something was scoring her kills like a digital clock-face inside of her head.
A dozen fell.
Two dozen.
At some point, she ran out of ammo for her rifle, dropped it without a second thought and switched to her pistol, which gave her more maneuverability. She put down more of them, cutting a bloody path to her destination, vaguely aware of Pendleton at her side, helping her carve through this inhuman, unfeeling tide monsters.
At some point, the last one fell, and there were no more.
And the fugue began to lift.
Callie groaned, suddenly feeling the tremendous strain she’d just put her body through. Her mission clock indicated that they’d been at almost non-stop murder for a good fifteen minutes. Maybe not that long for other activities, but to be going as hard and as fast as you possibly could continuously for that long...her muscles ached and her head pounded thickly with pain. She realized she was at the end of a long corridor.
Looking back, she saw about twenty dead technos strung up and down the passageway, the walls and floor spattered with red-black fluid.
“Jesus,” she muttered.
“Yeah, we really cleaned house,” Pendleton replied, standing beside her, looking down the length of the corridor with her. “I think-”
There was the sound of a gunshot, then of shattering glass and suddenly Pendleton was falling, silent, murdered.
Callie locked her gaze on one of the technos she’d thought had been dead, a badly mangled man half-covered in dirty metal, bleeding from half a dozen wounds, a spark of awful life still lingering, and once again she saw red. Not just a red haze or a red fugue but a world of red, and then she was running, screaming, abandoning her pistol.
She didn’t want to shoot this thing, she wanted to rip it apart with her bare hands. The world around her seemed to fade in and out as she leaped onto the thing, screaming at the top of her lungs, grabbing and ripping and tearing and breaking, her power armor granting her extra strength. And when she came back to herself, she was crying and screaming, her voice raw, punching the thing’s head into a bony paste, her fists sore and covered with red-black blood and oil. She fell silent and her arms dangled at her sides.
For a long moment, Callie simply sat there. She felt drained, totally empty, like her brain had overloaded and needed to reboot. Military discipline and years of fighting didn’t let her stay like that for long. Hauling herself up, Callie retrieved her pistol, then moved slowly over to Pendleton. She frowned, felt a tremor of fury and immense sorrow ripple through her, and then she dropped to her knees and patted him down just as she had done with Shaw not twenty minutes ago. How could this have happened?
They were right there, right fucking there, and he’d died because of a fucking lucky shot from a half-dead techno.
How was that, in any way, fair?
It wasn’t, because nothing was fair, it just was what it was. Shaw and Pendleton and all the others were dead and she wasn’t, so that meant she had to carry on, she and Allan and Hollis. She wondered how they were doing. Standing up, Callie moved through the final door. It was big and metal and at first she thought it would be locked, because it almost resembled a vault door, but it wasn’t locked. It opened with ease the second she pushed the button next to it. A thin gray fog began to spill out as soon as the door slid open.
Callie looked across the room, frowning, feeling like something was off. It wasn’t very large, and its walls were covered completely in all manner of high-tech gear and equipment, or what would have been high-tech over a century ago, and all of this was centered around some kind of rectangular pedestal in the very center of the room. All sorts of wires and cables and tubes ran to and from it, some very thin, others almost as thick as her wrist. The top of the pedestal was made of glass, she saw, though it was frosted over.
Callie carefully walked forward.
She came to stand beside the pedestal and looked down into it, but the frost was too thick. She spent a minute wiping it away.
A gaunt, skeletal face was revealed, staring up at her.
Callie gasped in surprise, felt her heart jump a little, but she made herself scrape the frost off further, revealing more of the withered, pallid thing within. It was the hair that gave it away, hair that looked like a great gray wig, but she could see it in the face, too. There was just enough of it left that let her know she was looking at the great, late Werner ReSequez Esquire the Third. Except that...he had clearly been dead for quite a while.
A long while.
For a moment, everything else fell away completely, even her fury, and she was left utterly stymied, mired in pure confusion.
If ReSequez was dead, long dead, then who in the fuck had been pulling the strings here?
Her attention was called to a silently flashing display. She looked over and saw that there was a big workstation in the midst of all this technology, built around ReSequez’s cryogenic coffin like a temple, and she went to it, sitting down heavily in the chair that creaked dangerously for a moment, but held together.
Callie realized, as she activated the screen before her, that she had access to the castle’s private internal database.
She began digging.
She found ReSequez’s private journal and skipped to the end, past his rise through the military, past his campaigns and conquests, past his disillusion with the government, his rebellion, his slow descent into madness, past his great exodus beyond the Far Reach. (Would he be proud, she wondered, to know that even now, over a century later, the Far Reach still didn’t extend to encompass the strange, vibrant jungle world he’d settled on?), and past the settling of that world. She wanted to know what had happened at the end.
Then she had it, the truth.
At least, the truth as to why ReSequez had gone into cryogenic storage. He’d claimed, in his righteous, maddened spiels (of which there were many recordings), that they were to freeze themselves, that they might be forgotten by society and that they would rise up in the future to launch an attack on an unsuspecting government, and that the machines he left behind would build them an army while they slept.
The reality was that he was dying of a disease there was no known cure for, and he had hoped to freeze himself long enough to find such a cure in the future. Obviously, that had never panned out. That was his last entry.
So what the fuck was happening now?
Callie switched over to the automated updates the machines running the castle gave. For months, then years, then decades, there was nothing of interest. Just the same reports over and over again with the occasional hiccups.
Then, something had happened, and it was very recently, too. About a year ago something new had entered the systems. She didn’t know how or why, what it was or from where it came, but as soon as it infiltrated the castle’s systems, things started to get weird and buggy and strange. The machines meant to tend to the castle suddenly started pulling people from cryo sleep and turning them into the horrors that she now saw. And eventually they began raiding the outlying colonies for supplies. So what was this mysterious entity?
Callie activated her radio
.
“Allan, something’s wrong. ReSequez is dead, something else is running the show...Allan? Allan, are you there? Can you hear me?”
But Allan didn’t respond.
* * * * *
“I hear something.”
Allan and Hollis both froze, looking around. They had made good progress, running into almost no one or nothing, just a few simple worker technos that were easy to kill, and they’d only run into those while still in the castle. After making it outside, back into the rain and the washed-out gray sunlight, they’d made their way across a huge, overgrown garden, long since left to the elements, and into a shed that granted access to the underground.
That was where they were now, making their way slowly but surely through a series of dark, dead caves and tunnels. There were recent tracks in the dirt floor, a lot of them, all leading to the same place: the location they were currently heading towards. They’d been progressing for about five minutes through the dark silence now when suddenly that silence had been broken. Allan had heard something, somewhere up ahead, he thought, but there were a lot of side tunnels, so it could have come from beside or perhaps even behind them.
He didn’t know what it was, the sound had been lost in the echo, but he was far from willing to take any chances.
“It’s gone now,” he muttered. “But stay sharp.”
“Affirmative,” Hollis replied. He sounded tired and grim.
They kept going. Based on what he’d seen, they were maybe fifty meters away from the cavern where the large, strange power source was coming from. Not a great deal of distance, but it sure seemed like it when you were in pain, underground and potentially being hunted by something inhuman. Allan didn’t quite like his odds if they ran into something big and nasty like the metal giant Han had given his life to kill. A lot of him hurt and his vision became blurry sometimes and, on top of all that, he’d developed a limp.
Definitely a bad situation.