Before she blacked out, she noticed that her left arm was listed as red with a mark through it.
The drugs hit her system and helped her body not go into total shock. She had a passing thought as her thoughts dimmed.
“I’ve lost my arm.”
—
“Move, Bitches.” The command came from Bethany Anne and she and her team, who had been holding steady up at the top of the cave out of sight, dropped down quickly holding on to the grav carriers. Then, twenty feet from the floor they let go.
Seven bodies, encased in the world’s most advanced mechanized armor, dropped into the midst of the defenders with Bethany Anne landing just to the side of the hallway opening.
Goowek had been watching to see if he could get another shot at the two Yollins who had disappeared behind the rock on his left. He didn’t have enough power to shoot indiscriminately.
He barely had time to register the deep red armored person before his head exploded.
Fractions of a second later, his five team members had also been targeted and killed.
“Kiel!” Bethany Anne called out.
“Here,” came back his voice over the comm.
“How is Bo’cha’tien?” she asked. She looked to her left, a man was pulling up a pistol to shoot her. She reached down and grabbed it out of his hand. Crumpling it up, she tossed it away. He reached back for the rifle he had been using a moment before and she reached down to her leg. She issued a command, one piece separated. She used the armor sized Wakizashi to cut the man’s head off before she reattached the sword. “Stupid ass,” she muttered as she walked towards the elevator.
Kiel came back, “She will live, but the weapon disintegrated her whole arm.”
“No shit?” Bethany Anne asked, then turned around and walked back to the first alien. She bent down and picked up the weapon the alien had used. She pushed it into the Etheric.
Walking back to the five other bodies, she picked up every one of their weapons and pushed them into the Etheric as well. Better to not leave this technology hanging around.
“Folks,” she put out over the radio, “the little gray guys have something that will disintegrate you, so if you see one of those, put them down fast. Grab the weapon, I want them for R&D.” She switched to the command channel, “You got that, Dan?”
Dan’s voice came back, “Watch out for the little gray guys, their weapons will atomize you.”
“That’s right. We have a Yollin down, she’s missing her arm,” Bethany Anne said. “So, let’s get this going but make sure everyone is super careful.”
“John’s going to be particularly happy about this,” Dan quipped.
Bethany Anne thought about it. “You know, that’s not a bad suggestion.”
He agreed, “I know, it’s why you pay me the big bucks, Bethany Anne.”
She watched as her guys took a few moments to check everything out and get their stuff back together. “Okay, bring up the teams, Dan.”
“We have a problem with entrance three,” he said.
“What problem?”
“Their paths are totally blocked by explosives. We’re pulling them out, putting up a Puck curtain and moving them around to entrance two at this time, but they’ll be a couple of minutes behind.”
“Any change on the Pods flying in here for cover?”
“Nope, we still have something messing up the computers on the Pods, until that stops, we continue to be stuck.”
Bethany Anne turned and looked at the elevator. “It’s like the damned scene in Star Wars where we have to turn off the tractor beam,” she huffed. “Okay, keep them coming, we have to deal with this elevator.”
“Good luck,” Dan said and closed the connection.
Bethany Anne looked at her guys. “Who’s feeling lucky?”
All of the guys started looking back and forth at each other as Kiel came walking up. Now, she had seven males from two species looking back at her.
“Okay, anyone who wants to volunteer, take a step forward,” she said.
Six sets of feet shuffled one step backwards.
Kiel turned and looked behind him at the guys all smiling. He turned back around to see Bethany Anne smiling at him as well.
Except, her smile seemed just a touch malicious.
Kiel looked down at his feet, and then everyone else’s feet and realized he was now in front of everyone. He turned back to Bethany Anne. “I want it on the record that I have been screwed.”
Bethany Anne reached out to him. “Sorry, I can only take one more with me and you just volunteered.”
“Take me whe…” the Yollin got out before they both disappeared.
The humans all laughed softly in the sudden silence before they spread out to make sure no one took them by surprise.
CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT
The MJ-12 operations room was full of people. Patrick had a team watching all video cameras, but really focusing on the ones that showed the elevator and elevator shaft. More of his people were busy setting up explosives they could drop down the elevator shaft.
The final descent into the bottom landing field was through one hundred and twenty feet of damn near impregnable rock.
Patrick’s eyes narrowed and he hit the buttons to switch through the video streams from outside. So far, TQB had destroyed twelve of their cameras, but they still had four in operation.
TQB had not brought along any devices to dig through rock as far as he could determine. He jerked a little when the video stream that he was watching suddenly went to static.
Make that three video cameras still in operation.
He gritted his teeth. They had defensive preparations up top, but not nearly enough down at the bottom. They were between a rock and a hard place and the final choice he had was to call in the U.S. military.
But if he did that, they would be screwed a second time. A few or even most of his human people might get away. There was no way the experiments in section two could be allowed to leave.
Or even found.
Patrick was watching the video stream of the team working to booby-trap the elevator shaft when his brain could not… no, dared not believe what his eyes were telling him.
Etheric
“What… is this place?” Kiel asked, looking around the grey amorphous landscape. The light was bright enough, but because of thick fog he couldn’t see. The sensors of his mech-suit were not helping, either.
“Follow me,” she said and then answered over her shoulder, “This is the Etheric dimension. We can’t travel too far because between the two of us, the energy to transfer this much metal drains me every damned step we take.” Even now he could start to hear her breathing harder.
“Where are we going and how far is it?” Kiel asked, and looked around trying to get a sense of where he was.
“Fuck all if I know, but it had better not be too far.” She stopped and seemed to lean forward just a bit and then they continued, walking another five paces before she stopped and leaned forward again.
“What are you doing?” Kiel finally asked.
“Looking out from inside the elevator shaft to figure out if we’re at a floor yet,” she answered and then resumed walking. She did this another three times before pausing longer. “Oh… well, that’s just fucking rude.”
“What?” Kiel asked, turning back around to watch her.
Bethany Anne looked up and around, wherever she was looking, before she reached back to him. “Hold my hand and walk three steps with me.”
Kiel gently grasped her mech suit’s hand and paced himself with her shorter strides. She continued holding his hand and leaned forward again. “Oh, this is going to be delicious,” she murmured.
“Are you planning on eating something?” Kiel asked.
“What?” she stood up, “No. At least, I hope not. I need you to go take care of some humans in the real world.” She looked around. “I’ve got to sit and rest for a few minutes and pull in energy. I’m sorry to say, but you are
a real fuck-ton of energy-sucking alien to be yanking through the Etheric.” She turned to him. “Ready to be a scary alien mercenary and kill some people?
—
Eric and Darryl were standing near the elevator when both turned towards it, looking up in unison.
“You heard that?” Eric asked and Darryl agreed.
“Screaming, yelling and a few…” Darryl stopped speaking as a scream of terror seemed to be getting closer, fast.
Then, the sudden thump-splat was loud and clear to the both of them. Darryl looked uneasy.
Someone had just decided to fall down the elevator shaft.
Darryl called out over the comms, “Hey folks, I think Team Bethany Anne just let us know they’re cleaning out the path up above us.”
Peter came up to them and sniffed the air. “Fresh dead. She isn’t leaving anyone for us,” he heaved a huge sigh of frustration. “Why didn’t I step forward?”
—
Kiel was trying to take all of these new experiences in stride, including when she told him to take a step forward and he went from being in the Etheric fog to inside a base in a hallway hewn out of rock.
With seven humans in front of him arrayed around an opened elevator door. He could see the empty shaft beyond. He took a step and grabbed the right arm of a man with a rifle. Tossing him forward, the flying body knocked one guy near the elevator entrance out of the way. The body continued forward, slamming into the far wall of the elevator shaft. Kiel could hear his screams as he descended until his sudden stop ended any of his worries.
Forever.
Kiel cranked the power up. And, in seven point two human seconds, he had been shot with forty-two rounds of which three ended up ricocheting back around and hitting other humans. For him, it wasn’t a problem and three humans died of crushed skulls, two with crushed chests and one arm had come off when he forgot to adjust his suit’s power. He remembered a phrase one of Bethany Anne’s people had used, and he murmured it as he tossed the arm away. “Oops, my bad.”
That human was screaming as he lay on the floor, so Kiel casually kicked his head to shut him up. Then, inside his helmet he made a face when he got brains on the end of his mech-suit’s foot.
“Gahh!” he took a step and felt the organic matter between his boot and the floor for a couple of steps before it rubbed off. “I’ve got to remember that those heads are crunchy on the outside, but meaty on the inside.”
His eyes opened when an arm appeared from thin air in front of him and pushed him backwards.
He landed on his ass in the Etheric fog again.
“Nice job. Now come along, I found their operations room.” She turned and started walking in a different direction from before, her steps, he noticed, seemed a little slower.
Kiel got up and walked with her. He got a warning beep that his energy was down fifty percent.
It seemed her energy wasn’t the only thing the Etheric drained.
—
Patrick was staring at the video input when the back of a Yollin attacker appeared in the middle of his video feed.
“What the fuck?” He jerked back and saw the Yollin fighter grab Greg Humble and throw him into the elevator shaft. Greg disappeared down out of view.
The sounds of gunfire came through the speakers as well as screams of the men as they turned to fight the alien who had somehow snuck up behind them.
In seconds it was over. The Yollin kicked Jay Biers in his head and crushed his skull. As it took steps towards the video camera, an arm appeared and the alien started falling backwards, but disappeared and all Patrick could see was the dead bodies in the hallway outside the elevator.
“Kenny!” he yelled. Hearing Kenny’s ‘sir’ he ordered, “Lock down this room!” He opened the top drawer of his desk and then slammed it shut, opening the second in a rush. Reaching in, he pulled out a silver-grey metal container with a place for his thumb. Pressing the lock, it turned green and he used both hands to open the box. Leaving the box in his right hand, he reached in and pulled out Ztopic’s gift to him.
His own Zeta weapon. Placing the box on the desk, he turned towards the door, keeping an eye on the video cameras in case the alien attacked somewhere else.
—
Bethany Anne was leaning forward. “Yeah, this is the place.” She pulled back and then sat down before finally laying down on the ground. She reached up and unhooked her helmet, taking it off.
Kiel was surprised to see her face had lost most of its color. Her skin was now almost the color of bones, bleached in the sun of many seasons.
“What can I do?” Kiel asked, concerned she was going to die and if she did, how was he going to explain this to the rest of the team?
Hell, how was he going to get out of this dimension? He unlatched his helmet and took it off, sniffing the air.
“Give me a few more seconds, I am barely pulling in energy right now. If you can shut down your systems, do so. I need enough energy to push you through. Then, you need to stay alive long enough for me to get in and help you.”
“Why would I not be alive?” Kiel asked, shutting down the unnecessary systems in his suit.
“This is the operations room,” she told him. “There are a lot of people in there. Probably not as many rifles, but I’m sure lots of pistols and high ranking staff.”
She closed her eyes for a moment, took a deep breath and then stood up, “If anyone is going to have weapons we don’t like? It’s going to be them.”
Kiel considered his options. “How big is the room?” She told him. He turned off the ability to jump high and drained the energy back out of those capacitors into his plasma gun. “Do you need any of the machines in there?”
She was silent for a moment, “Yes, probably.”
The Yollin’s two mandible-looking appendages both turned inward at the top, then straightened. He drained the energy from the plasma pistols and looked at his supply of kinetic rounds. “How many people?”
She paused, then leaned forward, pulled back and said, “About forty-two.”
“I’ve got seventy kinetics left,” he said and pulled that pistol, exchanging the magazine for a full load.
“Don’t waste your shots,” she advised.
Fortunately, Kiel was able to bite back his response. He wasn’t sure what the translation software would have told her, but in his language it was pretty damned disrespectful. So, he decided to nod in her general direction instead.
She put her helmet back on and he followed her lead. “Let’s do this,” she said.
“One second,” he said. He turned away from her. “Okay, I take a tiny step and you push, correct?”
“Yes,” she agreed. “You’re coming out in a corner of the room where there are no people and no furniture. I’ll look right before I push you. Everyone is going to be in front and to your left, I think.”
“You think?” Kiel said, but then she barked.
“Step!”
—
The first person to die in front of Patrick was Michael Shanks. His head shattered, coating those near the door around him in blood and brain matter.
Those shot, but not dead, started screaming as Patrick dropped down and turned around to see an alien in the back left corner of the room, calmly shooting his people.
Patrick flicked off the safety on his disintegrator and aimed it at the alien who was turning towards him.
There was only one chance to get this shot right.
“FUCK YOUUUU!” Patrick yelled and then it was his time to scream in pain when a sword cut through his arm, the disintegrator beam taking a chunk out of the solid ceiling between him and the alien.
Patrick barely had time to recognize his arm was gone before a metal kinetic round blew through his chest, tossing his now dead body like a rag doll, toppling it over the desk behind him.
—-
“This is BA,” Bethany Anne’s voice came over the comm. “Status?”
“Bored,” John answered, “You planning on le
tting us in there?”
“Damn, you lazy butt whale sniffing asshats haven’t found another way through tons of rock?” she replied to the men’s laughter.
“No, but we’re thinking that the elevator shaft might be haunted,” Darryl replied. “It’s raining dead people.”
She laughed. “Kiel didn’t send him down dead.”
“Well, he finished dead,” Eric answered.
“We’ve got video and the elevator shaft is clear. They were setting up a loud boom for you coming up the elevator and as far as I can tell, that is the only path up. Take it up one floor and then you have stairs that access the floor above. Seven floors total, I’m on three.”
The Kurtherian Gambit Omnibus 05 - The Fans Version: My Ride is a Bitch - Don't Cross This Line - Never Submit Page 52