by S. A. Lusher
It took him two tries. He fell back into the fetid water that, he realized, stank of disuse and time. His head swam and he swayed on his feet, but Greg finally stood. He remained where he was, waiting until the world stopped swaying and pulsing. He looked around, studied the area he was in. The only light seemed to be coming from far away.
A cave. He was definitely in some kind of cave. As his eyes fully adjusted, he caught hints of uneven ground and rock walls. He glanced down. A pool of water lay at his feet, slowly losing the gentle waves he'd created while rising.
Greg glanced up. He couldn't see it, but he knew there was a hole in the ceiling. Again, urgency surged through him, like a countdown clock letting out a small but insistent warning as it drew even closer to its end.
Splashing carefully across the water, as he didn't know how deep it might be, Greg made his way to the opening across the way where the light came through. He wanted to be back with people, back in the light, at the very least, warm again. His suit was ruptured and the uniform he wore was soggy now.
Something let out a high-pitched moan from somewhere. Greg froze and suddenly the need for a weapon seized upon him. He patted down his armor. His weapons were gone, likely lost in the pool or maybe thrown around the cave, but also very likely broken in the fall.
His hand fell upon the butt of his pistol. Heart thumping in fear and hope, Greg undid the latch and extracted the pistol. He felt along it, but as his hands touched the tip of the barrel, his hopes went up in flame. The barrel was pinched. There was no way this pistol was going to be put to use anytime soon.
Not without reluctance, he abandoned it, setting it on the ground, unwilling to toss it for fear of the sound it would make. He was alone, wounded, and defenseless.
“I'm fucked,” he whispered.
Another sound, this one lower, more of a howl that ended in a series of odd clicks, sent ripples of raw terror up his spine. Moving, he needed to get moving. Greg made his way across the cavern he was in to the opening in the far wall.
Beyond it, the light was better. It was still thin, gray, and dim, but it was better. He took a small amount of relief from this fact alone. Greg peered cautiously into the area beyond. He was at the end of a rocky tunnel. There was a single work-light placed a dozen meters away, pointed in the opposite direction.
His light.
Cautiously, he worked his way towards it. His leg hurt worse now, forcing him to limp. A thought came to him out of the blue: his radio. He reached up and felt around in his right ear. Hope shot through him like a jolt of electricity. It was still there. Carefully, he pulled it out and studied it.
The hope was gone in an instant: the exterior casing was cracked and the little light was dead. It was broken. He wanted to toss it aside, but instead pocketed it, thinking it might still be salvageable to someone more technically-minded.
Greg reached the work-light and passed it, his shadow hobbling along on the wall with him as he kept going. The tunnel went on for quite a ways, and he had an idea that it was part of an abandoned project by the miners, a new tunnel hunting for fresh deposits of precious minerals. Eventually, the tunnel came to a sort of junction that looked more civilized. There were light-strips attached to the ceiling and a few crates were stacked in one corner.
There was only one way to go, another tunnel, this one much smaller and more comfortable, so Greg went. Thoughts haunted his aching head. He wondered about the others, about the nature of memory, about what might be down here in these tunnels with him. There were no more sounds, for the time being.
He finally came to another break in the tunnel, this one even more civilized. It resembled a remote outpost, a place for mining teams punching ever deeper into the rock to stop and take a break from time to time without having to go all the way back.
Greg felt like it was a God-given blessing.
He moved slowly through the area. The three-room sanctuary stood against the chilled darkness of the tunnels and caverns. Greg moved slowly, deliberately. He detected no hint of Undead or Augmented. As a matter of fact, the place felt completely empty. For a second, he felt like he was investigating the long-abandoned ruins of an ancient civilization, buried deep beneath the dead surface of a long-forgotten moon.
His head throbbed in dull, thick pulses. Greg confirmed that he was alone in the three-room break area and then locked down the pair of entrances. A sense of palpable relief washed through him. He wasn't out of this yet, not by a long shot, but he was safe, for now. The light, the relative warmth, the simple, animal comfort of four walls and a roof was enough to help him feel less like giving in to the panic that was gnawing at him.
The primary room was a break area, complete with some couches, tables, chairs, and a small kitchen area. The second room was a small storage area that resembled a large closet. Shelves held small crates of basic supplies: mining equipment, spare parts, spare light-strips, tools. He left it alone and moved on to the third and final room, which turned out to be a white-tiled, well-lit bathroom.
Sinks and mirrors to the right, stalls and urinals to the left. Greg immediately walked over to the nearest urinal, freed himself and took a lengthy piss. He hadn't even known he'd needed to until he saw the bathroom.
Sometime later, he finished up, washed his hands, and moved along the stalls. As he moved down the row, he smelled something. It wasn't the rotted decay of Undead flesh, but rather something a little more basic, a little more cloying, and somehow, less repugnant. Greg abandoned his notion of complete isolation when he reached the last stall and slowly pushed it open, fearing what he might find.
A miner had committed suicide in the back of an isolated, abandoned bathroom, deep beneath the surface of a dead, airless moon on the edge of known space.
Greg stared for a long time at the corpse. He found himself wondering about this man. Who was he? Why had he been driven to kill himself? Did he have friends? Family left? What was his favorite color?
It was hard to believe that something as small and simple as a corpse could have once held so much knowledge, so many memories, so much life.
And that it could be snapped away in an instant.
The man had killed himself with some kind of tool. It was still gripped firmly in his pallid hand. Greg knelt and gently pried it from the death-grip. After a moment of inspection, he realized it was a bolt-gun.
A slow, painful, grim grin spread across his face. In the absence of any real kind of arsenal, this thing would do nicely.
Greg spent the next five minutes stripping the man of his gray miner's uniform. The method of suicide had, somehow, left the uniform largely undamaged and without any stains. Greg felt a momentary pang of guilt as he stripped the jumpsuit, but gave himself a little bit of comfort in the knowledge that this man would no longer need it. Once he had the jumpsuit stripped, he folded it up into a bundle and headed back out into the break room.
Greg slowly came back online. His thoughts were clearer, but so was the pain in his body. Shock and a mute numbness granted to him by the almost frozen water in the cave both wore off.
He’d need painkillers, and to make sure nothing was broken. Greg hunted through the break room for a while, setting aside the bolt gun and the miner's uniform, and turned up a medical kit. It was larger than the smaller, emergency kits that were bolted to walls in corridors, service tunnels, and bathrooms. This was meant more as a field kit, as this was likely very far away from anything that might be called civilization.
Greg sat down on one of the couches and opened up the kit. Inside, he found was he was looking for: a handheld scanning unit. Firing it up, he ran it over his body in wide, sweeping arcs, focusing on his head, his chest, and his leg. After a few moments, the device seemed satisfied it had gathered enough data.
By some small miracle, the device reported that nothing was broken, cracked, or even sprained. All the pain he felt was on the surface. He supposed Linda was right. These suits could take quite a bit of damage. It was too bad he hadn't kept h
is helmet on, if he had, he might not be in such a painful and shitty situation right now.
The device also showed no signs of infection, of any kind. He took that as a good sign. Satisfied that he was okay, medically at least, Greg stood up and took off the suit, which was ruined now. He also stripped off the uniform he had beneath it. Next, he dug around in the kit and came up with the proper supplies to treat the small collection of cuts, scrapes, burns, and bruises he'd gathered.
When he was finished, he dosed himself with an anti-viral/antibiotic injection, then a hit of painkillers, and for good measure, a half an injection of stimulant, to wake him back up and really get his blood pumping again.
For a while, he just sat there in his boxers and let the painkillers work. When he felt good enough, he pulled the dead miner's uniform and his battered suit of armor back on and then hobbled over to the kitchen area. Hungry. He was hungry. Ravenous, actually. And thirsty. He pried open the fridge and found a couple of cans of Vex.
Without hardly a thought, he popped the top and downed the whole thing in one go. Greg crushed the can and tossed it over his shoulder, belched loudly, then hunted some more. He found a pair of freeze-dried meals. One of them was a hamburger with fries and another was a beef-and-cheese enchilada with hot sauce and rice.
He nuked them both in the little microwave and tore into them, eating right down to the black plastic case. Greg felt better as the painkillers really took effect and the food settled comfortably into his stomach.
He grabbed the bolt gun and fiddled with it. After a moment, he saw that it operated basically like a gun. It came with a magazine, which held ten bolts of metal about three inches long and were about as thick as his pinky.
They were blunt, not pointed like bullets, but they'd do the job.
Resisting the urge to fire a test shot, Greg instead opted to hunt the nearby storage room for spare magazines. He located two spare magazines and pocketed them.
As he stepped back out into the break room, he realized the area rattled gently. For a moment, he was absolutely, completely perplexed; convinced he was having some kind of hallucination. The rumble grew stronger, knocking things off shelves, making a mess of the break room.
At first, he thought it might be some kind of earthquake, but began to seriously wonder if airless moons even had those. Then he heard an earth-shattering, marrow-freezing roar as the tremendous rumbling reached its apex.
Greg stood frozen, even after the tremors had completely disappeared. All he could think of was some kind of giant worm, a titanic monstrosity that had been infected by the Undead or co-opted by the Augmented. Suddenly, going on seemed a lot harder than it had been before. He stared down uncertainly at his bolt gun.
Finally, Greg took a deep breath and let it out in a long, slow sigh. He could do this. He had to do this. There was no telling what the hell was going on upstairs with Kyra, Campbell, and the others. Not to mention that the local star was on its way to going supernova. He roused himself and made for the far door.
After hesitating far too long, Greg finally released the lockdown he'd placed on the door and opened it. There was nothing waiting for him in the rocky tunnel beyond, the way he had yet to go, the way he prayed held his escape from this rock tomb. His mind wandered as he slipped out into the tunnel and progressed down it.
What could have possibly been large enough to produce such a sound and such a tremor in its passing? He couldn't think of anything, not even the beefed-up Berserker or the Augmented thing he'd fought in the garage. This thing, this mystery creature, seemed larger by several magnitudes than either of those things.
Greg came to a stop as he neared the end of the tunnel.
He looked down at his bolt gun once more, took another deep breath, held it, and then let it out in a long, slow sigh.
He could do this. He had to do this.
Greg pressed on into the unknown.
Chapter 10
–The Deep–
Keep moving.
It was a survival tactic that Greg had picked up somewhere in the rainy wastelands of Dis. It had stuck with him ever since. Already, he missed the primal comfort the break area offered. Like a little outpost of civilization, staked in the outer reaches of the explored regions beneath Onyx. The warmth, the light, the walls.
Greg made himself forget about the break area. He was forging ahead into new territory. Undead territory, by the smell of it. Only he hadn't come across anything. Besides the rumbling and the roaring, Greg hadn't encountered even a single corpse, walking or dead. No zombies, no Stalkers, no Rippers.
On the one hand, it filled him with relief. The bolt gun he held would do the job...probably, but even if it did, he had limited ammo and it wouldn't be as effective as even a pistol. He kept his ears sharp for undead groans, haunting moans, shuffling footsteps, scurrying, anything that might tip the hand of any nearby Undead.
There was nothing.
Nothing but...the smell. The reek of corrupted flesh seemed to permeate the air, like something that drifted just beneath the surface. It made him gag. Greg tried to focus on his surroundings. He'd made his way through a long, poorly-lit tunnel. There seemed to be a work-light only every ten or fifteen meters. Among those, some of them flickered weakly, others were completely dead.
The tunnel was on a slope. He headed back up, which was good. He needed to get the hell out of this nightmare. Before long, he noticed the light up ahead was better. Not by much, but enough to stir his hopes. He finally crested the top of the tunnel and stopped the passageway opened up into a truly massive cavern.
At least, he assumed it was. The light was still quite poor. He could just barely make out the far wall, but couldn't tell how high the ceiling was. Every little sound he made echoed away from him into the abyssal darkness.
Greg sighed heavily. He scanned the area for any immediate threat. Nothing shifted in the shadows, he heard no movement. From what little he could see, it was obvious that this was some kind of central mining chamber. The dead hulks of earth-movers and drillers occupied the ground level.
There was a hint of catwalks and ladders built along the walls, but what little he could see was in poor repair. Something caught his attention, something flaring dimly in the thin light. He made his way towards it, weaving his way through the heaps of metal that had been forged into vehicle shapes.
As Greg came around the equipment, he saw what was producing the light: a terminal. It warmed his heart. He quickly crossed the distance between them and fired the thing up, bringing it out of sleep mode. Immediately he could tell that it was running off reserve power. Most of its functions weren't available.
He spent several frustrated minutes attempting to figure out what he could access, and then navigated that. Loading each new page seemed to take forever. Finally, he came to a map of the area and frowned at what he saw.
This was the lowest level of the mines, which explained why everything was so under-developed and empty. The only way up appeared to be the area he was in. However, he decided, he wasn't going anywhere until he got some fucking light going. It might help him directly, it might not, but it was just too creepy down here.
There wasn't much to the area he was in. It was mostly just tunnels and caverns with a few remote outposts, similar to the one he'd found a ways back. There was, however, a generator room nearby.
Greg wasn't a technician, but he'd picked up a handful of useful tips from Powell and the other techs he'd hung around over the past few weeks. If it wasn't totally gone, he might be able to reactivate the generator they'd installed down here and bring the lights back online. Another thing he'd discovered was that some of the more basic systems, like a generator or a terminal network node or a power junction, weren't too complex.
Greg stared at the map for a few more seconds. The route there was easy. He just had to go left, follow another tunnel for a dozen meters, and there was the generator room.
The bolt gun firmly in his sweaty grip, Greg turned and set off
towards the far tunnel. Drying off and changing uniforms had done a lot to help him warm up, but Greg noted how downright cold it was down in the mines. He shivered as he came to the mouth of the new tunnel. It was considerably smaller than the ones he'd been traversing so far. As Greg made his way slowly towards the generator, he pondered over the fact that he had somehow, in all his time spent down here, not been able to secure a flashlight.
Or a radio for that matter.
He supposed he should be thankful for the bolt gun, the food, the change of clothes, and the medical kit. It actually was a lot, when he thought about it. Maybe there was something to that saying about counting your blessings.
The tunnel came to an end. There was no door, just an opening with a great deal of thick, black industrial-strength cables coming out of it. Greg poked his head cautiously in and looked around. The light, though thin and gray, was just good enough to show him exactly what he didn't want to see. A handful of blackened, giant spiders occupied the generator room. Some of them clung to the ceiling and walls.
Greg hesitated, his grasp clenched around the bolt gun. He raised it, sighted the spider hanging on the ceiling overhead and hesitated as his finger tightened on the trigger. What if it wasn't powerful enough?
Oh well.
He squeezed the trigger.
There was a sharp hiss and suddenly the spider no longer stuck to the ceiling. It smashed to the floor in a tangle of dark, thrashing limbs. A high-pitched shriek filled the air as it attempted to right itself. The others came to life. Greg aimed at the next one, which came down from the wall, and fired twice.
There was a dark spray of gore and the creature thrashed violently. Greg realized he had pinned it to the wall. He aimed and fired again, this time destroying the alien face of one that had made it to the ground and was coming for him. He counted three more still moving and able-bodied. They were coming for him.
He backed up, taking aim and firing as they advanced on him, their movement frantic and jittery. Two of them went down, or at least stopped advancing on him. The third leaped through the air, legs splayed open. Terror seized Greg as the dark, titanic spider filled his vision and he froze.