by S. A. Lusher
He’d depleted his magazine as he finished off the other drones. Greg hastily reloaded and fired at Bone Saw. He managed to get through ten bullets, centered in its chest and head, before it reached him.
He let out a startled cry and fell back as it swiped at him. His chestplate vibrated as the spinning saw blade came in contact with it, cutting out a narrow groove.
“Done!” Burne called. He spun around. “Oh shit.”
“Told you,” Greg replied.
They both dove out of the way as Bone Saw's arms shot out once more.
“Get out of here, I'll deal with this.” Burne snapped.
“What? No-”
“Now. Get the job done. I'll keep it busy.”
Greg wanted to argue more, but he was too tired, too afraid, too ready to just be done with all this. Without a word, he shot off towards the maintenance tunnels they'd entered through. He managed to navigate them for about one minute before a tremendous explosion tore through the area, causing the lights to flicker.
Greg heaved a sigh as he jogged onwards, back to the elevator. Another one of them gone. Now it really did appear he was alone up here.
As he reached the elevator shaft again, his radio suddenly crackled to life.
“Bishop, it's me. Are you still alive?” Campbell.
Greg's heart leaped in his chest. “Where the hell have you been?”
“Sorry, one of those assholes gave my helmet a really good knock. Killed my radio. I just now found a new one. It was chaos out there. I thought you were dead, floated off into space. I managed to make it back to an airlock. What happened? What was that explosion?”
Greg quickly brought Campbell up to speed.
“So Burne's gone? Dammit. Well, I'm near where I need to be. On the right deck at least,” Campbell replied.
“Good. Get to the objective. I'll meet you up there-”
There was another burst of static. Suddenly, a new voice broke onto the channel. Or rather, an old voice. A familiar one.
“Bishop...I need your help...”
Greg hesitated for a long moment.
Finally, he spoke. “Cage?”
Chapter 15
–His Name Is Cage–
“Cage? Where are you?” Greg demanded.
“Down on the medical deck, Surgical Bay Four. Hurry...” Cage sounded bad.
“I'm on my way,” Greg cried. “Campbell, go get what we came here for. I need to go save Cage.”
“Bishop...” Campbell hesitated.
“What?”
“Nothing. I'll do my job, you go do yours.”
Greg stood in the elevator lobby, an uncertain shudder passing through him, like a sudden chill. Was there something he was overlooking? Something he was missing? No. Cage was here. Greg had so many questions. He spent a moment remembering where the medical deck was. Two levels up from his current position.
Okay, he could do this quick.
He moved over to the stairwell and opened the door. Nothing inside, just a thin gray light and some blood. He stared up the stairs.
“Cage, what happened?” he asked.
“The Augmented came, overran our position. I told Powell to take his bomb and go. Took down as many of the bastards as I could, but they overwhelmed me. Captured me. Knocked me out. I woke up in some kind of machine shop. They hadn't restrained me and the sedatives were wearing off. I broke out. I've been on this ship ever since, doing guerrilla tactics. Hit and run. But one of them got me bad...” Here, he groaned.
“It's nasty. Tried to do a patch job, but lost a lot of blood. Heard you on the radio. Knew you could help me.”
“I'm coming, don't worry,” Greg replied.
He reached the proper floor and opened the door, stepping out into an identical elevator lobby. The light was considerably worse here, but still good enough to see. Shadows grew in nests along the edges of the room. Greg played his light across the area in a broad arc, saw nothing and moved on. The corridor beyond was bloody but vacant.
Thoughts raced through Greg's mind as he pressed on, moving along the medical deck, shining his light over doorways, hunting for Surgical Bay Four. Cage was back. This would make the situation a whole hell of a lot easier. The guy was a one-man army. They were already honing in, presumably, on finishing up this whole project. They'd get the parts, build the things they needed and then go. Everything was going to go smoothly now.
Greg reached an intersection, stopped, and looked around. He finally found a sign attached to the ceiling of one of the corridors that informed him it was the Surgical Wing. Greg took a moment to look around, eager to see Cage, but still knowing it was a bad idea to be reckless. He expected a lot more resistance.
Cage had spoken over their radio, and Erebus had, apparently, cracked it by now. So it knew exactly where not only Cage was, but where Greg was going. Erebus should have had a lot of bad guys on the way to take care of both of them.
So where were they?
Where were the Drones?
Greg decided to count his blessings and hurried on down the corridor. He counted off the bays and then stopped at the one marked Four. The door was closed. He walked up to it, raised his hand...then hesitated.
As much as he wanted to deny it, something felt off here. Greg's combat instincts whispered to him. His finger hovered over the button, lingering there, as unpleasant and uncertain thoughts shuffled through his mind.
He banished them and pushed the button.
The surgical bay was pitch-black, and the weak, pallid light from the corridor did little to help illuminate it. Greg raised his weapon and suddenly a brand new, not-so-implausible thought raced through his mind.
What if Erebus was just imitating Cage's voice and this was a trap? It was completely, utterly possible.
But the door was already open. One way or the other, Greg was going to face this. He stepped into the room, played his flashlight across it.
“Cage?”
The room was largely empty. There was just a single examination table in the center and a series of medical cabinets along the walls.
“Bishop...”
Greg zeroed his flashlight on the voice and realized Cage must be sitting on the opposite side of the table, his back pressed to it, out of sight.
“Are you okay?” Greg asked as he began making his way around the table.
“Better now,” Cage replied.
Greg slowed to a halt as he came around the examination table. A slow, creeping horror began to steal over him.
Cage stood up.
“Greg, I'm sorry it's come to this, we honestly don't like using deceptive tactics, but we're getting desperate.” Cage’s voice became flat and monotone now.
Greg stared in horror at this thing that stood before him. This thing that had once been a man named Cage. It was lean and perhaps a little taller than before. Twin ice-blue orbs stared out at Greg from a pallid, gaunt face that gleaned with silver implants. The head was shaved, half the skull plate replaced with something metal.
One arm was replaced in favor of a metallic facsimile that glistened with technology. A weapon had been fitted onto the end, where the hand should be, something that looked like a bizarre combination of a wicked knife and a powerful pistol. The body wore the tattered remains of Cage's uniform.
Red, wet, glistening muscle and cold metal technology showed through in some places. The skin was pale and sickly.
“Not you,” Greg moaned, taking a step back.
“I'm better now, Greg. Better at killing than I ever was before. Erebus has plans for you. He has such things to show you...but first we need to give you the proper eyes to see with.”
Cage raised his arm.
“Bishop, get the fuck out of here, damn it!” another voice called.
They both looked over at the source of the voice: a ventilation grate. It exploded open in a fury of gunfire and Burne leaped out, shotgun raised. He aimed for Cage and pounded out a round, then a second, a third.
Cage stumb
led back with each blow, but did not fall.
Greg backed away, blind, animal terror filling his mind. He caught a glance of Burne, who had seriously begun to resemble his name. He looked like hell. His suit was scorched, his helmet was missing and he was bleeding from several cuts across his face.
“Go!” he roared.
Greg turned and ran. He slammed into the door, which was now closed, and frantically pressed the open button.
The door wouldn't open.
More shotgun blasts. Greg moaned with sick, raw fear, and spun around, raising his weapon. Cage was already moving. He-No, Greg thought. Not he, not anymore. It. It shot across the room, avoiding another shotgun blast, and gripped Burne's head with two skeletal, metal hands. There was a momentary pause, then a sharp, horrible ripping and snapping sound, like someone tearing off a particularly thick drumstick from a turkey.
Burne's head came away in a spray of blood that washed across the thing that had once been Cage. Burne's body took a few clumsy steps, and then collapsed into a heap on the deck. The Cage-Thing stared curiously at Burne's dead face, turning it slightly in its grasp, then, abruptly, dropped it and turned to face Greg.
“He got off easy,” it said.
Greg realized he was still holding his rifle. With numb, trembling fingers, he raised it towards the Cage-Thing, which was slowly advancing. He remembered Burne's useless shotgun blasts, then spun around, aimed at the door controls and fired. The controls spat a stream of sparks, then, almost reluctantly, the door slid open.
Greg shoved himself through and began running as quickly as he could. His mind emptied of absolutely everything except for the need to get away from this thing that he'd once shared a cigarette with atop an abandoned communications relay on a world that was now gone. Behind him, Greg heard movement.
For a long time, he simply ran. The all-consuming need to flee overtook him. By time he gained some semblance of sanity again, Greg realized that he hadn't just been running blindly. He'd been subconsciously running to a destination.
A good one.
An armory. He skidded to a halt, heard movement behind him, and slipped into the armory. It wasn't just any place to store guns, no, Greg realized with frantic joy, this was where you stored the heavy guns.
He raced over to a nearby rack and snatched a long tube of black metal off of it. A rocket launcher. Realizing he must have used one of these things in the past as he instantly remembered how to use it, Greg snatched a rocket off the shelf next to it and fed it into the tube. He turned around, raised the launcher, and primed it.
The Drone version of Cage was just coming through the door. Greg wanted to think of something to say but was too terrified.
He squeezed the trigger.
There was a sharp foomph sound as the rocket left its dark nest. Less than an eighth of a second passed as the rocket crossed the distance between Greg and the Cage-Thing. Then Greg was picked up by the raw force of the blast, momentarily blinded and deafened by its power. He landed a few feet away on his back.
Groaning, Greg sat up, desperately trying to clear his vision, which had become a freeze-frame image of fire and light. His ears were filled with a high-pitched ringing as he slowly crawled to his feet. As his vision cleared, his heart sank.
The Augmented monster got back to its feet. Greg looked around desperately, his eyes settling on another rocket. He stumbled over to it and tried to load it, but his hands were numb and shaking terribly. Suddenly, a skeletal hand, metal showing through the bleached skin, gripped the launcher.
“Not even close,” the Cage-Thing said.
Greg cried out and let go of the rocket launcher, backing away rapidly. The hand squeezed, crushing the launcher tube. Greg kept backing up, frantically grabbing for something, anything.
His hand suddenly grasped something.
At first, Greg had no idea what it was, only that it was a gun of some kind. It had a long, black barrel and a canister attached to the end, where the magazine would normally be. Whatever it was, he didn't care, he needed anything right now.
He leveled the gun at the Cage creature and squeezed the trigger.
Immediately, a powerful blue light filled the room as a gout of flames erupted from the muzzle of the weapon. It was a flamethrower, Greg realized. The Cage-Thing went up like a torch. Greg kept expecting to hear some kind of screaming or something to indicate pain, but the Augmented was silent as death.
And it was still coming for Greg.
Greg decided it was time to go. Some semblance of sanity and reason had returned to him. He abandoned the flamethrower and made his way around the walking torch, then bolted through the door and sprinted away.
“Campbell!” he cried, suddenly remembering his radio. “Campbell! I need help.”
“What happened? What's going on? I've got what we're looking for,” Campbell replied.
“It's Cage. He's a fucking Augmented. He's fucking unstoppable. I just hit him with a goddamned rocket launcher and flamethrower.”
“Jesus Christ, I knew it...shit. Okay, we have to get out of here. Listen, we're closer to an escape pod bay than we are to our extraction point. There's one of the dormitories deck, two levels above medical, you know the one?”
“Uh...yeah, I remember seeing it on the map.”
“Get there and punch out.”
“On my way.”
Behind him, an awful, shifting light suddenly lurched into being. Greg risked a glance over his shoulder and saw a figure made of flames coming for him. They were already dying out, half as brilliant as they had been before, but the Cage monster was still coming as though this were all a walk in the park.
Greg kept running, sprinting through the dark, bloody corridors of the dead ship Isis. The Cage-Thing kept pace with him. He reached the elevator lobby, hurried through the door to the stairwell and surged up two flights of steps. Coming back out into another lobby, he found a pair of Drones waiting for him.
Growling in frustration, Greg leveled his rifle at them and put bullets in each of their skulls. He was out the door before they even hit the ground. There were more things of dead flesh and cold metal waiting for him out in the corridor.
Greg took potshots at them but, for the most part, dodged past them. He didn't have time for this. He kept going, rushing down the corridor, slamming into Drones and dodging potshots as he passed. A few glanced off his armor and one came startlingly close to his faceplate. When he reached the escape pod bay, he became vaguely convinced that he might have managed to lose the burning Augmented that was coming for him.
Campbell waited for him in the bay.
“Go!” Greg cried, spying Campbell hovering uncertainly in front of an open pod.
The man nodded and entered the pod. Greg rushed in after him, turning and slamming his fist on the close button. The doors snapped shut behind him. There was a window in the back of the pod that allowed him to see into the pod bay. As he glanced into it, listening to Campbell warm up the pod and prepare for launch, he spied the Cage-Thing. It came into the pod bay, still glowing menacingly. A lot of metal had been exposed by now.
How much of it was metal?
“Hurry!” Greg snapped as the Augmented caught sight of them and hurried over.
“I'm trying!” Campbell yelled back.
The Cage-Thing was in front of the window now, peering in with a face that resembled a metal skull.
“You can't run from us, Greg.”
It pressed a button, opening the exterior doors. Now all that stood between Greg and it were the back doors of the pod itself. It reached forward and, Greg watched with horror, dug its metal fingers into the frame of the pod itself, latching itself on.
“We're gone!” Campbell cried.
The escape pod punched out, shooting forth from its nest. Greg stared at the Cage-Thing, still attached firmly to the back of the pod. It stared right back at him. Then, suddenly, it climbed up and out of sight, to the top of the pod.
“It's still with us!” Gr
eg managed.
“What?” Campbell called back.
Greg turned and rushed to the cockpit. “Cage! That thing grabbed on. It's on the roof.”
The Augmented abruptly appeared atop the canopy windows of the cockpit. Ahead of them, Onyx was growing bigger. They would hit in a matter of seconds. A metal fist reared back and punched at the glass, cracking it.
“Shit!” Campbell snapped.
They slammed into the dead surface of Onyx.
Greg caught a very brief sight of the Cage-Thing being thrown free from the pod, and then he slammed forward into the canopy. If he hadn't had the suit on, Greg was positive he'd have been killed in the crash. As it was, he was dizzy as hell and a million new aches and pains performed a maddened frenzy of suffering on his body.
“Damn,” he moaned.
“Should've fastened your seatbelt,” Campbell said, and then gave a little laugh.
“Shut up,” Greg replied, pain cracking his voice as he got his breath back.
The two men slowly stood up in the cramped cockpit. As Greg finished popping his neck and making sure nothing was broken, there was a solid thump overhead. Both men cried out and whirled around. The Cage creature was back, though it appeared one of its arms was now missing. It was climbing onto the canopy.
“Go, now,” Greg said.
The pair hurried back out into the passenger bay. Campbell reached the back door first, opened it and stumbled out onto the airless surface of the moon. Greg hurried after him. He spied the cluster of buildings maybe a quarter mile away.
“Run!” Greg snapped.
They hurried across the surface of the moon, their movements awkward and stilted in the low gravity. Greg glanced behind him. The Cage-Thing came for them, the eyes now tinted crimson, flaring in the gloom.
He gained on them.
As they ran, one structure resolved into a more solid shape sooner than the others. Greg was unfamiliar with it. He knew that if he had his mental map of the area right, then he could see Dark Ops HQ to the far right and the miner's headquarters to the far left. In between them, set a little away from them, was another building.
It was large and blocky and not lit.