No sooner had they forced the doors open than a Reint bolted through, colliding with the Preacher and carrying her down into the murk below with a splash.
I cursed and aimed, but there was nothing I could see; just the thrashing, sloshing water below as the Preacher fought the Reint hand to hand underneath the surface of the liquid. The other Barious dived in after her, and soon the water stilled, broken eventually by the corpse of the dead Reint, floating to the surface.
The Preacher and the other Barious climbed out, hand over hand up the cable. “Door’s open,” the Preacher said mildly, shaking her head like a dog, flinging water from her metal skin.
“Have a nice swim?” Javier asked her.
“I’ve noticed over the years that organic humor leaves a great deal to be desired,” she replied dryly. “I think it has something to do with the fact that every single one of you thinks you’re far funnier than you actually are.” She leapt from the rope, through the now-opened door on the first basement. She’d lost her rifle in the scuffle—one she’d claimed from one of our injured, retreating to Sanctum—but there were two sharp blasts anyway: the energy weapon she had built into her wrist. The other Barious, still hanging from the cable, fired through as well, expertly controlling the recoil even with a one-handed grip on her gun.
“Clear,” the Preacher called from inside.
“I hate this place,” Javier muttered, slinging his rifle on his back and reaching for the cable. “I hate everything about it.”
“Just keep reminding yourself that in a week or so, this gun might be the only thing standing between us and a Pax armada,” I told him.
“Oh, I’m not saying I won’t be grateful for it; just that I also hate it. I’m a man of contradictions.”
“You’re a man of lots of things. Now get to shimmying; the sooner we get down there, the sooner we can get this done.”
CHAPTER 19
I reached out and grasped the cable. It was slick with moisture; I didn’t know if that was leftover lubricant from back when it had still run, or built-up gunk from the soaked atmosphere inside the derelict facility. Either way, I had to trigger my implants just a bit to get a tight grasp on the thing, so I didn’t immediately lose my grip and follow the Preacher’s path down into the water below. I doubted I could win a one-on-one fight with a Reint underneath the surface, so I was careful with my hold on the cable.
I slid down, and vaulted into the hallway. The facility above had still been relatively clear of debris—junked and damaged, but clear. Not so down in the basements. The Reint who had been nesting here had piled up all sorts of crap, creating narrow alleys out of wide corridors. Everything seemed to have sharp edges. My HUD had switched over to full night vision, giving everything an eerie green glow that made the hallway seem like it was rotting, turning the detritus-scattered halls into a kind of gangrenous maze.
We started checking rooms.
The first few Reint we found were torpid, slow moving, the heat of the reactor slowing their reactions and dulling their senses. As much as we could, we finished them with knives and our hands, trying to keep the sound level to a minimum. It worked, but only for a while.
We could start to hear movement in the other rooms. Movement, then hissing, then the clicking sound of Reint talons on metal; the predators were shaking off their torpor as they realized the basement had been breached. Then the screaming started.
They knew we were here. They knew someone had invaded their nest. The fighting above hadn’t concerned them—Reint were used to everything around them trying to kill each other, all the time; the Reint homeworld had been . . . kind of a terrible place—but now that we’d come below, they were angry. We’d breached the pheromone trails that marked their territory, warning off other Reint, and they were going to tear us apart for it.
None of Sahluk’s troops had their exosuits anymore; we were down to ballistic weapons, and whatever close-quarters tools or implants we had. Every room we checked had at least a few Reint waiting for us, usually with an ambush prepared. The question was never if a room would be occupied—it was where the Reint would be hiding, where they would leap from. The staccato sound of gunfire—silence, then deafeningly loud, then silent again—became a kind of constant ringing, echoing down and back through the basements.
By the time we cleared the first level, leaving the wet concrete dripping with gore, two more of Sahluk’s squad were injured. Neither was completely incapacitated, but their effectiveness was degraded significantly. I could tell Sahluk was struggling with the question of whether or not to send them back upstairs, but if a fleeing Reint made it through our sweep and past us to the elevators, they’d be easy targets. He kept them with us, in the center of our grouping.
We descended to the second basement level, our feet treading through a slight scum of water that rippled and washed in waves down the stairs. The murk was ankle deep on the landing, and well over knee deep in the hallway beyond. Deep enough that a Reint could hide itself under the water by lying prone, and wait until we were nearly on top of it to burst free.
Whether they’d somehow done this on purpose—ripped open the roof above to let the water in—or it was just a happy accident, the basements now resembled the Reint homeworld, which was all swamps and tropical forests and things with lots of teeth. Purposefully or not, it had become as close to their natural hunting ground as a concrete and metal structure could be, exactly the kind of morass they’d evolved to stalk prey in.
It was also getting warmer; I was sweating into my body armor. That should have been a good sign—it meant we were getting closer to the reactor—but we were all decked out in cold-weather gear, clothing designed to make subfreezing temperatures feel temperate. We took a moment to strip most of it off. The Reint chose that moment to attack, because of course they did. They were predators; they recognized hesitation, innately.
We cut them down, but two more of ours were wounded, and one more was killed, his throat slashed by a Reint who burst through a pile of debris. I was glad the lime coloring of my night vision couldn’t show me the eddies of blood that must have been creeping through the water between my knees.
Finally, we reached the fusion reactor itself, or at least the catwalks and maintenance shafts that surrounded it. We set up a breach profile at the door, with Sahluk doing the breaching. He ripped the damn thing clear out of its housing and threw it at the hissing pile of Reint on the other side, disrupting their ambush. We opened fire before they could recover, the bright flashes popping in our HUDs. Right up next to the reactor was where it was warmest, so that’s where the alphas of the Reint had congregated—the biggest, the strongest, the fastest, the deadliest.
We lost another of our team before we could even get into the reactor room proper, Sahluk’s man cut down as a Reint we’d missed somehow in the hallways behind took advantage of the chaos in front of us to grab him and tear half his face off. He didn’t even manage to scream; we never would have known it had happened, except the Preacher saw the motion from the corner of her eye and blasted the Reint in two with her energy cannon.
Nothing we could have done; the Preacher salvaged the man’s rifle, and we pressed forward, into the reactor room itself. The open space was ten times as big as Scheherazade’s entire interior, full of pipes and chains and catwalks, the reactor machinery taking up all three floors of the basement, leaving it open to the standing brackish water that flooded up from below, creating a wide pool at the very center of the complex, surrounding the massive reactor itself.
That’s where the Reint were emerging from. They just kept coming up out of the murk, their claws skittering on the metal gratings as they emerged dripping from the pool and lunged across the space at us. It was like the water below was boiling already, there was so much movement down there.
Javier and the Preacher moved to the reactor’s controls as the rest of us covered them. Sahluk’s Barious team member moved with them as well, her gun raised and firing: apparently whatev
er had been in that little exchange of ideas they’d had back in Sanctum, the Preacher had come out on top as far as who should be allowed to do the technical work. She knelt in front of the control panel, breaking open an access port and pulling some of the wiring free so that she could plug it into her arm like a junkie after a fix.
I’d fired my rifle dry, so I tossed it aside. Maybe I’d be able to find it later, maybe not. I drew my pistol instead, began picking my shots more carefully. We didn’t speak, none of us. We all knew what would happen here—either the Reint would overwhelm us, and we’d fail, or the Preacher would succeed, and every single Reint who didn’t boil to death in the basement below our feet would come up out of the water surrounding the reactor. They’d emerge maddened by pain and with only one thought: to get out. The only way out available to them would be through us.
“It’s heating up!” the Preacher called out, unplugging from the console and stepping back, lifting her rifle as she did so, the weapon still bloodstained from the hands of the soldier she’d taken it from.
The Reint were calling out to each other under the water below, a kind of burbling howl distorted by the liquid. They were coming.
CHAPTER 20
It was ugly. It was endless. They just kept coming. We hadn’t planned for this—devolved Reint were territorial by nature: there should have been a dozen at most down in the basements. There just wasn’t enough space for more of them to share, given the room they needed before they would start killing each other off. Except these Reint were different, had been willing to cram nearly on top of each other, and there must have been half a hundred in the flooded basement below.
The water sloshing around our knees—now choked with Reint blood and viscera—was growing warm, and it was quite a ways away from the reactor’s piping a floor beneath us, the heat source that was making the basement literally boil.
The clouds of steam rising from the brackish foulness didn’t help our visibility, nor did the fluctuating light leaking from the reactor itself, bathing the mist and murk in shades of indigo and violet like a strobe. I’d dialed down my HUD’s light levels as the illumination from the reactor had increased, and now I was firing at motion more than anything else, the spikes and ripples in the waves from my tracker seemingly everywhere, the clouds of steam eddying and shifting this way and that, broken every few seconds by another Reint charging our position.
Finally, it was over. There was no signal, no last defiant charge—just an end to the screaming, and no more forms exploding up from the superheated water to try and tear our faces off. Reint bodies floated past us in the wash, broken like dolls and riddled with bullet holes.
The light from the reactor steadied into a constant glow, and the Preacher activated the heat circulators, meaning the boiling died down almost immediately. The smell of death and cooked reptilian meat was thick in the air, enough that I tried not to breathe as much as possible.
Sahluk was panting, kneeling near the center of the room. He’d lost his rifle early on, had fallen back on hand-to-hand tactics, almost daring the Reint to come at him because he was stronger than the rest of us, with tougher skin. It had worked—he’d pulled the more aggressive away from those of us who still had their guns, let us fire more freely, but he hadn’t gotten away clean. I moved to take at least some of his weight as he stumbled; Javier reached him just after me and applied a medical foam to his damaged face.
I’d known when he took the wound that he would lose the eye.
“Sound off!” he shouted to his men, nothing in his voice giving away how badly he was hurt. One by one, his troops responded. Two of the wounded had been dragged away in the chaos. Maybe we’d find them somewhere in the rest of the facility; maybe not. The overhead lights were beginning to come up, those that still worked, giving the basement a patchy glow.
It was an ugly place, full of death and carnage. Four more of ours had died in the fighting, among them the other Barious. The synthetic species was tough, but three Reint had pinned her down as a fourth ripped her head entirely free of her body. Even Barious couldn’t survive that. Almost half of the soldiers who had entered the complex wouldn’t be coming back out again.
A nothing price to pay, if it meant we got the cannon back in working order.
I hated to think like that; I did. But the Pax were still coming—having this gun online, if the engineers could get it back to full operation, meant that we’d be able to pound their dreadnaughts as they moved into a firing solution over Sanctum. If they wanted to be able to bombard our home with impunity, they’d likely have to take this gun first. That could save hundreds of lives, thousands, maybe even turn the tide of the coming fight. The cold, hard math was still very much on our side.
It didn’t feel like that, watching the soldiers prepare their comrades’ bodies for extraction, trying to keep them out of the water made pale pink with blood, both their own and that of the Reint we’d cut down.
“We’re not done yet,” Sahluk growled at his troops. “We’ve cleared most of them, but I want this facility checked again, and again, before the techs get here. Top to bottom, at least two more times. Plenty of Reint got past us, I’m sure—they could still be hiding elsewhere in the building.” He turned to me, which was easy, given that I was the only thing keeping him standing. “Get outside, see if you can get a line to your ship. I need to know what the ETA is on those engineers.”
“I’ll take him,” the Preacher offered, sliding in beside me and shouldering more of Sahluk’s weight than I possibly could.
I nodded, and managed to retrieve my empty rifle from the water, slinging it over my back. Thankfully, Justified guns were designed to fire wet, and our munitions were waterproof. “Take someone with you,” Sahluk said, still leaning on the Preacher. “This place isn’t clear yet; none of us should move alone.”
“I’ll go,” Javier offered. “I could use some fresh air.”
“I think we all could,” Sahluk agreed. “Get moving. Like I said: we’re not done yet.”
CHAPTER 21
We went to work.
Javier and I rejoined the others as they emerged from the basement. The Reint who had survived our initial purge were either the sickly and the old—those who had remained hidden—or those injured in our attack. They didn’t have much fight in them. We were merciless anyway. It would only take one left behind to decimate the engineering team, and we’d just been through a bloodbath. Violence makes sentient beings more violent.
Besides, what we were supposed to do, herd them all outside? They’d just run into the fences and the autoturrets. There were millions of lives in the balance, and these devolved Reint would never be able to return to a sapient state.
We killed them all, every living thing we found inside the facility. Then we swept again, looking to make sure we hadn’t missed any. And again. And again.
By the time Scheherazade returned with the first team of engineers, Bravo emplacement was officially clear. The technicians had studied the videos we’d sent back, and had been poring over the plans for the facility besides; they had Schaz drop massive payloads from orbit, crates filled with tools and equipment and supplies. Getting the gun up and running—and keeping it up and running during the coming battle, even as its shielding was fighting off whatever damage the Pax could dish out, not to mention the thick radiation—would take a great deal of work.
Sahluk left half of his remaining team with them, to maintain the autoturrets and the fences and to cover the engineers just in case, and the rest of us climbed back up to Scheherazade. Time to clear Alpha gun.
First, though, we plotted a return course to Sanctum. We needed more equipment; at least half our number needed medical attention; most of all, we needed new soldiers. And we needed to return our dead to their home.
When we set down inside the hangar, Marus was waiting for us. He hadn’t returned with the first set of engineers—had sent a message saying that he was assembling equipment for us back at Sanctum, that he’d
be waiting. He was as good as his word. Sahluk had another dozen volunteers from his police force standing by, with fresh gear and charged exosuits, ready and willing to take on Alpha.
Sahluk let the new volunteers handle rearming the men and women he’d returned with and got himself to the medbay to get treatment for his damaged face. He should have stayed there, but he said that he’d rejoin us before we left, and I didn’t try and stop him. It was his decision to make.
I’d spent most of the flight over in the shower, trying to warm up again and to wash the blood off of me. I popped a few caffeine pills and crammed down a quick meal in Sanctum’s cafeteria as the others loaded up—Javier joined me, though we didn’t talk much, both of us too busy thinking about how we were going to survive another action like the one we’d just made it through; worrying about our long shared history or how anything was going to play out other than the next day or so would have taken more energy than we had to spare.
With a hot meal and fresh ammunition, we were about ready to go again, regardless of the fact that I didn’t want to be ready to go again. I didn’t want to spend any more time fighting monsters in the dark. Truth be told, if you’d offered me a choice, right then and there—try and clear the Alpha gun, or have the Pax show up, a week earlier than we expected them, and start that fight right now, I would have taken the second option. Better to have it over and done with.
Criat swung by the cafeteria to thank me for the mission. He’d wanted those guns reclaimed for decades now, and taking Bravo was the closest he’d come to that goal since we’d settled in this system. I told him we likely couldn’t hold them after the Pax assault was over, that the pulse radiation and the Reint were just too thick, that it would be too expensive. He dismissed my worries.
“If we have to abandon them after, we can do so,” he replied. “You’ve proved that they can be retaken when we need them. We’ll just do it again if necessary.”
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