Deathstalker d-1

by Simon R. Green

  The party's lights glanced across shifting scenes like flashes of lightning in a storm as they shorted in and out, until finally the contact team came to the great steel doors of the Vault of the Sleepers. According to the computers, they were twenty-three feet tall and ten feet wide; great featureless slabs of shining steel with no trace of lock mechanisms. The team fussed around with them for some time before losing patience and blasting them open with a portable disrupter cannon. The doors blew back, light flared within the Vault, and the Sleepers came boiling out.

  Guns flashed desperately, but the aliens were everywhere. Huge creatures, eight to ten feet tall, wrapped in spiked silicon armor that was somehow a part of them. Mouths stuffed with steel teeth, gaping and grinning. Blood dripped and spattered from their jaws. Marines were firing in all directions. Swinging swords. Shouting and screaming. The aliens darting among them, almost too fast to follow, despite their size. A clawed hand tore a human head from its body, which walked on for several steps before collapsing. Another alien ripped a hole in a marine's belly, despite his field armor, and buried its face in his guts. Blood flew on the air, intermittent light from discharging guns, screams of pain and horror. A face filled the screen, begging and pleading, and then was snatched away. An alien posed for a moment before the camera, wrapped in human entrails. A marine stuck his gun in an alien's mouth and blew its head off. Another alien thrust its clawed hand into his back and out his chest, and waved the dying body like a banner. An alien ripped the lower jaw from a marine's face and used it like a club till it shattered. There were aliens running on the walls and on the ceilings, like huge impossible insects. The last marines fell, and the aliens swept past the bodies, heading for the surface. The screen showed light fading away into darkness, and then went blank.

  Silence sat watching the blank screen for a moment, then reached forward and turned it off. The record didn't lose any of its impact, no matter how many times he watched it. Everyone who'd recorded those scenes was dead, their footage preserved by their ship's computers. He still found it hard to believe that the aliens had slaughtered the contact team so effortlessly. But he'd seen swords shatter on the alien's crimson armor, and disrupter beams ricochet, leaving the aliens unharmed. He was beginning to wonder if anything could stop them, short of another scorching.

  And these were the creatures the Empress wanted him to capture and train as shock troops.

  "I don't think we'll show this to the troops at their briefing," said Stelmach. "It would only upset them."

  "I've already shown it to them," said Silence. "It's my experience that informed troops last longer."

  "Then with your permission, Captain, I'll set things in order for the drop. I still have arrangements to make."

  "Do whatever you have to," said Silence. "We drop on the hour. If you're not ready by then, you can walk down."

  Stelmach nodded briefly and left the bridge. Frost sniffed.

  "That man needs more fiber in his diet. Are you sure we haven't got any more footage of the first contact?"

  "This is all that's viewable. I don't think I could stand much more. I don't think I've ever seen anything as vicious and deadly as those creatures."

  "Damn right," said Frost, grinning broadly. "I can't wait to go head-to-head with them. Been ages since I had a real challenge."

  The trouble is, Silence thought dryly, I think she means it.

  * * *

  The surface of Grendel was even more depressing in reality than it had been on the viewscreen. The great sea of ash stretched away in all directions, smooth and featureless and dead. There was more ash in the air, diffusing the pale crimson light of the sun, till it looked like the sky itself was bleeding. The five pinnacles from the Dauntless touched down one after the other on the specially constructed steel landing pads floating on the ash and waited just long enough for the contact team to disembark before taking off again. Captain Silence looked about him, getting the feel of the new gravity. Bit heavier than he was used to, but he could manage. The recreate built into his uniform's collar surrounded his head with a bubble of fresh air. Even if he could have breathed the vomitus mixture Grendel called air, the ash suspended in it would have blinded and choked him in seconds. He watched the departing pinnacles arrow up through the bloody skies with mixed feelings. Without them, he really was on his own.

  He looked back at his team, noting without surprise that it had already split up into its three components of marines, espers and Wampyr. They still all looked to him for orders. As though he had any better idea what to do than they did. Still, when in doubt, sound confident.

  "All right, pay attention! There's an elevator to take us down to the buried city attached to the underside of these rafts, courtesy of the mining equipment. Bad news is it'll only hold fifteen at a time, so the marines will go down first to check things out. Once they've given the okay, the Investigator will go down with the espers, and then Stelmach and his Wampyr. Weapons in hand, ladies and gentlemen. If it moves and it's not us, shoot it. You don't have to wait for my permission. And watch yourselves once we get down there. The alien technology can have a somewhat disquieting effect on the human mind. Just concentrate on the mission, and you should be fine. Any problems?"

  "Do you want the bad news, or the really bad news?" said Frost.

  "Give it to me straight," said Silence heavily. "What's gone wrong now?"

  "First, we've lost all contact with the Dauntless. Something in the city below is interfering with our comm systems. That's a new development since the first team was here. Which means, if we need to leave here in an emergency, we're stuffed. We can't call for help, reinforcements, or a pickup. We're stuck here till the pinnacles return at the agreed time. Which is four hours and counting. You might care to consider that the first team lasted a grand total of two hours and seven minutes."

  "And the really bad news?" said Silence after a moment.

  "The mining machinery's broken down. The elevator's still working, but the shaft extends only to the edge of the underground city. That leaves us with at least an hour's walk through the city before we reach the Vault."

  Great, thought Silence. Just great. The one thing he'd been counting on was being able to avoid long exposure to the city's alien technology and its effects on the human mind. It also meant that they had that much less time to cope with whatever came out of the Vault. Silence thought hard.

  "Do we have any idea of why the mining machinery's broken down?"

  "No. Telemetry's out, along with the comm systems. The slightly good news is that at least the elevator's still working. For the moment."

  "So that even if it gets us down to the city, there's no guarantee it'll still be working when we want to come back up?"

  "You got it."

  "Marvelous. All right, we go ahead with the mission as planned. Unlike the first team, we've got battle espers and esp-blockers on our side. Hopefully one or the other will protect us from the city's influence. If not, we get to find out just how tough we really are. Get the marines moving, Investigator. Time is not on our side."

  The trip down in the elevator turned out to be something of an anticlimax. It was crowded, hot and stuffy, and distinctly claustrophobic, but since everyone was busy considering the horrors to come, nobody really noticed. With the comm systems out, there was no point in waiting for the marines' all clear, so Silence and the Investigator accompanied the first batch of espers down and hoped for the best.

  The city itself seemed quiet and peaceful, but Silence couldn't help thinking of it as the quiet of the graveyard. The marines had already set up a perimeter, with bright lights pushing back the darkness in all directions. They carried their guns at the ready and looked more than willing to use them at the first opportunity. Frost hummed something cheerful as she set off to inspect the perimeter, and Silence moved the espers off to one side. For the moment, he had all three of his esp-blockers working, hoping their field would be strong enough to protect the entire team. But, just in cas
e, he briefed the espers on maintaining a full psionic screen, should it prove necessary. They agreed easily enough, their eyes elsewhere. Silence couldn't blame them. It was all he could do to keep from turning round to stare out into the darkness. Anything could be out there. Anything at all.

  The Wampyr waited patiently for orders. Stelmach was too busy looking around with an open mouth. Apparently seeing the city on a viewscreen was quite a different thing from seeing it up close and personal. He caught Silence looking at him and closed his mouth with a snap. He barked out orders, and the Wampyr moved unhurriedly to take up a formation around him. Whatever else happened, Stelmach was clearly determined on surviving to tell everyone else about it. Silence smiled crookedly. It wasn't a bad idea, surrounding yourself with a wall of Wampyr. He just wished he'd thought of it first. Frost came back from the perimeter, and he put on his best cool, calm and confident look. Though he didn't know why he bothered. It had never fooled her before. She nodded casually and moved in close, her voice little more than a murmur.

  "Perimeter's secure, for the moment. Nothing on the motion trackers, but the long-range sensors are malfunctioning. We have to consider the possibility that ail our tech could fall foul to the city's influence. No guns, no force shields, no anything. We could end up going one-on-one with the Sleepers armed only with our swords and bad intentions. I'm not even going to think about the repeaters breaking down. Of course, there's always the Wampyr. They're pretty deadly in themselves, and their strength and speed aren't reliant on tech. Maybe our superiors did know what they were doing when they insisted we include the Wampyr on our team. How are the espers holding up?"

  "Hard to tell. They're acting pretty spacey, but that's hardly unusual with battle espers. I'm relying on the esp-blockers to protect them and us for the moment. Let's get the troops moving. Investigator. The less time we spend down here, the better."

  "Spoilsport," said Frost. "You never want to do anything fun."

  The marines took the point, guns at the ready, lights blazing on their helmets. The cameras on their shoulders were still working, even though they couldn't transmit live to the Dauntless. The only way a record of this expedition would survive would be if someone returned to the surface with it. Frost moved with the marines, eyes alight, just waiting for some enemy stupid enough to start something. Silence came next, with the espers, if only because he wanted to keep an eye on them. They ignored their surroundings and trudged along with their heads hanging. Whether this was due to the oppressive nature of the city or the numbing effects of the esp-blockers was unclear. Stelmach and his Wampyr brought up the rear. The city didn't seem to bother the Wampyr at all, but presumably when you've already been killed and brought back there's not much left that can upset you. Two of them were carrying a large piece of equipment that Silence hadn't been briefed on. When he'd inquired, he'd received a cold stare and was told he didn't need to know. Apparently it was some secret weapon for Stelmach to try out, if he got the opportunity. Just another secret Silence wasn't party to. He smiled briefly. Damn thing probably wasn't working anymore anyway.

  They moved on into the city, and things got worse. The huge buildings and other, less obvious constructions pressed in around them, intimidatingly huge and claustrophobically close. Sometimes enigmatic projections stretched out to block the way, and then they had to be stooped under or climbed over. The surfaces felt slick and unhealthy to the touch. The moving lights hid as much in shadows as they revealed, for which Silence for one was grateful. What he could see was disturbing enough.

  The city was a nightmare of steel and flesh; an unnatural combination of breathing metals and silver-wired meat. Rounded cylinders pulsed like gleaming intestines, and pumps beat like hearts, with great shifting valves. Things that might once have been living creatures had been made parts of functioning machines. There were complex devices with eyes and entrails, and long metal limbs tapering away to nothing. Things moved and settled for no reason, and swiveled slowly to follow the contact team as they passed. There were great, slow machines that looked as though they'd been grown as much as made, and small metal scuttling things with bright pinpoint eyes that kept to the shadows. So far, the marines had resisted the temptation to fire at them, but their patience was getting strained. An almost palpable oppression had settled over the party like a dark cloud. Everyone could feel the pressure of watching eyes and something listening to every sound they made. And everywhere it was all slick and smooth and functioning, as though the makers and operators had just stepped out a second ago and might return at any moment. Silence moved up to walk alongside Frost.

  "Remind you of anything?" he said quietly.

  "Yeah. The alien ship and the base it transformed on Unseeli. Biomechanics. A cross between living organic materials and functioning technology, far beyond anything we've ever achieved."

  "Could there be a connection between the Unseeli alien and whatever built this city?"

  "It's possible. But the alien ship crashlanded on Unseeli very recently, and these ruins are old. According to the Dauntless' sensors, before they started acting strangely, this city has been down here longer than the human race has been civilized… Makes you think, doesn't it?"

  Things got worse as they descended slowly toward the vault. The weird constructions closed in around them, enigmatic and disturbing, till the team was forced to walk in single file. The crowding shapes and structures hinted at meaning and function, but never enough to make any sense. The angles and dimensions were wrong, somehow, as though they added up to more than was visible with the naked eye. The marines became twitchy and quarrelsome. Some fired their guns out into the darkness, then couldn't or wouldn't say why. Their personal force shields stopped working for no apparent reason. Silence tried turning the esp-blockers off, to see if the espers could protect the team better, but they immediately became so hysterical he had to turn the esp-blockers back on to keep them from going insane. Even the Wampyr were affected. They stuck close together, their dead faces cold and intent. Stelmach looked like a bag of nerves, all wide eyes and trembling mouth. Silence had a growing ache between his shoulder blades from tense muscles, and it seemed to him that his thoughts weren't as clear as they had been. He sometimes lost track of what he was thinking and had to concentrate hard to recover it. Even Frost had stopped her cheerful humming. They'd been walking just over three quarters of an hour, and were deep in the guts of the alien city, when they lost their first man.

  A trapdoor opened up beneath the feet of the leading marine, and as suddenly as that he was gone. He just had time to start a scream, and then he disappeared into the darkness beneath the floor. Silence and Frost pushed their way forward and stood at the edges of the gap. They could hear the marine's scream fading away to nothing long after they lost sight of the light blinking on his helmet. The marines clustered around the gap in the floor, shining their lights down, but the light didn't travel far, and the blackness showed them nothing at all.

  "Any idea how deep that is?" Silence said finally. "Could we lower a line and go after him?"

  "The sensors are out," said Frost dispassionately. "Nothing on the motion trackers. It could be bottomless, for all we know."

  "Move on," said Silence, straightening up. A marine glared at him.

  "We don't leave our people behind, Captain."

  "You do this time. We've no way of getting to him, in the unlikely event that he is still alive. We're probably going to lose more men before we get out of here. Get used to the idea. Now move. Since you're so eager, you can take the point." The marine glared at him for a long moment, as though he was going to say something, and then he turned away and started off down the narrow corridor. Silence waved for the marines to follow after him. "Everyone stay close together and keep your eyes open. No telling what other booby traps there are here," He looked across the gap at Frost. "Are any of our instruments in good enough shape to spot things like this in advance?"

  "Not really," said the Investigator quietly. "The c
ity… confuses them. It's too different. Too alien."

  The team moved on, jumping the gap where necessary, taking things a little more slowly now. They were all remembering what had happened to the first team. There hadn't been any booby traps then. It was as though the city was learning how to defend itself from intruders.

  Traps stuck at them from all sides, sudden and unexpected. Pointed metal spikes shot out of a wall and skewered a passing marine. He hung from the spikes like a butterfly on a pin, and then the spikes retreated into the wall and let his body drop to the floor. The metal made soft sucking noises as they left the marine's body: sinister sounds in the eerie quiet. The contact team pressed cautiously on, leaving the body where it lay. They'd retrieve it on the way back. If all went well. There were sudden bursts of heat and cold, both extreme enough to sear and burn exposed flesh. Once a howling followed them down the narrow way, shrieking in their ears, and then the sound sunk to a tone so low it shuddered in their bones. It did them no harm, so they ignored it. Compartments opened in the walls, full of mystery and strangeness, the sliding panels opening and slamming shut like snapping mouths. Gravity fluctuated from near freefall to a crushing weight that made every move an effort. One of the espers suddenly stopped in his tracks and started giggling. He laughed and laughed his sanity away, until one of the marines took pity on him and shot him in the head. The contact team pressed on. An hour had passed, and they had lost seven marines, one esper and one Wampyr who hadn't looked where he was walking.