Inferno Station (Helltroopers Book 1)

by Isaac Stone

  The pit was a sports arena.

  There was a motion beside him and he saw Barbara Ann stare at a sequence of numbers painted across from them on the wall. The paint looked fresh. The numbers were painted only a few days ago from the appearance.

  She stared at them for a few more minutes. This had to be another access code. Whoever painted those numbers wanted her to find them. Whatever information they blocked from her memory was now free. They were being played, that much was obvious to Ash, he just hoped that whomever was pulling the strings had a check waiting for them when this was over, or things were going to go down with a bullet.

  “This is an arena,” she told Ash. By now, the rest of Team Omega stood next to him and looked down into it.

  “Plenty of permanent stations have arenas and ball courts,” Ash commented to her. “Though I’ve never seen one quite like this.”

  “Men fought to the death in this place,” she told him. “Their mangled bodies were taken out to be replaced by new contenders. At the end of the day, only one would survive and go onto the next match. There were always plenty of contestants, men who wanted to be freed from the lower depths of this place. It smelled of blood when in use.” She closed her eyes again and Ash thought he saw a look of horror over her face.

  Costa leaned over to Ash and whispered in his ear. “Our friend in the rear is getting closer. Look, there’s an arch ahead. It will lead to something and we can get down to the next level.”

  Ash nodded and led them around the pit and through the arch. It only took them fifteen minutes to cross through it and into the next room. This was the largest level he’d yet encountered and seemed to serve several functions.

  This next section was in equal size, but was built to resemble a tranquil scene. The ground resembled real dirt and the lighting overhead had the softness of a summer day. In the middle of the room, a small stream divided it. It was pumped from one side and recirculated out of the other. A bridge divided it in the middle. Ash walked to the stream and looked down at it. It was clear and filled with goldfish.

  “They needed a place to relax after the fights,” Ash observed. “This has to be some kind of park.”

  It was at that moment their tail revealed itself.

  From out of the arch behind them, the three-headed dog emerged into their field of vision.

  At first Ash assumed it was some kind of actual flesh and blood monster, until the beast’s lips curled back to reveal wicked metal teeth and its eyes flickered from red to blue to yellow and then back to red, giving the impression that it was cycling through visual assist modes. It was a droid, but with a synth outer casing to give it the appearance of being a beast. He could hear the servos at work as the heads growled and turned in their direction.

  This horror wasn’t left over from the Mars Wars; it was built special. The robotic dog stood a good four feet high at the shoulder and was at least seven feet long. The heads were smaller than he would’ve expected, but they had to be so as to provide balance for the rest of the body. How the massive war machine had been able to tail them without giving away its size made Ash’s guts twist.

  Each head was circled by a chain collar. The collective heads snapped their teeth at them and growled again. It hunched itself down and aimed in their direction. Ash watched the claws grip the ground beneath it.

  “Guns up!” Ash told his crew.

  “Seems a shame to blow it away,” Kris spoke, the awe clear in her voice, “Whoever built that thing put a lot of work into it.”

  “Not the time Kris,” Ash said as they raised their guns and aimed directly at it.

  “Would like to meet the person who designed it,” Kris spoke one more time.

  “Fire!” Ash yelled the same moment the robotic dog leaped at them.

  The beast anticipated their assault and launched itself into a high leap using its powerful legs, the servos whining with the tremendous force at work. Impact round tore into the ground where the robotic dog had been moments before, and Ash snarled as he attempted to track the beast through his gun sights as he continued to fire. He wasn’t the only one struggling to keep up, and as the creature zig zagged through the natural cover in the room the rest of the team burned through ammo at an alarming rate as they unleashed everything they had. It seemed to Ash like it was in several places at once, and soon Team Omega was firing in all directions. In a few moments everyone would have to swap out magazines, Ash realized with a sickening certainty, and that’s when the beast would be among them.

  His weapon clicked empty just as the beast leapt across the other side of the small bridge and disappeared into the water. The rest of the team chewed up the surface with rounds, pulping the goldfish and kicking up a silty churn from the bottom. Ash let go of his rifle, knowing he didn’t have time to reload, even as the rest of the rifles of Team Omega hit empty almost in unison. Ash’s hand gripped the handle of his plasma pistol, thumbing off the safety as he ripped it from the holster even as he spun on his heels and dropped to a knee.

  His instincts served him well, and just as Ash raised his plasma pistol the calm water on the other side of the tiny bridge exploded outwards. The beast emerged from the water in a spray as it roared and bared its teeth, the creature’s leap carrying it out of the water and over the bridge. Time slowed to a crawl as Ash leveled the plasma pistol and fired, the globule of super-heated matter tearing through the creature’s chest. The mechanical beast twisted in the air and fell to the side, its precise leap turning into a haphazard collapse as the plasma slagged the majority of its central systems. The team stood dumfounded at how close they’d come to being at the mercy of its claws and teeth as they fumbled with their fresh magazines. Barbara Ann was the only one who appeared non-plussed.

  Theo, the first to react, activated his heat sword and walked over to one of the heads, which still snapped away on the floor. Wires and circuitry trailed away from it as the mechanical jaws continued to work. He stopped in front of it and looked down. It seemed insane this part of the machine would continue to function since it served no purpose once it was severed from the main body. It had had some processing unit on the inside, which allowed it to operate separately. Likewise, where were the power cells or pack that would feed it?

  Theo shook his black, curly hair at the head and sliced it in half with the heat sword. The white-hot wand split it down the middle from one side to another. This time it stopped and he could see the mechanism inside. More circuits, wires and hose fell out from the two sections. A small black pool began to form on the floor of the room.

  The two sections of the head burst into flames. Theo turned off his heat sword and stepped back.

  “This is crazy,” he yelled back to the crew. “What would cause it to burn like that?” He slid the heat sword in its scabbard and walked back to the others.

  They looked at the remains of the three-headed mechanical dog and watched them twitch separately on the floor. Ash thought each of those sections would burn if a heat sword were thrust into them. Whatever technology was used to build it was beyond his understanding.

  “We keep getting lucky, but that isn’t going to last forever, stay sharp people, that thing almost had us,” he told the others. “I see a staircase that leads down. Barbara Ann, anything more to tell us?”

  She shook her lovely head. “We’ll talk later,” the android told him.

  9

  The temperature dropped as they entered the next landing. The armor could protect them against temperature extremes, though Ash was beginning to grow concerned that their power cells might begin to get over-taxed by all of the radical changes and the output required cope with that. He walked ahead of his crew and looked at what lay before them.

  It was a huge room at least fifty yards wide and seventy yards long. He glanced at the temperature gauge on his arm and found it to be several degrees below freezing. How the levels could change in such dramatic ways implied a tremendous amount of energy output, adjustments to the life support sy
stem, and much more intent than he was comfortable admitting.

  Before him were lines of capsules, each about seven feet in length. Each with a viewport. Each one was made of some kind of chrome metal and attached to a box that monitored the contents. A series of lights were illuminated on each box, which showed gauges that indicated the status of what was inside. They were stacked five high with enough room to move between each one. Each capsule was also connected to an array of hoses and pipes. All of the connections merged on the floor and ran back into a jungle of more attachments that continued along the walls. Once again, the place was deadly quiet. Nothing moved from the inside this time.

  “What is this place?” Ester called out to him.

  “Don’t know,” he answered, “Nothing makes sense at all in this level. Let me have a look at what’s inside one of these things.”

  Ash walked over to one of the capsules and lightly touched it with a gloved hand. Even through the glove, he could feel how cold it was on the surface. With his glove, he scraped away some of the frost from a viewport which was located on the near end. Ash assumed there was some kind of system that took the moisture out of the atmosphere, else wise the capsules and walls would be coated in ice.

  One swipe took away the frost and he found himself looking into the face of a young girl. She was pale and had her eyes open, which stared into his. Her face was devoid of life.

  Ash walked over to another capsule and scraped the frost from its viewport. He did this to several others before he ceased his effort. All of them contained bodies of young people. They were of various sexes, nude and obviously dead. Why they were preserved in this place was beyond his understanding.

  “This is a tomb,” he announced to his crew. “All of them contain frozen dead bodies.”

  The rest of Team Omega began to examine the capsules and look into the view plates. It was a bizarre experience, nothing like they’d expected. Ester noted the serial numbers on each one and speculated how they might relate to each other.

  “You have any insight on this place, Char?” Theo asked his box. The box still dangled in place.

  “Not a thing,” it told them. “I found an AI that monitors the systems, but it won’t talk to me. The AI encryption quality has been on a steady incline as we descend levels.”

  Ash turned to see Barbara Ann’s green eyes close to his. Once again, she’d walked up next to him and he didn’t hear her. He looked down at her feet.

  “I keep forgetting you don’t need shoes,” he told her. “Not even here where the floor and walls have to be below freezing. You don’t even need a wrap to keep warm.”

  “It doesn’t affect me,” she responded, her voice still the sound of crystal bells.

  “This place,” Ash said to her, a loss for words. “It’s terrifying. I don’t know why it gives me the creeps more than any other we’ve found here. Just something about seeing all these bodies stacked up. What kind of nightmare is this?”

  Barbara Ann opened her mouth as if she was about to say something, but was cut off by one of the crew. It was Makulah who shouted from the other side of the room where they stood.

  “They’re harvesting organs!” he shouted. “This is a human chop shop!” His hands trembled as he looked at the pad in front of him.

  The others gathered around him and began to go through the paperwork, which lay on a bench toward the place he stood. As Ash made his way toward his crew, he could see the anger in their eyes.

  “This is why they keep them preserved,” Costa pointed out. “And why the AI won’t talk to Char? Do you realize what any number of system governments would do if they suspected this place was here?”

  “They’d nuke the entire asteroid,” Theo filled in the answer. “There are plenty of atomics still out there to do it. If EAC is responsible for this place, there’s nowhere in the universe the executives will be able to hide. They’d be hunted down like rabid dogs. There wouldn’t even need to be a bounty placed on any of them.”

  “I don’t know if we should go any further,” Costa announced. “This whole place puts us in a bad situation. If the corporation were involved with it, why would they want us to live now that we know about it? We’ll never be paid. Once they have Haddo, they’ll find a way to kill every one of us. We’ve seen too much.” He tried not to look at the view plates around him.

  “Most of these people weren’t transfers from other penal systems,” Makulah pointed out as he went through the pad. “They’ve been abducted from all over the system. Why the hell would someone do such a thing? Especially when they had all these convicts on hand?” His hands continued to shake as he looked at the pad.

  “You realize what we’ve seen?” Ester pointed out. “I don’t like this place. Look, the mechanical three-headed dog was crazy, but this is downright diabolical. If they can make those crazed robots, what else is down here? I don’t even understand why we were brought in to get this guy out of the station. We’re all dead unless we leave this place.” She started to walk back the other way.

  “What makes you think we can go so easily?” Ash shouted to her. “We’ve got this far without a real fight for a reason. That battle droid was the only real threat, I’m starting to think it was a test. Everything else after that, I don’t know, it’s like we are part of the show now. We try to go back; God only knows what is behind us. I think we need to continue down to the next level. We’re in the game now, let’s finish it.”

  He pointed to the exit on the other side of the room. “Look at that. There is another way out of here. We take those stairs down and deal with whatever is there. With any luck, Simon Haddo will be waiting for us.”

  “Yeah, waiting for us with what?” Makulah brought up. “I think that nut case has a lot to do with the way this place was built. It’s the work of a madman, and considering his history…”

  “This station is a torture chamber,” Barbara Ann announced. “It’s designed to cause terrible things to be done to people so the builders of it can extract from them whatever they want.” She stood in place and let the words sink into the others.

  “Is that what you meant to tell me?” Ash finally broke the silence. No one had said a word; they merely stood in place and listened to her. “You mean it’s more than a way to make those power packs?”

  “You had to see this level in operation to fully understand,” she explained. “People were put into these chambers and slowly froze to death. Do you not notice the looks on their faces? This was done so they could be killed in the slowest manner possible. The builders of Inferno Station wanted to get the most horrible sensations humans can experience. Not only were these people selected for their physical ability and appearance, they were selected for their ability to die slow and painfully.”

  “How could anyone find such people,” Makulah asked.

  “It’s easy enough if you have access to the right databases,” Ester mentioned. “All you have to do is find the ones who match what you want. Then you bring them here. This station was designed by psychopaths.”

  “The food processing plant,” Barbara Ann continued, “used humans as its source of protein. People were made to watch their friends turned into cooked flesh. This place is designed to create reliable and renewable pain and suffering. There are no other reasons for it to be here.”

  “And the arena we just saw?” Costa asked her. Ash could see the look on his face.

  “Worse than anything the ancient Romans ever accomplished,” she told him. “Friends made to fight friends, family forced to kill family. And people forced to watch it all. A theater of pure evil. Entertainment for the worst kind of sadists imaginable.”

  “Who are writing our paychecks,” Ester added.

  “We need to get out of this place,” Makulah brought up. “Fuck Simon Haddo and fuck the money. Damn lot of good it will do us if we’re all dead. We need to load up and be prepared to shoot our way back to the gunship. Then we need to torpedo this place into dust.”

  “And no on
e would ever find out if existed,” Barbara Ann told him. “Assuming you were allowed to leave and Inferno Station is destroyed. The builder will create another one.”

  “You keep referring to the builder as if it’s someone other than ECA,” Kris said to her. Her teeth rattled and it wasn’t from the cold in the air.

  “There is more to this than rogue executives at EAC,” the android told them. “This place was built for reasons other than to make some people richer than they already are. No matter how twisted their impulses, no one would create a place such as this for their own amusements. The risks are too high.”

  Ash walked back to the first girl in the capsule view plate he’d seen. Barbara Ann had some pretty serious philosoph-ware installed to be able to go on like that, which made her even more alien to him, though he knew she was right. While the rest of his crew bickered and argued over what they should do, it hit him the face that this girl reminded him of someone. He looked at her and them he remembered where he’d seen those same innocent eyes before that looked up. It wasn’t her, it couldn’t be, there was no way this could be the same woman, but the resemblance was uncanny. He looked at the terrified eyes one more time and then looked away.

  He remembered the day he left the Mars colony. It was a long time ago and before he was able to think about starting his own company. There were so many things left unfinished back there and he’d never had the opportunity to return and see to them again. Why had he left so suddenly?

  He remembered it had to do with the academy where he was accepted. The years after his mother vanished were difficult for a young kid on his own. It was after he was out of the foster homes. If he hadn’t had a family to stay with, he might not be alive today. One of his friends put him up with his parents and they let him stay on until he was able to find work.

  They were good people, hard-working types who made the trip to Mars in search of new opportunities and who wanted to get away from the mess back on Earth. Old Earth was a disaster everywhere with the planetary climate out of control and whole sections not fit for man or woman. There were the spots where the limited nuclear exchange had rendered sections contaminated with radioactivity. It happened years before he was born, but even the colonists on Mars talked about the human mutations that resulted from them.