Inferno Station (Helltroopers Book 1)

by Isaac Stone

  “Follow me,” Ash ordered. “I’m taking us to the other door. Synth, this going to cause you any trouble?”

  “Not for a while,” the android told him. “Even my clothes are temperature resistant.” However, Ash noticed they started to smoke with the latest flame jet from the floor.

  “Single file on me,” Ash cried out as he began to hustle down the floor. He stepped over a pillar of fire that sprang up minutes ago, but the armored suit protected him.

  Ash made his way down the floor with the sound of the boots from his companions echoing on the floor. He concentrated on the door and kept his eyes on it. He prayed no one slipped and fell, as the room temperature was over 500 degrees and rising.

  The room temperature still increasing, Ash reached the far door. As before, this one was open. He was grateful as the room was already close to the point where the suits would start to have difficulty to function. The time wasted to get a secure door open would be fatal.

  He ran down the latest stairs with the crew behind him. Now the temperature decreased as they left the flame barrier behind them. In a few minutes, he reached the bottom of the staircase. This time Ash was certain to get a good look at what he’d walked into.

  It was a small vestibule, about ten by ten feet across. This appeared to be some kind of waiting room with another door, this one closed, to the front of him.

  Ash turned around to see the remainder of Team Omega catch up to him. He could see the smoke rise from their suits and the look of exhaustion in their faces through the visors. The only exception, once again was Barbara Ann who appeared to be the very image of composure with a broad smile on her face. Her clothes, however flame proof, were singed and smoldering.

  “Temperature seems stable down here,” Costa pointed out. “Char, can you get the door behind us closed? The heat will rise, but it’s too close us.”

  In response, the door whirled shut as it moved on its rollers and sealed the door behind them. “That wasn’t so hard,” said the friendly AI over the team channel. “Guess I am figuring these units out.”

  When the temperature in the room dropped to a point where it was bearable, Ash removed his impact rifle from its bag. The air seemed to smell of smoke and the sulfur used to mark natural gas, but that had to be in his imagination. He could still feel the heat on his face from the other suits in the room.

  “That room,” he said to Barbara Ann. “Another torture device?” She nodded, the smoke still rising from her undamaged body, “Being roasted alive does sound rather unpleasant.”

  Another reason to kill them all, he vowed to himself.

  “Check out the symbols again,” Makulah, pointed to the walls of the room. The light was faint, but they could see them.

  “That Enochian script again,” Ester observed. “Appears someone liked it a lot. Those symbols and letter are fresh, maybe just a day or two.”

  “That isn’t any strange angel language,” Kris said as she pointed out something on the ceiling. They all looked up to see a five digit number sequence, also from fresh paint.

  “Another pass code?” Ash asked Barbara Ann. She blinked three times after reading it and turned in his direction.

  “Yes,” she said. “We are close to the end of this journey, but it still has many things in store for us. No more frozen corpses, from what it lets me tell you. Plenty of threats on the other side of that door. The builders of this place wanted it to bring out the worst in people. I see they were very successful.

  “Then let’s not waste any time,” Ash ordered the team, “Guns up. The synth here doesn’t know or want to tell us what is on the other side of that door.”

  Ash was glad to see his impact gun sustained no damage on the run through the oven. He was still concerned the horde or perhaps some other battle droid they’d missed might bust the door down somehow, but doubted any of them would survive the flames.

  “You want me to go first this time?” Costa asked Ash. “No reason you should do all the heavy lifting,” He walked over to it and placed one gloved hand on the handle.

  “Go ahead,” Ash approved, “just watch yourself. Anything moves the wrong way, start shooing immediately!” He stepped back a few paces to give him some room.

  Costa looked at the door and noted the hinges were all on the other side. “Here goes,” he said and twisted the handle.

  The door opened up as he shoved it.

  Nothing happened this time, but Costa took no chances. He brought up his gun and used it to poke the door open the rest of the way. As he still saw nothing from the other side, Costa walked into the opening and stood in place with the gun aimed straight out.

  “Looks fine to me,” he announced and the rest followed him into the room. Barbara Ann shut the door behind her.

  The room was at least a hundred yards in length and width. It was full of artificial hills and obstructions, but Ash could see the exit door on the other side. Once again, it was devoid of human life, although he could see the footprints of many people in the dirt on the floor.

  “We’re not alone,” Ash observed. The fanned out and tried to get a bearing on where they were.

  The first bullet kicked up some dirt on the floor. Ash had just enough time to find a barricade made out of barrels to dodge behind.

  “Over here!” he yelled at the rest of the crew. Seconds later, they’d scattered behind various obstructions

  The first bullet was followed by more from a small two-story building across from them. Ash watched the bullets ricochet across the floor as they kicked up enough dirt to reach the hardened iron ore floor that was made when the builders burnt into the asteroid.

  “That was quick,” Kris observed. “Who the hell is shooting at us?” She hunched down but tried to see over the barrels.

  Jack reached over and picked up one of the bullet fragments that were left from the volley. “Older model,” he pointed out. “However good it is, they don’t have up-to-date weapons.”

  “You with the Fields?” a voice yelled out from the building across from them. It appeared to be made out of cast-off parts and junk.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Ash called back from his position. “We’re EAC contract security and all we want is Simon Haddo.”

  “I don’t know about anyone called Simon,” the voice, very male, yelled back at him. “People come through here all the time. Sometimes they’re here because the Fields brought them in. If I don’t know you, you have to be a Field. The gun barked and another bullet whizzed past his head. It caused Ash to duck.

  “Seems we’ve walked into something,” Makulah pointed out. “Now how do we get out of it?”

  “We have enough firepower to pulverize that building,” Ester brought up. “I say we give him what he wants.”

  “Waste of ammunition,” Ash stopped her. “We don’t know a thing about who is in the tower. Let me fire off a round so he gets the idea….”

  From behind another barricade, this one made of plastic crates, emerged a band of men and women in clothes that were worn out. Ash froze when he saw them. He wasn’t scared, they carried the same low caliber rifles the man in the building used and Team Omega’s suit armor would prevent their crew from being gunned down. But these newcomers didn’t seem to recognize them as fellow humans. Ash couldn’t believe these people were human. They stood in place and stared at him. Finally, just as the rest of his crew turned to acknowledge the new band, one of them spoke.

  “Them Coys bothering you?” one of them asked. Another bullet from the building spun in the ground after it bounced off a barrel.

  “Looks like they is,” said a young man who stood next to him. “We’ll take care of them for you-ins.” They slid behind another barricade of barrels next to them.

  Team Omega sat in fascination as they sighted on the building and began to return fire. There were four of them in the band and they began to fire off random shots at the second story, which cause the gunfire from it to stop.

  “I’ll
see you in hell, Coy!” the older man shouted across the divide at him, and the exchange of gunfire continued while the combatants appeared to forget about the presence of Team Omega.

  With great stealth, Ash and the rest of his crew slipped away from the gunfire and made their way across the field of obstacles to the other door. Then went past an encampment of some kind where an older woman barely registered their presence. In fifteen minutes, they were down the stairs to the next level.

  “That was insanity,” Ester pointed out to Barbara Ann, “but I don’t understand how it represented any kind of torture. I’m sure the number sequence in the chamber wall triggered your memory. What was the point of it?” She continued down the staircase with the others.

  “They are two branches of the same family, cloned over and over again,” Barbara Ann told her. “See how easy it is to make them hate each other?” The android remained silent until they reached the bottom of the landing.

  In some ways, this next level was the worst one he’d seen so far. There, before them, were bodies lying in all matter of death. All of them were intact and appeared to have died without any violence, but they were in a pattern. From what he could tell, the last ones took the first to go and pulled them to the side. The room wasn’t that big, but there had to be several hundred people in it. The smell was disgusting, but his visor prevented him from experiencing it. Unless again it was the sight of it making his mind think he was smelling something.

  “What was this?” Ash asked Barbara Ann.

  “Poison,” she told him.

  “Why are they all stacked up like that?” Jack asked.

  “Do you really want to know?” she told him and continued to walk, “Or are you asking because you think you should?”

  Jack stayed silent and turned away.

  The bodies were stacked up everywhere, which bothered Ash to no end. It was done deliberately, he could tell. One group would take the slow acting poison, and then they would be moved to the far side of the room to die in a spasm of death. This had to have taken a long time and was planned with a method that he didn’t want to speculate. He didn’t want to ask Barbara Ann why they had decided to do this, as the last of violence did give the impression that it was voluntary, or at least not physically forced. They were all adults, both men and women, and that was a small mercy. Children would have been too much.

  And once again, the walls were covered with the fresh paint of the strange symbols left behind by someone. What did it all mean? There had to be some reason behind this, he decided, just what it was he couldn’t tell.

  “There has to be some reason behind these symbols,” Costa said to Ash. “You can’t tell me they were placed here just to scare off the likes of us.” In truth, the scenery around him was enough to make Costa take seriously all the old stories his grandmother used to frighten him. He wanted to get out of this place as fast as they could.

  “Somebody believes in this Enochian stuff,” observed Theo, “And they believe hard.”

  “We got movement behind us,” Kris mentioned to Ash over the team channel. “I saw it, did you?” She kept her attention straight ahead and did her best not to turn back.

  “No,” Ash told her. “But I’m not surprised, seems like every other level or so there’s some kind of big boss nasty.”

  Suddenly it occurred to Ash, out of nowhere, that Barbara Ann could talk to them over the team channel too, although she wasn’t wearing any sort of headgear and Theo had never patched her in. if any of the rest of the team had noticed they were keeping quiet about it. This was all just too perfect.

  “You think that horde got through the door?” Makulah asked the others. “It was pretty thick, but maybe they found another way around, they were certainly all hanging out somewhere before attacking us.” He starred ahead just like the rest.

  “Doubt it,” Ash responded. “They’d never make it through the oven level. We only made it through because of our suit armor. It would roast them before they got halfway. This is something worse.”

  The team turned around, weapons at the ready. All of the dead bodies could be seen on the floor, but something was moving in the distance. She managed to enlarge it so everyone could get a better look.

  It was a battle droid, another leftover from the Mars Colony Wars, all of which was supposed to be banned by treaty. Once again, the station seemed to have not received the word that such weapons were forbidden. It was about seven feet in height at the shoulder and rolled across the floor on a set of twin tank treads. The twin chain cannons were visible even in the gloomy half-light of the chamber. As one Team Omega spread out and hit the ground, following silent hand signals from Ash as he directed them to hide themselves amongst the bodies. There wasn’t a scrap of cover in this chamber, and those chain cannons could mow them down easily.

  Despite the open chamber the war machine seemed more intent upon ensuring that all of the bodies in the stacks were actually dead. Once it entered the chamber from what appeared to be a side tunnel it began putting single rounds through the skulls of each corpse.

  “Jesus Christ,” Costa pointed out from his vantage point next to his leader. “Ash?”

  “Don’t engage yet,” Ash responded. “We might be able to overwhelm it with fire like we did the first battle droid, but without any kind of cover it would only need a few seconds to wipe us out. No we’re gonna have to do this with heat swords.”

  Ash gave his team the ‘hold fire’ hand signal and then nodded at Costa. The two men readied their heat swords carefully and quietly, and it took every scrap of self-control Ash had to remain still as the war machine went about its grisly task. The sound of single shots being fired in the suicide chamber echoed over them like an unspoken threat.

  After what seemed like an eternity the droid reached the two troopers. Ash barely kept himself from flinching as a point blank round from the chain cannon obliterated the skull of the corpse laying right next to him. He heard the sound of the internal servos grinding as the old war machine turned at the waist and begin to level its chain cannon with Ash.

  “Now!” Ash shouted as he rolled to the side and activated his heat sword, narrowly avoiding being drilled by the single round from the chain cannon that bit into the floor where he’d just been.

  Costa sprang to his feet and ran behind the creature, lashing out with his heat sword to sever what appeared to be the hydraulics of the beast’s right chain cannon. The droid reeled from the attack and attempted to spin around to catch Costa in its sights, though as it did Ash got to his feet and attacked. Ash slammed his heat sword down on the barrels of the functioning chain cannon and the man roared with victory as the sword burned through the rotating barrels.

  Costa began rapidly thrusting his heat sword in and out of the war machine’s back, damaging internal systems even as Ash assaulted the creature’s legs. In a matter of seconds the two men had cut the beast to the ground, rendering it little more than an assortment of slagged scrap metal.

  Not a word was said as the rest of the team stood, they were just glad to leave this nightmare level with their lives, though each of them, other than Barbara Ann, could not shake the sound of the point blank rounds being fired into the corpses.

  12

  Once again, they were in a small vestibule. Overhead was a faint light that showed the landing and the end of the stairs. The door to the other side lacked any kind of window or way to see through it.

  There were several goggles, which hung from the ceiling next to an open panel which revealed a vast assortment of hypodermics filled with who knew what kinds of chemicals, drugs, or medicines. Ash walked over to examine them. These were not meant for eye protection, but had thick lenses on them and special protective harnesses designed to fit over the head of whoever wore one. Ash pulled one of the off the attachments and looked them over.

  “Hell with it,” Jack announced, “I’m going to see what’s behind this door.” He turned the handle and pulled it open.

  The room
on the other side was black. Light seemed to enter and was sucked up into the blackness. He still had on his helm and switched on the vision assist to better see what lay beyond. The helm was built to use infrared light to help the wearer see in darkness.

  But he could see nothing beyond. It still appeared as blackness beyond the range of his visual range. Somehow, this room had a way of interfering with the helm’s visual assist.

  Jack stepped back inside and closed the door.

  “Pitch black in there,” he announced to everyone, “Visual assist doesn’t even work. Damn if I can figure out what this level is all about.”

  “It’s a virtual reality room,” Barbara Ann told them. “Completely blocked to sensory input. Even the walls are built in such a way to absorb sound. The only way through it is by using those goggles.”

  Unable to believe what he’d been told, Ash walked over to the door, rifle in hand. He pulled it open and stepped inside, but kept the door open. Just as Costa had done, he took a few trial steps inside the room and faced the darkness.

  The light from the vestibule was faint and stopped a few feet into the room. Ash could not tell how far the room extended because there was no way he could see into it from where he stood. From what he could tell, the room was painted a flat black with helped to absorb the light. There was no illumination in the room whatsoever.

  Frustrated, he began cycling through his helmets visual modes. One flick of a switch and the room should have been visible for him to see. The visual assist came with its own source of infrared light that, in most cases, could have illuminated a cavern. But, just like Costa, he saw nothing before him. The visual assist was of no use inside it.

  “I can see inside this room,” Barbara Ann spoke next to him. “It’s empty, just as you would expect since the room is designed for VR use.”

  “Why should I believe you?” Ash demanded.