by S. A. Lusher
Until those above him had made a call so terrible that he'd been unable to justify working for the GA any further. He'd quit Spec Ops cold turkey after that. They hadn't liked that, and he'd spent five years drifting the galaxy under a dozen assumed names, but they'd left him alone. Eventually. Although he still suspected that if the opportunity came up they'd put a bullet in his head. He'd learned a lot of state secrets and shady shit along the way.
“Done, come on,” Lee said.
They retreated out of the maintenance bay, back into the corridor, and moved over to a ventilation grille near the floor. Lee knelt and opened it up, then climbed inside. Enzo followed her in. They began crawling, not talking, just focusing on moving. Well, Enzo was more focused on the way Lee's uniform stretched across her well-maintained ass.
It was, he thought, at least going to be a pleasant crawl.
* * * * *
The crawl lasted for about twenty minutes. They wound their way through the confusing network of ventilation shafts, at one point climbing a ladder so that they could be above the lab as opposed to coming in at ground level. Now, they were nearing the lab. As they closed in on it, they began to hear voices. Enzo and Lee kept crawling until they were in position, each of them over a ventilation grille above a different part of the room.
Their plan of attack was to blow the explosives, killing the power, then drop in some flash-bang grenades. Enzo wanted to use something deadlier, but neither of them had any fragmentation grenades on them, so it would have to do. They'd decided to listen in for a little bit first, however, trying to pick up any kind of relevant intel about Dark Ops and what the hell they were planning on doing. Enzo studied the room. It was set up like a security command post, the walls stuffed with workstations, consoles and terminals.
This was clearly the more technological portion of Dietz's personal lab, as there was nothing medical in the room. While the exterior was ringed with technology, the center of the room was open, made for movement, and currently occupied by a dozen soldiers, one of them being the woman in charge, Director Fielding.
“So where the fuck are they?” Fielding snapped. Nine of the soldiers were occupying the workstations, while the other two stood before Fielding. They looked like students being screamed at by the principle.
“We don't know, yet, Director. All we know is that Eve still in the military HQ and some of the Marines are on the level above that. We haven't confirmed whether or not the pair of survivors we encountered are still down here,” one replied, trying to sound professional, but it was clear that he was very nervous.
“Well that's fucking great!” Fielding screamed. “And what the fuck happened in the weapons testing lab?! How the fuck did he get hold of the Burner? And who the fuck is he, anyway?”
“We're still working on it, but we think he was one of the test subjects taken from the most recent prison transports.”
“He's a fucking prisoner!?”
“We're not sure.”
“Jesus Fucking...just get on it.”
Fielding turned and marched out of the room. Enzo glanced up, looking across at Lee in the gloom of the ventilation duct that overlooked the area. She pointed to something below and behind her current position. Enzo glanced down, shifting gently to get a better perspective of it. After a second, he realized what it was. A device resting on a table hooked into one of the workstations with thick black cables. Obviously not something that was built into the original design. It had to be the transmission blocker. He glanced back up and nodded.
Lee activated the bombs. There was a distant rumble, followed by a dying hum of power, and the entire area went pitch black.
Below, the men began shouting in confusion, the terror obvious in their voices.
Lee pulled out her flash-bang. Enzo did likewise.
They both gently pulled open the ventilation grilles, primed each grenade and tossed it down into the room. They fell back deeper into the duct area, covering their eyes and ears, as the men below began to make confused sounds. The flash-bangs went off. Enzo and Lee dropped into the room among the confusion and opened fire.
Enzo focused his fire on the transmission blocker while Lee began gunning down the Dark Ops troops, none of which were wearing armor, as they all seemed to be technicians maintaining what was left of the network that helped them understand what was happening throughout the base. Enzo emptied his entire magazine into the blocker and, satisfied that he'd damaged it beyond repair, reloaded and emptied a second magazine into a pair of important looking workstations. He reloaded once more as a door opened and mowed down a trio of soldiers coming into the room. His eyes were beginning to ache by now as he reloaded a third time.
The pitch-black room was lit up in the staccato flare of muzzle fire, turning it into a confusing series of freeze-frame images in grainy black and white. Men were screaming, sparks spitting, blood spraying in the dying light.
“Enzo! Grenades in three! Go!” Lee shouted.
This was another part of their plan. They'd try to recover grenades from the corpses of those they killed to cover their escape. Enzo had done his best to keep the layout of the room, and his current position and direction within it, oriented tightly in his head. He'd been good at things like that. As a result, when Lee gave the call, he turned and rushed towards a door at the back, in between two of the workstations, that led to a maintenance and storage room just off of Dietz's lab. He got the door open, cleared the room to the best of his ability in the darkness, then turned and covered Lee as she came towards him.
She tossed the grenade she'd found and hurried into the maintenance room. Enzo barely managed to close the door before the grenades went off. They both scurried up into the ventilation system again and took off. The next fifteen minutes were a confusion of darkness and sweat and crawling as they navigated the network of vents once more. Eventually, they found a disused storage room that seemed to be empty and came down into it.
After taking a moment to get their breaths back, Lee pulled out her radio, slipped it back in her ear and activated it. “This is Corporal Lee to Staff Sergeant Stern, please respond.”
Enzo listened on his own radio. There was a pause, then a burst of static. “Lee! You did it. Thank God. Where are you? Have you made contact with Ramirez?”
“...Ramirez is dead, Staff Sergeant.”
“Fuck...all right, what's the situation down there?”
Lee spent a moment catching her superior up on the situation. Enzo took the opportunity to get his breath back. His shoulder was bugging him again, burning at all the exercise and activity. He massaged it for a moment, then finally opened his medkit, grabbed the morphine injection he'd used a quarter of earlier, stuck it in his shoulder and injected half of what was left. He let out a long, happy sigh, laughing briefly at the utter pleasure of it, and replaced the syringe. He realized that Lee was looking at him. He clipped the medkit to his belt.
“Can I help you?” he asked.
“Are you...hurt?” she replied.
“My shoulder hurts.”
“Lee? You still there?”
“Uh...yeah. What's the plan?”
“We need to meet on Level Four and take care of the big fucker, then get into the Control Room so we can get the data on this place and figure out our next move. You listening in on this Brooks?” Stern replied.
“Yeah. You need to be careful. It's a big one.”
“I'm aware. I've got an idea. Lee, take your new recruit through the ventilation system up to Mess Four, got it?”
“Yes, Staff Sergeant.”
“Good. Godspeed, everyone.”
Enzo groaned. “Not back in the vents,” he muttered.
“Are you sure you're okay?” Lee asked, replacing her radio.
“I am now,” Enzo replied.
He began climbing up into the vents. After a moment of hesitation, Lee followed.
Chapter 10
–The Language of Violence–
The crawl through the ven
ts was anything but pleasant this time around. The smell was getting worse than ever, an awful reek of blood and murder and, hidden beneath it all, the foul odor of the Slugs and the infection itself. On top of that, Enzo was forced to kill two Slugs along the way. Not an easy tasked in close quarters. They'd managed to climb up to the next level, the military headquarters. The radio chatter had been light since then.
“So, tell me about Stern,” Enzo said as they crawled on.
“He's great. Among the best I've ever worked with,” Lee said. “He has a good career, fought in the Systems Wars, led his men to a lot of victories. He ran everything with perfect efficiency, never fails to notice everything.”
Enzo sighed. “So he's a jerkoff, huh?”
Lee hesitated. “Maybe from a civilian's standpoint.”
“I told you I was former Spec Ops, and Marines before that,” Enzo snapped.
“Yeah, former. You washed out, because no one just leaves Special Operations.”
Here, Enzo openly laughed. “Is that what they tell you? Is that what you believe? No one leaves Spec Ops? You're dumber than you look, Lee.”
He paused as he rounded a turn in the vent. Up ahead, debris blocked the path. There was an opening along the right side. Enzo moved up to it and glanced through the metal mesh. A small, ruined infirmary waited below.
“We're getting out here,” he said. The morphine was already wearing off and his shoulder was throbbing with all this crawling.
“We can just take another route-” Lee began.
Enzo opened the grille. “I said we're getting out here.” He slipped through.
Landing with a grunt, he moved out of the way, making room for Lee. She came through a moment later. He was worried she'd just keep going.
“What's the problem?” she asked, her voice now edged with frustration.
“The vents are too dangerous. Too easy to get ambushed in there. You saw how fast those Slug things are,” Enzo replied.
“Fine,” she said, moving across the infirmary, “we'll have to head through a few storage rooms to get to where we need to go.”
As they made their way through the infirmary and into the first of a handful of storage bays, Lee explained the situation. “The military HQ is essentially a giant square with a smaller circle placed inside of it. That circle is a corridor that grants access to everywhere in the area. Along the outside of the perimeter, where we are now, are things like mess halls, storage bays, barracks, infirmaries, shooting galleries, the gym, stuff like that. Support stuff. The interior holds the Control Room, the primary communications relay, central security network, the important stuff. From what we can tell, the big Altered thing is roaming that main corridor.”
“Fantastic,” Enzo muttered unhappily.
They continued to navigate the disused storage rooms, through narrow alcoves between stacks of crates. As they did, Enzo realized he could hear it. A thudding sound, like heavily plodding footfalls of what might have been a fucking dinosaur, growing louder. As it seemed to reach an apex, out of instinct, Enzo froze, Lee doing the same. The thudding became so loud and powerful that several smaller items, previously perched on a workbench, fell onto the ground. The footfalls stopped for a second and Enzo felt his fear ratchet up another notch.
Whatever it was, it must have been close by, possibly just on the other side of the wall he was looking at, past the crates. After a long moment, the footfalls started up again, retreating, making its continual slow circuit around the corridor, no doubt killing anything and everything in its path. Enzo let out a long, shuddering breath.
He and Eve kept going, heading through the door at the opposite end of the storage bay. The next room was, thankfully, the mess hall they were looking for, Mess Four. It was also, unfortunately, already occupied by a less than thrilling reception committee. As Enzo stepped into the room, moving out from behind Lee, he spied a dozen Mutants and a pack of Harvesters thrown in for good mix. They were all spread out across the room, as if they were taking refuge from the huge creature roaming the main corridor. Silence fell across the room.
Seconds of tension began to pass and Enzo and Lee readied themselves. The whole room seemed to be holding its breath, as if waiting for some unseen event to pass. Then the far door opened up and two more Marines stepped into the room.
That did it.
Chaos exploded as four guns spoke. The dozen and a half Altered shrieked as one and split up, dividing into two groups to deal with the fresh flesh that had stepped into their fields of vision. Enzo squeezed the trigger, blowing the top of the head off of the nearest Mutant and, while it was still falling, putting another three-round burst in its chest as that particular fact returned to him. It was difficult to re-learn the notion that headshots no longer got you confirmed kills. He turned his rifle, took aim and fired again.
Thick, crimson blood sprayed from another Mutant's chest and it fell, shrieking. All around him, he could hear the others firing, rifles and shotguns. Mutants fell, Slugs were exterminated and Harvesters were put down. Thankfully, they were all of the skinny variety, not yet allow the opportunity to fill up on dead flesh. Within two minutes, all the hostiles had been put down. They spent an additional minute taking care of the Slugs that had survived the slaughter and were attempting to escape their now dead host bodies.
When that was all taken care of, the five survivors met in the center of the mess hall. Right away, Stern and Enzo began sizing each other up. Stern looked every bit a career Marine. Tall, broad, buff. He wore a high-and-tight of black hair and combat gear over traditional military fatigues. Even through the blood and the burns, the rips and the tears in his uniform, he looked ready to stand tall and dole out orders. Tell other people what to do.
“Brooks told me about you,” was the firs thing he said.
“Lee did likewise,” Enzo replied.
“You're a mercenary. Unsurprisingly, you sound like a jackass who could get us killed.”
“He's former Spec Ops,” Lee said suddenly.
Enzo laughed. “Oh, so now that means something?”
“What happened? Were you honorable or dishonorably discharged?” Stern asked.
“Neither, I walked out when I got fed up with the bullshit.”
Stern frowned, clearly not liking the answer. Finally, he heaved a sigh and pulled out his radio. “Whatever. Beggars can't be choosers. Brooks, we've reunited in Mess Four. You said you had information on this thing and how we can kill it.”
“Yes, I do. I've been digging through the files on the research they were doing and it seemed that there were two kinds of the Slugs. The kinds we've all seen so far are the most common, they comprise about ninety nine percent of the Slugs that were on the vessel. But the other kind make something different entirely,” Eve began.
“The thing out there?” Stern asked.
“No, not quite. All the Altered are being controlled by something. From the lowliest Slug to the largest Ire,” Eve said.
“Ire?” Enzo asked.
“Ires are what they call the big ones, I don't know if any of you have encountered Ires yet-”
“We have,” both Enzo and Stern said at once.
“-fine then. They're all controlled by something, what the researchers called the Alpha Beast. They grew an Alpha, kept in captivity, trying to use it to control the Altered they created. But it was too strong-willed, it wouldn't be bent. So they tried to clone it. What they got was the Bio Creature, or the Beta. It's not as big as the Alpha, or as powerful, and it didn't work. It couldn't take control of the Altered from the Alpha. In all the chaos, it ended up here. Now, as for killing the damned thing, as I'm sure all you boys and girls in green remember, Military HQ comes equipped with a killzone near the main entrance.”
“Yeah, four heavy-duty drone guns,” Stern said, smiling. “I was under the impression they were offline, or broken.”
“They are offline. They'll need to be repaired. You will need to split up into two groups. One will have to make thei
r way to the defensive network room to make repairs as quickly as possible. The other will have to shadow the creature and, when the time comes, lure it to the drone guns. Let them do the work and shred the thing.”
“Rains, you're volunteering for shadow duty,” Stern said.
“Oh, am I?” Enzo replied.
“Yes.”
Enzo glanced down at his rifle, presently pointed at the floor, and shifted it, so that the barrel now pointed at Stern's midsection.
“Consequently, I could also volunteer to give you an emergency vasectomy.”
Stern didn't move, but Lee and the other man, who Enzo realized must be Beam, raised their rifles, covering him.
It was Lee who spoke first. “Despite what you might think, Enzo, we don't have time for a dick-measuring contest. And besides, you'd be best suited for this, if you were really once in Spec Ops.” A moment of silence passed.
Enzo sighed and lowered his rifle. “Fine,” was all he said.
He listened to Stern outline the rest of the plan in further detail, then prepared himself for his dangerous task.
* * * * *
Shadowing duty.
This was extremely stupid, but there was a part of Enzo that liked the job. It was absurdly dangerous, generally the kind of thing he did. He listened to the radio chatter as the Marines made their way toward the defense network room or wherever the fuck they were going. He was in the main corridor, moving towards the sounds of immense plodding footfalls. The corridor bothered him, it truly was a circular tube, which meant no corners. No corners made it that much more difficult to comfortably hide yourself.
He was toying around with the idea of just leaving. There was a decent chance that he could figure out some way to climb the rest of the way up, break out of Syberian Station and hot-wire a space-worthy craft of some kind. It'd be easy to punch it and jump halfway across the galaxy, provided it had an FLT drive, and then what? Keep drifting. Drifting was fun. It offered the greatest percentage of pain-relieving activities.