by S. A. Lusher
He pressed on until he reached a small cavern with several tunnels leading away from it. One was utterly dark and showed no sign of civilization. Another was well-lit and sloped up. Enzo hoped it led to the surface. The final tunnel was poorly lit and, he determined after a moment, where the sounds of conflict were coming from. For a little while, he jogged, sticking to the right side of the tunnel where the shadows were deepest.
He slowed as the sounds became louder. Finally, the tunnel ended, opening up into a huge cavern. A slew of prefabricated structures had been set up in a rough horseshoe shape along the right, left and back walls. There were nearly two dozen of them, some of them two or even three storied, nearly hitting the rock ceiling. More tunnels led in and out of the cavern. A dozen Dark Ops troopers were fighting off a horde of Altered in the large, open area in between all the prefabricated structures. Enzo left them to it.
He made for the first structure. They seemed to be connected in clusters. The first room he came to was a disused storage room, almost completely empty save for a few bare shelves and empty crates along the walls. There was only one other door in the room, so Enzo hurried over to it and opened it up. Beyond, another empty storeroom. He passed through that as well, moving as quickly and quietly as he could manage.
Outside, the battle raged on.
There was a small cargo lift and a ladder in the second room. Not wanting to leave any stone unturned, he hurried up the ladder and checked out the pair of storage rooms above, but there was no such luck either. He dropped back down and opened up the next door, which led to a small alleyway between the structures. As he stepped between them, a bullet whizzed by. He dropped into a crouch and turned, expecting to find one or more troopers bearing down on him, but no one was there. It must have been a stray shot.
He hurried over to the next structure. This one yielded more results. There were actually a pair of guards standing by a door that led deeper into the building. Enzo quickly fired out a pair of three-round bursts, taking one man in the faceplate and the second in the neck. Both crashed to the ground, spurting blood, dying. Enzo finished off the one he shot in the neck when the man made a grab for his sidearm, then opened the door they'd been guarding.
Eve, Lee and Beam all sat on the floor in the empty room beyond.
They immediately stood when they saw him. “See? You owe me fifty creds,” Lee said.
“Who bet that I wouldn't save your asses?” Enzo asked.
“Both of them,” Lee replied.
“Don't be so surprised,” Eve said as they exited the room and knelt by the guards, relieving them of their guns and ammo.
“I'm shocked,” Enzo replied, rolling his eyes.
“You're a total dick. You're definitely the kind of guy who'd leave us to rot,” Eve said, grabbing one of the pistols while Lee and Beam both armed themselves with rifles.
“This is one hell of a thank you,” Enzo replied.
“What's going on out there?” Beam asked.
Enzo quickly brought them up to speed on everything that had happened after they'd parted ways. From Stern's and Dietz's death to the hole the Alpha had torn in the ceiling to the surface to the escape of the Altered.
“We've got to stop them,” Lee said.
“And how will we do that?” Beam muttered unhappily.
“Kill the Alpha, simple,” Eve replied.
“Yeah, simple,” Enzo said.
“Look, the Alpha controls them all telepathically. You kill the Alpha, they lose all their intelligence, their cooperation, their coordination. They'd be easy pickings and they likely won't spread any further than this facility. If they do, they'll just freeze to death beyond the perimeter. There's nothing for a hundred miles in every direction. If the Alpha is on the surface, then we need to get up there and kill it,” Eve explained.
“How?” Lee asked.
“We'll find a way,” Eve said.
The fighting outside had died away. Enzo moved over to the window and looked out it. Only four troopers were left, though that's how many were outside. Enzo called the others over. “Come on, we need to take them out now while they're still distracted.”
Lee agreed and they moved to opposite sides of the room. Leaving the structure, Enzo and Eve on one side, Beam and Lee on the other, they took up residence in the narrow alley created between the prefabs and took up aim.
An unspoken message seemed to pass between them all. Four guns spoke. Four bodies dropped as the life was blasted out of them. They waited a long moment, but nobody else came out. They were either all dead or they'd wised up. The quartet returned to the building they'd originally come from and met in the center.
“Now what?” Eve asked.
“Now we search the buildings, room by room, and kill any of the bastards left. If we can get rid of Dark Ops, killing the Alpha will be that much easier,” Enzo replied.
“So you're onboard for this plan now?” Eve asked.
“Maybe, if I get paid for it. Jobs this dangerous usually run pretty high,” Enzo replied.
Eve sighed, but Lee laughed. “Well, let's get on with it,” she said.
They began the unhappy task of searching through all the prefabs. It was slow going, seconds passing by, bleeding slowly into minutes. Within fifteen minutes they'd managed to move through all the rooms and structures along the right side of the cavern, encountering no one. They moved on to the ones along the back wall. Nothing but mostly empty rooms and the occasional sign of battle. Dark Ops must've been using this as a desperate rally point, not as a base of operations. They were probably planning to press onwards and upwards.
Before long, they came to what might have once been a command center. There were a few workstations left over, now plugged into a mobile generator. After they cleared it, Eve took a seat at the biggest workstation still working while the others patrolled around the room, guarding her. A few minutes passed.
“Anything?” Enzo asked.
“They were plugged into the security sensors and databases of the installation. Not sure what they were planning,” Eve murmured.
“Do you hear-” Beam's words were cut off neatly, replaced with a strange gurgling sound. Enzo and Lee whipped around.
He'd been standing by one of the doors, checking it out. Now a hand had shot through that door and was holding him up at least a foot off the ground. He clawed ineffectively at the arm attached to the hand, his feet kicking. Enzo frowned. Something seemed wrong with what was happening. Then whatever was holding him stepped through the door, lifting him yet higher. It wasn't something, but someone.
Director Fielding.
She was...different somehow. Her veins showed more clearly, and red now, not blue. There was something a little sinister about her face and she seemed taller and broader. When she grinned, she revealed twin rows of sharp teeth.
“I told you I've managed to perfect the process, and this is just the beginning of what these things can do,” she said. Her voice was deeper now, and held a slight echo. Enzo, Eve and Lee were all standing now, guns at ready, but Fielding held Beam in between them and her own body. She continued talking. “Imagine a whole army of soldiers like this! Telepathically linked, stronger, faster, deadlier than anything out there on the market today. We'd be able to accomplish so much...”
“Put him down and fight me,” Enzo said.
“Not today, Rains. I have bigger fish to fry now. Don't bother following me.”
With a sudden jerk, she clenched her fist and then threw Beam bodily across the room into the three of them. In a blur of motion, she was gone. Enzo went down for the count as two hundred pounds of dead weight slammed into him, knocking his breath out. He gasped for air, struggling to his feet. As he lurched to one of the windows that offered a view out into the cavern, he saw nothing out there. Fielding was gone.
“Jesus...he's fucking dead,” Lee whispered. Enzo turned around. She was crouched over her fallen comrade. She glanced up, her hand on his neck, checking for a pulse. “She broke h
is neck. She broke it just like that.”
“She wasn't bullshitting,” Eve muttered. “I was worried about something like this.”
“Time to pick up the pace,” Enzo replied. “Let's finish out search, grab whatever guns we can and get the hell out of these mines.”
Chapter 15
–In Darkness Dreaming–
“So how do we get out of here?” Enzo asked.
They were leaving the vaguely civilized area of the prefab camp, moving back up the tunnel towards the crossroads.
“The tunnel up here that slants upward, it leads directly to a cargo elevator that will take us to a warehouse on the surface,” Eve replied.
“So it's that simple? Good, I was hoping so,” Enzo said.
“It's never that simple,” Lee said bitterly. “Nothing's been simple since they all got out.”
“Speaking of which...” Enzo said, glancing over at Eve.
She looked back at him, looked away, sighed. “Fine. Yes, I did it. Just so the question is out of your minds, I was the one who let them go.”
“How?” Enzo asked.
“Why?” Lee asked.
They reached the crossroads and looked around. Still nothing. The Altered had to have moved on by now, wreaking havoc on the surface. Enzo wondered if the people who staffed the topside weather station were privy to the secrets just beneath their feet. He imagined that they weren't. It was a lot easier to convince nosy investigators if you actually didn't know anything. What a horrific shock it must have been when the creatures came screaming out of the ground. He wondered if there was anyone left alive up there.
They began walking up the well-lit tunnel.
“I've done a lot of work over the years,” Eve began. “Corporate, freelance, government...I spent a year running computer core repairs for a mercenary clan out on Hesh. Over the past two years, I started getting clued into something strange. There was a kind of...shadow, thrown over the ultranet. Something moving in the deeper recesses of government black ops, corporate espionage and deep space research. I was curious. The clues were minute, extremely subtle, but I've gotten good at looking for such clues. I used to find guys that ran off with stolen corporate data, schematics and plans and theories. So I wanted to know what was happening,” she explained.
“What'd you find out?” Lee asked. She sounded interested. Enzo had to admit, it sounded very interesting.
“Not much, at first. Then, I finally grabbed a name. Dark Operations. I kept digging. And then, about a year ago, I got found out. I had...a partner. Dark Ops knew I was on their ass, though they didn't know it was me, I covered my tracks well. But my partner didn't, and they nailed his ass to the wall. They bombed our apartment. I was out at the time. They made it look like a terrorist attack. I drifted deeper into the techno-criminal substratum to avoid detection. And it became personal. At first, I thought they were some deep-cover government black ops program. But the more I dug, the less that made sense...” Eve trailed off.
“What do you mean?” Lee asked. “It is government, we know that now. I mean, that's the whole reason we Marines were sent in.”
“You were sent in because the government no longer trusted Dark Operations, and they wanted someone they could trust there to keep an eye on it. That's what's so weird. I actually found a few of the ops that Dark Ops was running.”
“What were they?” Enzo asked.
“One was running some kind of experiment on ancient alien tech on a backwater planet named Lindholm. Older than Cyr stuff. Another was running some kind of genetic experiments way out in the middle of nowhere based on some kind of indigenous lifeform they found. Another was trying to build super-soldiers. One was this. This one was just getting off the ground, and I pulled a fast one, inserted myself into the files as a power maintenance tech. Something low-level that they needed. It took a while to actually make it so that they wouldn't notice that someone who wasn't supposed to be there was, but I pulled it off.”
“So you got in...and let loose all the experiments?” Lee asked.
“Yes. I studied everything here, broke into places I wasn't supposed to, got into their network a few times. What I wanted was hard evidence against Dark Ops. I wanted to see them burn for what they did. I knew that to do that, I'd need into the Control Room, and there was no way I was going to get in if everything was running business as normal. They had the place locked down tight, staffed and manned twenty four hours a day. So I sent a virus into the system, one that was engineered to do one thing: open as many of the cages and doors in the facility as possible. Obviously, some things didn't go as I'd liked but...well, here we are. I've still got the data. We're going to kill the bad guys, get out and spread the word,” Eve replied firmly.
“Maybe you can spread the word after I'm gone,” Enzo said.
“You don't want to help?” Lee asked.
“No, not really. You go spreading the word around like that, you paint a target on your back. It gets very difficult to stay alive at that point,” Enzo replied.
“Some things are bigger than your life,” Eve said.
“Not to me.”
“You came to rescue us,” Lee pointed out.
Enzo just grunted. They were coming to the top of the tunnel. The three of them each began checking the area out for hostiles, hunting through the shadows, looking overhead, checking everywhere something might be hiding. Still nothing. What was better, in Enzo's opinion, was that there didn't seem to be any other openings in the area. Nowhere for any Mutants to sneak in. And, best of all, directly ahead of them was the cargo lift. It currently wasn't in its nest. Realizing Fielding must have taken it up, they approached and hit the call back button. High overhead, the sound of grinding gears sprang to life.
“At least we'll finally be out of here,” Eve murmured. “I hate it underground, especially here. It's all rocks and shadows.”
The elevator continued to grind down. Enzo was glad as well. He was tired of the endless corridors, the enclosed spaces, the pervasive, endless smell of blood and exposed meat and the Altered themselves. He could still recall the bitter taste of the Slug.
They'd hit the surface and-
-an explosion ripped through the room.
Enzo barely had time to throw himself out of the way, grabbing Eve as he did so and pulling her back as, high overhead, the cargo lift disappeared in an expanding plume of orange and yellow flames. Debris and rocks came raining down. He could hear Lee shouting amidst the chaos. Enzo crashed to the ground, rolled over onto his back and let out a small shout of surprise as saw a hefty rock coming right for him. He rolled out of the way, narrowly avoiding the impact, and scrambled to his feet. Stumbling several times, he ran from the lift.
A moment later the rocks stopped falling. Enzo turned and surveyed the area, praying that he hadn't been the only survivor. Being alone in this godforsaken mine might be a bit much, even for him. Things lurked in the darkness down here. A long moment of silence passed, then he heard a noise. Hurrying over, he spied Eve trying to push a steel beam off of her. For a second, he was worried it had crushed her, but he saw that she was merely pinned and it didn't even need to be pushed off. She just had to crawl out.
The beam rested on the floor and a partially crushed crate, lying over her body.
“Here,” Enzo said, giving her hand. He pulled her out from beneath it.
“Where's Lee?” she asked.
“I'm here, I'm fine,” Lee replied, coming out from behind a particularly large rock. “We got lucky, that could have been a real cave-in.”
“Well,” Enzo said, staring at the ruined lift, “this thing is obviously out of order. I don't suppose there's another way out.”
“There is, actually, a secondary lift. It's back down, the darkened tunnel we passed earlier at the crossroads,” Eve replied.
“Fantastic,” Enzo muttered. “Well, let's get moving.”
* * * * *
They retraced their steps, heading back to the crossroads. They stop
ped at the arched entrance to the dead-lit tunnel. The light didn't reach very far before it guttered out. Even flicking on their flashlights didn't help too much. Enzo sighed and took point, the butt of his rifle tucked into his shoulder, finger inside the trigger guard for now. More chance of a misfire that way, but he'd rather risk that than not being able to shoot a Mutant or Harvester in time. Eve came up beside him and Lee covered the rear. They began making slow progress down the tunnel, both he and Eve covering their half of the tunnel as they went.
“Do you really think you have a chance to survive if you go galactic with your information on Dark Ops?” Enzo asked after a long moment.
“I think so. I do like being alive, despite what you might think,” Eve replied. “I know how to cover my tracks. It's less about me getting the info out and more that the info has gotten out. But even so...I feel like something's off here. Like Dark Ops is doing something they don't want the rest of the government and military to know about.”
“Like they've gone rogue?” Enzo replied.
“Yeah, maybe.”
“You could be wrong.”
“That has happened before.”
Something shifted up ahead. The trio stopped. A low growl came to them. Enzo and Eve focused their lights further down the tunnel. A moment later, a Mutant stepped into the light. Followed by another, then two more, and, near their feet, a pack of Harvesters.
“Shit,” Eve whispered harshly.
“Get ready,” Enzo replied.
Lee joined them. The trio stood shoulder to shoulder, weapons trained on the horde of Altered as they began rushing towards them. They opened fire. Bullets flew, creatures shrieked, blood was spilled. The droning screams of combat overloaded the sounds of the meat impacts as the bullets found their marks. Enzo blew the chest out of the lead Mutant, then snapped his barrel down, squeezed the trigger and watched as bloody chunks of skull were torn away in a plume of gore from a Harvester. Shifting the barrel again, he shot out the eye of a second Harvester, watching the bullets blow out the back of its misshapen head.