by S. A. Lusher
“We route most of our power, water and utilities in underground maintenance tunnels and bays beneath the buildings.” She paused and looked directly at Trent. “I'll guide you over the radio to some important equipment governing the drone guns and talk you around disabling them remotely. Get going.”
“I'm coming,” Drake said.
“No, I want you two here, with me, to make sure nothing else gets in here,” Sharpe replied.
“You honestly expect-” Drake began. Trent cut him off.
“Don't worry, I've got it.”
Drake stared at him for a moment, then nodded very slightly. Trent was grateful. Sometimes he liked to play dice with his life, Drake liked to do the same thing. Sometimes the other argued, and now wasn't going to be one of those times. Trent knew that Sharpe was sending him down there with the hopes that he was going to die.
He would be glad to prove her wrong.
Trent dropped into the hole, landing with a grunt ten feet down, ignoring the ladder. He looked around, finding himself in a narrow corridor where the ceiling was made almost exclusively of piping and the walls were covered with screens and dials and control panels. Nothing behind him, nothing ahead, good enough for him.
Slipping his finger inside the trigger guard, Trent turned on his radio.
“So, where am I going?”
“Ahead, ten meters,” Sharpe replied.
“How do you know which way I'm facing?” Trent asked as he set off.
“I was looking down at you.”
“Oh.”
Trent moved down the narrow maintenance passageway. Various machine sounds came to him: soft beeping, the hum of power, the quiet respiration of a heat exchange. Trent imagined he could hear the shriek of the winds overhead. He came at the end of the corridor to a small cross-section, a corridor in each wall, making a plus.
“Okay? Now what?”
“Turn left. Follow the corridor twenty meters. Take the third door on your left. It will bring you to a room holding the control for the automated defenses.”
Trent felt a small quantum of relief. So this wouldn't be so bad. He turned left and moved off. After a moment he passed the first door, then the second. As he approached the third, something hissed behind him. Even as he spun around, part of his mind was telling him to relax, it was just a leaky pipe or something.
Only it wasn't, he was sure of it.
The sound had been too organic. It hadn't sounded like anything he'd encountered so far. Could it be the thing that was skinning people? He was glad for his suit...then remembered that Sergio had been wearing the same model armor. Possibly even more resilient stuff, considering he was the boss.
Trent sighed softly, seeing nothing, and kept going.
He found the proper door, opened it and peered inside, gun-first. Nothing inside but a mostly empty room. The walls were lined with equipment and technology. He spied a console at the back of the room, shut the door behind him and crossed to it.
“Okay, I'm at the terminal, now what?”
Sharpe spent the next few moments helping him navigate the menus and hunt down the control commands for the automated defense network. Trent had never been very tech-savvy, but for the most part, modern terminals and consoles had decently uncomplicated user interfaces. He managed to get it shut down without too much trouble.
“Okay...hold on, let's check it out,” Sharpe said. There was a pause, then, “okay, it's good. Come back up.”
Trent let out a small sigh of relief. “On it.”
He turned around, crossed the room and opened up the door. Something dark and close to the ground leaped in through the doorway and attached to his suit. Trent let out a sharp cry of surprise as he fell back on his ass, dropping his rifle. Whatever it was, it had six limbs and they were powerful. Something clacked just in front of his faceplate.
With a burst of strength, Trent shoved the thing off of him. Sitting up, he tore his pistol out of its holster, aimed and emptied the magazine into the dark, thrashing form. A high-pitched shriek began when the first bullet entered it and had cut off by the time the sixth had. He kept firing anyway. When it had stopped moving and his pistol had clicked dry, Trent rose to his feet. He hastily reloaded, holstered his pistol and, without taking his eyes off the new thing, turned and grabbed his rifle. Slowly, he approached the (hopefully) dead body.
Immediately, it reminded him of some kind of giant beetle. He kicked it over onto its back and nudged it with his boot so its head was facing him. He knelt, studying the hideous new face. It had no eyes, but instead strange, almost metallic looking grilles. It had very pronounced mandibles over its mouth, which was oddly spherical.
“What's taking so long?” Sharpe asked.
“I found a new one,” Trent replied.
“What does it look like?”
“A giant beetle.”
“Hmm. What does it do?”
“Far as I know, it jumps on you.”
“All right, hurry back. We need to get a move on.”
Trent stood up and stepped over the corpse, half-expecting the thing to suddenly come back to life and make a snap for his nuts. Stepping back into the corridor, Trent kept a sharp eye out for anymore of the things, but he was alone again.
He retraced his steps back to the cross-section and then let out another sharp cry of surprise as something whizzed past his field of vision. He saw it, it being something like a giant black needle, embed itself in one of the screens on the walls, then turned his attention to its point of origin. Another beetle was waiting for him in the doorway.
Now that it was alive, Trent got a better feel for the creature and its abilities. For one, it had to capacity to shoot needles. Even as he raised his rifle and took aim, the creature opened its mouth and mandibles and loosed another six-inch black spike. Trent dropped to one knee, narrowly avoiding certain death, and fired two, quick three-round bursts.
The thing's odd alien face disintegrate in a spray of black gore.
“Stone? What happened? We heard gunshots,” Sharpe said over the link.
“Ran into another one. New note: they can shoot spikes from their mouths with some pretty good force,” Trent replied, glancing back at the two black spikes buried two inches into the solid steel wall. He shook his head and righted himself.
“Fantastic,” Sharpe muttered.
Trent broke into a quick jog down the final stretch of corridor. He hit the ladder and hustled up it, eager to be free of the cramped, subterranean confines. When he hit the top, Drake offered him a hand and hauled him out.
“Good work, idiot,” Drake said.
Trent chuckled. “Best kind of work I do.”
Sharpe and Tristan were by the door. Trent and Drake moved to join them. Trent hesitantly stared into the corridor beyond. A pair of big black drone guns hung from the ceiling like ominous sleeping insects. The sides of the wall were lined with closed doors and a large set of double doors waited for them at the other end.
“That's Command,” Sharpe said, heading towards it.
A handful of lizard corpses occupied the floor, shot to absolute shit, their silver blood sprayed across the walls, the floor, even the ceiling. Sharpe led the way, Trent behind her, Drake behind him, Tristan bringing up the rear.
They had made it maybe halfway down the passageway when, as one, all the doors along the sides of them slid open. At first, nothing happened, then a living midnight wave of beetles erupted from every single opening.
“Fuck!” Trent managed as he brought his rifle up.
For the next several moments, gunsmoke, blood and shrieking filled the corridor. Trent flipped his rifle to full auto and cut loose. The nearest two beetles were chewed up by his bullets, black gore spraying the wall and into the room behind them. Even as their bodies dropped, another two crawled out of the open doorway to replace them. Several of them fired off spikes that narrowly avoided the squad.
Trent emptied his magazine, listening to the others yelling and firing around him.
The omnipresent shriek of the bugs threatened to overload his speakers and Trent didn't have time to adjust them properly. He hastily reloaded and emptied a second magazine, then a third. When he slapped the fourth one in, the tide finally broke.
“Holy. Mother. Fuck,” Drake breathed.
“You said it,” Trent muttered, shaking from adrenaline.
“How did that happen?” Tristan asked. “There's no way all those doors just happened to open at once. That wasn't a malfunction. That was planned.”
“Yeah,” Sharpe murmured. “Too much coincidence for my liking.”
“Could someone still be alive? Fucking with us?” Trent asked.
“I don't know, it doesn't seem likely, given the state of this place...”
“Someone from our squad? Trevor?” Tristan suggested.
“Doubt it,” Sharpe replied. “Whatever, let's just go.”
They moved forward the rest of the way and went through the double doors. Nothing waited for them in the expansive room of pure chrome technology beyond. The walls were lined with workstations, the center of the room taken up by a large piece of equipment covered in keypads and screens. The place was dim and vacant. Only a handful of bodies occupied the area, most of them lying on the ground in death poses.
“Fucking finally,” Sharpe whispered as she approached the terminal and booted it up.
Trent and the others waited around while she worked. As he stood around, Trent began to hear the same deep thudding he'd heard when they'd first entered the facility. He frowned, catching it immediately this time and listened.
“Anyone else hear that?” he murmured.
“Yeah...” Drake said softly.
“I think so...wait, yeah, I do. It sounds like...” Tristan trailed off.
“A heartbeat,” Trent surmised. “A giant heartbeat. Like the base is alive.”
“You're creeping me out,” Drake said.
“I'm creeping myself out,” Trent replied.
“Shut up and let's go,” Sharpe said, standing back up. “I've raised the final lock.”
Chapter 10
–The Collapse–
Trent felt anticipation welling up within him.
Everything that had happened so far just seemed to make the mystery grow, piling question onto enigma on top of curiosity. This research base, nestled on a field of ice on a planet at the absolute edge of the galaxy, seemed to be nothing but cryptic questions. As they rode the tram to the first of three research structures, Trent examined a myriad of potential scenarios that might explain just what, exactly, was happening here.
There were always rumors of biological weapons research going on in the shadier departments of corporate academia and the government R & D programs. Though that usually meant things like viruses and strength or vision enhancement chemicals, it had, occasionally, resulted in bizarre, twisted caricatures of human beings.
Trent had heard lots of horror stories of experiments gone wrong. He'd heard a story of some kind of super-solider with machine guns for hands and armor plating going berserk and killing almost everyone in the facility before finally getting taken down. Not to mention that old horror story from the previous century about an apparent cure for a new lethal disease that turned its test subjects into unstoppable killing and eating machines. If someone hadn't set the power reactor of the facility to overload, it would have spread to a whole planet.
Those stories were on the fringe of possibility. Trent took these tales with a grain of salt, believing that it really could happen, and it may even have happened. But then there were the totally out to lunch stories about awakening a hibernating race of killer aliens or unleashing some kind of nightmare from an old Cyr site.
He didn't really believe that stuff.
But what the absolute fuck was happening here? None of this shit made sense. It was obvious that this was some kind of research facility, but how in the name of god was the corporation creating these nightmares cast in flesh?
He wasn't sure he'd get a genuine answer if he somehow managed to make it out of this place. Sharpe wouldn't be forthcoming and anyone that actually knew anything was probably dead now. Trent decided that, somehow, someway, he was going to get answers. Even if he had to force the issue. Hell, he was probably going to have to kill Sharpe anyway. She didn't seem like she was going to let them leave here alive.
The tram slowed to a halt.
“All right, everyone up and out,” Sharpe said, coming back from the front.
Trent thought that her voice was beginning to break a little, the stressful wear-and-tear of the mission starting to show through the cracks. There was still light-years to go, though, and Trent felt pretty confident that the woman would carry on with her mission one-armed and blind if she had to.
They all stood up and filed out of the tram, into the now familiar loading bay. Blood on the walls, but no bodies. They moved to the tram station itself, finding even more signs of chaos and bloodshed. Instead of a door on either side of the room this time, there was one large set of double doors at the front of the room.
Sharpe led them right up to it. She hit the access button and the doors slid open. Trent wasn't prepared for what lay beyond the aperture.
Everything he had seen so far had been human-built. Corridors of steel, glass windows, bland carpeting, light-strips. But what lay beyond the open doorway was entirely inhuman. A broad, open room of sharp titanium white that, despite it all being one color, was thrown into incredible detail. A soft amber light filled the room, seeming to come from everywhere and nowhere. There were no support pillars.
The group took a few tentative steps into the room.
Trent kept looking around, his shock obvious and unhidden. High overhead there was what appeared to be a hole in the ceiling. A perfectly spherical one. And yet, no snow escaped in through it, they couldn't hear the wind and there didn't seem to be any telltale signs of an exceptionally cold environment.
The edges of the room were gently curved, giving the appearance of being inside some smooth, giant white sphere. Spread out across the room were a series of odd pieces of equipment that moved smoothly from one color to the next, like giant, technological nodules. They appeared to glow from within somehow.
Placed among these nodes, sticking out like very sore thumbs, were pieces of human equipment. There were tables, piles of crates, mainframes, data stacks. Opposite them, across the broad room, Trent spied another opening. He caught hints of another two, one on either side of them. What was even more striking was the blood.
It showed up very well against the white material.
“What...what the fuck is this?” Drake asked, his voice soft.
“A Cyr structure,” Sharpe replied as she began walking across, crossing the room, heading for the door along the opposite side.
“Holy fucking shit,” Tristan murmured.
“Come on!” Sharpe snapped.
The trio began following her again.
“This...how did you find this? This must be one of the most intact Cyr sites in the known galaxy,” Tristan said, her voice awed.
“Stay focused,” Sharpe replied.
They moved silently among the glowing nodes, in between the ruined and incongruous human technology, haphazardly slapped onto the Cyr environment. Trent's mind reeled. Suddenly, his previous notions of far-fetched impossibilities didn't seem so impossible. They were in a Cyr facility. A very intact, very isolated one.
Suddenly, the importance of this mission, the secrecy, the real reason why he suspected they were never meant to survive the mission...it all slid into focus. This could be the find of the century. And whichever company Sharpe worked for, if they could properly exploit whatever secrets lay locked away within it, would be catapulted to the forefront of galactic power, policies and politics. Trent frowned as he began wondering further.
“How the fuck did you guys manage to cover this find up? Cyr tech automatically belongs to the government,” he asked.
“Do you actual
ly expect me to give you an answer?” Sharpe replied.
“No, I guess not. I mean, it's just...this is totally nuts. You guys obviously had absolutely no fucking idea what you were playing with here.”
“Look, I'm just a glorified gun for hire. I'm here to do a job. I want to do it and get out. However stupid the scientists and bureaucrats that work for my corp might be, I don't really give a fuck as long as I get paid and stay alive,” Sharpe replied.
Trent was impressed. It was probably the most honest thing she'd said so far. They crossed the immense room and came to the far door. There was a numbered pad that seemed to be projected holographically next to the door. Only they weren't numbers, Trent realized as he focused harder on them, but strange, cryptic, runic symbols. Sharpe stared at the pad for a moment, hesitating, then she reached out and pressed one.
The door slid open. They came to a much smaller corridor, though it was still large by human standards. It was broad enough to drive a truck down and easily twenty feet in height. Trent hunted for any obvious origin of the soft amber light that somehow was easy on the eyes and yet perfectly illuminated everything.
But there was nothing. No strips, no holes, no bulbs.
Nothing.
The battle had come and gone here, too. The corpses, bullet markings, pools of blood, it all looked extremely out of place in the high-tech, glossy environment.
“Fuck, this is creepy,” Drake muttered.
“We just need to get to the end of this corridor,” Sharpe replied. “Then you cover me while I do my thing.”
“Wonderful,” Trent replied.
They kept going. Trent couldn't help but feel a sense of tension slowly building in the air, almost like a string note drawn out to hair-pulling proportions. He thought of the strange heartbeat, the odd feelings of being watched, the general dislocation that the whole base seemed to permeate. What did it all mean? What did it add up to?
He supposed it didn't matter. Whatever it was, it was bad.
They reached the end of the corridor and come to what appeared to be some kind of control room. A Cyr piece of equipment dominated the center of the room. It was roughly rectangular and looked as though it was lying on its narrow side. All of its surfaces were covered with softly glowing white light-pads. Along the walls were human terminals and workstations. Sharpe ignored the Cyr tech and moved to a large workstation beyond it.