Absolute Zero (The Shadow Wars Book 4)

by S. A. Lusher

  “Okay, I'll need about ten minutes,” she said, opting to stand as she set to work.

  “Fine,” Trent replied.

  He looked around. Besides the way they had come in, Trent spied another three entrances. Two along the left wall, one along the right. He sighed softly. It couldn't be simple, could it? Of course, there was a chance of nothing happening the whole ten minutes, he supposed. Almost as if reality itself had somehow picked up on this thought, one of the doors opened to admit a small clutch of lizard men. Four of them raced into the room, shrieking as they sprinted towards Trent and the others.

  Drake snapped a shot off, blowing the top of one's head off in a spray of silvery blood. Trent put a three-round burst in another one's central mass, punching a trio of neat holes in its dark-skinned chest. It collapsed to the ground, still shrieking, and he silenced it permanently with another three-round burst that entered through its chin and blew out through the top of its skull. Tristan put down the other two with well-placed single shots.

  “Think we've got company,” Trent said.

  “Deal with it,” Sharpe replied.

  Behind them, another door opened. Trent spun around and stared in mute horror as a pair of what he had come to think of as chest-holes stalked in through the door. He had no wish to see if his armor could stand up to whatever the hell was in their chests. He raised his weapon and fired. He blew the arm off of the first one, and the second went down under a hail of gunfire from Drake and Tristan. Another door opened, then another.

  Trent cursed sharply and got to it. He'd been in situations like this before, and was at least grateful that none of them could fire back. Of course, as soon as he thought it, one of the doors opened to admit a small wave of beetles.

  He hastily reloaded, set it to full auto and let them have it. Their midnight blood sprayed across the walls, floor and equipment as they squealed their dying shrieks. Behind him, he could hear Tristan and Drake dealing with their own problems. Trent emptied his magazine, reloaded, ducked and narrowly avoided a needle spat at him, then put the last of the beetles down. He began to worry as he realized the tide of enemies wasn't slowing down.

  If anything, it was speeding up.

  “How much longer!?” he called.

  “Six and a half minutes!” Sharpe called back. Whatever she was doing seemed to have become automated, because suddenly she joined the fight.

  The room quickly became a hectic battlefield. Lizard men, chest-holes and beetles crawled into the room, all eager to get at the fresh meat. A small part of Trent's mind that ran during times like this like background software on a terminal was wondering why they were suddenly so coordinated. It was things like this, like when all the doors had opened simultaneously and let out a wave of beetles, that made him feel there was someone, or, perhaps more likely, something in control of the situation.

  Something that liked toying with them.

  Trent burned through four more magazines before switching to his shotgun for some up close and personal combat. He blew a hole in the chest of a lizard man, then turned the head of another into a plume of silver gore. He kept pumping out shells until the shotgun ran dry, didn't have time to reload it and pulled out his pistol.

  He went through three magazines on it before the tide abruptly ceased. The last of the hostiles fell and Trent automatically took the time to reload. He shoved a fresh magazine into his pistol and holstered it, then fed ten more shells into his shotgun, let it hang and reloaded his rifle. He heard the others doing the same behind him.

  “What the fuck was that about?” Drake asked.

  “Don't know, don't care. I have what I came for, now let's go,” Sharpe replied.

  Trent took one more look around, standing amidst a sea of corpses, and then moved after Sharpe as she headed out of the room. The others followed.

  * * * * *

  The ride back to the first building was, thankfully, uneventful.

  They hardly had to leave the trams themselves, just getting out onto the antechambers and transferring over to other trams. Trent was grateful. After that last shot of adrenaline from the intense battle, he was coming down and feeling tired. He wanted to take a long nap after a longer soak in a hot tub with a redheaded sex goddess.

  But that was still a long ways away, and not guaranteed.

  Trent laid his head back against the inside of his helmet, and that up against the wall behind him. He closed his eyes. They were on the final tram, headed back to the original structure. They hadn't run into more than a handful of nasties. There was hardly any conversation between the mercenaries at this point.

  Trent was grateful.

  He honestly couldn't muster the mental energy for conversation, even the basic back-and-forth bullshit that tended to be the subject of mercenary squads. Trent turned his thoughts to Lovelace Station and that club Red. He'd only ever been once, but they had private apartments in the back where you could rent it and a girl out for the night. Or hell, two or three girls if you wanted. It was expensive, but far more than worth it.

  The tram came to a halt, jarring Trent from his thoughts. He sighed as he stood and shouldered his rifle, ready for whatever else this place was ready to throw at him. He followed Sharpe out of the tram and into the little antechamber. The others shuffled out behind him. They moved back to the tram station and found nothing waiting for them.

  As they walked back through the building, Trent couldn't help but feel they were getting off easy. There was some part of him that refused to believe that they would be allowed to simply walk out of here. There was still the nagging feeling of the other survivors. They had only found Sergio's body and hadn't even heard from the others.

  Could he just leave them?

  A cold but firm part of him said that yes, he could. If it really came to down to it, he was looking out for himself and Drake. That was it, honestly. That was the hard truth of being a mercenary, or a soldier. Sometimes, you left guys behind.

  They came into the main lobby, and stopped.

  “Stephen?” Drake asked.

  Trent blinked in honest shock. The man before them looked like he'd been through hell. His armor was bloodied, dented and burnt. All he had on him was a pistol and his eyes were nearly bugged out of his skull. He moaned with sick relief and nearly collapsed, lowering the pistol he'd been pointing at them when he realized who it was.

  “Oh, thank fuck,” he groaned, breathing heavily.

  “What the hell happened to you?” Sharpe asked. “Where's everyone else?”

  “I...God, it was horrible. This thing, it was like...blades. That's all it was, man. It was just blades. It jumped us. Carved up Sergio. We bugged out when we couldn't put it down, got separated. I decided to make for the ship...it's gone.”

  “What?!” Sharpe cried.

  “The ship...I got there, stole a vehicle and drove out. It's been destroyed. I saw it happen. These ships came in right after it got destroyed. It was hit with some kind of missiles from orbit, I think. These ships were coming in, didn't know who they were, but I headed back here right away. Caught sight of these guys in black armor. They're coming here now.”

  “Oh fuck,” Sharpe groaned.

  “Do you know these jackasses?” Trent asked.

  “I might,” she replied reluctantly.

  “Why didn't you contact us?” Drake asked. “Are any of the others alive?”

  “I tried, man. The fucking radio didn't work! And I didn't actually see anyone else die, but I haven't heard shit from anyone since I booked it. What are we gonna do now?” Stephen replied, his voice becoming hopeless and despairing.

  “Okay, listen up,” Sharpe said suddenly. “This is what we're going to do.”

  Trent was actually pretty interested to hear what Sharpe was going to say. Unfortunately, that was the exact moment that the far door literally exploded open to admit a new horror. Trent barely had time to look at it.

  He caught a hint of something huge, something that had to duck to fit in th
rough the doorway. Something that stood with a hunch, even despite its height. There were limbs that flashed like blades and a maw, some immense jaw stuffed with teeth.

  And then it was among them.

  It was confusing after that. Screaming. Muzzle flares. Shrieking.

  Trent was smashed into before he really had a chance to do anything. He felt himself fly across the room, smash into something that gave. He just had time to process that he'd been hurled into a vent and that now he was falling into the underground.

  Could the day, he wondered briefly, possibly get any worse?

  Chapter 11

  –The Escalation–

  Trent was falling.

  Twisting, turning, flailing.

  He banged against the side of the vent once, twice, three times. Then crashed into something–a vent grate, his mind told him with a flicker of thought–and smashed into something a lot more unyielding.

  He landed on his back and though the suit cushioned him from the worst of the blow, the breath was driven from his lungs. He gasped, rolling over to the left, spying nothing but a length of empty, dimly-lit corridor, then over to the right.

  A lizard man was coming towards him.

  Still gasping, he groped for his weapons. His rifle was somewhere nearby, nowhere within reach, and his shotgun had laid against his back. He gripped his pistol and tried to tear it free. It caught on the holster. He tried to scream in frustration, but his lungs were still recovering, and he only managed a weak noise of impotence.

  The lizard man pounced for him.

  At the last second, Trent ripped his pistol free, brought it up and emptied half the magazine into its chest. The force of the blasts sent it flying back, spraying the walls with silver blood. There seemed to be nothing else alive with him in the corridor, so Trent rested on his back once more, just trying to get his breath back.

  After a long moment, his lungs seemed in roughly the same condition they had been before the fall, so he sat up. Everything ached. His back, his limbs, and now he had a bad headache. What a day this was turning out to be.

  “Drake?” he asked into the radio. “You okay?”

  Nothing. No response. Not even static. A black bolt of panic shot through him. Trent shoved his back against the wall, keeping a vigil along both lengths of bleak metal-and-pipe corridor for anyone that might be trying to sneak up on him.

  “Drake? Are you there? Anyone?”

  Dead silence mocked him. Trent clamped down on his fear. There wasn't any time for it. He could be alone now. What if he was the only survivor? What was that living nightmare? Trent spied his rifle lying a few feet away. He stood up, slowly, painfully, and walked over to it. Retrieving it, he was glad to see that it had survived the fall.

  His shotgun, on the other hand, had been partially crushed by him when he'd fallen directly onto it. He was glad it hadn't broken any bones. Trent abandoned the thing, then reloaded both his rifle and his pistol, making sure they were both up to snuff. Satisfied, he holstered the pistol and slung the rifle back over his shoulder, setting it to three-round burst.

  Trent looked around. He'd obviously fallen into the maintenance complex that ran beneath the surface of the planet and the facilities. He tried the radio, but there was still nothing on it. His panic subsided into the background, low-watt electrical current of worry. It would do, for now. Trent picked a direction almost at random and set off, moving down the length of metal corridor. Pipes ran along the walls and ceiling.

  He tried to formulate some kind of plan, he was good at that, always had been. It was kind of in the job description for being a mercenary. Guys with low situational awareness or no ability to think for themselves usually didn't make it past year one. Trent was creeping up on his twentieth year, consecutively, as a merc.

  Coming to the end of the corridor only granted him access to another crossroads antechamber that bled away into more of the endless, cramped maintenance bays and passageways. He felt like a rat, burrowing just below the surface. Again, Trent chose a direction at random, allowing his mind to sort of restart.

  A plan wouldn't come. He couldn't stop seeing that great maw, the hulking figure. It had been a wholly different breed of beast from the things they'd encountered so far on this frozen hell of a planet. What kind of nightmare had they stumbled into?

  Trent wandered down another corridor. He supposed he should get back topside. What had Stephen said? There were guys in suits of dark armor suddenly showing up? Could it be a rival corporation? He'd also said that their only ticket out of here was gone. Trent knew that his endgame was to get off-planet. But how?

  A thought of hangars came to his mind. There were hangars at the base. Those hangars had ships. But the one he'd managed to get in to had been nothing but a display of non-functional ships. Or was that just negative thinking? He'd only had a glimpse of the hangar, and even then just the one. There'd been two of them.

  Okay, so, he had to get topside, get to a hangar, find a ship with an FTL drive. Otherwise he'd be stuck in-system and that was no good. And those guys in dark armor...they must have gotten here somehow.

  Perhaps he could steal a ship from them.

  Of course, before he did any of this, his number one priority was finding Drake. He might be cold-hearted enough to leave everyone else behind, but there was no way he'd leave Drake behind. He'd die first.

  Trent heard a sound, gunfire, somewhere distant. It seemed like it might be coming from the underground and not somewhere overhead. But maybe that was just wishful thinking. Trent pressed on. He checked a few of the doors he passed, finding nothing but vacant storage rooms and maintenance bays stuffed full of monitoring equipment. He'd gone another five minutes in the gray, gloomy silence before the sound of gunfire came to him again.

  This time, it was much closer.

  Trent slipped his finger inside the trigger guard and set off towards the noise. Maybe it was one of Stephen's dark-armored mystery men, or it might be another survivor from his squad. Trent had basically given up any hope of finding any of the original crew still alive. He began to see muzzle flares as he turned another corner.

  The gunfire suddenly ceased.

  He heard the clatter of a spent magazine.

  “Who goes there?” Trent called.

  There was a long pause, then, “it's Gideon.”

  Trent breathed a sigh of relief. He came around the corner and then spied the huge veteran reloading his immense machine gun. A pile of lizard men lay before him in a heap, their silvery blood, like mercury, sprayed liberally.

  “Goddamn good to see you,” Trent said.

  “Likewise,” Gideon replied, finishing with his reload. “What's been happening?”

  Trent looked around and spied a universally pleasant sign over one of the doors in the antechamber they'd come to. A red plus against a white background. An emergency infirmary. He pointed to it. Gideon followed his finger, the nodded.

  They entered the infirmary, cleared it, then Trent took off his helmet.

  “You first,” he said. “What the hell happened to you?”

  Gideon gave him a rundown that started the same way Stephen's did.

  “I was forced underground when that cutter showed up and started going to town on the boss. Went through his suit like it was fucking butter, man. I got jumped by a bunch of beetle things, got hit twice. Holed up in a storage room and licked my wounds for the better part of an hour. There was a lot going on out there and I wasn't really prepared to see what I saw. I was expecting a rival corporation, not a bunch of fucking sci-fi monsters.”

  Trent chuckled as he scrounged around for some painkillers. He didn't feel like digging into his own personal supply if he could help it, and the infirmary was well-stocked. It seemed to have been mostly passed over by the chaos overhead. It was like the eye of a hurricane. Trent found a bottle of extra-strength painkillers and washed them down with water from a sink. He splashed water on his face a few times and dried off.

  “I've been h
anging around down here ever since, trying to find a safe way up and someone to get into contact with. I thought everyone else was dead.”

  Trent gave him his own rough version of events, ending with the attack by the thing with the immense maw.

  “So, now what?” Gideon asked finally.

  “I know I'm finding Drake, dead or alive. And, I've got to be honest, I'd obviously welcome your help, but if that objective doesn't scan with you, then I've got to go off on my own. It's completely non-negotiable,” Trent replied.

  Gideon chuckled. “I feel you. And I'll stick with you. I'm not a hundred percent sure about getting out of this place by myself. Hell, not even fifty. Especially not with these new players to the game. What are you thinking about them, rival corporation?”

  “Probably,” Trent said, relieved that Gideon was going to stick with him. The guy was obviously hell on wheels.

  “So you haven't heard from anyone?” Gideon asked after a moment.

  Trent shook his head. He pulled his helmet back on and secured it firmly, then ran a quick suit-check to make sure everything was still working right.

  “Nothing,” he replied.

  “Fantastic. We're going to have to find someone, preferably a tech. Whatever we plan, I imagine it'll involve terminals and decryption and shit like that. Not really my thing,” Gideon said.

  “Me neither,” Trent agreed.

  They finished getting ready, checking their suits and their gear, then headed back out of the infirmary and into the antechamber.

  The pair set off.

  * * * * *

  Trent climbed up the ladder first, activating the hatch at the top and playing dice with his life once more as he poked his head out. There was nothing waiting for him atop the ladder in the small storage bay. He and Gideon had managed to get in contact with Stephen, who had made it, somehow, to the storage structure and was by himself. They spoke for a little while about what might be done to formulate some kind of plan.