Absolute Zero (The Shadow Wars Book 4)

by S. A. Lusher

  It had something to do with a life of violence; especially one lived by a man who took the violence and twisted it to his will, bent it to his own accord, honed it finely for use in a universe that seemed to care little, if at all, for those inhabiting it. Trent listened, heeded the advice of his environment around him, and in return, he got to live when others didn't. Because not everyone listened, and even those that did weren't always lucky.

  So when he stepped into the next room, another heat exchange, Trent looked around, saw nothing and was about to give the all-clear. Something made him look up. He barely managed to throw himself out of the way as the Fiend dropped from the ceiling directly towards him. It hit the ground where he'd been standing and he knew, as he crashed to the ground, that if he hadn't looked up, if he hadn't moved, his head would have gone right into its chest hole.

  The others opened fire and put a quick end to the nasty thing.

  “You know,” Gideon said as Drake helped Trent up off the floor, “I think that of everything we've encountered, this thing is the creepiest. I mean...just look at this fucking thing. Those giant hairs in the hole, no head, all that dark, bristle skin...damn I hate these things.”

  “You'll get no argument from me,” Trent replied.

  They moved through the heat exchange, more on edge than ever. After another few moments, Trent finally managed to locate the first ladder that would bring them up to the surface level. He went first, as always. Trent climbed up, popped the hatch and looked around. A small, empty room, lit by the soft ambient Cyr glow, awaited his inspection. Seeing nothing hiding anywhere in the room, he hauled himself up and out, then helped the others.

  “Where to now?” he asked.

  Trevor shrugged. “I'll need a terminal to figure out the best route.”

  Trent sighed and opened the only door in the room. Beyond was a vast corridor, and it seemed to Trent, as he stepped out, that all of their meddling in Dark Ops' affairs had finally done some serious damage. A dozen black-armored corpses littered the ground. They had all had their brains scooped out of their skulls. A few black, lizard-like Harvester corpses were mixed in, as well as a pair of Fiends and a Bugbear body.

  “Damn,” Gideon murmured.

  “Maybe they wiped each other out,” Trent said hopefully.

  Then a sustained, staccato burst of machine gun fire sounded somewhere else in the facility. More guns added to the discordant symphony. Something shrieked wildly. Then the eruption of a grenade. Trent sighed.

  “Guess it's too much to hope for,” he murmured.

  They checked out the other doors in the corridor. They mostly led to empty rooms, but one finally turned up a terminal that, again, looked extremely out of place in the Cyr structure. Trevor hurried over to it and booted it up. A few moments passed, the mercenaries listening to the distant sounds, then Trevor made a small noise of success.

  “Got it,” he said.

  Trent listened to him explain the route through Research One, made sure he had it locked in his head, then shouldered his rifle and got ready. He stepped back out into the corridor, the others following him, and they set off.

  Time passed in bloody fragments.

  The way ahead was riddled with death and danger. They ran into a clutch of Dark Ops troopers and Trent kicked things off with a three-round burst that shattered the faceplate of one of the troops in spray of glass and blood.

  Everything became a bit of a red blur from there. They put down half a dozen black-armored troops, then immediately found themselves hip-deep in Harvesters in the next corridor. Trent emptied his magazine, reloaded and emptied that next one. He found a small cache of grenades among the corpses and tossed them around, spraying alien blood along the corridor walls. When the last Harvester fell, Trent and his squad pushed on into the next room and found a small army of Fiends waiting for them.

  Trent's skin crawled as he started putting the creatures down.

  It went on like that for some time. Dark Ops seemed to have underestimated how difficult taking control of the facility would be. By the time they hit the tram station, Trent had had to abandon his rifle after being forced to use it as a club and snag a new one from a dead trooper. As he and the others climbed onto the tram, he noticed how they were all dripping multi-colored blood and had a few more dents in their armor.

  “Damn,” he said, collapsing into a seat as Sharpe took her place at the head of the tram, just like she had before, and got it going.

  “You can say that again,” Gideon agreed, sitting down heavily.

  “Now that's what I call a fight,” Drake said.

  “That sucked,” Trevor replied. “I'm not even close to what you'd call a warrior.”

  “You're not doing too bad for yourself. At least you're still alive and you've still got all your parts and pieces attached,” Drake said.

  “Yeah, maybe,” Trevor murmured unhappily.

  The tram came to life, heading through its tunnel to Research Two. Trent didn't want to think, deciding instead to just let his mind sit in the dark for a while. He took that downtime to catch his breath, wanting to take off his helmet and massage his temples. A headache, low and dull and pounding, was working its way up his skull, making a slow burn towards genuine pain. Everything ached. His muscles burned from use, his joints hurt. There were a million tiny bruises and cuts and scrapes and burns across the topography of his skin.

  Nobody spoke the rest of the way there.

  Trent was beginning to nod off when the tram came to a halt in the next station. He blinked several times, shook his head and stood up. The others followed him out of the tram and into the station. It was even worse over in Research Two.

  “Shit, how far?” Trent asked, staring at the bodies, the blood, the spent shell casings.

  “Not far, luckily. There's a corridor just beyond that door that leads to the garage. From there, we just need to take some vehicles over. It's not much of a drive,” Trevor replied.

  Trent headed over to the door he'd indicated and opened it up. There was, indeed, a corridor, a long one, waiting for them. Unfortunately, it was filled to bursting with troopers and insidious monsters engaged in an all out war.

  “Let's move it!” Trent shouted.

  They plunged into the hectic chaos.

  Trent sighted a Dark Ops troop and took a shot at his neck, barely had time to see the bullets tear through the thin lining there and create a geyser of blood before turning his sights on a Harvester that was coming his way and shooting the back of its head out by putting a trio of bullets in its gaping maw. Even as it dropped, he sighted up a Spitter, crawling along the wall, and shot it until it sprayed blood across the wall and crashed to the ground.

  He heard the others behind him, firing almost continuously, taking down anything that came close enough. Blood flew and bodies fell. They stuck to one wall, not shooting as often as they could, trying to keep to the sidelines and let the hostiles tear each other apart. Trent was glad for the distraction, as he was pretty sure that if any one side were to gain the upper hand, he and his meager band of survivors wouldn't stand a chance.

  An age passed and an era went by it seemed, but they made it to the garage. Trent surveyed the area and saw that it was a nasty, bloody mess. But he laid eyes on a small collection of black jeeps across the way and felt a bit of relief lighten the burden of the past several hours. At least that part of the mission had gone right.

  “Let's go! Haul ass!” he called, rallying the others.

  There were fewer Dark Ops troops and alien mutations in the garage, but they were still fighting just as fiercely. They spent more magazines and bullets as they hurried across the expansive garage, over curious stains and spilled tools and spare parts, and in exchange they received several dead hostiles. Trent hit the clutch of jeeps first and turned around, offering cover fire for the others. They approached rapidly, narrowly dodging bullets and sometimes not.

  “Drake, take Gideon and Trevor. I'll open up the door and follow you wi
th Sharpe in a second jeep!” Trent shouted.

  “Got it,” Drake replied, tearing open the driver's side door of the nearest jeep and getting in. The others followed, disappearing into the black vehicle.

  Trent hurried over to the controls, found the one that opened the nearest garage-style door and hit it. As soon as the door began opening, the room was immediately filled with the howling shrieks of the planet's winds. Snow blew in and ice began to form around the edges of the doorway. Trent abandoned the terminal as soon as he saw that the door was going to keep opening. He hurried back to another jeep, passing Drake's vehicle on the way out, and opened the door.

  “Come on!” he shouted.

  Sharpe had gotten into a shooting match with a trio of Dark Ops troops. She glanced back at him, then tossed a grenade towards the troops and rushed to the jeep. Trent got into the driver's seat, Sharpe in the passenger's and they shut and locked the doors. Starting up the engine, Trent gunned it, heading out into the freezing whiteout.

  At first, Trent had no idea how they were going to get to where they needed to go. Then he began to notice that the jeep came with several nice features. For one, the windshield was heated on the outside, a nice de-icing system that fought the continual build up. The second thing he noticed was a Head's Up Display had been overlaid across the inside of the windshield, giving him a nice guide to the nearest structure: Research Three, which was a little over a hundred meters away. The numbers started counting down as he drove.

  For a long while, there was silence. Save for the brief check-in over the radio by Drake, nobody had much of anything to say. Trent glanced briefly at Sharpe, who sat in her seat, which was just barely big enough to hold her. He knew how she felt, they had basically the same body type and size. He wanted to say something to her, but he wasn't sure what, so he just stared ahead, kept on driving and held his peace.

  Things went well, and the counter had fallen below twenty meters when, abruptly, it all went to hell. After so much white, blurry snowfall, the sudden appearance of something large and dark startled Trent so much that he couldn't react to it. The jeep smashed directly into the thing, it might have been a Bugbear, that's what its shape and size suggested to Trent, but it didn't matter because suddenly the jeep had turned and was rolling.

  It kept going, the world turning to hazy, painful chaos, twisting and turning, nothing but white and the interior of the jeep, bits and pieces of black metal coming off outside the windshield, which had become cracked and smeared with blood. It kept going, making Trent dizzy, his head banging against the inside of his helmet several times.

  Then, it was over.

  There was nothing but the shrieking of the winds as it filtered into the vehicle. They had landed upside down. Trent groaned and began moving his limbs experimentally. Nothing seemed broken, so he hit the seat belt release and then groaned again as he fell onto his head, then his back, on the roof of the jeep, which now served as its floor.

  “Sharpe, you dead?” he asked.

  There was a second thump as she hit her own release. “Not yet,” she said.

  Trent managed to get up on his hands and knees, but there wasn't much room to maneuver. The front windshield had been broken, he realized, not just cracked, in all the chaos. He began crawling out into the snow.

  “Drake,” he said as he headed into the whiteout. “Drake, we crashed. We hit something.”

  There was no response. Not even static. A moment later, he and Sharpe stood a little bit in front of the ruined jeep, which was smoking now. Sharpe tried her radio as well, but there was nothing awaiting them save for dead silence.

  “Fuck, now what?” Trent asked.

  “There,” Sharpe replied, pointing to what looked like a small, dark structure a little ways ahead of them. “We need to get there.”

  Trent knew that she was right. Already, he was beginning to freeze, to feel the cold seeping in through his armor, no matter how high he turned up the thermal units. They set off, the snow knee-deep and hard to kick through. The storm was in full blast now, whiteout conditions, like being inside of a ping-pong ball.

  By the time they managed to reach the dark shape, which solidified into a one-story, one-room shack, Trent was shivering, trembling with the cold. Sharpe got there first, hit the activation button and waited for the door to open. It did, a little bit, then it stopped. She sighed, slipped her fingers in through the crack and began pulling. Reluctantly, inch by inch, the door opened up. She went in and Trent hurried to do so as well, right behind her.

  Now that it had been forced open, clearing what must have been ice from its interior, the door closed easily enough. The interior of the tiny building wasn't warm by any stretch of the imagination, but it wouldn't kill them.

  “What is this place?” Trent asked, looking around. There was just one room with a mini-fridge, a cot and a couple of crates of supplies. They had all been raided and emptied out.

  “Emergency shelter I imagine. Look.” Sharpe pointed.

  Trent spied a hatch in the ground. “Think it leads to Research Three?” he asked.

  “Probably. If it isn't collapsed. It's either that, or we brave the storm, which is almost certain death,” Sharpe replied.

  “Well, better get to it then,” Trent said.

  Sharpe hesitated. She looked at him, her eyes unreadable as always, hidden behind the black, opaque lenses. Despite this, Trent understood what that gaze conveyed. Sharpe was tired, this whole thing had taken a lot out of her, and maybe she needed five minutes to get her breath back. She just didn't want to say so.

  So Trent said it instead. “On second thought, let's relax here for a minute. I need to wait for the world to stop spinning.”

  Sharpe nodded, offering no comment. She walked to a wall, put her back to it and slid down into a sitting position. Trent moved on the other side of the room, directly opposite her, and repeated the action. They sat like that for a long moment, staring at each other. Trent felt like saying something again, so this time, he did.

  “Would you sleep with me?”

  “What, now? Because I don't think that cot would support our weight,” Sharpe replied.

  Trent laughed. “No, I mean, well...it's tempting, no, no time. But I mean, if we met under different circumstances, like at a bar or something, and I asked you to come back to my cabin?”

  “I'd invite you back to mine. I'm not the kind of woman who waits to be asked,” Sharpe replied.

  “No, I guess you're not.”

  A moment of uncomfortable silence passed.

  “You'd really want to sleep with me?” she asked finally. Her voice was still its usual titanium-clad self, a voice that spoke of grim determination and brooked no argument, but there was a crack there, a small one, and through it showed something Sharpe probably never showed to anyone, probably not even to herself anymore: uncertainty.

  “Yeah, of course,” Trent replied.

  “The whole, six foot five, built like a bodybuilder, could kick your ass in a fight, implants over her eyes thing doesn't turn you soft?” she asked.

  Trent laughed again, louder this time. “No, the opposite, actually. I mean, I go for my share of the 'pretty' girls, although I prefer merc girls or Marine girls. Tough chicks with tats and muscles. I prefer my women a little trashy...not that you're trashy.”

  This time it was Sharpe who laughed. “I used to be, I guess. Used to hang out in bars and night clubs, hunting for guys. When I was growing up, I was pretty awkward. I crashed headlong into puberty and that was it. I got big, real big, and I always seemed to be interested in 'boy' stuff, as my friends called it. A lot of people thought I was a lesbian, but I always knew it was guys that got me wet. I just stopped giving a shit what people thought, well, for the most part. I gave up trying to dress 'pretty' and started lifting weights.

  “Got onto whatever sports teams I could. I had a thing for guns, got real good at shooting. Being a mercenary seemed kind of like the right fit for me. I signed on with an outfit when
I was nineteen. I had pretty much given up on guys. I was sure I couldn't even get a mercy lay. I think I scared their dicks.” Here, she laughed again.

  “Too bad we couldn't have met back in the day, we might have had something,” Trent said.

  “Yeah, I think you're right. After I joined up with the mercs, I realized that there was a whole other world. There were guys out there who got turned on by how hard a woman could hit or how well she could shoot a gun. I started cruising bars, night clubs, whatever. I started looking at men like most men look at women: notch on the belt. It kind of felt like a victory, every time I went to bed with one. It was like, 'you guys wouldn't give me the time of day back then, but now here you are, in my bed, giving me a good time', you know? Kind of petty, I know, but I don't really give a fuck.”

  “So why'd you join up with a corporation?” Trent asked. “Seems like the mercenary life suited you really well.”

  “It did, but...I don't know, things kind of rang hollow after a decade of cruising the galaxy. I found a guy, got serious, tried to get pregnant, didn't work. Some medical thing, I don't want to go into it. We wanted to build a life together, but then he died. Some asshole with a grudge showed up, killed him. I killed him after that, and all his friends, and the mercenary gang he was working with. I went to fucking war, and I killed them all.” She said this without emotion, without guilt, without anything really.

  It was like she was reading off a script.

  “Fuck,” Trent said after a moment.

  Sharpe shrugged. “Yeah. Things seemed ever more hollow after that. I had always heard about the megacorps, how they offered lives to people. Not just benefits, but a sense of meaning, of belonging. So I decided 'what the fuck?' and I signed up. Rose in the ranks, got some implants. Started out as security, and within five years, I was Sergio's bodyguard. I think he was afraid of me, but he trusted me at least.”