Those farther back were blown surface-ward while warning bells and alarms rang in their armor and across the comm. The reflex armor’s smart systems tried to control the damage, saving many, and their augmented bodies did what they could to save as much of the new chassis as possible while assigning brain protection the highest priority.
Other depth charges landed on the distant drifting lunar bottom of the high arctic lakebed, exploding and sending sand and rock debris sweeping in slow underwater motion out across the other approaching combat wedges.
One explosion tore a palletized sled to shreds, actually scoring a direct hit and sending shrapnel, like direct-fire torpedoes, streaking bubbles through the water and into the nearest Eternals. In response Crometheus muttered darkly, “That’s their problem,” not realizing he was talking to himself over the general comm until he finished the last part of his non-empathetic statement, meant solely to drive himself forward in the moment of overwhelming fear he was now experiencing.
A fear that he would die at the bottom of this frozen lake. His new body ruined. His mind screaming for help that would never come. His dreams of becoming a god… just dreams and nothing more. All of it for nothing.
“Forward and make problems for everything in front of us!” he screamed. “Ruin them, Eternals!”
Others within the assault force whooped and jeered, almost breathlessly, nervously, as he uttered this last bit. And then they were all surging into the breach. Pushing to survive. Intent on murdering everyone within.
It was tight beyond the still-glowing cut of the breach. The area they’d cut into was some kind of piping and energy conduit transfer. Temperatures within the surrounding water spiked, and someone commented that this was because the base was running a geothermal energy tap into the core of the world.
More bombs fell along the sunken sands behind them, devastating whatever portion of the attack force was not yet at the breach point.
An engineer who didn’t possess cutting tools but was equipped with a bulkier armor system that was running a number of tactical processors and function interface tools along the gauntlets was busy hacking an industrial airlock to a maintenance vehicle garage for this level. Most likely used for the station personnel that performed work on this deepest level along the outside of the base.
“Get it open!” shouted Crometheus as he pushed forward through the crowded stack of Eternals within the tight space.
“Can’t!” replied Player Hephastor. “We’ve got to wait for decompression on the other side.”
Another explosion rocked the outside of the base. Maestro came over the comm, his voice calm and reassuring despite the thunder and death all around them. “Continue with your assault lane and secure your objectives, Eternals. The plan is still in effect.”
Crometheus knew they needed to get away from the depth charges. Even here within the breach the pounding from the hydraulic shock waves resulting from the explosions was setting off armor integrity alarms and causing minor faults within the systems that were being handled by the onboard AI.
They couldn’t stand up to too much more of this.
Studying the control panel the engineer was hacking, Crometheus saw the U-shaped bar that manually started the process of opening the garage. The engineer had already overridden the safety protocols. Hopefully that would be enough.
Without comment Crometheus slammed his gauntlet onto the hazard-yellow bar and pushed it into the open position.
The blast door opened into atmosphere and sucked the armored Eternals right through an airlock, the semi-hacked hatches open on both sides simultaneously against all sane tenets of design safety and protocol, into a vast garage on a sudden typhoon of ice-cold water that instantly began filling the lowest-level maintenance deck.
Surprised Animal defenders and tech crew, armed and waiting to repel, were swept away and then smashed into the far walls and bulkheads of a garage filled with racked submersibles, their bodies already half-frozen by the icy water. Their faces held expressions of pure horror as the bitingly cold lake water grabbed hold of their cardiovascular systems, shocking them to death well before their ice-stiff bodies rammed into the walls and were pinned against them like so much discarded flotsam in a flood.
Even the Eternals themselves were fighting for something to grab hold of as they were dragged past underwater maintenance vehicles and swept into offices and maintenance lockers, smashing into and being smashed by everything as the entire level filled with water.
The assault was underway.
Gods: Chapter Twenty-Five
The forward assault team was the first into the secondary airlock that would lead deeper into the base.
“You’re in command of the forward teams, Crometheus!” ordered Commander Zero over the comm. She was staying behind to organize what remained of the scattered assault force still on the lake bed and get them cycled into the other airlocks across the flooded lower levels.
“Can do!” replied Crometheus as the water drained rapidly out of the airlock he and the rest of the team had secured. Forward Assault was now down to twelve players, besides himself, and the sensors embedded within their armor were already picking up multiple Animal hostiles converging on the level they were now storming.
“What are we expecting on the other side? Maestro’s not talking back right now!” chattered some nervous player over the assault team comm.
“Spilursan Defense Forces,” boomed a player tagged Tiamatus. “Pretty good. Highly motivated. Maybe the best the Animals have got to throw at us as of this moment. But we can handle them, brothers and sisters. Stay together and concentrate your fire on my lead.”
Though Tiamatus knew Crometheus had been assigned squad god, slang for the leader of any Uplifted combat small unit, it looked as though he was trying to take charge and earn some glory along with a few extra achievement points.
Crometheus had seen other leaders within the Uplifted game-over a player from behind, and there wasn’t any fallout from it. Nothing was off the table if you were trying to do everything you could to make it up to the next step on the Path. But there were too many enemies swarming down the underwater base to start offlining allies right now. So Crometheus let it ride and went to the comm.
“Shoot, move, and communicate. First priority is to hold this level so the rest can get through and link up with their teams. Once we’re together we can proceed to the next line inside the base.”
The water had drained from the overridden airlock and now fresh air was being pumped in. Over the HUD the armor ran a background diagnostic check while everyone bent to their carrying systems and unlimbered their packed weapons from within waterproof rucks.
Finally, thought Crometheus, as he pulled his weapon out and ran a quick systems check. They’d been near defenseless during their long march across the haunting seafloor. Now they had weapons again, and there was something comforting in that. Something to fight with. And he was getting his first chance to use, in real time, the specialized Eternal weapon system. He’d trained on it extensively in the download sim, which equated to over six months’ time of handling and proficiency within his current muscle memory, but he’d never fired it in real time.
And now it was finally time to rock and roll.
Live concerts are always the best.
Bad Old Self nodded knowingly from some shadowy place in his mind.
The Eternals referred to their new weapon system as the “sewing machine”—informally, of course. Its official designation was the MK-1000. A ribbon rifle. Based on a design used by some of old Earth’s shock troops back during the Plague Riots of the planet’s last years. It fired five rounds at once along a five-barreled bore that used electromagnetic actuators to propel the munitions forward at speeds of two thousand five hundred miles per hour, according to the old reckonings. The rounds were caseless six-point-five-millimeter ammunition that came in belt
-fed stacks. When fired, the powerful and terrible weapon emitted a steady stream of hissing electrical snaps, much like a sewing machine stitching, as it violently tore everything apart it was aimed at for as long as the trigger was pulled. The blur of destruction it created within its tight cone of fire was very satisfying. Crometheus had felt all kinds of positive reinforcement while simming with it against overwhelming adversary bots.
But still… live shows were the best.
You got that right, boy, hooted Bad Old Self.
“Follow me, Eternals!” thundered Tiamatus arrogantly as the airlock’s blast door scissored open on the main level. A second later a Spilursan heavy automatic pulse gun saved Crometheus the work of shooting the obnoxious boor Tiamatus in the back at some future opportune moment, as its fusillade of incoming fire ventilated his fellow Eternal with multiple hits.
Crometheus was just holstering both the fifty-cal Automags he’d taken from loadout into tactical holsters on his armor-plated hips. Other Eternals hugged wall within the airlock and returned fire. The armor’s sensory systems were tagging at least two squads of Spilursan defenders, annotating their weapon types for user edification.
Tiamatus was still being riddled with incoming direct fire, his body rag-dolling from each hit as pulse rounds penetrated armor and ricocheted internally. Strong enough to penetrate but not exit. The giant dead Eternal somehow seemed incapable of falling down even in the face of overwhelming firepower.
Crometheus watched all this in a languid syrup of thought his mind could turn time into despite the fury and relentlessness of real-time progress. Then he surged forward and grabbed Tiamatus’s jerking body for a meat shield. Crouching behind the crumbling armored form and holding out the ribbon gun from beneath the smashed arm of his would-be successor, he returned fire on the heavy gunner forming the base of fire for the Animals coming at them.
A quick fusillade of six-point-fives tore the enemy heavy gunner to shreds, and suddenly the battle was theirs. Just like that it shifted and within seconds his fellow Eternals were switching over to the indirect targeting systems on their rifles as they covered, holding out their weapons to engage and fire. Dumping on full auto using the HUD’s targeting abilities to aim at their covering targets.
Lightly armored Spilursan Animals were targeted in the head where possible, five shots apiece, their helmeted skulls coming apart in explosions of red spray and flying gray matter. Those Animals who made the mistake of having any other portion of their bodies exposed—chests covered by bulletproof vests, shins and forearms protected by olive-green Kevlar, or even bare flesh crawling with spiraling tattoos and credos of promised death before dishonor—had those portions, too, slammed by five incoming, all at once, heavy-caliber rounds moving at three times the speed of sound. Each on-target burst of fire from the Eternals was like a swarm of angry hornets ripping into the Animal soldiers. The sounds of discharge and sonic travel came after the damage was done.
The first line of Animal resistance collapsed within a minute of first contact. But already more Animal troops were cycling in, eager to have at a foe they had no intelligence data on. Coalition command traffic indicated only that there had been a breach in a place they’d least expected an attack to come from. Forces were responding pell-mell. For the moment.
The battle isn’t won yet, thought Crometheus, as he advanced deeper into the level, fellow Eternals at his sides, massacring defenders by the score.
Gods: Chapter Twenty-Six
Two hours into the fight and the Spilursan military had gotten itself organized and was bringing numbers to bear. The Eternals were suffering casualties now, but they were still advancing toward the core access point on level nine.
In the first hour of heavy fighting the gains made by the forward assault team had been particularly significant. But everything had almost come to a screaming halt when the Animal defenders flooded level three. The move had been a desperate one by the on-site enemy commander to slow the swift advance of the attacking force. Or so Crometheus noted when the blast doors suddenly sealed shut and the waters flooded in, right into the midst of what had been a raging firefight within the refrigeration coils that cooled the main plasma conduit feeds to the powerful network core.
The enemy commander had sacrificed his own, just to delay the enemy.
They were desperate.
Within moments the battle ground to a halt as the arctic-cold lake waters rushed in, swirling across the almost alien-sculpted ceramic coils that bled off the fortress’s heat. Some of the Animal defenders escaped through emergency hatches, apparently alerted to the plan in the moment before all hell broke loose, but many were carried away into this whitewater maelstrom.
This maneuver wouldn’t stop the Eternals in their armored weapon systems… but it would affect their firearms. As the rising waters swirled about the power coils, electrical discharges shot forth with powerful snaps and booms, and Crometheus’s deadly new rifle malfunctioned and went offline within the HUD. He discarded the ruined weapon and waded through the torrent for all he was worth for an enemy-held blast door.
“Player Crometheus, status update! We’re having networking problems down here!” It was Commander Zero, and while she wasn’t freaking out, there was definitely a strident tone in her voice that belied the fact that not everything was going according to plan so far.
“Pushing forward,” replied Crometheus, starting to deliver his sitrep. “This level now submerged. Our 1000s are offline. Switching to sidearms.”
“I need a beachhead on level four,” shouted Commander Zero over a background of damage control klaxons shrieking for attention. “We’re hacking the pumps and should have three cleared in twenty minutes. We can push forward more weapons systems if you’re still holding.”
“Roger, can do!” acknowledged Crometheus.
He had linked up with an Eternal tagged Heratix. Now submerged on level three, their armor protecting them from the violent electrical displays that turned the red floodlights to blue and then back again, they were swimming up through the discharging coils to reach a high blast door that had been sealed off. A maintenance access door, the kind work crews probably used up in the ductworks to effect repairs. Chances were, both Crometheus and Heratix were hoping, it wouldn’t be a primary focus of the evolving Animal defenses. They might be able to get into the maintenance shafts and flank the next level’s defenders.
They pushed past the flotsam of ruined and free-floating debris within the underwater world the level had become. Animal corpses, frozen and dead defenders who only seconds ago had been engaged in a murderous firefight complete with pulse fire and flashbangs, floated by, pushed or pulled by the swirling currents like plants along the sea beds of some forever ocean. In the silence created by the cessation of gunfire and the overwhelming waters, their vacant Animal eyes stared off at nothing.
“Force the control panel and I’ll handle the hack,” ordered Heratix over their team comm. Crometheus couldn’t argue with her plan and used both gauntlets to pry open the blast panel that covered the controls for the hatch. The strong current tried to drag them both away as Heratix swam in close to grasp his armor and the panel in succession. Then one armored glove began to dance across the glowing interface panel, opening secure menus with backdoor passwords that worked almost instantly.
“I hacked one of their interfaces on a lower level during a lull in the fighting. Some maintenance chief kept a bunch of easy passwords in a secure file. But it’ll only get us so far, Crometheus. I need to hardwire in.” Then… “Hold on to me.”
Crometheus let go of the panel door and slammed his armored fist into it to bend it askew, jamming it open. Then he held on to her.
Heratix pulled a fiberwire cable from her gauntleted forearm and hard-connected into the panel. A moment later she had a menu open on the hovering screen beneath them.
“This’ll let me override their higher-level sa
fety parameters now that it’s in default malfunction mode. Any idea what’s on the other side of this door?”
“Negative,” answered Crometheus.
She laughed.
“Feels weird, doesn’t it?” she asked.
“What?” said Crometheus as she overrode sysadmin commands via the fiberwire connection.
“Breathing. Hearing yourself breathe inside these helmets.” She laughed nervously. “It’s like we forgot what it’s like to be alive.”
He hadn’t thought much about it, but now that she’d mentioned it his mind couldn’t stop hearing the two of them breathing heavily as they worked to hold on to the hatch while the violent currents pulled and sucked at them.
“Yeah,” he said. “It’s been a long time. I’d forgotten.”
“Me too,” she confessed, and then touched the command function interface key. The maintenance hatch shot open and water rushed in.
“Me first,” ordered Crometheus, and a moment later he was through and kicking into the darkness beyond the tight hatch, letting the flooding water pull him forward and then up toward the next level once he reached some sort of maintenance shaft lift. A blast door was closing up ahead, automatically trying to seal off the floodwater breach, and he kicked as hard as he could to make it before it locked him out on the wrong side. He reached the scissoring halves and pulled himself through at the last second before they clanged together.
Heratix’s voice came to him broken and distorted across their comm. Something was interfering with the signal.
“I’ll establish an ingress here,” he ordered, hoping her reception was better than his. “Gather the rest and stage them on your side of this door. Once the level pumps out, cut your way in and follow me. We’ll assault from this axis.”
Gods & Legionnaires (Galaxy's Edge: Savage Wars Book 2) Page 24