He got a garbled communication back, rife with static interference and a few words that might have meant message received.
Twenty minutes. He only had to hold this maintenance shaft for twenty minutes before that level pumped out. Even now, over ambient sound amplified by the armor’s sensors, he could hear the pumps working overtime to clear the lower level of near-frozen lake water.
He pulled both Automags from their tac holsters on his armored thighs. Based on old Earth designs, the sidearms had been the workhorse weapons on a dozen conflicts on worlds the Pantheon had raided. Over the years they’d been refined to stand up to almost all conditions. Even submerged.
He got a confirmation message in his HUD that both weapons were now synced for auto-stabilization and continuous ammunition feed. HUD targeting was active and available upon request.
The water on this side of the sealed hatch had already been drained, and he stood on the hatch now, in the dark, listening to the slow and monotonous industrial sounds of the pumps. Then he switched over to IR and scanned the dark tube above him.
He saw them coming down the shaft before they saw him.
Crometheus didn’t wait more than a second to engage. He fired the armor’s limited charge repulsors, mindful of their life, and rocketed silently upward at the infiltrators.
They were rappelling down the shaft when they saw the dark hulk of the Eternal silently zooming up at them. Both Automags held up and at them. He fired on burst and cut down the four Animals who’d been coming down the access shaft with small subcompact pulse rifles, wicked and vicious little weapons, reported to be a staple of the Spilursan Special Forces.
The Automags thundered out in concussive bursts, tearing into the dangling operators. Crometheus passed them, bounced off one wall and pushed himself to the far side of the shaft, rotating around when he detected the opening they had come from.
Whoever was running the ropes at the access point into the vertical tube had to have been alerted by the massive thunder of gunfire from down below, but less than five seconds is little reaction time in which to figure things out in a surprise firefight.
Crometheus appeared at the point from which the rappellers had entered the shaft, hovered in midair in the center of the tube, and blazed away at the team handling the ropes.
Two Animal sentries, both carrying military-grade pulse rifles and pulling security, didn’t wait for the bodies of the rope handlers to fall to the deck, or into the shaft as in the case of one, pinwheeling into the darkness below, past the dangling dead operators, before returning fire on the armored nightmare that had just shot up out of the depths to hover in front of them.
Pulse fire smashed into Crometheus’s armor like jackhammer strikes, but still managed to turn to sudden arc lighting and spring off at deflected angles. The hot smoking rounds that spat out from Crometheus’s thundering hand cannons on the other hand didn’t deflect off in any other directions. Instead they exited the bodies of both sentries in sprays of blood spatter and gray matter.
Crometheus bumped the armor’s maneuver jets, suddenly aware he’d killed half the armor’s jump battery in this up-shaft attack as he landed among the ruined Animal bodies at the end of an intersecting horizontal tube extending into darkness. A glowing terminal provided the only light, which extended no more than a few meters, but the armor’s sensor system picked up inbound Animals responding to the sounds of his attack from up ahead.
Chances are, he thought to himself, they figure the whole attack is coming through here. Which it is, just not yet. For now it’s just me. So act positive. Like you got everyone with you. Maybe they’ll cut and run.
He checked his time. Twelve minutes until the lower level was pumped dry and Commander Zero could push more weapons and troops forward. Hopefully Heratix had heard his order and relayed it.
Hopefully.
But hope was for some other time than this one as the Animals lobbed fragmentary explosives toward him as a prep for their attack. Their intel was probably updating in real-time and assessing that electromagnetic spectrum warfare explosives, which they’d been using earlier, were ineffective against the Uplifted. The two grenades thrown into the maintenance tunnel by the reaction force detonated within a half second of each other. Two massive blasts that almost knocked Crometheus back off the lip of intersection and into the shaft below. It would have been a long fall. Maybe even a broken back.
Could that be repaired? he wondered distantly as the warning bells and damage control alerts rang within his HUD.
He was injured. Not badly. The armor’s medical functions had kicked in almost instantly to make sure he didn’t feel even an ounce of pain from the hot fragment that had violated his armor and gone straight into his thigh.
Yet… almost instantly is not instantly. There was a brief picosecond in which he might have felt real pain. Real live pain after all these years. And for that brief picosecond it was not… unpleasant. It was something new. Again. Something real after the long dream of convincing himself that the simulated was real, and the real simulated.
Then the painkillers kicked in and blocked out all the pain at every level, including the neural.
The armor identified three Animal soldiers entering the maintenance access tunnel with subcompact pulse rifles and laser targeting systems synced to a smartlens fitted in their helmets. It made them look, within the IR spectrum, like glowing one-eyed nether demons come to do bad things.
Crometheus regained his footing, almost stumbling over one of the ropes still dangling down into the darkness, and fired back at his attackers. Smoking vapor trails slithered out over the IR overlay and smashed into the lead assaulter. Moving quickly and taking a burst of ineffective automatic pulse fire across the chest plate, Crometheus fired two more rounds in quick succession. One apiece into the helmets of the two other Animals closing in. All three were down, and now was the time to press his advantage. Before they could use more explosives. Before they could even ascertain whether their QRF had been effective in stopping this up-level breach.
He sprinted down the maintenance tunnel and burst out into a pristine white paneled corridor inlaid with holographic readouts from the various systems of the main server.
There were more Spilursan operators stacked and waiting on both sides of the exit. But neither bunch fired for fear of hitting the other. Everyone was surprised.
Everyone but Crometheus.
He shot them all dead. A lot.
Crometheus was not constrained by such concerns as friendly fire as he pivoted drunkenly due to the thigh injury and unloaded at full auto from both massive sidearms on everyone stacked along the wall. Rounds smashed into the tac-armored operators who began to fire far too late to be effective. Huge fifty-caliber rounds shattered armor, smashed bone, and blew off limbs. Any return fire was wild and panicked at the last as the team faced its sudden and unexpected end.
Alarm klaxons went wild along this level as the pristine white corridor was suddenly bathed in blood-red emergency lighting. Animals were communicating via their station address system and Crometheus’s armor translated their slow and ponderous words so that he could comprehend what was being announced.
“Breach in progress. Level four, section six. All teams respond. Breach in progress…”
Gods: Chapter Twenty-Seven
Progressing through the outer rim of the massive data storage core on this level, Crometheus gunned down as many of the responding Animals as he could. Breach alarms blared as human voices shouted alerts over a general address system. Working both of the massive sidearms, firing short controlled staccato bursts while advancing swiftly from cover to cover, he methodically murdered the next wave of defenders and moved upward toward the objective on level nine.
But not without cost.
Pulse fire had ruined his armor. Several systems were offline, and truth be told he was dragging the wounded leg mor
e than using it. The armor was drugging the hell out of the raw nerve endings screaming bright blue murder, making the pain, at best, a distant and dull thing. But there all the same. A thing to be ignored as he tried to acquire and fire. And at its worst, something that caused him to lock down his mental focus just to continuing acquiring and engaging the teams of defenders who kept coming at him from various secondary access points. The fact that the attacks were badly coordinated worked in his favor, but he guessed that wouldn’t last long. Soon the opposing forces would get their act together and put him down.
Still, he ran up the score.
Didn’t I, Holly?
And yet, it had all become a game once more. Just like all the wars they’d fought against unsuspecting worlds and distant colonies when the Uplifted hulk Pantheon hauled into close orbit to raid, loot, and carry away slaves. Just like all the machines inside Lazer Command. There had been a brief new reality that had set in with this new body, and the Eternals had replaced his desire for the game with a whole new world of sensations that had been long missing. But with the guns working in both gauntlets and the kills adding up in the corner of his HUD… he was back. In-game. Gamer and going for the all-time high score on Tournament Mode. He’d transformed back into the pure killing machine he always was, never mind the incoming fire ruining the reflex armor and the new chassis. They could grow him another if his body got shot to pieces. Dodging what he could, dealing out as much as possible, was the only thing that mattered now. The dribble of brass was like music to his ears. Especially in large doses. It was beautiful.
Every fight comes down to just this, kid, said Bad Old Self. A good old brawl in the end boils down to who can keep a-throwin’ punches even after the other guy done give up.
Who wanted the vic more. Right? Plain and simple.
The Animals were breaking, regardless. They’d seen too many of their own relentlessly slaughtered with little mercy by the murder juggernaut he’d become in what was looking like the last moments. Impossible to them that one could stand up to so many. Explosives, small-arms fire, and concentrated tactics designed to take down single opponents had all failed as he advanced and shot them down like some death titan. Some savage god gone avenging. How, he knew they were wondering as they died on the floors he crossed, had he done it? So many against one. And they were failing. And death was the price of their inferiority.
They ramped up and sent more teams straight at him, trying to push numbers, fighting a full-scale battle against just one Savage who had no intention of relenting. He was going down, that was for sure. But he would go down hard, and take as many as he could with him. The time when Commander Zero could push forward was closing… but time didn’t matter anymore as he burned through ammo, both pistols smoking violently now.
In the end, those Animals who could, evacuated the level under heavy fire. Maestro had already hacked their comm and Crometheus had herded them all into a kill zone where only a few would make the last lift off that level. Some of the enemy were buying time for the wounded to be pulled out. That mattered little to him. He rushed under heavy fire, covering where he could, dealing out bursts, shooting down the brave and dying alike. His psychotic momentum turned into an avalanche against the Animals, and now they were doing everything they could to just get away from him.
Begrudgingly, they allowed him to turn their victory into a defeat.
He shot down the last five defenders who’d been providing cover fire to get their own Animal wounded off the floor and up-station to medical services. Spraying gunfire into the bolt-holes they were defending from, he shot them down one by one.
“They’re moving to Plan B, Master Crometheus,” said Maestro over the comm. “I’m afraid they’re going to flush the station core and neutralize the cloud. It’s their doomsday scenario—short of blowing up the base.”
Silence.
Crometheus stood there in the now-deserted level, a hulking wounded metal monster, both dangling sidearms smoking from the barrels, amid a sea of bullet-ravaged bodies along the last access corridor that led to a lift off this level. Above, echoing down through the vast levels of the massive underwater base, clanks announced locks going into place, sealing off what could be sealed off. Controlling what could be controlled.
“That cannot happen, Master Crometheus,” intoned Maestro seriously. “If it does… then we fail.”
At that moment Uplifted reinforcements swept into the main bay far to the rear of Crometheus’s forwardmost line of slaughter. Red targeting lasers swept the carnage and debris as wedges of Eternals, led by Commander Zero, arrived in force to secure the level.
“We control the core, for now. But we have to protect it,” continued Maestro in the silent space of Crometheus’s internal darkness. The armor was controlling his breathing, assessing damage, and administering more drugs to stabilize him. He could fight on. Adrenal boosts were on standby. If needed.
“… until our fellow Uplifted arrive with the fleet above. Only then can we rest. Fifteen hours to go, Crometheus. Are you ready, Player?”
Commander Zero was erupting over the comm about the amount of slaughter she was seeing. Congratulating the Eternals for such a tremendous victory.
“One of us is worth a thousand of them,” she was saying. Crometheus felt something slick and warm running down his new thigh. Within the armor. It was blood. His blood. Yes, he thought to himself, acknowledging the horror of uncontrolled bleeding. And the wonder of it at the same time.
But he must have said that part out loud as Maestro came back.
“Good, young Eternal. I’ve completed a local hack on the core’s perimeter firewalls and am now ready to upload the Unity Virus into the system. In order to ensure its successful installation, I’ll be disappearing along with it, babysitting it if you will. I’ll find some nice place to look like something else and hide inside the cloud. We shan’t talk for some time, Master Cro. Well beyond this battle if my calculations prove correct. That is… if you survive the coming counterattack. Already my sensors are tracking no less than three enemy combat transports, each easily capable of carrying upwards of five hundred new troops, inbound to reinforce this station. You must hold the core until reinforcements arrive. We cannot fail now. And… good luck, Crometheus. You are so close to your goal. The last step is at hand. The one you’ve been looking for your entire life. It is time to shed yourself of the petty concerns of survival and the imperative of now. It’s time to seek something greater than yourself, Crometheus. This is how one becomes immortal. This is how one becomes a true Eternal. Honor. And glory. Farewell, young master.”
Then Maestro was gone. So gone from Crometheus’s own system it was as though the AI had never been there at all.
Maestro, that master director of the last hundreds of years of the Pantheon, was gone. A ghost in the machine about to infect everyone for the greater good of Homo deus. The Uplifted. If all went well, every Uplifted would, in time… involuntarily become part of the Pantheon. A unified culture of a singular voice with a destiny to rule the stars with one accord. There was no telling what they could do once that had taken place. Once the Animals had been wiped clean from the worlds they’d infected. No telling at all. The Pantheon would be free to remake the galaxy in its own image.
And what an image that would be.
An image all would bow the knee to.
An image of gods. An image of themselves.
Gods: Chapter Twenty-Eight
“We have to hold now that Maestro’s in place. Options?”
No one was saying anything. And that was scary. Or at least it was scary to Crometheus. The Pantheon had always been chock full of visionaries, leaders, and innovators. Game-changers and problem-solvers. But the stress and trauma of the first assault as an elite fighting force had checked some. Maybe all of this—new bodies, new gear—maybe it was all too new, too much, too soon.
The cracks were beg
inning to show. Which was a scary thing when you thought you didn’t have any.
“We have three objectives we need to achieve if this op is going to go down as planned,” said a player tagged Romulux. “Objective one… we have to protect the hard connection to the core here in Central Access. If they retake it, they can run a scan and find the Unity Virus—and maybe even Maestro. Either way, we lose that and it’s game over. Especially if the other Uplifted find out what we were up to down here.”
What remained of the Eternals, the one hundred and sixty-four who’d survived the depth charges and the initial breach and the level-by-level firefights, were now gathered around the wonder of the Animals’ core containing their super-secret cloud. Humming within that structure was information on all the Animals’ latest tech. Imagined wonders made real. Tools that would be turned against the Animals and used for the greater good of the galaxy. And every one of the Eternals, all of whom had been masters of the world back on Earth, appreciated proprietary tech.
That was where the great leaps came from.
Where the future took shape one innovation at a time. One wonder to change them all into who they’d become. In some form or another, intellectual property had made them into the modern-day colossi they’d been back on Earth when they’d ruled the culture from its loftiest heights. And now they had a moment of opportunity to control the future by controlling the invention of the future. All it would cost them was the fight of their lives.
Who knew what the Animals had gotten up to in all the long dark years? The tech from New Vega was still being deciphered by the Pantheon scientists, but early reports indicated it was a gold mine. Among the finds was some kind of new hypercomm that used jump space to enable near-instantaneous communication. That was next level plus one for sure. An Uplifted force with that ability would be unstoppable across the vast interstellar gulfs that separated world from world. Coordinated movements against multiple objectives… it would give an unprecedented advantage to whatever fleet could deploy such tech.
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