Refuge 9 (Fire and Rust Book 5)

by Anthony James

  It got worse. Much of the floor was a seething mass of Sekar. In places, they clustered so tightly that Conway was unable to distinguish their individual shapes. All he could see was death and hunger. Movement caught his eye and a dozen or more Sekar slithered from one of the rifts directly opposite his position high up in the wall. The aliens writhed as they fell and they landed amongst the others, becoming lost in the morass.

  “Looks like we’re in the shit,” said Conway. “We’ve found the main teleporter room and it’s filled with Sekar.”

  Rembra approached the viewing window a short distance from Conway. “They are not doing anything.”

  It was as though the words were a challenge to fate. Like a rolling tide, the Sekar surged towards the wall below Conway. He watched in horror as the aliens threw themselves against the alloy sheets. The Ravok had lined the place with tharniol and the Sekar couldn’t get through. Instead, they surged into several exit passages in the walls to the left and right. Conway was also left with the uncomfortable feeling that other exits lay directly beneath the window, out of his sight arc.

  He took a step away. “We’ve got to finish this,” he said. “Has anyone found a place to fit this damn repair module?”

  Every answer was in the negative.

  “We have about five minutes before we’re overrun,” he said.

  His attraction to the viewing window was gone and Conway looked around the upper room. His squad had searched this area of the room already, but he wondered if there was a way he could speak to the Refuge 9 entity again. Maybe it could tell him exactly where to install the repair module.

  The closest console had many interface ports and Conway had no cable to plug into them. Corporal Freeman usually carried some and he got him on the comms.

  “I’ve already tried, sir,” he said. “I’m not carrying anything that fits.”

  Conway swore. “I take it you’re pissing about with the hardware somewhere. Have you got it working?”

  “Yes, sir. Everything has power and I’m sure this room was the control area for the main teleport hardware. Don’t ask me how it works, because I don’t know.”

  “It’s broken anyway,” said Conway. “We need to find a place for this repair module. Stop what you’re doing and find it.”

  “Will do, sir.”

  Conway strode deeper into the room. Other members of his squad were visible and they were all busy hunting for a place into which the repair module would fit. So far, none of them were successful and Conway hated the thought of falling at what could be the last major hurdle.

  He crossed the room at a diagonal and came to the right-hand wall. It was fitted with rows of tall cabinets. The cabinet doors had no handles and he thumped his fist on one, producing a hollow clang. A short distance away, Private Warner and Corporal Brice levered the doors using a couple of crowbars. Conway had no idea where the hell they’d found crowbars.

  “Anything in these?” he asked.

  “Computers,” said Warner.

  Conway looked in one and saw hundreds of cables plugged into the faceplate of what he guessed was a processing or data storage unit.

  “Keep going,” he said. “Maybe one of these others…”

  Conway left the sentence unfinished and went to look for Lieutenant Rembra or Sergeant Lockhart. On the way, he discovered two exit passages. Staring into the gloom revealed nothing. The Sekar were coming soon – he had no doubt whatsoever.

  Lockhart was paired up with Corporal Barron at the opposite end of the room to the teleporter. They’d discovered a chest-high cube which was mounted on a low alloy slab. Thick black cables protruded from the lower edges of the cube and vanished into holes in the slab.

  “This thing’s making a buzzing sound,” said Lockhart, looking as if he wanted to put a few bullets into it. Instead, he hit it with his knuckles. The cube sounded solid. “It looks important and it’s also completely sealed.”

  “I don’t know how long we have left,” said Conway, crouching at the base of the cube. He gave it a tap with the stock of his rifle, not exactly sure what he hoped to achieve. Nothing happened.

  “Should we organize a defense?” asked Lockhart. “We’ve got three exits to cover.”

  “Or we could go through the teleporter again and see if we can buy ourselves some time,” said Barron. She shrugged to indicate that she wasn’t too hopeful about the idea.

  The situation was a bad one. Each member of the squad carried approximately eighty rounds and the Fangrin chain guns were on their last magazines. The squad had enough for a short firefight. Anything more and they’d run out of ammunition.

  “You didn’t see how many Sekar were in that room,” said Conway. “We don’t have enough bullets for all of them.”

  “So we’ve got to keep looking and hope for the best?” said Barron, the spark fading from her eyes as she realized the end was coming.

  The thought of it angered Conway and he hated that he couldn’t change what was to come. He tightened his grip on his rifle and walked away to join the search. The room wasn’t as big as he first imagined and his squad had checked out most of the kit. The map provided by Refuge 9 was clear that they were in the right location which meant the solution was to keep searching.

  A rectangular console was fitted to the wall adjacent to the viewing window. To Conway’s eye it looked different to the other consoles and he wondered if it was maybe used by a lead operator. He looked it over and saw nothing that resembled a failed teleport module for him to swap out. The unit was powered on and when he pressed a button, three of the screens lit up with input prompts. Conway couldn’t remember a time when he was as frustrated as this. Given time, they could investigate this room properly. As ever, time wasn’t on their side.

  “Same as always,” Conway muttered bitterly.

  “Movement, north exit,” said Private Berg.

  The sound of Berg’s rifle was muffled by the presence of the Sekar, like it was being fired from twice its actual distance. With a single glance at the readout on his own gun, Conway dashed towards Berg’s position. The other visible members of the squad did likewise, abandoning their search in order to repel the enemy.

  It was useless resistance and everyone knew it. Even if they located the place to fit the replacement teleport module, it was too late to carry the new one over and install the software. For all Conway knew, the new part would require ten minutes of automatic calibration before it was ready. And whatever happened with the teleporter, fixing it would only prevent more of the Sekar coming rather than killing the existing aliens.

  Berg’s rifle was joined by a second and a third. To his left, Conway saw fast-moving shapes darting along the edge of his vision’s limit. Instinct took over and he put three shots into the first and three into the second. A third Sekar appeared, then a fourth. Before Conway knew it, there were far more of the aliens than he could hope to put down with a single magazine.

  The knowledge didn’t stop him trying. Conway shot the third and the fourth. He was joined by Private Kemp. Then came Corporal Barron. Together, they fired, each shot killing or injuring one of the Sekar at the same time as it brought the soldiers closer to their own deaths.

  “Reloading,” said Conway.

  He dropped out the old magazine and slotted in the new one. A number of the Sekar veered directly towards him. They sprang across the consoles with hideous agility and into a hail of tharniol slugs. Fangrin chain guns roared from nearby, cutting a swathe through the clustered Sekar.

  “At least I’ll get to see my dad again,” said Kemp. “Maybe the afterlife’s better than this shithole, huh? What do you think, Captain?”

  “I don’t think I’m ready to find out, soldier.”

  Choice wasn’t a luxury available to Conway. The Sekar were too many and they didn’t seem to give a damn how many of them died. On they came. To his left, Conway saw one of the aliens swing an arm that seemed way too long. The talons at the end swept clean through one of his soldiers. />
  Conway turned and shot the Sekar. The alien crumpled at the same time as the soldier and the two of them hit the floor. Wherever Conway looked, he saw more of the enemy and he shot two more. From his periphery, he noticed a shape racing towards him, all spindly arms and legs like a Ragger made twice as bad.

  Too slow. That one’s got me.

  The death pulse came with a grating resonation that shook the walls and set every piece of technology in the room vibrating like a choir of salvation. Conway felt the pain, but this time it brought the joy of a thousand summer days. He reveled in it and he reveled at the sights before him. The Sekar dropped dead – each one expunged without mercy by the Ravok weapon. A dense shape – the Sekar which had been coming for him - thudded into his side and Conway drove his elbow into the creature, knocking it away.

  In seconds it was over. The death pulse ended and nobody cared that it left them feeling like shit. Everywhere, the Sekar lay alone or in heaps. Kemp lashed out with his foot at one of the corpses, thought about it and then kicked it twice more in the head.

  “There’s some head pressure for you,” he said, kicking again. His anger faded and he stopped, lowering his rifle like he was drained of energy.

  “We made it,” said Barron quietly.

  It wasn’t quite true. “These ones are gone,” said Conway. “There’ll be more if we don’t get this finished.”

  Private Calhoun and the Fangrin Nixil were both dead, adding to the loss of McCray a short time earlier. Their corpses were withered and unrecognizable – a travesty of what they had been in life. The additional deaths struck Conway hard – the two humans were new to his squad and now they were gone. He shouldered the burden like he always did – added another three souls to the pile that kept on growing.

  “Some of us died, the rest of us got lucky,” he said on the open channel. “We were due a break, so I’m not grateful it happened for us. Recover their ammunition and then find what we came here for.”

  These soldiers had seen it all. That didn’t mean they were invulnerable to shock and a couple of them dragged their feet as they resumed. Lockhart got them moving, this time not with curses and threats, but with praise for a job well done.

  At the window, Conway looked into the teleport area again. The rifts were gone – every single one of them, and the floor was a patchwork of Sekar corpses. He doubted they had anyone mourning them. The thought seemed absurd.

  Five minutes after the death pulse, they located the damaged control module. The cube which Lockhart and Barron had been investigating was fitted with a concealed hatch in its surface which only opened to a gentle touch on one of the corners. Conway couldn’t decide if he admired the slickness of the method or if it angered him because it took so long to find.

  It wasn’t important and he crouched at one side of the cube, looking at what Lockhart had discovered.

  “That’s got to be it,” Conway said.

  The faulty module was a pain in the ass to extract, since it evidently required a special tool to remove from its slot. After much cursing and several failed efforts, Conway told Brice to bring him one of the crowbars she’d been using earlier. A minute later, he managed to lever the failed unit out, damaging its housing and the larger cube at the same time.

  Hacher stood nearby, the replacement module at his feet. He didn’t wait to be asked and carried the part over as soon as the old one came free.

  “It goes in this way,” said Conway, having taken careful note of the old one as he levered it free.

  The Fangrin nodded and slid the working module into place. It went in without a sound and fitted the hole perfectly.

  “What now?” asked Kemp.

  “I don’t know,” said Conway. “I’ve got the software for it. I’m damned if I know how to install it.”

  “There’s no interface port on this outer cube,” said Barron. “Maybe you were supposed to plug a cable into the module before fitting it.”

  “The Refuge 9 entity didn’t require a cable to link with my suit,” said Conway. On a whim, he placed his palm on the new module. As far as he could tell, nothing happened.

  “It probably doesn’t work with that hatch open,” said Kemp.

  Conway thought he’d give it a try and he swung the hatch closed on its ingeniously hidden hinges. It clicked shut and the seam was so thin as to be almost invisible.

  “Let’s see if you’re right, soldier.”

  Before he could test Kemp’s method, a new sound filled the room, coming from everywhere at once. It made the air heavy and thick like treacle, and Conway remembered it as the same one which made the Fangrin suffer earlier in the mission.

  The results were the same – waves of pressure beat against the soldiers’ eardrums and Conway’s helmet microphone shut off temporarily. The Fangrin bowed their heads and the set of their shoulders indicated the depths of the pain they suffered.

  Even before the sound dropped away to zero, Conway was moving towards the window. He looked through in time to see the patterned cube vanishing from the dais. A second later, a hair-thin black line snaked across the air in front of the window. Slowly and reluctantly it expanded, as if something on the other side was tearing it wider.

  “Shit,” he said.

  Conway didn’t linger – he’d seen enough. He ran towards the cube once more, letting the others know what had happened. The news was greeted with a predictable lack of enthusiasm.

  “We’ll deal with it later,” said Conway, not exactly sure how that would happen when the squad had about three hundred tharniol rounds between them.

  At the cube, Conway placed his hand on the outer shell. A green light appeared on his HUD to indicate an active data connection.

  “Something’s happening.”

  “How long?” asked Warner.

  “I don’t know.”

  The suit computers weren’t designed to hold vast quantities of data. However, they were fitted with wide-bore interface ports. When Conway added these two facts together, he was sure the wait would be over soon.

  He was right. The data download completed and, to his surprise, a new file was uploaded at the same time. Conway opened the file and discovered that it contained instructions. He read them and then stepped around to the opposite face of the cube. Following the instructions, he tapped the upper-left corner and another hatch opened. With a hiss, a cube slid a few inches free of its housing.

  “Design documents for us to make our own death pulse?” asked Private Torres.

  “Let’s hope so,” said Conway.

  This cube was smaller than the control module and, though it was heavy, it was manageable. Conway asked Gundro to carry it and the Fangrin picked up the data array without complaint.

  “Have we even fixed that teleport thing out there?” asked Kemp.

  “We did what we agreed,” said Conway.

  “What if we got fooled into doing something that screws everything up even more, and that new cube we got contains a bunch of recipes for cock burgers?”

  “Cock burgers?” asked Conway, at a momentary loss.

  “I always figure it that aliens chow down on alien-type food,” said Kemp.

  “I have never consumed a cock burger,” said Rembra.

  “Nor have I,” said Gundro.

  “Can we stop talking about cock burgers?” asked Torres in absolute disbelief. “We’ve got to get the hell out of here.”

  Conway was in complete agreement. Everyone was ready to go and he moved them out, heading towards the last teleporter they’d exited. The Sekar corpses – already showing signs of decay - were everywhere and seeing them drove home how close to defeat the squad had come. Conway couldn’t deal with the emotions yet – maybe not ever. He swept them into a corner of his mind which was as dark as the Refuge 9 base and led his squad away.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  The mood on the Broadsword was a mixture of anxiety and good old-fashioned boredom. It felt like days had passed since the Iron Cell vanished from th
e sensors, when in reality it wasn’t any more than a few hours. The whole situation was uncertain, the future unpredictable and Captain Jake Griffin didn’t like it one little bit.

  The Ragger captain, Hass-Tei-112 denied any and all knowledge of the transport’s disappearance and insisted that the Broadsword and the Gradior should wait with his capital ship Prime011. What exactly they were supposed to be waiting for wasn’t clear and trying to figure it out occupied much of Griffin’s time. On top of everything, the extended shifts were making the crew tired and irritable.

  “It’s time for boosters,” said Griffin eventually. “That’s an order.”

  The ULAF stimulants were carefully designed to keep a person awake and alert, yet without offering a hit that would cause dependency. To some personnel, Griffin included, they felt like cheating and he stared at his injector for long seconds before jabbing it into the port underneath his flight helmet. Almost at once, his creeping exhaustion was vanquished, leaving him with a feeling that everything was possible.

  With clarity returned to his brain, Griffin knew he’d been stubborn in holding out this long.

  “We’re being screwed over,” he said. “Something is happening and we’re in the dark about it.”

  “We know too much,” said Lieutenant Brandy Shelton, dropping her own injector into a plastic disposal pack. “But the Raggers aren’t ready for us to leave.”

  Hass-Tei-112 was aware a squad of soldiers had made it off the Iron Cell. At the time, it had been tempting to keep it secret. In the end, it seemed better to pay lip service to the truce rather than giving the Raggers an opportunity to point the finger of blame.

  “Why not shoot us down?” asked Lieutenant Effie Jackson.

  “I’m sure they will if we try to leave Glesia,” said Griffin. “The Raggers are hoping that Captain Conway comes up with the goods.”

  “And they reckon that killing us will be enough to make the ground troops go into hiding?” said Dominguez.