by Greg Dragon
19
For several long minutes Helga and Raileo patrolled the length of the underground garden, looking for clues to explain its function. The plants were plentiful but they were all the same, and with trough-shaped planters built into the floor, they looked to have been strategically placed.
Helga’s initial thought was that it had been a sort of peaceful refuge for the human captives, but the more she observed, the more it looked as though it served a different purpose. What evaded her, however, was the lack of spores on the walls. The room’s size was significant, roughly the size of an assault cruiser. Did the plants require oxygen? That would make sense, but why then have fountains and benches? It was all so bizarre. Helga just knew that at any moment, the vines would start moving and they would learn that the plants were all parts of one monster.
“Have you ever been to an algae farm, Ray?” Helga said, pausing to get a closer look at one of the leaves.
“On Rendron, sure, but there wasn’t much to look at,” Raileo said. “What makes you ask?”
“This layout, the way they’re planted. Doesn’t it strike you as more of a farm than a garden or park?”
“It’s crossed my mind, yeah. Do the lizards have vegetables in their diet?”
Raileo whistled and when Helga looked over to see what he wanted, she saw that he was scrolling through some information on his wrist-comms.
“Find something good?” she said, not expecting much since their wrist-comms were limited in terms of data.
“Untamed moon and over a hundred humans to feed to preserve their lives,” he said. “These plants were flown in. I knew I recognized them. They are pigmy war crests, from the wetlands of Traxis. It’s what we use for our ration bars; these plants are essential to the survival of those captives. If you look at the ceiling above those lights, you will see a sprinkler system that I bet is on a timer. Near the benches there, those grooves at the edges is where the water gets drained and recycled.”
“I see,” Helga said, stunned. It was so easy to forget that Raileo had more to him than his pistol aim. “This is quite something, isn’t it? The lizards built this all to keep those people preserved for them to bite.”
“Commander, I think we’ve found their communications room,” Quentin said over comms, nearly causing Helga to jump. “There’s equipment in here from the cockpit of a ship, and it all seems to be functional. It even has a starmap and a torpedo guidance system.”
“What’s displayed on the map, Q?” Cilas said.
“The station, A’wfa Terracydes, and I see three—wait, make that four drones relaying back this signal.”
“What in the worlds do the lizards want with the Arisanis?” Cilas muttered.
“Commander, if you will allow me,” Sundown said. “I think this has more to do with our pirates than the Geralos.”
“How so, Jumper?” Cilas said, sounding past his limit.
“Well, I have been observing the rooms within this structure, and they are strategically set up to house both the Geralos and their captives. There are vents above us, pumping oxygen through converters, purifying the moon’s toxic atmosphere. In the area where you are located, the spores were plentiful, but none are in here. This tells me that the lizards built a shared space down here, and there is bound to be another way out, which they use to transport prisoners from the surface.”
“Want to bet that other entrance is near the greenhouse that we’re in?” Helga said to Raileo Lei.
“None of this makes any sense to me,” Quentin said. “What in the worlds are they doing down here?”
“That’s not for us to figure out,” Cilas said. “Smarter minds in the Alliance can solve the puzzle once we’re done. We’ve managed to find the room with the captives, a communications room, and proof that the pirates are trading with the lizards. Now what’s left is for us to finish clearing these rooms, and then we can call in aid for these people. Helga, grab a recording of those plants, and anything else odd that you find. If that communication room is truly functional, we can upload what we find to the Ursula.”
“Now I regret not grabbing footage of all those szilocs swarming,” Raileo said. “You know those thrust heads back on mother won’t believe us unless there’s—”
He held up a hand and quickly crouched, which prompted Helga to do the same. She still held her auto-rifle, despite them having walked the entire length and breadth of the room because it held two more doors besides the one that they had come through.
One led to the room with the Vestalians hanging from the walls, and the other was a mystery, though she was sure it pressed on deeper, towards the same communication room that Quentin had just discovered.
Helga peered through the leaves that obscured the last door, and when she saw movement, her heart rate skyrocketed. She reached over and grabbed Raileo’s arm, dragging him back towards another planter. “Contact,” she said through clenched jaws, and then she saw four Cel-tocs tending to the plants.
“They’ll reveal us to the lizards,” Raileo said, reaching into his pack to bring out a gun that Helga hadn’t seen him use before.
“Going up,” Helga announced, then jumped and rocketed towards the ceiling, spraying the line of androids liberally with cryo-rounds. Her shots did more harm to the plants than the Cel-tocs, though one got hit in the arm, and it did nothing to stop or slow him.
Raileo was running and firing, dropping one and wounding another. There was something different about his gunfire, though, and Helga immediately noticed it. The Cel-toc that had been wounded was only shot in the arm yet it too went down, twitching as if malfunctioning.
“What are you firing at, Nighthawks?” Cilas was shouting over the comms, and it took several long seconds for it to register to Helga, who had come back to the ground to switch her ammo from cryo to kinetic.
“We have Cel-tocs, and they know we’re in here,” Helga said, barely able to talk. “They’re tough, not a model that I’m familiar with—”
“Commander,” shouted Quentin Tutt, suddenly, his booming voice cutting through the comms, “I see four dropship signatures above the moon, and they don’t appear to be Alliance. Are we expecting anyone?”
“Those aren’t friendly, they’re likely stolen,” Cilas shouted. “Thype me, did we walk into a trap? Nighthawks, new mission. Kill everything and find that other exit, fast. We have to leave these hostages. Right now the focus is on uploading our intel and surviving long enough for rescue or escape. Q, Sunny, lock down that communications room. I’m on my over, now.”
On cue, Raileo started pressing on the Cel-tocs, who seemed confused and incapable of defending themselves. Still, “kill everything” had been the command, and Raileo Lei wasn’t the type to pass up showing off his skills on mechanical targets.
Helga rushed to join him now that her ammo had been loaded and charged, but the Cel-tocs were already down, lying in the alleys of the planters, with blue smoke rising from their wounds.
“What are you shooting with, Ray?” Helga said. “I know those aren’t kinetic rounds.”
“Rupture rounds,” he replied, and she couldn’t tell from his tone if he was joking.
“Rupture rounds. Are you making schtill up?” she said, scanning the area in front of them for movement.
“No, they’re fusions, sort of like our explosives,” Raileo said excitedly. It was obvious that he had been waiting to talk about them. “I don’t know what they use to make them, but you can’t question the results.”
“Did you get those from A’wfa Terracydes as well?” Helga said, though she knew the answer would be yes. “Maker, you must have spent a year’s rate there. You’re positively reckless.”
“Says the Nighthawk,” he laughed, causing her to reflect on the irony.
“We shouldn’t joke about our mortality. Not now at least, when we have our people hanging like meat inside of that room.”
“We’ll get them, Ate,” Raileo said confidently. “You heard the commander. Nothing ins
ide here is going to make it out alive. Do you want a cartridge? I have a spare, and its energy-charged; you would only need the one.”
“Thanks, but I’m good with my kinetics, Ray. I can’t bring myself to trust those black market rounds. Anyway, let’s cut the chatter and press on into the next room. Those dropships will need to find a clear space outside to land, and you saw it yourself that there is nowhere around here that can accommodate one, let alone four. This means that we missed something. There’s a landing platform, a camouflaged base, or something else beyond this crashed ship.”
“Only one way to find out,” he said, and walked over to the door that the Cel-tocs had come through.
Helga got to one side, and Raileo fried the panel and pulled it open. Inside was a room full of all manner of equipment. There was a generator, which Helga assumed powered the underground facility, and lines from it running to several computers that were unlike any she had ever seen before.
On the walls near the door where they entered stood several rows of Cel-tocs charging at their stations. In the back were shelves, stacked with supplies for the plants, and samples pickled inside of jars that glowed in the low light.
“If the plants are food, then these are cooks, I’m guessing,” Raileo said, and then raised his gun and started shooting each one of the androids in the head.
It seemed excessive and unnecessary, but Cilas had ordered them to kill everything that wasn’t a Vestalian survivor. Helga joined in on the executions, and in a minute all eleven Cel-tocs were fried beyond repair. She reported their findings and checked the map to make sure that the additional room was added, and then went through the supplies to see if anything there could give them information on the Geralos.
“Looks like this is a dead-end,” she said, frustrated. “Tutt finds the communication room, and we get a glorified greenhouse.”
“We should make the best of it and snag a few seeds to bring back to the Ursula,” Raileo said, flashing her a smile.
“Terrible idea. We don’t know what the lizards have done to anything down here. We could take that home and cook it up, and the whole lot of us transform into mutants, all because you want to play at farmer,” Helga said.
She led him out of the room and onto the next, which was opposite the equipment room that they had originally come from. “If this is another storage facility, I am going to laugh,” Raileo said, kneeling down to hack into the panel and fry the circuits to trigger yet another manual override. Again, this breach didn’t yield a room full of the enemy or an alarm from the system, so the two Nighthawks didn’t hesitate to slip inside.
There was another tunnel, this one wide and well built. Its walls were made of stone, and it was wide enough to fit a transport through. It was also well-lit, with lights so high in the ceiling, Helga wondered if they were merely holes coming from the surface. The effect they had gave off that illusion; someone had put time into building it to withstand the test of time.
“This is starting to feel like a bunker,” Helga said. “And this tunnel that we’re in feels military.”
“I’d imagine that if this is a base, they would deck it out in the same manner that we deck out our spaceships. We’ve found the food supply—let’s call it the mess—communications, brig, and an equipment room. We have yet to find their berthing, some sort of head, though I don’t even know if the lizards drop waste like we do,” Raileo said. “So, berth, head, entertainment? If they’re down here for as long as it takes to build rooms and cut stone and metal, they would need some release, so I expect to find a brothel, theater—”
“Did you say brothel?” Helga said.
“Yes, a pleasure hole. Maybe a bar, and oh—where was I? Oh, a barracks, right? Maybe a training facility with ranges to keep the lizard Marines on their schtill.”
“I think you got it all, Nighthawk,” Helga said, laughing, “Good job. I personally think that this place is a sort of lab, but the rooms that you’re describing aren’t far-fetched. Let’s keep moving. I don’t want to be this open if something comes out of that door.”
With that they pulsed their rockets and shot forward 40 meters to the end of the tunnel. By this time, they had been through so many doors that the communication was automatic. Raileo got it open, and Helga rushed in with her weapon raised and ready for action. This time the room was a cave, as long as it was wide, and they were above it on a mezzanine installation, with steps leading down into darkness.
Helga’s night-vision cut through the blackness of the space to reveal a warehouse loaded up with giant tanks wedged in between its support columns. It seemed to be void of life, another massive room whose purpose was solely to support the Geralos facility. Raileo grabbed her arm and pulled her down to the floor, where he gestured for her to follow him as he crawled forward to peer over the edge.
Directly below them was a Geralos commando, armored and bigger than any Helga had ever seen. He was pacing about the floor below them with a laser-sighted auto-rifle in his hands. The two Nighthawks didn’t dare move a muscle as they waited, watching him and scanning the room for more guards. Nothing moved, and the HUD radar was still not giving them any information.
“We don’t have time for this,” Helga complained, as she placed the barrel of her auto-rifle on the railing to employ the use of its scope. With slow, focused breathing, assisted by her innate senses, she scanned the darkness for more enemies, possibly hidden in the deeper corners of the room. Her eyes found one they had somehow missed, sleeping with his back up against a tank.
“I have eyes on a lizard in the back,” she whispered. “I’ll take him out if you can neutralize that monster.”
“Taking the shot,” Raileo said, and he got up to a knee and aimed down at the giant Geralos. He fired, and so did Helga, though where Raileo’s kill was clean, hers grazed the scalp of the lizard in the distance. Her shot, however, struck the tank behind him, and it started to leak a thick yellow liquid onto the floor. She fired again, striking him in the forehead, killing him instantly, and he toppled backward into the gunk.
A reaction occurred upon the Geralos’s fall, as the liquid not only melted him but started to grow, eating through both metal and stone. When it touched another vat, the supports were ruptured, causing it to collapse and break open, adding more liquid to the mix. This sped up the process, and the Nighthawks watched in awe as the room began to collapse onto itself.
“We should go,” Raileo whispered, helping her back up to her feet.
“Damn my aim, Ray. What if it keeps growing?” she said, frightened. “This could bring the whole thyping place down!”
A loud screech came from behind them, and Helga turned to face the open doorway as a section of the tunnel broke out. A sziloc stepped out and upon seeing them, screeched again and started towards them, followed by several more. Without saying a word, the Nighthawks began firing, Raileo’s rupture rounds putting holes in thoraxes and blowing apart a number of legs. More poured through, and in less than a minute the tunnel became packed with the creatures scrambling along its walls.
“Commander, we have szilocs swarming beyond the plant room,” Helga reported above the loud chattering of her auto-rifle. “Ray, we need to cross that room,” she said. “There is another door and we have our PAS. Let’s take our chances there before we get pinned back and fall into the sludge coming from those vats!”
She ran and jumped over the railing, triggering her rockets to take her over the hole and the smoking chemicals that were rapidly eroding the floor and walls of the room. Worried for Raileo, she glanced back to find him on her flank, rolling masterfully to avoid a vat that collapsed after she passed it, nearly showering them with its contents.
The room was large, and they covered it in no time, but Helga could see that the szilocs were beyond persistent at chasing them down. The first few that followed had crawled out into the liquid, and it melted their limbs as they stubbornly pushed forward. More crawled on top of them, and more on top of those, forming a bridge
while the others took to the walls to keep pace with the Nighthawks.
It was absolutely nightmarish, but Helga was well beyond fear, and as they gained the door and pressed on inside, her thoughts grew quiet, replaced with action, borne of training and instinct.
“Ray, seal the door,” Helga shouted before pulsing her rockets to zip past the tables to reach an open doorway in the back. Unlike the numerous doors that had been breached to get here, this one seemed unfinished. The frame was installed, but there was no door, and beyond it she saw another shaft leading up, this one having a set of concrete steps to allow easy access up and down it.
Her comms came alive to Quentin Tutt, and the distraction caused her to glance at her map. She was surprised to see Sundown’s signature directly above her location.
“Ate, is that Ray’s rifle I hear down there?” Sundown said.
“Yes,” she started, wondering why it was that Raileo was still fighting when she had just told him to seal the door. Glancing quickly behind her, she saw the cause of his hesitation. Several szilocs had bypassed the door and torn through the concrete to gain the room, only to be met with rupture rounds from Raileo’s double pistols.
She switched chat to general comms. “Commander, we’re being swarmed by szilocs,” she shouted. “They’re coming through the walls, and we’re about to be overrun. Sunny, Q, if you can make it over here, we could use some help. Thype me, they can break through solid stone, and there’s an endless number of these things.”
“Okay, what happened over there, and why am I just learning of this now?” Cilas said, angrily. “How is it that they got in all of a sudden when these tunnels have gone unprovoked for years? I need answers fast. We have civilians imprisoned down here, and if we cannot stop the szilocs, they will break into that room and shred every single one of them to pieces.”
“Commander, it was me,” Raileo said, before Helga could utter a word. “There was a room full of tanks and I accidentally hit one of them when we coordinated shots on a pair of lizards.”
