by S. A. Lusher
“Well, it’s obviously not just some mercenary group doing this. I mean, these are supposed to be top secret facilities. Fucking no one is supposed to know about them,” Eric said.
Drake shrugged. “I don’t know. Maybe a hacker broke through their security net and scooped out some state secrets and sold them off to the highest bidder.”
“Maybe. It just seems weird. And kind of creepy. These places have fantastic security, both human and mechanical...” he frowned, hesitated. “Maybe it’s an inside job.”
Drake snorted. “Yeah, someone’s that stupid. These are the kind of secrets where they kill you if you know something you aren’t supposed to. No questions, no trial, no judge or jury, just the executioner. In fact-” he stopped speaking as the comms console chimed. Who the hell could be calling them? It wasn’t like a lot of people had the frequency.
He checked the ID. It was the Dauntless.
Drake hit the answer button. One of the screens in front of him cleared to show Hawkins. “Drake, stop the ship. Turn around. I need you to come back right now.”
Drake felt ice fill his veins as he sat up straighter and began working the controls to bring them out of FTL flight. “What happened?” he asked.
“I’ll fill you in on the details when you get back here, but we’ve got a bad situation here and we’re going to need you and Eric to help unfuck it. I’m headed your way as fast as I can. If you turn around right now and push the limits of your engine, we should be able to meet in the middle in about four hours.”
“We’re on our way,” Drake replied.
“Good. Thanks. Out.”
Hawkins cut the line. The speedship began its transition back into regular space.
“What do you think that could be about?” Eric asked.
“No idea,” Drake muttered. The ship finished its deceleration and he reoriented it, basically turning it back around and pointing it towards the Dauntless. “Although, if I had to guess, I’d say it must be some kind of emergency situation that cropped up. A mission, or...maybe one of the other missions went wrong. If the ship was under attack, he’d have been a lot more specific. Jennifer and Genevieve were on a mission, and I think Eve had one, and Allan and Callie have been away, too. Something must have gone wrong with one of them.”
“It must have been bad if he’s recalling us,” Eric murmured.
“Whatever it is, let’s just hope we’re not too late,” Drake replied, dropping them back into FTL flight and pushing the engines as hard as they would go.
* * * * *
Drake could feel bad vibes on the air as he navigated the corridors of the Dauntless. Eric strode along beside him, and from the way he was tensing up, Drake could tell that he was feeling them too. Although he felt he’d made a good point earlier about the Dauntless not being under attack, he’d been paranoid about all sorts of things as they’d finished their approach on the ship and dropped out of FTL flight. He thought the ship might not be there or maybe it’d be in pieces or under assault by someone or something.
Hell, he’d been a little reluctant to go through the airlock. Who knew what kind of crazy ass monster might be onboard?
But they’d slid into the hangar without a problem and when they landed, a quartet of technicians arrived with a battery of tools and spare parts, ready to perform triage on the speedship that he’d pushed so hard to get here.
Hawkins had called them to the primary briefing room.
Drake kept trying to think about what it might be but had ultimately made himself stop, or tried to, anyway. There were just too many variables to consider. With their fucking job, it could be basically anything.
They came to the briefing room and opened the door. Stepping inside, Drake was surprised to see a fair amount of people gathered. He saw Callie, who looked awful, her eyes bloodshot and baggy, her skin paler than usual. He didn’t see Allan, however. That sent a cold wave of fear through him. Something had happened to Allan.
“What happened?” he asked, taking a seat along with Eric.
“That’s what we’re going to discuss,” Hawkins replied, sitting at the head of the table. “Now, I’m afraid we’re very short on time and Greg isn’t going to make this briefing in time, so someone will have to update him on the fly. Callie?”
Callie sighed and rubbed the bridge of her nose for a moment, then seemed to try and shake off her bad feelings.
“Okay. I’ll keep it short. Allan and I led a Spec Ops team beyond the Far Reach to take down those tech-modded terrorists once we discovered their headquarters. We discovered that they were being manipulated by a rogue artificial intelligence. Erebus. Some of you may remember this as the same AI that Greg dealt with a year ago. Somehow, it managed to get way out there. In short: the entire Spec Ops team is dead and Allan has been captured. I managed to dig up a little bit of intel and have determined that he’s being taken to one of two locations. We have to mount a rescue mission to these two locations.”
Silence fell across the room.
“So...what can you tell us about these locations?” Drake glanced over at the speaker. He was one of the very rare newer recruits that Hawkins had managed to find, Paul Stacker. He struck Drake as kind of the ideal Spec Ops soldier, or what people thought of as the ideal Spec Ops soldier. Tall, fit, tanned, shaved head, attractive in a bland kind of way, he seemed like the kind of guy you’d slap on a military recruitment poster.
“Nothing,” Callie replied grimly. “All I have are the locations. These could be asteroids or moons or planets full of razor hail.”
“This sounds kind of insane,” Stacker replied, looking around the table.
“Insanity is par for the course in this job,” Hawkins replied. “You’re the one who asked for this position. This is what you’ve got to deal with.”
Stacker looked like he might be getting ready to respond to that, but instead just settled back into his seat with a kind of ‘yeah, I guess you’re right’ look on his face.
“While I was waiting for pickup, I wasn’t just sitting around,” Callie added. “I prepared as detailed a report as I could on all the creatures I encountered on the jungle world. I don’t know if we’ll be facing the same things or just similar things or something totally different, but read over them. Now, based on the coordinates, we’ll be going past the Far Reach, into completely unknown territories. Our goals are simple: find and recover Allan, and anyone else who might be out there, and shut down Erebus by any means necessary.”
She looked over at Hawkins, indicating she was finished.
He nodded and cleared his throat. “I’m afraid that’s all the intelligence we have. This mission is...admittedly not the best prepared one, but we’re in a bad situation. Hell, I don’t even have two pilots to spare for you.”
“I can handle it,” Callie said.
“That’s what I was hoping. I’m going to be dividing you into teams. Callie, you and, when he gets here, Greg, will be taking Mertz and Keron. Drake, Eric, you’ll be taking Stacker, Weller and Porter. I tried to balance these best I could. I’m starting to sound like I’m stuck in a loop, but again I have to apologize for the lack of personnel. I do need a bare minimum of staff to keep this ship running. Plus...I’m going to have to deal with the fallout of recalling you two. Although I don’t even know why the hell they keep insisting on this when they have their own investigators...” he sighed. “Your things are being loaded onto the speedships. We’ll need another two hours to finish maintenance on them, I’m afraid, and to pick up Greg. As soon as we get him, I’ll point us in the direction we need to go and shave off as much distance and time as I can before the speedships are ready. Now, um, does anyone have any questions?”
There were none, at least, none spoken.
He nodded tightly. “Good luck out there.”
* * * * *
Greg found himself wishing for the sense of detached dislocation he’d felt earlier as he stepped into the airlock of the Dauntless.
It would help him d
eal with the confusing maelstrom of emotions boiling inside of him at the moment.
After Kyra had said goodbye for the last time, he’d had no idea what to do. He felt like the earth had opened beneath his feet and swallowed him and now he was falling into an eternal black void. He’d left the SI Headquarters and had started walking through the city, unsure of where he should go or what he should do. He’d walked for a while, he wasn’t sure how long, at least an hour, probably longer. He’d ended up at a streetside cafe serving up burritos and tacos and the smell had called to something very basic and primal.
Simple hunger.
He realized he was starving. So he’d gone inside, ordered a big meal and sat outside at a table, eating and watching the traffic and the people walking by. He’d eaten, and then he’d walked again until he had arrived at a hotel, and there he realized he was exhausted. So Greg had gotten a room, and almost as soon as he was behind a closed door, the emotions, which were not gone but merely hiding, seemed to take their opportunity of attack and had pounced. All at once, a profound mixture of loneliness, blind terror, intense anger and awful, malignant guilt began to hammer on him. He had felt paralyzed and he’d stumbled into the bathroom, gathered enough coherency to strip down and start up the shower, and had crawled into it.
He wasn’t sure how long he stayed in the shower and he only knew that he had cried until his body ached and his ribs hurt.
Some time later, he’d dried off and crawled into bed.
A call had woken him. It was Hawkins, and then Callie, and she’d needed his help.
When he’d heard that Allan had been taken by Erebus, he’d wondered, briefly, if he had gone insane. If this was a delusion. But that would have been easy, wouldn’t it? Greg was confused about a lot of things, almost everything, but he wasn’t confused about whether or not he would put his life on the line to get Allan back.
So here he was.
Callie was waiting for him on the other side of the airlock.
“Greg...thank you for coming,” she said.
“There wasn’t even a question about it,” he replied, stepping out. “What do you need?”
“Right now,” she said, turning and leading him out of the bay, “I need you to come with me and get on a speedship. Allan’s been gone for over eighteen hours now.”
He followed her through the Dauntless, keeping up a brisk pace.
“You’re sure it’s Erebus?” he asked.
“Yes. He...it mentioned you specifically. I’m going to update you once we’re flying out there, not that there’s a whole lot of info.”
“No surprise there,” Greg muttered.
They came to the hangar bay holding the pair of speedships they were going to take. “Who’s coming with us?” he asked.
“Keron and Mertz are coming with us. Drake and Eric are already here with their team, Porter, Weller and Stacker, onboard their ship. We’re all ready to go.”
“Sorry I held you up. I got here as fast as I could.”
“I know. I...come on, let’s just go. We have to hurry.”
They made their way up into their speedship.
CHAPTER 03
–Into the Howling Darkness–
“I’ve got to get to the bridge,” Callie said as they finished stepping through the airlock. “Come on, I’ll get you caught up.”
Greg nodded and followed her out and into the ship. They moved along the central corridor and passed by an open door leading into the squalid medical bay. He spied Mertz inside, going over a lot of medical gear. As they passed by the armory, he saw Keron, the massive man facing away from him, performing a similar job to Mertz’s as he went over the arsenal they were taking with them. Too many thoughts were tumbling through his head right then and he tried to shut them off. He followed Callie onto the bridge.
She settled into the pilot’s seat and began warming up the engines. He listened as she recounted everything that had happened to her and Allan and their squadmates. The jungle world, the crash landing, the meat puppets and the death and the horror. She ended it with her conversation with Erebus and watching Allan disappear.
“We’ll get him back,” he said as she fell silent.
“I hope so,” Callie replied quietly as she finished the warm-up procedures for the speedship. All around them, the vessel hummed with energy. She brought the ship up off hangar floor and maneuvered it forward into the airlock bay. Accessing it remotely, she shut the inner doors and began the process of cycling the airlock.
“I promise that we’ll get him back,” Greg said, trying to sound more sure than he felt. Too many things had gone wrong recently, too much of his life was a fucking mess. He didn’t understand a lot of what he was feeling, not in any deep kind of way, and it was probably because his memories only went back a little over a year. He was still figuring a lot of shit out and although generally he felt like he had a handle on things, sometimes a situation would arise and it would throw him completely off his game. Sometimes for days.
This mess he found himself in now was easily the worst he’d come across. Even worse than the origin of his memories, waking up on Dis.
“I wanted to thank you again for coming back,” Callie said, sound uncertain as the outer airlock doors opened and she pushed the ship out into space. “I knew it couldn’t have been easy. Having you here means a lot.”
“You don’t need to thank me,” he muttered, falling down into the co-pilot’s seat and rubbing his eyes. “I shouldn’t have left in the first place. I was a fucking idiot.”
“Why?” she asked. “What makes you say that?”
He heaved a sigh. “I went to see Kyra.”
“I...oh.”
“Yeah. Oh. I thought...Kyra was the only aspect of my life that ever felt right apart from my life here, aboard the Dauntless with you and Eve and everyone else. Since it wasn’t working anymore, I thought that maybe that would work. I didn’t know what else to do. I was panicking. But she’s engaged. And she didn’t want to see me. And she made a lot of good points about how stupid it was to come out there expecting anything at all. So...I don’t know, I guess one of my points was that I was probably going to come back anyway. This happening just sped up the timetable.”
“Are you going to be all right?” Callie asked. She was orienting the speedship in the direction they needed to go now after having moved it a safe distance from the Dauntless. Out the window, Greg could see the other speedship moving off.
“I don’t know,” he replied. “Everything’s all fucked up right now and I’d really like to just focus on something I actually know how to do. Which is this.”
Callie laughed grimly. “Yeah. We seem to have gotten pretty good at throwing ourselves into crazy situations and coming out on top. Well...usually, anyway.” She sighed and finished punching in the coordinates. The specially reinforced metal sheaths slid down over the windows and, a moment later, the ship punched out into FTL flight.
She spent a moment checking over everything, then slowly stood up. “I need to get checked out in the infirmary, make sure I didn’t sustain any internal injuries. Would you mind making me, like a pizza or something? I’m starving.”
“No, I don’t mind,” he replied, standing up. He realized he was pretty hungry, too. Before she left the bridge, Callie reached up and took off her helmet, then stepped up to him.
“Thanks,” she said, and gave him a quick kiss on the lips.
Then she turned and headed away. He watched her go, a new cascade of thoughts tumbling through his mind. Where the hell did he stand with Eve? He hadn’t even had a chance to talk to her, or anyone else on the ship. He shoved the thoughts aside and made his way to the galley, just wanting to lose himself in simple tasks. There were things that needed to be done. He’d glanced at the screen and saw they were going to be in transit for twelve hours. If it was going to be a miserable twelve hours for him, then he imagined it would be torturous for Callie. Every second they were in transit was another second for Erebus to do wha
tever it wanted to Allan.
As he stepped into the galley, Greg looked down at his right arm. He made a fist, feeling the warmth of his own flesh. Erebus had cut it off and grafted a metallic one in its place. And he’d been awake during that horror.
Who the fuck knew what it was doing to Allan.
Greg tried to put those thoughts out of his mind, too, as he stepped over to the refrigerator and started hunting through it. He yanked a big, triple-meat pizza out of the freezer, freed it from its wrapping and shoved it into the oven. Then he sat down at the table and began waiting, slowly massaging his temples. He still felt like shit. He just wanted to sleep. He’d drifted in and out of unconsciousness on the ride home, but it wasn’t real sleep. He sat there and tried not to think until the pizza was finished.
As he got up and took it out of the oven, Callie, sans her suit of power armor, came into the room and sat down heavily.
“You doing okay?” he asked.
“Yeah, Mertz checked me out. I’m fine. Keron said he’d do some basic maintenance on my suit. And that smells fucking amazing. What is there to drink?” she replied.
Greg cut up the pizza, put it on a plate and brought it over to the table, then moved back to the fridge and looked around some more.
“There’s regular Vex and...that new stuff, Black Hole. It’s supposed to be dark...berry, or something, I dunno.”
“I haven’t had it yet, let’s try it out,” Callie replied.
He grabbed a few cans of it and sat down with her. They both cracked the cans open and took a tentative drink. After Supernova, he was a little more reluctant to try new flavors. But his reservations turned out to be unnecessary.
“Holy shit, this is actually fantastic,” he said.
“Yeah. I need to make sure to stock up on this when we get back,” Callie agreed.
They spent the next several minutes chowing down on their meal, clearing the plate and draining the cans before too long.
“So, um...have you seen Eve since you’ve been back?” he asked.
