by S. A. Lusher
“It’s got me!” he screamed, feeling panic surging through him.
Flipping over, he saw that he was being dragged back towards the central mass. Mertz was saying something, but his raw panic was drowning that out. Greg leaned down, laying the barrel of his pistol against the black tentacle, and squeezed the trigger. Nothing happened. Fuck! He’d forgotten to reload. Frantically, he popped the empty magazine out and groped among his pockets for another one. He got it out, but it slipped from his grasp and disappeared from sight as he was dragged towards the darkness. “Are you kidding me!?” he cried.
Struggling to hurry, he finally found a new one, slapped it in and repeated the process. This time, it worked. He put six shots through the tentacle, which severed it and caused what was left of it to whip away back into the darkness. Greg hit the jets again and started boosting out of there. “John! What’s happening?! Where are you!?” he called.
“Now it’s got me!” Mertz yelled back.
Greg looked around and spied an armored figure being pulled into the mass of plants. He stared helplessly. He was too far away to do any good.
“Shoot it! Sever the tentacle!” he called, jetting forward, back into the heart of darkness.
“I lost my pistol and my rifle!”
“Fuck!”
Greg kept going, hitting the booster again. Another tentacle wrapped around his waist, then yet another one around his chest. He stopped fighting, instead allowing himself to be pulled in. If he was going to save Mertz, he had to kill this thing, or at least do some lasting damage. Both of them were pulled through the shifting curtain of plant life, then beyond it. Greg’s heart leaped into his throat. First, alien sharks, now an alien squid.
It was huge, dark and menacing. A great green-yellow eye that glowed with a faint iridescence stared at them as the tentacles drew them inexorably towards its huge mouth. The beast was enormous. The body was easily the size of a dump truck, probably bigger. Greg raised his pistol. He was only going to have one good shot at this.
As he drew closer to the thing’s mouth, he shut out everything else, aiming carefully, waiting for his perfect moment.
It came.
He emptied the magazine into the huge alien eye and watched it disappear in a plume of bright, cloudy gore.
Immediately, the grip lessened and the creature let out a low sound that rattled his bones as it shot away, up and over the base, then disappeared from sight. Greg looked around for Mertz and saw him a few meters away.
“You okay?” he asked, shakily reloading.
“Uh...yeah. Yeah, I’m okay. Thanks,” he replied.
“No problem. Let’s get inside.”
* * * * *
Greg still hadn’t called back.
Callie was starting to get worried, but she was becoming too distracted by her surroundings to focus on that worry. She knew that Greg and Mertz could take care of themselves, though that tremor that had shaken the base seemed fairly powerful. She knew it had to be a result of something one of them had done. But she was hearing sounds now, strange, creepy noises coming from somewhere up ahead and she had to focus.
She and Keron had been uneventfully navigating the underwater base for close to ten minutes now, not running into anything. Alive, dead or in between. Just long stretches of bland, poorly lit metal passageways and rooms.
As she came around another corner, a faint smell hit her. Blood. Exposed meat. Death. It set her on edge and made her readjust her grip on the assault rifle she carried. The sounds she was hearing were getting louder, and now she was starting to be able to make them out. She wished she couldn’t. Callie could hear drilling, buzzing, sizzling, snapping. She remembered the horrors she’d encountered beneath the castle, the conversion labs.
One must be up ahead.
But as much as it turned her stomach, it also gave her a grim kind of hope. Maybe Allan was up ahead. She could get to him, rescue him. They reached the end of the corridor and Keron silently hit the access button.
The door before them slid open.
Horror awaited Callie.
Just like before, she found herself standing at the edge of a place of death, of corruption and perversion. About a dozen examination tables were spread out along the room at seemingly random intervals. Each of them were blood splattered and occupied by a body, and most of them were being tended to by a silent, glowing-eyed meat machine surgeon. They were all being operated on, having things cut away or attached.
“Take them out,” Callie said, feeling a cold fury sweep over her.
Keron silently raised his weapon and began selecting targets. Within ten seconds, the pair had dropped each and every one of the mock surgeons. As she stepped into the room, another emotion overrode the fury: hope.
She began moving among the bodies, checking to see if any of them were Allan. She had to find him. Keron stood guard while she checked over them. A few minutes later, she stood at the other end of the room, disappointment washing over her. He wasn’t here. As she was thinking this, abruptly, as one, ten of the dozen bodies sat up. They rose to their feet, swaying like drunks in some cases, and started coming for them.
Callie and Keron quickly put them down, one after the other, with headshots, just like the surgeons. They were incredibly creepy, these slow, silent men and women. No doubt colonists kidnapped from the outer settlements that had been raided by Erebus and its metal army. They were all naked, their skin a dead white pallor. Heavy, ugly stitching crisscrossed them in some places and they still slowly bled old, coagulated blood from their nasty wounds or places where they had had pieces of technology grafted onto them.
As she finished killing them off, Callie felt uncomfortable. That had been too easy. Why? Too easy was never a good thing.
It usually meant-
Behind her, a door opened. Callie spun around as Keron called out a warning. She found herself staring into the face of three electrical elementals. Except these were bigger, badder and nastier than the one’s she’d faced in and around the black castle. They looked more sturdily built, were about half a foot taller and had what appeared to be skin stretched out and stapled onto their metal frames. They were horrifying.
One of them raised its hand and instead of a barrel, she saw a metal cone that was topped with a small silver sphere. It was glowing blue-white, spitting off sparks. She let out a cry and began to retreat when an electrical arc surged out and hit her square in the chest. She screamed as pain flooded her body and she crashed back into the floor. Bullets flew over her head in a deadly barrage as Keron opened fire. She saw more electrical arcs shoot by overhead as she struggled to get up. Her suit had been damaged and overloaded.
Now she had about a hundred pounds of fucking armor holding her down. Grunting, straining against both the resistance of the suit and the pain, she barely managed to get her rifle up, aiming it at one of the elementals.
She squeezed the trigger.
Hot lead sprayed the fucker down and she emptied her entire magazine into it. As the last shot was fired, it fell backwards, toppling over. By then, Keron had dealt with the other two. A few seconds later, he appeared overhead.
“I need to reboot your power,” he said, crouching down.
He propped her up into a sitting position. She waited, worried she might have to ditch the armor, but suddenly her HUD flared to life and she found that she could move again. Slowly, Callie got to her feet, pain still washing through her.
“Thanks,” she said heavily as she got her breath back. The electrical charge had really fucked her up. She took another moment to let some of the pain subside. Keron just grunted in response, moving forward to the door where the electrical elementals had come from and standing guard. After a little while, Callie ended up throwing down some painkillers. They would have to get the job done. She forced herself to start moving.
The pair of them continued pushing deeper into the facility.
CHAPTER 07
–Blood & Steel–
Somethin
g was rubbing Drake the wrong way.
They’d gotten through the airlock and had hunted down a general access terminal without any more trouble from the locals. But that was just the problem. Erebus had to know they were there, it had to know where they were coming in through. So why wasn’t there a legion of freaks here to mow them down or melt them or blow them away? Why these empty corridors and rooms? Even stranger was this map he was looking at.
It was inconsistent as hell, and that made him even more nervous. So far, it seemed to resemble the rough outline of the structure he’d viewed from below, so at least that wasn’t a problem. Probably. The thing was, several of the locations were labeled, which didn’t make sense enough by itself. Why would Erebus need to label anything? It was a damned AI, it had photographic memory and it was controlling everything in this facility. But to make matters stranger, some of the labels were in German, and French, and some language he didn’t recognize.
Was it just screwing with them?
“So what do we do?” Weller asked.
He looked over at them, then back to the map, considering it. They seemed content enough to put him in charge of the operation. It was funny to him how that was very rarely actually decided. It was funnier to think that he was a fucking career mercenary and a bunch of Spec Ops personnel were letting him run the show.
“We’ll try to keep it simple,” he replied. “This is...apparently a storage bay for spare parts of, among other things, vehicles. Eric and Weller will go there and track down the parts we need to fix our ship. Stacker, Porter, you’re with me. We’re heading for what I hope is the command center. If we can manage it, I want to run a LifeScan and see where that gets us. If Allan or anyone else is here, it should really help cut down the time on finding them. Questions?” There were none. Everyone seemed in agreement with his plan.
“Good. Then let’s go. Good luck,” he said, looking at Eric and Weller. Eric replied in kind and, after they finished studying the map before them, headed out. Drake watched him go, frowning, miserable and frightening thoughts beginning to surface in his mind.
“Come on,” he muttered, leading the others out of the room and down the corridor beyond, making for the control room.
He was thinking of Trent.
During the vast majority of his life, throughout his career as a mercenary, he’d lived under a kind of permanent cognitive dissidence. In his mind, he knew that no one escaped death forever and that one false move could result in death for either of them. You had to accept that if you were going to survive in a job where you grabbed a gun and went to war every other week. But in his heart he believed that both of them would either go out in a blaze of glory together or live forever. In the deepest, darkest part of himself, Drake never truly thought that he would have to live in universe where he was alive and functioning but Trent was gone.
Looking back on those dark, harrowing months after Trent’s death, Drake was honestly surprised that he was here, now, alive and relatively sane. It felt like nothing short of a miracle. But he also knew the reality of the situation was that he was simply adjusting to life after losing someone crucially, critically important to him. In a way, it felt like his soul had been maimed. And that was the core, perhaps, of his fears now.
That he would be forced to endure a second maiming.
He wasn’t honestly sure if he could survive that.
Up ahead, Drake heard heavy footfalls. A distraction. Perfect. No more time for thinking. He switched his rifle to three-round burst and quickly covered the distance in between his current location and a four-way junction. He waited, listened, trying to determine where the footfalls were coming from. Obviously not dead ahead, because he’d be able to see them. He waited, determined that they were coming from the right. He peered cautiously around the corner and spied a pair of big metal motherfuckers coming his way.
“Get ready,” he whispered to Stacker and Porter.
As soon as they were nearby, he quickly stepped out into the corridor, firing off several volleys of shots as he stepped across it and slipped into the opposite passageway. Now they both had good lines of fire. He leaned out again and kept up his rate of fire, trying to hit something sensitive as he studied the pair of things walking slowly towards him. Each was a different make and model. They were both seven and a half foot metal behemoths with dried, cracked skin stretched hideously over their bodies, though one was tinted green, the other orange.
Goddamn their faces were ugly, pulled into awful grimaces that looked like hideous caricatures of smiles. As they came within range, they each raised their arms, aiming their wide-bored obsidian barrels at the squad. At once, they unleashed torrents of their own special threat. One of them sent a spray of glowing green liquid ahead of it, while the second sent a burst of white-hot flame jetting their way. Cursing, Drake pulled back, narrowly avoiding the barrel. Knowing that he had very little time, he grabbed one of his grenades, primed it and tossed it around the corner, calling out a warning. A few seconds later, the detonation burst.
Pushing his advantage, he leaned back around and took aim. Both of the creatures had been damaged, though not killed, but they were currently distracted with trying to get back on their feet. He and the other two put them down with several shots to their big, blocky skulls. As the armor-piercing rounds punched through the metal and blasted away whatever served as their brains, the pair of creatures crashed to the deckplates.
“Jesus,” Stacker whispered. “Those things are tough.”
“They aren’t too bad,” Drake replied, frowning as he studied the corridor. “We’ll have to find another way around. I really don’t want to get any of this acid on our suits.”
“Good idea,” Porter replied.
They move down the corridor Drake had originally taken refuge in and took the first door on the right, finding an empty room with another door on the opposite wall. They passed through the door, moving through a room half filled with randomly sized crates and barrels, then came back out into another corridor. Jogging down it, they reconnected with the original hallway they’d been looking for and resume their route.
Drake kept his eye out as he led the way. He couldn’t shake the bad feelings that seemed to enshroud him. A glance back at the others seemed to confirm that he wasn’t the only one feeling it. Stacker seemed on edge and Porter, although she was usually pretty good about keeping a straight game face, was a little nervous, too. He hated being here, hated the fact that he’d had to send Eric and Weller off on their own.
Most of all he hated Erebus, and he’d never even met the fucker.
Dead ahead was the entrance to what, hopefully, was the control room. Drake got there first and hit the access button after listening in, trying to discern if there was anything on the other side of those doors. He couldn’t hear anything, but they might be too thick. The doors slid open, revealing a rectangular room stuffed with consoles, terminals and workstations. Jackpot. The place was suspiciously empty.
“Porter, get to it,” he said after they cleared the room. While Porter got to work on what seemed to be the biggest, most important workstation, he keyed the radio. “Eric, we’re at our destination. How are you doing?” he asked.
“We’ve been tangling with the locals, but nothing we can’t handle. Maybe halfway there,” Eric replied. He sounded confident, which was good. Neither of them had been on a dangerous mission since Ash, and Eric had been rattled. It was good to see him functioning in the field again. “Something feels off.”
“I know what you mean. You have any specific ideas?”
“No. Not yet...eh, hold on, got more incoming. Call you back.”
“Affirmative.”
He turned and surveyed the room again. There were three ways in, the way they’d come through and smaller doors to either side of them that Stacker was checking out. One of them was a dead end, the other connected back into the main network of corridors. They were still alone. He looked over at Porter.
“Anything?” he
asked.
“I’ve found LifeScan and I’m running it, so, we’ve at least gotten that far,” she replied. “We’ve got to scan the whole base, so...” she trailed off as they began to hear a very loud, heavy, banging set of footsteps slowly approaching.
“What the fuck is that?” Stacker muttered, moving back to the main entrance.
“Whatever it is, it sure as hell isn’t trying to be stealthy,” Drake replied. “Porter, where are we on that scan?”
“Almost done, so far I’ve just got one contact and it’s...weird,” she replied.
“Where?” Drake replied.
She began to respond, but then the thing making the noise stepped into view at the other end of the passageway.
At first, Drake thought he was seeing another one of the fire or acid spitting creatures. But this one was, for once, all metal. It was polished silver and looked very well made. It was a solid eight feet tall, its head barely a foot from the ceiling, and from what he could see it had no barrels or other odd extensions at the end of its wrists. There were just hands. Big, metal hands. Its eyes glowered a sullen, deep red, like fresh spilled blood.
“Take it out,” Drake said, raising his rifle as a cold wave of fear rolled through him. He drew a bead on its face...realizing that it didn’t actually have much of a face. Merely those two eyes. He opened fire.
The three bullets were fired sure and true.
They hit the face...and bounced right off. Drake swallowed and tried again. Stacker joined him and they poured fire onto the metal behemoth, but it just kept coming. Cursing, Drake primed and threw a grenade out. It was a perfect throw, sailing through the air and landing practically at the thing’s feet. As it was stepping over the grenade, it exploded, showering the metal monster’s body and the corridor in fire and metal fragments.
And the robot walked right out of the smoke without ceasing.
“You are shitting me,” Drake groaned. “Is that fucking LifeScan done yet?”
