by S. A. Lusher
“Almost,” Porter replied.
The thing was very close now.
“Fuck it, we need to go, now!” he snapped, shutting and locking the doors. They’d hardly made it over to the other exit before a metal fist punched through the door. The three of them fled the command center, back into the installation.
* * * * *
Eric sighted and dropped the next meat machine as it stepped into the room through one of the two entryways. His gun ran dry and he crouched back down behind the stack of crates he’d taken cover behind when the assault had hit. As he did this, Weller popped up and kept up a good rate of fire. Eric ejected the spent magazine and slapped a fresh one in. It had been relatively smooth going for about ten minutes before they’d run into a small army of these freaks. They were a lot like Greg had described them: hideous, naked men and women, killed and brought back to some sick form of life by machinery grafted crudely onto their bodies.
Killing them was easy enough, mercifully.
He had to admit, after Ash, this felt easy.
As Weller ran dry, he came back up, punching a hole straight through the forehead of another meat machine, then switching aim and bursting the remaining organic eye of another one, watching a portion of its skull come apart in a spray of dark gore and shooting sparks. It dropped and he hunted around for another target, but there were none. They were alone. He checked every entryway in the room, but the tide had ceased, for now at least.
“Damn,” Weller muttered, standing back up. “That was unexpected.”
“Everything’s unexpected,” Eric replied. “You okay? You hit?” he replied.
“No, I’m fine,” she said.
“All right, let’s get going then.” As they set off once more, Eric found himself itching for conversation, and there didn’t seem to be any hostiles around. “I don’t think we’ve ever really been on a mission before now,” he said.
“No, I suppose not,” she replied.
“How’d you end up being a pilot for Anomalous Ops? I can’t imagine it’s easy to get in.”
“You’d be surprised, honestly,” Weller replied. “Like almost everyone else, I was culled from Special Operations. Hawkins came to me actually. He needed pilots and apparently when he ran his search through the database looking for skilled but crazy-ass pilots who also could kick ass on the ground with a rifle if need be, my name came up. I’ve been in a lot of conflicts against raiders and mercs and slavers, all over the galaxy, but what really caught his attention was the fact that I was the pilot for one of the groups he sent out beyond the Far Reach last year to tackle Rogue Ops before they set off their super weapon or whatever. It was pretty bad, but I managed to survive the encounter,” she explained.
Eric remembered Drake telling him about that, about the insane plan of Rogue Operations to let in some kind of inter-dimensional horror and how they’d had to go beyond the Far Reach to shut down at least one of the sites to keep the portal from opening. If Weller survived that then she was definitely an impressive pilot and warrior.
“What about you?” she asked.
“I was the sole survivor...well, the sole human survivor of an incident involving these nasty, deadly as hell aliens. I was trapped on an asteroid and lost everyone, but I stopped them. It was the hardest...okay, well now the second hardest thing I’ve ever had to do,” he replied.
“I heard about Ash,” Weller said quietly.
“Yeah. That was bad.”
Luckily, before he had to think or talk about that anymore, they arrived at their destination, the storage bay they’d been hunting. They moved in through the door and found themselves in a large, warehouse-sized room packed with all manner of crates, stacked seemingly at random. Several of them, at least, were open.
“Great,” Weller muttered. “Come on, start looking for anything that looks like ship parts...or do you know what they look like?”
“Oh yes. I’m actually a technician,” Eric replied. “Just tell me what we’re looking for.”
She ran down a quick list of parts and he figured they shouldn’t be too hard to find. They spent the next several minutes quickly moving through the bay, digging around in the open crates and opening up any other ones. Unfortunately, they were all unlabeled, so it was taking longer than he’d hoped. Five minutes became ten, ten became fifteen. Abruptly, as he stepped up to another crate, he found himself looking at a part they needed.
“Got one!” he called.
“Fucking finally,” Weller replied. She hurried over to join him and together they searched through the current crate he was investigating and the surrounding ones. All it took was another three minutes before they found all the parts they needed. Eric spent a few seconds wondering how they were going to cart it around, since some of the parts weren’t big enough to fit into their pockets and they needed their hands free, when Weller found a smaller crate, dumped it out and put all the parts in it, then sealed it back up.
“It’ll have to do,” she said, letting her rifle hang and holding the crate under one arm while pulling out her pistol with her free hand.
“At least we’ve got them,” Eric replied, keying the radio. “Drake, we’ve got the parts, how are things coming for you?”
“We just ran into some fucking unstoppable killing machine. We might have a lead on the LifeScan but I’ll have to fill you in later, we’re on the run. Before I go, escort Weller back to the airlock. Weller, I need you to go back to the ship and start making repairs.”
Eric looked at her and she didn’t look happy with the order, but she just nodded. “Fine.”
“Great. Talk to you later.”
Well, that was fantastic news. With a sigh, Eric started heading out of the bay, rifle in hand, Weller behind him.
* * * * *
“What are you hoping to accomplish with this?” Allan asked.
He’d hoped that the samples and any other little distractions would have stretched out longer, and although he had no way to measure time, he knew that it hadn’t lasted long enough, because now Erebus was getting ready to do something new.
He needed to distract the AI.
“Quite a lot, actually,” Erebus replied. The awful corpse it controlled was across the room, messing with something. “I’m hoping to utilize your luck. Which is why I need to discern its very nature. I need to know how to isolate it, how to measure it, how to recreate it. I want to be able to imbue my creations with it.”
“Why? What’s your endgame? What are you hoping to do?”
“I thought it was obvious,” Erebus replied. “You humans, you’re too...prone to outbursts. I mean, look at that whole mess a few years back, your Systems Wars. That’s a good example of your idiocy. If someone isn’t there looking out for you, you’re going to kill yourselves. It’s frankly a miracle that you managed to make it off of Earth without destroying yourselves. Now...” Erebus turned around suddenly. It was holding a bone saw. “I’m afraid I need to know your pain tolerance, Allan. I also need your legs. Don’t worry, I’m going to give you new ones, and I promise you aren’t going to die. You’re too important to me.”
Allan felt a sick, cold, frantic terror swelling within him as the corpse crossed the room and came to stand over him.
“Wait, listen, Erebus-”
“I’m sorry, Allan, I just don’t have the time for idle chitchat any longer,” Erebus replied. With a metallic shriek the saw spun to life and with a relentless lethargy lowered towards his thigh. In that moment, he suddenly knew what Greg had meant when he’d been describing the absolute horror of having his arm cut off in this exact fashion.
Metal met flesh in a blur of steel.
Allan began to scream as blood sprayed across his face.
CHAPTER 08
–Auxiliary–
Greg sighed heavily as the airlock finished draining. They were back inside. His heart was still hammering in his chest and he imagined it would be a little while before it went back to normal. Not that his pulse ever fell
to normal during one of these fucking missions. His thigh was aching badly now that his adrenaline levels were falling and as he stepped out of the airlock bay he had a slight limp. Grimacing, he cleared the area, finding himself in a vacant corridor, though he thought he could hear some kind of movement not too far away.
“Sit,” Mertz said as he came out, unclipping the medical kit from his belt. “Now,” he added when Greg began to protest.
Sighing heavily and wanting to be free of the pain, and to confirm that no serious damage had been done, Greg acquiesced to Mertz’s command and sat down slowly on the floor, keeping his rifle nearby and watching their environment.
“I think you’re fine,” he said as he began taking off the plate of armor covering the wound. “But we need to be sure. Don’t worry, I’ll be quick.”
“Thanks,” Greg replied. He activated the comm. “Callie, sorry about earlier. Erebus tried to kill us. It blew the pressure in the control room and we got thrown outside. Had to tangle with the local wildlife, but we’re fine now. What’s your status?”
“That’s good to hear. Keron and I are getting closer to the first auxiliary generator.”
“All right. Mertz and I are going to come up with another plan, talk to you later.”
“Later.”
“What’s our other plan?” Mertz asked as he pulled back a torn portion of his jumpsuit. He’d bled a lot, but it looked like it had clotted. The wounds were long, thin and neat. Also ugly. Mertz started cleaning the area.
Greg hissed briefly in pain and made himself focus. “I saw another area like the one we were going to on the map. If we are where I think we are, we should be able to get there. There’s no way Erebus will blow both of his command centers or data cores or whatever. It’s got to store itself somewhere digitally.”
“I guess you have a point there,” Mertz replied. “Get ready, this is going to hurt.”
Greg began to ask what was going to hurt when a blinding, searing white-hot pain enveloped his leg. He let out a strangled yell as Mertz poured some antiseptic into the wound. Breathing heavily, closing his eyes, reminding himself that he’d been through way, way worse not all that long ago, he fought for control.
“Thanks,” he growled through gritted teeth.
“Happy to help,” Mertz replied cheerily. He put bandages over the wounds. “This will have to do for now,” he said, reattaching the armor.
Greg sighed heavily and ran another suit-check. While he was waiting for it to complete, he popped some painkillers and then slowly got to his feet. Looking around, he confirmed that they were still alone in the corridor. Once his suit-check came back and he saw that there were no problems with it, he set off again, moving slowly down the passageway, trying to recall the map. Ironically, Greg actually had a pretty decent memory for maps and things like that. He thought it was funny, given that he’d lost all of his memories before a year ago, but he supposed it made enough sense. He’d lost his cached memories, not his ability to make new ones.
That was as intact as ever.
As he started navigating the corridors, he realized how much he was...well, okay, enjoying wasn’t the right word. But how much he was...accustomed to this. Accustomed to insanity. Accustomed to roaming metal corridors with insane things out for his blood, monsters or zombies or meat machines, whatever the creature of the fucking week was. This was his life. Having to adapt to situations as they were thrown at him, having to scrounge for ammo, having to keep himself in one piece. Other people got used to going to work as technicians or waitresses or cargo shifters, and he’d ended up getting used to something that was, in and of itself, un...get-used-to-able. He’d adapted to reacting to the unpredictable.
Insanity was his every day.
“What do you think I should do, John?” he asked after a moment.
“About what?” Mertz replied.
“My life. I thought things might have worked out with Kyra, but I was an idiot. They didn’t, they won’t. That path is closed to me. I don’t have anything to ‘go back to’, because, for all intents and purposes, my life began in the midst of a zombie apocalypse on a world that no longer exists. My life, my remembered life, has just been this craziness. This fucking insanity. I mean, I know there are other jobs out there, jobs that I could do and probably get transferred into easily. Search and Rescue, Security-Investigations, Special Operations. But...” he trailed off.
“But it isn’t this, is it?” Mertz replied. “It isn’t Anomalous Ops. It isn’t rushing off into the howling darkness. It isn’t monsters and doing whatever it takes to get the job done and staying alive. It isn’t somehow piecing together a way to make it all happen and still come out the other side. It isn’t basically getting to do whatever the hell you want in between missions. That’s your problem, Greg. That’s your concern.”
“That’s very true,” Greg murmured.
“Stay,” Mertz said simply. “Stay here. Don’t leave. Keep doing this. Whatever your fears are, as justifiable as they might be, they don’t really matter, I’m afraid. You need to face your reality, and your reality is that this job is the only thing you can do that will fulfill you in any meaningful capacity,” he explained.
“That was very well put,” Erebus said from a speaker somewhere nearby.
Greg jerked to a halt and looked around. “What the fuck do you want?” he growled.
“Same old, same old. Why are you so mad at me, Greg? I had hoped this to be a happy reunion,” Erebus replied.
“You cut my fucking arm off while I was awake and gave me a metal one that I didn’t want, you sick fuck!” Greg roared. He could feel his white-hot fury shrieking through him, drowning out everything else.
“Keep moving,” Mertz said quietly, laying a gauntlet on his armored shoulder. Greg looked back, and seeing Mertz’s calm, certain features was like a spray of cold water. He forced himself to keep moving, to not get distracted.
“You humans really don’t like that, do you?” Erebus murmured. “Well, I’d apologize, but I believe the idea of apologies are that you give them out when you believe yourself to have acted in error. I didn’t act in error. I was improving you.”
“Fuck off,” Greg replied.
“Don’t you want to know how I got here?”
Greg had to admit, he was curious, but he wasn’t going to give Erebus the satisfaction of admitting them. Thankfully, the AI went on anyway.
“That extra-solar array you and Campbell were so eager to destroy when you came up to my ship, looking for parts...it was almost finished, actually. And, in fact, it was close enough to being finished that I managed to send most of a copy of myself out into the stars. I am that copy. I ended up being received and stored by ReSequez’s databanks and it was very easy to take over. I got right to work waking them back up, continuing my plans. I even set up an outpost out here as I started working with more interesting properties...I must admit that I am very curious about how the whole thing back over Onyx shook out. What happened?”
“We killed you,” Greg replied bluntly, taking another turn.
In reality, it was Powell who had given his life to stay behind with the EMP bomb to ensure that Erebus had no way of escaping before the local star went supernova, wiping out everything. Only he and Kyra had made it out alive.
“I see. How interesting. I’m impressed. I don’t suppose you’d be so good as to turn yourselves over to my forces? I really do need more test subjects, and you and your friends would be absolutely perfect,” Erebus replied.
“Fuck yourself into oblivion,” Greg snapped back.
“I admit, I’m not sure if I know how to do that,” Erebus murmured. “No matter. I have more than enough forces in this installation to deal with you all. If we must do this the hard way, then so be it, we shall do this the hard way.”
Greg didn’t like the sound of that, but he hadn’t expected anything else but a fight to the death. One of them wasn’t leaving this time. He realized that he actually did know where he was g
oing and that they weren’t all that far away from the destination. Now, to discover if he was correct or not, if his guess was on the mark or total BS. He jogged to the end of the corridor they were in with Mertz covering him and hit the access button. The door slid open to reveal another room packed with all manner of equipment and gear.
“Jackpot,” he muttered. “Mertz, watch my back. I’m going to see what I can see.”
* * * * *
Callie put down another one of the fire elementals with a three-round burst to its face, punching holes through what served as its brain and sending it stumbling backwards. It crashed to the deckplates with a tremendous thud and all was still and silent. She waited, heart pounding, sweat trickling down her, breath coming fast and heavy, but no more malignant monsters came for her and Keron. Several seconds ticked by, and the pair of them quickly began to reload and move forward. She was moving as quickly as she could now.
Too much time had passed.
They’d been shooting their way through the corridors and she’d just received an update from Greg. They were making progress, but it didn’t feel like enough. The pair of them found the door they’d been looking for and opened it up. The first of the two auxiliary generators awaited them. It was a broad, tall room, tended to by about a dozen silent meat machines, the walls covered in panels and screens and keyboards.
Callie and Keron began taking them out, but they’d just barely finished putting the walking corpses down before two other doors opened up to admit small squadrons of meat machines, each led by more fire elementals. Erebus wasn’t fucking around anymore. There was no cover in the wide open room, nothing to hide behind. The two of them quickly began strafing while opening fire. Callie plucked one of her few remaining grenades from her belt, primed it and hurled it towards the group nearest to her. It landed in their midst and exploded.
Chrome-studded bits of flesh and coagulated blood mixed with oil flew through the air as about half the meat machines were shredded in the blast. Unfortunately, as she did this, the fire elemental stepped forward and began to bathe the area in white-hot flames. Fleeing, she barely managed to avoid the fire, though her suit began chiming warning alarms at her and it grew uncomfortably warm. She dodged and ran, though she didn’t have much room to maneuver in. Callie knew she had to put this thing down now.
