Into the Void (The Shadow Wars Book 14)

by S. A. Lusher

  It came with a lot of weapons, too.

  Cannons of some kind were mounted on its shoulders and one hand was simply a long, thick gun barrel, while the other was a huge, wickedly sharp blade.

  “What do you think it’s for?” Eric murmured.

  “Maybe it’s for Erebus. Maybe it wants a body,” Porter replied softly. Abruptly, she marched forward into the room.

  “What are you doing!?” Eric hissed, terrified of waking the thing up.

  “Obviously,” Porter replied, reaching into her pocket and pulling something out, “Allan isn’t here. And we can’t let this thing survive. We need to kill it. The best way to do that is to use some well-placed bombs to destabilize this room and drop it into the lava below. And I happened to pick up some explosives while I was making my way towards you. So come here, take one and help me get these set up. Sooner the better.”

  He knew she was right and made himself go deeper into the room. Hurrying over, he collected one of the shaped charges from Porter, moved around the horrific construction in the center of the room, giving it a wide berth, and moved to the opposite side. Eric placed the charge on the primary support beam built into the left wall and paused to look out of one of the windows. He really wanted out of this base. Knowing that they were suspended above a pit of lava wasn’t making things any easier. Glancing over, he saw Porter placing the last bomb.

  “All right,” she said, turning to face him, “that’s set, now let’s-”

  She stopped speaking and her eyes widened as she looked past him, towards the way they’d come in through.

  The only way out.

  Eric spun around and felt mindless terror begin yammering in his mind. An eight foot thing of metal, badly burned and scarred in several places, stood in the doorway, staring at the two of them with glowering, malignant red eyes. Eric realized in a flash that this must be the killer robot Drake had told them about.

  “Run!” Eric screamed as he opened fire. Porter joined him but the beast was already moving into the room at a brisk pace. Eric fell back from it, emptying his magazine and seeing that it was doing no good at all. The thing really was bulletproof. He ended up standing near Porter at the opposite end of the room.

  “Go around it,” she said quickly.

  He realized she was right, there was no other option, and if they could trap it in here while blowing the bombs, then all the better. Both of them tried to time it as best they could and they each went around the creature.

  It almost worked.

  At the last second, however, the metal monstrosity turned, twisted and lunged right for Porter. It wrapped its long fingers around her waist and lifted her up. She let out a scream of agony. Eric stopped and turned, weapon raised.

  “Get the fuck out of here!” she screamed, then let out another cry of agony as the robot squeezed. A spray of blood spurt up out of mouth, coating the inside of her visor. Eric saw she had something in her hand.

  The detonator.

  “ERIC! GO!” she screamed.

  He could see no other way out of this, no other options. She was dying and she’d be dead in a matter of seconds and then where would he be?

  Screaming in furious sorrow, Eric turned and sprinted out of the room, hitting the tunnel and running as fast as he could. Hardly three seconds went by before a tremendous eruption burst into existence and sent him stumbling. He continued running, then broke into a cold, harrowing sprint as he realized that the tunnel was coming down as well. He was still thirty feet from the door. Eric kept running, feeling the floor shake beneath his legs. He could see cracks appearing in the windows and walls, racing ahead of him.

  Twenty feet.

  Ten feet.

  Abruptly, he felt his stomach lurch as the floor disappeared beneath him. The tunnel had broken off and it was taking him down with it. Screaming, he ran as fast as he could, every muscle burning, hit the broken edge of the tunnel and threw himself as hard as he could. Barely managing to avoid the collapsing ceiling, he flew into the rest of the facility, which was mercifully remaining intact. Eric cried out as he hit the deckplates and rolled painfully to a stop. For several seconds, he simply laid there, chest heaving, everything hurting.

  Porter was gone.

  She was dead.

  His radio crackled to life. “Eric? We just felt an explosion. Was that you?” He tried to respond but couldn’t. He could feel tears burning his eyes. “Eric? Are you okay? Porter?”

  “I’m here,” he groaned, forcing back the tears. There wasn’t time to cry right now. “Porter’s dead. So is that hunter thing you were talking about. Or at least it isn’t going to interfere with us anytime soon. Allan wasn’t at that location, some kind of huge monster was and we killed it. Porter sacrificed herself to kill both of them.”

  “Fucking Christ,” Drake said after a long minute. “Are you okay? I mean, physically, are you hurt?”

  “Not enough to slow me down,” he replied, slowly getting to his feet.

  “Good. You know where we’re going?”

  “Yeah. I’m on my way.”

  “Okay...I’m sorry about Porter.”

  “Me too. I’ll be there as fast as I can.”

  CHAPTER 14

  –The Hard Truth–

  All around them, the base creaked and groaned.

  Water was leaking in from several different locations, though the leaks were slow and most of them were from internal plumbing rather than external breaches. In several of the locations she and Keron were stalking through, the lights were flickering. Some just occasionally, some were strobing madly, giving an already eerie environment an even more ominous atmosphere. Combine that with the fact that the base was now populated by shrieking metal people that attacked anything moving on sight and add in a countdown that no one could accurately measure and you came up with probably the most stressful situation Callie had ever been in.

  They’d been walking for close to fifteen minutes now and they’d both expended a lot of ammo on the way to what was hopefully their final destination. Callie was out of grenades and down to just a few magazines. Keron had reported that he wasn’t fairing all that much better. Her only real hope was that a swift resolution to this wretched, miserable situation was awaiting them all. As she pressed on, uncomfortable thoughts ground slowly against her mind. She was wondering how the others were doing, what they might be facing.

  Was the facility Drake and Eric and their team was at underwater as well? Or was it something completely different? What if Allan wasn’t here? Or what if he wasn’t at either of these facilities? What if he was somewhere else completely?

  What if he was already dead?

  Callie told herself again that it didn’t help to think and wonder about these things. In fact, it could hurt. It left her distracted. But she needed a break, a real one. Every part of her was screaming for some kind of rest and she wasn’t sure how long she could go on. She’d been at it for days at this point, almost literally non-stop, with just a short break in between back-to-back missions of life-or-death situations, one after the other.

  Either Allan was here or he wasn’t.

  She would know soon enough, one way or the other.

  More banging was coming from up ahead, and electronic squealing. It sounded like something halfway between the maddened howl of a damned soul and feedback from a comms system. Callie readied herself. Not much farther now. One more fight...hopefully. They turned another corner and stood shoulder to shoulder, aiming down the length of it. The doors that led to their destination were at the other end.

  All that stood between it and them were a dozen of Erebus’ awful creations.

  They had been fighting each other, about half a dozen of the more traditional meat machines and half a dozen elementals.

  Not exactly a good combination.

  Luckily, they seemed to have weakened each other. The pair opened fire, spraying the hostiles down with a metal rain, punching holes through their mottled flesh and twisted bodies. The meat
machines wilted under the lethal barrage of armor-piercing rounds. Two of the elementals joined them. Unfortunately, as the pair of them ran dry and hastily reloaded, they found themselves still facing four relatively intact elementals.

  Two were acid, two were flame, though neither of them appeared the remember how to use their special abilities.

  Callie and Keron managed to get their rifles up in time for a few good shoots. They put them to use and felled another two elementals, but that gave the remaining hostiles a chance to get in close enough to force a melee encounter.

  One of them sprinted right up to Callie and punched her in the chest hard enough that it caused her chestplate to crack, drove the breath from her lungs and sent her flying back several feet. She landed on her ass, her vision blurring as she gasped to catch her breath. She barely managed to get her rifle up and into play, squeezing the trigger and emptying the magazine into the elemental that bore down on her. The thing danced and juttered as the bullets punched through its decayed flesh and metal body. As her rifle clicked empty, the creature fell back with a loud crash onto the deckplates. At about the same time, Keron was finishing off his own problem.

  He offered her a hand and she took it gratefully. He pulled her to her feet and studied her chestplate.

  “How bad is it?” she asked. Her chest still hurt like hell.

  “It’ll need to be resealed before we leave,” he replied.

  “Better deal with it now,” Callie muttered.

  Keron watched her back while she pulled out several more suit repair kits and set to work. A few minutes later, she had done a fairly decent patch job that would probably hold. She ran a suit-check just to be sure and once it came back clean, they resumed their journey. The pain wasn’t exactly abating...Callie hoped something hadn’t be broken. She’d broken ribs before and they took more than a little bit to stop hurting. If they were broken, they at least hadn’t pierced anything important. Not the lungs, because she wasn’t having trouble breathing now that she’d gotten her breath back, and not the heart because...well, she wasn’t dead.

  Just one more thing to add to the list of distractions.

  As they reached the final door, Callie pushed everything from her mind as hard as she could. Her pain, her aches, her worries, her anxieties, her fears…

  Anything could be behind that door.

  She had to be ready for anything.

  The pair of them stood ready before the open doorway for several seconds. Finally, Callie reached out and hit the open button. The door slid open to reveal...a vast room bathed in shadows. They immediately set her on edge. She couldn’t see over half the room. Anything could be hiding in there. Could Allan be in here?

  From what she could see, there were huge cargo crates suspended from the ceiling. It struck her as very strange. If this were a human base, it would make sense. But why would Erebus bother? As she was thinking this, something stirred in the darkness. From the sounds of it, the thing that was stirring was huge.

  A shard of ice sailed out of the darkness from the far side of the room, over their heads and directly into a mechanism that was holding up a huge crate directly above the door they’d just come through. Callie and Keron threw themselves forward as the massive crate slammed to the deckplates, effectively blocking off their exit. They turned away from the crate to face whatever it was had trapped them in there.

  It was a big one.

  A fifteen foot behemoth made of rock and metal stepped out of the shadows. Baleful electric blue eyes blazed out at them from its hideous face. It raised both of its arms, each one ending in a black gun barrel. And, on top of that, it sported the gaping maw of a cannon like appendage on its chest. For a moment, nobody moved.

  Then the creature fired off another ice bolt from its left arm. Even as they were dodging out of the way, Callie saw the creature begin to shoot fire from its second arm. Fuck! What the hell came out of the chest?!

  Callie wished she’d hadn’t even thought it.

  To make matters even worse, glowing green acid shot out of the chest, coating the area as the pair of them scrambled to get away. As soon as they were a relatively safe distance away, they opened up, hosing the thing down, hoping to hit something sensitive. They sprayed it with gunfire, emptied their magazines, and saw no visible damage.

  “What the fuck are we going to do!?” Callie snapped.

  “I’m open to suggestions,” Keron replied as he slapped a fresh magazine in.

  Callie looked around. The room was huge, easily three stories tall, and very broad and wide. There was at least a lot of open space, but...what were they going to do?! This thing was armored head to toe! Well, that wasn’t entirely true. Parts of its head didn’t seem to be armored. As Callie glanced around, inspiration suddenly struck.

  “Keep it busy!” she shouted, turning and sprinting away, towards the edge of the room.

  In the shadows, she could just make out a series of catwalks and ladders that lined the walls of the room. Keron didn’t answer, he simply continued firing, trying to lure the immense thing away from Callie, for which she was extremely grateful. This idea of hers was crazy enough as it was. She hit the first ladder, let her rifle hang and scrambled up it. As soon as she was up, she hit the catwalk, sprinted down its length, boots clanging loudly against the metal, hit the next ladder and climbed up it as well. Now she was on the third story.

  Above the creature.

  Thankfully, catwalks also crisscrossed the room, creating an impromptu third story. Hoping against hope that this crazy-ass idea would actually work, she headed out over the nearest catwalk and moved until she had a good view of the creature. From overhead, looking down on it, she could see that her initial theory had proven correct: it had a weak spot at the top of its head. Grinning ferociously, Callie grabbed her rifle, aimed right down at it and opened fire. It really should have been that simple...but, of course, it wasn’t.

  The creature stepped forward just as she was firing and the bullets instead hit a metal collar that ringed its neck. The giant rock-metal monster immediately knew what was going on and turned around. It began to raise its arms.

  Callie only had one more shot.

  She carefully took aim, blocking out all else, knowing she had to make this shot. Focusing on the dead pale flesh of the creature’s head, she fired off a three-round burst. At the same time, the beast let out both a blast of fire and an icicle. Just before they reached the catwalk, Callie saw the bullets connect. Black-red blood sprayed and the creature began to topple. Then so did she, as the combined force of the thing’s assault destabilized the catwalk. A portion of it warped and melted and, within seconds, snapped.

  There was nowhere for Callie to go but down.

  She let out a scream as she plummeted. Barely more than a second later, she found herself crashing onto the corpse of the thing she’d just killed. Pain flared throughout her entire body and then did so again as she rolled off of it and hit the floor. She laid there for a long moment as Keron hurried over to her. He stared down at her.

  “Are you okay?” he asked.

  “I think so,” Callie said quietly, still trying to get her breath back. The power armor had managed to save her from what would have undoubtedly been a fatal fall. As it was, she was going to be sore for a while.

  “We killed it,” Keron murmured, staring at the immense corpse. “You killed it.”

  “Yeah,” Callie said, slowly standing. “But Allan isn’t here...let’s hope that Greg and Mertz are having more luck than we are.”

  * * * * *

  “Well...this is it,” Greg murmured.

  He and Mertz had finally found the place where Allan might be. As he opened the door, he wondered about the others, if they might have found him already. It didn’t matter. He still needed to run down this loose end.

  What if he was the one to find Allan?

  Greg approached the last door between him and the room they’d been making their way towards for what seemed like ages now. He cam
e to stand before it with Mertz. Greg looked over at the combat medic. “You ready?”

  “As ready as I’m going to be,” he replied.

  He looked awful behind his visor, haggard and exhausted. Greg was sure he looked worse. He sure felt shitty enough. He made himself stop stalling and reached out. He hit the access button. The door ground open.

  A sterile white room awaited him.

  The walls were coated in gleaming white tile, same as the ceiling and floor, but they were studded with all manner of monitoring equipment and medical lab gear. All of it seemed to be centered around a single examination table in the middle of the room. Greg felt his heart skip a beat as he spied a familiar figure occupying the table.

  Allan.

  Except…

  Even from this distance, he could tell that something was very wrong.

  The first and most obvious thing was that one of his arms had been replaced by a metallic replica. And so had both of his legs. His head had been shaved and he was completely naked, his body sporting painful zigzags of fresh wounds and stitches, some of them still bleeding. It looked like Erebus had been in the process of switching Allan over into a drone when they’d pulled the plug. Now was the moment of truth.

  Was he alive or dead?

  Greg and Mertz moved forward, coming to stand on either side of the examination table. Greg felt relief sweep through him as he saw the man’s chest rising and falling. “Check him over,” he said quietly, then hesitated as he thought he heard something from back the way they’d come. Leaving Mertz to it, he moved back to the doorway and checked it out. Nothing was in the long hallway they’d traversed.

  Except for the groaning of the bulkheads and the sounds of the base on life support, it was quiet. Greg glanced back.