by S. A. Lusher
All fell still and silent. The world seemed to be holding its breath.
Something silver and crimson burst from Callie’s left. It hit her hard and she felt something latch onto her shoulder as she was thrown to the ground in a fury of movement. Callie’s hand was already going for the knife on her belt. Something short but powerful, her mind brought an image of a dog or maybe a tiger, some kind of animal, to the forefront, was attacking her, digging its teeth into her armor. She heard gunfire and saw flashes from somewhere nearby: Morris hard at work, trying to stay alive. Callie focused on her own situation.
She swung the knife up and around, and nearly lost her grip on it as the tip hit metal. Cursing, she shifted and swung again. This time she hit meat, and as the blade sank into flesh the pressure on her shoulder was released and a fresh electronic squeal was released. Callie yanked the blade out and stabbed again, and again, and again, over and over as she scrambled to her feet. The final time she dug the blade in, the beast leaped back and her knife was ripped from her grasp. She looked around frantically and spied her shotgun.
Reaching out, she quickly grabbed it and brought it into play.
She finally put eyes on the thing that had attacked her.
It was a long, dog-like creature of lean musculature and steel plating. It stared at her with one real eye as black as midnight and one digital eye, glaring a vicious sizzling green. It was huge. The thing had to be seven feet long from nose to tail. It was bleeding heavily now, a deep, deep red liquid oozing out of the half-dozen wounds she had put along its shoulder and into its torso. Its muzzle was enormous and stuffed with ugly teeth.
Callie took aim at it right about the time it began to leap at her.
She squeezed the trigger once and just began to see a thick, tremendous eruption of red-black gore exploding across its elongated head before it crashed into her, sending her sprawling again. Only this time, as she smashed into the ground, the weight she felt was slack, no longer moving, no longer trying to kill her.
With an enormous effort, Callie shoved the corpse off of her, then, yet again, lurched to her feet. She still had her shotgun in hand, at least. She swung around, scanning the immediate area, and saw that Morris had fared a lot better than she had. He was still standing and two more dead bodies lay at his feet, smoking holes in them.
“Shit,” he muttered, staring at her. It seemed an appropriate statement.
“Something new,” Callie replied, staring down at the corpses. She moved over to the one she’d killed and knelt, retrieving her knife, or trying to, anyway. She gave up the effort of ripping it out of the body, knowing it was too fucked up to be of any real use anymore, and instead hunted around for her shotgun yet again.
“So they’ve expanded their constructions from beyond mere humans,” Morris said, also staring at the strange tech-dog corpses.
There was something strangely haphazard about their design, Callie noted. If it was her, she’d design them a lot more uniform: metal teeth, metal claws, reinforcement of the vital areas. But that wasn’t how these things were designed at all, and none of them really looked alike either. Some had flesh where others had plate metal or wire mesh, and only some of their paws had been replaced with metal facsimiles.
She wondered why that was.
There was her damned shotgun.
Was it a necessity of the strange bio-engineering and tech/meat fusion at work here? Or was it simply an intentional design?
They’d probably never know.
Wordlessly, the pair of them finished their inspection and hurried out of the area. They managed to reach the ridge overlooking the base they were to hit without further confrontation ten minutes later. As they did a headcount, gathering in a small clearing in the jungle, Callie felt another immense relief wash through her at seeing Allan, right here, alive and roughly intact. The bad news was that they had found the pilot, and he was dead, dying on impact, and that nobody had found or heard from Corporal Lang yet.
“Unfortunately, we can’t wait for her,” Hollis said, after gathering the intel. He glanced at Callie and Allan, both of them nodding regretfully.
“He’s right,” Callie said. “Hollis, you’ve been here the longest, scouting it out, I’m sure. What’s our plan?”
“Keep it simple,” he replied. “There’s a number of entrances into the facility, due to the poorly maintained nature of it. I counted at least two dozen hostiles, maybe more, all armed. Our best bet is to split up into three squads and hit them all at once, overwhelm them, shock and awe tactics.”
“Sounds good to me,” Allan said, and Callie nodded.
“All right. How do we want to divvy up?” Hollis asked.
In the end, Callie took Morris and Pendleton, Allan took Nelson and Hernandez, and Hollis took Han and Shaw.
They split up, moving along the ridge, enacting their plan.
Callie led her two charges down the right side of the ridge, towards the base. She took a moment to study it from up high and found it to be essentially one large structure surrounded by some open space and, at the edge of that, a decayed fence. Most of the windows along the walls were broken out. Callie found herself wondering what the place was originally built for. It looked ancient, heavily weathered, and out of place among the vicious greenery.
Leading Morris and Pendleton into position, just at the edge of the treeline, Callie waited for the signal.
Once it came through and the others confirmed that they were in position, she charged in with them all. Bursting in through a hole in the fence, she sighted the nearest target, one of the techno-terrorists positioned up on the roof, then squeezed the trigger, sprayed a few shots its way, popped one through its head and made it topple off the top of the building. It slammed into the ground, twitching and sparking.
There was a second of silence, then the others opened up, everyone opened up.
The seconds bled into minutes, passing in freeze frame fragments, as they cut through the base, converging on it, putting down as many of the enemies as possible as quickly as possible. Gunfire sounded, the meat puppets loosed electronic shrieks as they were put down and muzzle flare lit up the surrounding area.
Callie ended up using every last one of the shotgun shells she’d managed to acquire as she worked her way through the base with the others. After putting down all the hostiles on the roof and eliminating any along the exterior, they quickly entered the main structure from several different points and worked their way through it, clearing it and gunning down any survivors inside. The whole operation took approximately seven minutes.
After clearing the base, they located the central control room and Nelson immediately set to work plugging into their local network. Callie moved slowly through the base as he worked, finding herself strangely interested in the area. It was almost like being in an archeological dig site. The walls were scored and pitted by weather and whoever had occupied the remote outpost long, long ago. The windows were almost all broken out. The crates of supplies, the workstations and terminals that occupied the rooms and were haphazardly stacked into the corridor walls all seemed extremely out of place. They were polished and shiny next to worn, rusted out shell of the base. In the course of investigating, she did manage to find more shells for her shotgun, as well as an SMG and a stack of magazines for it, so that was something at least.
It took another fifteen minutes before Nelson had something.
They all gathered in the control room of the outpost, which was little more than a medium-sized room with a huge workstation fused into the far wall. Nelson sat at it, his leg stretched out, armor off of it temporarily as Shaw crouched there, checking him over. He didn’t seem to notice as he worked furiously at the console, framed by the light from it.
“What have you got?” Callie asked.
“Good news and bad news. The good news is that I know where we are, and where the castle we’re looking for is, and how to get there. The bad news is that it’s going to be like, a huge pain in the ass-ow!
Will you fucking be careful down there, Shaw?” he snapped.
“Quit bitching,” Shaw muttered.
“Here’s the problem,” he said, trying to bring himself back to the impromptu briefing. A broad map of the area appeared on the screen. There were several flashing lights. Nelson pointed to one near the bottom of the screen. “That’s us,” he said. Then he raised his finger to three flashing lights about halfway up the screen. “That’s what we’re going to have to deal with if we want to even approach the castle, and to make it easier on ourselves, because there are a lot of these fuckers in between here and there.”
“So what are those places?” Allan asked.
“One of them is a power station, it provides energy for the castle. We take that out and I’m sure that’ll fuck their day right up. Another one is a communications facility. Crippling it will, I’m sure, also fuck their day up. On top of that, I figure we can get a burst transmission out to someone important, let them know how fucked we are here. The final one is the big enchilada: home to the defense grid. I couldn’t exactly get a clear detail on what exactly the defense grid is, but what it seems to be is a pain in our ass. We aren’t getting close to the castle without taking it down, and also taking its power down, as well, which is also, you guessed it, that other power plant that also powers the castle. So this is going to be kind of a big operation.”
Hollis looked at Allan and Callie. “It’s up to you two how we handle this,” he said.
They looked at each other, considered the situation.
“Well,” Allan said, speaking up first, “I guess I’ll take the comms tower. Shaw, Hernandez, you two are with me.”
“I’ll take the defense grid,” Callie said. “Pendleton and Han will join me.”
“I guess that means Nelson and Morris, you two are helping me take down that power station,” Hollis said.
“Keep an eye out for Lang,” Callie said.
They all gave affirmative replies and began to study up on the map, preparing themselves for the tasks ahead.
CHAPTER 07
–Radio Darkness–
“So, Gray, are you and Callie like...an item?”
Allan glanced over at Hernandez. Shaw was up ahead of them, maybe five meters out, running point. They’d been walking through the jungle for a while now and they hadn’t run into any other patrols. At first it had been nice, then it started making him nervous. Battle he could handle, because that was really just action and reaction, but waiting and dead zones on a battlefield? That started to take the edge off, which was a good way to get on the fast track to death. He couldn’t help but wonder what waited ahead of them.
“Yeah,” he replied. “We’re in love.” He said it factually, almost like he was choosing ‘what statement answers this question best?’.
He’d never been particularly good at letting his emotions show to most people, especially people he’d just met.
“Interesting,” Hernandez replied. “Cause I saw you eye-fucking me.”
“I was,” Allan agreed.
That seemed to throw her off her game a little bit, but she recovered fast.
“So what kind of relationship is this, exactly?”
“Why? You interested?”
“I am,” she said. It felt strange to be having a conversation like this so bluntly, but then again, everything in Allan’s life was strange. Where he lived was strange. His job was strange. His friends were strange. His boss was strange.
And this whole fucking planet was strange.
By contrast, he realized, this conversation was practically normal.
“In who? Me or Callie?” he asked as they kept walking through the dense, vibrantly emerald foliage, pushing aside huge, flat leaves and avoiding thick, mossy trunks.
“You,” Hernandez replied. “I don’t swing the other way.”
“Okay. Well, I’m interested in you and you’re interested in me and I’m in an open relationship. Want to do something about it?” Allan asked. He sounded calmer than he felt. Sex had always been a weird thing for him. On the one hand, he was pretty okay about being in an open relationship and he felt fairly confident once he was actually having the sex, (well, most of the time, it really depended on the situation and the person), but when he was actually trying to set something up? Well then he might as well have been back in high school, awkward, shy and nervous.
But he was glad to see that he was at least he was getting better at faking confidence.
“Yeah, that’d be nice. You want to go on a vacation or something when all this shit is over? I could sure use one.”
“I can arrange that,” he replied.
“Good. I’ll look forward to it, you’re pretty cute.”
They fell silent again, the conversation having run its course. Allan figured that they were maybe about five minutes out. They’d all studied up back at that military base, gathering whatever intel there was to be gathered, but he knew they were basically winging it. Weren’t they always? His gaze fell on Shaw’s armored back.
“What’s her story?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” Hernandez replied. “We don’t talk much. Nobody talks much with her, except Lang, sometimes. All I’ve been able to figure out is that she lost someone, I don’t know who though, but it seriously fucked her up.”
Allan felt a pang of sympathy for her. He knew what that was like.
Something pinged his senses.
“Freeze,” he hissed, and up ahead, he was glad to see Shaw freezing into place. From the way they both reacted, they must have sensed it too.
Allan tried to suss the situation out, tried to figure out what had pinged him and from where it had come. He looked first left, then right. What had it been? He’d heard or seen something. Right? He had just started to move again when he caught movement from somewhere overhead. A branch jiggling, leaves shifting.
Instinct kicked in.
He threw himself backwards and felt something tap the top of his helmet. As he flew back, preparing himself for the hard landing, everything seemed to slow down. Something done up in all black that looked only vaguely like a human being was dropping down from above. It seemed to have positioned itself entirely around its arm, which was tipped in a long, silver blade that glinted in the light, as though putting all of its weight into it. He realized that the very tip of that blade was what had tapped the top of his helmet.
It was looking at him with eyes covered by black lenses, set deep into a face of flesh as black as midnight oil. All of it was completely obsidian, except for that silver blade. Time caught itself, sped up and then he was landing flat on his ass and this strange assassin mechanism had already recovered, landing on its feet like a cat.
This was definitely something new.
“Shoot it!” Allan roared even as he leveled his rifle at the thing and opened fire. A trio of bullets punched through the air, but the assassin was already moving, gliding to the right. Jeez, it was fucking fast. Shaw and Hernandez opened fire, strafing away, putting some distance between them and it. The creature dove for Allan once more, blade extended, a silver sliver of death coming straight for his faceplate.
He barely managed to roll out of the way. One of his companions managed to land a lucky shot, throwing the creature off-balance. It stumbled and Allan took the opportunity presented to him. He shifted and fired. The creature moved, but not fast enough. Two of the three bullets from the three-round burst missed, but the third one clipped the side of its head and that caused it to stumble bad enough that it fell.
That was all they needed.
Without even standing up, Allan adjusted aim and began squeezing the trigger as fast as he could, adding his gunfire to Hernandez’s and Shaw’s. They had a moment of opportunity and pressed it as hard as they could.
The assassin meat puppet twitched and spasmed. And died.
All was still and silent for a long moment.
“What the fucking hell is that?!” Allan snapped as he got to his feet.
> “Something new,” Shaw muttered darkly.
Allan looked down at the new threat. It was creepy as fuck. If he hadn’t moved at the last second...he shuddered in the way one did when one had a close brush with death. And this one had been particularly close. Raising his weapon, he put a few more shots into its head, just for good measure, then straightened up.
“All right, let’s keep going,” he muttered, trying to sort his thoughts out.
What the hell else were they going to come up with on this mad jungle world, way out beyond the Far Reach?
He didn’t really look forward to finding out.
* * * * *
Allan was still feeling the residual effects of his near death experience when they finally came upon the communications tower.
They’d been heading up a sloped incline for a hell of a long time now, following a natural path and keeping a sharp eye out for any more assassins. He supposed it made enough sense to put the tower somewhere up high, but fuck, he hated hiking. The three of them gathered at the edge of a treeline, staring at the clearing the tower resided in. It looked old, though more well-maintained than the rest of the structures they’d come across.
The camp mainly consisted of the tower itself, looming over them like a gunmetal gray middle finger, beckoning them on, daring them, perhaps. There were just a few other shacks and sheds around. Allan didn’t see any bad guys.
Hey, maybe they’d finally caught a lucky break.
Even as he thought this, a bullet whizzed by his faceplate so close that he could practically smell the burning atmosphere and metal.
“Open fire!” Allan roared as he dove for cover behind a thick tree trunk. They’d been discovered. Fantastic.
Techno-terrorists boiled out of the shacks and sheds, out of the tower, coming for them. A hailstorm of bullets exploded into existence. Allan felt the tree he was hiding behind shake furiously as dozens of rounds hit it.
Well, this was off to a great fucking start.
Where had all the pushovers gone? These guys seemed like they were seriously on the ball. Allan waited for the hail of gunfire to let up a bit, then he leaned around the tree, aimed and fired. The first burst fire was lucky and popped the head of a nearby meat puppet. He barely managed to wing a second one in the face, sending it spinning towards the ground, before the hail resumed with a renewed intensity.
