by S. A. Lusher
Mostly it looked like circuit-boards and all manner of other technical gear. She studied it for a moment, then mentally shrugged and kept going with her mission. She left the building, intending to continue along towards the structure in the middle and get inside there to plant the other two bombs when, suddenly, gunfire sounded somewhere else in the area. Callie cursed and, as a quartet of techno-terrorists burst from the central building and started running away from her, towards the sounds of the gunshots, she decided to quit playing it safe.
She gunned them down, spraying their position with the rest of the rounds in her magazine. Emptying it, she slapped a fresh one in.
“I’m compromised.” It was Pendleton.
“I’ve made it to the main structure, I’m inside,” Han said.
“Pendleton, do you need help?” Callie asked, making for the central structure.
“Hold on-” A pause, then a huge explosion rocked the area and Callie saw a great red-yellow plume of fire shoot into the sky. “-no, I’m fine. Meet you there.”
Callie suppressed a sigh. So much for the stealthy approach. As she came up to the nearest entrance into the central structure, it suddenly opened up to admit another pair of awful flesh-metal constructs and she put them both down with shots to the face. Stepping over their twitching, sparking corpses, she found herself within the main building of the defense compound. She was in a short corridor with a few open doorways.
“I’m inside the structure, clearing it out now,” Callie reported, moving down the corridor and peering in through the doors.
“Affirmative. Same,” Han said crisply.
“I’m in!” Pendleton reported against staccato bursts of gunfire.
The first two doors were empty, but the third held a trio of metal men hard at work on something, apparently ignorant to the chaos surrounding them. Workers, perhaps. She gunned them down and moved on, pausing to plant one of her explosives. Straightening back up, she hurried deeper into the facility, passing through an open doorway at the end and nearly getting her head taken off by a shotgun blast.
Callie spun and fired almost without realizing she’d done so, putting a fist-sized hole through the chest of the techno creature that had tried to murder her. It twitched briefly, made a squealing noise, then toppled over backwards, landing with a meaty clang. She stepped over it, hurrying down a maze-like corridor, taking a left, a right, another right, then passing through a room stacked with crates on one side and machinery on the other.
Nearby, she heard gunfire.
Tracking to its source, she located Han, who was pinned down and putting down technos with a startling efficiency. She indicated her presence as she came up behind him in a broad corridor scattered with stacks of silver crates, got behind some and helped him gun down the last of the technos that were hounding them.
“Where’s Pendleton?” she asked after gunning them down and feeding more shells into her shotgun.
“I believe he’s nearby. I heard some gunfire not far from here,” Han replied.
They started making their way through the base.
“Han, you never told me how you figured out you had these special skills,” Callie said.
“Ah. I suppose that’s true. Long story short, slavers came to attack my home. I was out hunting when they came. When I realized what had happened, I...was forced to fight for my life, and my parent’s lives. And I did. And I found that I was very good at it. I took down thirty four slavers by myself. I was sixteen,” he replied.
“Good lord,” Callie muttered.
“Indeed. Ah, I believe Pendleton is up ahead.”
He was. They found him putting down his own squad of resistance.
“How are we doing?” he asked as he saw them coming in.
“I’ve planted my explosives,” Han said.
“I got all but one done,” Callie replied.
“Same here. Let’s plant ours and get the fuck out of here. We’d probably do well to put at least one on the second story,” Pendleton replied.
“It would help ensure destruction,” Han agreed.
With that settled, they made their way through the core of the defense network. Callie hoped this would work. If they couldn’t bring down the grid, then she wasn’t sure how they were going to proceed. The map she’d been studying seemed to outline a pretty extensive network. Hunting down some stairs, Callie led the way, pounding up them, listening to her armored boots clang against the metal in the narrow space.
She moved through the door up ahead, raised her shotgun and squeezed the trigger, blowing the head off of a tech puppet that had been rounding the corner at the end of the corridor she found herself in. She dropped to one knee, pumped the shotgun and fired a second time while simultaneously allowing someone behind her to fire over her head as another two technos entered the corridor. They went down under a hail of gunfire. They waited, but no more came. Callie led the way again, moving down the length of the corridor.
They kept going until they reached an important looking room near the center of the building. Its walls were covered in all manner of gear and equipment, screens and terminals.
“Well, this looks like a good a place as any,” she said, finding a good place for the little cube of yellow explosive deep in a shadowy, recessed niche behind a bulky piece of machinery. She straightened up once it was placed.
“One more, then we can get the fuck out of here.”
They hurried back the way they had come, making their way down the stairs and through the tight corridors of the first floor, pausing once to place Pendleton’s final explosive in another room they came across. Then they booked it for the exit, putting down another three techno-terrorists on the way towards the outside.
“Let’s get the hell-” Callie cut off as she heard a powerful thrumming noise coming from somewhere overhead. Cautiously, she stepped out of the exit and looked up. Her eyes bulged as she spied a gray areal assault vehicle hovering overhead, supported by two big rotor blades. It seemed to spy her immediately and turned quickly to face her.
“Oh fuck,” she whispered, and narrowly managed to get back inside before a chaingun attached to the vehicle opened fire. She saw it churn up the dirt beyond the doorway, but it cut off as it drew closer to the structure.
“What the hell is it?” Pendleton asked.
“Gunship,” she replied. “Big one. We’re gonna need something bigger than a rifle to take it down, it looks like.”
“It won’t shoot the tower,” Han said quietly. “It can’t, or it risks damaging something extremely important.”
“Okay, so we’re safe as long as we stay in this tower, which obviously we can’t do, because we need to blow it up. So how do we take it down?” Callie muttered.
“Let’s head back upstairs,” Pendleton replied. “There’s got to be something we can use.”
Callie didn’t think there had to be anything up there, but it was better than just standing around doing nothing. They hustled back through the first floor and up to the second where, in their search for that special something that would help them out, they put down a handful of stragglers and found nothing worthwhile. Then they made their way quickly up to the third story. It was there, after five minutes of frantic searching, that they found it.
A small, makeshift armory that housed, among other things, a rocket launcher.
“Who’s the best shot?” Callie asked, looking from Pendleton to Han.
“I am,” Han replied. He stated it as simple fact and, well, she was inclined to believe him.
After that, it was literally as simple as Han walking to the nearest window, waiting for the gunship to come into view, aiming and firing. The gunship began to back away and up, but the rocket was much, much faster and it struck the side of the ship, at first splitting it half, then igniting something powerful inside, explosives or its fuel core perhaps, and that fractured it into hundreds of free-flying metal pieces.
“There,” Han said quietly, setting the launcher aside.
“Done.”
They quickly raided the armory, grabbing whatever extra ammo they could, then the trio hurried down the stairs one more time and made their way across the camp. Once they were at a safe distance away out in the jungle, Callie triggered the detonator and the whole thing went up in a tremendous plume of black smoke and orange-red flame.
Callie let out a sigh of relief.
One more thing done.
She activated her radio. “Allan, the defense grid is down. How are you doing?”
There was a pause, then, “We’re good on our end. The message has been sent and the communications facility is trashed.”
“Excellent. Hollis, how is your team doing?” Silence. “Sergeant Hollis?” More silence. Callie felt a cold dread fill her.
“Shit, we’ll have to go in after him, that power plant needs to go down,” Allan said. “I’ll meet you there.”
Callie hesitated. “Allan, it would make more sense for one of us to start making our way to the castle, to scout the situation out and gather intel.”
A pause. “I suppose that’s true.”
“I’ll do it. You take care of the power plant and catch up with me.” Another pause.
She could tell Allan didn’t like the plan, but he couldn’t argue with it. “Fine. Be careful.”
“You too. And I will.”
They set off.
CHAPTER 09
–Hostile Territory–
Allan thought they were making good time, but when lives were on the line, there was no such thing.
Every second that slammed by felt like another second too long, and they’d been walking for twenty minutes so far, going as fast as they could through the jungle. They were lucky that the power station wasn’t terribly far from their current position. A terse tension had fallen over the trio after they’d trashed the communications facility and gotten the call from Callie. The obvious question hung on the air: what had happened to Hollis and the others? There were all sorts of possibilities. Unfortunately, how it usually went was the grimmer the more likely.
And then there was the extra pressure of Callie leading her own team on ahead of the rest. What kind of threats might she be facing? But there was no time for that, never any time for that, and to focus on it was to invite distraction.
And to invite distraction was to invite death.
Every five minutes or so, Allan would attempt to contact someone, but it had been the same response each time: dead air.
The situation was looking grim.
Allan pushed his way through a particularly thick collection of leaves and branches, and as he stepped into the next clearing, nearly tripped over a dead meat puppet. He studied it for a moment as the other two came in.
“Hollis was here,” Hernandez said quietly.
Up ahead, there were another four corpses.
“We’re getting close,” Shaw replied.
“We need to hurry,” Allan said and stepped over the corpses. Their sentences were tight and terse, trying to break up the haze of tension that encapsulated them. Allan could feel his muscles bunching beneath his armor and tried to make himself relax. He needed to stay loose if he was going to get through this and come out the other side alive.
It took another five minutes before they came to the edge of the power complex. It was easily the biggest compound they’d come to so far on the planet. A huge central structure dominated the area. Most of the compound was obscured from view by a large, solid wall. Dead ahead of them, Allan spied a large hole blown in that wall, the edges of twisted metal singed and coated in soot. Hollis had decided to blast his way in, guns blazing.
Had it gotten him killed?
Allan listened for any indication of conflict: gunfire, shouting, explosions. But there was nothing, save for the deep hum of the power plant that was almost, but not quite, beyond the edge of human hearing.
Allan led the way through the opening, rifle in hand, ready for thunder and action. What he found, on the other side in a mostly walled off alcove, were a lot of dead bodies. Almost an even dozen. Riddled with bullets or broken by the blast. Hollis meant business. Allan led the way carefully across the field of corpses, keeping his eyes sharp, his head on a swivel. Shaw and Hernandez were silent behind him, cold competent warriors at his back, reassuring as hell. He led them down that alcove and through the opening at the end, coming into a large L shaped area. The center of it was the power plant itself, the main structure, but there were other buildings around. Some of them were shacks, others were long and low.
There were more bodies, more signs of the battle that had ripped the place apart. They moved slowly along one side of the main structure, looking for a way in. It remained a largely unbroken expanse of gunmetal gray metal to his left, marred occasionally by bullet holes or sprays of red-black blood. As he reached the end of it and prepared to make the turn around it, a round seared past his faceplate. Allan jerked to the right, aiming and sighting a techno that was lying on the ground, one leg blown off, the other twisted gruesomely behind it, slowly dragging its way towards him with one arm while aiming at him with its other, which terminated in a barrel. It fired again and he narrowly avoided it while drawing a bead on the creature.
As soon as he had its twisted, pallid face in his sights, he squeezed the trigger. The bullet cut through the air and punched through its forehead, knocking the mockery of life right out of it, causing it to go slack against the ground.
Almost before the echoes of that shot dissipated, Allan began to hear other sounds all around them. He scanned the area with a sweep of his rifle and began to see enemies. They crawled and limped out from inside of or behind the other structures. The broken survivors of the battle that had raged through this compound, wanting revenge for their fallen brethren perhaps. Or maybe that was him just projecting.
It was more likely they just reactivated in the presence of new targets.
Allan, Hernandez and Shaw cut through them with relative ease, punching holes through twisted faces and metal-plated chests, spraying red-black gore across the dirt ground or the metal walls where it ran in rivulets or beaded. As the final gunshot sounded and the last body slumped to the ground, all became still and silent.
They waited, but no more came.
Allan got back to the corner of the main building he’d been planning to turn around and this time he made it around without interruption. As he did, however, something immediately leaped out at him. He’d taken in the next area at a glance, and found it largely similar to the place he’d just come from, and then he saw it.
A suit of power armor was lying on the ground.
“Ah shit,” Hernandez muttered from behind him.
Well, definitely a bad sign.
“Cover me,” Allan said quietly as he made his way across the open space. He stepped over another pair of dead meat puppets and came to stand next to the armored body. He crouched down, unable to tell who it was, and carefully flipped the body over.
“Who is it?” Shaw asked.
Allan frowned, staring into a pale face with blonde hair, ruined by a round that had punched through the faceplate and into the right eye, turning it into a bloody eruption. “It’s Nelson,” he replied, then sighed softly.
Second casualty of the mission.
So far.
Allan patted the body down for ammo but found nothing. Someone had beat him to it. So it was likely that Hollis and Morris had still been alive at this point at least. He stood up and looked around, spying an open doorway in this side of the power plant. Bloody bootprints led up to it, two pairs. Silently, Allan set off towards it. The other two brought up the rear. The atmosphere only grew grimmer as they headed inside.
The first area beyond the entryway was a barren room done up in blood decorum. The sheer amount of blood and bodies seemed to indicate that Hollis and Morris had hit this place with a vengeance, probably screaming for death after Nelson had gone down. And they seemed to have certainly gotten that.
The ar
ea permeated that awful, heavy silence that post-action battlefields seemed to be lousy with. There was nothing quite like making your way through an area that had been subject to heavy fighting, and now all was still and silent, all (probably) were dead or gone, and there was just you, making your way through bloodied, bullet-riddled corridors, stepping over corpses. Allan found himself piecing together little scenarios as they pushed into the facility.
They made their way past derelict rooms packed with all manner of monitoring and siphoning equipment, affixed to the walls, some of it old, some of it new. As he made his way through the dark, bloody hallways, he began to wonder about the meat machines. There was something totally whacked out about the situation out here, something that had a strange, ugly vibe beyond the immediately obvious nature of it all. He tried to run the scenario through in his head. This crazy old man takes his followers and his strange black castle out into the far darkness, and then...what happens? That’s honestly as far as the intel went.
Why disappear and do nothing for over a century?
Obviously they’d done something when they had gotten out here. These buildings they were coming across were old, and obviously had been reactivated at some point in the recent past. Why suddenly come back into the world and begin attacking? What was different? What had changed? Had the nutjob thrown himself into a cryo-tube and punched in a completely random date for him to reawaken? Or maybe it had been part of a master plan? Or maybe it had just been an accident? There were just too many possibilities.
And nowhere near enough intel.
Allan focused up as he spied a large set of double doors marking the end of the corridor he was in. One of them was closed, but one was partially opened and he could see a single gauntlet lying out of it in a pool of its own blood. The sight filled him with cold dread. He felt his senses sharpen as he approached that armored gauntlet.
