by S. A. Lusher
Beauty often hid danger.
It suddenly began to rain.
He turned away from the view and stepped into the cave, moving slowly at first, letting his light-amp filters kick in and help him pick out any threats. He discovered hiding places and points of interest among a collection of rusted-out, derelict pieces of mining equipment taking up the entrance to the cave system. He made quick hand-gestures to Han, who moved off to the left while he took the right. They checked out the vehicles and equipment, moving slowly but surely to ensure that nothing would sneak up behind them.
A couple minutes later, they met up again at the exit to the first cavern. As he suspected, there was nothing waiting for them, nothing lurking in the shadows. With that out of the way, the pair started to traverse a lengthy tunnel that slowly wound its way down, into the earth. Unfortunately, going off of the rudimentary map that had been in the database, they had to go down before they could go up. Though, luckily, not for too long.
Allan couldn’t shake the impression that they weren’t alone in here.
He and Han made their way quickly down the rocky tunnel, burrowing into the earth. Thoughts began to creep into his skull as he pressed deeper. He could die, Callie could die, all sorts of awful things could happen to one or both of them. Or all of them. They might fail. As much as they had succeeded at rescuing the galaxy and containing these unique situations that kept cropping up, he wasn’t much more confident than before. He was confident in his ability to perform, but he kept running into situations where he had no fucking clue what they might throw at him, what he might find himself facing down.
It made him wonder, yet again, about the possibility of leaving. Being here, in the dark, almost totally alone with his thoughts, facing down an army of meat machines with a lunatic leader, knocked loose a lot of strange thoughts and old fears. Back on Frontier and later, on Lindholm, Allan thought that he was no longer afraid of death. In fact, he’d almost welcomed the thought of it after losing his first team.
It seemed like an end to suffering.
But he’d endured for no other reason than the fact that people were counting on him to do so, and eventually, he’d come back from the brink, and he wanted to live. Callie had a lot to do with that, and the debt he felt he’d owed to those he’d murdered. Again, he found himself with the ultimate question of: could he find any kind of solace in a life outside of Anomalous Operations? He wasn’t sure he could, not anymore, not after all that he had been through. But that was just one of those questions that he didn’t think he’d get an answer to.
Because he was afraid to leave, honestly.
He thought that he might be afraid to do anything else by himself now. He could do it, he knew, but he didn’t want to.
Allan realized that they’d reached the break in the tunnel. The main one would continue down even deeper, but the offshoot to the left would begin their long journey upwards. It was a relief, making progress was always a relief. He and Han broke off, heading into the tunnel, and started making their way briskly back up.
It was a long walk.
Neither of them spoke, both apparently content to be alone with their thoughts, or, in Allan’s case, unwilling to break the dark silence that enveloped them for his own reasons. But, eventually, they came to a simple metal wall with a ladder affixed to it. As Allan approached it, Han murmured for him to wait. He froze, looking up again, as he’d already scanned it once, and realized he’d missed something. His heart began to pump ice into his veins. How could he have missed that? A single hand, studded with silver tech, hung over the edge.
It didn’t seem to be alive or moving at all.
Carefully, Allan scaled the ladder, trying to lean away from it. He peeked up over the edge and found himself staring at a dead meat machine. Its eyes were dead, no light in them, and as he hauled himself up and over the edge once he was sure the way was clear, it became obvious how fucked up the body had been.
“It’s shredded,” he said quietly.
Han appeared beside him, crouching, studying it. “Our squad didn’t do this,” he murmured.
“Animals?” Allan asked, but even as he suggested it, it just didn’t sound right.
“Maybe,” Han replied, but he sounded just as doubtful.
They lingered a few seconds more, then pressed on down the tunnel. As they continued navigating the pitch black mines, they started to find more evidence of the growing mystery they found themselves in. The tunnel terminated in another medium sized open area, this one also packed with stacks of crates, workbenches and a few larger pieces of mining gear. There were three more shredded corpses in the center of the room.
Allan picked out some bullet holes in the walls and realized that they’d been fighting something. He frowned as he studied them. They weren’t just shredded, some had their limbs lopped off. Quite gruesomely, too.
“It looks like this was done with...” Han hesitated.
“With what?” Allan asked.
“A drill. A big drill,” he murmured.
“Oh, fucking fantastic, exactly what I need to be thinking about in a dark mine surrounded by dead bodies. Thanks, Han.”
“Always happy to help,” Han replied, and he couldn’t tell if the man was being sarcastic or not. Sighing, Allan picked out the correct route and pressed on.
It was another five minutes, walking up tunnels and climbing up ladders, before they began to pick up on the fact that someone, or something, was following them. Both men froze and turned to look back the way they’d come.
“I heard it, too,” Allan murmured. “What is it?”
“Something big, heavy but stealthy.”
“Maybe we can outrun it.”
“I doubt it.”
“Well...let’s keep going, I don’t see anything.”
“Neither do I.”
They turned around and pressed on, moving more quickly now. Allan knew that the exit to the tram cart wasn’t all that far away. Just up a few more tunnels. Maybe he’d catch a break for once...though he really doubted it.
The tension kept rising as little sounds came to him: footfalls, metal scraping against metal, and, vaguely, some kind of heavy, off-kilter breathing. His mind was feeding him all sorts of ugly possibilities as to what might be following him.
In the end, they made it to the last tunnel, the one that would let them back outside. In fact, Allan could actually see a dim gray sunlight at the end of it, maybe fifty meters up. But that’s when the thing without a name decided to make its move. Both men spun around as they heard a suddenly ragged breathing and heavy, plodding footfalls. It came out of the shadows with startling speed. It was a solidly built, eight foot horror of rotted flesh and grimy metal. It had two brilliant yellow eyes, piercing out of the darkness like beacons.
Worst of all were the things it had attached to its wrists.
One was a huge, long drill bit that was already starting to spin up. The other was an honest to god fucking chainsaw with big, shiny, razor sharp teeth. It was spinning up too. Allan raised his rifle, feeling terror rip icily through him as the beast charged for him and squeezed the trigger. It dodged, it ducked, it sprinted towards both of them and neither man seemed to be able to put it down. Allan found himself ducking as well as that chainsaw came straight for his neck. He didn’t want to find out if his armor could stand up to it.
Even as he barely managed to avoid it, Han shouted a warning and he realized that the drill was coming in to do what the chainsaw hadn’t. Han managed to get a few shots into it, throwing its arm off course and barely missing Allan in the process. He stumbled away, his body reacting in automatic survival mode, desperately trying to stay alive. He tried to put some distance between himself and this latest horror that had been thrust forth to kill him, but the thing was fucking fast and it seemed intent on finishing him off.
He jerked backwards, narrowly avoiding the chainsaw again, then threw himself to the side, barely managing to get out of the way of the drill.
&n
bsp; This fucker was fast.
As he slammed to the ground, the creature was already righting itself and making another attack on him. Allan saw its drill dipping for him, nothing but spinning chrome death, and then Han was there, throwing himself bodily into the techno terror and sending it stumbling. But even then, as it recovered, it brought its chainsaw up and around and made contact with Han’s chest. There was a scream of metal and a run of sparks as Han quickly backed away. Allan raised his rifle, flipped it to full auto and took the shot he’d been offered.
He managed to put several rounds through the creature’s chest and sent it sprawling to the floor. It shrieked as a spray of red-black gore sprayed across the rock wall behind it and it fell to its knees. That gave Han just enough of an opening to put a quartet of shots into its malformed face, eviscerating it and splattering its brains all over the place.
“What the fuck was that?!” Allan growled as he got to his feet, staring at it.
“I think it might have been a mistake,” Han replied.
“A mistake?”
They stared at it a bit longer, then Allan put a few more rounds into it, just to be sure, (he found himself doing that a lot lately), and they resumed their journey.
“Consider all the corpses we found. I think it’s safe to assume that that thing killed them. Obviously it was killing its own kind. Either they were defective or it was. I think it makes more sense that it was defective. It was probably meant to guard these caves and something went wrong with its programming and it killed everything it came across.”
“Makes enough sense,” Allan replied after a moment.
They came back out into the rain and the thin gray sunlight. The pair found themselves atop a rocky plateau overlooking the top of the castle. There was indeed an old tram cart that ran on cabling between where they were now and the castle’s rooftop. The tram itself was on their side, looking old but serviceable.
“Let’s get to it,” Allan said, making for the tram.
* * * * *
So far, they hadn’t encountered a single thing, but Callie knew that it wouldn’t last forever. She was already hearing signs of life.
She and Hernandez had managed to get out of the city and into the old mine without incident. They’d made good progress and so far she liked the way things were going. The old mine had been mostly dead and dark, nothing but rusted out machinery. But the deeper in they went, the more they began to discover signs of recent progress, and eventually they began to find lit areas, making it that much more difficult to be stealthy.
“Contact,” Hernandez whispered.
She was on point. Callie moved slowly down the rock tunnel they were occupying. It was mostly dark but there was a pool of light up ahead. She saw a pair of technos at the mouth of the tunnel. It looked like they were standing guard. She could hear more sounds coming from the area beyond them. Well, time to get to work.
“Let’s drop them on three,” Callie said, raising her rifle. “One, two, three.”
Twin gunshots whispered out and both guards dropped almost as one as bloody holes opened up on their foreheads. Both women waited to see if anything else would show up to investigate, but nobody did, the sounds beyond the opening continued unabated.
“Cover me,” Callie whispered and moved forward. She kept going until she was just shy of the entrance and peered carefully into the area beyond.
It was a half-developed room littered with machinery of some kind. There were maybe half a dozen technos tending to the machinery and another pair unloading crates. They struck her as workers rather than fighters. She motioned for Hernandez to join her and once she did, they both began taking the targets down, one after the other, until they’d cleared the whole room. As the last one fell, Callie began to hear something.
“What is that?” Hernandez whispered.
“I think...footfalls,” she replied.
Her theory turned out to be proven true just five seconds later. At the head of the cavern, through a tunnel that was partially furnished with metal walls and deckplates, something new appeared. At first, Callie mistook it for just another techno, but she quickly realized that this was an uncommon breed. It was seven feet of raw musculature and cold steel. This thing looked well put together, it looked like it was designed intentionally.
Its eyes blazed a fiery crimson and its body bulged with muscle and tech implants. One arm ended in a skeletal hand with long, metal fingers, the other ended in a wide-bore weapon of some kind. It stepped into the room and let out an electronic roar.
“Oh shit,” Hernandez muttered.
“Put it down!” Callie yelled, opening fire, sending a series of three-round bursts its way.
The creature was on the move, and what few bullets did make contact either buried themselves in metal or didn’t hit anything sensitive enough.
The techno, which Callie was already thinking of as an elite guard, took three big steps forward, raised its arm and unleashed a great burst of white-hot flames. Even through her suit Callie could feel the heat as the flames jetted towards her.
Cursing, she hastily backed away with Hernandez.
They split up, strafing, trying to get away from the flames and to draw a bead on the techno. Callie loosed a few more bullets and then Hernandez did the same. None of them hit anything worth mentioning. Callie emptied her rifle and as she reloaded, Hernandez kept up her rate of fire. They were far enough apart that the techno had to make a choice as to who it was going to attack. It chose Hernandez.
And that’s what gave Callie her opening.
As it turned away from her, she saw a sensitive spot: a pair of tanks mounted on the elite guard’s back.
Slapping the fresh magazine in, she raised her rifle and took her shot. A trio of bullets connected with the tanks and suddenly her vision whited out as a fresh wave of heat washed over her and a concussion wave picked her up and threw her across the room. She ended up sprawled on her back and began scrambling to her feet blindly, blinking furiously, trying to clear her vision and get up, wary of further attack.
But nothing happened and as the white went out of her vision, she found herself looking at flaming pieces of gore and blackened, twisted metal sprayed all over the room. Hernandez was on her feet across the room.
She started laughing. “Well, you sure nailed it,” she said.
Callie laughed, too, simply happy to be alive. “Sure did.” She began to say more, but her radio crackled to life.
“Ward, you inside yet?” It was Hollis, he sounded grim.
“Yes, Hernandez and I are inside. Be advised: we have encountered a new type, some kind of elite guard that has a flamethrower. If you run into it, shoot its back and make sure you have a good distance, because it explodes.”
“Affirmative. I need you and Hernandez to get to my present location immediately. There’s something you need to see.”
That sounded ominous. “What do we need to see?” Callie replied, leading Hernandez out of the room, deeper into the area.
“We found Lang.”
* * * * *
They had found Corporal Lang, all right.
Callie wished they hadn’t.
After coordinating with Sergeant Hollis and backtracking several times, she and Hernandez had finally linked up with his team. The deeper they went into this place, the weirder it got. The hallways were now constructed almost exclusively of old metal and they were running into weird things like halls that ended abruptly or corridors that shrank in size or bizarre, unknowable pieces of machinery that made odd noises.
But all of that changed when they found Lang.
It went from weird to horrific.
They came into an awful, twisted parody of an infirmary. In the center of it, as if on display, was an examination table.
Lang lay on it. She was bloody, her arms were missing and her eyes had been cut out. It was obvious that they had begun the process of turning her into a meat machine. There was a table rolled up next to the examination table,
it held several tools and spare parts.
“She’s dead,” Hollis said quietly. “They killed her, recovered her body and now they’re changing it over to one of their own. Fucking bastards.”
“We’ve got to stop this. This whole operation,” Callie whispered.
“How?” Hollis asked.
“I don’t know yet, but we’ll find a way.” She turned and walked through the only other door in the room. As she stepped through it, she stopped, her jaw dropping, her stomach churning. Beyond the door, spread out before her, (and she could see it all so clearly because she was on a slightly elevated platform), were dozens of examination tables, all of them holding corpses in varying states of being transformed.
Most of them were being tended to by meat puppets.
Callie raised her rifle. “We’re putting a stop to this.”
CHAPTER 12
–Shutdown: Part One–
The only real mercy of the situation was that no one was still alive.
Callie wasn’t entirely sure she would be able to handle it if these were living people and not a roomful of corpses. She led the squad through the slaughterhouse, trying not to focus too hard on the details of the horror surrounding her but finding herself unable to completely succeed. There were just too many mutilated corpses. They surrounded her on all sides, an ocean of suffering. She had to pass between rows of simple metal platforms, mockeries of examination tables, most of them spattered with red and black fluid.
Each was occupied, none were empty.
They had already taken shots of opportunity and put down every single techno hard at work in the area, headshots all around. They’d also capped a couple of the corpses that showed signs of life. Now it was still and silent.
The reek had been beyond tolerance.
Callie had closed her vents, using her suit’s oxygen supply for the time being, because the heavy, thick aroma of exposed internal organs, of blood and raw meat and slow decay, was simply too much. Especially when it was mixed with the oily scent of machinery and hardware, and the crispy stench of burned flesh.
