by S. A. Lusher
“All right, Volker, I’m at the core. What do I do?” he asked as he slipped into the room. It was the same design as the one up on Tempest: a large circular room built around a thick pillar of glass and steel and technology in the very center. He spied a few Mutants lurking around and put them down, then took a moment to lock down the three doors that led inside. Volker began to feed him instructions and he spent the next twenty minutes running around the room, replacing circuitboards and other things that he didn’t know what the hell they were, patching wires, opening and closing panels and finally punching in a string of commands on the main console.
As he hit the enter key, suddenly, the whole room churned to life. Brilliant light filled the bay, banishing the darkness.
“You’ve done it! Perfect!” Volker cried as he finished the job.
“Yeah. Perfect. Now tell me where my friends are so I can go get them,” Greg replied.
“Ah...they’re with me,” Volker replied after a moment.
“...what?”
“Yes, I’m afraid I’ve failed to mention that. I have their cryo-stasis units with me, in the command center of the Military Headquarters. I figured they would be valuable bargaining chips, but apparently I was wrong. Well...not quite wrong, I suppose.”
“Bargaining chips with who? Wait...” Greg hesitated. He’d been pushing Volker out of his thoughts ever since he’d met the man, but something was bugging him. He suddenly put a few pieces together. “Why the hell are you here? Why are you locked up in the Military HQ? Why aren’t you up on the ship?” he asked.
“That...is because I was left behind,” Volker replied hesitantly.
“Why? You know what, nevermind. I’m coming your way right now to get my friends.”
“No,” Volker said quickly, making Greg hesitate. “Listen, I can’t let you in until you kill the Revenant, okay? You have to kill it.”
“What the fuck is the Revenant?” Greg replied, knowing he wasn’t going to like the answer.
“It’s a creature that we recovered from one of the research sites. Two of your allies, I believe...Jennifer and Genevieve, subdued it on an asteroid. I’m sorry, but I simply cannot let anyone in or out unless the Revenant is killed. All the others can be dealt with without too much trouble, but the Revenant is too dangerous. That’s my final word on the matter.”
Greg groaned loudly, massaging his temples. “Fine. Where is it and how do I kill it?” He knew exactly what the man was talking about now. He remembered the dark, unseen horror that Jennifer had described to him, the thing that could not be looked at. What an appropriate name. Even that word, Revenant, sent chills down his spine.
“It’s in Building Echo, last I checked. That’s where we scientists lived back when this base was still functional. Don’t know how the hell it got over there. You’re going need two things: a gun specifically created to kill it and some goggles that were designed to enable the wearer to look at it. Although I must warn you, it’s...looking at it directly with these goggles can be dangerous. You mustn’t look for too long.”
“Dangerous how?”
“I’m not sure, exactly. I’ve seen the beast myself, although I have a hard time remembering it. Some of the test subjects...well, prolonged exposure to the beast caused several subjects to become violently suicidal.”
“Fuck.”
“Indeed. Now, the gun and the goggles were stolen from the labs in all the chaos. Both ended up in Building Echo as well, although the goggles are actually in the tunnel beneath it. I’ve updated your map. You need to hurry.”
Greg wanted to say a lot of things just then, but he knew he was just wasting time. Promising himself that he was going to get some answers, all the answers he wanted, out of Volker, one way or the other, he set off once more.
CHAPTER 09
–Revenant–
Underground again.
Greg had wanted to go back outside...okay, well, he hadn’t wanted to, it was more just that outside seemed like the less risky course. He’d rather be kicking his way through snow and freezing instead of fighting his way through a dark, subterranean hell. But he hadn’t made it. Volker had warned him basically at the last minute that the Freeze Storm was upon them. Apparently, the planet had storms that hit which made it way, way too cold to be outside. Hence the reason they’d built the tunnels. It was something like negative a hundred and fifty out there right now. They actually did have specialized suits in case of emergencies, but what few were left were rare and in difficult-to-access locations. So Greg was now beneath again.
He had his shotgun in hand, as he preferred it for the close quarters.
“Volker,” he said as he slipped back out into the main tunnel and cleared the area.
“Yes?”
“Patch me through to Drake. I want to talk to him.”
“Very well.”
Greg didn’t plan on talking about anything seriously pertinent over the open air, but it would be nice to hear from someone he actually trusted. He was functionally alone down here, but hearing another voice went a long way.
There was a pause, then a soft crackle of static. “Hey, Greg, how’s it going over there?” Drake asked.
“Like shit...but I’m making progress at least. I’ve got to kill one nasty son of a bitch monster,” he replied.
“Oh yeah? Which one? Any I’d recognize?”
“Yeah. Remember that thing that Jennifer, Genevieve and Keron took down on the asteroid a couple months ago?”
“Oh shit...how in the hell are you going to do that? They didn’t even take it down, they just froze it. And you’re supposed to kill it?”
“Yes. The scientists here cooked up some kind of special gun and goggles to go with it. How’s Eric doing?”
“He’s still out but I managed to get him to that little infirmary down the way, so I’ve got him hooked up to some machines and they’re monitoring his brainwaves and biochemistry and whatnot. They tell me he’s not bleeding internally and there’s no serious damages, he’s just out. I figure he needs his rest after hauling my heavy ass all over that space station, so fair’s fair.”
“Yeah. Did you secure the area?”
“I did. Scavenged some supplies from around the infirmary. I don’t want to leave him while he’s out, even locking the door. It’s too dangerous with the Shadows and everything running around, so I’m staying put.”
“Good. Don’t worry, I’ll wrap this up soon enough.”
“Glad to hear it. Good luck.”
“Yep, you too. Out.”
Greg killed the connection and pressed on through the tunnel, continuing past where he had gone last time. The original tunnel he’d been in was basically a big circle, with other tunnels branching off of it at mostly regular intervals. Some of them were just side storage tunnels that dead-ended, others, the bigger ones, led to the rest of the installation, and they were broad, tall, huge things, full of corpses and laden with foreboding.
Not exactly the most pleasant environment.
As he began making his way down one of these tunnels, he immediately saw a problem. About thirty meters dead ahead, the way was blocked. The passage was choked with a snarl of crates, vehicles and debris that had fallen from a partial collapse.
He stopped and sighed. “Volker, you couldn’t have mentioned that the tunnel had collapsed?” he asked.
“What?...oh dear, it has. I’m sorry, I’ve been busy trying to keep track of everything. I’m just one man...okay, there is a door to your left, the one closest to the collapse. That will take you through a large storage bay and should let you out on the other side.”
“Is anything in there?”
“Um...I don’t know. No working cameras.”
“Great.”
Greg found the way to be clear and moved quickly over to the indicated door. He opened it up and peered cautiously inside. The lighting wasn’t as good as he’d have liked, and when he listened, he could hear something...some kind of heavy breathing. Well, not Sha
dows at least, they didn’t breathe. They just did that weird creepy whispering thing. Probably Mutants then. Unless there was something else hanging out down here.
Shotgun in hand, Greg slid into the room.
And immediately wished that he didn’t have to go through this goddamned room. The bay itself was a long, low room, the peripheral of which had once been packed with all manner of crap. Now there were ugly, bulging, pulsating sacks of meat and skin and other body parts. There had to be close to a dozen of them lining the walls. Hives, where the Slugs came from. Which meant...Greg’s eyes widened as he saw a Guardian come running at him from out of the shadows. Trying to push the stupefyingly awful smell outside of his awareness, he raised the shotgun and opened fire. The blast hit it in the chest, picked it up and sent it flying backwards.
Which was all well and good, until an explosion of burning pain ripped across his back. Screaming in agony, Greg spun around and blasted off another shell into the Guardian that had managed to sneak up behind him. He blew its stub of a head clean off, then delivered a second blast directly into its chest, punching a fist-sized hole through it and blowing it straight to hell. The pain burned across his back and he could hear Volker trying to talk to him over the radio, but it was distant and unimportant because there was fucking another one.
Greg heard its heavy breathing and lumbering footfalls. He spun back around, trying hard to push the burning agony that consumed his back away, and fired again. This time the shotgun missed by what might as well have been a full kilometer. The creature continued rushing towards him. He aimed again and fired. The barrel was nearly touching its chest when the blast went off. Almost choking on the godawful stench now, trembling in pain, Greg stumbled away through the storage bay, wanting nothing more than to pass the fuck out.
Somehow, he managed to make it out the other side and back into the main tunnel.
“Volker,” he growled. “Nearest infirmary. Now.”
“What happened?”
“Now!”
“Okay, okay, uh...forty meters ahead, on the right side.”
“Good. Guardian got me across the back,” Greg growled as he set off.
The next forty meters were like a walk through hell. He didn’t know how he made it, only that he did. Each step seemed to bring a fresh wave of pain and he could feel blood pumping down his back. The cold weather gear and jumpsuit hadn’t done shit against its claws. He needed some actual goddamned armor. Not that he was probably going to find any. He ran into half a dozen Mutants and put them all down with a boiling fury, emptying his shotgun, forcing him to grab his pistol. Each time he moved his arms, new waves of suffering rippled across his back. He killed and stumbled his way through the tunnel.
Then, he found it.
The door with the red plus symbol above it.
Marching up to it, he opened the door, slipped inside and put several rounds into the lone Shadow that was hiding out within. Locking the door and making sure the area was clear, the first thing he did was find some heavy painkillers and down a quartet of them. Once that was done, he took off the cold weather gear, screaming as he did, as the movements caused even more agony to tear through him. It was torture, but he managed to do it. Once the coat was off, he unzipped his uniform and let it hang down around his waist.
Then he looked at the damage.
“Holy shit,” he whispered. It looked pretty bad. Three big, awful claw-marks raked down his back, tearing opening his flesh. Fuck, he could see the meat inside. It turned his stomach. And there was no one here to help. He knew what he had to do and he wasn’t looking forward to it at all. With a sigh, he forced himself to get up and raid the medical cabinet. He managed to find a bottle of antiseptics, a bottle that had a numbing agent inside and another bottle that held artificial skin. The first order of business was the numbing agent.
He opened up the bottle and dumped it down his back.
“Holy fuck!” he screamed in shock as pain exploded from the simple contact of liquid on the cuts. His vision swam for a moment and he had to grab the examination table he was standing by to steady himself, dropping the bottle in the process. Greg blinked several times, focusing on breathing, just breathing, pushing away from the miserable, godforsaken suffering, his arms trembling from the effort. Slowly, the numbing agent went to work, and soon there was nothing left but a vague discomfort. He took a deep breath and let it out slowly.
Next, he grabbed the bottle of general antiseptic, opened it up and upended up the same way he’d done with the other. He didn’t even feel the liquid, which was awesome, because he imagined that would have burned bad enough to knock his ass out. He could deal with a fair amount of pain, more so now that he’d had his fucking head chopped off, but even he had his limits. Especially considering there wasn’t some magical field making him deathless. Once that was all done and over with, he tried to put the artificial skin on, but it was too hard, so he gave that up and hunted until he found a big enough adhesive patch to cover the whole wound and positioned it as best he could over it, using a mirror to guide himself.
Once it was on, he slapped it into place as well as he could, then put his back against a nearby wall and hunched his shoulders, pushing his back out into an arch and rolling it across the wall to press the adhesive into place. Once that was done, he pulled his gear back on. He’d need a new suit, but that was going to have to wait.
“Are you okay?” Volker asked finally.
“No, but I’m still going. Gonna need someone to stitch me up or something at some point,” he replied.
“I’m sure one of your friends can help. You should be near the goggles,” Volker said.
Greg ignored him and checked the infopad, knowing he’d have to move fast. The longer he took, the more this numbing agent would wear off. And then he’d be in real fucking trouble. He saw that the scientist was right, the goggles had ended up in a break room down below. The room in question wasn’t too far from his current position.
Figuring this was as good as it was going to get, Greg left the infirmary and stepped back out. He found a Fiend wandering around, looking for scraps no doubt, and put it down with a shotgun blast. Then decided he needed to conserve ammo and switched to his pistol. As he began making his way forward, he contact Volker again.
“So, Volker, you were head researcher of this whole op, right?” he asked.
“Yes...” Volker replied cautiously.
“What the hell did you find out about these things? Any of them. Anything interesting?”
“Yes, actually. Perhaps the most interesting studies we did were on the Shadows. They are exceptionally fascinating.”
“What’d you find out?” Greg had to admit, he was deeply curious about them.
“Not nearly as much as I had hoped. We’re fairly sure that they are constructed things. Artificial in nature. They’re too precise and powerful and just plain flat-out bizarre to be natural. They’re basically impenetrable when it comes to scanning techniques. However, we did manage to discern a few things. Like the fact that they tend to run at about negative thirty degrees Fahrenheit. And they are all exactly the same in height and weight. And that they hardly weigh anything at all. They’re like carbon copies of each other.
“We also carbon dated the only two known locations of these things. The first being the derelict vessel your team investigated last year and the second being the site we found this current batch at. They are approximately two point eight million years old.”
“Holy shit,” Greg muttered.
“Indeed. Very ancient. Perhaps the most interesting thing is that we managed to measure an energy output when they kill their victims. It’s a little complicated, but essentially what we’ve seen is very similar to the very few amount of unstable wormholes we’ve discovered in our short history among the stars. We’ve also discovered some quantum dislocation. In simple terms, we believe that somehow, whenever they kill in the manner that they do, all flesh and blood and meat, everything that isn’t bone
, gets instantly teleported to...somewhere else. We think possibly another dimension, but it could be somewhere inside of this dimension.”
“Why? Why create something like that?” Greg replied after considering it.
“That’s a fantastic question. Until someone translates that database, which will require figuring out how to fully translate Cyr, which is still a little ways away, then I’m afraid we’ll be in the dark. And we may still be in the dark. Who knows what horrors lurk out there? What kind of technologies they might have unlocked? It could be that they need flesh and blood as a resource. Or maybe they’re just collectors? Who knows, the civilization might be so far advanced that these Shadows are just mere toys for them.”
“Now there’s an awful thought,” Greg muttered.
He came to the break room, only having to put down another pair of Harvesters and a Mutant along the way, and found the goggles among the remains of a skeleton. They were a strange, heavy thing, basically a block of metal with two pitch-black lenses stuck into it and a strap attached. He picked them up and looked them over.
After a moment, he determined that they didn’t work.
“Volker, got a problem here,” he said.
“What?”
“Your fucking magic goggles don’t actually do anything. I mean, I’m guessing these have to turn on, right? I see a little switch here...”
He sighed. “Yes. Dammit. The power must be depleted. Unfortunately, they take a very special kind of battery and we didn’t make a whole lot of them. It’s going to take me a little bit to track it down. Pray that it’s in the same building. What you need to be doing now is heading up and getting to an infirmary in the area. There’s samples of CSF, the real stuff, not the artificial stuff, it doesn’t respond to that anymore, unfortunately. By the time you get those samples to use as bait to get the thing away from you, I should have the location of the battery.”
“This just keeps getting better and better,” Greg muttered.
“Yes...keep at it.”
