by S. A. Lusher
There were huge tubes, what looked like oxygen pumps placed in clusters and fat nodes of glistening technology, all hooked together in a mind-twisting confusion of a modern marvel. If he was right about the pumps, then this level was likely where they'd be keeping the atmospheric control and filtration system. Large stores of oxygen, carbon scrubbers and all the extra equipment necessary to make them run and keep the base swimming in an atmosphere that humans could survive in would make up this entire level.
He kept moving, crossing the catwalks, constantly scanning the area. It was a nightmare down here, he soon realized. An attack could come from anywhere. Below him, beside and above him was nothing but technology, a collection of dark niches, holes and vent shafts and shadows where anything could be hiding. Enzo hurried across the room, coming to the next door and passed through it without incident. He breathed a sigh of relief.
Next up was, of all things, a small office annex. It looked startlingly out of place amidst all the death and technology, but he supposed it would make enough sense to have people down here around the clock, maintaining everything, keeping a watchful eye on the intricate network of equipment that kept the base running. And it made more sense to give them the relative comfort of a modern office complex to do it from.
Enzo moved through the office annex, finding only eight rooms. Six offices, a break room and a bathroom. His first action, after making sure there was nothing actually in there with him, was to take another long drink of cool water from the sink. He spat several times, trying to get the lingering effects of the Slug aftertaste from his mouth. Despite the virtual tastelessness of the water, the sheer act of cleansing his mouth helped.
After he drank, he headed into the break room. The place was a mess, someone had flipped over and torn into the only couch, knocked over one of two arcade cabinets that'd been set up and smashed the screen of the second and it seemed as if someone might have killed themselves with a shotgun pointing directly up. There was a wicked nasty stain of blood and brain matter on the ceiling. Still no bodies though.
These things appeared to be thorough.
Enzo did, however, find a mini fridge. A grin split his face as he spied two cans of Vex soda and a peanut butter and jelly sandwich wrapped in plastic. He took them all out, popped the top on the first can and downed the entire thing before doing anything else. He then tore into the sandwich, not realizing how absolutely ravenous he was until actually seeing the food. It was gone in less than a minute. Enzo then downed the second can, crumpled it in his fist and tossed it into the nearby wastebasket out of habit.
Time to get to business.
Enzo moved to the nearest office, which was little more than a closet with a chair and workstation built into it. He booted up the workstation and gained access to it a moment later. Thankfully there were no passwords to screw around with. Five minutes passed, then ten, the silence only broken occasionally by some distant noise of things moving in the darkness. Enzo finally sat back, frustrated. He had a map of the area, of course the 'area' meant only this level, which was nice, but there was nothing else worthwhile.
Nothing but a bunch of meaningless reports on all the technical crap down in the dungeon he was locked in. Enzo spent a few more minutes rummaging around through the desks until he finally came across an infopad. It had a little smiley face sticker stuck on it and looked a little worn. Enzo thought it was a personal infopad, not a professional one. He was about to activate it when his radio suddenly kicked to life.
“I need your help again, Enzo.”
He sighed and pocketed the infopad.
“Why is it you only call me when you want something?” he replied, already heading for the final door in the office annex. According to the map, it would take him to the rest of the area.
“We're kind of in a shit situation. There's literally no one down there but you and these aren't situations that can wait or be brushed off,” Eve replied.
“Yeah, no one but these fucking Mutants,” Enzo muttered. “It sounds like you need me.”
Eve sighed. “Yes, I need you. Everyone left alive in this facility needs you, including you! So will you get your ass in gear and help me?”
Enzo paused for a second, then grinned. “If you say please.”
“Are you fucking kidding me? If you don't do this, you will die!”
“So be it,” he replied stubbornly.
Eve let out a sharp shout of exasperation. “Fine! Fucking please! Will you fucking please go fix the oxygen filtration system so that we all don't fucking suffocate!?”
“Yes. Was that so hard?”
“Go fuck yourself.”
She cut the link. Enzo laughed and replaced the radio. So their relationship was a little antagonistic. He could work with that. Stepping out of the office annex, he came to a broad, tall room not unlike the one he'd seen below. There were a dozen doors on the first and second floor, each one leading to different areas of the oxygen plant. The oxygen filtration system had two primary nodes, according to the map.
Luckily, they were side-by-side. The area at large was vacant, though several of the doors were open. Something about that fact made Enzo uncomfortable. He moved across the room, trying to keep his footsteps quiet. His boots seemed magnified in the vast underground chamber. It wasn't exactly quiet down here, a great deal of machinery was running, but it was little more than white noise, whispering in the background.
Before long he'd come to where he needed to be, at least he hoped. One of the primary hubs for the oxygen filtration system. He opened the door and peered in. Still nothing. The tension was beginning to get to him. He slipped in and began inspecting the equipment. Immediately, he could tell that there was a good chance he wasn't going to be able to fix this one...at least not all of it. Enzo stared at the ruined equipment. Someone seemed to have taken a machine gun to the thing in some areas, in others it looked like blunt force trauma.
There was a part of him that just wanted to keep going, but he tamped down on that part. He might be willing to risk his life on a day-to-day basis...but not from sheer laziness. Enzo pulled out the radio and hit the call button.
“Gonna need some help here, this thing is pretty fucked up,” he said.
There was a long pause. Finally, Eve responded. “Fine. You need to activate the bypass. It should be easy. In the far right corner of the room, if you're standing in the doorway, should be a maintenance hatch. Open it, go down inside, there's a big red level. Pull it.”
“You got it, boss,” Enzo said, marching across the room.
Eve sighed and killed the connection once more. He found the hatch, knelt and opened it up. The hole it led into was dark. The light from the room overhead was just good enough to show a body down there in a pool of blood. Frowning, Enzo pulled out his knife, then lowered himself into the narrow opening. He landed with a soft grunt beside the body. It was a security guard, he was glad to see. It looked like he'd been shot several times.
Probably crawled in here to die, Enzo thought.
He knelt and began patting the man down, hoping for a good find. After a minute, he had it, extracting a pair of magazines.
“Thank God-” he began, then screamed as the body shifted and a Slug that had been hiding somewhere near it squealed and leaped for him.
Enzo had good reflexes and consequently managed to bring his knife up and around in a tight arc, spearing the Slug and slamming it into the wall. Sparks shot as the tip of the blade hit the metal and dug in a few centimeters. The Slug let out a long squealing wail as it writhed around on his blade. Enzo stared at the hideous creature while it died, frowning, studying it. These things...were they made? The idea that could have naturally evolved to be able to so thoroughly overtake and subvert a species that it had likely never come into contact with previously was a bit too much for him. Something that had been designed, on the other hand...
He had to see that ship, figure out what they were doing here.
He was just too curious not to.<
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Enzo freed the corpse, then reloaded his pistol and pulled the switch. There was a sharp hum of power and the tiny room lit up. He let out a sigh of relief and climbed back up. Before heading back out into the main area, Enzo took a moment to check out the infopad he'd snagged. He sat on the floor, facing the only entrance to the room, and booted it up. Ten minutes went by while he sorted through a technician's personal logs. There weren't that many, all of them written down instead of verbally recorded. The man must've been paranoid.
Though not paranoid enough to keep his thoughts to himself.
It seemed that Syberia Station was just a much a mystery to him as it was to Enzo. More, actually, given the fact that Enzo had been let in on its secrets by Eve. The man spent all his time on this level and another several stories above, what amounted to the living quarters section for all the technical personnel that helped maintain the base. He was deeply curious about what they were keeping from him, and called those above him members of Dark Operations. Enzo frowned. He'd heard that phrase before, not just the time Eve had said it.
More than usual lately, now that he thought about it.
What exactly was Dark Ops?
He had the rough idea that they were the shadowy branch of the government that did all the things governments weren't supposed to. Assassination, illegal research, spying. All the interesting stuff. But before he'd always heard them referred to as the Office of Intelligence. That fit with what Eve had said. Lately the phrase Dark Ops had been popping up in the shadier regions of the galaxy. Was this the kind of shit they were up to nowadays? It was akin to the Black Operations of old Earth, back before they'd all united under one banner (theoretically) and headed out into space.
Enzo discarded the infopad after figuring it would give him no more data. He stood back up and headed to the doorway. Opening it up, he became immediately aware of a sound. It was a horrible, disgusting slurping noise. It reminded him of someone trying to stuck down a particularly thick milkshake through a straw. It turned his stomach over. Enzo pulled out the pistol and paused, hesitating, then stepped out.
Something was happening across the vast room, in the farther recesses that were bathed in shadows from failing lights. That's where the noises were coming from. Keeping in a low crouch, Enzo made his way slowly towards the source of the hideous sounds. Whatever it was, it was short, low to the ground. Enzo fumbled with the pistol, remembering that most of them came equipped with a flashlight on the muzzle.
He found the switch, activated it.
His stomach turned over once more at what he saw. It was a dog, he realized. A malformed dog was crouched over a body. It was almost built like a bulldog that had been genetically engineered to be much, much bigger. Its legs were thick and muscled, though its stomach was bulbous and grotesque. Strangest of all was that a thick tube was protruding from its face, directly into a corpse. And it was, apparently, sucking the corpse dry.
Upon having the light turned on it, the beast retracted the tube-tongue, turned and offered a menacing growl, far deeper than a regular dog could manage. Enzo took a step back, fear overwhelming him for a moment. The dog shot forward with a surprising speed. That got things going. Enzo aimed and fired four times in quick succession. The first two shots missed, but the second pair took the dog-thing right in the face.
Its misshapen head split apart under the twin impacts and it as crashed to the ground, its stomach bursting open. A wealth of meat and muscle and tissue spilled out onto the deckplates. Enzo began coughing violently, stumbling back.
“Fuck!” he moaned.
The smell was so horrible he nearly threw up his sandwich. Once he was far enough away, he took a few deep breaths, willing his bile back down. What had it been doing? He thought about it, keeping a watchful eye out for more. It was gathering meat in its belly, which was obviously swollen with the putrid stuff. It must have been harvesting meat for the Nests. Enzo thought that made enough sense to fit together.
So he had a new kind now.
He considered the hideous dog-thing for a moment, searching for a name. It came to him suddenly: Harvester. Fit perfectly. He hoped he wouldn't be seeing many more of the smelly, disgusting things, but doubted his luck would hold.
He activated the radio. “Okay, Eve. I'm done, I think. And I ran into a fuck-ugly dog thing down here. How do I get up?”
A pause, then, “unfortunately, the elevator that is supposed to run from the technician's living quarters to your level was taken out in all the fighting. I've managed to locate an emergency security hatch. I'm trying to hack it open, but I'm having trouble. Head that way and hopefully by the time you get there I'll be done.”
“All right,” Enzo replied.
He jogged across the room to the security station he'd seen earlier. It was the only real place of interest on this level and he'd meant to check it out anyway. Security stations had guns, or at least ammo. He opened the door and stepped in, then frowned. The trio of gun lockers in the room were open and almost empty. Sighing, Enzo hurried across the room and checked them out. No guns, but there were still a pair of magazines for the pistol he was carrying in the bottom of one of them. Enzo pocketed them, then found the hatch Eve had mentioned.
“Hey, Eve...”
“Yeah, yeah, still no luck,” she replied.
“I think I know why.”
“Why?”
“Because someone blew the damned thing open. I can get up and out. This will take me to the next level, right, not bypass it?”
“That's correct.”
“Good.” Enzo climbed up into the hatch, which led to a narrow tube ascending straight up. Nothing inside but a ladder and some red lights.
“Why?”
“Because I want a look at that spacecraft.”
“Oh...fine, I guess I'd have a look if I was down there, too. But be careful. There's more dangerous things around than the former humans and the dog creatures.”
“Like what?”
“I...oh dammit, not again.”
Once more, she was gone. Enzo sighed. He was getting sick of this.
He kept climbing.
Chapter 06
–Not Alone–
Now he was getting somewhere.
Enzo hauled himself up and out of the tube, into another security center. This one was less ruined and more just dead. Banks of flat monitors occupied the walls to the left and right, each to be manned by two personnel on rolling chairs. The monitors were dead and dark. Two of the chairs had drifted away from the desk. One was overturned, giving hint to the evacuation that must have taken place at some point earlier.
He ignored the chairs, the inert monitors and the open, empty gun lockers. All he had eyes for was the huge, glaringly white thing residing a hundred meters beyond cracked glass of the security room. Slowly, Enzo walked across the room until he came to stand before the glass. The ship. He knew right away that it was Cyr technology. Enzo had heard about the Cyr, had encountered the scant remnants of their civilization in the form of artifacts and the occasional structure across his long career. But it was damned rare.
The government and (when they could get away with it) the megacorps got their hands on Cyr technology whenever they could, squirreling it away from the rest of the galaxy, attempting to reverse engineer it, distill its secrets. Cyr tech was lightyears ahead of what Humanity had, generally. There were even rumors that Humanity's sudden ability to travel across the stars via faster-than-light engines was a result of a hidden Cyr cache of technology discovered in the Sol System back at the end of the twenty first century.
There was never anything substantial to back that claim up, and Enzo had never been particularly interested in it. What difference did it make? But he was interested in the Cyr. There was something almost ethereal about them, something otherworldly. Enzo had put up with his shoulder pain for most of his life now. All the money he made, all the doctors and neurosurgeons and specialists he saw...none had been able to help him with his phantom pa
ins. They all said there was nothing actually wrong with him, it was all in his head.
There was a small and desperate part of him that clung to the belief that Cyr tech might be able to help. It might somehow unlock his cure. Ridiculous, he knew, but it made him enjoy seeing the Cyr artifacts in the same way that adults found themselves sometimes captivated by simple things that had once been of significance during childhood. Enzo moved to the door, opened it and stepped through. He took a look around.
The Cyr ship resided in a massive cavern, the roof some three or four hundred feet overhead. Everything was lit up by brilliant, powerful arc-lights. Behind him, Enzo spied a handful of single-story structures lined up, one of them being the security center. They all looked abandoned. Ahead and beyond the ship was what appeared to be an observation platform, half an octagon of glass and steel jutting out from the rock high above, near the ceiling. It was dark and dead. He ignored this for now, turning his attention fully to the vessel.
It wasn't very large, maybe two or three times to the size of a jump ship. It was sleek and angular and glaringly white. Nothing marked the flawless skin of the craft. It reminded him of pearls, the ideal of where that phrase 'pearly whites' had come from. There were no windows. The vessel was long and narrow, coming to a tip at one end and a flat expanse at the other. That flat expanse was open, curving down into what seemed to be a cargo ramp, allowing personnel access to the interior.
That would be his point of entry.
Someone had built scaffolding around the entirety of the craft. All manner of equipment was supported by the scaffolding. Enzo saw lasers and drills and monitoring gear. It looked like they were trying everything on the vessel, which made sense. It this technology existed, it was entirely possible someone could have reverse-engineered it, or figured it out. If you didn't know how to defend against Cyr tech, you'd be fucked. Enzo studied the gear closer. It looked very powerful, the kind of stuff you could cut through a starship hull with. And yet the exterior of the smooth white vessel was entirely undamaged. Enzo was impressed.
