by Joshua James
Ada hadn’t expected Francesca to open up so much. Since she’d saved the teen on Sanctuary Station-33, she’d never heard her say more than two sentences.
“So your family, you ran?” asked Ada, even though she knew the answer.
“We had to. First we made our way off-planet to Lunar. The moon, it was…hard. Life there is not for people like my dad. He was gentle, you know? Not soft, but not callous. With that said, he always protected us, so he took us away from the moon. We went to Mars.”
“Mars?” Tomas asked in surprise, echoing Ada’s own thoughts. “There’s only mining settlements there. If your father was, uh, not callous, how did he manage to do that sort of work?”
Ada kept looking down to make sure she didn’t step on something more unsavory than what her boots were already steeped in.
“He didn’t,” Francesca said. “He offered a couple of independent mine owners the opportunity to better feed their men with his enhanced maize. His thinking was that so far from home, his presence would go under the radar and he could make enough credits for us to leave and go to a more hospitable planet. A nicer one.”
“But that’s not the way it went,” Ada said.
“No, no it’s not.”
“It stinks down here!” Ace barked, interrupting both his argument with Ben and the discussion with Francesca. “How long do we have to—”
His complaint was interrupted, in turn, by a loud rumbling noise that reverberated through the tunnel. Pieces of the sewer ceiling crumbled down. Nothing huge, but enough to notice.
“What was that?” Ben asked.
There was another loud rumble, and another. Then, even under the streets, under the city, the group heard sirens.
“I know that sound,” LeFay said as she stopped and cupped her ear upwards. “That siren. They only play that in case of emergencies.”
“Maybe because there’s a hell of a big emergency going out there that we just escaped from,” Tomas said.
“No. If that were the case, they would’ve sounded it earlier. This is something else.”
Ben looked around and locked eyes with Ada. She hadn’t known him long, but she knew when somebody was thinking of doing something stupid.
There was a loud explosion up above. It dislodged a large chunk of stone from the sewer ceiling. Vassar-1 might be a technological marvel, but the materials that made up the city infrastructure hadn’t changed much in untold years.
The rock barely missed LeFay, who calmly sidestepped it with perfect timing.
Ace frowned. “How did you do that?”
“Let’s keep moving,” Ben said. “We’ll worry about what that is up there once we climb out of this literal shit.”
After a few minutes of trudging in silence, with occasional rumblings continuing to reverberate through the sewer, a light suddenly appeared in the darkness just ahead of them.
It was an open manhole.
Then something, or someone, fell through.
Six
Ben didn’t trust LeFay. Her relationship with the woman he now knew as Clarissa Moreno, an operative of the powerful AIC Intelligence Agency, meant she was unreliable at best.
He was still struggling to understand how he’d been so wrong about Moreno. In the short time that he’d known her and Ace, he’d come to trust her implicitly.
He did trust Ada. He was growing to think of her as the only person he could trust.
He was certain that LeFay was leading them into a trap. He wanted desperately to share his concerns with Ada, but the chance hadn’t come yet. He was just figuring out an excuse to split the group up when the figure dropped through the manhole cover.
“Who’s there?” Ben called.
The person who had fallen through the manhole—and it was a person, not a body or a bomb as he’d first feared—managed to splash down in the murky water without badly injuring themselves, at least as far as he could tell.
LeFay tossed her blue flare in the stranger’s direction.
The flare lit up a middle-aged woman who looked to be in good physical shape, but Ben saw now that he was wrong about her condition. She was clearly hurt, although he wasn’t sure the fall had done it. Her eyes were wide and panicked, the whites clearly visible in the flare light, but not scared.
She picked up the flare and ran towards the group.
“Stop,” Ben ordered.
“Don’t come any further!” warned Tomas.
He and Ada pointed their weapon at the mystery woman, as did Ace, who was closer and more likely to shoot first and ask questions never.
LeFay crossed her arms and cocked her head. Francesca lagged back behind everyone.
“Easy,” Ben murmured to Ace. “I don’t see a weapon.”
“Easy yourself,” he hissed back.
“Shoot me if you want, but I’m not stopping!” yelled the mystery woman as she kept coming.
“Don’t mind if I do,” Ace shouted back. But he didn’t move his finger to the trigger of his rifle.
Ben was about to try and end the stalemate when a loud screech reverberated through the sewers. He knew the sound instantly, and it made his blood run cold.
“No way,” Ace said, his voice suddenly high-pitched. “No damn way.”
“You gotta be kidding me,” Tomas said.
“How is this possible, man?” Ace said, shaking his head. He looked like he might cry.
Of course, the creatures had had no intention on stopping at Sanctuary Station-33. Ben must have felt that in his gut the moment they escaped that floating morgue, but the dawning certainty that the nightmare had followed them from space still made him want to puke.
“Bastards,” Ada breathed. Ben found her grim, determined look reassuring.
Two Shapeless with the twisted visages of AIC soldiers dropped down through the open manhole.
“Friends of yours?” LeFay asked.
The creatures screeched and growled as they manipulated their bodies, their arms twisting into sharp, curving blades that they waved menacingly.
The mystery woman, practically forgotten, ran past Ben and then the rest of the group. A bolt of adrenaline shot through Ben as he found his own rifle at his shoulder without even thinking about it.
He sighted on the nearest of the two Shapeless and fired. “Die, bastard.”
But it didn’t die, of course, even as the rest of the group unloaded on the Shapeless monsters with their rifles.
“Fall back,” Ben shouted. He knew their weapons would do nothing more than slow the Shapeless down. They all did.
“We need to get out of here,” Ada barked.
She was backing up now, along with Tomas. Ace had given up all pretense of firing behind him, and was just hustling to keep up with the mystery woman, who still hadn’t slowed.
“What in the holy hell are these things?” asked LeFay. For the first time since Ben had met her, she looked unnerved. Considering the Shapeless were taking bullet after bullet and not going down, Ben could understand why.
“You don’t want to know,” he said. “Just run!”
LeFay finally turned as Ben grabbed her arm. She shook it off and started sprinting faster than he could hope to keep up with. She scooped up Francesca, who was lagging behind the others, leaving Ben at the rear of the group.
“Run!” yelled Ada, as if Ben wasn’t already doing that.
But where? We got nothing. We weren’t ready for this.
Seven
Ada racked her brain, trying to think of some way to fight the Shapeless without welding torches, without flamethrowers, without cold-cast guns.
Learning fast, the Shapeless started dodging the bullets as best they could. Sometimes they moved out of the way. Other times, they simply morphed their bodies to avoid getting hit. The bullets that missed ricocheted off the walls of the sewer. Some hit the pipes that ran along the ceiling.
The pipes!
Ada hadn’t paid them any attention when they’d first entered the sewer. But she did now.<
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There were several pipes and wires that lined the tunnel ceiling. One of them, colored a dull red that set it off from the others, had a universal symbol for a gas line plastered on it at regular intervals. At least, she thought that was the symbol. She couldn’t tell for sure. The light was too weak, and the pipes too old and encrusted. At this point, she’d take anything that required a hazard symbol. She just had to hope it was a gas line and not a toxic liquid.
Who was she kidding? The toxic liquid was what they were splashing through right now.
Ada aimed at the pipe just ahead of the advancing Shapeless. Not trusting her aim as she ran backwards with her heart pounding, she fired off a stream of super-heated bullets.
The pipeline instantly erupted right over the heads of the Shapeless, engulfing them in flames.
“Yes! Eat that, assholes!” she bellowed.
Then the rest of the line up and down the sewer exploded as well, mixing with the toxic atmosphere inside the sewer and practically igniting the air all around them.
An ever-growing ball of flames roared in the group’s direction.
“Shit,” Ada said, spinning around. “Shit, shit, shit.”
There was nowhere to go but down into the grey water, into the human waste. “Get down,” she screamed at the others.
“What the shit!” was the last thing she heard further down the sewer before diving into a little over a foot of raw sewage.
While face-down in the sewage, Ada felt an intense heat on the parts of her back that hadn’t been covered by water. She heard muffled screeches and tried her best not to open her eyes, inhale through her nose, or take in any of the filthy waste.
Once the intensity of the heat died down, Ada got up. Before she could call out to check on the others, she heard Ace screaming curses up at the universe and everything in it.
“They’re all right,” Ben said. Ada hadn’t realized that he’d stayed back with her while the rest of the group had fled further up the tube.
“We’re not all right!” Ace barked. “You just tried to blow us up.”
“She didn’t just try,” LeFay said. She picked something unsavory off her shoulder. They were all covered in shit from head to toe.
Ben slipped past Ada and approached a still-smoldering heap of charred flesh that lay spread out against one of the sewer walls. It looked like someone had thrown a giant tomato against a wall, then blowtorched it.
He poured soiled water out of his rifle’s barrel. “Not a fan of the afterparty, but it got the job done.”
“Seemed smart in the moment,” Ada said. “Didn’t really think it through.”
Ben turned around. “Saved our asses,” he said. “We’d be dead if it weren’t for you.”
Ada waited for the other shoe to drop. “Okay,” she said at last, when she realized there wasn’t some openly condescending remark coming, and then decided maybe she’d missed it. “You don’t have to sound so surprised about it.”
“I’m not,” Ben said, shaking his head in wonder. “I’m really not.”
Ada heard someone throw up behind her. She turned to see Francesca bent over.
“You okay?” Ada asked as she rushed over to help her up.
“No,” Francesca said. “I… I swallowed water.” She threw up again.
Ada helped hold her hair back. Poor thing, she thought. This was a hell nobody deserved.
“Almost smells as bad as that old farm,” Tomas said.
Ada was about to wave him away. There were times for jokes, and this wasn’t one of them. But before she could, she heard Francesca crack up laughing.
“Actually, it’s worse,” the teen said. “But still better than that armpit you lived in.”
“Hey,” Ben said, looking back at the group. “I think we’ve got a problem here.” He was closely examining the charred Shapeless remains on the sewer wall.
Tomas started to turn, but Ada indicated he should stay with Francesca. The two of them seemed to have a connection. Instead, she walked over to join Ben. “What is it?” she asked.
“Look at this here,” he said, pointing at the wall.
“What?”
“We only got one of them,” Ben said.
“What?”
“Look.” He nodded to part of the stain that slipped down below the waterline. “One got fried. But one went … well.”
“In the water,” Ada realized with a shock. “But then where—”
Francesca’s scream pierced the silence.
Eight
For Ada, time froze. Her mind raced, but her body couldn’t seem to move. Terrible things could do that in a moment. It just happened too fast.
The alien spike exploded out of the sewage under Francesca and impaled her through the chest, exploding out of her back and ripping half her spinal column with it. Tomas jerked backwards in shock as the teen was lifted off the ground and slammed upward against the sewer ceiling.
The Shapeless rose up out of the sewage, spreading its body in every direction, almost skewering LeFay and Ace in the process. They, like Tomas, stumbled backwards.
The creature screeched out in pain, half of its body crispy and burnt. By all appearances it was a gravely-injured animal, cornered, lashing out. Francesca’s blood flowed down its outstretched limb, still pinned to the concrete ceiling.
Finally, time came unstuck for Ada. She felt rage propel her forward.
“You son of a bitch!” she screamed, unloading everything she had at the Shapeless monster. One by one, Tomas, Ace, and Ben followed suit.
The Shapeless dropped Francesca’s lifeless body to the sewer floor and swung its limbs around wildly. Ada could see now that it was badly burnt. It couldn’t live long like that, she thought, and she wanted to be the one to kill it.
She bore down on the open wounds she saw, firing again and again at it. “Die, you bastard thing, die!”
LeFay tackled Ada a moment before one of its wildly-swinging limbs sliced through the air where she’d been standing.
“Get off me!” she snarled at LeFay.
“With pleasure,” LeFay said, standing. But then she backhanded Ada and sent her sprawling backwards.
Ada rolled over and got to her feet just as LeFay took out a small pistol-sized grenade launcher from—well, it wasn’t exactly clear where she’d gotten it. She fired one round at the ceiling above the Shapeless creature.
Whatever the charges she fired were, they were powerful. Either that, or the crumbling sewer was even less stable than Ada thought. It was probably a little bit of both, she decided.
Large chunks of the sewer ceiling fell on the Shapeless creature, immediately silencing it. LeFay calmly opened up her grenade launcher and threw away the empty cartridge. She then loaded another one. “Back up, boys and girls,” she said.
Ada crawled over to Francesca’s body and dragged it clear with the help of Ace, who kept cursing the universe under his breath. Ben and Tomas, who’d joined in the initial barrage of fire on the alien, also helped.
“Now, let’s make sure you stay asleep,” LeFay said. She fired another grenade into the pile of rubble, then spun around. Sewage and rock flew up behind her as she walked away.
Ada fell down to her knees next to Francesca and cradled her head. She was gone. The only thing that brought Ada any comfort was the thought that the teen was with her family now.
“Goddammit,” Ben said, shaking his head and slamming his rifle down. It slid down the rock face and stopped just above the water. “I’m sorry, Ada.”
“What the hell are those things doing here?” Ace barked.
“And what exactly are those things?” asked LeFay. She loaded another grenade round.
“Death,” answered Ada in a quiet voice.
“We don’t know,” said Tomas.
Ada felt Ben put his hand gently on her shoulder. She felt a sudden violent urge to shrug it off, but resisted it. She was just looking for something or someone to lash out at. It was the damn aliens she should hate.<
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“It’s … I’m sorry,” Ben said again. Ada could tell he wanted to say more, but for once he held his tongue.
Ada felt hot tears on her cheeks as she cradled Francesca. She deserved better. They all deserved better. She seethed as she sniffed back the bitter tears. These damn aliens are going to pay.
“LeFay, is that you?” The mysterious woman from earlier came walking back through the darkness to the group.
Ada had honestly forgotten about the woman. She’d assumed she’d just kept running.
“Madam Director,” LeFay said. A smirk grew on her face, but her movements looked guarded to Ada. She didn’t trust this woman. “Fancy meeting you here.”
“I’m sorry, who the hell is this woman?” Ace snapped. For once, Ada was glad for his short temper. She wanted a little of his unfocused hatred at the world.
“Meet AIC Intelligence Director Heather Engano,” LeFay said. “The top know-it-all on Vassar-1.”
Engano frowned at LeFay. “And you’re the top pain in my ass. Or were.”
LeFay crossed her arms. “I know you’re used to spending your days knee-deep in shit, Director, but it’s typically a bit more … abstract.”
Engano was ignoring LeFay and scanning the group. She stopped on Ben’s face, then squinted and took a couple more steps. “I know you. You’re …” Her eyes grew wide. “You’re Saito’s son.”
She looked at LeFay for confirmation. “Is it?”
“It’s him,” LeFay nodded.
“I am,” Ben furrowed his brow. “How did you know that?”
“Unbelievable,” Engano said under her breath. “To meet you, of all people, down here in the sewers.”
“Which you still haven’t explained your presence in,” said LeFay. “Just a casual dip?”
“Don’t worry about it, tinkerer,” Engano said dismissively. “Anyway, Ben—may I call you Ben?” She didn’t wait for an answer. “I know everything my agents are up to. That includes who they’re running with. Agent Moreno told me all about you, son of the great Captain Lee Saito, commander of the Atlas. The same goddamn Atlas that is, at this very moment, reducing this planet and city to ash.” She paused. “One of three, actually. And when the hell did that happen?”
