We thought about Cassie’s words as we continued to gear up. The Galactic Government armor was a simple yet effective affair of ceramic plating over liquid armor that spread impact when struck by a round.
Chest plate, shoulder pads, vambraces, and gloves were all fit together with interlocking sections to allow for maximum movement. All together, the gear didn’t weigh more than forty pounds.
The helmet was set with a wide visor that acted aa a heads-up display when worn. In addition to my own MK II, axe, and knife, I took a standard Galactic Government Hyperion Mark Seven. The rifle was simple yet durable. It shot laser rounds that were fed through charge packs at the base of the weapon.
I retook my seat with the rest of the crew. Chatter and discussions were still taking place around the dropship. At the moment, all I could think of was getting what shut eye I could.
As soon as we landed, we’d be searching for Rival’s contact, who would be able to unlock whatever location had been hidden in X. Whispers of doubt and all the different scenarios that could go wrong invaded my mind as I sank into my seat with eyes closed.
If I had known the horrors that waited for us in the mist, I wouldn’t have let anyone come with me.
Twenty-Two
“Roger, reaching the Swamp Lands now,” Major Valentine said so loud, it was clear she wanted everyone aboard to hear.
I roused from my short slumber. It had only been a few hours, but it was exactly what I needed to recharge my batteries. Despite the chatter aboard the dropship, I found the dull thrum of the thrusters calming.
I rubbed sleep from my eyes, stretching with a yawn.
“Good morning, Sleeping Beauty,” Cassie teased. Despite the unease I saw in her eyes, she was putting her best foot forward. “Ready to enter the belly of the beast?”
I followed her eyes toward one of the windows lined up behind our row of seats. Outside, the night sky was clear. My guess was that it was somewhere near midnight. Aided by the moon and stars, a rolling ocean of mist covered the ground below.
Nothing broke the thick, wispy matter. The fog was total, concealing the beasts my imagination promised were present. It was strange; the idea of there being monsters in the mist didn’t seem to faze me with the rest of what I had seen.
The monsters could be nothing more than mutated animals. I was willing to accept that. I had just taken on a herd of wild mutated boar after all.
“Helmet off,” Major Valentine instructed the Shadow Praetorians sitting on either side of Rival. “We need our landing coordinates.”
This time, the male Shadow Praetorian on Rival’s right pulled off his helmet.
Rival’s eyes were closed. He snored like some hibernating creature, dead to the world around it.
“Rival!” Major Valentine shouted. “Wake up!”
“No, no, I want to wear the dress,” Rival mumbled to himself, lost in whatever dream he might be in. “Oh stop, you’re pretty.”
“Rival!” Major Valentine yelled.
The Shadow Praetorian on his right slapped him across the face.
“What? Huh?” Rival blinked his eyes open, taking in his surroundings. “Oh, right. The whole Aleron Jacobs thing.”
“Heading!?” Major Valentine insisted. “I’m getting tired of asking you.”
“Well excuuuuuse me.” Rival rolled his eyes. “I was getting my beauty rest. You know it’s important to get between—”
The expression on Major Valentine’s face was enough to make Rival stop speaking altogether.
“29.9511 degrees north, 90.0715 degrees west,” Rival answered. “The last I heard, he was holed up in an area known as the French Quarter. We’ll have to search for him once we get on the ground.”
“Helmet,” Major Valentine instructed the Shadow Pretorian next to Rival before relaying the directions to the pilot over her comm channel.
“Wait, if we could just talk—”
For the second time, Rival was cut off from whatever he was going to say next by the steel dome over his head.
I almost felt sorry for the guy. If he wasn’t linked to the death of my parents, I might have. I also knew it was a tactic of the criminally insane to get people to feel sorry for them. I had known a few killers that would lull their victims into a sense of false friendship before bashing in their skulls or robbing them blind.
I felt the dropship curve toward our desired location ever so slightly.
“Gear and weapons check,” Major Valentine ordered. “We’ll be on the ground in ten.”
“You heard the major,” Sergeant Toy took over in a voice that sounded as if it were made for doling out commands. “I want your own load out, checked and rechecked, then checked again by another Titan. Extra rounds are mandatory and don’t go light on your water supply. We may be out here for a while, and I don’t want any of you drinking the swamp water. Titans?”
As one, the Shadow Praetorian unit called Titan lifted their voices. “Yes, sir!”
I took the opportunity to examine my own gear. My helmet was comfortable and made adjustments to meld to my head. The servos inside the padding of the helmet pressed against my skull to make a snug but not crushing fit.
My heads-up display worked well tracking distances for me as well as showing a circular radar grid in the lower left side of my vision. As the radar made its rounds, it pinged off members around me. They showed up as tiny white dots.
The metal recallers that looked like silver rings on my wrists were in good working order. I tested them, motioning with my hands to my weapons. Sure enough, with a twitch of my finger, as if I was beckoning to them, the axe and knife I wore at my belt flew to my waiting hands.
Out of the corners of my eyes, I could see Cassie adjusting the metal sections of her forearms while Laine opened the chamber on her Artemis 3000 then packed a smaller caliber blaster on her hip as a secondary weapon.
The dropship finally stopped its forward movement and began to descend. As we got closer to the ground, we lost the view of the clear night sky. White rolling mist covered every window now, as if the fog not only welcomed our arrival but embraced us in its wave-like arms.
“Let’s expect visibility to be minimal out there,” Sergeant Toy barked. “Stay close on the channel and watch the radar pings on your HUDs. If there’s anything out there in the mist, it should be more afraid of us than we are of it. If it’s not, it will be, arrooh!”
“Arrooh!” the Titans responded.
“Creeves and Dion will take point.” Sergeant Toy continued looking over to Major Valentine and then to Rival.
“Everyone should be aware of where he is, but I’ll be in charge of Mercer,” Major Valentine answered. “If your Titans can offer us a clear path to our objective, we can do the rest.”
“Understood, ma’am.” Sergeant Toy wore his helmet with a metallic visor that hid his eyes. He adjusted something inside that made the visor go clear so he could look his commandeering officer eye to eye. “Do you mind if I give them a little pep talk? It’s a bit of a tradition.”
“Not at all,” Major Valentine answered.
The dropship shuddered and shook for a moment as we made impact with the ground. A tremor ran up through my feet and legs.
“You remember your training? You watch the Titan’s back next to you and we’ll come home from this,” Sergeant Toy shouted in a clear voice that reverberated through the interior of the dropship. “If it’s you or them, then it’s always them first. As one!”
“As one!” the Titans in the dropship returned the cry.
“You going to do your speech too?” Cassie whispered to me. “You know, the wolf howl or the can’t-kill-our-spirit one?”
“You mean this one?” I asked, placing my right fist in the space between us. “They can take our bodies.”
“But they can never kill our spirit,” Cassie answered, rapping my knuckle with her own and holding it there.
We both looked over to Laine.
“What? I mean, I’m not a member o
f whatever it is—do you want me to? Am I allowed?” Laine asked, turning her head from me to Cassie and back again.
“We’re in this together now,” I answered.
Laine walked over with the Artemis 3000 her left hand. She placed a closed fist in the center along with my own and Cassie’s.
“We murder them all if that’s what has to be done,” Laine began. “To protect our families, the blood from our enemies will soak the ground as we dance on their remains and—”
“Wow, that’s—that’s too much,” Cassie interrupted. “Usually, Daniel just says something like, ‘they can destroy our bodies,’ then we say, ‘but they can never kill our spirit’.”
“Oh, right, right.” Laine blushed. “They can’t kill our spirit.”
The dropship’s rear hatch opened, halting any further conversation we might have had. I knew it must have been my imagination, but I felt the temperature in the dropship drop by a few degrees.
The rolling mist wasn’t complacent in its space. Slowly, it crept into the inside of the dropship like an uninvited guest tentatively approaching.
My HUD was equipped with eye-tracking technology that allowed me to switch between options. I looked over at our channel features and selected the one marked “Titan Open.”
“Man, this fog is some thick crip,” the woman sitting next to Rival said. I recognized her voice. When I looked at her back, her name popped up above her head, Creeves. “I can’t see more than a few meters in any direction.”
“We’ll figure it out,” the man sitting on Rival’s other side answered. My HUD showed me his name was Dion. “Stay close.”
There were twelve Titans, including the sergeant. With the addition of Rival, Major Valentine, and my own group, we numbered seventeen in all.
“We’ll watch Rival with you,” Cassie told the major as she aided Rival to his feet.
Major Valentine gave her a nod.
We walked with Rival in the center of Sergeant Toy’s Titans.
When I stepped off the dropship, I noticed the ground was soft, spongy even. My boots didn’t sink into the ground, neither did I get the feeling that the floor was exactly stable.
Peering into the mist told me little to nothing. With my enhanced vision, I thought I could make out broken buildings in the distance. I wasn’t sure if that was my imagination or if they in fact stood there.
The dropship closed its rear doors behind us.
Major Valentine left the pilots instructions to wait for us.
With any luck, we’d be able to get to the technician Rival knew before Aleron. Even better, we could get there long enough ahead of Aleron to set up a welcoming committee, bagging him and then recovering X in the process.
Things were never that easy, but I could wish.
We moved down a wide lane that did in fact seem like it used to be some kind of street. Here were ruins of buildings that reached up out of the mist like long-forgotten skeletons of dead giants.
I quickly realized our plan of combing the area wasn’t going to work unless we split up, and I didn’t think that was a great idea. Who knew what was in the mist? Even if it wasn’t monsters, it could be diseased insects, uninviting locals, or treacherous terrain.
It was hard to think anyone or anything could live in such horrible wet conditions, but I’d been wrong before, and I wasn’t about to lower my guard.
The only noise I could hear were the soft footfalls of those in our party and the occasional verbal exchange over the comm line. Everything else was silent as a grave. If that was because of the mist dampening the noise or there actually was no other noise was yet to be seen.
I sure as crip felt something watching me, though. My sixth sense kicked in, telling me we weren’t alone.
Easy, Daniel, I coached myself in my head. Eyes open and alert. We have enough fire power to deal with anything that comes our way, including Aleron or any kind of mutated animals.
Laine moved to walk next to me just ahead of Cassie, Rival, and the major.
Her visor was clear, giving me the ability to see her large eyes roving around the sides of the street.
“Can you sense anything?” I asked her, looking at the radar in the lower left hand corner of my HUD. Nothing changed, just the heat signatures of the seventeen members in our party. “Does it work like that? Can you reach out with your mind?”
“I can, and yes,” Laine said slowly. “There’s so much life here, it’s hard to distinguish one entity from the next.”
So much life? I repeated in my own head.
“Call me crazy, but I don’t see much of anything,” I answered, searching the area around me in a three-hundred-and-sixty-degree turn.
Sergeant Toy set his Titan up in a perimeter around Rival and our small group. All that I could see were the ghostly forms of the members of our group. Lights from the barrels of their weapon and the tops of their helmets did their best at penetrating the dark mist. The attempt was pathetic at best.
Laine reached out a hand, stopping me in my tracks.
I looked over to see her eyes squinting with concern and confusion.
“What is it?” I asked. “Is there something up ahead?”
“Tell the men to stop,” Laine nearly yelled. “Tell them to pull back.”
Twenty-Three
All I knew was that Laine had not been wrong thus far. In a situation like this where we all had something to lose, I wasn’t going to question her now.
I looked back to Major Valentine, who walked right behind us with Rival and Cassie.
“Laine senses something up ahead,” I told her. “Sergeant Toy’s men are in danger if they don’t pull back.”
Major Valentine must have come to the same decision I did.
“Sergeant,” Major Valentine said over her open channel. “Tell your scouts in the lead to pull back.”
“There’s something—something ancient, primal in a way I’ve never experienced before,” Laine said, shaking her head as she joined us. “Whatever we’re looking for isn’t in front of us. We should turn to the right or left.”
“Are you sure?” Major Valentine asked her. “What do you mean by ancient?”
“My consciousness only just pressed up against it.” Laine looked confused herself, as if she were trying to decipher some complex code. “It’s not human but old. The closest thing I can relate it to is Daniel’s wolf dog.”
“Butch?” I asked incredulously. “There are wolves here?”
“Her name is Butch?” Laine asked. “That’s a horrible name for a girl.”
“Well, it’s Lady Butch, but that’s not the point,” I answered. “How is what you felt similar to a wolf?”
“That name is not any better,” Laine said before moving on to the matter at hand. “No not wolves, but in the same way I sensed Butch was ancient from a time long past. This creature is similar.”
“You have any idea what she’s talking about?” Major Valentine asked me.
“Butch belonged to a species long extinct, Lupus, hybriodmus somethingmus. She was resurrected by manipulating DNA from her wolf ancestors. Maybe whatever Laine sensed was also brought back from the dead.”
“Here? By who?” Cassie asked out loud. I got the sense she didn’t really expect an answer.
Sergeant Toy jogged back to our location.
“I pulled them back like you ordered.” Sergeant Toy sounded like he wanted to ask more but refrained. “Any idea on which direction you’d like us to search?”
“If someone is here, they’d need shelter to survive.” I worked through the problem out loud. “If we could find an area with any kind of structures still intact, we may be able to find someone there. But in all of this fog, it’s impossible to see.”
“An elevated vantage point would let us look out into the city, but that does us no good if we can’t see more than a few meters in any given direction,” Cassie agreed.
We all looked at Rival.
I don’t think anyone wanted to hear the mad
man talk again, but if he had any kind of information that would lead us to the technician, we needed it.
Major Valentine reluctantly removed the helmet from Rival once more.
Rival blinked, looking around him at the rolling fog in every direction. He licked at the moisture in the air as if it held a unique flavor he enjoyed. He stopped suddenly, eyeing us all with hurt.
“Hey, how come I’m the only one without a helmet now?” Rival asked as if his feelings were actually injured.
“Directions?” Major Valentine asked him.
“I don’t know.” Rival shrugged, squinting into the mist. “I only know the last time I had tabs on the technician, he was here. I’ve never been crazy enough to actually travel to the Swamp Lands. It’s scary here.”
“How did you track him?” I asked. “How did you know he was here?”
“After I was done torturing him for information, I tagged him with a tracking chip in case I needed anything else from him,” Rival said as if it was the most normal thing in the world to torture then tag a human being like some kind of animal. “You know, catch and release.”
“Maybe we can use that same chip to track him now,” Cassie interjected.
“Maybe. It’s been a long time since I checked to see if the tracking chip still worked.” Rival shrugged. “I’ve been in Hole for a decade now.”
“You’ve been in the Hole for four years,” Major Valentine corrected.
“That’s what I said,” Rival answered. “I can give you the tracking information if that helps. I implanted it in his rear end while he was knocked out then stitched him up. It should still be there.”
We all looked at one another.
“What?” Rival asked. “It seemed funny at the time.”
“Give me a second with him to see if I can pull up the tracking chip,” Cassie said, looking down at her left forearm. The vambrace-like section of her arm showed a holographic screen that popped up in the air in front of her.
Nemesis: A Near Future Thriller (Forsaken Mercenary Book 6) Page 14
