Deathless (The Shadow Wars Book 12) Page 7

  “They must've set all this up in a hurry,” Drake murmured as he crossed to the workstation. He tried to boot it up. Sparks sputtered and shot out of a portion of it. “Damn!” Drake snapped, stepping back in surprise. He sighed. “Can you take a look at it?”

  “On it,” Eric replied. He set his rifle down, took a seat at the workstation and pulled out his toolkit. “What do you think they were doing out here?”

  “I dunno. Could be the Marines they sent in after the fact, or maybe soldiers from the military base. They might have fled out here with whatever they could find to establish some kind of safe zone. Obviously it didn't work. I'm hoping there's going to be at least some kind of relevant data on that terminal but it looks to be in pretty bad condition.”

  “It is,” Eric replied, getting down onto the floor and prying open one of the panels. “There might yet be hope for it, though.”

  Silence began to pass between them. Eric heard Drake shift uncomfortably elsewhere in the room. He was feeling more than uncomfortable himself in this environment.

  “So, uh, you got any family anywhere?” Drake asked.

  “Somewhere, yeah. Grandparents. I never really got know them, either set of them. Only child, so were both my parents, and they died over a decade ago in a shuttle accident.”

  “Oh...sorry.”

  “It's fine. What about you?”

  “I've got a sister, somewhere. My home life wasn't what you'd call, uh, stable. It's why Trent and I ran away. My dad got killed in some industrial accident when I was pretty young and my mom...never really recovered. She turned to some crazy ass designer drugs that pretty much leave you comatose in pleasure for days on end. My sister was the younger of us and...” He sighed. “My mom OD'ed when I was fifteen. I tried to raise my sister by myself. There wasn't much of a system in place so no one really knew. I hadn't been going to school anyway and I was working the same shit job my dad had been...I finally moved her in with friends of the family. That's when I ran away. I promised to send money back and I did.”

  “So what happened with her? What's her name?”

  “Lonnie,” he replied softly. “She was always a lot smarter than me, pretty resilient, too. I don't think she ever fully forgave me for running away, but the money I sent helped the family out and in turn helped her out. She graduated high school, managed to land herself in a good college a couple systems over, last I heard she was a computer tech running IT for a small start-up corporation that sells something or other.”

  “Last you heard?”

  “Yeah...last time we talked was, damn, five years ago at least. We're...very different people, I mean, now more than ever, you know?”

  “Why not try talking to her again?”

  “I gotta admit, I've been thinking about it lately. But...what the hell would I say to her? 'Hey sis, I fight aliens and monsters for the government now!' Obviously not that, but you get what I'm saying?” Drake replied.

  “Yeah, I get it. But, I dunno, it's worth reaching out. Maybe I'm projecting a little but if I had even one other person who had survived in my life that I'd been attached to, I'd stay in contact with them...ah-ha! There we go.”

  All at once, the workstation lit up. Eric put the panel back into place, replaced his tools and secured the kit to his suit. He got back to his feet and sat down, staring at the screen. Drake came to stand behind him.

  “Let's see what we can see,” Eric muttered as he started navigating the system.

  Right away he could tell that they weren't going to be able to pull much out of the station. It was a very simple device and obviously it hadn't been used very much. The good news, at least, was that he didn't have to sort through very much crap to get to the relevant data. There were two entries, one of them made two days ago, another made yesterday.

  He played the first one.

  A wide-eyed, sweating, terrified face appeared. From the background, it appeared that he was sitting in the very chair Eric sat in now.

  “This is Sergeant Matthew Peters...I'm trying to keep some kind of a record of what's happening out here but it's insanity. I can't even begin to describe...last night, some kind pulse, some red light, strobed through the base and I'm guessing the colony, too. I was just going to sleep and the light nearly knocked me out...”

  The screen began to fade out, turning to fuzzy static, the audio going with it.

  After a moment, Peters returned. “-veryone started going nuts and killing each other! We fought a retreat but they just wouldn't...zzt...” The image turned fuzzy again, the man's harried voice lost to the static, then reappeared once more. “-managed to establish an outpost. I've only got a dozen men with me, those unaffected by whatever the fucking eggheads cooked up over there. They've really opened Pandora's fucking Box and I don't know how the hell we're going to get out of this. I can't get in touch with anyone at the colony or get any transmissions offworld...”

  The image faded out again and this time it didn't come back.

  “Shit,” Drake muttered. “Can you fix it?”

  Eric shook his head. “No, unfortunately the data is corrupted. If I had more time and some help, maybe, but...”

  “We don't have that kind of time. Run the second log.”

  Eric brought it up, but, unfortunately, it was even more scrambled than the first one. All they could make out was screaming and gunfire and the occasional explosion. They only managed to get a single, clear image from the log and it did nothing to put their minds at ease. The image was of Sergeant Peters, screaming, several of his teeth had been broken out and his right eye socket was nothing more than a yawning bloody hole. It looked like he'd taken a direct hit from a bullet at point blank range. Then he was gone, lost to the static.

  “That's not very inspiring,” Drake muttered.

  Eric wasn't sure what to say, that last image burned into his mind now.

  “Come on, let's get out of here. There's nothing more we can learn.”

  Eric nodded, slowly rising and following Drake back outside. They got into the jeep, started it up and drove off.

  CHAPTER 07

  –Whispers–

  Greg rolled the jeep slowly to a stop as they made their final approach on the colony. Ahead of them, the exterior wall loomed. It was a good forty or fifty feet high. To Greg, it looked more like a penal colony than a support site for research staff. Had someone known something ahead of time? Or was it just this place that had made the original staff and builders extra paranoid? Either way, it was obvious that they weren't just going to walk in. But he'd suspected as much based on the schematics he'd studied up on.

  The real question was how difficult it was going to be to get in.

  “Keron, watch our back,” he said.

  “Affirmative,” he replied, standing up and then leaning against the frame of the open-roofed vehicle, his huge rifle in hand.

  Greg and Jennifer departed the jeep. They'd come to rest about ten meters from the main gate to the colony and, immediately to the left of it was the security checkpoint that housed the controls for operating said gate. Immediately, Greg could tell that it was trashed. Most of the windows were peppered with gunshots, turning them opaque and milky with dozens of impact sites and cracks. He saw a good deal of blood sprayed up against one window in particular. Not the best sign. He kept his finger on the trigger as he approached.

  With Jennifer backing him up, Greg came around to the entrance. The checkpoint itself was a low concrete structure that more resembled a bunker than anything else. Although it made his job a bit easier, he was unhappy to see that the door had been forced open. It was half into its recessed niche in the wall and the odd, pallid light that seemed to come from nowhere and everywhere spilled into the room beyond.

  “Watch my back,” he muttered as he peered cautiously in through the opening.

  Nothing good awaited him inside. It looked like a group of maniacs had gone completely psychotic within the confines of the checkpoint. When he was sure there was no one
inside, (there didn't seem to be any obvious places to hide), Greg stepped in through the half-open door and moved slowly deeper into the room. He canvased the room slowly, trying to gather details from the wanton destruction that surrounded him. The left wall was mostly made of a glass and steel grid of bulletproof windows that occupied the top half of the wall. Below this was a row of workstations that had been smashed, battered, shot and bled upon.

  The far back wall was taken up almost entirely by a bank of security monitors that were dead and blank, offering him no new information. Most of them were cracked or outright shattered as well. The final wall housed a row of broken-open gun lockers and a pair of workbenches. There was a great deal of blood. It was everywhere: on the walls, the floor, even the ceiling and certainly across all the equipment.

  But no bodies.

  Never a good sign. It always meant something truly fucked up was going on.

  Among the wreckage, however, Greg did spy a sparking security terminal tucked away into one back corner, between the monitors and workstations. It wasn't exactly untouched, but it looked intact enough to possibly still function.

  “Find anything?” Jennifer asked from the doorway.

  “I might have. Hold on.”

  Greg crossed the room, doing his best not to step in the pools of blood. The smell coming in through his vents made him especially cognizant of the stuff and he felt suddenly uncomfortable with the idea of placing his foot in it.

  It seemed almost...disrespectful.

  Getting to the terminal, he tried to turn it on. It spat a jet of blue-white sparks at him, making him jerk slightly, then the screen flickered weakly to life. Working quickly, he began navigating what he could, trying to bring up the gate controls. Unfortunately, after a few moments, he determined that it was simply out of the question to open the gate from within this bunker. Luckily, after a bit longer, he managed to discern an alternate route. When he figured it out, it almost made him smile. Almost. He turned around.

  “Got it,” he said as he crossed the checkpoint and stepped back outside. “We can't open the gate from here but there's an emergency backup switch. There's a pair of security checkpoints at the edges of the colony, about three hundred meters away in either direction. We've both got to get there and activate it simultaneously. It's a dual-lock system.”

  “That's annoying,” Jennifer muttered.

  Greg did smile now. “At this point, I think it's tradition.”

  “Tradition?”

  “I think, collectively, we at Anomalous Ops have run into about a hundred of these fucking dual or triple lock systems. They're a popular feature.”

  Jennifer just sighed.

  “All right, I'll head to one, you'll head to the other. Keron, stay here and keep watch.”

  “Affirmative,” Keron replied.

  “Let's get this over with,” Jennifer said.

  Greg turned, scanning the area, and frowned. He hadn't realized what a relief it had been to be actually inside. Even if inside was broken, dark and blood-splattered. Because it was at least better than being out here where the sun was black and the skies were dark and shot through with crimson veins and huge, dark, mountain-sized things walked off in the far distance. He stopped looking around and set his gaze firmly on the secondary checkpoint, which he could just make out as a dark lump at the end of the colony wall.

  He set off, marching through the sea of pale, brittle dirt, trying to keep his mind both alert and off of his current surroundings. Greg finally settled on thinking about his damned guilt. As much as it pained him, it felt safer than contemplating the utter madness that currently surrounded him. More than safe, it felt saner.

  With a soft sigh, he opened up a private channel with Keron.

  “Keron...”

  “Yes?”

  “I was wondering. Um. How do you...” he hesitated, wondering if he was being an idiot. Keron waited patiently as he walked the length of the security wall, gathering his thoughts. “How do you deal with all the murder in our line of work?”

  Now it was Keron's turn to be silent, marshaling his own thoughts perhaps.

  “I've been in this business of protecting humanity for decades,” he said finally. “This is what I've learned: the things that we are doing need to be done...inasmuch as anything needs to be done. We are preserving our society as a whole. When these moments of decision come upon you, in that moment, you are as good as you are, no more, no less. So all you can do is your absolute best, and then, later, you can only improve yourself so that when the next moment comes to you, the next harsh decision that must be made, you'll be better than you were before, and maybe you can get through this next situation with less death...” He paused again.

  “The universe will fall as it will fall, things will be as they will be. All we can do is to keep getting better, keep trying to make the present, and thus the future, better than the past. And to not let the past consume us.”

  Greg was silent for a long while, digesting this. It wasn't exactly the answer he had expected, or, well, maybe it was, given what little he knew about Keron. It made a certain kind of sense, and he suspected it might as close as he was going to get to a 'right' answer.

  If there even were any right answers.

  “Thanks,” he said finally.

  Keron said nothing in return. Greg tried to regain his focus. He felt at least a little bit better, and hey, the security center was just up ahead. It didn't look quite so trashed as the other one had been at least, so that was something. Another twenty steps and he was there. Hitting the open button, he saw that this one still had power. Stepping inside, he spied some signs of a struggle, but it wasn't the slaughterhouse the previous one had been.

  “I'm here,” he said to Jennifer.

  “Same,” she replied, her voice sounding somewhat faint over the radio. It sent a faint wave of unease through him.

  “Okay, let's get this over with.”

  They both found the appropriate terminal, made sure it was powered and functional and then hunted down the proper program. From there, they did a little countdown and hit it perfectly. Over the radio, Keron reported that the gate was opening.

  “Do you see anyone?” Greg asked.

  “No. No movement. No signs of life.”

  “Okay. We're on our way back.”

  Greg turned and left the security center, but as he stepped back out into the peculiar light, he was suddenly hit by the certainty that he was being watched. He turned around, half expecting to see someone or something standing beside the small building he'd just left, but there was nothing there to be seen. Slowly, he walked a little away from the wall, doing a complete three sixty. There was nothing, just Keron in the jeep off in the distance. He glanced up, thinking he'd missed something or someone standing on the wall.

  Still, nothing.

  But the feeling wouldn't abate. It was horrifying and cold and malignant. It wasn't just that he was being watched, it was that he was being watched by something that hated him, something that abhorred his very being, was offended by his very existence. He started making his way quickly back up along the wall, wanting to be in the presence of others very badly. It seemed to take forever to walk that same length of wall and the impression that something was right behind him, something furious and alien and horrid, would not go away.

  He kept glancing back over his shoulder, not the easiest thing to do in power armor, and there was always nothing there. However, he couldn't help but get the impression that there was something there, and each time he turned to look at it, it somehow shifted out of view, but it was still there all the same. It was a deeply discomforting feeling.

  Finally, he reached Keron, about the same time Jennifer did.

  “You feel that?” Keron asked.

  “I feel it. Like something's aware of us,” Jennifer replied.

  “It's not good,” Greg murmured. “Mount up. We're headed into the city. And it's about time we gave Drake an update.”

  They
all got back into the jeep. Greg activated his longer range radio. “Drake, we've reached the colony, how close are you to the base?” He waited and a cold stone of fear settled deep into his guts. “Drake, are you there?” Nothing. “Fucking shit...you gotta be kidding me.” He tried to connect back to the Raptor. “Martel, do you copy?”

  Dead silence.

  “Fuck!” Greg snapped. “Of fucking course, because what mission isn't complete without goddamned radio silence?” He began to say more, then shut up, started the jeep and began driving into the silent colony.

  * * * * *

  The colony was silent, inert, unyielding.

  And yet, not empty.

  At least, that's how Jennifer felt as they rolled in through the main gate. They drove slowly down a main street that served as the primary entryway into the colony. A sense of impending doom seemed to permeate on the air and, beneath the veneer of abrupt abandonment and desolation that saturated the colony, there was something else, a barely restrained, maddened horror that was luring them into a trap of some kind.

  Jennifer looked out over the buildings that surrounded them. She spied several two-story apartment complexes, a bar, a health clinic and a couple of diners. The most immediate and obvious thing resided directly before them.

  “Great,” Greg muttered.

  After only about ten meters, the street was choked by a snarl of crashed vehicles and wreckage from a collapsed structure. They sat in the vehicle for a long moment while Greg seemed to gather his thoughts. The feeling of being watched still hadn't abated. Jennifer found herself constantly scanning the buildings around them.

  “All right,” Greg said finally. “We need to hit the primary security center for the colony, the communications array and an emergency bunker, in that order. I'd suggest hitting the comms array first, but the security center is on the way. Come on, we'll go through that clinic over there and see if we can get around this crap.”

  “You want me to stay with the jeep?” Keron asked as Greg and Jennifer got out.