Absolute Zero (The Shadow Wars Book 4) (19 page)

He activated the grenade, threw it and dropped the rest of the way. Landing with a grunt, he barely managed to get free before a series of explosions shook the area, making the lights flicker madly. As the tremors died down, Trent joined the others further down the corridor.

“Almost done,” Drake said as they set off towards Research Two.

“Yeah, but I get the feeling this isn't going to be anywhere near easy,” Trent replied.

Drake laughed. “It never is.”

Chapter 16

–
The Cold
–

“Son of a
bitch
,” Trent snapped as he stopped.

He'd stopped so abruptly that Drake walked into him.

“What-oh,” Drake said as he came around him and got a good look at what was irking him so. The others gathered behind them. They'd come to the forked corridor that led to both Research One and Two. The corridor that led to Two had collapsed.

“You've got to be shitting me,” Trevor said.

“Is there any other way to get to Research Two down here?” Trent asked.

Trevor shook his head. “No. This was it. We need to go up through Research One now and take the tram to Two.”

Trent heaved a sigh. “Fine, whatever. Sooner the better. Let's get going.”

He turned and began heading down the corridor. The others followed silently. For a long moment, they walked in silence, which was broken only by the dark hum of energy flowing through the base and their quiet footfalls. Trent listened to the base as he walked. He often found that if he listened, his environment talked to him.

It had something to do with a life of violence; especially one lived by a man who took the violence and twisted it to his will, bent it to his own accord, honed it finely for use in a universe that seemed to care little, if at all, for those inhabiting it. Trent listened, heeded the advice of his environment around him, and in return, he got to live when others didn't. Because not everyone listened, and even those that did weren't always lucky.

So when he stepped into the next room, another heat exchange, Trent looked around, saw nothing and was about to give the all-clear. Something made him look up. He barely managed to throw himself out of the way as the Fiend dropped from the ceiling directly towards him. It hit the ground where he'd been standing and he knew, as he crashed to the ground, that if he hadn't looked up, if he hadn't moved, his head would have gone right into its chest hole.

The others opened fire and put a quick end to the nasty thing.

“You know,” Gideon said as Drake helped Trent up off the floor, “I think that of everything we've encountered, this thing is the creepiest. I mean...just look at this fucking thing. Those giant hairs in the hole, no head, all that dark, bristle skin...
damn
I hate these things.”

“You'll get no argument from me,” Trent replied.

They moved through the heat exchange, more on edge than ever. After another few moments, Trent finally managed to locate the first ladder that would bring them up to the surface level. He went first, as always. Trent climbed up, popped the hatch and looked around. A small, empty room, lit by the soft ambient Cyr glow, awaited his inspection. Seeing nothing hiding anywhere in the room, he hauled himself up and out, then helped the others.

“Where to now?” he asked.

Trevor shrugged. “I'll need a terminal to figure out the best route.”

Trent sighed and opened the only door in the room. Beyond was a vast corridor, and it seemed to Trent, as he stepped out, that all of their meddling in Dark Ops' affairs had finally done some serious damage. A dozen black-armored corpses littered the ground. They had all had their brains scooped out of their skulls. A few black, lizard-like Harvester corpses were mixed in, as well as a pair of Fiends and a Bugbear body.

“Damn,” Gideon murmured.

“Maybe they wiped each other out,” Trent said hopefully.

Then a sustained, staccato burst of machine gun fire sounded somewhere else in the facility. More guns added to the discordant symphony. Something shrieked wildly. Then the eruption of a grenade. Trent sighed.

“Guess it's too much to hope for,” he murmured.

They checked out the other doors in the corridor. They mostly led to empty rooms, but one finally turned up a terminal that, again, looked extremely out of place in the Cyr structure. Trevor hurried over to it and booted it up. A few moments passed, the mercenaries listening to the distant sounds, then Trevor made a small noise of success.

“Got it,” he said.

Trent listened to him explain the route through Research One, made sure he had it locked in his head, then shouldered his rifle and got ready. He stepped back out into the corridor, the others following him, and they set off.

Time passed in bloody fragments.

The way ahead was riddled with death and danger. They ran into a clutch of Dark Ops troopers and Trent kicked things off with a three-round burst that shattered the faceplate of one of the troops in spray of glass and blood.

Everything became a bit of a red blur from there. They put down half a dozen black-armored troops, then immediately found themselves hip-deep in Harvesters in the next corridor. Trent emptied his magazine, reloaded and emptied that next one. He found a small cache of grenades among the corpses and tossed them around, spraying alien blood along the corridor walls. When the last Harvester fell, Trent and his squad pushed on into the next room and found a small army of Fiends waiting for them.

Trent's skin crawled as he started putting the creatures down.

It went on like that for some time. Dark Ops seemed to have underestimated how difficult taking control of the facility would be. By the time they hit the tram station, Trent had had to abandon his rifle after being forced to use it as a club and snag a new one from a dead trooper. As he and the others climbed onto the tram, he noticed how they were all dripping multi-colored blood and had a few more dents in their armor.

“Damn,” he said, collapsing into a seat as Sharpe took her place at the head of the tram, just like she had before, and got it going.

“You can say that again,” Gideon agreed, sitting down heavily.

“Now that's what I call a fight,” Drake said.

“That sucked,” Trevor replied. “I'm not even close to what you'd call a warrior.”

“You're not doing too bad for yourself. At least you're still alive and you've still got all your parts and pieces attached,” Drake said.

“Yeah, maybe,” Trevor murmured unhappily.

The tram came to life, heading through its tunnel to Research Two. Trent didn't want to think, deciding instead to just let his mind sit in the dark for a while. He took that downtime to catch his breath, wanting to take off his helmet and massage his temples. A headache, low and dull and pounding, was working its way up his skull, making a slow burn towards genuine pain. Everything ached. His muscles burned from use, his joints hurt. There were a million tiny bruises and cuts and scrapes and burns across the topography of his skin.

Nobody spoke the rest of the way there.

Trent was beginning to nod off when the tram came to a halt in the next station. He blinked several times, shook his head and stood up. The others followed him out of the tram and into the station. It was even worse over in Research Two.

“Shit, how far?” Trent asked, staring at the bodies, the blood, the spent shell casings.

“Not far, luckily. There's a corridor just beyond that door that leads to the garage. From there, we just need to take some vehicles over. It's not much of a drive,” Trevor replied.

Trent headed over to the door he'd indicated and opened it up. There was, indeed, a corridor, a long one, waiting for them. Unfortunately, it was filled to bursting with troopers and insidious monsters engaged in an all out war.

“Let's move it!” Trent shouted.

They plunged into the hectic chaos.

Trent sighted a Dark Ops troop and took a shot at his neck, barely had time to see the bullets tear through the thin lining there and create a geyser of blood before turning his sights on a Harvester that was coming his way and shooting the back of its head out by putting a trio of bullets in its gaping maw. Even as it dropped, he sighted up a Spitter, crawling along the wall, and shot it until it sprayed blood across the wall and crashed to the ground.

He heard the others behind him, firing almost continuously, taking down anything that came close enough. Blood flew and bodies fell. They stuck to one wall, not shooting as often as they could, trying to keep to the sidelines and let the hostiles tear each other apart. Trent was glad for the distraction, as he was pretty sure that if any one side were to gain the upper hand, he and his meager band of survivors wouldn't stand a chance.

An age passed and an era went by it seemed, but they made it to the garage. Trent surveyed the area and saw that it was a nasty, bloody mess. But he laid eyes on a small collection of black jeeps across the way and felt a bit of relief lighten the burden of the past several hours. At least
that
part of the mission had gone right.

“Let's go! Haul ass!” he called, rallying the others.

There were fewer Dark Ops troops and alien mutations in the garage, but they were still fighting just as fiercely. They spent more magazines and bullets as they hurried across the expansive garage, over curious stains and spilled tools and spare parts, and in exchange they received several dead hostiles. Trent hit the clutch of jeeps first and turned around, offering cover fire for the others. They approached rapidly, narrowly dodging bullets and sometimes not.

“Drake, take Gideon and Trevor. I'll open up the door and follow you with Sharpe in a second jeep!” Trent shouted.

“Got it,” Drake replied, tearing open the driver's side door of the nearest jeep and getting in. The others followed, disappearing into the black vehicle.

Trent hurried over to the controls, found the one that opened the nearest garage-style door and hit it. As soon as the door began opening, the room was immediately filled with the howling shrieks of the planet's winds. Snow blew in and ice began to form around the edges of the doorway. Trent abandoned the terminal as soon as he saw that the door was going to keep opening. He hurried back to another jeep, passing Drake's vehicle on the way out, and opened the door.

“Come on!” he shouted.

Sharpe had gotten into a shooting match with a trio of Dark Ops troops. She glanced back at him, then tossed a grenade towards the troops and rushed to the jeep. Trent got into the driver's seat, Sharpe in the passenger's and they shut and locked the doors. Starting up the engine, Trent gunned it, heading out into the freezing whiteout.

At first, Trent had no idea how they were going to get to where they needed to go. Then he began to notice that the jeep came with several nice features. For one, the windshield was heated on the outside, a nice de-icing system that fought the continual build up. The second thing he noticed was a Head's Up Display had been overlaid across the inside of the windshield, giving him a nice guide to the nearest structure: Research Three, which was a little over a hundred meters away. The numbers started counting down as he drove.

For a long while, there was silence. Save for the brief check-in over the radio by Drake, nobody had much of anything to say. Trent glanced briefly at Sharpe, who sat in her seat, which was just barely big enough to hold her. He knew how she felt, they had basically the same body type and size. He wanted to say something to her, but he wasn't sure what, so he just stared ahead, kept on driving and held his peace.

Things went well, and the counter had fallen below twenty meters when, abruptly, it all went to hell. After so much white, blurry snowfall, the sudden appearance of something large and dark startled Trent so much that he couldn't react to it. The jeep smashed directly into the thing, it might have been a Bugbear, that's what its shape and size suggested to Trent, but it didn't matter because suddenly the jeep had turned and was rolling.

It kept going, the world turning to hazy, painful chaos, twisting and turning, nothing but white and the interior of the jeep, bits and pieces of black metal coming off outside the windshield, which had become cracked and smeared with blood. It kept going, making Trent dizzy, his head banging against the inside of his helmet several times.

Then, it was over.

There was nothing but the shrieking of the winds as it filtered into the vehicle. They had landed upside down. Trent groaned and began moving his limbs experimentally. Nothing seemed broken, so he hit the seat belt release and then groaned again as he fell onto his head, then his back, on the roof of the jeep, which now served as its floor.

“Sharpe, you dead?” he asked.

There was a second thump as she hit her own release. “Not yet,” she said.

Trent managed to get up on his hands and knees, but there wasn't much room to maneuver. The front windshield had been broken, he realized, not just cracked, in all the chaos. He began crawling out into the snow.

“Drake,” he said as he headed into the whiteout. “Drake, we crashed. We hit something.”

There was no response. Not even static. A moment later, he and Sharpe stood a little bit in front of the ruined jeep, which was smoking now. Sharpe tried her radio as well, but there was nothing awaiting them save for dead silence.