Absolute Zero (The Shadow Wars Book 4) (20 page)

“Fuck, now what?” Trent asked.

“There,” Sharpe replied, pointing to what looked like a small, dark structure a little ways ahead of them. “We need to get there.”

Trent knew that she was right. Already, he was beginning to freeze, to feel the cold seeping in through his armor, no matter how high he turned up the thermal units. They set off, the snow knee-deep and hard to kick through. The storm was in full blast now, whiteout conditions, like being inside of a ping-pong ball.

By the time they managed to reach the dark shape, which solidified into a one-story, one-room shack, Trent was shivering, trembling with the cold. Sharpe got there first, hit the activation button and waited for the door to open. It did, a little bit, then it stopped. She sighed, slipped her fingers in through the crack and began pulling. Reluctantly, inch by inch, the door opened up. She went in and Trent hurried to do so as well, right behind her.

Now that it had been forced open, clearing what must have been ice from its interior, the door closed easily enough. The interior of the tiny building wasn't warm by any stretch of the imagination, but it wouldn't kill them.

“What is this place?” Trent asked, looking around. There was just one room with a mini-fridge, a cot and a couple of crates of supplies. They had all been raided and emptied out.

“Emergency shelter I imagine. Look.” Sharpe pointed.

Trent spied a hatch in the ground. “Think it leads to Research Three?” he asked.

“Probably. If it isn't collapsed. It's either that, or we brave the storm, which is almost certain death,” Sharpe replied.

“Well, better get to it then,” Trent said.

Sharpe hesitated. She looked at him, her eyes unreadable as always, hidden behind the black, opaque lenses. Despite this, Trent understood what that gaze conveyed. Sharpe was tired, this whole thing had taken a lot out of her, and maybe she needed five minutes to get her breath back. She just didn't want to say so.

So Trent said it instead. “On second thought, let's relax here for a minute. I need to wait for the world to stop spinning.”

Sharpe nodded, offering no comment. She walked to a wall, put her back to it and slid down into a sitting position. Trent moved on the other side of the room, directly opposite her, and repeated the action. They sat like that for a long moment, staring at each other. Trent felt like saying something again, so this time, he did.

“Would you sleep with me?”

“What, now? Because I don't think that cot would support our weight,” Sharpe replied.

Trent laughed. “No, I mean, well...it's tempting, no, no time. But I mean, if we met under different circumstances, like at a bar or something, and I asked you to come back to my cabin?”

“I'd invite you back to mine. I'm not the kind of woman who waits to be asked,” Sharpe replied.

“No, I guess you're not.”

A moment of uncomfortable silence passed.

“You'd really want to sleep with me?” she asked finally. Her voice was still its usual titanium-clad self, a voice that spoke of grim determination and brooked no argument, but there was a crack there, a small one, and through it showed something Sharpe probably never showed to anyone, probably not even to herself anymore: uncertainty.

“Yeah, of course,” Trent replied.

“The whole, six foot five, built like a bodybuilder, could kick your ass in a fight, implants over her eyes thing doesn't turn you soft?” she asked.

Trent laughed again, louder this time. “No, the opposite, actually. I mean, I go for my share of the 'pretty' girls, although I prefer merc girls or Marine girls. Tough chicks with tats and muscles. I prefer my women a little trashy...not that you're trashy.”

This time it was Sharpe who laughed. “I used to be, I guess. Used to hang out in bars and night clubs, hunting for guys. When I was growing up, I was pretty awkward. I crashed headlong into puberty and that was it. I got big, real big, and I always seemed to be interested in 'boy' stuff, as my friends called it. A lot of people thought I was a lesbian, but I always knew it was guys that got me wet. I just stopped giving a shit what people thought, well, for the most part. I gave up trying to dress 'pretty' and started lifting weights.

“Got onto whatever sports teams I could. I had a thing for guns, got real good at shooting. Being a mercenary seemed kind of like the right fit for me. I signed on with an outfit when I was nineteen. I had pretty much given up on guys. I was sure I couldn't even get a mercy lay. I think I scared their dicks.” Here, she laughed again.

“Too bad we couldn't have met back in the day, we might have had something,” Trent said.

“Yeah, I think you're right. After I joined up with the mercs, I realized that there was a whole other world. There were guys out there who got turned on by how hard a woman could hit or how well she could shoot a gun. I started cruising bars, night clubs, whatever. I started looking at men like most men look at women: notch on the belt. It kind of felt like a victory, every time I went to bed with one. It was like, 'you guys wouldn't give me the time of day back then, but now here you are, in my bed, giving me a good time', you know? Kind of petty, I know, but I don't really give a fuck.”

“So why'd you join up with a corporation?” Trent asked. “Seems like the mercenary life suited you really well.”

“It did, but...I don't know, things kind of rang hollow after a decade of cruising the galaxy. I found a guy, got serious, tried to get pregnant, didn't work. Some medical thing, I don't want to go into it. We wanted to build a life together, but then he died. Some asshole with a grudge showed up, killed him. I killed
him
after that, and all his friends, and the mercenary gang he was working with. I went to fucking war, and I killed them all.” She said this without emotion, without guilt, without anything really.

It was like she was reading off a script.

“Fuck,” Trent said after a moment.

Sharpe shrugged. “Yeah. Things seemed ever more hollow after that. I had always heard about the megacorps, how they offered lives to people. Not just benefits, but a sense of meaning, of belonging. So I decided 'what the fuck?' and I signed up. Rose in the ranks, got some implants. Started out as security, and within five years, I was Sergio's bodyguard. I think he was afraid of me, but he trusted me at least.”

“Did you ever...”

“With Sergio? No, he was one of those guys who went limp at the sight of me.” She shrugged again.

“If we make it outta here...want to hit up a bar?”

Sharpe grinned. “Hell yeah.” She stood. “Come on, let's get going. The others are going to think we're dead.”

Trent nodded and stood as well, feeling better than he had in a while. They moved over to the hatch, opened it and climbed down.

Chapter 17

–
The Core
–

Trent hopped off the ladder and looked around, automatically sidestepping to make room for Sharpe. They'd come to a similarly styled underground tunnel as all the others they'd spent the past however long down in. The only difference being that this one ended abruptly behind him and seemed to be extremely barren. Where the other tunnels all supported heat exchanges or piping or power distribution, this was just a tunnel.

“Come on,” Trent murmured, making his way down it.

It extended a ways in the same direction, a couple dozen meters, and he couldn't see anything in there with him. The lighting was decent, at least. Trent heard the reassuring sound of Sharpe at his back, making sure nothing snuck up on them. He tried his radio several more times as they progressed down the passageway.

Nothing. Dead silence and deader air.

They reached the end of the passageway without incident and came into more familiar territory. Pipes and terminals and dark, bloody corridors. Only, as Trent made his way into the thousandth antechamber he'd come so far, he realized that this wasn't like all the miles of corridor he'd tunneled through earlier.

This was worse.

A collection of bodies had been laid out across the ground. They had been ripped limb from limb. There was blood
everywhere
. In fact, Trent didn't think that four bodies could actually contain that much blood. It seemed to cover every single surface.

“These men died very,
very
violent deaths,” Sharpe murmured, startling him.

“Shit...yeah, they did. Something new?” he replied.

“We're close to whatever is in charge around here, at least I think it is, so maybe this is its handiwork?”

“Maybe.”

They contemplated the corpses for another few moments, then pressed on, their boots squelching loudly in the blood. Trent felt the pressure of an unseen presence, of eyes, inhuman and probing, watching him. There was a malignancy in its hidden gaze, an ill intent. Trent felt fear ripple through him, forcing his stomach to do a slow roll. The base seemed to have come to life with a dark, awful energy.

The respiration of the heat exchange had become a haunting, uneven hiss, like the breath of some dreaming behemoth. The soft hum of energy had mutated into a dark, disturbing nightmare noise that seemed to make Trent's teeth vibrate and his bones ache. Every shadow seemed to hold something, every vent some kind of presence.

Possibly worst of all was the heartbeat. Trent could hear it regularly now, a malevolent pulse of ominous intent.

They came across more awful death and bloody ruin. More corpses of Dark Ops troops that had tried to take control of the situation and had failed miserably. Trent felt genuine terror shudder through him: how could he and his handful of allies hope to succeed where dozens of highly-trained, well-armed men had failed?

He supposed, (and hoped and prayed), that the only edge they had was that they weren't trying to contain this. They were trying to end it. The further they went, the worse the horror became. They found one man that looked as if he had been swallowed up by a wall. His legs jutted out of solid, unbroken metal. Another man had been cleaved in half and had managed to crawl quite a ways before dying, judging by the blood trail.

In one room, they found nothing but burnt skeletons.

Finally, they managed to locate another ladder that would bring them to the surface of their final destination: Research Three. Trent had little hope that the ground level was any better than the underground, but he hurried up the ladder nonetheless. If he was being honest with himself, underground places had always creeped him out. He hit the hatch at the top and poked his head up, looking around apprehensively.

Nothing awaited him but bloody desolation.

“Holy shit,” he whispered.

“What? What's wrong?” Sharpe asked from beneath him.

“It's just...a lot more of what was down there,” Trent murmured.

He climbed out the rest of the way and came to stand in an immense room of Cyr design. Nodes of softly glowing technology studded the floor, set at seemingly random intervals. There were easily another two dozen bodies, possibly more, partially obscured by the ankle-level gray mist that clung to the ground.

More blood, more death. It looked like the life had been squeezed out of them. Trent and Sharpe made their way slowly through the fresh necropolis. As they reached the end of the room, moving into a smaller, (though still uncomfortably large) corridor, Trent tried his radio again. This time, he got more static, and there seemed to be a voice, swimming in the sea of white noise. Trent kept waiting for it to resolve into something recognizable, but it never did, instead dying away and leaving him alone once more.

Up ahead, a little ways down the corridor, was a terminal, jutting from the wall like an ugly tumor. The pair moved silently up to it. Sharpe worked it while Trent watched her back, but he could see and hear absolutely nothing around. The only thing that kept them company was a couple of lonely Dark Ops corpses.

A long moment passed as Sharpe worked. Trent couldn't help but feel the monolithic pressure of the unseen Presence, bearing down on him, staring at him like some fallen god, chained up but preparing to break loose and wreak some terrible vengeance. He swallowed, suddenly that much more nervous with the image he had just conjured up in his head. Trent had never been much for imagination, but now he was just scaring himself.

“Okay, I've found out where we need to go,” Sharpe said. Trent joined her, staring at the screen. The map before him seemed fairly simple. “All we need to do now is get to the central chamber and hit the final killswitch, whatever that entails.”

“Good, hopefully we'll run into the others along the way. Shit, I really hope we do,” Trent murmured.

They left the terminal and followed the set path towards the center of the facility, where the final killswitch resided. Trent kept waiting for something to leap out at them, a Harvester, a hidden Dark Ops troop, a Spitter, but there was nothing. Research Three seemed utterly abandoned, void of life, save for the Presence that seemed to infect everything. The lighting was dimmer, shadows dwelt at the edges of the corridor they traveled down.

“What do you think our chances are?” Trent heard himself murmur.

“Not good, but then again, they never were really,” Sharpe replied.