Syberian Sunrise (12 page)

“Yeah, impressive. Come on, I'm getting ready to throw up. Let's deal with this.”

“Okay. Cover me. I managed to snag some explosives from an armory a little while ago. They should do very nicely,” Lee replied.

Enzo nodded in reply and turned to watch the only way into the room. While he waited, he thought of Special Operations. It seemed like another life, and, he supposed, it really had been. He'd been a fundamentally different person back then. He still had faith, however thin it might have worn, in the Galactic Alliance, in the Marines, the soldiers he shared the battlefield with. He'd been very good at his job, and his superiors had loved him as a result. It was something that Enzo could have seen himself doing for the rest of his life.

Until those above him had made a call so terrible that he'd been unable to justify working for the GA any further. He'd quit Spec Ops cold turkey after that. They hadn't liked that, and he'd spent five years drifting the galaxy under a dozen assumed names, but they'd left him alone. Eventually. Although he still suspected that if the opportunity came up they'd put a bullet in his head. He'd learned a lot of state secrets and shady shit along the way.

“Done, come on,” Lee said.

They retreated out of the maintenance bay, back into the corridor, and moved over to a ventilation grille near the floor. Lee knelt and opened it up, then climbed inside. Enzo followed her in. They began crawling, not talking, just focusing on moving. Well, Enzo was more focused on the way Lee's uniform stretched across her well-maintained ass.

It was, he thought, at least going to be a pleasant crawl.

* * * * *

The crawl lasted for about twenty minutes. They wound their way through the confusing network of ventilation shafts, at one point climbing a ladder so that they could be above the lab as opposed to coming in at ground level. Now, they were nearing the lab. As they closed in on it, they began to hear voices. Enzo and Lee kept crawling until they were in position, each of them over a ventilation grille above a different part of the room.

Their plan of attack was to blow the explosives, killing the power, then drop in some flash-bang grenades. Enzo wanted to use something deadlier, but neither of them had any fragmentation grenades on them, so it would have to do. They'd decided to listen in for a little bit first, however, trying to pick up any kind of relevant intel about Dark Ops and what the hell they were planning on doing. Enzo studied the room. It was set up like a security command post, the walls stuffed with workstations, consoles and terminals.

This was clearly the more technological portion of Dietz's personal lab, as there was nothing medical in the room. While the exterior was ringed with technology, the center of the room was open, made for movement, and currently occupied by a dozen soldiers, one of them being the woman in charge, Director Fielding.

“So where the fuck are they?” Fielding snapped. Nine of the soldiers were occupying the workstations, while the other two stood before Fielding. They looked like students being screamed at by the principle.

“We don't know, yet, Director. All we know is that Eve still in the military HQ and some of the Marines are on the level above that. We haven't confirmed whether or not the pair of survivors we encountered are still down here,” one replied, trying to sound professional, but it was clear that he was very nervous.

“Well that's fucking
great
!” Fielding screamed. “And what the
fuck
happened in the weapons testing lab?! How the fuck did he get hold of the Burner? And who the fuck
is
he, anyway?”

“We're still working on it, but we think he was one of the test subjects taken from the most recent prison transports.”

“He's a fucking
prisoner
!?”

“We're not sure.”

“Jesus Fucking...just get on it.”

Fielding turned and marched out of the room. Enzo glanced up, looking across at Lee in the gloom of the ventilation duct that overlooked the area. She pointed to something below and behind her current position. Enzo glanced down, shifting gently to get a better perspective of it. After a second, he realized what it was. A device resting on a table hooked into one of the workstations with thick black cables. Obviously not something that was built into the original design. It had to be the transmission blocker. He glanced back up and nodded.

Lee activated the bombs. There was a distant rumble, followed by a dying hum of power, and the entire area went pitch black.

Below, the men began shouting in confusion, the terror obvious in their voices.

Lee pulled out her flash-bang. Enzo did likewise.

They both gently pulled open the ventilation grilles, primed each grenade and tossed it down into the room. They fell back deeper into the duct area, covering their eyes and ears, as the men below began to make confused sounds. The flash-bangs went off. Enzo and Lee dropped into the room among the confusion and opened fire.

Enzo focused his fire on the transmission blocker while Lee began gunning down the Dark Ops troops, none of which were wearing armor, as they all seemed to be technicians maintaining what was left of the network that helped them understand what was happening throughout the base. Enzo emptied his entire magazine into the blocker and, satisfied that he'd damaged it beyond repair, reloaded and emptied a second magazine into a pair of important looking workstations. He reloaded once more as a door opened and mowed down a trio of soldiers coming into the room. His eyes were beginning to ache by now as he reloaded a third time.

The pitch-black room was lit up in the staccato flare of muzzle fire, turning it into a confusing series of freeze-frame images in grainy black and white. Men were screaming, sparks spitting, blood spraying in the dying light.

“Enzo! Grenades in three! Go!” Lee shouted.

This was another part of their plan. They'd try to recover grenades from the corpses of those they killed to cover their escape. Enzo had done his best to keep the layout of the room, and his current position and direction within it, oriented tightly in his head. He'd been good at things like that. As a result, when Lee gave the call, he turned and rushed towards a door at the back, in between two of the workstations, that led to a maintenance and storage room just off of Dietz's lab. He got the door open, cleared the room to the best of his ability in the darkness, then turned and covered Lee as she came towards him.

She tossed the grenade she'd found and hurried into the maintenance room. Enzo barely managed to close the door before the grenades went off. They both scurried up into the ventilation system again and took off. The next fifteen minutes were a confusion of darkness and sweat and crawling as they navigated the network of vents once more. Eventually, they found a disused storage room that seemed to be empty and came down into it.

After taking a moment to get their breaths back, Lee pulled out her radio, slipped it back in her ear and activated it. “This is Corporal Lee to Staff Sergeant Stern, please respond.”

Enzo listened on his own radio. There was a pause, then a burst of static.
“Lee! You did it. Thank God. Where are you? Have you made contact with Ramirez?”

“...Ramirez is dead, Staff Sergeant.”

“Fuck...all right, what's the situation down there?”

Lee spent a moment catching her superior up on the situation. Enzo took the opportunity to get his breath back. His shoulder was bugging him again, burning at all the exercise and activity. He massaged it for a moment, then finally opened his medkit, grabbed the morphine injection he'd used a quarter of earlier, stuck it in his shoulder and injected half of what was left. He let out a long, happy sigh, laughing briefly at the utter pleasure of it, and replaced the syringe. He realized that Lee was looking at him. He clipped the medkit to his belt.

“Can I help you?” he asked.

“Are you...hurt?” she replied.

“My shoulder hurts.”

“Lee? You still there?”

“Uh...yeah. What's the plan?”

“We need to meet on Level Four and take care of the big fucker, then get into the Control Room so we can get the data on this place and figure out our next move. You listening in on this Brooks?”
Stern replied.

“Yeah. You need to be careful. It's a big one.”

“I'm aware. I've got an idea. Lee, take your new recruit through the ventilation system up to Mess Four, got it?”

“Yes, Staff Sergeant.”

“Good. Godspeed, everyone.”

Enzo groaned. “Not back in the vents,” he muttered.

“Are you sure you're okay?” Lee asked, replacing her radio.

“I am now,” Enzo replied.

He began climbing up into the vents. After a moment of hesitation, Lee followed.

Chapter 10

–
The Language of Violence
–

The crawl through the vents was anything but pleasant this time around. The smell was getting worse than ever, an awful reek of blood and murder and, hidden beneath it all, the foul odor of the Slugs and the infection itself. On top of that, Enzo was forced to kill two Slugs along the way. Not an easy tasked in close quarters. They'd managed to climb up to the next level, the military headquarters. The radio chatter had been light since then.

“So, tell me about Stern,” Enzo said as they crawled on.

“He's great. Among the best I've ever worked with,” Lee said. “He has a good career, fought in the Systems Wars, led his men to a lot of victories. He ran everything with perfect efficiency, never fails to notice everything.”

Enzo sighed. “So he's a jerkoff, huh?”

Lee hesitated. “Maybe from a civilian's standpoint.”

“I told you I was former Spec Ops, and Marines before that,” Enzo snapped.

“Yeah,
former
. You washed out, because no one just
leaves
Special Operations.”

Here, Enzo openly laughed. “Is that what they tell you? Is that what you believe? No one leaves Spec Ops? You're dumber than you look, Lee.”

He paused as he rounded a turn in the vent. Up ahead, debris blocked the path. There was an opening along the right side. Enzo moved up to it and glanced through the metal mesh. A small, ruined infirmary waited below.

“We're getting out here,” he said. The morphine was already wearing off and his shoulder was throbbing with all this crawling.

“We can just take another route-” Lee began.

Enzo opened the grille. “I said we're getting out here.” He slipped through.

Landing with a grunt, he moved out of the way, making room for Lee. She came through a moment later. He was worried she'd just keep going.

“What's the problem?” she asked, her voice now edged with frustration.

“The vents are too dangerous. Too easy to get ambushed in there. You saw how fast those Slug things are,” Enzo replied.

“Fine,” she said, moving across the infirmary, “we'll have to head through a few storage rooms to get to where we need to go.”

As they made their way through the infirmary and into the first of a handful of storage bays, Lee explained the situation. “The military HQ is essentially a giant square with a smaller circle placed inside of it. That circle is a corridor that grants access to everywhere in the area. Along the outside of the perimeter, where we are now, are things like mess halls, storage bays, barracks, infirmaries, shooting galleries, the gym, stuff like that. Support stuff. The interior holds the Control Room, the primary communications relay, central security network, the important stuff. From what we can tell, the big Altered thing is roaming that main corridor.”

“Fantastic,” Enzo muttered unhappily.

They continued to navigate the disused storage rooms, through narrow alcoves between stacks of crates. As they did, Enzo realized he could hear it. A thudding sound, like heavily plodding footfalls of what might have been a fucking dinosaur, growing louder. As it seemed to reach an apex, out of instinct, Enzo froze, Lee doing the same. The thudding became so loud and powerful that several smaller items, previously perched on a workbench, fell onto the ground. The footfalls stopped for a second and Enzo felt his fear ratchet up another notch.

Whatever it was, it must have been close by, possibly just on the other side of the wall he was looking at, past the crates. After a long moment, the footfalls started up again, retreating, making its continual slow circuit around the corridor, no doubt killing anything and everything in its path. Enzo let out a long, shuddering breath.

He and Eve kept going, heading through the door at the opposite end of the storage bay. The next room was, thankfully, the mess hall they were looking for, Mess Four. It was also, unfortunately, already occupied by a less than thrilling reception committee. As Enzo stepped into the room, moving out from behind Lee, he spied a dozen Mutants and a pack of Harvesters thrown in for good mix. They were all spread out across the room, as if they were taking refuge from the huge creature roaming the main corridor. Silence fell across the room.

Seconds of tension began to pass and Enzo and Lee readied themselves. The whole room seemed to be holding its breath, as if waiting for some unseen event to pass. Then the far door opened up and two more Marines stepped into the room.