Syberian Sunrise (14 page)

Enzo had no idea where they were going, but figured it must be somewhere with guns. Big guns. A back up they had failed to mention to him. Sure enough, a dozen meters ahead, almost out of sight, Stern was the first to disappear into a doorway. Beam was next, then Lee.

“Give us some cover fire!” one of them shouted.

Enzo growled, spun and shouldered his rifle. The Bio Creature was coming for them. He aimed for its twisted caricature of a face and loosed a volley of bullets, squeezing the trigger until the gun clicked empty. The spray of lead took it mostly in the face, small eruptions of crimson gore spraying the ceiling, dripping onto the floor.

The behemoth stumbled, came to a stop, its pincer hands brought up in a defensive gesture. He must have hit something vital, maybe an eye. Enzo hastily reloaded and kept up the fire now that he had it on the defensive. A minute passed, then two. The gun was getting hot in his hands. The creature made slow, inevitable progress against the stream of bullets. And then Enzo reached for another magazine, ejecting the freshly spent one, and found nothing waiting for him. He quickly checked his pockets, but realized he'd run dry.

“Any fucking day now!” he screamed.

“Coming!” Stern called. “Clear the way!”

A second later Stern emerged from the room they'd all disappeared in to. The Bio Creature was closer now, much closer. Stern was holding a double-barreled rocket launcher. He dropped to one knee, shouldered the launcher and fired both rockets simultaneously. Enzo barely had time to fall back and cover his eyes before the twin rockets shrieked from their metal nests and smashed directly into the Bio Creature. A wave of heat washed over Enzo, pushing him back several steps as he twisted instinctively away from it.

When he opened his eyes back up, he stared in horror. The creature was still standing. Its right arm had been blown off, but it was still standing, and coming for him.

“Beam!” Stern called.

The Marine shot out of the room. “Found them!” he called, handing a pair of a small, silver rockets to Stern, who quickly fed them into the launcher. He raised the weapon a second time and fired again. Another wave of heat and light and fire tore through the corridor, forcing the survivors back into the armory they'd grabbed the weapon from. This time, when the dust and smoke cleared, they were relieved to see that the Bio Creature was down and out. They cautiously approached it, studying the body, and saw that one of the rockets had hit it dead in the face, the other in the chest. Twin craters had opened up, killing the creature.

“Damn,” Enzo breathed, letting out a deep breath. “That was fun.”

“Not exactly what I'd call fun,” Beam muttered.

“Come on, let's go see Brooks,” Stern replied. “After we raid this armory.”

Enzo followed the three Marines back into the armory. His rifle was tapped out for ammo and his pistol wasn't far behind. What was worse, he couldn't seem to find any magazines for either. What he did managed to find was a shotgun and a box of fat blue shells for it. He let his rifle hang across his back and added the shotgun to his arsenal, loading it up and pocketing the rest of the shells for future use. It had been a while since he'd used a shotgun.

After picking the armory clean, they returned to the corridor and followed it around until they came to the big door that led to the Control Room.

It was still firmly closed.

“Come on, Brooks, we've taken care of the big monster. Open up,” Enzo said.

“Fine. Opening the door now.”
She sounded reluctant.

After a moment, the door slid open, revealing the technology-packed interior of the Control Room. It was spherical in nature, the exterior ringed and utterly crammed with all manner of workstations, consoles and terminals. The floor was littered with infopads and spent shell casings, and not a little bit of blood. A lot of the screens were either dead, cracked or registering only static. In the exact center of all this was a raised dais with a single chair and workstation built around it in a half-circle. This is where Eve Brooks sat.

Enzo took her in at a glance. She was about as hot as she sounded over the radio. She was a little under average height, trim and fit, she looked like she did a lot of cardio. Shoulder-length red hair, startlingly blue eyes, clear, pale skin. No, forget that, she looked
better
than she sounded, Enzo decided as he came closer.

“So,” she said, looking up, finishing whatever it was she was doing, “we're all finally here.”

“Yeah. Did you get do what we discussed?” Stern asked.

“Yes, I finally managed to fix the BioScan,” Eve replied.

“And?”

“There are, by my count, forty nine people left alive in this base. Five of them are in this room, and twelve of them are clustered downstairs in the holding area, which means that the remaining thirty two are either all Dark Ops or random survivors we haven't encountered yet. But this late in the game, I'm willing to bet they're all Dark Ops. Only a few of them are on the levels above us anyway, and I don't have access to the abandoned mines or the topside weather base. There's a solid chance that those people above us are scouts.”

“So there's a dozen still in stasis?” Stern asked.

“Yes.”

Stern was silent for a moment. Enzo simply leaned back against a wall and waited, watching everything play out. Finally, Stern seemed to come to a conclusion.

“How long will it take to get all the relevant data on this godforsaken hellhole into a mobile data storage unit?” he asked.

“At least an hour if we want multiple copies. I can do three in an hour,” Eve replied.

“Fine, then. Start the process.”

“That's what I was just doing when you came in.”

“Good. Beam, Lee, stay here, guard Brooks, make sure everything goes to plan.” Here, he turned to Enzo. “Rains, if you really were in Spec Ops and if you've got a shred of dignity left in you, you'll agree with me that those people can't be left behind. It isn't right.”

“What if they're all prisoners? Death row convicts?” Enzo replied.

“What if they aren't? What if they're guards, techs, pilots? Does it matter? You could have just as easily been left to die down there, but you weren't. We owe those people.”

Enzo considered his words. Roughly ninety nine percent of him said to hell with that, he didn't owe anyone anything. He hadn't gotten to where he was today by doing unnecessary favors that could get him killed. But there was a very small part of him that seemed to be gaining traction ever since waking up in this horrible place that remembered that he was still in the red in his life, he'd done a lot of bad things over the past few decades, and that maybe something like this could help him get closer to being in the black.

And besides, it sounded dangerous, and he liked dangerous things.

“Fine,” he said. “Let's go.”

Chapter 11

–
Brutal
–

The vents, yet again.

Enzo followed Stern down yet another stretch of bland, crimson-lit metal. They were dropping back down to the research level. He'd popped a handful of painkillers before crawling back into the vents and they were barely doing anything for him. He focused on their plan. Originally, he wanted to know why Eve couldn't just free them from their tubes the same way she'd done for him. She explained to him that that was no longer an option, as Dark Ops had been working steadily to cut her out of the operations of the installation. She could still do a few things, but it wouldn't be long before she was cut out completely.

As it was, they'd be lucky to get away with all the data.

So Enzo and Stern had to do it manually. Climb back down, navigate the dark, bloody corridors, fight the Altered and probably Dark Ops. Though another Bio Scan had shown a retreat. Dark Ops were leaving that level, bypassing the Military HQ level entirely. They were using a series of maintenance hatches and ventilation grids to get up. But where were they going now? Wherever they were going, it was clear the war wasn't over.

Enzo still wasn't sure what they were going to do with these people once they rescued them from the cramped hell they were locked into.

“Hey, Rains,” Stern said.

“Yeah?” Enzo replied.

“What happened with Spec Ops?”

Enzo sighed softly. He was wondering when this was going to come up. For a moment, he considered ignoring the question, but then he figured, why not? Maybe his story would actually get the Sergeant to cut him some fucking slack.

“Politics. Bureaucracy. Bullshit. Also, I'd like to preface this by saying that I did four years as a Marine before Spec Ops,” Enzo began.

“I call bullshit, you need a
minimum
of five years in any branch to be considered for Spec Ops,” Stern said, then paused, hesitating, as if remembering something, “unless-”

“Unless you are
really
good at your job. And I was. I was your rank when they yanked me. I'd been in Spec Ops for five years. For most of it, I thought we were doing the good work. We tended to cut through all the red tape and political bullshit that keeps soldiers from getting the job done, it was great. Lots of rescue ops, demolitions, the occasional assassinations. We were killing guys that'd gladly blow up a starport or a schoolyard, then claim it was in the name of some cause or another. I had a squad, eventually became the leader of it when our commander got killed. We were doing a lot of good out there in the galaxy,” Enzo said, trailing off, remembering.

“So what went wrong?” Stern asked.

“Like I said, politics. I'd been running into more and more political BS, the politicians sticking their fucking noses in our business, questioning fucking
everything
, when they didn't know what the hell was going on out in the galaxy. My last mission...me and my squad were running exfil for a recon team. Their job was to infiltrate a facility, gather some data and get out without anyone the wiser. Unfortunately, their cover was blown and they ended up having to shoot their way out. We were sent in to get them out of there.”

“Seems like a direct mission,” Stern murmured.

“You'd think, only there was a big problem. The base they were investigating was a Russian base. The Galactic Alliance plays like they're one big happy family, but it's all the same bullshit. The Russians are spying on the Chinese, who are running illegal deals with the Japanese, who are lobbying against the Brazilians because they staked a claim to what was supposed to be a Japanese asteroid belt...shit, you get the idea. Obviously, if the Russians found out it was an American Spec Ops team who infiltrated their base, had to shoot their way out...well, that wouldn't look good. And was it was, we weren't on too friendly terms with the Russians just then anyway.”

“What was the other squad looking for?”

“We thought that the Russians were harboring American criminals. Really sick bastards that might have some knowledge they weren't supposed to, I think it might've been secret missile production sites. We never got the data, but the recon team
did
find something out. The Russians had intercepted a secret communique that a squad of slavers was going to hit a Japanese colony. The Russians passed it along to the Japanese, but both of them decided not to do anything about it because the colony was technically outside their jurisdiction. When we pulled the squad out, I presented the data to my superiors, told them we should defend them, or, for fuck's sake, at least send them some kind of warning.” Here, Enzo paused, as he'd heard something.

Stern froze up as well. They waited, positioned on either side of a grille that overlooked a main corridor. They were now in hostile territory, well, it was
all
hostile at this point, but the research labs were extremely hostile.

The sound went away and, after a moment, they kept going.

“And they didn't send a warning?” Stern asked.

“No. They felt that doing so might tip their hand to the fact that they were the ones that had pulled the black op. See, we'd already pissed off Russian by grabbing some of their mining operations via dubious legal loopholes, as well as the fact that there was a big scandal going on at the that time. An American corporation had sold faulty parts to a Russian medical organization and, as a result, a bunch of civilians died...they felt that we couldn't afford another 'scandal'. To be honest, I think they were just pissed off at the colonists.”

“Why?”

“I've noticed a kind of 'they made their bed, let them sleep in it' policy that the governments have towards those colonists that want to strike out on their own, free of government rule.
All
of the governments have that policy, it seems. It's so fucking high school...so, I walked. I was so pissed, so sick of it all. I even tried to make a deal, let me and my crew go on 'leave' and deal with the problem on our own time. They told us no, flat out. Me and about three quarters of my squad just straight-up walked the fuck out of Spec Ops.”

“That seems a bit rash for a little colony,” Stern said after a moment.

“Maybe it was, but it was
everything
. The way they were questioning everything, the way it became less about doing some real good in the galaxy and more about covering the government's ass. The way the megacorps seemed to having their fingers in fucking
all of it
. We walked, went and protected the colony. Gave them warning, helped them set up defenses. We fucking
broke
those slavers, sent them all to hell.”