Origins (3 page)

This is different…

It was coming, I realised, from beneath us. I slammed a foot on the ground. The combat-suit was heavy; that and the simulant inside made for a big weight. The metal decking produced a metallic
thump
. I did it again, producing the same echo: loud enough to be heard even inside my armour.

“There's something underneath us,” I decided. I pointed. “Get that crawler out the way.”

Mason clambered into the cabin, activated the engine. With a low grumble, the big crawler pulled forward. The Legion and Baker's Boys circled where it had sat: looked at the patch of floor that had been uncovered.

“Well I fucking never…” Baker said.

There was a circular hatch – big enough to accommodate a man in armour – set into the ground. The frost-covered metalwork was worn, had recently been used, and the nearby area had been disturbed with a series of footprints. My HUD glowed with heat markers. They had a power supply down there. Beneath us, probably unaware that they had been found at all, the bio-signs disappeared off my screen. Either moving deeper underground, or fooling the scanner. I'd come across Krell that could do that – could manipulate their biological processes to avoid detection – but I wasn't aware of any such human tech. Still, the Directorate were full of surprises.

I prised open the hatch set into the ground, grunting as it came free, and the moaning sound became more precise.
Something is calling me down there…
Jenkins gasped. Baker started barking orders to his team, to give me room and provide covering fire.

I dipped my suit-lamps. Half-expecting to be met with a face full of flechettes, I peered into the shaft. A vertical shaft: precisely machined, made to accommodate human proportions. A series of metal rungs had been sunk into the compacted ice – forming a long and precarious ladder to whatever was beneath.

“There are lots of scanner returns down there,” Jenkins said. Her voice quivered with excitement.

“How many?”

She swallowed. “A hundred? Hard to say.”

“It's like they're on top of each other…” Mason whispered.

The shaft was deep enough that it disappeared into darkness. I unclipped a flare from my suit webbing. Flicking the activator, I tossed it down. Listened to the gentle
chink
as it hit the floor.

“You want to send a drone down first?” Mason offered.

“No,” I said. “I need to do this myself.”

I could see the flare at the bottom of the shaft now. Fizzing, throwing ragged light over a grilled floor plate. There was a facility of some sort below. My danger-instinct insisted that this was a
very bad idea
, but I needed to know what was down there.

“I'm going in. Jenkins, watch my six.”

“Affirmative,” she replied.

As I went, the moaning got louder and louder until I couldn't dismiss it any more.

It took me a couple of minutes to clamber down the shaft. One hand on the ladder rungs, the other clutching my PPG-13 plasma pistol: half-aimed at the segment of tunnel directly beneath me. The ladder was glossed with ice but as I climbed I realised that there were also fresh markings on the rungs – as though they had recently been used. Boot prints.

“How's it going, sir?” Jenkins asked.

“Fine. Any movement up top?”

“Nothing so far. You want me to come down and help?” she asked, with painful eagerness.

“No. I'm good.”

It was a tight fit in full armour. My shoulders grazed the tunnel walls, and the expectation that I would be shot on the way down the shaft never left me. The flare light gradually diminished until I was alone. My left hand began to shake as I descended.

I reached the bottom of the shaft and panned the corridor with my plasma pistol; let the targeting software analyse for potential targets. This deep underground, the tunnels had been bored out of the ice: chemically treated to retain stability. The floors were decked with metal plating. Glow-globes were strung from electrical cabling in a line along the ceiling. Meltwater
drip-drip-dripped
from the ceiling and huge transparent icicles had formed overhead—

A hand brushed my combat-suit. Stained, bone-thin fingers.

I instinctively pulled away.

Then the noise hit me. A hundred voices, rising in a ghostly choir: individually quiet, collectively devastating. I couldn't hear actual words but the overall impression was undeniable. Cries for help, for salvation.

“Shit…” I said, the word escaping my lips unbidden.

I'd seen war. I'd seen horror: alien, human and even – with the discovery of the Shard – machine. There was little that could move me, that could genuinely shake me. But what I saw in that tunnel did just that.

“I'm at ground level,” I said into my comm. “They have people down here.” I swallowed. “Lots… lots of them.”

Metal cages lined the corridor on either side of me, and skeletal hands were reaching from within. The cages went on for as far as I could see – as far as my suit-lamps would penetrate the dark – and each was crammed with bodies.

We'd found the prisoners.

Maybe I'd been stunned by what I'd seen, or maybe I'd just grown sloppy. Either way, I missed the prison guard until she fired the pistol.

She was facing me, but retreating – arm outstretched, firing again and again. I recognised the snap of a semi-automatic slug-thrower: a heavy calibre weapon firing at close range.

My null-shield failed to respond and two rounds hit my shoulder. There was a sharp spark of pain as the bullets impacted. AP rounds, I guessed: high-density anti-armour. Warnings flashed across my HUD, suggested immediate defensive action.

For a second, I was as frozen as the world around me.

Seeing one of
them
again, after so long… It was almost as debilitating as the pain.

She was Special Operations: a Sword of the South Chino Stars. Clad in full combat-armour; a hard-suit black as space, segmented like an upright insect. No helmet: her face made pale by the cold, bald head pocked by tattoos and kill-markings. She fired again and again, weapon flashing as rounds discharged—

Before I could react to the gunfire, she reached out with her other hand. Slammed it against the wall. The tunnel was suddenly bathed in red light, accompanied by the ring of an emergency siren—

Plasma fire erupted behind me and the Sword collapsed to the floor.

“Thank me later,” Jenkins said, at my shoulder. “You're getting slow.”

The spell was broken and I snapped awake. “I told you to wait upstairs.”

“And I knew that you'd need back-up…”

Jenkins' voice trailed off. Her face slackened with a mixture of fear and astonishment. Hands reached for her, like they had for me. They were animals on auto-pilot: that was what they had been reduced to. Filthy, dying and exhausted, some of the prisoners were nothing more than eyes embedded in flesh-wrapped skulls.

“We… we need to get them out,” said Jenkins. “They need suits, water, food…” She amplified her suit-speakers. “We're here to get you out, people. It's going to be okay. There are transports up-top. Follow us and embark as quickly as possible. If you cannot walk, make yourselves known and we will assist.”

The cage doors opened with the groan of ill-maintained gears. The prisoners let out a half-hearted cheer. Some had started weeping, others rattling against the prison bars. There was no telling how long they'd been down here. Those in the worst condition recoiled further into the caged alcoves, covering their ears as the siren rang out.

This should've been a victory but something felt wrong here. The dead guard's body had fallen at an absurd angle. There were three gaping holes in her chest, caused by Jenkins' plasma fire. The guard was wild-eyed, nerve-staples across her naked scalp. Her time and place of birth were tattooed in universal code across her cheekbone: together with the name of the cloning-vat from which she'd been birthed.

Before she'd been shot, the guard had been reaching for something. I traced her actions and identified an unmarked control panel on the wall. Now activated, buttons glowing red in the dim light. The purpose of the unit wasn't immediately clear to me but I considered the possibilities. There were no other soldiers down here: had she been trying to summon help? I checked my comm, watched the vid-feed from my surveillance drones. They were currently circling the overground hangar, and had reported no new movement. Nothing had changed in the compound above.

“She opened the cages…” I whispered to myself.

Why did she do that? Why set off an alarm anyway?
The Directorate commando was a top-of-the-line gene-enhanced soldier; no doubt her head filled with metal. She'd have an in-line communicator – a device that would allow her to communicate with the rest of her squad – somewhere in there.

Events overtook me before I could explore any of these doubts. Prisoners flooded from their cells and Jenkins was organising them, lining them up. There were servicemen and women from every agency here – Navy, Marines, Army – identifiable by their faded and torn uniforms. They responded sluggishly, zombie-like.

“Vincent Kaminski!” Jenkins yelled. “Any survivors from the Damascus expedition make yourselves known to me!”

For a long, fraught moment no answer came. Could we come this far not to find them? I felt Capa's cold grasp my heart: felt my tired bones aching despite the simulant body.

“What took you so long?” came a broad Brooklyn accent, from the back of one of the cells. “Whenever you're ready, we should get the fuck out of here.”

PFC Vincent Kaminski, lost legionnaire, stood among the prisoners. A wide, inane grin was plastered across his face.

“'Ski…?” Jenkins asked. “Is it really you…?”

“It's me,” he said.

Jenkins' reaction was immediate and unprofessional. She pushed her way through the dazed prisoners, and flung her arms around Kaminski.

“By Christo,” he said, burying his face in her armoured shoulder. “I wondered whether you'd ever find me…”

Kaminski was in bad shape. His face was dirt-stained and bruised, head shaven. He wore a yellow vacuum-suit, the type used in evacuation pods: the words UAS COLOSSUS printed on his arms, in faded white print.

“We never stopped looking,” Jenkins said. “Not for a second.”

Beside a simulant in full combat-suit, Kaminski's emaciated form looked even smaller. He winced as Jenkins wrapped her arms around him. The bruising to his face made it obvious that he had taken a beating: a narrow line of studs in his head indicated where he had been nerve-stapled. I started to wonder how long he'd been down here, what the Directorate had done to him, but knew those questions would have to wait.

“Steady, California,” he said. “Watch the ribs. Think I've got cracked something…”

Jenkins stepped back, evaluated Kaminski with wet eyes. “Thinking again? Isn't that what got you in trouble in the first place?”

'Ski smiled, but the reaction was muted and weak. “Lesson learnt. I'll try not to do that again.” He ran a hand over his chin; through the rugged beard that had grown there. “I need a shave. Good to see you, Harris.”

I felt almost as much emotion in the moment as Jenkins. Kaminski was my oldest friend, and we'd grown through the ranks of the Alliance Army – and then Simulant Operations – together. We fist-bumped, but gently. Kaminski's hands were blackened and blood-encrusted; poking from the cuffs of his torn vac-suit.

“And you, 'Ski,” I said. “Jenkins is right; we never stopped looking for you.”

“I don't doubt it,”'Ski said.

My tactical helmet had started a medical analysis of Kaminski's condition: he had borderline malnutrition, with a repressed heart rate. The spiral of his body consuming fat reserves had already started, would probably have become fatal in a few days – weeks at best.

“Looks like we got here just in time,” I said.

“Not just for me, either.”

Another thin and dishevelled figure hobbled towards us. A man with a black-and-grey beard, dressed in the same style of suit as Kaminski.

“Professor Saul?” I asked.

“Harris,” he said. “I am most glad to see you. Yes, yes.”

Saul was gaunt, tanned skin pulled tight over his cheekbones, and his beard was patchy and irregular. The vac-suit hung off his frame, pooled at his booted feet. He hadn't eaten in a long time, and hadn't seen proper sunlight in even longer.

“You aren't here to accuse me of being a terrorist again, are you?” he asked of me.

“Not this time,” I said. “I'm glad to see that you made it out alive.”

“Only just,” Professor Saul said. He tapped a hand to his leg; flinching awkwardly. “The Directorate haven't been kind to me.”

Saul's eyes were sunken into his head, one milky orb glaring at me blindly. He too had been beaten; face lacerated, both cheeks swollen with purple contusions. From the way that he moved – slowly, imprecisely – I guessed that he was even closer to death than Kaminski. His left leg dragged uncomfortably as he walked.

“We have a strike force,” I said. “Lots of simulants and dropships, ready for evac.”

“I hope that it will be enough,” said Saul.

“Holy Christo and all that is Venusian,” Martinez said.

Mason was just speechless as she took in the line of shivering bodies; with the same horrified expression as Jenkins. It was pretty much a universal reaction to what we were seeing.

“Hello works just as well,” Kaminski said, as he clambered out of the hatch, Jenkins grabbing his arm. “But maybe you don't know the words in Standard or something…”

“Ever the asshole,” Martinez said. “Good to have you back.”

“There was no one left to ride on you,” Kaminski said. “I could hardly leave the job to Mason.” He nodded at her, a little of his old self returning. “Glad to see you got your stripes, New Girl.”

“No one calls me that any more,” Mason said.

“Not to her face, anyway,” Jenkins said.

Kaminski reached out, fist-bumped with Mason. He frowned as he read the nameplate on her chest. “I'm not sure that PRINCESS is much better…”

“She picked it herself,” Martinez said.

“Save the chat for later,” I said. “We've got prisoners down here.”

Baker and his troopers stood back as the ragged column of POWs filed into the hangar. The prisoners were silent, following whatever commands we gave them.

“I hate to ask the question, but are we going to have enough ships to get these people off Capa?” he asked over our closed comms.

“No one gets left behind,” I said. “We'll make return trips if we have to.”

“Of course, sir,” Baker said. “We haven't heard from—”

My ear-bead chimed.

“Lazarus!” came a panicked shout: I immediately recognised Hooper. “We've got renewed resistance out here!”

I heard gunfire over the comm-link, Hooper yelling an order. Distant thunder was audible through the hangar walls. Kaminski and the prisoners seemed to shrink in response to the noise.

“Hooper – you need to lock that down,” I said. “We've got prisoners, moving to the landing bay.”

“Something—”

Hooper's bio-signs vanished from my HUD. Not just his, but those of his squad as well. The comm-line went dead.

“Overwatch is down,” I said. “We need to move fast.”

“Copy that,” Jenkins said.

I called up a map of the compound on my HUD: plotted a route cross-facility. The most direct path was beneath the tower that Hooper had been using as a sniper's nest, and around the covered mine shaft that we'd discussed during the briefing. About a klick through the snow.

I turned to the survivors. “Follow the Legion and stay down. We'll go through the central yard and to the landing pad.”

The compound had come alive again: the lull in activity well and truly broken. Gunfire poured down from every roof parapet and gantry. Mortar rounds exploded overhead: made the ground shake. Hot frag peppered the sector, forced us into cover behind some stacked cargo containers.

I took point, holding the Directorate back with plasma fire. Jenkins' null-shield flared, and prisoners hid behind her armoured bulk. Martinez and Mason carried those most badly injured or malnourished; scooping them under armoured arms like children. Baker and his remaining soldiers took up the rear, throwing whatever ordnance they had left at the enemy.

“The mortar shells are to suppress us,” Mason said.

“I know,” I said. “We've got to keep moving.”

The wind had picked up again, with enough force that I had to brace against it. I dreaded to think how the survivors felt without proper survival gear. The centre of the compound was ahead, the comms tower reaching up through the storm. One of the circular structures – the pit or shaft, whatever it was – lay a hundred or so metres north. We were getting close.

“What's the latest on Scorpio Squadron?” I asked Jenkins, as we advanced. “Have they touched down yet?”

I couldn't see much above ground level, and with the Directorate active again the ships would be running dark.

“ETA three minutes,” Jenkins said. “They're experiencing heavy resistance.”

“Do we have anyone else left down here?”

Jenkins shook her head. “Sperenzo is off the grid, and Hooper is long gone…”

The remains of Hooper's squad lay in the snow. They'd probably fallen from their posts, high on the tower. The simulated bodies were riddled with rounds, pouring crimson blood into the snow – weapons and equipment sprawled around them.

“Move up on the mine shaft,” I ordered. My M95 user display flashed with LOW AMMO, and I only had one power cell left. Hooper's team carried compatible ammunition: the Long Sight used the same cell. I waved at Mason and Martinez. “Get the survivors into cover. I'm restocking.”

The rest of the team moved up, and I dashed to the bodies of Hooper's Raiders. All five of them had crashed out here, their armour already sinking into the snow. I stooped beside a soldier called REIKER – the name flashing on my HUD, stamped onto the combat-suit chest-plate. I pulled the body towards me, using the strength-augmentation of my own armour to shoulder the weight—

Reiker had been hit by a gunshot to the chest. Not a big wound, but noticeable by the extreme blood loss that it had caused. Something made me pause, for just a moment: my intuition screaming, causing me to examine the body in a little more detail.

For the second time that day, I questioned myself. I reached out and touched the ruptured armour. A piece of something black and blood-wet was stuck inside; and beyond the shattered face-plate Reiker's face was necrotised and withered. Hurriedly, panic rising inside like the storm out, I scanned the other bodies. Each of Hooper's Raiders had been killed in exactly the same way: armour breached by a handful of black spines, punching cleanly through the ablative plate.

But how can they…?

Something enormous and heavy hit me side on, with tremendous force. Splinters of pain erupted all over my torso and I sprawled into the snow, rifle slipping from my fingers.

Then I was falling.

I reached out with my open hands for something to grip on to. Found nothing. The white sky spiralled above me.

The pit. I'm falling into the pit.

The drop was brief but brutal and I hit the ground hard. My breath was knocked from my lungs with intensity. I'd landed on my back, and despite the Trident combat-suit I felt the armour plating buckle around my neck and shoulder. I snarled as pain exploded across my left leg: knew that it had absorbed a good deal of the fall, that it was as good as broken. Medi-alerts flashed over my HUD. A blot of pain spread across the back of my head: a dull ache that probably signalled a fractured skull.

But I was still alive. The sim was made of sterner stuff.

NULL-SHIELD DAMAGED, my suit insisted. TAKE CORRECTIVE MEASURES.

I focused on my surroundings, on the immediate threats that I had to surmount in order to survive for the next five seconds.

I was underground. The covered shaft that Mason had noted on the orbital maps – the silo or pit – was now open: the mechanical hatch agape like a trap door, exposing the chamber beneath. The pit was dark, fetid, and something like fish guts were plastered to every available surface. The beginnings of coralline formations sprouted from the walls, providing artificial cover and possible handholds. Steam rose from the walls as the pit was exposed to the frosted air. The shaft was maybe twenty metres deep, and as many round.

Through the miasma of pain – quickly diminishing, becoming controlled by the advanced simulant metabolism and the combat-suit's medi-suite – I pieced together what I was seeing.
I'm in a viper's nest
, I told myself. The events of the last few minutes snapped into place: made perfect sense. The Directorate guard had deliberately let the prisoners out, but not to save them. She wanted to open the pits, because the Directorate had brought more than just
human
POWs back from the Maelstrom. Something had been imprisoned down here: but what had started as a prison, had become a lair.

Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.

“Jenkins!” I yelled into the comm. “Keep your eyes on—!”

A Krell xeno-form lurched over me.

I scrambled onto my elbows. I'd lost my rifle, either overground during the initial attack or when I'd fallen into the pit, and there was no time to search for it. Instead, I unholstered my PPG-13 plasma pistol with numb fingers, brought the heavy pistol round to aim. In the same smooth action I fired.

The alien was probably affected by the temperature. By human standards, it was still fast, but the Krell didn't like the cold. It was infinitesimally slower than would otherwise be the case, and I managed to shoot before it reached me. A volley of plasma bolts hit the alien's armoured chest and the corpse flew backwards, twitching with bio-electric feedback.

I got to my feet. The servos in my left knee-joint buzzed angrily in protest.

The primary-form was emaciated: muscled frame atrophied, shrivelled by exposure to the cold. The Krell's skin was blasted, had turned grey to an unhealthy white in places. The skull was pocked with metallic studs, and most of the alien's bio-tech enhancements had been torn out. It wore the remnants of a bio-suit – I always found it difficult to decide whether the things were actually wearing armour or not, so closely grafted to the skin were their protective suits – but no helmet. Insignia that looked like scars stitched its chest. I wondered, briefly, whether that was some sign of allegiance to a particular Krell Collective, or perhaps birthing aboard a specific warship or fleet.

There was babbling over the comm-link from the rest of the Legion.

“Sir!” Mason asked. “What's happening?”

“We've got Krell down here, and in numbers!” I yelled, as I backed into the middle of the pit: in vain, trying to cover every angle of the nest.

Primary-forms bounded across the covered walls with renewed vigour. I clocked a handful of primary- and secondary-forms slithering over the edge of the pit, into the compound. How many had been kept in here? A hundred? Two hundred? Were there other nests like this, hidden elsewhere on the surface of Cold Death? Those questions ran through my mind, but I had no opportunity to consider them. My bio-scanner was quickly filling with signals. There were other, shadowy tunnel-mouths leading into the pit.
Things
were stirring inside those as well. Leader-forms, or something else?

Mason appeared at the lip of the shaft, helmet bobbing as she looked over the edge. “Oh, shit!”

Flame erupted from my flank as a secondary-form fired a shrieker; the Krell equivalent of a flamethrower. The bio-gun was loaded with a phosphorescent fuel: licking the ground with bright light.

That was it. The Collective was awake. Hissing poured from all around me.

I ducked beneath another gout of flame and ran for the nearest wall. Had to get out of there.

“Go, go!” I shouted to the Legion. “Pull out and run!”

I reached the wall and vaulted up it. An intense blossom of pain spread through my left leg – eye-watering, exquisite – but the leg held. That was the combat-suit in action: the leg joint supporting a limb that was for all intents now useless. The armour stayed rigid, and my toe slammed into the bio-coral. The porous, honeycombed material might've looked delicate, but it was far from it, and the structure took my weight. I scrambled up the wall, using the strength-aug of the powered armour to just get me out of—

“The colonel is trapped down there!” Mason shouted. “Covering fire!”

Mason started shooting. Plasma pulses rained, dropping Krell primaries as they lurched out of their prison. Martinez jogged into view, picking off bodies as they crawled up the wall after me. My fingers tore into the coral, found purchase on whatever surfaces I could, and I climbed rapidly. A claw grabbed my injured leg, but I lashed out: felt the pleasing connection of an armoured boot with a Krell skull—

They were more interested in getting out of the pit than in taking me down, I realised. The awakening Krell bio-forms rushed past me – gills flexing as they adjusted to the frozen air – and dashed out into the snow. I'd seen behaviour like this before. They had no leader-form to guide them: were reverting to feral instinct to stay alive.

“Take my hand,” Mason said, reaching out with an open palm.

“I told you to go!” I said, but did as she asked. Even simulated, I felt a flood of relief to be out of the nest. “Keep that pit covered!”

As she dragged me over the edge, from one perilous situation to another only mildly less so, I reached for the combat-webbing across my chest. I unclipped a frag grenade. Twisted the activator and tossed it back the way I'd come.

“Fire in the hole!” Martinez yelled, already pulling back from the danger zone.

Krell pouring out behind me, secondary-forms firing all manner of bio-weapons into the storm, the grenade went off. The explosion shook the snow, threw up a yellow flash. It was probably futile – would only anger the nest – but it felt good to kill some of them at least.

Jenkins and the remainder of Baker's Boys were at the end of the road. The prisoners were in abject terror, harried by gunfire from both the Directorate and the Krell escapees.

“Well isn't that just great,” Jenkins barked. “As if we don't have enough to worry about.”

I dragged my injured leg behind me. “Just get out of here! Those things are pissed, and I don't think that they can tell the difference between us and the Directorate.”

“Dropships are here,” Martinez said, pointing ahead.

The sky brightened as three ships descended on the landing bay, the glow of the Jaguars' engines visible through the swirling snow. The landing bay was barely a hundred metres away – an elevated platform lined with ladder-shafts.

“Move, move!” I yelled. “Get through there! Ships are waiting!”

The ships immediately deployed their rear ramps. The air crews disembarked, waving handheld beacons – guiding us through the storm.