The Outlaw (Phantom Server: Book #2) (25 page)

Foggs reloaded and headed back. Soon I received his message,
I'm in position.

Stay put and wait for us
, I replied.
We won't be long.

I checked my gravitech and headed into the floor's depths.

Zander
, Liori's voice touched my mind.
May I ask you something?

Sure.

Why did you come back to the Founders' station?

To rescue you.

She didn't say anything. The nanites clung closer to my armor, creating a layer of molecular protection.

It didn't take me long to find a suitable chunk of metamorphing flesh. A smoking blob of biomass spread over the floor, flinching as it grew new tentacles.

Its seeming helplessness might deceive you. But I already knew from analyzing the battle video files that the slightest damage would mobilize all of the creature's potential.

I stepped back, took aim and fired a burst at it, dealing damage.

The Flesh reared up, rapidly transforming into a fantastic and undoubtedly lethal alien creature. I'd have loved to have known the mechanism behind its activation and its choices of particular DNA elements.

I bolted back, seeing as the monster had grown itself a few legs and scurried after me, finalizing its shape as it ran.

As I approached the edge of the floor and the lilac shimmer of the force escalator, I kicked with both my feet and slammed the gravitech on, soaring up into the air in a well-practiced motion. The freshly-grown mob stepped on the brakes, his hateful feline green eyes following my flight.

The Tesla gun snapped once.

I swung around in the air, killing speed, and landed, very pleased with myself, watching the metamorph, immobilized by the Paralysis debuff, roll down the invisible stairs down the escalator.

The Dargians weren't in a hurry to finish it off. I could understand them. It was always a good idea to first find out how long the debuff lasted.

My feet touched the floor. Five seconds? Exactly. The mob stirred and received another round from Foggs.

The Disciples were talking, looking very pleased with themselves. Five seconds were well enough to fire a plasma generator not once, but twice.

Oops, my mistake. The creature was already immune to the Daugoth toxin. The second time it took it two seconds to come round. It was a good job the ever-vigilant Foggs struck it with another bullet — which also failed to stop it completely.

What an incredible survivability. The creature's adaptivity was indeed an unpleasant surprise.

They scorched it in the end, of course, but one of the Disciples very nearly paid with his life for our daring scientific experiment when the creature punched him in his helmet, deforming it.

Roakhmar scrambled toward me on his short legs. It was so funny to watch him wear heavy armor. He looked almost square as he trotted toward me.

“Zander,” (so it was
Zander
now, not
Human
? Nice!) “we need your ammo.”

“I'll make you some. Not much.”

“How much?”

“Fifty rounds for the time being. In return, you'll supply my men with personal force shields. Plus one heavy pulse machine gun.”

“I can give you the shields,” he agreed, “but not the gun. You can't use it, anyway.”

“He can,” I pointed at Vandal.

“Very well. Two hundred rounds? Deal?”

I loved it. Was he trying to haggle? “No,” I stood my ground. “Fifty for the time being. The bullets aren't easy to make. Did you notice that the mobs quickly become immune to them?”

“So what?” he pulled his neck in again. “We first paralyze, then scorch them straight away!”

“Soon we might need much bigger doses of the toxin. No, I'm afraid, I can't promise a hundred rounds now. I'll be making them in small batches, and that's the end of it.”

He hissed something that my semantic processor failed to translate. Still, he didn't argue. He turned round and headed off to issue orders to his group.

* * *

A bestiary.

There was no other word to describe it. We climbed to the second floor of the tower and walked along the walls of shimmering light, followed by the greedy stares of fantastic animals.

The force fields that divided the floors into rooms bore the fiery symbols of the Founders' language.

I had no doubt that this building had in the past been used by the Founders themselves and not by their AIs. Otherwise, all these warning signs and instructions wouldn't have been necessary.

The semantic processor deciphered parts of one of the signs,

Biological lab 237. Project ?????

The question marks stood for personal names which weren't in the processor databases.

Biosphere samples: Planet ?????

I slowed down, peering through the force field “wall”. Behind it was a rectangular room about sixty by ninety feet crowded with the skeletal remains of unidentifiable devices and equipment. Time had taken its toll on these rooms; and later, the Flesh had occupied these floors, leaving traces of its activity on every surface.

A metamorph stirred weakly in a cloud of rancid smoke. Seeing us, it tensed, transforming, then lunged at us — but clashed into the scorching wall of energy and recoiled.

The sounds of gunshots and plasma charges distracted me. The Disciples' point men had come across some surviving Flesh lining the corridor. The tower activation had sliced it into many pieces but failed to kill it completely.

The Paralysis debuff worked like a dream. The creature failed to complete its transformation as it was first immobilized, then incinerated with plasma.

There couldn't have been more than two or three such mobs per floor. The Dargians shouldn't have any problems. Problems would start if the remaining emitters died on us.

I kept scanning them occasionally but so far, the emitters' signatures looked stable. That's quality! The Founders' technologies were indeed beyond our imagination.

“Zander,” the Disciples' leader caught up with me.

“Speak up.”

“I need to know how you got in here.”

“Just stealthed up and followed you. Why? Is it a problem?”

“Followed us, what for?”

“Didn't I tell you? Loot is good here. What's there not to understand? Besides, we simply had no other option once your men surrounded the hill. We'd set up camp on its top so seeing as we couldn't get down, we were obliged to check out this place.”

I could see he didn't believe me, so I added, “You may think what you want. My ship was shot down. My men need to level up. I didn't want to meet your slave drivers again. Been there, done that. Didn't you see that I have a Dargian semantic processor?

He frowned. “Slave drivers are the scum of our society.”

“You don't have to apologize. You consider us your enemies, I know. But you've given me your word so you'd better keep it.”

“You invaded our world!”

“I understand you can't wait to smoke me. But just think how many mobs we're yet to tackle. What you gonna do when you run out of neurotoxin cartridges?”

“Very well, Human. I'll keep my word,” Roakhmar snapped and stepped up the pace.

“Zander, what did he want?” Kathryn's voice chimed in the earphones.

“He was trying to find out how we got here and what our plans were.”

“Did you tell him??!!”

“Do I look like I did?”

“He'll kill us,” Kathryn panicked. There was no way she could have been their raid's leader. Then again, what made me think she was?

“Don't worry,” I said. “The Disciples won't hurt us.”

* * *

Floor 7 of the tower met us with a gaping abyss.

We'd fought our way through the lower levels without further losses. Their desperate combat by the tower's base must have made these elite Dargian warriors fully appreciate the danger. Now they allowed no room for error. Their force shields were considerably better than the ones I'd seen earlier: theirs were actually segmented like fighter craft shields which allowed them to redistribute their power on the go, concentrating the shields’ protective properties in the direction of a potential threat.

We'd been given identical ones. I hadn't hesitated to take full advantage of the fact by adding another unique scanner file to the Technologists database.

It was about time we stopped for a break, but Roakhmar seemed to be made of steel. Besides, he was anxious. This was the area that had suffered the multiple emitter breakdowns. We stood on its edge facing an expanse of gloom. At its far end you could barely make out the weak glow of the force field and the shimmer of two force escalators.

The mobs were nowhere to be seen. Whatever had happened to them? What if the metamorphs that had attacked us earlier had come from here?

The Disciples leader didn't seem to share this idea. I watched three of his snipers activate their gravitechs, taking up positions on small deformed platforms which had once been used to support the emitters.

“Zander, we need more ammo.”

“Wait a sec,” I activated Object Replication, using the template I'd saved in my mind expander. “There, take it,” I produced three more clips for their Dargian rifles, thirty rounds each. I really didn't like this gutted floor. I had a bad feeling about it.

A Disciple sent by Roakhmar delivered the ammo to the snipers.

“Kathryn, I suggest you go one level below and wait.”

“No way! I'm not going anywhere on my own!”

“That level is clean! You're safe there. That way I'll have one less thing to worry about. You've never told me why you tend to trigger aggro, have you?”

“How do I know? I'm not going anywhere!” demonstratively she perched herself on the scorched stump of some machine or other.

The Disciples fanned out and began to advance.

“Zander,” Foggs pointed at a small platform overhead, “what if I cover us too?”

“Very well. Do it.”

I watched the three plasma generator teams set up their machines on some kind of synthetic hill formed by piled-up debris and the brown mass of compacted organic remains. The discovery didn't make me any happier. If anything, I found it alarming. Did that mean that the emitters had packed up thousands of years ago?

“Roakhmar,” I forwarded him my assessment. “There has to be a metamorph around somewhere. And it must be huge.”

He didn't have time to reply. A wall of flesh reared up and headed for the line of Dargians, crashing its way through the rows of ancient machines.

The snipers' rifles snapped. The Tesla gun discharged with a crackle. That stopped the metamorph's spasmodic progression under the heaps of debris. It stopped; but what could that change? The debuff only lasted five seconds at best. The plasma generators were ready to fire but this mass of paralyzed flesh lay virtually under the Dargians' very feet.

Roakhmar barked a guttural command. The Disciples broke ranks and scattered, switching on their personal force shields. The three plasma guns fired a volley in ionization impact mode, creating a fine grid of manmade bolts of lightning over the area. This was a true
sacrifice
when the death of a few saves the lives of many.

Chunks of flesh flew everywhere. I heard five or six secondary explosions — these were individual force shields packing up under pressure. And almost straight away, rising from amid impact craters and red-hot framework, dozens of regenerated mobs came for us, scattering the smoldering debris around.

Kathryn ran toward me. Vandal and I covered her with our force shields while stopping the attacking monsters with our two pulse guns. The Dargian snipers fired again but to no avail: the original monster that had now split into dozens of smaller ones had already adapted to the neurotoxin.

The surviving Disciples formed a circle and segmented their personal force fields, forming a dome shield. All their motions looked practiced to oblivion, apparently drilled into them by Roakhmar himself. Having met with their fiery resistance, the wall of assaulting mobs receded. Apparently, even when infuriated, these creatures had some semblance of a self-preservation instinct. They began seeking easier targets, switching their attention to us, the snipers and the plasma generator teams.

Liori, let's do it!

I'm with you. To the end, whatever it is.

The nanites swirled into the air and then suddenly took the girl's shape. My mind expander still held her identity, but her new replication matrix inspired awe. Dripping with iridescent aura, the girl scorched two of the mobs as they tried to get to Foggs.

A level-10 Plasma Blast! Dissolving in the fire, the girl's shape spewed protuberances of blinding discharge as tens of thousands of nanites burned away, turning all living matter to ash.

My Plasma Blast was lamentably low, but I did have Disintegration which turned a target into molecular mist. The air around me was rife with energy, about to explode. Without a moment's thought, I struck.