Syberian Sunrise (13 page)

That did it.

Chaos exploded as four guns spoke. The dozen and a half Altered shrieked as one and split up, dividing into two groups to deal with the fresh flesh that had stepped into their fields of vision. Enzo squeezed the trigger, blowing the top of the head off of the nearest Mutant and, while it was still falling, putting another three-round burst in its chest as that particular fact returned to him. It was difficult to re-learn the notion that headshots no longer got you confirmed kills. He turned his rifle, took aim and fired again.

Thick, crimson blood sprayed from another Mutant's chest and it fell, shrieking. All around him, he could hear the others firing, rifles and shotguns. Mutants fell, Slugs were exterminated and Harvesters were put down. Thankfully, they were all of the skinny variety, not yet allow the opportunity to fill up on dead flesh. Within two minutes, all the hostiles had been put down. They spent an additional minute taking care of the Slugs that had survived the slaughter and were attempting to escape their now dead host bodies.

When that was all taken care of, the five survivors met in the center of the mess hall. Right away, Stern and Enzo began sizing each other up. Stern looked every bit a career Marine. Tall, broad, buff. He wore a high-and-tight of black hair and combat gear over traditional military fatigues. Even through the blood and the burns, the rips and the tears in his uniform, he looked ready to stand tall and dole out orders. Tell other people what to do.

“Brooks told me about you,” was the firs thing he said.

“Lee did likewise,” Enzo replied.

“You're a mercenary. Unsurprisingly, you sound like a jackass who could get us killed.”

“He's former Spec Ops,” Lee said suddenly.

Enzo laughed. “Oh, so
now
that means something?”

“What happened? Were you honorable or dishonorably discharged?” Stern asked.

“Neither, I walked out when I got fed up with the bullshit.”

Stern frowned, clearly not liking the answer. Finally, he heaved a sigh and pulled out his radio. “Whatever. Beggars can't be choosers. Brooks, we've reunited in Mess Four. You said you had information on this thing and how we can kill it.”

“Yes, I do. I've been digging through the files on the research they were doing and it seemed that there were two kinds of the Slugs. The kinds we've all seen so far are the most common, they comprise about ninety nine percent of the Slugs that were on the vessel. But the other kind make something different entirely,”
Eve began.

“The thing out there?” Stern asked.

“No, not quite. All the Altered are being controlled by something. From the lowliest Slug to the largest Ire,”
Eve said.

“Ire?” Enzo asked.

“Ires are what they call the big ones, I don't know if any of you have encountered Ires yet-”

“We have,” both Enzo and Stern said at once.

“-fine then. They're all controlled by something, what the researchers called the Alpha Beast. They grew an Alpha, kept in captivity, trying to use it to control the Altered they created. But it was too strong-willed, it wouldn't be bent. So they tried to clone it. What they got was the Bio Creature, or the Beta. It's not as big as the Alpha, or as powerful, and it didn't work. It couldn't take control of the Altered from the Alpha. In all the chaos, it ended up here. Now, as for killing the damned thing, as I'm sure all you boys and girls in green remember, Military HQ comes equipped with a killzone near the main entrance.”

“Yeah, four heavy-duty drone guns,” Stern said, smiling. “I was under the impression they were offline, or broken.”

“They are offline. They'll need to be repaired. You will need to split up into two groups. One will have to make their way to the defensive network room to make repairs as quickly as possible. The other will have to shadow the creature and, when the time comes, lure it to the drone guns. Let them do the work and shred the thing.”

“Rains, you're volunteering for shadow duty,” Stern said.

“Oh, am I?” Enzo replied.

“Yes.”

Enzo glanced down at his rifle, presently pointed at the floor, and shifted it, so that the barrel now pointed at Stern's midsection.

“Consequently, I could also volunteer to give you an emergency vasectomy.”

Stern didn't move, but Lee and the other man, who Enzo realized must be Beam, raised their rifles, covering him.

It was Lee who spoke first. “Despite what you might think, Enzo, we
don't
have time for a dick-measuring contest. And besides, you'd be best suited for this, if you were really once in Spec Ops.” A moment of silence passed.

Enzo sighed and lowered his rifle. “Fine,” was all he said.

He listened to Stern outline the rest of the plan in further detail, then prepared himself for his dangerous task.

* * * * *

Shadowing duty.

This was extremely stupid, but there was a part of Enzo that liked the job. It was absurdly dangerous, generally the kind of thing he did. He listened to the radio chatter as the Marines made their way toward the defense network room or wherever the fuck they were going. He was in the main corridor, moving towards the sounds of immense plodding footfalls. The corridor bothered him, it truly was a circular tube, which meant no corners. No corners made it that much more difficult to comfortably hide yourself.

He was toying around with the idea of just leaving. There was a decent chance that he could figure out some way to climb the rest of the way up, break out of Syberian Station and hot-wire a space-worthy craft of some kind. It'd be easy to punch it and jump halfway across the galaxy, provided it had an FLT drive, and then what? Keep drifting. Drifting was fun. It offered the greatest percentage of pain-relieving activities.

Speaking of which...

The pain was spiking.

Enzo rubbed his shoulder, gritting his teeth against the agony. He stopped, knelt in the corridor for a second. His vision began to white out, the pain growing teeth. Enzo glanced down, realized his hands were shaking.

He clenched them into fists. “Please...” he moaned, his fists now trembling.

“Rains, do you have eyes on target?”
He barely heard Stern.

Enzo groaned, squeezing his fists tighter, feeling the fingernails of his left hand digging into his palm. He realized he was grinding his teeth slowly back and forth.

“Rains? Do you have eyes are target?”

The moment passed, the pain began to abate, slowly simmering down to a more tolerable level. He took a deep, shuddering breath and stood back up.

“Rains?”

Enzo broke into a light jog, catching up to the creature.

“Almost,” he whispered, still feeling slightly sick from the pain.

Sometimes it got like this. The pain would spike for no reason. There were no warning signs, nothing consistent to tell him it was coming. He was never doing the same thing when it happened, he could be dead asleep or in the shower or gunning some bastard down. It was totally random. Enzo couldn't remember the last time he'd gotten a good night's sleep that didn't result from getting blackout drunk or taking a near-fatal dose of sleeping pills, Hypno, Drowze, Drone, or any of the other dozens of new designer drugs on the market.

He'd largely come to terms with the fact that he'd deal with this shit for the rest of his life. It was what fueled his fundamental lack of fear of dying. Sometimes dying looked dangerously seductive. Something to make the pain stop, really stop, even for a fucking minute. If he was dead, there'd be no more pain, no more suffering or burning agony. No more waking up in the dead of night screaming. No more misery.

Of course, there'd be no more women, no more booze or drugs or the adrenaline rush, the thrill of combat and danger.

The only things worth living for at this point.

Enzo rounded the final stretch of corridor between him and this Bio Creature. He finally got a good look at the thing. It must be, he realized, the thing that had escaped from the massive cage he'd come across a floor below. Either that, or that had been the Alpha's cage. This thing had to hunch to fit in the corridor as it was. It easily reached fifteen feet in height. Its flesh was a pallid network of crimson lines, like a roadmap of hell, stretched tightly over a collection of thick, powerful muscles. It still retained a vaguely human shape, though each of its hands seemed to end in pincers that snapped close occasionally.

It was facing away from him and even from this distance, he could hear the massive huff of each breath. It was growling gently, a low, incredibly deep bass rumble that prickled Enzo's instincts and touched him on a very primal, ancient level, making him bristle in an utterly basic response. A throwback to caveman days when some particularly deadly animal cut loose with a growl. He took a few steps back, waiting.

“I have eyes on target,” he murmured into the radio.

“Good, we've hit the network room and are beginning repairs. We'll let you know when we're ready to initiate,”
Stern replied.

The Bio Creature paused. Enzo tensed, waiting for it to pick back up its pace. A long moment passed. Finally, it set off again. He wondered what it was looking for, or how it had even gotten into this situation to begin with. Minutes passed while he played this stupid game with a monster that had a thousand pounds on him. It kept stopping every thirty feet or so, and he had to stop too, falling back each time until he actually lost sight of it. Not that it really mattered whether or not he could see it, he just didn't need it seeing him.

Finally, the call came through.
“We're ready. Drone guns are repaired and we're in position. Bring it to us,”
Stern said.

“On it,” Enzo replied.

Now came the fun part.

Enzo raised his rifle, flipped it to full auto and tucked the butt of it against his shoulder. He jogged forward a few meters and aimed at the thing's broad back. It stopped again. Good. He squeezed the trigger. The creature let out a roar that shook the whole of the area as he emptied the entire magazine into its back, spraying a thick ooze of deep crimson blood across the walls and ceiling. The creature spun around as Enzo hastily reloaded.

“Come get it!” he screamed, then turned and began running.

The entire area shook as the beast came for him, the ground trembling with its approach. Enzo sprinted down the corridor, orienting himself. He'd made two complete circuits at that point, having neared his original point of origin where he'd stepped out from Mess Four. He had to go a little over a third of the length of the entire corridor, back to the massive, vault-like doors that admitted access to the whole complex.

Enzo glanced over his shoulder and felt his heart leap into his throat. The Bio Creature was faster than it looked. It was gaining on him, already killing half the distance between them and coming closer. He picked up the pace, breaking into a flat-out dead run. He dodged slicks of blood and the occasional bit of debris or body part that hadn't already been crushed to dust by repeated trampling from the thing as it wandered the corridor.

Within a moment, he had it in sight. The doors were opened and Stern was waiting for him. The Staff Sergeant urged him on, sighting the Bio Creature with his rifle and firing over Enzo's head. Enzo ducked and kept going, listening to the beast howl and rage as it gave chase. He almost crashed directly into Stern, instead managing to get around him at the last second. They both retreated into the lobby and Stern began screaming for them to hit it.

The beast began ripping the door frame out of the wall trying to get in. Enzo took in the lobby at a glance. The central area was a broad, wide-open section beset on both sides by security checkpoints, where Lee and Beam were waiting. Enzo and Stern split up, each of them heading for opposite checkpoints as the creature tore its way into the room.

“Well?” Stern called.

“Working on it!” Lee shouted back.

“What's the problem!? You said you had it ready!” Enzo said.

“We ran into some technical difficulties!” Lee snapped.

The creature roared, silencing all conversation. Enzo trembled in anticipation, his gaze snapping back and forth between the drone guns and the Bio Creature. It was looking at him and Beam, then across the room at Stern and Lee, as if deciding who to go for. A sharp whirling sound suddenly filled the air and Enzo felt relief pour through him as the quartet of huge, dark drone guns sprang to life, tracking the monster.

A second passed, then another.

Abruptly, the drone guns died, the sound falling silent.

“Lee...” Stern said, the fear obvious in his voice.

“Shit! They're not going to come online! Everyone out! Plan B!” Lee called.

“What the fuck is Plan B?!” Enzo cried as they left the security checkpoints and raced past the monster, towards the exit they'd just led it through.

“
Run
!” Stern screamed.

The Bio Creature roared once more, making a grab for Enzo. He narrowly ducked beneath its pincer hand, feeling the displaced air as it came within inches of the top of his head, and ran out into the central corridor. The quartet of them sprinted away. The Altered titan came after them, crashing back into the main corridor.