Syberian Sunrise (5 page)

What more invitation could he ask for?

He sheathed his knife.

Enzo grinned darkly as he slid quietly out of the elevator, crossed the short distance between them and grabbed the gun. The Mutant made a warning sound. Gambling on his luck to hold out, he yanked the gun free of the holster, brought it up and pressed the barrel against the back of the smelly thing's head. He squeezed the trigger. His luck had indeed held out. The gun let off a satisfying
pop
! sound and the accompanying bright flash blinded Enzo for a moment. His was briefly stuck with the image of the Mutant's head snapping forward, blood and brains and bone fragments spewing out in a spectacular display of death.

He blinked a few times, watched the body slump to the floor. Enzo dropped into a crouch by the corpse and began patting it down to see if it had any other goodies hidden away in its pockets. His head snapped up, however, as he heard the unmistakeable sound of a door opening. Ahead of him, across the lobby, he spied first one, then two Mutants coming in through a doorway.

“Shit!” he snapped, snatching the pistol from where he'd set it on the ground.

They could open doors!?

He took aim and fired, taking the first one directly in the face. The bullet pierced its left eye and punched through its skull, turning the back of his head into a plume of crimson gore. The new corpse dropped immediately to the ground, but as he focused on the second one and squeezed the trigger, nothing happened.

The gun clicked empty.

“Fuck!” he snapped, dropping it and pulling his knife back out.

The Mutant rushed across the room, faster than any of the others he'd encountered so far, and took a swipe at him. Its claws raked across his security vest, tearing through some of it. Not enough to break his flesh. It was a what appeared to be a medic, a woman who wore a tattered and heavily stained white jumpsuit. Enzo plunged the blade into her chest three times in quick succession. He was rewarded with a spray of blood and an earsplitting shriek.

He shoved the body back and it toppled over, joining the others.

“Damn,” Enzo muttered, breathing heavily, shaky with adrenaline. He laughed nervously, then moved over to the door they'd opened, the only other one in the room besides the lift he'd exited, and poked his head cautiously out.

A hallway extended away from him to the left. There was just a single door at the end of it, and it was closed. Nothing was in the corridor. He pulled his head back in and turned to the bodies. One of them shifted.

“Dammit!” he snapped, remembering what he'd forgotten.

Enzo hurried forward, dropped to his knees and stabbed the chest of the security guard he'd killed. Thankfully the man hadn't been wearing a vest when he was taken over, so it was considerably easier to stab him. Something squealed inside the body and Enzo immediately turned to the final corpse. Already, the Slug within was freeing itself, poking its hideous head from out of the body's mouth. Enzo wrapped his false hand around it and squeezed.

There was a second, muffled squeal of pain that was sharply cut off. The Slug's head was crushed to crimson pulp in his hand, oozing out between his fingers. He made a face and spent a moment wiping his fake hand off on the medic's jumpsuit, staining what was left of the clean white space. The smell of the corpses reignited his memory of how that Slug had gotten halfway down his throat and he gagged, feeling his bile rise.

Enzo spat a few times, bringing himself back under control. With that done, he searched the bodies. The two that had come in from the corridor didn't have anything on them, but the security had one more thing: a single magazine of ammo He reloaded the pistol and then stood, lamenting his lack of ammo. But at least he had a pistol and some real light now.

Before heading deeper into the unknown, he decided to try and get some more information out of his mystery contact.

“Hey, you still out there? Or are you dead?” he asked.

There was a pause, then, finally,
“yes, I'm still here. I'm sorry about that. I'm in kind of a delicate situation at the moment. On top of that, our communications gear is in...not the best shape. But listen, now that I've got you back, I need you to-”
Enzo cut her off.

“No. I did your favor, you owe me an explanation. You gave your word. Now tell me where the fuck I am and what's going on.”

The woman sighed.
“All right, fine. You're on a planet called Syberia. It's a little, snowy mining planet in the middle of nowhere. This whole place is owned by a shadowy branch of the government called Dark Operations, formerly known as the Office of Intelligence. Originally, this was a mining complex, but they found a ship buried in a cavern beneath the surface. It's two levels above you. As far as I've been able to tell, they found these...things onboard the ship.”

Enzo processed this for a moment. “How did I end up here?” he asked finally.

“I'm not a hundred percent, but listen...I'm running on bare minimum power here. I can see that you started up the auxiliary generator, and that's great, it's helping take a lot of the load off of the primary generator. However, all that means for now is that we won't lose power completely, and we'll be able to keep breathing. My lack of power means I don't have access to the files I need. Which is why I need your help,”
she explained.

Enzo frowned, closing his eyes for his moment, feeling the steady pulse of his shoulder. He sighed heavily, opened his eyes back up.

“Fine, what do you need done?” he asked begrudgingly.

“A pair of power relays, both in the same section, were damaged during the fighting. I need you to either repair them, or find a way to reroute power through dormant relays, whichever is easier. Where are you at right now?”
she asked.

“I'm in the elevator lobby of Level Eight, fresh off the lift, pretty much.”

“Okay, good. Level Eight isn't very big, at least in terms of walking around. It just holds the primary power plant. Head down the hall beyond the lobby to the primary room, then, along the left hand wall, take the third door. That will lead you to the relays and you can assess the damage for yourself...how are you at technical stuff?”

“I'm pretty good,” Enzo replied. It wasn't quite the truth, but it wasn't quite a lie. It was more that he'd picked up a lot of random knowledge. He could handle an eclectic smattering of situations, and some he outright couldn't.

Of course, he wasn't going to tell her that.

“Good. Get there, make the repairs. If you can't, reroute them. There's a terminal in the room. The process should be easy.”

Enzo set out, leaving the lobby and coming to the corridor. While he still had her, Enzo intended to get some more info out of her.

“So, what's your name? Who are you?” he asked, coming to the door and opening it. Peering through the opening he made, he spied a large, decently-lit room that was the main bay for the primary generator.

While it was obvious that a fair amount of fighting had gone on, there didn't seem to be anything actually alive within the confines of the bay.

“My name is Eve, but how about you go first?”
she replied.

Enzo smirked, and then complied. If there was one thing he was addicted to beyond his need to do whatever it took to dull the pain in his shoulder, it was women. There was nothing better than the raw, chemical pleasure of a morphine shot straight to his shoulder, but the unfiltered ecstasy of sex with a hot woman was a very close second. Even in the midst of all this, if there was the slimmest chance that he could meet up with this Eve and maybe relieve some stress with her in a closet somewhere, he'd take it. Who knew?

He'd gotten laid under crazier circumstances.

“My name is Enzo. I'm a mercenary, have been for a long time now. I'm good with guns, all of them. Same for vehicles. I can drive and pilot pretty much anything that moves. I've fought in conflicts on over two dozen worlds, killed a lot of guys and I don't have a home. No family left, no real friends left, either.”

It wasn't quite a script, but it was more or less what he tended to tell most of the women he came across. He augmented it, depending on who was talking to. He put more emphasis on his combat prowess and killing techniques if he was talking to a fellow mercenary or a Marine babe, since they were into that. He focused more on 'seeing the galaxy', all the interesting places he'd been and the traveling he'd done if he was talking to a civvie.

“I see,”
Eve replied. He couldn't read her reaction, although he thought she was less than thrilled about his response.

So maybe she was a tougher nut to crack. It didn't matter, he was pretty sure she'd be more impressed when she actually saw him.

“Oh hell,”
she said, her voice dropping to a whisper.
“I need to go again.”

And then she was gone. Enzo sighed. He found the door he was supposed to go through and hit the access button. It opened to reveal a small room that had obviously been heavily damaged in the fighting, as Eve had pointed out. Blood ran down the walls in rivulets, pooled on the floor and even dripped from the ceiling.

The walls themselves were less walls and more instrumentation panels. Several of them were dark and dead, others spat blue-white sparks occasionally. The actual power conduits, square silver boxes mounted on the walls that resembled fuse-boxes of old, still seemed relatively intact, compared to everything else. He walked up to the first one and pulled open the door panel. Staring within, he studied the damage.

Luckily, power relays were things he understood. And the damage to this one was obvious: a stray gunshot had punched right into it. Enzo frowned, taking it all into account. All he had to do was reconnect some wiring, replace a few spare parts...shouldn't be too difficult to get the thing running at least up to minimum capacity. The second one was also fairly simple, he discovered upon examination. One of the large wires that actually connected it to the power equipment had been severed by what might have been a Mutant claw.

He just needed to reconnect it.

Enzo grinned. This part would be easy, at least. And not too stressful. Now all he had to do was find the local maintenance bay. He stepped back out into the main room, looking around. After a moment he realized that the doors were actually labeled. He began making a slow circuit of the room, checking each door. Most of them were relay centers or other miscellaneous equipment that helped run a massive generator. For a moment, he wondered about why the area was so empty. There was something almost suspicious about it.

He nearly passed that thought out of mind, but...one of them
had
opened that door. How smart were these things? The ones he'd encountered on Level Nine were slow-moving stupid things, easy to kill, for the most part.

Was he walking into some kind of trap?

Enzo finally located the maintenance bay that would have the supplies, tools and spare parts he'd need to make the appropriate repairs. He opened the door, stepped in...and stopped. The room was a long, low rectangle, the walls adorned with shelves and crates. The first thing that his eyes fell on was a dark mass that hung from the ceiling in the far right corner of the room. He had just enough time to process how downright creepy this was when suddenly there was a blur of motion and something slammed into him.

Grunting, he flew back out of the room into the main reactor bay, the breath knocked from his lungs. Enzo cried out as he landed on his back and slid a few feet. Dizzy and in pain, trying to get his breath back, he propped himself up on his elbows and looked at the door he'd just been thrown through. A Mutant stood in it, a
big
one, as its bulk filled the frame of the doorway, blocking sight of the room behind it.

Only...no, this wasn't just a big Mutant, it was different. As he it let out a low warning growl, like a dog letting you know it was very close to biting the shit out of you, Enzo studied its features. It was large, though it arms and legs seemed to be a little on the skinny side. Its torso, however, was the opposite, bulky and powerful. Its head was a lump and there seemed to be no neck. The beast let out a deep roar and came for him.

Enzo knew he had to act fast. His pistol, it was still in the holster. Good thing, or might have been thrown free of his grasp. He gripped it with both hands, aiming down the length of his body directly for the broad chest of the thing, and opened fire. The beast kept running for him, roaring, geysers of blood bursting from his ashen flesh. Enzo kept firing, kept squeezing the trigger over and over again until finally the thing collapsed.

It rolled a few times, landing at his feet.

He let out a deep breath he'd been holding and stood up. Checking the pistol, he confirmed his suspicions: he'd depleted his minimal reserve of bullets.

Enzo kicked the body, rolling it onto its back. This thing was definitely a different breed. Something else. Something new. But what? He remembered seeing that dark mass in the room and an idea began to form. Enzo moved past the body and stepped back into the maintenance bay. Cautiously, he approached the mass. As he drew closer, the stench of the Slugs hit him and he twisted up his nose. The mass appeared to be made out of flesh and muscle and meat. A dark, twisted confusion of cartilage and skin.