Chapter Fifteen

According to the map, there should have been a corridor that ran left to right past the room wed just exited, then at the end of the right hand side corridor, there should be the area that Timur was pushing into.

Nice and simple.

That wasn’t the case though, the right hand side was entirely blocked by thick steel plating, leaving only the left, and that led away in the wrong fucking direction.

I paused, checking the map, thinking quickly.

If we went back, we would be sitting in a narrow corridor while Timur and his people fought against what seemed to be a heavy concentration of the specters. This route had to lead somewhere, and the floor plan wasn’t exactly complicated, so we should be able to pick up the next crossing corridor easily enough and get around to help them.

Should.

I didn’t like it, but I reported in.

“Timur, Liolet, the cross corridor has been sealed, working to find a way around the blockage, be aware the maps are inaccurate.”

“Whatever,” Timur snapped, clearly firing. “Just get your arse in gear!”

“On it,” I agreed, moving out again, rifle up and leading the way.

The corridor we headed down ran for a dozen meters, before it hit a dead end, again, totally different to the map, and we were forced to take a left into one of the rooms that had been sealed off from the other corridor.

This one, like the last was square, old power distribution points and torn out light fixtures the only break in the four walls… beyond the two cameras in the top far corners of the room.

“This is feeling more and more like a setup.” Luna was the one to say what we were all thinking, and I nodded, rather than responding, as we exited the room via another door, into a new corridor, still leading away from the others.

The concrete floor and roof changed into a metal gantry way, as rather than walls, we excited into the middle of the building, slowing as we saw the mess before us.

“Oh FUCK,” I gasped, and the others echoed the thought, right before jammers came online, and we were reduced to point to point transmission, and a hidden door slid down behind us, cutting us off from the fucking corridor.

The door was massive, at least six inches of solid steel, and it’d nearly cut Todds in half, the fucker jumping through at the last minute, before it slammed down, and locking mechanisms engaged, as floodlights flared, bathing the area in brilliant clarity.

“Boss, I forgot something at the warehouse, mind if I go home?” Luna whispered as we stared in dumbfounded amazement.

“Me too,” Reign said.

“Me fucking three,” I agreed, before shaking my head. “Fuck this shit, Todds, get that fucking door open…”

“No chance,” he replied, having already looked at it. “We’d need to climb around the outside of the gantry, you think that’s going to work out well?”

I looked where he pointed, and I cursed.

The gantry we were in was a cage, that was clear, reinforced steel mesh that formed the corridor, but let you see though, and as evidenced by the rising clicks and buzzes, be seen as well.

The section we were in was nothing like the maps we’d been given, instead of level after level that had been built inside the old cooling tower, it’d been stripped back.

There were a dozen levels up and down around a solid concrete and steel block that jutted out into the middle of the tower. That block was clearly where we’d just come from, and I was guessing that was designed to make us think that the tower was as it’d been sold to us.

Now that we were in too deep to do anything about it?

It was clear the entire building was a trap.

Level after level up and down, of crossing gantry ways sealed all around, braced and built carefully to hold us, while cameras were set to record every detail.

This was a new deathmatch, one that was being streamed live, and the opponents were fucking specters .

They were everywhere, as the gate at the end of this section unlocked with a flash of lights and a whoop of alarms, designed to make sure that every fucker in here knew where we were.

The gantries we could see above and below were filled with specters, some small some large, several collapsed and being crushed by the mass around them, but easily hundreds in just the first level up and down from us.

I took it all in a fast glance, and then the floodgates were opened, and the first of them poured in.

“Fuck!” I snarled. “Advance!” I shifted to the right of the corridor, it was just wide enough for two to stand side by side, and one of the sisters stepped up to my left.

We took four fast steps, getting some room to move from the sealed door, some room to retreat if we needed it, and I felt someone pulling at my bag behind me.

“I’ll try and cut us out of the cage,” Todds said, and I nodded, shifting my aim and firing, single shot, round after round, aiming for the head.

Bodies fell, Gessh taking down at least as many as I did, her shotgun firing solid slugs that hammered through rotting corpses one after another.

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The tide was solid at first though, dozens and then hundreds falling, the first relief we got in the fight was that there were so many bodies piling up that they had to literally struggle through them. We made it to the halfway point, and slowed, Gessh and I taking a knee and reloading as Reign and Luna fired over our heads, keeping the wave back.

The new full head helm made me smile grimly as the steady hammering of their weapons was reduced to a more manageable clatter, rather than deafening me as such weapons once could have done.

After thirty seconds though, Reign spoke.

“I’m gonna sweep the stairs with the grazer, full power sustained beam, see if I can get us some space.”

“Do it,” I agreed, and a second or three later the subtly wrong beam charged through the air, the hum deep enough that I felt it, balls to bones, but the effect on the specters was more pronounced.

Dozens of them simply collapsed, their metal and robotic components suffered little effect, but the flesh, living or dead, fell apart like overcooked meat, shredding into component parts.

Cybernetic limbs collapsed onto the floor, shreds of flesh holding onto them and torn, filthy clothing. While the limbs spasmed, following the last routing ordered into them; legs walking, arms reaching, hands grasping… they didn’t take long to fail fully.

That the mass of specters, driven supposedly entirely by the need for nanites and mods, totally ignored the piled mods by their feet, clambering over them and fighting to get at us?

It proved beyond any doubt that they were being guided.

“How much did that cost you?” I called to Reign over the clatter and chatter of gunfire.

“Fifteen percent,” she replied and I cursed.

“When I tell you, give me another one, higher up, aim for the floor above and drag it sideways fast, I want as many on the floor as possible, don’t worry if you don’t kill them, their friends trampling over them will do it for us. Use twenty percent, then hold at that, don’t waste any more.”

“Ready,” she replied.

“Gessh, switch to shotgun, I want you and Luna to clear me a fucking path,” I ordered, waiting as Gessh stepped forwards, and Luna stepped around me. I ceased fire, reloading quickly as the pair started hammering out solid metal slugs that punched through several at a time.

“Todds, what’s happening with that barrier?” I barked.

“Fuck all, boss,” he replied, sounding frustrated. “The mechanism is out of reach, and it’s taking longer to cut through the gantry than I like, I might run out of charge before I’ve gotten all the way out, and then we’re fucked.”

“Stow it,” I ordered after a second’s thought. “Fuck this shit, this place was set up as a trap, clearly they set the place up for this, and expected us to march in, then spend all our effort on escaping, while they bring in specter after specter. Those numbers can’t be unlimited, but if we can close off the area, we can cut them down.”

“We’re going with the original plan?” Reign asked, surprised.

“Nothing’s changed,” I pointed out. “If we can cut off the supply of specters, then we can finish the job. Artem City itself pays the bounty on the fuckers, so that way we save our teams, we save the guild AND we get paid. The owners pay a portion of that fee, but most of the fee comes from Artem’s government.”

“So?” Luna said, before cursing. “Reloading!”

“Me too!” Gessh snapped, dropping her magazine as I stepped up to their shoulders, the pair shifting to make room for me as I started firing quickly, my headshots really dialing in thanks to the dumb fuckers moving steadily, and the good rifle.

“So…” I said, lining up another shot and seeing the specter, a young woman with bright blue cybernetic eyes, drop as if her puppets strings were cut as the hole bloomed in her forehead. “We still get paid for this. Then we go to the fuckers that set this up to profit from our deaths…”

“Ah.”

“And we profit from theirs instead,” Reign finished for me, all of us having the same thought.”

“Hell, yeah,” Gessh growled. “So how the hell do we get from here, surrounded by goddamn specters, to there, curb-stomping some corpo fuckhead’s skull in?”

“We clear the stairs up and down, and we go down,” I said, “We cut our way where we can—we’re definitely going to need to conserve ammo—and then we seal the lower levels. At that point we know we’re dealing with limited numbers, and we cut our way back up. Every room, every level, we kill anything that’s not us, and we keep going.”

“Hell, the way these are moving? Something’s gotta be controlling them, maybe one that’s in charge? Something that we’ve not seen yet. Maybe if we could capture that…” She left unsaid that capturing any kind of specter was a pain in the ass, let alone something that could control all the others around it.

“We’ll see what we can do. Even dead it’ll be worth a lot of creds, and hopefully we can link up with the others soon,” I said. “For now, on three Reign you wipe the next level, drag that beam nice and slow, make sure there’s a good pile of bodies they need to climb over.

“Gessh and Luna, be ready to hammer those fucks back, while Todds and I get the fun job.”

“What’s that boss?” he asked.

“Well, the Specters are having issues getting over their dead friends, but we need to get past as well,” I pointed out. “So we’re piling those fuckers up at the bottom of the stairwell going up.”

“Damn.”

“Let’s go!” I called out, and the sisters did. They’d been firing slowly but steadily, taking the specters down now that the initial press had waned, and that the majority were being held up as they clambered over bodies.

Instead now they moved with a will, charging forwards as I counted down, and Reign opened fire at the next level above. Todds and I set to with a will at the pile of bodies, dragging them aside and clearing a path as Luna led, turning left at the end of the T-junction, killing anything between her and the stairwell down, while Gessh paused for us to pass her, before she started to walk slowly backwards.

With the two shotguns firing over and over, and a good thirty or so specters above us reduced to collapsed, half shredded bodies, we had the chance to move and we damn well took it.

As soon as Luna was out of ammo, I stepped around her and drew the plasma sword, striding to meet the monsters of a thousand tales.

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