Chapter Five

We hurried down the stairs, weapons ready, but the sight when we reached the bottom and moved out onto a metal gantry?

It was nothing like what we’d been expecting.

Below us was what looked to be one of the old reservoir tanks, massive things designed to hold millions and even billions of units of water for the city in times of drought and so on. It’d been long since abandoned, and then repurposed.

We stood on a metal gantry that ran across the middle of the basin, and below us? Easily several hundred specters milled, with the basin vanishing into the distance beyond the range of our enhanced optics.

The clicks and whirrs of old mods, the occasional cry as something triggered a vocal processor and the clinks and clangs of bodies bouncing off each other in the darkness below us impressed the need for silence in ways that an order never could, and we slowed, staring with wide eyes.

“There’s hundreds,” Reign whispered.

I nodded, looking to the right and left, before speaking softly.

“Luna, take the left. Gessh, the right. Reign, stay here. Let’s check out the size of this place, don’t fire unless you really fucking need to, swords and knives only.”

The gantry crossed over the middle of the basin below, but it also ran left and right vanishing into the darkness, attached to the walls. As the sisters split and headed along those paths, I moved out over the center, as Reign used the scope on her grazer to check the basin below.

I moved slowly, the metal underfoot creaking occasionally as I searched, the cross hatch pattern that the entire system was made of making it easy to see through it to the ground far below.

Here and there I could see evidence of recent firefights, bodies laid still in true death, stripped of their mods. I saw pipes and old machinery that covered the inner walls of the basin, and some of them were damaged, the edges looking sharp and recent, as the smell of recent gunfire and blood hung in the air.

Worst of all though were the bodies. Some of the specters were covered in wet blood, and I saw the remains of a body against one wall, broken and forgotten.

The left arm was gone entirely, as was the right foot, and the head had been cracked like an egg. Blood dripped from nearby mechanisms where it’d presumably sprayed at some point recently.

Their rifle was laid on the floor nearby, and I winced, seeing a hatchet like mine, snapped off at the handle, the rifle’s butt glowing with a single red LED that proclaimed to those that knew what to look for, that it was unloaded.

I paused, staring down at the body slumped in death, and the slowly spreading crowd of specters, and I gritted my teeth, shaking my head in anger.

Not only were we too late to the fight? We’d arrived just in time to see the specters winding down. It didn’t make sense as to why the door above had been closed off, but fuck it, you never really got to know all the ins and outs of another’s life, never mind their death.

I moved on, scouring the ground, looking from the gantry way ahead, to the sides where Luna and Gessh had vanished into the distance, when I saw it.

A tiny light, a laser pointer or something similar, flashing at me.

It was a single burst of light, a rangefinder or something, then it vanished, then it was back, three sharp pulses, then vanished again.

I moved forwards quickly. It’d come from somewhere just beyond the range of my optics, and I frowned as I made it far enough along that I thought I should be able to see something and instead saw… nothing.

The basin below me was circular, and had clearly been intended as a series of circular units. Presumably they’d once had a top to them, and the gantry passed over that. Internal walls ran under me now, sealing sections away from each other, with doorways between them, so that if the owner wanted they could be used individually or as a whole.

The internal walls had sections that were covered in mechanisms, and others where they were blank, and yet…

Luna and Gessh were roaming around the outside of the setup. Reign was somewhere behind me, and with her better scope on her rifle I had to hope she could see me and was watching.

I started to wave my left hand up and down slowly, then made a ‘move up’ hand signal, before starting again.

All the time, as I did it, I was staring at the area I thought the light had flashed from, seeing a shadowed mass of complex rusting machinery, and fuck all else.

The walls of the tank were about forty meters high, and several hundred across, making the specters below me pretty much the limit for my current upgrades, and I cursed over the thought that there could be anything down there, and I’d have no fucking clue.

Sections lifted up higher, like they had where we’d entered, the specters being maybe fifteen meters below us, but here it was steadily sloping further and further down.

I’d gotten pretty turned around as we’d gone lower and lower, but I was guessing that somewhere nearby was the wall, the outer city one, where it sloped down into the ground.

It couldn’t have been that though, and I was sure I’d seen light flashing… maybe it’d been a reflection off a bit of metal?

I was still frowning, trying to work it out, when Reign almost gave me a heart attack, appearing by my side and grabbing my hand to stop me waving.

“What’s up?” she whispered.

“ Fuckin… ” I took a deep breath, shaking my head as I looked at her. “Fucking hell, Reign…warn a guy, alright?”

This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.

“What did you want?” she asked in a low hiss. “I think they can sense us…”

I looked back down. More and more faces were starting to lift up, casting about and trying to pick up the source for the nanites they could presumably sense nearby, not to mention whatever else the fuckers had for senses.

“Dammit… look there,” I said, pointing to where I thought the light had come from. “I saw a…”

Light shone at us from a section of piping about halfway up the wall, and this time it was steady, making damn sure we saw them, before it winked off again.

“It’s a survivor,” Reign said. “Using the rangefinder on their gun maybe?”

“I’m thinking stealthed.”

“The specters are close to them…” She winced. “Don’t suppose you’ve got a rope?”

“Nope. You?”

“Would I be asking you if I had one?” she countered, looking from side to side, then lifting her rifle and sighting in, scanning things outside of my range. “Okay, there’s a section where the wall is close enough that we can probably catch them if they jump, but that section is close to a staircase down as well.”

“Right?”

“So, we basically need to get them the fuck away from that section, and whoever it is can either climb up, or down and run across.”

“So get the specters away from there you mean?”

She nodded again, waving a hand as if to say ‘get on with it, that’s fuckin’ obvious’.

“Is there another way down?” I asked and she shrugged.

“Not that I can see… but I can only see so far. Gessh and Luna should have reached the far side by now.”

“Okay, we need to rig something, just in case, a couple of grenades where the path leads down maybe, then if we get swamped it’ll take the path up out—”

“If we do that and there’s any more survivors down there, we’re pretty much giving up on them,” she pointed out and I swore.

“Okay, fuck it,” I growled. “Let’s get Gessh and Luna back here, and get ready. We make sure there’s no more ways up here, we don’t want to get swamped if we can avoid it.”

“What’s the plan?” Reign asked and I shrugged.

“I’m thinking we go with overwhelming firepower. We get him across to the nearest point to climb up, and I drop down with my plasma blade. I cut a way through to the bottom of the stairs while you three cover the sides and rear as we run for it.”

“And the rest of the team?” Reign asked. “Remember, we still don’t know who that is, they’re in stealth suits, so they might be one of the team, or…”

“Or they might be one of the fuckheads who lived and worked here.” I groaned. “Yeah good point.”

“So…” We both looked over the side, then Reign signaled down to the person in stealth. Using hand signals she conveyed ‘stay there’ and ‘be back in 5’.

Then we moved back quickly, more growls and clatters rising from below as a few more of the stumbling specters saw us and tried to figure out how to get up.

“So?” I asked in a low voice.

“So I wanted to get back from where he might be able to hear me,” she said. “Look, he might be a member of either our team, or the local fuckheads that are chopping people up for parts. Either way, we need to get them and find out what the fuck happened here. If they’re from our team? They’ll know what happened to the others, or at least have a clue. If they’re the local fuckers, same, except they’ll probably know who and what the hell was going on, and…” She shot me a downright evil smile.

“They’ll also know who financed this and where the fucking money is. There’s nothing we can do for the dead, not here, but we can find it out, and either leak it to the corpos and the press—they’d have a field day using it to distract us from whatever shit they need to hide—or we use it to blackmail the fuck outta them, clean their accounts out, and then we do all of that.”

“That’s…” I broke off.

“Look, Kabutt, I know it’s not nice, but that’s the way the world is, I’m just saying we could get something for us out of this.”

“I was going to say evil, but magnificent,” I said. “I think we should leave it to Julius though, he’ll be here with the rest of the guild soon, and as our ‘boss’, it’s both his problem, and his privilege.”

“Damn, fine,” she grumbled.

“Besides, do you really want to try and sell the story to the press? They’d fucking dig your past up and shit on it just for fun, you know those vultures.”

“Fair point,” she groused, then waved ahead, nodding. “There’s Luna.”

Less than a minute later we’d met up again and were backing up into the stairwell, moving back from the edge where the few specters at this end of the basin below could see or sense us.

“Where’s Gessh?” I asked Luna, who hesitated.

“No clue, my gantry went around the outside and then stopped, there’s a fuck load of specters, but no way up or down, so I came back. I expected her to be here. What did you find?”

We filled her in quickly as we could, waiting quietly… until the sound of crashing metal, followed by sudden and heavy gunfire rang out.

“Gessh!” Luna swore, spinning on her heel and starting to run, and we followed after.

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