Chapter Fourteen

We were ready on time, which was a bit of a relief. I hated being late. It was the years of army training, where there was no such thing as ‘on time’. You were damn well early, or you were late.

Sliding in on the deadline was an anathema to me.

Still, the five of us were now linked with the new tac-net, and as the individual units were decent ones, they offered a choice of sub-vocalization, full speech, or linkage to your keystone, which meant that we could focus and ‘speak’ without saying anything aloud with ease.

At last we could talk privately, and for the first time in probably my entire life, I wasn’t concerned about a superior officer pulling the recording and punishing me for what they found.

All three teams jogged across the scrub wasteland, splashing through the rapidly forming puddles as the neon lights flared distantly, and I saw the first of the newbies—they’d all been clearly ordered to stay outside the tower, but a handful had been detailed for this job—standing by the door with a crowbar and a welding set.

Once we were inside the door would be kept ready, until one of the three team leaders sent a code word to them. Then the doors would be sealed. Not all of them, obviously, but two to prevent outbreaks.

The welding kit could be used to cut doors if we needed to, or to seal the door again behind us if we had to fall back, but it was best to have shit ready.

I keyed the command line, and spoke quickly as we neared the bottom of the building, curious as a thought came to me.

“So… just checking here people, but are we sure they know we’re here?”

“They do,” Timur grunted. “There’s forty of us, all modded to fuck, the specters know we’re here.”

“So why haven’t they come out?” I asked. “I mean if they know… why wait for us to dig our way in?”

“Who knows why or how they think, they just do,” Liolet replied.

“Okay, let me and mine take point then,” I suggested as we reached the door. “If for any reason they don’t know we’re here, then we can stealth kill some before they find out, right?”

“Kabutt.” Timur snorted. “You’re a good fighter, I’m sure, but they’re specters. They don’t think like that. You take one down? Even if they don’t see you? Whatever is in control of it knows. It’s a machine, they’re not exactly contemplating their innermost existence you know.”

“Yeah, trust us. We do this a lot,” Liolet said. “Let Timur lead, it’s his role.”

“Fine.” I sighed and shrugged, backing out of the conversation and switching to the team net. “Be ready here, people, the others seem to think the specters know we’re coming, but they’re happy to run blindly in…”

“Meat to the grinder?” Luna asked, and I tried not to curse as my thoughts clearly matched hers.

“Let’s stay optimistic, but hey. So we’re going down first…”

“Sounds fun,” Reign said.

“…and the others are securing the floors then waiting for us,” I finished, ignoring her. “We’re to find the way the fuckers are getting in and seal it, I’ve got a small arc welding kit in my bag, we seal it, then we’re moving back up, clearing as we go.”

“Good old bug hunt eh?” Luna quipped. “Room by room, slaughter and move on.”

“Basically, yeah,” I agreed. “Where possible use melee weapons, save as much ammo as we can until we need it.”

We had a veritable buttload of it, I had literally ten mags for the assault rifle, each holding thirty-five shots, five for the handgun, each holding eighteen, or three reloads of the revolving cylinder per mag. Then I had the three mags for the shotgun. Two were solid slug, one was a mixture of ‘fun’ rounds, bolo and solid alternating until I get to the final round which was the Dragon’s Asshole.

Beyond that I had a single box of two hundred rounds for the assault rifle in my bag, four frags, two flashbangs, and unfortunately only the one EMP. We’d been told under no circumstances to use one, but fuck it, if it came down to that or our lives? I’d walk with our lives.

I’d given up on the hatchet, I’d carried it into three fights and never used the fucker yet, but I had both the vibro-blade knife and the plasma sword.

Then I had two small and two medium medikits.

I was loaded for fucking bear, and the others were the same, although the sisters were focused on the combination of the shotguns and swords as their primary choices, where mine was the assault rifle, meaning they carried a lot more mags for the shotguns than anything else.

Gessh had her grazer assault rifle for emergencies, and Luna her standard slug firing one.

Reign was already complaining about the weight of the batteries she had to carry for the grazer sniper rifle, but none of us were fooled. We’d tried to convince her to leave it behind and focus on the solid slug sniper rifle and she’d acted like we were trying to get her to sacrifice her first-born.

She’d given up on her assault rifle entirely, possibly due to the sheer size of the sniper rifle duo she was struggling with, and its ammo, but had kept a handgun as her last line of defense.

“Start recording!” Liolet sent to everyone. “Backup to the offsite guild repository, just accept the link people.” I did as usual, not liking it but that was life.

Now as the newbie jerked the door open, stepping behind it and bracing herself ready, the teams raced into the ground floor of the cooling tower without a pause.

This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road. If you spot it on Amazon, please report it.

The darkness as we went inside caused the line to slow a little, even the best mods took a second to adjust from the flaring neon lights and falling rain outside, to the darkness inside, and we were all the same on that.

As soon as I was in though, I felt the hackles on the back of my neck rise.

The outside looked dilapidated, the concrete and steel construction leaving great long scars of rusted runoff marring the funnel tower shape, but inside?

The walls and ceiling were close in, seriously so.

Where I’d expected the entire place to look fucked, the floor and walls were solid, and the ceiling covered in a solid metal mesh. Here and there as we ran, I thought I spotted the tell-tale reflection of lenses, and I gritted my teeth, sending a comm directly to Julius.

“What’s up, Kabutt?” he asked, appearing in the corner of my vision.

“The cameras,” I said. “Are they active?”

“Not as far as I know,” he replied a second later. “Sorry, sarge, give me a minute, just getting reports from another site run, it’s not going well.” He sighed, before looking back at something else. “Camera, cameras… yeah, got it here. They’re full 3D projection types, sealed away apparently, too expensive to remove them, so we’re to leave them be. The owner of the building says they’re worth plenty and they’ve got plans for them, so you’re to not damage them.”

“Julius…” I said slowly. “I’ve got a really bad feeling about this place. You said it was used as a site for death matches, and had a maze?”

“Yeah, they shut it down a year or two ago I think. The fans drifted off when they realized that nobody could win.”

“And it’s the same owners?” I asked, going cold as I passed another offshoot doorway, each and every one welded shut so far.

“Unknown. It’s a corpo deal, the old one shut down, but it might be… yeah, two of the ‘new’ corporation’s bosses are registered as the old one’s as well. Why?”

“Because I think they’re filming us, and I think they’re going to sell the footage of us clearing the specters out and use it for something.”

“And that’s why the want the cameras left alone.” Julius groaned. “Well, they were weirdly specific about getting all the rights to the recordings you make. Fucker. I should have asked for more.”

“Asked for more?” I growled, and he sighed.

“It’s not that unusual, Kabutt. All client sites have cameras and so on, and they all get a copy of your sweep, it’s so they can verify how many are killed etc. They have the right to share that recording if they need to, usually its insurance companies and so on. In this case, yeah, they’re probably going to charge people to watch you fight the specters, dammit. It is what it is though, do the job, keep your people alive, and view it as if you’re doing an advertising reel for the guild. Now, I need to go, shout if there’s an issue.”

With that he disconnected and I was left swearing, before calling the others, and then adding in both Liolet and Timur.

“Okay people, be aware, those cameras hidden about the place? They’re probably live, recording all we do, this place was a broadcast point for death matches and shit like that, you better believe they’ll happily share reels of us fighting the specters. Be careful, and for fuck’s sake if you need to break for a shit? Check that you’re not being filmed first.”

I got a series of ‘acknowledged’ and ‘motherfuckers’ from the others, and the team leads dropped out of the net quickly, clearly spreading the word.

“Good catch there,” Luna said in our tac-net as we continued along the hall, and I nodded my thanks absently.

“I’m hoping I’m wrong, but Julius doesn’t think so,” I said.

“Okay… I’m accessing…” Reign muttered into the feed, then started swearing.

“What?” I asked, before a new image was sent to me.

It was a broadcast studio, with a pair of talking heads sat in the middle around a desk, with images of specters playing on screens behind them… and yeah.

A line of us running through a corridor right in the center.

“Motherfuckers,” I growled, before sending the link to both Julius, and the other two team leads, as well as talking to my own team. “Looks like we’re vid-stars, people!”

“Great, I always thought you’d be the one to embarrass us publicly,” Gessh shot to Luna, who started chuckling.

“Remember, nothing changed,” I said, feeling anything but that it was right, but hey. “We’re still being paid for this, and we’ll still be risking our lives, so just act professional, rely on the team, and we’ll get through this.” I repeated into the tac-net.

Another round of acknowledgement and the first gun shots were ringing out somewhere ahead.

I resisted the urge to watch as I had no doubt the talking fucking idiots would be showing the world it, but that was a fight for a different day. As I’d cut the feed to the studio, the last thing I’d seen was the viewer counter.

It’d been in the low thousands when Reign sent it to us, it was in the high hundred thousand range when I disconnected.

We passed two more doors, both sealed, before we finally found some that could be opened, and by then the front line were encountering serious resistance.

“Taking the left,” I sent on the command line, leading my team through the room to the left, the map telling me that we should be able to pick up a second corridor on the other side of this next room, then take the force that Timur was fighting from a second angle.

The room I led my team into was absolutely bare, almost surgically so in fact, even the floor was bare of anything beyond dirt, and I felt my stomach cramping as I moved through it, the door on the far side sliding into the wall recess to let me out into the next corridor.

That was where the problems started.

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