Chapter Sixteen

The fight wasn’t short, clearing the way to the stairs wasn’t overly hard, although that the gantry cage had been treated with something to prevent us cutting our way out was damn clear when I tested the plasma blade against it.

It would cut, the plasma sword was far more powerful than the piddly little welding torch’s cutter after all, but even though I’d charged the battery in the plasma sword, and its containment chamber was at half strength, it clearly wouldn’t last long. I could have probably used it to carve my way through the door behind us.

We’d not be able to close it though, and if they’d closed the next door, and the next? Eventually we’d run out of power and have to stop, and we’d have nowhere to run to.

No it was better to finish the mission, then ram the sword up the asshole of the people that thought they could profit from my team’s death. Maybe use it like a combination blender and toaster for their internals.

I cut the first bodies down with a simple flowing figure of eight turned sideways, the old infinity symbol I’d once been told. Well, what it was, was great for a flowing movement that required just the snap of the wrists, and the blade could carve through outstretched hands, arms and then take heads with ease.

The stairwell down at the end of the gantry was a little harder.

Stepping over the bodies of those I’d just killed, and kicking limbs aside, I stabbed down and down, thrusting over and over, the blade sizzling through foreheads, into open mouths and through eye sockets.

As the brain, and frequently the head, was destroyed each time, the body collapsed, creating a larger and larger barrier as I kicked my way down, until finally, I had to stop, power down and switch to my handgun.

The advantage here was that I was standing over them as they tried to climb a mound of bodies, teeth chattering and arms reaching.

I lined up the shot, fired, moved to the next. Rinse and repeat, shots ringing out steadily behind me, until there was enough of a lull before me that I clambered onto the pile, and practically body-surfed my way to the bottom as they shifted under my weight.

Reaching more or less solid ground, I fired three more times, taking another kill after kill, before lining up on the fourth, firing and as he dropped the figure behind came into view…

And shot me in the chest with a tactical shotgun.

I was thrown back, the armor enough that I was winded and hurt, rather than killed, but still, one of my grenades on my chest started making a buzzing noise, and Todds tore it free, throwing it hard away, seconds before it exploded.

Fragments flew in all directions, Reign calling out in pain as one presumably winged her, then the sound was lost as Luna opened fire on full auto, returning the surprise for the ghoul that had just tagged me.

“Up and at them, boss…” Todds grunted, hauling me back up.

I coughed and forced air back into my spasming diaphragm, gasping in relief as the sweet filtered and cooled air provided by my helm flooded my lungs, and I reached down, pulling a small medikit out, then putting it back as I winced over the pain.

It hurt, fuck me it hurt, being kicked by a shotgun always hurt, especially when you’re at the business end of it, but that fucker was firing a single action shotgun, and the slug had literally hit a grenade full on.

I was insanely lucky, I realized as I looked down at my chest and saw the dented plate that had been behind the grenade.

That shot should have taken me out, or at least the exploding grenade should have. That it hadn’t, and that I was left with at worse a cracked rib, and probably not even that, just bruising?

The medikit could be saved for now.

I glanced back up and down the corridor.

To my left, as I stood, catching my breath against the side of the caged gantry, the stairwell down was being filed by falling specters as they tried and failed to climb over their dead brethren.

As they fell, they were stabbed over and over in the head by Gessh, who then stepped back and waited for the next, her handgun in her other hand, just in case.

Reign was in the middle, grazer at the ready, but waiting for the order to ‘clear the path’. Todds was with me, and Luna was standing with her shotgun ready, waiting for whatever was fucking stupid enough to poke its head up now out of the lower levels.

I squeezed Todds’ shoulder in thanks then moved up behind Luna, reloading my handgun as I went.

“How… we doing?” I asked Luna, wincing as my chest twinged in pain.

“Half a mag left, and a foul attitude,” she said, making me smile.

“Glad to hear it, soldier.” I grunted, forcing the next breath out, then straightening and wincing as the pain flared again. “Okay, take the lead, clear the next section. We need to keep moving,” I ordered her, as more gunfire rang out from above.

I looked up, seeing the flashes of fire, hearing the thunder that had to be the assault shotguns on full ‘rock and roll’ and seeing dimly through the overlapping mess of gantries, the press of bodies high overhead being blown apart.

“Cavalry’s here!” Reign called out, grinning. “Sounds like Timur just joined the party!”

I tried to connect to him, the tac-net should have been able to reach the other team leads despite the jamming field after all, but nada.

“We’ll get this section cleared, seal the bottom, and move up,” I ordered. “Come on, there’ll be less control down here now the ghoul has gone.”

“Let’s hope,” Reign agreed from behind.

We moved on, the corridor we were in was a short one, which explained how the ghoul had managed to get me by surprise, when I’d killed the one in front of it, it’d been half way up out of the next stairwell, and half out of sight.

When Luna had gone full auto? Even though she was using a much less powerful shotgun than the assault models that Timur’s team used, it was still enough to shred that fucker.

As we reached the top of those stairs, and stared down them, the press of specters was much weaker, fortunately.

The stairwell looped around in a descending spiral, limiting range, but Luna didn’t hesitate, and seconds later we were at the bottom, with her blasting twelve shades of shit out of everything nearby.

It was a massive relief as we reached the bottom, now several levels underground, although that only lasted until we came up against a single, open door into a large hexagonal, solid walled room, just as two more specters came staggering out.

They were cut down, but the way that the path led to here and no further?

“Now I’m not the brightest, alright, boss…” Luna started.

“But that screams ‘trap’ to me too,” I agreed with a snarl, sticking my head in, then jerking it back.

Gunfire hammered into the doorway where my head had been a split second before, and the wall on our side deformed outwards under the sudden barrage.

“Fuck’s sake!” I snarled, grabbing a grenade and pulling the pin, then tossing it into the room. “Fire in the hole!” I ground out.

“What’s in there?” Todds asked, wincing as the explosion, magnified by the walls rang out.

“Ghouls I think,” I growled. “Four of them that I saw, but I could only see a little, and an open door to the sewers.”

“A door?” Todds asked, before moving up close to the edge of the doorway, and poking a little cable around the edge.

I assumed it was a camera of some sort, one of those fiber optics or a drone or something that he could see around, but before he could say anything, a robotic hand, all shining black and red bones, reached out and clamped over his wrist, dragging him inside with a scream.

“Fuck!” I snarled, darting into the room, handgun raised… only to be back handed across the face and thrown across the room as the door slammed shut, locking the others out.

I hit the wall, bounced off it and hit the floor, my helmet having taken the blow that should have killed me, and kept me alive. It still stunned me though, and before I could make sense of the world around me, another hand, this time snow white and highly polished, with gleaming red fingernails like drops of blood—it’s weird the details that the mind latches onto with a blow to the head—clamped around my right wrist.

I was hauled up, dangling from my right arm, as I instinctively went for the vibro-blade in its chest rig with my left. Another hand gripped that wrist as my arms were yanked out to their full extension, as a half skull appeared. It was matte black, with an old national flag painted over the top sloppily and missing the lower jaw, then suddenly it was inches from my helmet, examining me intently.

There was a clicking, buzzing noise from it as I screamed, the arms holding me tugging taut and then twisting them against their natural range of motion.

It held me there for a long second, and I thought it was going to rip my arms free, my cybernetic one no match for its strength as my shoulder socket popped and cracked…

Then it relented, and let me sag in its grip.

The first thing I saw was Todds, held the same way to the side in two more hands, the same fucking specter holding us with multiple arms.

I knew instinctively this was a banshee, and now that I could see, I saw the ghouls behind it, encased in cages and locked into the wall, guns mounted on heavy duty welded frames and pointed at the door I’d entered through, while all around the room the camera’s had been smashed with blatant fury.

Below us, hovering as we were, the light of the banshee’s repulsors illuminated the torn hole that led through into the undercity below…

And dozens of faces stared up at us with slack, vacant expressions, devoid of everything bar hunger.

The specter, no, the banshee , was badly damaged, and seriously pissed! I could see sections hanging from the walls and ceiling behind it where the damn thing had ripped its way free of the undercity and into this room, leaving an arm or three behind, as well as a small section of armored carapace that’s seemed to have had restraining bolts drilled into it.

Now it was free to move around the room, but that was it, the door that we’d entered by was too small for this behemoth, and the entire structure was designed to be a trap for us to have to fight the ghouls in, layers of solid steel making it up.

The banshee was at least two meters across, the skull extending on a cantilevered post, the arms hanging in rows and partially obscured from view by handing sheets of material.

Material that I identified as fucking body armor! They were arranged in overlapping sections, like a normal man might wear clothing, a long coat or something, this wore layer upon layer of body armor, mainly suspended from an armored, welded together carapace that looked weirdly familiar.

It took my addled brain a second to place it, and then my asshole clenched even tighter.

Before the APS suits were made viable, there was a single unit that filled the space between giant assault mecha piloted by people, and actual people fighting in more normal body armor.

They were an experimental tech, one that I thought, and that the army swore , had all been eliminated after they went rogue.

They were people, dead fucking soldiers, that were put into mechanized bodies, restarted into a sick parody of life, and sealed into crab-like armored shells. Then they were fitted with repulsors, heavily fucking armed, and sent to patrol the battlefield.

As weapons of terror? Fucking yeah, ‘a’-game all the way, the effect that seeing something like that flowing towards you had on an enemy? Multiple weapons systems all firing in all directions?

A single Archaeon had been recorded eliminating entire battalions. They were a fucking unholy terror, and they were exactly what the army wanted to use… right up until they tried to stop them.

The Archaeon turned on their controllers, and fucking slaughtered anything that came nearby. The ten test units they produced had been patrolling the section of battlefield they’d been given for a year before they were pulled back—it was supposed to be a week, as a temporary measure, but fuck all is as eternal as a government ‘temporary measure’—and when they were?

This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.

Their nanites had been increased somehow, by tens of thousands, if not millions.

Later rumors would say that they’d taken to harvesting the battlefield for nanites, the dead on both sides being torn apart, and then they’d fed on them. Those nanites had bullied the cerebral systems that the Archaeon used to operate, back into some semblance of life.

A life without memories of anything but that this was ‘their land’ and that they were at war with everything else. Directives were discarded, rules of engagement? Hell the various cities armies had basically given up on most of those long ago, but even the few rules that were left were utterly discarded.

It'd taken a full military deployment of assault mecha to take the fuckers down. That one of them was here? No.

My panicked brain rebooted at that stage and locked in on the figure that stared at me.

This wasn’t an Archaeon, it couldn’t be, not unless they’d seriously evolved. This was a specter, yeah, a fucking banshee, and that was enough to repaint my pants in all sorts of colors that stank to high heaven, but it wasn’t an Archaeon.

This was a specter that had found an Archaeon shell.

It stared into my electrical pickups, as another arm lifted forwards, long elegant fingers and a hand that looked like it was designed to model gloves or something, all perfect angles and grace… welded onto the end of three full length arms, attached end to end to give it range.

That hand grasped me by the chin, tilting my head this way and that inside my helmet, before flicking the latch and removing it, tossing the helmet aside like garbage.

I hissed in pain as it twisted my arms one way then the other, clearly checking for something, as the others shouted and banged on the door from the outside, calling, asking what had happened and if I could hear them.

The thing clearly wasn’t interested in Todds, beyond keeping him out of the way and under control, but the skull was shifting, examining me from various angles… before starting to search through my gear.

After a few seconds of my mind racing as I tried to come up with an escape plan, and it basically checking me over for anything interesting, I was suddenly slammed back into the wall and pinned there, more arms flashing out, locking onto my ankles, pressing me, starfish style, against the solid wall, and slowly increasing the pressure as it started to pull the rest of my limbs out of their sockets.

It clicked and buzzed at me, and I hissed in pain, then cried out, frantically heaving against the pressure it was gradually increasing, as the strain grew more and more painful.

“Shit!” I cried. “Stop! Fuck… what the hell do you want?!” It stopped, the buzzing changing pitch, then rolling up and down the register, going high enough it made my ears sting, then vanishing, before lowering all the way to a point that my teeth ached as it continued.

After a few seconds it started the pressure again and I shook my head.

“I don’t understand!” I snapped, the pressure stopping at my words. “Are you… are you speaking?” The buzz was back, rolling up and down and I shook my head.

“I don’t understand.” I panted. “Words… can you speak? Wait, can you understand me?”

Buzz.

“Your head, can you nod your head if you understand me?” I said, and after a few seconds it nodded… its arm.

“Head,” I tried again, waggling my head side to side.

After a second it did the same and I drew in a long breath. It understood.

It fucking understood . This was a specter that was thinking and responding to me!

“What do you want?” I tried again, and for a long second it paused, watching me, before slowly extending another arm from underneath the carapace.

I thought it was an arm anyway.

It’d presumably started out as one, judging from the mechanisms, but it’d long since been rebuilt and repurposed.

Now, it was damaged, new sections of shining chrome showing where it’d been rebuilt, a central post that everything was built around, with surrounding layers of armor that could be retracted—as they did before my eyes—or deployed to keep it safe.

The main point though, were the dozen or so medikits that were locked into position higher up on the arm.

They had tubes running from a central ring lower down, and then up to feed each of them, with spaces for dozens more to be attached.

I frowned trying to make sense of the thing. Was it some kind of massive medical system? A storage?

It looked more like it was meant to be used to harvest stuff the banshee passed over, like the arms would swing down and cut loose mods it wanted, collect whatever and then… maybe it pulled the medikits up and locked them onto there for later?

But the tubes, they were there to feed it, and to…

My eyes locked onto the hand. At the end of the arm there was a hand, brand new judging from the shine on it, with injection ports and needles replacing the ends of the fingers.

Right behind that, where tubes left the fingers… was an empty section. One that I suddenly knew should have a very specific bit of kit in place to cover.

I flinched and looked back at the skull, finding it watching me, ready.

It nodded the head up and down jerkily, signifying it’d fucking seen me jump and it damn well knew why.

“We recovered it,” I admitted. “We killed goblins and found it. It’s yours?”

Another jerk of the head.

“And let me guess, you want the fucker back?” I said, getting a vigorous nod. “Can you stop all this?” I jerked my head in the direction of the room overhead.

The skull shifted, moving and looking up, as if looking directly through the metal and seeing the area above, before shaking its head, and glancing down at the figures below us waiting in ordered rows.

I squinted down at them, at the torn sections of the floor, and the damaged cameras, the ghouls that were damaged, but intact, and yet not firing any more.

I took it all in, in an instant.

This section was supposed to be a place for us to bleed. Ghouls locked into the walls armed with shotguns and assault rifles that were in turn locked into welded frames.

If the banshee hadn’t torn its way up through the floor, taking control of the specters here, this would have been a fucking bloodbath.

If the door had shut behind us, as it was set to do, with specters pouring up through the hole in the floor, and the ghouls firing at us? With the sheets of metal welded over them forming their prison and armoring?

We’d have lost at least a few people, and possibly the whole team trying to close off this section.

Instead, the banshee had presumably sensed the collection of specters and had come here, fucking hunting for US .

The way that it was watching me said it knew exactly what I was thinking, and it fucking wanted its stripper back. This was the creature that someone had stolen the device from originally.

Presumably, looking its clearly fresh repairs over, the fucker had barely survived the experience, and then whoever it’d fought with, had then been shanked by goblins.

Then we’d killed the fucking goblins, and this thing had been searching for its spare parts ever since.

“I don’t have…” I started to say and it pulled hard on my arms and legs, making me scream in pain, Todds doing the same as he was apparently punished as well. “Stop!” I howled, and after a few seconds it relented.

“Fuck…” I panted, head sagging as I caught my breath. “I… was trying… to say, I don’t have it HERE.”

It nodded, the hand that had taken my helmet off making a point of tapping my bags and pockets as if to say ‘I fucking know that, you dick’.

“I can get it,” I assured it, and it nodded, hard. “This place, I need to get rid of the specters… my team and I are paid to get rid of them. We need to save my team, and I’ll bring you the… the... whatever it is!” Realizing at the last minute that if it thought I didn’t know what it was then there was a chance I’d actually survive this.

It turned, floating towards the exit, the specters below moving back, clearly about to leave and take us both wherever, and I shook my head.

“I need my team to get the device, the thing you want! I need them to get it, but we have to finish up here first! If we go before the whole site is clear of specters? Then…” I hesitated. I had no clue what this thing could understand.

Was it at human levels of comprehension? Did it understand debt, or honor? Was it like a dog, only understanding the immediate goal? Was it more intelligent than I was?

It wouldn’t be that hard to be, I was well aware of my own shortcomings.

“The device, the thing you want?” I said slowly. “I can get it, we can trade! I’ll get it, and give it to you, and in return…” It waited, and I felt a wave of relief wash over me. “My spinal mod,” I said quickly.

It hesitated and I tried to twist, nodding my head in its direction as I spoke.

“I need a high end one, the best I can get, full spinal tap, do you understand? I need a tier… four!” I tried, knowing that it was fucking unlikely that it could get something like that, but that if anyone could it could.

I also knew that there was no way I was putting a mod from a fucking specter into myself, not willingly, but…

I was starting to figure that a serious portion of the mods in the various chop shops around the city were coming from these. Hell, one or more of those I already had might be.

That thought made my skin crawl, knowing I might be spiraling closer to the flame of madness, infected by my own mods, and never knowing.

The specter waited, and I watched it, not sure what I was waiting for, until it drove its head forwards suddenly at terrifying speed, making me screw my eyes shut, expecting it to smash the front of my skull in.

Instead, when I slowly reopened them a few seconds later, the gleaming eye sockets were millimeters from my own, and it waited.

“Uh…” I tried, until Todds spoke up hesitantly.

“Maybe… tell it where and when?” he suggested.

“Fuck!” I gasped, as the head nodded. “Uh, this time, tomorrow? Outside of here, outside of this building?” It waited for a second, I assumed considering, before it removed a small device from under its cloak, and showed it to me.

I stared at it, it was a disc, about six inches across, maybe two deep at the thickest point, and I held it before my face… before it twisted me around and slapped it onto my back.

I felt the solid click as it connected with the magnetic plate, then I was jerked back around, and a hand was held before my face. It formed a fist, then mimed an explosion, before finally waggling a finger at me in warning.

Clearly a message that if I fucked with it in any way? I’d regret it. If I didn’t come with the device? If I tried to run, to hide, whatever? Kaboom.

I’d recognized it as some kind of pressure explosive, one of the ones that massively increased the local gravity field, possibly, like the reverse of the repulsors tech that let vehicles fly did.

I guessed that doing anything with it would be a very bad idea, possibly one that would result in me suddenly being an inch thick all over, but who fuckin’ knew.

All I knew for sure right now, was that banshees were real, this one was fucking terrifying, had both Todds and I at its mercy, and the only way we were getting out of this, was if I basically gave up the one bit of tech that I thought could earn us serious credits.

It was a fucked if you do, fucked if you don’t situation, and I didn’t like it one bit.

I did like living though, and if this was how I got out of this situation I’d take it.

The banshee watched me for a long few seconds, then threw me across the room. I bounced off the wall, and then was hit by Todds, the pair of us falling to the ground in a groaning heap, and the banshee vanished into the ground, leaving the ghouls strapped in place.

We laid there, catching our breath, trying to deal with what had just happened, before Todds finally spoke in a low whisper, as we both popped a medikit and stabbed ourselves with the injectors

“Boss, you can tell me to fuck off if you want, but this is seriously the weirdest fucking team I’ve ever worked with.”

“Yeah,” I said, struggling to my feet, and wincing at the way the ghouls, now apparently free of the Banshee’s control, were wrenching at the guns, trying to get them around to us. “This is just my fucking life mate.” I drew the handgun, shot each of the ghouls in the head, one round each, then holstered it, offering him my hand and pulling him to his feet when he accepted it.

“You probably have some questions…” I winced.

“Oh, that’s a fucking understatement.” He shook his head. “How about we get the fuck outta here first though?”

“Deal.”

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