Chapter Thirty-Two
Bull-gators were one of the many mutated species that we were ‘blessed’ with by the old world, essentially a form of reptile that stood fully two meters high at the shoulder, weighed in excess of two tons, and had a generally foul fucking temper for anything that wasn’t the actual beast in question.
The females, from what I could remember of the single class I’d had on them in the army, were the more colorful, with a collection of yellow strips that ran their length, providing warning that yes they were dangerous enough they didn’t give a shit about hiding, and yes they were venomous.
The stronger the venom? The redder the lines.
Interestingly in one of those ‘fuck you’s’ that only Mother Nature’s twisted cousin Mother Mutation could come up with, they also developed those red lines when they were ready to breed.
I guessed that made their sex-lives an interesting experience.
The fact that we were unfortunately knee deep in brackish water, with dozens of infant bull-gators swimming towards us, a pair of the massive males battling it out directly ahead and what looked like an entire herd mooching around the outside of the cavern?
Yeah.
“Let’s back it up people!” I said quickly, matching words to action, when Todds screamed.
Apparently as well as the fucking giant bull-gators, there was some breed of ‘fisher’ here too, as I’d heard them referred to, and due to the fact that they flattened themselves against the cavern roof high overhead and essentially ‘reeled in’ whatever they could catch in their ‘nets’?
Yeah.
Todds was being dragged up into the air, his screams ringing out as instead of silencing him, the steady electric charge that the fucking thing apparently deployed was burning him as the stealth suit was overloaded.
That scream was enough to break the rest of the cavern out of watching the two alpha males battling it out, and to seemingly ring the dinner bell, as Reign lifted her rifle and opened fire on the fisher.
The damn thing seemed to absorb the bullets, and she quickly cursed and swapped from the solid slug model to her grazer.
While she did that, Luna raced forwards, leaping into the air, and snagging Todds’ leg. The charge flowed through to her as well, and she cried out in pain, but the combined weight was enough to stop them being reeled in, as Gessh swapped to her grazer rifle, and started firing at the nearest closing infants.
I was firing non-stop already, the bullets from my rifle sinking into the flanks of the big bastards as they turned and charged at us.
“Now we know why the hell the specters were all in there!” Reign called out. “They were fucking trapped and neither they nor these beasties had anything that the other wanted!”
“We…” I broke off as a second ‘line’ smacked into Luna and started hauling her and Todds upwards again, and I reoriented, zooming in and in, holding my stance…
The fisher’s face leapt into focus through my rifle’s scope, magnified again and again, until I could see the two bulbous eyes atop thin stalks, and the up-down, as opposed to left-right aligned maw.
It opened wider, salivating as it sensed the prey it was reeling in, long fangs angling outwards, ready to bite down and inject a powerful paralytic and dissolver… when I pulled the trigger.
The shot was dead on, slamming into the section where both eyes connected back to the head, barreling straight through and into the wall behind, before causing even more damage as it ricocheted off, burying itself somewhere in the back of the head.
It was enough, probably it was enough to kill the fucker outright, but either way it was enough to send paroxysms of conflicting signals through the body, and when said body is devoting every possible effort to hauling a great struggling weight upwards, and desperately clinging to the roof at the same time?
It ended badly for it, with Todds crashing down to land in the knee deep waters, the electrical and burning damage he was taking shorting out, replaced by impact and the shock of the water.
He hit hard, the angle he’d been at meaning he was unable to catch himself, and he went under, even as I switched my aim to the second fisher, seeing more scuttling dimly across the ceiling.
This one was bigger, long spindly legs that clung to the underside of the cavern roof, the head weaving as it moved backwards, intent on dragging its prize from the field of battle. Its body was long, almost stick-like, as were its limbs, but the spray of glue, the lure and fishing line both, came from the center of the chest, with smaller secondary limbs working the line, dragging Luna upwards as she struggled and jerked, being hit over and over with electrical shocks.
I fired, missing by an inch or less, and the damn thing flinched, picking up speed, scuttling across the roof and dragging Luna directly into the path of the oncoming bull-gators.
I went to fire again, only to curse and shift my aim, firing a shot at a charging behemoth’s eye instead.
The frustration almost made me miss, but luck was with me as the round penetrated, the head twisting sideways as it roared in pain, and it hit the creature next to it, who immediately swung for it, teeth snapping at the back of the target’s foreleg.
The two of them went down, multi-tons of charging ferocity suddenly back to snapping and snarling at each other, as I recentered on Luna, cursing as Gessh stitched the fisher with grazer rounds.
“Wait till she’s clear of the gators!” I snapped. “If she falls in there…”
“Fuck!” Gessh cried, twisting and opening fire on another as they closed, Reign switching to high powered solid beams of grazer fire as she stepped up between us and dragged the beam across the rippling scum-frothed waters ahead of us.
The beam hit dozens of smaller bull-gators, most of which I’d not even seen, as they went into full screeching thrashing spasming death.
Some would probably have survived, just being badly cooked, but that they were trying to scream while underwater?
Yeah, it turned out that semi-aquatic was not the same as aquatic when it came to respiration.
Those fuckers that didn’t cook, drowned.
We killed dozens of the little ones, and the two biggest were back to savaging each other, uninterested in the interlopers, which was wonderful, but Luna had ceased her struggling, Todds was barely struggling to his feet, frantically coughing and retching as he yanking the charging handle on his rifle and cleared the barrel, and dozens more of ‘smaller’ ones were racing at us.
That they were ‘smaller’ was a bit of a misnomer, they still weighed anywhere from half a ton to two, were basically mobile tanks, and were heavily armed in the old ‘teeth, claws and foul mental attitude’ stakes.
We’d been back pedaling to the corridor we’d entered from, then we’d been forced to stop that, when Todds was captured, now Luna was being dragged away through the air, by a wounded fisher, and several other, smaller ones, were firing attacking lines to her, starting to tug her this way and that as they tried to steal the meal from their injured matriarch.
Todds splashed his way back to us, firing as he went, Gessh was screaming at Luna to ‘fucking stop laying around’ and firing at one then another of the charging monsters. I tried to slow the fuckers claiming her, firing a shot into this one, then that, trying to force the lines that were attached to her to break strategically and swing her off to the side, away from the incoming wall of muscly death.
She was still thrashing though, letting us know that she was alive at least, but for how long we didn’t know.
“Fuck it!” I snarled, grabbing Reign’s high powered sniper rifle from her back. She was still keeping the waters near us clear, essentially frying them with overlapping beams of lethal gamma radiation, then managing a quick shot at the incoming tanks.
We had seconds before they were going to be too close and we’d be forced to retreat into the corridor behind, and we all knew that if we did that? Luna was dead.
I barely bothered to aim the rifle, they were that close. The slugs were designed to penetrate armor, the kind that old world tanks had hidden beneath, and that modern ceramics and alloys had made possible for ‘normal’ people to wear as a deterrent.
Against a weapon designed for that? Even the thick plates of bone that were evolved to absorb the damage as it headbutted other giants was insufficient.
The shot slammed into the nearest creature just above the orbit of the eye, hitting some bony protrusion and ricocheting downwards into the small glaring organ.
. Where the bullet came to rest eventually in the massive monstrosities head, nobody knew, but the fountain of blood that suddenly burst from its mouth and nose, as it face planted the water all at once made it clear it wasn’t getting back up.
As big and bulky as the creature was, when it went down, it cut off an entire section of the approach, two others smacking into it with squeals and roars of frustration. Frustration that became tearing and feasting as they fought over the suddenly available corpse of their sibling.
The world descended into a screaming, roaring flashing madhouse as we tried to keep things going, firing over and over, twisting this way and that as here and there smaller spawn managed to make it through Reign’s cleansing.
The first that surged up made the mistake of sinking its teeth into Gessh’s leg. Or it tried anyway. It was about the length of a large rat, the mouth was almost a third of the length of its body and full of teeth, and the confusion it must have felt when the elation of ‘gotcha’ became ‘this is hard to chew’ must have been immense.
It was probably even worse when Gessh kept standing on that leg, raised the other, and stomped on the little fuckers back.
The crunch of breaking bone and the abrupt squawk of pain, before it drowned beneath the murky waters made it clear those legs were paying dividends.
I moved left and right firing, chambering another round and firing again, barely aiming, they were that close, but where Gessh’s shots caused pain and distress, mine shattered skulls.
Todds and Gessh fired on the big fuckers after I did, aiming for roughly the same location, and where cracks and occasionally worse were left in their skulls, the pounding of ‘small’ arms fire over and over took them down.
Reign switched from local area suppression to medium range, the beam reaching out and touching the fishers, burning them from the rock they tenaciously clung to, no longer dragging Luna up, they were suddenly falling limp and adding to the weight the remaining creatures struggled with.
In another minute, it was over, Luna going silent and falling through the air to land with a splash, sinking beneath the waters as Gessh crouched and leapt, landing atop one of the corpses, then leaping to another, racing to her fallen sister’s side.
Todds, Reign and I focused on the least wounded of the two alphas, concentrating fire as we took the big fucker down, followed by its injured opponent.
Gessh landed in the water, thrashing her hands this way and that before dragging her unconscious and half drowned sibling free, then racing back to us, as we pulled medikits and more, backing up the corridor.
This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.
A few minutes passed while we checked ourselves and each other over, reloaded our weapons and figured out what the hell had just happened, before slowly returning to the bottom of the corridor into the water.
We stood there for long seconds, looking around the cavern, trying to figure out how the hell these creatures had gotten down here, and more to the point why such massive carnivores would congregate here of all places, when a section of the roof clanked open.
Meat, maybe real, maybe not, but looking real enough, cascaded from the gap into the middle of the room, hitting the water with a resounding series of splashes, as Todds snarled something nearby.
“What?” I asked, having missed it.
“They’re pets!”
“What are?” I asked, confused to fuck.
“The bull-gators! Some fucker kept them here, look at the size of them, and then at the doors to get in and out!”
I looked, scanning the distant intact walls quickly, blinking as I took in what I’d missed before.
There were three exits, counting the one we’d used to get in, and aside from a set of massive sealed steel doors that clearly hadn’t been used in centuries… they were all way too small for the creatures to have come along.
“They were probably brought in as pups, then fed!” Todds snarled, and I stared at him in confusion. “As guard dogs!” He explained. “Think about them as a line of defense, sure it’s illegal, but who’s going to care, or even report it, anyone that finds them? They’re a meal most likely.”
“And the fishers?”
“They’re not common in the undercity, but not that rare either.” Reign sighed, checking her grazer, then slinging it back over her shoulder and reclaiming her sniper rifle from me, checking it for damage, reloading and stowing it over her shoulder.
“So, what, we just killed those assholes pets?” I asked, disbelievingly.
“Probably not,” Todds said. “There’s three exits here, want to bet that one of the leads to the owners of this little nightmare show?”
“I… I don’t care,” I said after a few seconds. “Fuck this shit. Does anyone care?”
“Not beyond a need to kick someone’s face in.” Luna grunted, injecting herself again with a medikit.
“Then fuck it,” I said. “Anyone recording?”
“Turning it off, job’s done,” Reign said, the others echoing her with smiles.
I moved to the nearest corpse, and reached out, slotting one of the empty medikits we had into the port in my new left arm, taking a deep breath, and relaxing.
This time the sensation of the nanites was harder to sense, coming and going as it had been on our way over was weird, the sensation of them in my companions didn’t bother me, but here?
The nanites sang softly, the vibrations of them inside the bodies made me respond without thought. The claws, formerly retracted on my left hand, slid out, and I sank them into the body of the nearest beastie, burrowing inwards until I found a decent vein, then sinking into it.
The magnetic rings in my arm pulsed, like I was drinking something thick and viscous, but through my arm as the ports in the heel of my hand opened and blood jetted out.
I swallowed hard, the feeling being weird, and sure as shit the experience was as well, the shaking and pulsing as I tried to get the rings in my arm to react in smooth relaying instead of a pull, then a pull, then a pull, each barely seeming connected…
I forced myself to stop thinking, to stop interfering .
The software, the programming was all done already, and Lion had integrated it as best he could into the arm. My RI was trying to make it work with me, but I was basically focusing on it and forcing myself into every step along the way.
It wasn’t the way to damn well do this, and I knew it.
When moving the arm of my suit I didn’t fire each motor and actuator individually, just like I didn’t move the muscles of my arm individually.
I did them all on instinct, instinct that that was partially developed over years as a child, learning to control my muscles, and partially was hard-coded into my brain.
That same hard-coding that was used for the muscles, was there in the arm, but used to control the rings and harvesting device, I just needed to learn to let it do its job.
I relaxed, focused on the overall aim, on harvesting the pure nanites, on separating and storing them, and discarding the rest, focusing on the end goal, and ‘pulling’ all at once instead, and the difference was night and day.
At first it was like a stutter, as the RI stepped in and smoothed things, the subconscious fight I’d been having with it as I mentally ordered it to help, then tried to do it myself each time, suddenly falling away.
Then it just… worked.
It was weird, like breathing, if I tried to guide my breathing it slipped out of the natural rhythm and I got a weird feeling in my chest, if instead I just ignored it and let my body do it on autopilot?
Boom, no issue.
The harvesting was like that, the more I left it to do it itself, the more efficiently it worked.
“Fuck!” Reign gasped suddenly, and I jerked unthinkingly, before looking over at her, and seeing the wide grin on her face as she doffed her helmet.
“What?” I asked, frowning.
“It’s working!” she said, grinning widely, as we all turned to look at the formerly empty medikit attached to the port on my arm. It was already a third full, and the creature I was harvesting?
Everything had nanites, by now. They were pervasive across the entire planet, and had been for centuries, the air we breathed, the water, the food, us, everything had nanites on it, from the soil to the seas, but they were almost all contaminated, failed nanites.
Out of every thousand nanites, there were, according to estimates I’d seen years ago, two or three active, pure nanites. That was it.
But when you considered that we all have billions in us? That was both a huge number of pure ones waiting to be collected, and a tiny, tiny fraction that actively was.
I’d seen plans that were floated by idiot friends to build floating scoops that would trawl the seas, like they once had to dispose of the plastic that nearly killed us all, they would now repurpose those old dredges to instead separate the nanites, harvesting and destroying the corrupt, and recovering the pure.
It was a fucking pipe dream.
The same people that swore they could do this, also spent their entire wages each month on a combination of hookers, drink and drugs, as well as buying novelty masks, giant movie prop hammers and so on.
How they intended to develop tech that the world’s best scientists couldn’t? Well that was a minor detail, often ignored.
Now though? As the small medikit attached to my arm slowly filed with gleaming quicksilver nanites? All those plans came back to me, making me grin.
We had the tech. We literally had it here, attached to my fucking arm!
If we were to buy one of those fucked up old dredges and attach this to the intake jets? They could syphon off billions of gallons of water an hour, at top speed. That would in turn fill great vats of nanites!
My mind raced ahead, until a strange almost bloated feeling started to rise in me. I checked the arm, finding the medikit was almost full, and as I reached for another empty, Reign was there already.
My arm had been designed with slots for holding kit, or for installing the overall boosts that high end prosthetics could bring you, from hidden weapons to storage areas for strength, speed or perception enhancing drugs and hormones.
Lion had instead used those section that weren’t needed for the harvesting process to provide attachment ports for the medikits, as well as for the actual containers that sat inside the medikits.
I took the empty medium kit from Reign and plugged the port on it to the port on my arm, hearing a satisfying solid ‘click’ as the two ports mated, then pulled the small kit free, passing it to her to keep in a special bag we’d brought along just for this.
The theory was that the medikits were now filled with pure nanites, but there’d been a few incidents over the years where dodgy batches of medikits had been released, mainly by gangs, although when a Corp had tried it, they’d been forced to provide a solution, as part of the rehabilitation of their image.
Basically here and there, scattered across the city, were vending machines. You could go to them, plug your medikit in, and they’d verify the kits authenticity, charge and purity.
Well, ours would fail the ‘authenticity’ straight away, we had no legal right to be refilling these after all, but if they passed the other tests? Then we could use, sell and supply them.
The creature was emptied before the medium kit was filled, but that was fine, there wasn’t exactly a shortage of them after all, and I simply moved to the next.
An hour and forty minutes later, and we were making our way back into the main building, stifling grins when we looked at each other over the sheer volume we’d been able to harvest.
The specters, on the whole, had been fairly unimpressive, individually at least. It was working out as an average of five to six specters to fill a single small medikit, with ten to twelve for a medium, and twenty to twenty-five for a large.
That wasn’t that impressive, but considering a medikit, a small one, was about a thousand credits? There was a damn reason that most places still used stitches, bandages and more.
If five specter kills got us a couple of bits of loot, like a few mags or a bit of jewelry and so on, it was barely noticeable in the grand scheme of things. They were brain dead after all, they tended to drop shit and forget about it.
That they had mods that we could sell? Well, that increased their value. Most of them were crappy tier one shit, some twos. The ghouls and occasional specters that had tier threes? Well, there was real value.
On average though, the parts once they were stripped, if we could do it properly, were worth maybe a few hundred per specter.
That the specter themselves were worth another hundred, from the government and the contractor?
Then add on that if it cost us five specters to fill a thousand credit medikit, so we were looking at another two hundred credits per specter there?
The potential credits were getting into crazy levels.
The real question was beginning to be, did we stay with the guild once we’d gotten the team all together again. If we hired our own ‘cleaners’ to strip the parts and give them to us, rather than the little bastards that were working for the guild currently and pocketing the mods?
That would be a game changer.
As it was though, we were happy.
We gave the owners of the ‘brain farm’ some photo ops on the way out, left them one of the creatures heads that Luna had decided she wanted as a trophy, then got bored of carrying, and went on our merry way with a quick explanation, and an agreement that the door below could now be sealed up tight.
The owners weren’t particularly bothered about the loss of their ‘clients’ as they had full control over the trust funds, and had been merrily plundering them for ‘maintenance fees’ anyway, so now a few minor repairs were needed and they had an entire floor available to resell.