The ramp was wide enough for a battalion to march down in lockstep, an artifact of the repurposed mining vehicles used to excavate it. While the dozens of individual sealed levels had never been finished, the central pit extended half a kilometer underground, not that I could see to the bottom thanks to a sturdy blast door bisecting it.

I felt like I was staring down an ICBM silo as we crept down the ramp, the way ahead screened by drones. Call me cowardly, but I'd have preferred to stay right up there in the lounge, but barring a few drones and turrets placed to guard our rear, the entire platoon was set on proceeding further, so I had to put my concerns to rest and hike along.

Back when Moshowitz was constructed, the geopolitical situation had been utterly different, and while the structure had been built to resist nuclear bombardment, it wasn't particularly designed to stop the ingress of a military unit. Barring the defensive turrets at the foyer, it was supposed to be a clear run in the interior, except for the innumerable blast doors guarding each lab. They'd had human security personnel on the roster, but had handed over control to the Base AI when the place was mothballed.

Still, the separatists had ample opportunity to set up traps and defenses of their own, leaving aside anything Machina had deigned to give them, so we remained on alert.

Instead of clearing the place floor by floor, the plan was to attempt to reach the servers hosting the AI itself, and with it back under our control, we could cut off life support for any ne'er do wells who wanted to resist. However, it was located on the 7th level, right below the massive blast door itself.

"Should we call for backup? I remember that our training was to always use at least a company when attempting urban warfare in a contested environment." I asked Hernandez as he overlooked the attempts to cut through the blast door.

"We can handle it." He said gruffly, unwilling to look away from the flare of sparks as laser and plasma cutters kept gamely cutting into the thick steel. "'sides, we're overstretched as is. The garrison forces on Mars number only about 2k, and even after diverting troop transports headed to Pluto, about another thousand."

I nodded, if they positioned most of their troops in civilian population centers, it would leave hardly anyone in a position to move out and assist us.

"We could potentially go around the blast door if it's taking too long." I pointed out to him. "Crack open one of the labs on level 6 and then blow a hole in the floor."

He paused for a second to evaluate the suggestion, before nodding. "We've got shaped charges, while I need the bulk of my guys to keep the ramp and the upper levels secure, you can take a squad in. Just lock down the section you end up in, don't push out ahead ok?" I certainly wasn't about to, but after seeing the schematics, it would take half a dozen hours to make a meaningful dent in the ridiculously overbuilt blast door, and we might be able to work our way past any traps in place. Neither of us expected it to be an uncontested entry, and I knew the more angles of attack we had, the better.

"There's nothing directly overlying the AI servers, so if you break through here-" Sanchez prompted, pointing at the part where a microbiology lab on the 6th level lay- "you'll find yourself in the sanitation section of another lab right below."

A gruff soldier (look, if you're a jarhead reading this, no offense but I'm going to call Marines here soldiers and there's nothing you can do about it) asked, "We're not going to drop into a vat of acid or an incinerator are we ma'am?" She simply gave them a scornful gaze, and waved us ahead.

Breaking into the labs on Level 6 was a piece of cake, this close to the hab quarters, especially on the wrong side of the blast door, they kept only rather trivial experiments running. Other than withered kelp in old tanks, it was entirely unremarkable, although we made sure to sweep it clean.

Once the correct spot was found, Sgt. Watts and his squad posted up, while an assortment of drones and an excavator bot got to work. I watched the whirring and buzzing for a moment, then turned to where the EOD specialist, a sturdy young man named Micky, carrying over what looked uncomfortably like the metal bowls they once used to cover up IEDs for controlled det, circa the early 2000s. In fact, it was meant to protect from the blast as a shaped charge the size of my head was placed inside, ready to blow through the weakened floor, and make anyone below regret their existence and poor choice in places to stand.

At his command, we all took cover behind whatever looked solid, albeit Watts seemed peeved when I took shelter behind his bulky power armor. "What?" I innocently inquired, and he snorted and motioned at me to duck lower.

A muffled thump later, and a whole host of our drones poured through the hole, attempting to secure the structure below before the humans got their hands dirty. I swear, soldiers these days are pampered.

Watts ordered us to move in, and we jumped in one by one, finding ourselves in an otherwise unremarkable disposal room. There was, in fact, an incinerator, but we'd wisely avoided entering it, albeit it was inactive. I eyed the ports that suggested gamma sterilization with caution, but it was unlikely they had enough power to do serious harm to armored targets. I still smashed them up just to be sure.

Following Hernandez's orders, we pushed up inside the lab, this one clearly showing more signs of use. Several massive tanks swirled with residue, and while nobody would be stupid enough to mix anything dangerous under open air, I still kept a wide berth.

"There's a discrepancy, this place was used to store several hundred thousand tons of feedstock, and in the EU survey, they were still full." Sanchez pointed out, watching through our cams. "Used for long term experiments? Turned into food for the rats holed up here?" I asked, mildly concerned myself. I doubted it, you'd need to garrison a full battalion for years to use up that much potential food. And knowing the typical bored soldier, they'd have trashed the place. Well, trashed it more than it already was.

"Can't tell, but keep on searching. If you guys make it to the middle pit without issue, we're thinking of giving up on the drill, it's taking forever." She told us.

The lab door proved no serious obstacle, but there was a burst of gunfire indicating that our ingress wasn't entirely unnoticed. I pushed forward, my trusty Bolter left behind, relying on a .50 cal man-portable machinegun like most of the Marines. It turned out that the separatists had setup two turrets of their own, each covering one of the labs. Watts pulled out a grenade-sized gizmo with the classic red and black labeling of Crafter kit, but reconsidered as our own drones managed to handle the turrets, albeit with moderate losses.

We pushed ahead, ready to breach into the opposing lab, when one of the displays previously displaying inane drivel about ancient metrics changed to display a video feed of a bedraggled man hunched over a foot away from the camera.

"We surrender! Please, we got dragged into this bullshit, we're not with the Patriots or the supes!" He plead frantically, with background shadows suggesting other people huddled near him.

I patched in Hernandez and Sanchez, while the others continued sweeping up, and more drones came down to reinforce our overwatch over the ramp. Concerningly, the lights were out, and even my NVGs didn't show much more than a few levels down, although thermals were clear.

"Who the fuck are you? Stand down the turrets right now, or we're not negotiating." Sanchez ordered. A popup in my vision confirmed his identity as Andy Reed, a colonist from the third colonization wave who had renounced his USMA citizenship several years ago, instead taking up one in an obscure and already defunct micronation. Call me cynical, but I didn't think his doctorate was valid.

He confirmed his identity, and then began a rambling explanation. Apparently, his homesteading commune had occasionally helped the Patriots and other vagrants by providing safe houses and resources. When the severity of the current sandstorm had proven too high for their primarily solar-powered systems to handle, they'd been too proud to head to Armstrong or any of the other major settlements to shelter in, and instead had decided to shack up in Moshowitz, a place they knew had been taken over by the Patriots an indeterminate amount of time back.

The Patriots had left without much in the way of instructions to the colonists, other than a promise to be back soon, and under no circumstances to activate the blast partition and go beneath it. Unfortunately, when they heard us making our forced entry into the facility, they had panicked, deployed the few turrets they had, and activated the one-time override for the door and ran beneath it. Now, they were stuck, and had no stomach for a fight.

At our behest, he displayed the other dozen or so colonists with him, 3 families, his included. He even promised to provide us access codes to the servers on the level below, as long as we didn't kill them. Under further interrogation, he admitted there were several turrets guarding them, which he hurriedly deactivated.

The bulk of the platoon came down, and when Reed was instructed to, he opened the lab doors, revealing a long corridor lined with turrets. Our own drones quickly pushed in, robots cutting through partitions and breaking open cabinets till they made it to the small annex the refugees were huddled in.

Reed stood with his hands raised, protecting a thin little girl clinging to his legs, while the others stood behind them. They'd deposited their guns on the floor, and we had our bots sweep them away and scan them down for funny business. Other than one idiot who'd kept a knife in his boot, they proved no issue.

"I was telling the truth, you guys see that right? We're not terrorists, we just got caught up in this mess!" He told us, shivering in terror as Watts forced him to his knees, and before he could protest, used a pneumatic gun to punch a stud into his forehead right into his frontal lobe. He screamed, trying to claw at it, but the device activated and stunned him, leaving him looking listless and lost.

"It's this or a Parrot and handcuffs? Any volunteers?" Sanchez proclaimed, to the frightened assemblage, half of whom preferred the latter. Their mistake, in my opinion. The neural staples were not as bad as they looked, after punching a millimeter wide hole in your cranium, they didn't pierce into the brain tissue, instead puncturing only the overlying meningeal layers and dispersing a thin bioabsorbable lace that only covered a part of the frontal lobe, meant to conduct just enough charge to make organized resistance futile. Entirely reversible and mostly harmless, which is more than can be said about Parrots even with reversal agents ready.

She hesitated before the crying little girl, and instead opted to gently stick a transdermal patch of some sedative on her cheek, leaving her knocked out in a few moments.

She turned to look at me, scanning my face for signs of disapproval, but truth be told we couldn't have them running around behind us, or afford to leave drones behind to watch them. I'd seen more brutal ways of pacifying insurgents before.

Reed came back to his senses, initially fretful over his daughter, but relieved to see she hadn't had her undeveloped brain fucked with a coghazard. "Thank you, we're not the bad guys, dammit, I'll give you the access code for the damn AI farm."

I stayed up with Watts and his boys this time as Hernandez lead the most heavily armored portion of his platoon to the labs, we hacked into the turrets belonging to Reed, and after a quick IFF update, they were happily guarding the prisoners, while I looked over their belongings. It seemed they'd only packed for their stay, which seemed consistent with leaving their domiciles to bear the storms for a week or two. I could see several of them were shivering with cold, for some reason the thermostat was stuck at a balmy 6 degrees Celsius, and they'd been unable to change it despite having access codes. Something about that number jogged my memory, but I set that aside for later.

This time, I watched the others move up to the access panel for the server rooms, and as Reed had promised, the access code allowed them to enter uncontested. I didn't notice anything amiss as they methodically swept and disengaged the outgoing connections, before their Tech urgently pinged something of note.

The server room was disconnected from the overall system, and all traffic was coming from a line further down, all the way at the bottom. The AI wasn't even running on the hardware it was supposed to. I checked the hardware, while it had been cutting edge in 2033, it was heavily antiquated now, and if someone was really set on it, they could run an AI that once needed a full server farm on something closer to workstation proportions. Further, they'd patched some known network vulnerabilities, so our hopes of hacking into it remotely were squashed.

At this point, all hell was let loose. It began with our drones detecting the opening of multiple lab doors, all below us, the ones nominally defunct due to "unauthorized intrusion". This was accompanied by billowing acrid smoke that immediately dropped down visibility to a handful of meters even after we'd lit up the ramp with IR illuminators. And what was even more concerning was the movement within the fog.

And suddenly, with no further ado, the turrets we'd supposedly hacked came online and opened fire indiscriminately. I was in the middle of examining some of their belongings when a burst of fire hit me, thankfully not armor piercing, or I'd have been incapacitated on the spot. My reflex boosters kicked in, the world slowing down to the point where, if I couldn't dodge bullets, I could at least see the slower ones coming. I threw myself aside, knocking a screaming woman off her feet, and probably saving her by taking some bullets with her name on it. Another girl, barely a teen, wasn't as lucky and took a round to the eyeball, smearing the contents of her brain all over the wall and causing the nerve staple to come flying loose, barely holding together a particularly meaty chunk. I managed to pivot on the ground to return fire, shooting one of the turrets before a round hit me directly on my visor, piercing through and just about being stopped by my reinforced skull.

It still knocked me down, my helmet bounced off the floor, my thoughts thoroughly rattled. I kept firing, to my surprise, the backup neural computer in my spine was capable of reasonably fine motor control, though it was lights out upstairs. I came to half a minute later to absolute chaos on the comms, surrounded by half a dozen dead bodies, the lucky ones those zoned out by the Parrot when they unceremoniously died. I had the mother of all headaches, and with hands still shaky from the massive dose of combat stims and painkillers, I poked at my temple to find a disconcertingly deep dent, the crackle of fractured plates shifting beneath my skin telling me it wasn't a good idea to continue that particular endeavor.

Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.

I backed myself up behind better cover, and attempted to get my bearings. A turret opened fire again, prompting me to toss a grenade overhand, which landed right next to it and put it down for good. Private Micky was dead, but he'd saved Reed's little girl, who was still unconscious and drenched in his blood. I dragged her away to safety, and reached out to unhook his backpack and as expected found it stuffed full of explosives, which were nice but didn't get me going nearly as much as some Crafter goodies did, not that I had time to read any labels. I staggered back on my feet, hooking into the camera feed of another dead Marine to confirm that none of the remaining turrets were operational.

Gunfire resounded from outside, feeds too chaotic for me to get a grasp on the situation, but as I picked up the kid after confirming everyone else was dead, I noticed Sanchez running into the site of that little massacre. She was worse for wear, her lighter power armor was mauled, one arm hanging loose, her fingers twitching like a poisoned cockroach while she swept ahead of her with a handgun. Her posture radiating visible relief when she saw me lugging the girl, almost no weight at all in the low gravity.

"Get to the hole, we're climbing out, we need to bottleneck the bastards, we can't hold them here!" She yelled, not trusting that comms were working. I paid heed, running out to find a firing line of Marines laying hate down the ramp,

I noticed a Hernandez running low on ammo, so I threw him a mag, before commencing raining down explosives I'd pilfered from the dead EOD operator. They detonated hard enough to shake the facility, but how much they did to stop the onslaught of Centauri warforms was questionable, because the very next moment a muscular tentacle wrapped itself around Hernandez's leg and yanked him off the ramp. He fell in slow motion, giving agonizing amounts of time for us to attempt to disentangle him in vain. I leaned out and swung my monosword, yet it barely cut into the tentacle, which, contemptuously, threw him clear of anything to grab, so that he continued plummeting several hundred meters down into the abyss. Even in Martian gravity, I wouldn't bet on his augments letting him survive the fall. At this point, when another bullet glanced off my helmet, I realized with some dismay that whatever we were fighting was shooting back.

The brand new concussion jogged my memory, reminding me of what struck me as unusual about the temperature in the facility. 6 degrees C was approximately the preferred temperature range for hibernating Centauri Warforms, at least before their accelerated metabolism kicked in and brought them to near boiling.

I caught my first glimpse of a Warform, a calf-sized pitbull from hell, bounding up on four legs and barreling over another soldier. He found himself pinned beneath it, and while he managed to bring up his vibroblade and stab it deep into its skull, no number of jabs seemed to quell its hatred. It bit down, jaws powerful enough to crush his arm even through the hardened power armor, at which point I was able to redirect my own gunfire and unload half a mag into the monster. For all its hideous biomechanical beauty, it didn't prove immune to armor piercing .50 BMG, the shells blew fist sized chunks out of the fucker, though it took me enough bullets to outright chop through the neck before it finally fell down dead, giving the soldier enough leverage to throw the corpse aside and clamber back to relative safety.

I'd seen a similar creature dissected before, they had redundant systems out the wazoo. This breed wasn't particularly smart, often slaved to controlling aliens or used as biological drones, but that meant that the three brain analogues were perfectly capable of functioning without each other, and even with all of them out for the count, the distributed nervous system resembled that of a terrestrial octopus, capable of driving the Warform right up to the point of catastrophic structural failure. Even decapitated, the Warform clambered back onto its feet and attempted to bum-rush us, only to be hit with an underbarrel grenade and knocked it to its doom. Unlike Hernandez, it might even be alive after impact, if in no position to fight on.

One of the remaining friendly drones flew by and picked up several explosive charges from where they lay next to my feet, and then buzzed down into the teeth of the horde, the resulting explosion threatened to throw me off my feet. This gave Sanchez an opportunity to to grab my arm and drag me back.

"Get your ass back upstairs now" She screamed, ichor dripping down her own visor. I picked up the remaining bombs and sprinted full speed for the hole, where several battered Marines held overwatch positions. My lace interfaced with the tactical AI, now rerouted to Sanchez's systems after Hernandez was KIA, and it agreed with my decision to place several charges on structurally important pillars in the lab. That done, I took a boost from a lumbering mech, and climbed through to find myself on the upper level.

I had a minute to breathe, muting my lace's urgent pings to seek care for the haematoma building up in my battered brain.

"But Pagliacci, I am the doctor."

A Marine flatlined next to me, but I was jolted back to my senses as his corpse suddenly jerked back on its feet, and smoothly picked up his dropped weapon. Looks like she'd enabled the Casualty Reanimation Mode, more commonly referred to as Zombie. Quite often in modern combat, injuries that might incapacitate humans wouldn't do shit to the far more expensive combat equipment they're using. A sabot round punching through a tank might easily kill the crew with shrapnel, yet hardly damage the combat effectiveness of the vehicle, especially those with more automated systems. Similarly, even though Corporal White, as my tac told me, had suffered irreversible brain damage from traumatic hypoxia, he still had his power armor and extensive cybernetics that didn't give two shits that bossman upstairs had taken a dirt nap. Some might even say that they did better without him getting in the way with that pesky fear of death and other inhibitions.

Others joined him, throats gurgling from where holes spewing pink foam sucked down air for their reactivated lungs. I could have sworn I saw a hint of panic in a man, eyes still darting hither and thither as his body carried him back to the fight. Maybe he wasn't fully dead, but the tac AI had given up on saving him and preferred to buy the living more time.

Sanchez and a dozen survivors emerged, and just after they got clear, the AI decided to detonate the explosives, the floor buckling beneath us as tons of concrete caved in, covering the hole for a moment.

She only let us rest for a moment before throwing us back into activity. Several drones diverted to disable the elevator in case something came crawling after us. The wounded were carried away upstairs, the Zombies ordered to sit tight and guard the temporarily collapsed opening. I could already feel frantic digging below, given the diversity of Centauri units, something capable of digging after us was almost a given.

We reorganized as best we could, an emergency transmission was made to HQ, and reinforcements were promised in 20 minutes. Not much, a QRF platoon of normal Marines, but certainly better than nothing, especially given they were bringing vehicles.

I discarded my oversized assault rifle as heavier ordnance was being distributed, snagging an automatic grenade launcher that ought to maul even the more resistant aliens.

Everyone else was quickly briefed on the Warforms, a process usually performed when a unit was voyaging over to the Kuiper wormholes. A stream of data poured into all our laces, giving us an overview of known types.

Of course, this was far from comprehensive, the Centaurs had several thousand known clades, with particular diversity in their combat Warforms. It seemed the ones we'd fought weren't sapient on the level of a typical Centaur or human, operating with closer to the intelligence of a chimp or dolphin. Nodal creatures, designed to be disposable, were usually preferred over the sentient aliens. Thankfully, it seemed that the kind we'd encountered were nowhere near as potent as the norm, to create/gestate them, the technology needed was a cut above what was normally available to humanity, and this lot seemed to have been built using repurposed hardware from Moshowitz. Almost cutting edge hardware, but still incapable of producing the extremely advanced alloys and optoelectronics that they could normally wield. Further, it was conjectured that they were likely being coordinated by the hijacked base AI, in place of the nodal organisms.

As for the firearms they were wielding, our footage suggested they were 3D printed with sintered metal, but the facilities in the lab's CNC workshop were more than capable of making lethal weapons.

At this point, our study session was interrupted by a rather unpleasant sound, that of klaxons wailing as the blast door we'd been struggling to cut through began opening. It was slow, but the barest crack was enough for a thin, semi-gelatinous Warform to squeeze through, shrugging off smaller caliber rounds, only to be burned away by a plasma flamethrower. Our attempts to jam the mechanisms were ineffective, they were buried deep in metal around the perimeter of the blast door.

Our defense was immediately disrupted by a missile launched at us through the aperture, stolen from a dead soldier below. It hit a Marine in the gut, punching through and scattering two others like ragdolls. I weathered the storm of shrapnel, and one of the specialists threw out a Crafter gadget, spawning a forcefield that brought us some reprieve. It was set up such that friendly projectiles could go outward but enemy shots were stopped, sparking off a translucent field. I took the opportunity to pelt them with GL fire, blowing limbs and appendages off, but hardly stemming the tide pouring out from the now quarter-open partition.

Following our tac AI's cue, I tossed one of the Crafter grenades I had pilfered into the surging mass, it illuminated rather than exploded, a blast of light so concentrated it almost overwhelmed the filters on our visors, igniting exposed surfaces and charring several Warforms to a crisp. But by far the most effective defense we had was the plasma flamethrower, the searing hot plume torching Warforms like moths that finally made it to the flame. But now that the blast door was nearly fully open, it no longer had the coverage to keep them all at bay, and we began a fighting retreat, handing the device to a Zombie and retreating full speed to the top.

"I talked to the tac, we can't hold inside, our best bet is to make it to the surface and hold the entrance, we can keep them pinned long enough for help." Sanchez said, grimacing as a medic cut into her mangled arm, threading artificial nerves into the wound, a remarkably painful process since there was no time for anesthesia, not to mention it would make it take longer to calibrate and integrate.

The last of the Zombies were tasked to hold on and long as possible, and we emerged out the airlock, to find the sandstorm had worsened to apocalyptic proportions. At least it sandblasted the worst of the gore off me, but it was hardly a bonus to visibility since we couldn't see more than a few feet away. I hefted my grenade launcher, grimly preparing to fight to the end, when news of something far more concerning reached us.

THIS IS AN AUTOMATED MESSAGE TO ALL USMA PERSONNEL, THIS AREA IS NOW UNDER THE JURISDICTION OF TURING

Article 2 is now in effect, you have 17 minutes to clear the area before area-denial weaponry is employed in your vicinity

"FUCK, they just shut down airspace over Hellas, we can't even get our dropship in." Sanchez swore like a sailor, sending out requests for aid that I doubted would receive satisfactory answers.

When Turing says Jump!, even the almighty USGov would be trying to achieve orbital velocity post haste.

"What are we waiting around for?" I asked, already boarding one of the vehicles, only to turn around and see she was still stationary, impotently glaring at the entrance to the lab.

She turned to face me, her figure a blur amidst the billowing storm.

"Infohazard. You don't want to know." She said curtly, before snapping her fingers, coincident with the Marines halting in their tracks and moving back to her, leaving me with the now empty vehicle pool.

I was torn, a decade of training had rammed the importance of that phrase into my thick skull. You did your best 3 monkeys impression when your commanding officer told you that, because being deaf, dumb and blind often beat out being dead.

Thing is, Captain Sanchez wasn't my CO. And the thought of trying to make my own way through a record breaking sandstorm and through whatever perimeter Turing had set up didn't sound particularly appealing. If I had already gotten on their bad side, my UN credentials would only entail a mostly intact corpse being mailed back with condolences.

Enough of this nonsense, if she and her goons had a death wish, I didn't have any desire to let them take me with them.

I took my leave instead, leaving the survivors grudgingly sorting out their equipment, especially a large briefcase with radiation warnings. Were they seriously planning to nuke the place? It might be a last resort, but this cat had been hard done by curiosity already.

I gunned it, relying on inertial guidance maps to keep the vehicle on a mostly safe route, even though whatever passed for a trail had been long buried beneath fresh sand. Still safe enough, the vehicle was elevated too high for the typical Martian boulder. yet I reduced our speed to sane levels when I was confident we'd cleared any potential blast zone.

It was at this point that I noticed that I'd brought along a surprise guest, as the little girl cuffed in the back came to, noticed that she was covered in blood, and began wailing so hard that I almost dented the roof with my helmet in my panic.

Sanchez, you absolute bitch.