Kind
“Pershing, I swear I’m going to kill them both.”
He’d made it into the elevator before the Spectre recovered from the gunship’s strafing run, though it had cost him. A stray round had gone through one of his arms, taking it off at the elbow. His suit had automatically cut off blood flow to the extremity, so he wouldn’t bleed out, but it made it significantly harder to drag Pershing with him. The cocktail of stimulants released by his suit meant that he wasn’t feeling his injuries yet, but he had a limited window before it started to catch up to him.
As the elevator descended into the massive sky-piercing hotel complex, Kind began mentally shifting through his list of contacts. Who did he know on Mordian who could pick them up? He’d hit the button for the hundredth floor, hoping to lose the spectres in the darkness of the undercity.
The elevator doors opened with a ding to reveal desolate decrepit hotel hallways, wallpaper curled and disintegrating into a heavy layer of dust that caked the floor. Finding help was definitely going to be a challenge. Of course they'd ended up in the one desolate area on Mordian, a planet with a population in the tens of billions. Dragging himself and Pershing along the peeling hallways of the building was nerve wracking enough, going door to door asking for a doctor was suicidal. The gear Pershing and him had on was worth a fortune. Definitely catering to the wrong crowd.
Kind kept putting one foot in front of the other, the stump of his arm leaned against the wall to support him. His other hand clutched a strap woven between Pershing’s shoulder guards, dragging him along.
“It’s alright Pershing, you’re going to make it. I’ll find us a way out of this one. Remember Illit 5? Still owe you for that one.”
Kind looked back at Pershing and gave him a grin.
“We were stuck in that hole for so long that the enemy just gave up.”
Kind came up to an intersection and picked a direction at random, taking the left branch.
“Orders were to just hold the building. So we did. For months.”
The pair came across another intersection, and Kind took a right to avoid looping back on themselves.
“We were there so long that the last time they attacked us during a meal you-”
“Took one out with a spoon?”
Pershing was looking up at Kind with a pained grin.
“That’s always the first story you bring up when the going gets tough.”
“Pershing! Do you know where we are? What tim-”
“Kind, stop with the A & O stuff. I’m not doing so hot. My suit is barely keeping me together. I’m only conscious because of my neural augments picking up the slack from my concussed organic brain.”
“We need to get you to a doctor.”
Pershing looked up and down the decrepit hallway they’d paused in.
“Good luck. I don’t think you’ll find much of anything here.”
When Kind looked up again to keep walking, he realized that he had no idea where he was. He’d lost track of the elevator and now he was just in a random decrepit corridor.
“At least it’ll keep the Spectres off our backs.”
“Yeah, and get us killed by scavengers.”
He could feel eyes watching him from all the peepholes in the doors, just waiting like vultures.
Damn.
“Alright. I’ll bite.”
With the stump of his arm, he knocked on the next door he came across. As he knocked, the door swung open.
“Well that was easy. Pull security Pershing, I’m going to go get some directions.”
He propped Pershing up next to the door and drew his sidearm, a custom ZC-94 repeater. After he made sure a round was chambered, he burst through the doorway.
The room was set up like a Hilton hotel room with two beds, a bathroom, and a centered TV. Except this room was completely upturned and the wind howled through it from the broken glass door leading to the balcony. Strewn about the room were passed out people. Probably high out of their minds on some drug or another. Kind looked for one that looked reasonably lucid and shoved a gun in his face.
“Hey dopey. I need some directions.”
“What the f-”
“Quiet. Where can I find a doctor?”
“Fshhhhiiiiiiiiiittttquetiesdfte”
Pop-fizzzzz
Smoke puffed from the man’s ears and he collapsed to the ground. Neural net. The man had been wired in and Kind had caused him to burn out by activating his sympathetic nervous system. Kind looked around the room, noting the wires crisscrossing the floor, and it clicked. The whole room was wired into a neural net, sharing all of their collective experiences. And they would have all just experienced death.
Kind ran to the door and grabbed Pershing just in time to see all of the doors within the hallway open at the same time. Out of each stepped a ragged mixture of people, all with vacant, dead looks in their eyes and broken cables hanging from their gaunt bodies. Kind looked back into the room he’d just left and saw a room full of the same people.
“Oh boy Pershing, we really kicked the hornet's nest this time. This might hurt.”
This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.
Kind holstered his handgun and grabbed a DRAG cable from his waist, then clipped it to Pershing. The cable activated thrusters on Pershing’s armor, lifting him off the ground and taking the weight off Kind. Kind unslung his rifle and braced it on the stump of his severed arm. Then he started rushing down the hallway.
“Get down! Get down!” Kind shouted to the crowd slowly forming at the edges of the hallway. It was unlikely they would comply, but it was worth a shot. Sometimes the network was young enough for the members to retain some individuality.
Not this one apparently, thought Kind, as a member of the crowd leapt out of a room in an attempt to tackle him. Kind sidestepped and kept running as the people lining the hallway began to collapse in like water rushing into a trench. Kind shouldered bodies out of the way, tossing them aside in a vain attempt to drag himself free of the tide. He felt hands on his shoulders and ankles, dragging him back, trying to bury him. Felt resistance on the cable connecting Pershing to him.
“Kind!” Yelled Pershing.
“I know!”
Kind brought his weapon up and opened fire. The ferrite chips fired by his TA7R Railrifle carved a deadly swath through the gaunt bodies pressing on him from all sides. He fired on automatic, sweeping the weapon up and down the hallway. The constant sonic boom of each shot accelerating from the weapon merged into a continuous roar that only stopped once the hallway was a mess of torn up bodies and mangled walls.
“Did not want to attract that much attention.”
“You always know how to get a show going Kind.”
“For some reason, it’s never an entertaining one.”
“Yeah, more the bloody, gory puke your guts out type deal. Let’s get out of here. That drag cable is getting real uncomfortable.”
Kind kept moving down the hallway with his rifle up, prepared to engage anyone who came out into the hallway. He maneuvered his way through the dozens of shredded bodies littering the floor, glancing into rooms as he moved past them quickly. The thick bundles of fiber optics lining the walls indicated that this had been a pretty well developed hive. Definitely started to hit wireless status, considering their behavior in the hallway.
Markyr hives first developed twenty years ago when the Markyr thinkspace program was released. Advertised as a way to connect people within a virtual space, the program was reengineered by terrorists into a virus that assimilated the consciousness of its occupants and turned them into little more than mindless husks. If enough of them gathered in one area, the virus formed a hive dedicated to propagating the virus. The worst part? The virus could survive within a single human and be distributed as soon as they connect to a network, taking out everyone connected to it. The only way to get rid of them completely was to kill everyone who’d been in contact with it.
Luckily for Kind, that wasn’t his job. The current objective was to find a doctor, not wipe out a Markyr hive. Though it wasn’t a much easier task. Chances were he’d find some sort of body shop or aug store that could perform some basic treatment, but finding an actual doctor might be impossible. The way Kind’s vision was starting to wobble wasn’t helping either. The concoction of drugs holding him together was definitely starting to wear off.
Kind reached a fork in the hallway, where it branched off into a Y. The area in between the two branching paths opened up into a courtyard. Separating the dense vegetation of the courtyard from the interior corridors were glass panes that ran floor to ceiling.
On a whim, Kind chose to move down the left pathway, hugging the side opposite the courtyard. The low hum emitted by the DRAG cable began to sputter and Kind quickly set Pershing down.
“Damn, seems like we’re out of fuel. I won’t be able to drag you and keep a weapon up, Pershing.”
“Just leave me in one of these rooms. I’ll take care of myself.”
“Are you sure?”
“Killing those husks earlier will have alerted the hive. Ambushers are probably hunting us as we speak. Kind, we won’t make it out of here unless we can move fast. And I’m just slowing us down.”
“I can pull you and you can provide security. We coul-”
Pershing attempted to hold his hands up but only succeeded in shrugging slightly.
“Kind. Just go.”
“I hate when you play hero. We both know this is supposed to be about making a living, not making hard choices.”
Kind edged up to a room two doors from the Y intersection on the left side and kicked the door open. Single one room apartment, sparse furniture, empty. Perfect. He went back to Pershing and slung his rifle, then pulled him into the room. Kind propped Pershing up in one of the corners of the room where he could see the door.
“Just give me a gun and get going. I don’t have a lot of time.”
Pershing gestured to the sidearm on his hip and Kind helped him draw it. He propped Pershing’s arm up on his leg so that he could shoot the doorway.
“I’ll be back, Pershing. The code is shade, above and within. Stay alive, will you?”
“You got it, boss.”
Reluctantly, Kind stepped back from Pershing and moved to the door.
“Hey, Kind?”
“Yeah?”
“Take my tags. Just in case.”
“No. Stop talking nonsense. I’ll be back soon.”
“Kin-”
Kind stepped out of the room and closed the door behind him. Kind looked down the hallway and noted that the courtyard seemed to extend the entire length of it, almost 300 meters, until it hit the next intersection. He took a moment to look into the courtyard, but couldn’t see past the dense vegetation. Seemed the area was abandoned and had become overgrown. Probably due to the hive nearby.
When Kind arrived at the intersection he emerged from one of the branches of the Y encasing the courtyard. One hallway led back towards the other side of the courtyard and the other pushed out into another section of the complex. Kind took the hallway leading away from the courtyard.
As he progressed further down the hallway, the walls started to change from peeling wallpaper and coiled fiber optics to bullet holes and blast searing. Signs of conflict were everywhere. Except bodies. Kind’s felt a distinct sense of unease at that revelation. If the defenders had been unsuccessful, then the hive would have cleaned up the dead. Not a good sign at all. As he pressed further in, he started to see evidence of fortifications. Overturned tables and sofas lined with spikes made of sharpened chair legs littered the hallway. The few remaining cables running along the walls were all severed at this point.
“Must be a makeshift firewall.” Thought Kind, “Must be getting close to the edge of the hive.”
The area was deafeningly silent. No hum of ventilation or electronics, just the soft impacts of Kind’s boots. Hives always maintain the existing infrastructure, especially cooling units because they needed to keep bodies and hot computing systems alive. They never left an area in disrepair, not to mention fortified. Unless...
Kind shot the ambusher behind him before he even set eyes on it. The crash of the ventilation system grate hitting the ground gave him just enough warning to react before it snagged him with one of it’s spindly limbs. The ambusher was humanoid in appearance, but with stretched, spindly appendages and metallic spines. Woven into the skin, mechanical augmentations broke up the pale flesh and made up for the strength the stretched bodies lacked. The loose hanging distended jaw just completed the monstrous visage.
Ambushers never traveled alone. Kind had been in enough hives to know that. They were like the immune system of the hive, collecting around threats and attempting to eliminate them. That meant that Kindwas definitely getting close to an edge of the hive, hopefully one with people on the other side. Hopefully a doctor.
Picking up the pace, Kind moved down the hallway, briefly clearing each doorway before preceding. Any one of them could be a deathtrap waiting to happen. A ways up ahead, Kind noted a floor to ceiling barricade blocking off the hallway. That was probably the outer wall of whatever group was fighting off the hive. A destination in sight, Kind abandoned caution and took off sprinting.
It was just as well too, because he could hear the clicking and whirring of ambusher augmentations spinning up behind him. The hive was in pursuit.
100 meters.
75.
50.
A spotlight on the wall blasted Kind and he heard a voice shout, “GET DOWN, GET DOWN!”
Kind dropped flat on his face and heard a roar erupt from the wall. Concussive waves rocked him as round after round passed over his head. After almost a whole thirty seconds of continuous firing, the area fell into silence.
“Stand up! Identify yourself!”
Taking his good hand off the grip on his rifle, Kind got to his feet slowly.
“I’m a mercenary. Picked the wrong fight, had to take a wrong turn.”
“Approach the gate. Slowly.”
A door opened in the barricade and Kind stumbled into the streaming light.