Slev was still chuckling every damn time he thought about that poor control tower operator. Whatever alien was on the other end of his call, had damn near gagged on hearing he was talking to the, Human owner of the, Human Instinct star-fighter.
After the tower's controller declared they needed to check his registration details, Slev had milked that for every bit it was worth. Vague insinuations of violence and all. That poor guy or gal, not like Slev could tell. Genuinely thought he was going to fly over and blow up his tower if he didn't give clearance. Slev really needed to start leaning harder into the whole I'm a human, be fucking scared thing he had going for him. It's not like he was out here as a fucking ambassador.
The trip to the jungle world of Vorimus Four was going breathtakingly, disconcertingly, smooth so far. Utter luxury, compared to the tight, cramped passenger quarters of the average dirt cheap passenger liner. He was watching old Terran movies with his legs kicked up on the holotable, when the video paused itself.
“Location Vorimus 4 deceleration complete.”
Slev unpaused the movie and glanced over his shoulder towards the cockpit window. A marble of green and violet spun peacefully. It was a truly magnificent view.
“Now this is the kind of shit I came to space for! I'm watching Predator and eating weird ass alien popcorn above a planet that I am about to kick the absolute shit out of!”
He happily tossed another one of the odd purple popcorn balls into his mouth.
Slev Torrent- Vorimus 4 Planetside
“Fuck this planet. Seriously, fuck whatever alien god envisioned it, and fuck whoever decided to build here.”
Slev had landed in a shrubby clearing approximately four kilometers from the research station. The trees here were incandescent blue and orange. With thick trunks tapering into thin lithe leaves on the ends. Dozens of brooks babbled across the soft blue shrubgrass at his feet. There were even glowing butterflies the size of his head drifting by like silken ribbons. It was the single most visually stunning world he had ever set foot on. None of that changed what he saw unfolding before him.
A half dozen corporate soldiers, armed and armored in teal vestments, were currently being shoved into the maw of one of the cotton candy-looking trees they wandered close next to. Slev had only even stumbled onto it because of the screams. The tree itself had peeled open at the base of its trunk as dozens of eyes opened across its surface. Then long grasping arm-like appendages covered in thorned claws had reached out and begun brutally piercing the wildly firing troops and dragging them into its gore-coated trunk.
Slev was frozen in place, his eyes darting back and forth between the trees near him, looking for even the slightest sign of movement as aliens gurgled in the distance. He slowly reached down and picked up a rather large rock, throwing it against the nearest tree. Nothing, just a dull thud on impact and a splash into the brook below. Another half-dozen rocks didn't reveal anything different.
"Uhh, reaper buddy, can you scan every tree near me?" Slev whispered tentatively.
“Of course, sir anything in particular we are looking for?”
“…...That!” Slev shouted, pointing at the alien abomination closing its maw. With a bisected foot soldier still flopping loosely from its gullet, twenty or so yards away.
"Ahh, yes, of course." reaper flatly stated
Slev just stood there, stock still, a jet black sore thumb, in a forest of vibrant orange and blues. This planet was nightmare fuel. He couldn't afford to deal with having to baby his AI every time he needed something done here. With a cold calculated expression hidden under his visor. Slev opened the panel hidden in his left vambrace. Flipped the steel cover off of the inhibitor switch, And turned the bright red do not turn knob. Reaper embraced the rest of his being, normally locked away behind layers of redundant safeties.
“Contacts closing fast, sir. Six small lifeforms moderately armed. Minor threat. Exterminate them. I will make sure the plants don't eat us."Reaper chimed his synthetic voice, still full of cheer, but with a decidedly malevolent edge to it now.
Slev smoothly shifted into a dead sprint, his armored boots digging furrows into the soft grasses. He angled slightly right so he would emerge from a thicket of blue-green shrubbery. He burst from the thicket, pumping his legs even harder, and dove into cover at the top of a short knoll behind a half-broken boulder. Just as the array of troops filtered into the sparsely canopied jungle slightly below,.
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"Sir, ignore the ones on the far left, they are already dead.” reaper ominously informed him.
Slev obliged, sighting his rifle towards the four men fanning out to his right. He braced the butt of the Railgun against his shoulder and let out a smooth, calming breath. Waiting one heart beat, then four, pulling the trigger with the echo of the fifth beat. The round crackled and screamed as it tore through the sound barrier, solidly puncturing through one and then a second soldier at chest height. They both soundlessly dropped like marionettes with cut strings. Blue ichor painted a swath of the jungle. The last two soldiers swerved into cover, one diving into a berm of claylike earth on a brook's edge. The other simply pivoted behind a tree and fired off a concerningly accurate laser shot. Slev was blinded for a moment as a flash of green energy and heat scattered off his armored cheek. Causing flesh to sizzle beneath the armor. As his face mask glowed a superheated dull red, Slev crawled back farther behind the cracked boulder and shouted “Status!”
“Minor damage, high yield transference energy rifles, nonstandard, likely effective against local wildlife, estimate three to five direct shots required to terminate you.” "Changing threat assessment to moderate”
"Alright, I really, really don't want to have a snipe off with that damn sharpshooter they have out there,” Slev murmured.
“Understood generating optimal intercept path now." reaper added helpfully
Slev's enhanced sight was overlayed with a deep blue line snaking from tree to tree with warning highlights where the surprisingly elite soldier would have a clear view of him. It also had two of the trees in the clearing painted a deep red. The path steering him well clear of them. Slev rushed down backwards and sprung to his feet, following the weaving path through the trees. Circling back towards the enemies. He dashed through a gap in the trees with an enhanced shove from his maneuvering thrusters. Just barley outpacing a spray of strafing green death that would have caught him.
Ten meters, then five, Slev roared at the now cowering figure as he rounded the tree. His left hand reached out and fully encompassed the man's circular helmet. With a grunt, he heaved him off the ground. Slev focused in on the dangling figure and simply squeezed, crushing the man's visor and feeling the skull beneath crunch. He kept up his momentum, moving again before the body even hit the ground, tree to tree. Toward the man hidden in the nearby brook.
Ducking through strafing but inaccurate, flashes of red searing beams, Slev boosted the last five meters, flipping his right hand outward as he did so. The sapphire blade within his right vambrace sprung forward and then sheared into the collarbone of the final soldier. With the bone-shattering combined force of Slev's weight and the maneuvering boost, The two halves of his foe fell into the clay with wet thumps.
“Reaper the other two?” Slev breathlessly asked.
“Eaten by something large sir” Reaper smugly responded. "However, something large is now headed this way, sir.”
Slev cursed his rifle was still at the top of the knoll almost 100 meters away, smoldering where one of the sniper shots had melted part of the fucking thing. Slev tossed his pistol into his left hand and shook the blood from his blade Turning toward the fast approaching crashing sounds.
It was massive, raising its bulk up almost to the treetops. A long, curved tail met with a deep Rusty scale-covered chest. Four hooked claws propelled it from tree to tree as its slavering maw swung towards one of the predatory trees. Its reciprocating jaws completely unhinged as it bellowed in delight seeing another morsel. Then, with a hissing whoosh, its acidic saliva shot towards the tree, immediately melting through the fake bark sloughing deep into the flesh beneath.
"Nope,” Slev said as he started running.
“Sir, this is why I always say, we need more explosives." Reaper added
Slev had kept running at a dead sprint until he could see the top of the research outpost peaking through the trees. Gasping for air, he knelt down next to a fallen log with an eerie black-green moss creeping across it. The research facility lay at the base of a sheer mountain cliff. Tall reinforced metal walls with watchtowers arrayed around. The domed roof peeking just above the lights on the towers.
There was a small, noticeably burned-out motor pool building. Next to it were two small shuttlecraft in the same teal livery as the soldiers he had encountered. Most concerning, however, was that one of the shuttles was still powered on, with corpses hanging from its open bay, eviscerated blue entrails spilling out meters from the craft. The soft wine of a long empty wall turret still cycling its barrels was the only sound that broke the still silence.
“Multiple life forms detected, specifics unknown”
Slev's eyes trailed to the mangled wreckage of the front gate, twisted and tangled bars and a few suspect blue-tinged smears. It didn’t look like there was much scorching, at least on the walls, from any kind of protracted firefight. Best case, there were a few men inside sacking the place for the same data cache he was after. Worst case, everyone inside was dead and what killed them had made an unholy lair inside.
Slev made his way as silently as he could in this bizzare, and utter lack of the jungle's ambient noises. No bird calls. No skittering rodents, scurrying through the trees. He made it past the gate, stepping over a cleanly vivisected arm and up the cold corrugated metal stairs. Peering into the open doorway ahead, he saw no signs of forced entry. Just a plain, clean white hall well lit with doors on each side and a door at the end. Slev stopped and plugged a filament from his suit into the door control console.
"I'm probably going to regret this, but hack in,” Slev muttered to his armor.
Mere seconds passed. "I have full control of all automated defenses, sir, unfortunately, they are all empty." Reaper sounded almost depressed.
“Of course you do....Tell me what this place was researching. Before we just wander on in and ring the dinner bell.”
“Broadly... Xenowarfare, Chemistry, and Geology, I can't glean much more than that from my file access currently.”
Well, that certainly didn't sound good. Slev shuffled to the side door, sliding it open just a hair. He snorted at the mop, and several maintenance robots arraigned next to basic chemical cleaners. The other door led to a small rec room. He had to pry the door open with a heave. Nothing that wasn’t on a starship was remotely human-proofed. There were several Cerberus personal dead in chairs with neat burn marks on the temples. Slev inspected the scene; it honestly looked like suicide. Pistols loosely hanging in cold grasps, a few scatted next to the bodies themselves.
So there was something bad enough here. That they locked themselves in the fucking rec room and mass suicided themselves rather than face it. Great, just great. Slev respectfully slid the rec room door shut and made his way to the end of the hallway. Still utterly quite other than the faint turret whine from outside. He cracked the door open to look and immediately brought his pistol up ahead of him, backing slightly away from the door.
Through the door, he could see a sliver of a dark laboratory utterly coated in the blood of some one, or more likely, multiple people. A single flashlight lay slowly spinning on the floor, casting eerie shadows on the corpses littering the room. He stilled his heart, not daring to enter the room yet, just listening. There, a slight shuffling sound deeper into the room.
"Reaper, turn on thermal.”