“Rise, rise, like the undead!”
-Tex
***Outer Rim, Prip Homeworld***
***Tex***
The drone skitters forwards and jumps with incredible agility, ignoring the rain of projectiles from our weapons. The ammunition is repelled and uselessly drops to the floor. Using one of its spindly appendages, it impales the man right next to me, ramming a fist-sized hole right through his chest. All that comes out in reply is a wet gurgle as air is replaced with blood.
“Scatter!” I scream and bring down my war-mace on the drone's back, but before the rest of my team can follow the command, the drone lashes out its serrated tail like a whip and another soldier goes down, her leg amputated right through the thick thighbone.
Giving my assault rifle another shot, I unload a full magazine into the monster, but it barely twitches.
'Grenade!' Someone behind me announces her intention over the network and a moment later the dark tunnel which spewed out our attacker is closed with the muffled 'whomp' of a shaped charge. Instantly, the tunnel we are in is filled with dust and debris and I have to force down the need to cough.
Giving up on my rifle, I allow it to attach to the holster on my nano-armour, then I busy myself with darting in out of the Cyber's reach, raining reverberating blow after blow onto the creature.
My trusty hammer only manages to dent the Cyber's back, while the drone is busy with mauling my comrade in its clutches - attempting to damage him beyond his healing abilities. Having drawn a combat knife, he tries valiantly to defend himself, but the opponent has the advantage in limbs.
Pinned to the mine shaft's wall, for all two limbs he is able to block with his arms, there is a third one which gets in a stab or a cut. His resistance only extends his suffering and the time until the creature will turn its attention to another target.
The Cyber chose a bipedal form, with two legs and two pairs of spindly spider legs as arms. There is also a tail with a serrated edge and the whole body seems to be covered in high-quality armour. The creature also has an infuriating battlefield awareness, keeping me expertly at bay with its tentacle-like tail.
After two more blows, I realize that the thing won't go down if I continue in this manner. The armour is just too thick for bullets. That said, the armour seems too thick for anything apart from a rocket launcher or an armour penetrating laser system, and neither would be usable in these tunnels.
A damn cannon! That's what we need! What we need right now is one of the anti-personnel spidercannons with armour penetrating ammunition! The ones which were developed for ship defense.
Giving up on wearing the creature down, I decide to go 'all in'. Its tail lashes out another time, but this time I block the attack with my own while I jump up into the air, grabbing my mace with both hands. Letting out a gruesome scream for motivation, I bring the maze down on the creature's insect-like head as if this is the last and most important hammer blow I'll ever make.
There is a crunching sound as something gives, and the mechanical head with its instruments and sensors breaks away, revealing a set of cables and a little hole which leads the wires deeper into the mechanism. The Cyber seems only slightly inconvenienced and one mechanical eye swivels to focus on me as if saying: 'You are next!'
Seeing his chance, my comrade points his previously useless side-arm right into the weak spot and presses the trigger without hesitation, firing round after round into the creature's torso as if he intends to empty the whole magazine.
For the first time, the drone shows signs of being affected and twitches. Finally, its movements come to a smooth and gradual halt as fire and smoke spews out of its torso. The bullets must've hit something vital like a power cell.
“By the Father's Belt!” I curse, using a metaphor that quickly became popular a few years ago. “Micki? Are you alright? Oh, boy. That bastard did a number on you.”
“Fuck no!” My right hand and friend spews out what seems like a gallon of blood. Apart from the huge wound in his chest, Micki was stabbed and slashed open several times by the remaining three appendages.
“You look worse than the Mother's kebab when she pulled out her meatcleaver. Should I pull that out of your chest? It looks like it stings.” I point at the spider leg, even though I have no idea how to get it out. It's not like there is a need for field medics nowadays.
But now that I get a better look, the monster seems more like an oversized, man-shaped grasshopper.
What is it with Cyber and insect mods? Can't they choose something that looks pleasant to the eye? Do they hate themselves that much that they have to choose these ugly bodies?
A case of theft: this story is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.
My comrade's eyes widen at the suggestion and he shakes his head. “No!? Do you see the serrated edges? Pulling that out will hurt like a bitch, no matter the direction. I think I'll take the easy way out. See'ya at the spawning pool.” He raises his gun to his head and fires, blowing away the upper half of his head, therefore reducing the size of our party to four.
“Wimp! Idiot! Why didn't he take some of the pain-reduction mods if he is that afraid of pain?”
I turn to the woman who got her leg cut off and who was the source of the accusation. I think her name was Evelyn. When I joined the team this morning, I just wanted to see the planet's surface.
A little survey mission seemed just right to do the trick.
While the remaining two members of our group went ahead to check for similar manholes, and I and Mickey dealt with the attacker, Evelyn crawled over to her leg to reattach it. Smirking, I admire her guts. “You also played Orbital Insertion?” I ask, recognizing a veteran of the wargame world when I see one.
“Just a few times. Too realistic for my tastes. Being bombed to bits isn't a pleasant experience, but the real turn-off is that the pain-settings are locked in at a hundred percent,” she admits. “But I take back what I said about you taking that hammer at the beginning of our mission. It was useful.”
Raising my arm, I show off the fifty kilograms of blunt steel. “Oh, you mean mean this hammer? The one which deals with armoured opponents when explosives would just cause another cave-in?”
Evelyn smirks, ignoring the pain of her leg reattaching itself while she holds it against the amputated stump. “Do you have another hammer to show around?”
“Stop the flirting and hurry up with healing, then let's get going.” One of our comrades returns out of the dark mineshaft. “We've checked a hundred metres ahead, but didn't find any more hidey holes.” She gestures with her finger, indicating the surface. “They must have landed troops. This thing must be some type of scout, intended to find our colony.”
Then her eyes land on the drone and Mickey's remains. “Oh, damn! It got him.” She bites her lower lip. “I wanted to invite him on a little private time after the mission. He seemed cute.”
“You could still confiscate his important bits. I am sure they are still viable,” Evelyn quips back.
Ignoring their argument, I turn to give the destroyed drone a deeper inspection.
The thing has roughly our size and build, which ensures that it can use any tunnel we do. The decision to put that much armour onto a drone which operates alone in the field can only mean that they expected it to die, but they wanted it to live for long enough to send information back to the collective. The scout-hypothesis is assisted by the large antennae on the creature, clearly a platform for all sorts of sensors. If that's the case, then we can expect a massive attack soon.
When we landed on this planet, we purposefully created several colonies and of the eleven established ones only eight are remaining. The others were destroyed by concentrated attacks when it was still too early for them to defend themselves.
“It's a real bother that we can't put anything above ground without it being destroyed soon afterwards,” I grumble, lamenting our defensive position. Almost fifty kilometres beneath the surface, our colony is relatively safe and construction is going well. The Cyber would have to work really hard to dig us out. Up until now, that wasn't an issue, because they didn't even know where most of our population was.
We might have to move the colony. Judging the situation as too important to wait, I use the network to fire off a quick report to our command centre. They should have the bigger picture and know which actions to take.
“I think he only attacked because we would have stumbled onto him anyway.” The second soldier, Lyla, also returns, completing our remaining group. “I overreacted when I threw the grenade into the side-tunnel. I thought it was a possible route for reinforcements, but when I looked inside it was just a small alcove. The grenade was already armed, so I had to dispose of it in the heat of combat.”
I wave her off. “You didn't react wrong. After questioning our actions in hindsight, one can always find something that could've been done better. At that moment, you had to ensure that we wouldn't get swarmed by hordes of those things. We weren't equipped to deal with such an opponent, since we were just supposed to place a few more sensors on the surface. We made the trip dozens of times and got lazy.”
“Not that anyone noticed the thing before it charged us.” Evelyn gets to her knees, tentatively testing her leg, then she gets up and stomps onto the ground to make sure. All that remains of the grizzly wound is a slight discolouration on her newly regrown nano-armour. Normally, healing wouldn't be that quick and complete for a simple soldier, so I guess that she must have a lot of points in some sort of self-healing ability.
After having made sure that it's fine, she nods and gestures at the tunnel. “Let's go and see if we can make it the rest of the way without running into more of those things. I am sure that command would like to know what's going on at the surface.”
We gather all of Mickey's belongings that seem useful. While doing so, I eye Lyla's actions carefully. When Evelyn suggested she should claim Mickey's important bits the woman wasn't as opposed to the idea as I would've hoped. But luckily she leaves her hands off of my friend's remains. I am not entirely sure that such an action would be a moral issue in our current society, but deep down I still have the moral compass of a human.
The remaining distance is covered in complete silence, as all of us strain our senses on the lookout for another Cyber who made it to the surface. The whole time, I imagine them having a base directly on top of us, burrowing down.
But my fears prove unnecessary; when we reach the end of the tunnel, a bright light awaiting us.
“It should be night outside...” Evelyn mumbles with a warning tone in her voice.
Slowly, we edge to the end of the steep tunnel and step outside.
It takes me a few blinks to understand what I am seeing and that even if that Cyber found our location, our opponents won't be able to do much with the information.
A new, bright star is in the sky above us, its light dimmed by countless dark objects surrounding it in a sphere. Then there is the silvery band of metal which seems to be surrounding the star and spans from horizon to horizon. Bursts of light are radiating from the star, the koronas of lasers so powerful that they create enough waste energy to light up space all around us.
Lyla gasps and points up. “They are here! Haven is here!” Then all of us grin in glee, bathing in the knowledge that our time beneath the surface has come to an end.
I catch myself grinning like an idiot as I watch the rays of light searching for unseen ships.
A shudder runs down my spine and I avert my attention, the bad premonition forcing me to search my surroundings.
I find the three females back at the cave entrance, playing rock-paper-scissors and whispering with each other.
“I won, I get him first once we are back!”
“You said you would take the other one.”
“He is a corpse, and I don't want to wait for two weeks at the spawning pool.”
“Well, bad luck.”
“He won't even like you, with that crookedly attached leg.”
*gasp* “My leg isn't crooked!”
“He is looking!”
They turn to face me, all three of them smiling.
I nod professionally and head back into the tunnel, feeling their eyes on my neck all the way back to the colony.