Opus X

Chapter 6

“This isn’t an ID team,” Anne noted. “Not the right equipment and nothing is responding to our codes.”

Jia continued to sweep her weapon back and forth, half-expecting something to burst out of the walls. “Alina wouldn’t double-staff an assignment without telling us. Somebody had to know this place was here.”

“The Core stepping on each other’s toes again?” Erik suggested. “This is just a bloodier version of what we’ve seen before.”

“These men weren’t just killed,” Anne noted, her voice filled with disgust. “They were torn apart.”

“Jamming is extremely high inside,” Emma noted. “But I do detect IO ports on either side of the tunnel.”

“We’ll need to check carefully before we stick you anywhere,” Erik replied. “We need to know what’s going on and where the people who killed these guys are.”

“Obtaining control of the systems is the quickest way to determine that,” Emma insisted.

The heavy feet of Erik’s exoskeleton clanked on the hard, cold ground. “Seeing a lot of casings over there, but almost nothing near the flitters.” He pointed his finger at a discolored patch on a loading ramp. “But look at that.”

Jia magnified her view before narrowing her eyes. She’d thought it was another bloodstain, but the fluid was clearly dark blue. “Some sort of yaoguai, Tin Men, or Elites. Maybe all three.”

yaoguaiTrails of red and blue crisscrossed the floor, some clustered by the entrance near the corners. Jia didn’t care about wounded monsters stupid enough to go out into the raging blizzard. Let the angry Icelandic cold finish off the creatures.

She frowned. How had they gotten there? Someone had to open the gates for them.

“They might be attacking our flitter right now.”

Kant chuckled. “First mission, brother. First mission.”

“We’ll just steal one of these if necessary,” Erik commented.

“These men were clearly not from these flitters,” Anne commented, walking around the bodies. “Judging by the positions of the bodies.”

“But they were ready for a fight,” Jia replied, stepping past a pair of rifles.

Kant scoffed. “Not enough of one. I don’t see a single exo. They might not have had a chance against whatever freaks killed them.”

“The flitters landed and they rushed teams here to intercept, and the monsters unloaded from these flitters and carved through them.”

Erik cleared the fronts of the flitters, his rocket launcher loaded and ready to unleash death on whatever bizarre monster the Core threw at him. “They had a decent-sized team ready to defend this place, but they weren’t expecting to encounter this level or type of enemy.”

“Which means this isn’t a known yaoguai or Elite factory,” Anne suggested.

yaoguaiKant looked at her. “Because they delivered the monsters?”

Anne nodded. “And they didn’t have any ready to defend the place. If I had a warehouse full of monsters, I’d throw them at other monsters.”

“Core-on-Core raid, then,” Erik commented. “I’m beginning to think the conspiracy civil war idea we’ve been tossing around is pretty damned close to the truth.”

“A few cross purposes isn’t the same thing as a war…” Jia began, then paused for a moment. “You hear that?”

Distant echoing gunfire reached the front of the tunnel, along with screams and gut-churning bestial roars. Shrieks added a texture no one wanted.

“That narrows it down to yaoguai or Elites,” she continued. “And it means the facility hasn’t completely fallen.”

yaoguaiErik advanced farther into the tunnel. “We need to gain nominal control of the tactical situation before we risk exposing Emma, and that means taking down whatever’s invading. We can’t have her sitting in an IO port, and some Elite shows up with an autocannon.”

“Should we bother worrying about the invasion?” Anne asked. “If it’s Core killing Core, they’re doing our work for us. Let them kill each other off.”

“We can interrogate or intimidate humans,” Erik replied. “Yaoguai might as well be mindless, and Elites aren’t human anymore just because they have human brains. Survivors make this more worthwhile. Let’s follow the trail and clean up, and once we’ve secured everything, Emma can do her thing.”

Yaoguai“I like the part where I don’t wait to be blown to tiny pieces,” Emma replied.

Jia flicked her thumb to load AP rounds into her machine g*n. They would help with both Elites and armored yaoguai.

yaoguaiFighting abominations was a normal day in the job as far as the Core was concerned.

The four exoskeletons broke into a light jog, which meant their heavy echoing footsteps could probably be heard from anywhere in the facility. The howl of the outside storm grew quieter as they moved away from the now-permanently-open tunnel door. There might be some digging with flamethrowers in their future if they spent too much time inside the facility.

Depending on Emma to find a convenient exit would mean little if there wasn’t one to find.

Unlike some of the Core facilities they’d raided in the past, the layout was remarkably simple. Small open rooms opened off either side the farther they moved into the tunnel, the occasional body or bloodstain marking a battle. They ignored them to continue toward the current struggle, rapidly closing on a central hub that led off in two other directions, which revealed that the facility was shaped like a giant Y.

In the central hub, rows of tables and crates had been pushed into a line to form a makeshift barricade.

Men with rifles manned the fortifications firing at their enemy, a group of seven scorpion-like monsters. Each was the size of a small horse, but their legs, tail, and claws had been replaced with cybernetic limbs.

Thin, flexible silver-colored plates covered almost all of their bodies, and six glowing artificial eyes peeked out of the front, the red glow from the center reflecting off the polished white surroundings.

Two men fired bursts into a scorpion at point-blank range, but the bullets bounced off, sparking. It whipped its tail forward, a spearpoint extending and penetrating one of the men’s heads. The creature jumped forward and decapitated the other with one swipe of a metal blade-like claw. Other survivors backpedaled, keeping up their fire, but their bullets weren’t doing much more than denting and scratching the armor.

“Is that an Elite?” Anne asked.

“Bodies are too small,” Jia observed. “Too small for a human brain anywhere. I think they’re cyber-yaoguai. Tin Monsters?”

yaoguai“Let’s worry about the names later,” Erik replied.

Three large cyber-wolves lay on their sides in rapidly growing pools of red and blue blood, displaying massive blackened holes in their mangled and lightly armored sides. Their modifications appeared less extensive, only the legs and teeth replaced. Dead men missing chunks of their chests and throats lay around them.

Erik grunted. “It seems like only yesterday our worst problem was brains in tanks. Can’t ever accuse the Core of lazy creativity. This crap will probably end with us fighting some Elite piloting a moon.”

The six monsters not behind the barricade spun and spread out, forming a rough semicircle around the exoskeletons. Their single ally skittered toward fleeing men, spearing and tearing them apart.

“You can’t reason with a monster,” Erik stated. “Light ‘em up!”

The exoskeleton machine guns roared to life, the overlapping cacophony filtered by Jia’s helmet.

She fired in short, controlled bursts, alternating between two of the closest scorpions. Her bullets struck true with a bright flash, forcing the cyber-yaoguai back and flaking off chips of their armor but not shredding them as hoped.

yaoguaiShe refused to be surprised and substituted irritation instead. Her machine g*n with AP rounds could tear through many vehicles, but these cursed monsters mocked them like nightmares the king of Diyu would spit up from its deeper levels.

Anne adopted a similar strategy, using controlled bursts. Kant’s free flow of bullets almost drowned out his cheerful yelling, but it didn’t do much to strip the armor off his opponents.

Erik was taking individual shots, striking the enemy on the limbs with little success.

The seventh scorpion ripped into what remained of the defenders. One man primed a plasma grenade and gripped it tightly, waiting to be speared. His killer took the bait and slammed its point through his heart. He died coughing blood but with a smile on his face before a massive white-blue explosion incinerated him and blew the tail off the scorpion, along with its top layer of armor.

An eerie, piercing scream echoed from the creature, and it backpedaled until it smashed through a pile of crates leading toward the others. Jia took the opportunity to fire into the exposed area, splashing blue blood around before the monster collapsed on its side.

“Rockets ready,” Erik ordered. “We now know how to open them up.”

“We don’t know how many of these things there are,” Anne yelled.

“We know draining our machine g*n ammo isn’t going to help!” Erik countered, sweeping his launcher toward the closest scorpion and firing at the charging beasts.

Jia fired her own rocket a half-second later, already convinced by the success of the plasma grenade. Anne’s complaints hadn’t slowed her reload and subsequent fire. Kant joined the fun, now noticeably silent in concentration.

The four rockets zoomed toward the targets, the distance short, and exploded in rapid succession, almost like a preplanned fireworks show.

Erik’s and Jia’s struck their targets’ heads directly, blowing them off and the bodies back several meters.

Anne’s rocket struck the body, carving a huge gouge out of it but not finishing the creature off.

Kant blew a good chunk of its side off. Quick machine-g*n bursts into the exposed body underneath collapsed the creature.

The two remaining scorpions rushed toward one of the forks in the Y, not as mindless as Erik had suggested. The team didn’t exchange additional words as they all fired another rocket. The converging explosives blew the last scorpions apart, leaving smoking charred corpses.

Jia took slow, even breaths.

Anne had been right earlier.

They might have a rocket launcher in addition to a grenade launcher, but they weren’t connected to a truck filled with ammo, and they’d used two rockets to open up the place. Judicious use of resources might be the difference between taking over the facility or ending up lunch for some hideous cybernetic mutant.

“If we get attacked by a horde of those things, we will run out of grenades and rockets in a minute,” Anne noted.

“It’s not like we’ve got a lab and endless time to figure it out,” Erik replied.

With their current loadouts including both rocket and grenade launchers, they had started with eight rockets and twelve grenades, along with hundreds of rounds for their machine guns. In some circumstances, that would be overkill. A single exoskeleton could probably have taken out an entire syndicate warehouse in the Shadow Zone in the old days, but a heavily fortified Core base might be able to resist a dozen people equipped like they were.

“Let’s try not to run into a horde,” Kane suggested sensibly if not practically.

not“Stay together,” Erik ordered. “Sweep the bodies over there, see if there are any survivors, and then we can worry about the rest of the facility and what big targets are hiding in it.”