Ilox Saga 1: Eris Monroe: More Than Human (22 page)

“Hey!
Foreman Briggs? We want to get on to Platinum City,” she said calling out to the big man who clearly only had a left arm. Briggs stood in front of his group and addressed them as they came within ten meters.

“Right…
stop right there – that’s far enough. You’re the group from FMM?”

“Yes, that’s us,” replied Eris. The foreman didn’t seem impressed.

“Frank called and said you were coming this way.” He seemed to be having trouble breathing as he wheezed out each word. “Dezali, go and search them,” he said to the Orvod female. “We’ll need to collect all their weapons.”

Eris noted that
Dezali was slightly shorter than Hasephrey Saephan, but was still a good two hundred and thirteen centimeters tall. Dezali ambled over to Eris and her team beaming a broad smile. Female Orvod didn’t have secondary sexual characteristics such as female humans – they didn’t have breasts or long hair to differentiate them from the males of their species. The main difference between the Orvod sexes was height …males were almost always taller and stronger. Dezali began to touch Eris but in one fluid motion Eris had put her in an arm-lock and forced her to kneel.

“Aaaaggghhh!
She’s breaking my arm!” The Orvod female screamed in pain as Eris tightened her grip. No one said anything, but the miners were stunned that a smaller human female controlled and subjugated their Orvod companion so easily… Eris stared at Briggs and his miners blocking their way. The miners had hastily swung their weapons to cover her group.

“No one is searching us and
no one
is taking our weapons.” Eris hissed out a warning between clenched teeth. “We came through hell to get here, and you are not going to stop us.” T’sell, Lia, Sev and Eli had also drawn their weapons at the same time as the miners brandished theirs. The foreman Briggs was wielding a laser pistol with his left hand, but he slowly lowered it when he realized his position. Eris was keeping the bulk of the Orvod between her and any possible incoming fire.

“Ok, let her go, and you can pass on through. Keep your damn
guns.” He spat. The rest of his crew lowered their weapons. The miners opened up the barrier and the airlock so they could pass through. Eris walked the big alien over to the makeshift barrier and let her go.

“Glad you could be so helpful,” said Eli cheerfully as
his group passed through the airlock and on to Platinum City. Inside was a bustling outpost full of thousands of sentients. It was then that the first creeping edge of a headache started for both Eli and T’sell.

It had taken Kyle
sixty-six minutes to fly the Starlifter to the next designated drop off point after leaving Captain Monroe and Alpha team behind. He flew low and slow over the rough mountainous terrain to avoid any kind of detection and to keep from hitting this atmosphere’s sonic barrier. He didn’t want to alert any passerby with a sonic boom. The heads up display of the onboard computer showed him all the vital information needed to fly the craft. They were one minute out from their destination and he adjusted speed accordingly, slowing the craft from seven hundred kilometers per hour to a relatively slow one hundred and sixty klicks per hour. The wind and pressure of this world made flying difficult, and there was constant buffering and jolts during the one hour flight. Kyle was sure the team in the back would be glad to be on solid land soon. Thankfully, none of the combat specialists had thrown up from all the jostling. He would have hated to clean that kind of mess up.

“Lieutenant Commander, we’re thirty seconds from drop off.” Kyle
couldn’t keep his mind off Eris - he hoped she was alright.
He wouldn’t be able to stand it if she got hurt or anything happened to her
.

“Roger that,” came Malik’s
instant reply. Omega squad was arrayed in the pressure seats located in the passenger compartment of the craft. Starlifter was like a miniature starship, complete with jump-drive, antigravity pulsar thrusters and even a stealth field generator. She wasn’t as sleek or fast as the Valkyrie fighter, but she was still fairly agile for a craft of her size and purpose. Her armor plates would be extremely useful in any kind of aerial or spatial dogfight. Kyle loved that she came armed with eight
Hellbore
missiles and carried a heavy pulse laser on a swivel mounted turret just beneath the cockpit. The powerful fusion reactor that powered Starlifter could easily energize the two GigaWatts needed for the weapon, the antigravity thrust engine and the kinetic shields simultaneously. The Hayles Zinder kinetic shields were a bonus that not many smaller craft could carry due to the amount of energy they drew. As the craft touched down, the aperture doors at the rear of the passenger bay opened and Omega squad trotted out at a swift jog. Kyle noticed they were all clear within twelve seconds, closed the passenger ramp door and took off vertically.

Arnav
Malik watched as the Starlifter, piloted by Kyle Arneson, rose rapidly through the hazy thick atmosphere and disappeared. He carried his gauss assault rifle in the ready position with safeties off. His team was only a dozen meters from the maintenance tunnel that would give them access to the deep mines surrounding Long Junction. His sergeant, Isabella Dulac, was intent on using the Valdren scanning device. She had synchronized up with her neural implants to the device to receive instant feedback. The bulk of his eight squad members were arrayed around him in a half circle. He commanded five men and three women in his squad.

“Anything?”
Lieutenant Commander Malik asked Dulac. She shook her head negatively.

“
Listen up. Garcia, open that airlock. Jackson, Taylor, Sekibo - cover him… Zhang and Barton start a security sweep, I don’t want any alarms tripping or cameras spotting us. Tokushima and Fasjovik – keep eyes and sensors on our six. His squad moved to obey and within a minute, the airlock had cycled open. The combat team sprinted inside the huge airlock and Garcia closed the outer door. Five minutes passed with a constant hiss of air inrushing as pressure was equalized.

Malik had the plans of the nearby tunnels displayed on his suit’s
data projector. “We’ll travel approximately two hundred and fifty meters down this corridor. At that point, there is a side passage intersection from the right. We’ll head down that for five hundred meters. There should be an emergency evac elevator waiting at the end that will take us deeper into the complex. Let’s move!” He started to trot down the sloping tunnel. Exactly as he’d stated, after moving a quarter of a kilometer there was a side tunnel. The squad turned right and began moving with Garcia on point. When the squad came within fifty meters of the elevator, Garcia knew something was wrong and held up his closed fist for everyone to stop. The squad used tactical hand signals to keep their electronic signatures low. The doors to the elevator kept moving to close but were hitting something in the way and then retracting.

Garcia
moved closer and his voice came over the link, “It’s a dead body.” He motioned for the squad to move up. They did so, keeping weapons loose and hot. Malik saw the body - a man wearing a Furnace Mining and Metals uniform. He was lying face down in a pool of congealing blood. He hadn’t been dead more than a few hours. Half of his back was blown out by shrapnel wounds. Arnav turned him over and saw horror. The man’s face was covered with thick grey scales and his eyes seemed wrong somehow.

“
Dulac, care to offer any insights?” said Arnav to his sergeant standing beside him.

“LC,
I don’t know, he looks human not alien…but…those scar lesions…I’ve never seen anything like it. It’s almost segmented like armor…” She checked her Valdren scanner again – it was negative. “Sir, no readings yet…I’m drawing a blank here.”

“We have a job to do so let’s head down. Blake…Jackson…drag that body out of the elevator.” The two
marines did so, smearing the floor with blood in the process. “Let’s take a ride.” Malik was concerned but didn’t show it to his squad.
What happened to that guy,
he thought. Another problem soon became apparent – the control panel had been hit by shrapnel and was malfunctioning.

“Isabella, can you get a bypass working?”

His sergeant nodded and attached the Valdren tech scanner to her tools harness at her waist with a
click
. She then pulled out an electronics kit from the other side of her tool harness and began attaching sensors to the shattered elevator control panel. Eighteen seconds after working with her tools Sergeant Dulac smiled broadly.

“Got it
,” she breathed. She had been subconsciously holding her breath in the last few seconds.

“Let’s go all the way down
to the bottom level. Be sure and check that damn scanner the whole way. We’ll stop the elevator if you get a hit. Ok people; let’s move like we have a purpose.”

Malik
punched the control panel that would take them two kilometers deep into the mines surrounding Long Junction. The squad traveled down in silence. The only sounds were the normal mechanical noises of the elevator hydraulic traction mechanisms. During the first minute of descent, Garcia decided to play a prank and played elevator music through his helmet speakers. Isabella and Blake laughed and the rest of Omega team snickered.

“
Garcia, shut that shit off,” Malik quietly ordered. As the music died out, the car accelerated downward and Malik once again displayed plans on his suit’s data projector. “After exiting this car, we’ll head south to the right for one hundred meters. That should get us to a large cavern where they store their mining MEKS. I’ll keep these maps synced to your helmet HUD’s. Keep weapons at the ready. Blake - I want you on point.” For the remainder of the short journey no one said anything further. After four minutes and ten seconds, the elevator car slowed and smoothly came to a halt. The indicator above the door displayed Level thirty-nine. The squad was two thousand one hundred and eighty meters below the surface of the planet. The doors opened and the squad exited the elevator car with gauss assault rifles at the ready.

They began leapfrogging each other down the
long corridor. Four squad-mates would slowly advance while the rear five prepared for covering fire if needed. Continuing this tactic Ryan Blake reached an elevated metallic platform - stairs descended downwards to the west and east. The rest of the squad was ten meters behind the front four. There were massive MEKS blocking most of their view.

“I’m picking up sounds of weapons fire…relaying,” came Blake’s deep bass over the link.
Through helmet links everyone in the squad heard the distinctive
droning buzz
of capacitors charging from pulsed laser fire and the staccato
vrrip vvrip vvrip
of gauss flechette rounds discharging. There were no visuals, just audio.

“Can you see where the fighting is taking place?”
questioned Arnav.

“Negative, I need to move up further.”

Arnav Malik used hand signals to direct the entire squad to where they could see what was happening. The area opened up before them into a huge cavern at least thirty-five meters high and two hundred meters across. Huge mining MEKS with gigantic fusion cutters and drill-bit boring heads were parked in neat rows in front of them. There were at least four of the giant robotic drilling machines – but they were inactive and still. Modular prefabricated living containers were also located in the cavern and were stacked together five units high. A series of ramps and stairs led to each level. At the other end of the cavern were two large rough hewn mining tunnels twenty meters wide and ten meters tall. Each tunnel angled away from one another at sixty degrees of divergence. At the base of each tunnel several dozen Alliance soldiers together with a few scattered Vortex mercenaries were firing into an onrushing mass of sentients that had charged out from the depths of the mine.
Something is definitely wrong with this picture,
thought Malik.

“Holy shit, we’ve stumbled into a warzone!”
Isabella shouted.

“There must be thousands of them!” roared Ted
Garcia. As they watched, a hundred or so Alliance and Vortex soldiers were swallowed up by the rush of sentients. Using helmet optics, Arnav zoomed in to get a closer look. All of the people attacking from the tunnel looked the same as the dead man they’d found in the elevator – covered in gray scales and with distorted bulging bug-like eyes. Lieutenant Commander Malik had to make a snap decision.

“We’re getting the hell out of here!
Dulac, check that Valdren scanner one more time and take a reading!”

As Isabella shouldered her assault rifle she detached her Valdren scanner from her waist and began using it
; holding it in two hands and quickly turning it in an arc in front of her. At that moment she heard a noise above and to the left of her position. Startled, the squad looked in that direction and saw at least five of the human
creatures
moving head down against the raw rock face of the wall. They were descending like insects…clinging to the surface of the rough hewn wall. One of them leaped straight onto Isabella, a distance of eight meters and knocked her down. The Valdren tracking device she had been holding was sent skidding and fell off the edge of the platform with a clatter. Garcia, the closest soldier to her position, reached down to pull the thing off of her – as he did so it turned its head in a way that was impossible for humans and made a
hiss
followed by an inhuman
clacking
noise.

“What the fuck! Man, these things aren’t human!”
Garcia was disgusted as he attempted to pull the creature off her…it was
much
stronger than it looked. Isabella was being crushed by the thing and she struggled to break its grip.

“Get it off me! Get it off!” shouted Dulac, struggling
to break free as it had pinned her against the metallic grating of the platform. The thing was regurgitating volumes of smoking vomitous chunks on her combat suit. Smoke arose where it touched her armor.

“Open fire!”
Arnav Malik began shooting the things crawling on the wall with his gauss assault rifle hitting once, twice…then a third time. As each creature was hit by flechette rounds it would fall off the wall down below the platform fifteen meters to the floor of the cavern. By Malik’s command the entire squad opened up, firing full automatic bursts at the onrushing creatures. Arnav glanced back at the open cavern and saw the horde had overwhelmed the Alliance soldiers. The creatures now fanned out and were coming their way running with a strange loping stride that looked freakish to Arnav’s senses. With the immediate threat of the wall climbing creatures eliminated, Malik shouldered his weapon and helped Garcia. He pulled out his combat knife and began stabbing the creature in the arm to try to get it to release Isabella. He didn’t want to chance blowing it away with his assault rifle or pistol since it was intertwined with her. He had cut the hand joint so badly he severed it. The hand of the creature hung from the stump of its wrist with black blood oozing from the knife wounds. With a short sharp
hiss
the creature finally let go of Sergeant Dulac and Garcia hurled it away and to the floor. Jessica Taylor finished it off with a quick burst from her assault rifle.

“
Back the way we came – haul ass!” Arnav ordered over his comm link. Firing enfilade against the creatures as soon they came at right angles to their position, the squad managed to drop twenty… but hundreds more kept coming. Private Ryan Blake and Wei Zhang each hurled M120 fragmentation grenades into their midst – the explosions blew a dozen tightly packed and swarming creatures into the air, ripping arms and legs from torsos. The blast wave rocked the soldiers and partially collapsed the metal platform where the grenades had landed. Retreating back into the tunnel Arnav kept trying to raise Arneson.