Captives

THIRTEEN

Les stared at the dark water. This wasn’t his first dip in the ocean at Red Sphere. But the other time was to save Michael, and he really, really didn’t want to dive into that murk again.

Most of the Hell Divers had learned to swim in a small decommissioned pool in the Hive’s water treatment facility. It was part of the training since some missions required a diver to swim. But he didn’t have the hours under his belt and was one of the weakest swimmers of the group.

Layla, on the other hand, was a strong swimmer, and he was glad she had the lead on this mission. The rope clipped to her belt had allowed them to pull her back to the pier when she discovered that the tunnel Dr. Julio Diaz used to escape Red Sphere was flooded.

She emerged from her fourth dive ten minutes after vanishing into the ocean. This time, she was wearing her armor and helmet so she could breathe inside the tunnel.

Working together, Les and Michael pulled her back toward the surface. It was tough work, especially for Michael, who had only one hand to lend, but after several minutes of hauling on what felt like a massive anchor, her helmet finally broke the choppy surface.

She climbed onto the pier and sat there while all three of them caught their breath.

“You okay?” Michael asked.

A nod.

“It’s a twenty-minute journey through that tunnel, to a hatch that leads into the facility,” she said. “I fixed the second rope to guide us.”

Les cringed at the thought of swimming down the long, narrow passage, even with a rope to guide him, but he didn’t protest.

“Tin’s going to take longer,” she said, “but the hour of reserve oxygen in our helmets should give us plenty of time. The hard part will be right after you jump in, which is the other reason I rigged that rope.”

“Is this our only way in, Timothy?” Michael asked.

The AI’s hologram flickered to life. “According to the knowledge I have gleaned from records accessed, this is the only entrance into the facility.”

“Say we manage to activate the defectors,” Layla said. “How do we get them out?”

“They can function underwater,” Timothy said. “You just have to tell them where to go and give them a way to climb out, which shouldn’t be a problem now.”

Les shuddered at the thought. This plan was looking bleaker by the minute. To Layla, he said, “You definitely found a way inside?”

“Yes.” She wiped her wet visor. “The hatch into the facility is in the tunnel ceiling, and it’s also open. I surfaced and found a chamber. There’s an open door inside.”

“Okay,” Michael said, “let’s stop lollygagging and get this done.”

Les reinventoried his gear for the dive. Almost everything was stowed, but his obsessive-compulsive tendencies had him worried about some of his electronics in the dry bag, especially his second minicomputer, which he had used to hack into old facilities just like this one and would soon be using to reprogram the defectors. After making sure it was watertight, he got in line behind Michael.

Les tied two butterfly knots in the rope, at twenty-foot intervals from the end that was clipped to Layla. He clipped his waist carabiner to one loop, and Michael clipped into the other. The far end was already in the water, tied to something inside the open hatch below.

“You sure it’s tied tight?” Les asked.

“On my life,” Layla replied. “I’ll lead the way just to make sure. You help Michael. Timothy, we’ll see you once we get inside, okay?”

“Roger,” the AI replied. “And good luck.”

His form dissolved in the night.

“Let’s dive,” Michael said.

Layla stepped back to the edge and jumped into the water. Michael went in right after her. Les hesitated until the slack between Michael and him played out, and then said “screw it” and jumped in.

He sank ten feet before he started kicking, and fear gripped him as the world turned pitch black. His armor, the bag, and the gun over his shoulder pulled down on him. Struggling, he kicked and used his arms to pull him upward. Once he was right under Michael, he grabbed the fixed rope.

All he had to do now was kick and pull his way up to the open hatch. Layla was already through.

As Les waited his turn, he glanced down at the gray pillars, like gigantic spider legs, that held up the pier. He couldn’t see the bottom where the pillars were buried, but he could imagine what dwelled down there. In his mind’s eye, he saw giant crabs, squids, sharks, and glowing beasts.

A flash of movement past his helmet made him flinch and grip the rope tighter, but it was only a large bubble that had escaped his vest. In a way, this reminded him of his first dive from the Hive. But jumping through the clouds, you didn’t have monsters that could swim up and bite your leg off or swallow you whole.

Kicking harder, he pulled himself up toward Michael, who was struggling. An arm reached down from inside the tunnel. Layla grabbed Michael’s left hand, and Les pushed up on his butt to give him a boost.

She pulled him up into the passage and then moved out of the way for Les. Sometimes, he really hated being so tall.

By the time he pulled himself in through the hatch, his legs and feet tingled from the adrenaline. The hard part was over now, and his heartbeat gradually slowed to normal.

White noise filled the speakers in his helmet, and Michael came online. “Helmet lights on,” he said.

Les reached up and turned his lamp on, then directed it back down through the open hatch. The beam penetrated perhaps fifteen feet into the depths. Beyond that range, anything could be lurking.

Seeing nothing, he moved back into the submerged tunnel, where Michael and Layla crouched. She shined her light on the end of the rope she had tied to the spin wheel on the hatch. They unclipped from their butterfly loops and set off down the tunnel.

Moving was difficult inside the cramped passage, and Les felt as if he was fighting a current. The weight of his gear didn’t help. His rifle barrel bumped and scratched against the ceiling, so he just tried to keep low, pushing his boots against the cylinder wall to move forward.

He ran his helmet light over the walls, stopping on a long gash from a laser bolt a defector had fired two hundred fifty-some years earlier. Another chunk of ceiling was missing where the second shot had punched a hole through Dana’s skull.

The violent images in the video had him on edge again, but he shook them away and pulled himself through the water.

They were ten minutes into the journey, and he was already feeling the burn in his fatigued muscles.

Michael and Layla stopped ahead to rest.

“You okay back there, Giraffe?” Layla said, her voice crackling.

“I’m…” He took in a breath. “Good.”

The next stretch of tunnel showed more evidence of the defectors. Grooves from hyperalloy fingernails streaked across the floor. Here was something else, too, which Michael and Layla had missed.

Les worked a small black object out of the crack between two panels of the tunnel floor and held it up to his beam. There wasn’t much left of whatever it was, but he had a feeling it had probably belonged to Julio or Dana.

He dropped the artifact and swam on.

The team moved for the next fifteen minutes without stopping until they reached the hatch in the tunnel’s ceiling.

Another transmission crackled over the comms channel. “I’ll go first,” Michael said. He climbed through the opening into the chamber and then pulled the short laser rifle from his holster.

Les followed Layla into a round room with a vaulted ceiling. Their lights revealed walls stained with some sort of green and red moss, the same kind he remembered seeing in one of the ships docked at the piers, where they had found the strange pile of bones and machines.

He put his backpack down and pulled three magazines from his dry bag, stuffing them into his vest.

Michael was already walking toward the exit. The steel door lay on the concrete floor where it had fallen.

“I’m bringing Timothy back online,” Layla said. She pulled out a tablet from Deliverance that allowed the AI to travel with them beneath the surface. A few taps to the screen, and his hologram emerged like a ghost.

A fourth beacon flickered on their HUDs as the AI took form.

“Everything working properly?” Layla asked him.

Timothy flashed several times and then let his hands fall to the sides of his suit jacket. “I’m one hundred percent functional and—remarkably, if I do say so myself—still connected to the airship.”

“Good. So you’ve already scanned these levels with the airship’s infrared sensors?” Les asked.

“Working on it, Lieutenant. Give me a minute.” The AI vanished, almost as if he was annoyed.

Michael jerked his helmet toward the door. “Let’s move, guys.”

“You don’t think we should wait?” Layla asked.

“We don’t have time, and Timothy already cleared the facility once. Now, let’s hit it.”

Layla slung her bag and pulled out her laser rifle. The team moved into another hallway, which had power conduits snaking along the walls. The lines connected to a bank of electrical boxes. Beyond this, several chunks of ceiling had broken away and fallen to the floor.

Laser rifle up, Michael navigated the debris. The three helmet beams flicked back and forth over another scene of violence. Bullet holes pocked the walls, and broken glass crunched under his boots. Les froze, gritting his teeth at the noise. The other two divers glanced back at him.

“Careful,” Layla said. “There’s more debris up here.”

Les checked his HUD again. The radiation levels inside Red Sphere were too low to register, but he still didn’t want to tear his suit or a boot on a snag. He brought his gun back up and kept moving toward an intersecting corridor.

“Take a left,” Timothy said.

Michael walked around the corner, then waved his laser rifle at a translucent web blocking the passage.

“Shit. I’m…,” he said, struggling.

Layla pulled the knife from her duty belt and cut through what appeared to be a spider’s web Michael had stepped into. While he was getting free of the sticky strands, the others all looked for the creature that had spun the web.

“Not detecting any life-forms,” Timothy said.

“So this is hundreds of years old?” Michael held up his left hand, the glove still covered in the white substance.

“I doubt that,” Layla said.

Michael wiped his hand on the bulkhead and started walking. Layla looked over at Les, shrugged, and followed Michael.

Their next turn was at a stairwell. Every step Les took, his mind raced with questions. How could a spider live here all this time unless there was an ecosystem they didn’t know about?

Timothy coalesced in front of the team, looking up from two stairs below Michael. “Commander, I’m not getting any electrical outputs down here, but I am seeing something quite unusual. Aside from your three heat signatures, Deliverance is now detecting a faint heat signature three levels below us, but it is not from the exhaust plume of a defector.”

“Maybe it’s the spider,” Michael said.

“Doubtful, Commander,” Timothy replied. “This entity is the size of a person.”

Layla stopped on the stairs. “Maybe a really big spider?”

“Perhaps,” Timothy said. “Or it could be a false positive, since the chances of finding anything alive down here are, for all practical purposes, nil.”

“I think we need to check this out,” Michael said. “You good with that, Lieutenant?”

Les took in a deep breath. He really didn’t like the idea of looking for some mutated bug the size of a human, but his scientific side itched to find out what was causing the anomalous reading.

“LT?” Michael entreated.

In answer, Les walked past Michael and Layla.

“I’ll take point this time,” he said.

The battle for the coastal city raged in the distance. X and the Barracudas moved silently along the remains of a three-story brick mansion with a tile roof that was mostly intact.

A brick-and-stone pathway meandered across a courtyard. Fountains and upended sculptures of lions and other old-world creatures marked the terrain.

Rhino held up a fist, then motioned for the team to get down.

A pair of Sirens sailed over the rooftop and flapped away, their eyeless faces scanning the ground with echolocation or whatever they used to hunt their prey.

The electronic wail that followed told X they had been spotted. Rhino, apparently realizing the same thing, flashed a hand signal toward a brick building on the eastern edge of the property.

The roof, once glass to support an indoor greenhouse, was gone but for a few jagged shards attached to the metal support beams.

This wasn’t the first time X had walked into a building that reminded him of some prehistoric monster’s rib cage. The curved metal bones rose overhead, some of them broken and hanging loose—daggers that could impale a man.

Rhino directed the team to fan out, away from the broken-out windows that provided an aerial view inside the building. X pulled out his battery unit, powering down so the beasts couldn’t detect his energy signature.

He kept close to the western wall, on the left side of an isle framed by hundreds of concrete and stone planters. Most of the pots were cracked and broken.

Only one plant remained.

A flashing orange stem supported a barbed ball of closed petals from a planter two rows down. X approached cautiously, using the glow from the plant and the sporadic flashes of lightning to guide him through the destroyed greenhouse. He had seen one of these creatures on the surface before and knew that getting too close could result in a nasty bite, injecting venom that would make for an even nastier death.

Rhino, Wendig, and Whale moved down the other aisles, but Fuego lumbered down the aisle of broken pots with Ricardo, both of them oblivious to the threat. As they approached, the stem began to move, creating a strobe-like effect of orange light.

The petals opened, exposing a circular jaw and fangs the length of a finger, each of them dripping purple fluid. The barbed petals shot forward and latched on to Fuego’s left arm. He gave a muffled cry of surprise that echoed in the broad open space.

X drew his sword and brought the blade down on the extended stem, severing it. Green fluid shot across the floor, spattering Fuego’s armor.

Ricardo laughed uproariously, the noise crackling through the ruined greenhouse, but Rhino didn’t find it amusing. He hurried over, grabbed the spiked ball of petals still attached to Fuego’s armor, and tore them off.

X would have laughed if not for the flicker of movement across the room. All at once, a dozen of the bizarre flowers rose up on thick stems.

Fuego ignited his flamethrower and engulfed the mutant flora in a wave of fire before Rhino could stop him. The plants shook as the flames consumed them, and it took only a few seconds for the fragile stems and petals to wither and die, filling the pots with ash.

“¡Imbécil!” Rhino growled. He looked skyward at a Siren swooping down toward the flames. The rise and fall of the ethereal screech receded above them as the beast sailed away to alert its cohorts.

X secured the battery unit back in its chest slot to bring his HUD and NVGs back online. Reaching over his shoulder, he drew the short spear and waited with the sword in one hand, and the spear in the other.

The Barracudas moved out into combat intervals as a second electronic wail answered the first.

Rhino pointed his double-headed spear toward the exit at the other end of the greenhouse.

The men cautiously made their way down the aisles, helmets turned skyward. Lightning forked through the clouds, and in its glow, a missile came shooting down.

Tucking its wings, the Siren smashed into the metal bones of the ceiling, breaking them like so many twigs and hitting the floor, where it wrapped its body with its wings and crashed into a planter near Whale.

Still wrapped up, it barrel-rolled through several pots, crushing them and the smoldering remains of the poisonous plants. Whale jumped clear, dropping the Minigun as he hit the ground.

The Barracudas all moved to help him dispatch the beast, but it was just a distraction. By the time Whale was on his feet with his axe in hand, three more dirty-white torpedoes crashed through the metal framework.

A draft of air hit X, and he looked up as a beast lowered through the gaping hole, flapping its wings to slow its descent. The long, spiked tail whipped, and a pasty, wrinkled face opened to let out a raucous whine.

X hurled his spear into its gut, then ran for cover. Concrete and stone shattered all around as other beasts bolted away from the first gunshots.

Rhino stabbed at one of the creatures and retreated with Wendig toward Whale, who was pinned down by a massive Siren. He punched the beast with his brass knuckles, breaking its jaw, and then pushed it off him.

In less than thirty seconds, the team had been divided: X was cut off with Ricardo and Fuego on one side of the greenhouse, and Whale, Wendig, and Rhino were on the other.

Another Siren crashed through the ceiling and twisted to scan the room, baring jagged teeth.

“Behind you!” X yelled.

Fuego turned the flamethrower on a beast running at him on all fours, but it slammed into him as he pulled the trigger. The gout of flames shot toward X, who dived for cover in the nick of time.

A human scream followed, and X scrambled to his feet to find Ricardo doused in flames. He crashed into a metal shelving unit and collapsed to the floor, rolling and screaming as the armor melted and fused to his skin.

X raised his sword and moved toward a creature bolting toward him on all fours. He planted his left leg and brought his right leg forward as if about to throw a punch, but instead brought his sword down in the center of the eyeless forehead.

Rhino was right about the sword: wielded properly, it did indeed split flesh and bone.

The monster slumped to the floor. X put a boot on its neck and yanked the weapon free, catching a spray of blood on his visor.

He didn’t bother wiping it. There wasn’t time. Another Siren folded its wings and scampered toward him.

Time seemed to slow, giving X a fleeting moment to take in the scene. Grunts and screams, muffled by breathing masks, blended with the electronic rise and fall of what sounded like miniature alarm sirens as the Cazadores fought the mutant abominations hand to claw.

A screech snapped him back to the moment, and he brought up the sword. The point was missing, apparently still lodged in the Siren skull at his feet.

He tried to jab at the creature leaping toward him, but the broken end of the sword only slowed the Siren down as it slammed into him. He hit the ground hard.

The male Siren had at least a hundred pounds on X. The sword’s hilt stuck out of its muscular chest, the jagged end buried deep in the flesh. If he could just get a hand around the hilt and twist it, maybe he could get the creature off him, but the damn thing had his arms pinned to his sides.

A foot clamped around his ankle, another around his knee. Wings flapped upward, rising above the creature’s spiked back. In another moment, the leathery wings would envelop him. The Siren loosened its grip on his hand for an instant, and he jerked free, grabbing the sword hilt and twisting it back and forth.

The beast roared in pain, and X bashed it in the jaw, breaking out several teeth. But that just enraged it even more, and it head-butted his helmet with the bony crest of its skull. Before X could throw another punch, it grabbed his free arm and put its full weight on him.

He squirmed against the massive beast—a futile attempt that wasted his energy. He was pinned like a mouse under a cat and was about to become a meal.

The Siren’s weight forced his helmet to the side, giving him a view of the room.

The other men weren’t faring much better. Ricardo’s body lay smoldering a few paces away. Fuego was on the ground, with two Sirens chewing at the armor on his leg and arm while he struggled to regain his footing.

Wendig and Rhino were out of sight. Only Whale was still on his feet. He threw his axe at a beast, missed, and grabbed it by the neck as it sprang at him.

The huge man held the creature in the air in his left hand. Using the brass knuckles on his armored right fist, he pummeled the eyeless features to pulp before dropping the carcass to the floor.

A sudden lessening of the weight on X gave him another opportunity to face the creature on top of him. Saliva dripped, mixing with the Siren blood on his helmet visor. Looking through the gore, he watched in horror as wormlike lips parted to expose a maw of barbed teeth.

It let out a wail and brought its head down toward his neck just as he brought his helmet up and smashed it in the face. X scrambled for the broken sword on the floor, grabbed it, and ran to gain some distance and catch his breath. Before he could escape, a talon grabbed his boot, tripping him.

Armored boots came pounding toward him as the beast dragged him backward. He flailed with the sword, groping with his other hand for something to grab, finding nothing but broken planters.

He heard the juicy crunch of impaled flesh. The grip on his boot loosened, and X rolled onto his back to see Rhino, pulling his spear out of the Siren’s torso.

“That’s another for me, Immortal!” he yelled.

Another Siren hurdled a pile of broken pots and grabbed Wendig by the arm, twisting and breaking it. The human scream filled the room. Before the aberration could finish Wendig, Rhino thrust his spear through its ugly head.

X took a moment to check his HUD, praying that the suit’s integrity wasn’t compromised. A quick glance revealed he was still at 100 percent. He wiped the blood and flecks of gore from his visor and staggered to his feet.

Whale helped Wendig up while Fuego and Rhino stood back to back, jabbing at the Sirens testing their defenses.

“Give me a weapon,” X said.

Rhino thrust his spear at another Siren, clipping its neck. The beast skittered away and took to the air, where Fuego turned it into a blazing meteor.

The last two Sirens made a dash to escape, and Rhino held up a fist to stop his men from firing. He moved over to check Ricardo, but it was obvious he wouldn’t be getting up again. Half his helmet had melted, and hot goo bubbled out.

X caught his breath as the other men recovered their weapons. There was no time for the thumping of chests or words spoken to honor Ricardo before the next threat sounded.

A vibration rumbled through the floor, and a guttural roar rang out somewhere outside the building. It was a noise X had heard only once before in the wastes and had hoped never to hear again—a noise he had immediately known to run from without ever even seeing the source.

Whale and Rhino spoke in hushed voices. Even through the breathing apparatus and despite the language barrier, X could hear the fear in their deep voices.

Only then did he realize that the departing Sirens were fleeing not from the Barracudas, but from a whole different order of enemy—the true apex predator on this island.

“Time to see why we came here, Immortal,” Rhino said. He grabbed the submachine gun Ricardo had dropped, and held it out to X. He held on as X grabbed it.

“You’re going to need this for what comes next on this hunt, but do not make me regret giving it to you. You got it?”

X nodded and took the weapon as the same deep roar sounded again in the distance. Whatever made it was a monster unlike any X had seen before, and he had a feeling he would need more than a rifle to bring it down.