Ceaseless (16 page)

“So as a result of that, they send
us
out to keep an eye on the place and make sure nothing funny is going on. But it's all fucking backwards-assed politics and bureaucracy. I can't do my job and I can't
make
them let me do my job, because my superiors are getting the runaround from
their
superiors are...
fuck
, I hate this job. So...well, for the next part of the story, what they were
really
doing down there, you gotta talk to the doctor.”

Montgomery stood up suddenly, flickering her cigarette into the dust.

“The doctor?” Allan replied, standing as well.

“Yeah. We found a survivor. He wasn't on site at the time. Apparently he fucking ran. We managed to track him down. His jeep broke down in the middle of nowhere. He's one of the lead scientists on the project. He told us everything, and I want him to tell it to you personally, since you've been so...involved with this whole thing. When you're done talking to him, I'll take you to our operations center and get you up-to-date on our plan.”

They came to one of the structures where a pair of soldiers were standing guard outside. Allan followed Montgomery inside, up a short flight of flimsy, rusted stairs. The building was akin to a trailer, a long rectangle of thin metal. Allan realized it was a makeshift infirmary. At the back, on one of the foldout examination tables, a single man rested. Another pair of soldiers were inside, as well as a medic, who was examining a machine hooked to the examination table. Allan and Montgomery approached the man.

“You must be him,” the man said.

He was tall and thin. He looked like he was wasting away, everything about him seemed hollow and gaunt. He looked like a prisoner of war.

“What happened to you?” Allan asked.

“Stress,” the man said, offering a weary smile. “I've been against what we were doing from the beginning, but you don't say no to Dark Operations. No sir, not at all. At least not if you expect to wake up afterward.”

“Dark Operations?” Allan asked, glancing at Montgomery.

“You didn't tell him?” the man asked.

Montgomery sighed. “Unofficially, the Office of Intelligence has...splintered. Within the government, there is know what is known as Dark Operations. Truly off-the-grid operations. They operate in cells. This was one such cell. They didn't even tell me.”

“The true evil of government and military. If you've got the right clearance, you can get away with anything. Absolutely anything. And no one asks any questions until it's too late. Hell, even when it's too late they usually don't ask questions.” The man trailed off into a coughing fit. “Forgive me. My name is Sergei Patel. And you are Sergeant Allan Gray. We were monitoring you, my friend. I must say, we were all very impressed.”

“Tell me about the killer. You made him. Why?” Allan replied.

“Straight to the point...just like I was. I respect that...why did we make him? We had no choice.” Sergei replied cryptically.

“
No
,” Allan said firmly. “I don't want any mysterious, half-assed answers that I have to sit around for six days and think about. I want facts. I want hard evidence. I want you to tell me everything in plain, clear detail. I've been tracking this bastard for days now. He's going somewhere, okay? He's fucking going somewhere. Where the fuck is he going?” he snapped, the tension in his voice rising steadily. Sergei stared at him for several seconds. He chuckled.

“You
are
like me,” he said quietly, then laughed again. “Okay,” he said. “Okay, no bullshit.” Allan waited patiently while the man gathered his thoughts.

Finally, Sergei took a deep breath and let it out.

“All right, where to begin? At the beginning, I suppose. This whole thing originates from a dig on a planet even further out in the middle of nowhere than here. Some dinky little place on the frontier of the galaxy. A dig crew found evidence of an artificial structure. Nothing big, mind you. But something to suggest that someone else had been there first, and built something. Of course the government stepped in, jumped all over it and covered it up quick as hell. And they dug. And dug. And dug. Until they found something.

“It was old, ancient. Billions of years old. It wasn't Cyr. Much, much older. It was some sort of box. A device. They dug it up and brought it here, for testing. My crew and I were tasked with figuring out what the fuck it was. We figured it out all right. It was a holding cell...” the man's eyes unfocused suddenly, lost in memory. Trent waited. He finally came back.

“Now, this is where it's going to sound completely insane. But it's the truth. Essentially, at the dawn of time, or sometime around there, there was this race of beings. They were very powerful, as far as the physical realm was concerned. There were millions of them, billions perhaps. Maybe more. Essentially, they were gods given form. They broke off into small groups, relatively small, I mean, and kind of just chose a galaxy and took over. They created species and races as they saw fit, and ruled over them.

“A somewhat...not nice group got
our
galaxy. They built empires and civilizations. They created planets and destroyed them. They had ultimate power. They ruled as gods among several thousand species. They did whatever the hell they wanted. Millennium passed. As time wore on, the species that they evolved and lorded over, got sort of...fed up, with being ruled over by such whimsical gods. And began formulating a plan.

“I can't imagine how long it took to come to fruition. Ages. Generations. But, somehow, finally, all of the species put their collective heads together and dreamed up a device to imprison all of the gods. A war was started. It was a long, brutal war and resulted in the near extinction of every species in the entire galaxy. But in the end...they won out. They won the fight. They imprisoned every last god in this device that we had discovered.

“It gets a little fuzzy, but they were trying to find some way to destroy the device. Instead, they locked it away. Or tried to. I'm not sure, it's confusing. When my team and I got hold of the device, after puzzling over it for several weeks, one of us managed to activate it. We were all possessed almost immediately by eleven of the damned things inside. We didn't quite know it, though. But we all started doing weird things.

“Looking back on it now, I realize they were gathering information. On us. On humanity. On the current state of the galaxy. And they had us dream up something wonderful and terrible for them. A suit of armor. A fusion of flesh and technology. Invincible. Unstoppable. A meat shell. For one of them to inhabit, to test drive. To work out all the bugs. They want to rule us, Sergeant. They want to return to power as gods among men,” Sergei explained. It was dead silent in the room when he finished speaking.

“Hold on, you're...possessed?” Allan asked.

“Yes,” Sergei replied, nodding. “But it doesn't...control me. Not anymore, anyway. I think it might be dying, this thing's consciousness...”

After a moment of wrapping his head around this, Allan spoke. “There's a few things I don't get,” he said. “Number one, when you opened the box, why didn't they all just leave and return as gods? Why bother with a suit of armor? Why bother waiting? Why just go around killing people for the hell of it on a path to...somewhere?”

“There is something you must understand. These creatures, they have been trapped inside of a tiny box for millions upon millions of years. Awake and aware. They must be...utterly insane by now. When the possession became apparent, and I started hearing thoughts that weren't my own...they didn't make sense most of the time. These creatures are demented in most ways, by now. I imagine that they may have forgotten most of their true potential, but they are still a large threat. You see, when we were 'possessed', we weren't taken over by the most powerful or the smartest...no, we were taken over by the first eleven to
escape the fucking box
. It was a mad rush, I imagine. They aren't all that together anymore. But that suit...we perfected that suit of armor. It is perfect. And one of them possessed it to go on a killing spree, to work out all the bugs.

“Here's the thing. All of that information he gathers out there in the field is being transmitted to a secret installation buried deep underground. Not Obsidian Station. Another installation. When we were possessed, we had that installation set up. Automated. The idea was, once completed, it would begin automatically construction these suits of armor, using the original design. Once the god that was out in the field received the signal that they were ready, he would have to go and manually begin the automated process,” Sergei explained.

“
That's
why he let me live in the beginning!” Allan exclaimed. “He must have got the signal, right then, as he was approaching me.”

“Yes. Listen. Those bodies are ready to be made. The containment device is there, Sergeant. Ready to release the insane gods to inhabit the bodies. They will form an unstoppable army of killing machines. Though not as powerful as when they were originally, they will be more than a match for us. You must stop them. You must stop him from getting there and activating that army,” Sergei stated. He fell back onto the bed as he ceased speaking.

Slowly, Allan began to straighten up. “We need to go,” he said, turning to face Montgomery. She nodded and began speaking, but Sergei interrupted her.

“I have one more secret to divulge, Sergeant,” he said.

Allan stopped and turned back, eager for more information. “What?”

“Closer,” Sergei replied.

Allan leaned in closer until his visor was almost directly over Sergei's face.

“Goodbye,” he whispered.

Faster than anyone could react to, the scientist snatched Allan's pistol from its holster, pressed the barrel into his mouth, angled up and fired the trigger. Allan cried out in shock as blood and brain matter sprayed his visor. He fell backward and landed on his ass, his body reacting automatically, scrambling to get away from the death.

The Spec Ops troops and Montgomery surged forward, but far too late to do anything useful. He felt hands on him, hauling him or maybe helping to his feet. Allan's eyes were glued to the ruin of the man's skull, the scientist who had once been alive just seconds ago. The man who was possessed by an ancient, insane god and had worked to help bring about an apocalypse. Now he was dead. Gone. Montgomery was saying something.

“Allan, here,” she said, handing him some medical rags.

“Yeah,” he murmured, taking them and staring at them stupidly for a long moment. “Uh...yeah. Thanks,” he managed, and began wiping away the blood and brains.

“Come on, we need to have the briefing now,” Montgomery said, her voice subdued.

“Yeah,” Allan whispered, following her out, wiping gore off his visor as he walked.

Chapter 13

–
Once More into the Darkness
–

Allan had mostly gotten to the gore off his visor by the time Montgomery had led him across the camp towards the main operations structure.

She'd been talking, explaining what happened, what went wrong, while they walked and while he wiped what was left of a scientist off his armor.

“It was all going according to plan,” she said. “We had him. He was locked down, passed out. After we dropped you off, we took him to our ship. We'd been given a planet-jumper, you know the model? Like cargo ships, sort of, fitted to hop between planets. We were taking him towards the sun, getting ready to launch him from the airlock. But we'd hardly left orbit when the fucker woke up. He was playing dead. He tore through the fucking ship, killed almost everyone onboard. We didn't get a chance to put him back under. I managed to get out with a few of the others in the escape pods. He took the ship, crashed it somewhere on the surface.”

“You know where he is?” Allan asked.

“Yes. We're tracking him. He left the wreckage and he's started walking again. Now that we have information on where he's actually going, we can project a path and timeline.”

“And? How long do we have?”

“We have time. He's still several hundred miles from his destination. We've got a while, at least. Unless he finds a ship or a vehicle. Come on,” Montgomery said, stepping into the structure. Allan followed her.

Inside, it was cramped. A dozen men and women in black-and-silver armor were situated around a holographic display table. A collection of large structures was being displayed in glossy 3D green neon, lighting up the area in a curious glow.

“All right, Allan. This is Shadow Squad. This is the bulk of what remains of us. You'll be joining them in the attack. This is Singer. She's in charge,” Montgomery said. Allan nodded to a tall, thin dark-skinned woman with buzzed hair and a razor sharp gaze.

“Can we get to it?” she asked, clearly anxious to be gone.

“Yep,” Montgomery replied. She and Allan joined them around the table. “This is pretty sketchy, guys, so bear with me. I've managed to scavenge and scrape together enough of the naontechnology-based weaponry for all of you to be armed. Unfortunately, they're all pistols, but it shouldn't matter. We're not looking for big and showy power here. You just need to shoot this asshole. Once should be enough to take him down.”