Necropolis 2

Dark Nexus Fiction
Presents

NECROPOLIS
2

–
a novel of sci-fi action
–

written by

–
S. A. Lusher
–

cover by

–
M. Knepper
–

editing by

–Cassi Reed–

Dedicated to my mother, Sheila Moreland,

for always being there for me.

Chapter 01

–
Welcome Back
–

It didn't seem fair, Greg reflected, that he should only have two weeks with this new life before it all came to an end.

Inside the jump ship, there was chaos. Billings and Cage pried open weapons lockers, and passed out rifles they'd secured just moments ago. Kauffman lay on the deck, pale and bloody, on the verge of being forgotten.

“
Powell, do we have any weapons?” Cage called, his usually calm voice now laced with tension.

Greg took a rifle, checked the sights, the magazine. He couldn't imagine fighting Dark Ops on their own terms, their own ship. It seemed impossible, but he refused to go down without some kind of a fight. He wouldn't go back to a holding cell.

“Just the minigun,” Powell replied.

Cage began to speak when the lights in the cabin flickered and died. Everyone fell silent. The interior of the ship became dead quiet. Greg heard sounds emerge from the cockpit, the flipping of switches and rapid pressing of buttons.

“Shit,” Powell muttered.

Greg noted with a certain terror that it was already getting colder and the oxygen filtration units weren't working. “They must have hit us with an EMP.”

“Wonderful,” Billings mumbled.

He sat down, suddenly. Cage moved forward to the cockpit.

Billings lit up a cigar and glanced up at Greg. “Might as well give it up, kid. There's no way we're getting out of here. Dark Ops wants us, they're going to have us.”

“
There must be
something
we can do.” Greg's heart hammered in his chest. It felt like the walls were closing in on him.

“
Yeah. Give them a reason not to shoot and kill us.” Billings' morose reply made things seem even grimmer, if that was possible.

Greg looked at Kyra, who was pale, tense with fear, uncertain. He glanced into the cockpit, past
the uncertain shapes of Cage and Powell. A ship moved towards them. It was massive, engulfing their field of vision. Greg spied an opening. A hangar. They were going to take the jump ship within them without compunction.

“
Cage?” Greg asked.

Cage had nothing to say. His silence seemed to echo Billings' own sentiment. Greg finally took a seat and Kyra sat down next to him. He took her hand in his and thought for a long moment, part of him waiting for the inevitable, part of him scrabbling hopelessly against it, desperately hunting for a way out.

Kyra leaned against him. Brilliant light flooded the cabin as they sailed into the starkly lit hangar of the Dark Ops ship. Greg found himself staring out one of the windows across from him. He grunted as the ship dropped with an abrupt, loud
boom!
of metal slamming into metal as the gravity of the vessel overtook their ship.

Beyond, he could see a broad expanse of open floor, broken occasionally by another ship or a stack of crates. Dark shapes, men in black armor, moved in on their ship. Greg's muscles tensed, prepared for anything.

A loud
clang!
sounded.

“
What are they doing?” Kyra murmured.

Greg stood. “
I'm not sure...I can't see.”

A sharp hiss of air greeted them. A green haze
began to seep into the cabin from the ventilation slits, slowly filling it up.

“
Gas!” Greg shouted.

It was all he had time to shout. A taste of bitter metal filled his mouth, his nose, his lungs, and then the world melted into darkness.

* * * * *

Greg snapped his eyes open, blinking rapidly.
The first thing he noticed was that he felt lucid, with none of the residual effects of whatever had knocked him out lingering in his system. He struggled, but quickly discovered restraints held him fast.

“
This is familiar,” he muttered.

Someone pushed him, the man's head and shoulders hovered just within Greg's field of vision. Unlike before, this man wasn't hidden behind a mask. This man wore something black that clung to his bulky shoulders. For a second, the man glanced down at Greg. A bolt of surprised fear shot through Greg's system as he saw this man's irises were one solid shade of red. They also seemed to glow with an intense inner light.

Other features came to Greg as the initial fear subsided. The man appeared middle-aged. His black hair buzzed short, his pale face marred by black, five o'clock stubble, and a jagged scar ran from the center of his forehead down to his left cheek.

“
Ah, Mister Bishop, you're awake.” A new voice spoke.

Greg glanced down, along the length of his body, (pleased to see that he was at least still wearing what he'd been wearing before the knockout), and saw someone tall, with a shaved head, wrapped in a form-fitting black jumpsuit walking alongside him.

“Williams,” he said.

Williams looked back and smiled. Although nothing had actually changed about the man, Greg saw that his face had taken on a
darker, sinister quality.

“
I believe a re-introduction is in order. I am Director Williams. I head up this particular cell of Dark Ops.”

The man pushing Greg faltered and made a sound, something like a warning noise. Williams chuckled.

“Relax, Graves. He's ours now. They all are. They're never leaving this ship alive.”

For another long moment, they walked on in silence, making occasional turns, sometimes passing people who pressed up against the wall to let Greg and his entourage pass.

“Where are my friends?” Greg asked.

“
Locked up, sleeping off the gas.”

“
Why are we here?”

Williams laughed, again. “Because I want you here. Experiments. Tying up loose ends. Take your pick.”

“Why should I cooperate with you at all?”

“
Because I am now the only thing standing between a reasonably comfortable couple of weeks, possibly months, and a long, drawn-out, painful death. I assure you, we've gotten quite good at keeping a man in constant agony for...well, a long time. Go against me, Greg, and you'll die by nanometers,” Williams said.

There was no threat in his voice. They might have been discussing the weather. Greg's blood chilled. He had to find some way out of here. If he didn't take this situation into his own hands, he was going to die. Plain and simple,
there was no other way around this fact. Dark Ops seemed to have everything locked down. Abruptly, they turned and came into a long, low room. The far wall, Greg could see, was made entirely of glass, perfectly clear, as if nothing stood between them and the dead vacuum of space.

Williams walked right up to the glass wall. Graves wheeled Greg along with him and manipulated the device he was on so that Greg
shifted into an upright position. He felt like furniture on a dolly.

“
Do you see that, Greg?” Williams asked, staring out the window. There was an uncomfortable note of fervor in his voice now.

Greg looked out the window.

What he saw stunned him. A collection of ships clustered beyond the window, at least a dozen, all of them enormous monoliths of polished obsidian. Darkness against the black of space, blocking out the distant pinpoints of long dead or dying stars.

“
Do you see that?” Williams directed his view to the left, towards something large and round, like a planet, but too small or perhaps far away.

“
What is that?” Greg murmured.

“
That's Kyo. That's Dis' moon. Its only moon. Without Dis, it has flung out of orbit,” Williams said, quietly, studiously, as though Greg was his student.

Greg stared at it, and then at a brilliant pinpoint of light, much closer than all the others, beyond it: the local sun.

“Yes, you can see where it's going...into the sun.” Here, Williams turned and looked directly at him, his eyes boring into Greg's. “This is the power we have, Greg. The power to destroy planets, moons, armies. Any thoughts you have of escape, of resistance, end them now. They will serve you no purpose here beyond pain and agony. And we are very good with pain, aren't we Graves?” He looked at the man who now stood behind Greg.

There was a quiet noise of affirmation and then Greg began to lower until he was lying on his back again. They walked once more, leaving the observatory, making their way back through the bowels of the ship.

“I'm not an unreasonable man, Greg,” Williams said.

“
Says the guy who just destroyed a fucking planet,” Greg muttered.

“
If you're willing to go along with these tests and experiments, I may be willing to let you see your friends.” Williams continued, as though he hadn't heard. “If not, well...Starck is somewhere onboard. I'm sure she'd be happy to oversee your life. And she isn't nearly so reasonable as I am.” His voice lowered.

Greg said nothing. Instead, he focused on his environment. They passed several doors, all of them identical. The ceiling and walls were all made of the same gray plate metal. Occasionally, they passed a camera built into the ceiling, red light
pulsing gently. Greg noted that the cameras all followed him when they passed by.

There were no more words and soon Greg arrived at his cell. It was stark. The opposite of his quarters back on Dis. Everything was white, made more so by a single strip of light that glared down on them from above. There was a toilet, a sink, a shower stall, and a bed. Williams waited out in the corridor while Graves wheeled Greg in. The man pushed a button and the straps holding Greg snapped open.

He stood, a little quicker than he meant to, and turned, feeling dizzy. A plan formulated in his mind, to attack this man called Graves, overwhelm him, get his gun somehow, and take Williams hostage.

This plan fell apart when he laid eyes fully on Graves for the first time.

Graves wasn't so much a man as he was a pile of muscle wrapped in a tight black jumpsuit. He must have stood six and a half feet tall, broad enough to fill an average-size door. Everything about the man spoke of pumping iron and possibly steroids. His eyes, full of digitized crimson, were impossible to read.

His posture spoke of expectancy, as if he wanted Greg to try to attack him, to put his titanic muscles to use.

His plan of escape deflated, Greg took a step back, hands clenched into fists at his sides. Graves stared at him for a long moment with his unnerving eyes, and then, seeming disappointed, wheeled the gurney out of the room, even going as far as to turn his back on Greg. It was practically an open invitation to attack.

The door shut behind him. Greg found himself encased in a white crate with no windows. As he thought this, a section of the door became transparent. Williams stared in at him, still smiling that damned smile.

“Be seeing you soon, Greg.”
His voice came through a mechanical filter. Then the door was opaque again.

Greg spent the next five minutes studying his new quarters in detail, trying to find some means of escape. There was nothing, literally nothing. Even the vents were little more than narrow slits, high up in the ceiling, to provide air and perhaps something more noxious should Greg prove too difficult to control.

Greg caught sight of another camera, positioned high, built into the ceiling. It droned steadily at him, an almost silent white noise of operational machinery. It watched him with an unblinking glass eye, never to grow bored or tired.

Flipping the camera off once, Greg lowered himself to the floor and began to do push-ups. He was going to get out of here, one way or the other.