Necropolis (17 page)

Could it be something from his past? Was he overly emotional? Maybe the answer was simpler. Greg couldn't help but feel a strong connection to Baker, to all of them really, even Powell with all of his stony silence. Was it because of the situation? Everything had been high-stakes and high-tension since the beginning. They were fighting and killing together. He supposed that would help form a powerful bond.

“Here we go,” Starck announced, pulling Greg from his thoughts.

Starck gathered them in the command center. Greg looked around the room. It was a mess, trashed like the others, but the internal database was still intact. Starck sat at it, working through the information. Greg stared out the front windows, peering out into the courtyard. It felt strange to operate back in the wastelands again, but the strangeness was blotted out by Baker's death. He wondered if Baker would think it was a cool way to go. That made him want to laugh, and then he felt guilty. He glanced over as Starck made a small triumphant sound.

“Excellent,” she said.

“
What?” Billings moved next to her.

“
This confirms what we suspected. Based on these reports, we can now safely discern our zero point. A mining installation. Let's go, we've got a lot of work to do.”

Chapter 19

–
Patient Zero
–

“So what do you expect to find here?” Greg asked.

They'd hustled back into the ship and were now punching deeper into the wastelands, heading for a place called Dark Core Mining. Starck seemed to take a long time to answer, perhaps weighing what to say.

“We believe that the virus may be a result of the Cyr,” she answered, finally. That seemed to make everyone sit up a little straighter, but Greg was left in the dark.

He shook his head and shrugged. “The Cyr?”

“Oh, yes, of course. Your memory loss. Over the course of the past two hundred years, as humanity spread out among the stars, we discovered ruins and wrecks from an ancient civilization. Some of the ruins were unique, from other, even older civilizations, but the most common relate to an advanced race we call the Cyr. Their technology dates back approximately two hundred thousand years.”

Greg was fascinated and suddenly had the urge to take a crash course in human history. What else was he missing out on? He'd been confined to just a single planet since he’d awoken and only now did he realize how much potential content he had to learn.

“What happened to them?”

Starck shrugged. “From what we can tell, civil war and a bio-engineered plague wiped them right the hell out, along with a lot of other species. Pretty much left the galaxy a big empty slate as far as we've been able to tell.”

“My God...” Greg whispered.

“
I'm glad you find this so fascinating. The point is we're concerned
this
might be what took them out. It's certainly beyond any scope we currently have. Although I have my doubts about whether or not this is
the
virus. As potent as it is, it doesn't seem capable of taking out an entire galaxy. Hopefully it's just some kind of experiment gone wrong and we accidentally dug it up. With luck there's a cure tied to it.”

The ship rumbled, halting the conversation.

“Approaching target,”
the pilot announced via their radios.

Despite however long he’d gone without sleep, Greg found the adrenaline always seemed ready to reactivate him. He knew it couldn't last forever...or even for much longer. If he didn't get sleep soon, there would be consequences. A loud, steady thrum rattled through the frame of the ship. It took him a few seconds, but Greg placed it: a minigun.

“We're going to do a few strafing runs, then we'll touch down. We're taking the installation as quickly as possible. Stay close to me-” The hull shuddered and the ship lurched. “What the hell was that?” Starck snapped.

“
One of the new ones. Slammed right into the cockpit,”
the pilot replied.

“
Shit,” she muttered.

“
Has anyone settled on a name for them?”

“
No. We've hardly just discovered the damned things...”

“
Banshees,” Kyra said. Everyone in the cabin looked at her. She shifted. “What? They fly, and they shriek like fucking Banshees...I don't see why not.”

“
I'll take it under advisement,” Starck replied.

The gunfire cut off and they descended.

“Time to hit dirt!” Billings called out.

They unlatched, readied their weapons, and pounded down the ramp before it even had a chance to finish opening up. There was blood and corpses everywhere. Black blood ran like oil or tar in the mud. Up ahead, built into the side of a mountain, was the mining facility. It stood over them, a towering monolith of steel, glass, and technology, stained with gore or sporting the occasional black eye of a broken window.

Greg kicked into high gear. The Undead were everywhere. Dozens, maybe even hundreds of zombies scurried about, moving faster than ever. As if to add to the spice of chaos, a handful of Berserkers and Stalkers rampaged about. Overhead, the skies seemed to fill with Banshees and the ships battling them.

Greg opened fire on the nearest targets. They all did. Time seemed to lose meaning, seconds melting away into minutes and more as he and the others made a charge for the main entrance to the mining facility. They shot everything in sight. Blood, brains, and bullets rained in a hail of metal and decay.

Greg felt as though his body moved and reacted quicker than his mind could keep up with, so he didn't try to fight it. His muscles were tensed, keyed for reflexive murder. He sighted the nearest zombie, dropped it with a headshot that punched an ugly hole through its forehead, moved his aim to the next one even before the first finished falling. For a second, he felt in his element. Blood in the air, the war cries of soldiers...

He’d missed this, tucked away beneath the earth, confined within poorly-lit structures or creeping through corridors and stairwells. Was this who he was? A killer? A warrior who felt most alive when he was on the battlefield? He wasn't sure, but he knew that he was enjoying this on a deep, primal level.

Before he knew it, they had carved a path of black blood and pale corpses to the front entrance where another dozen black-armored soldiers tackled a Berserker that seemed to be door guard. It toppled as Greg and the others approached. Some of the soldiers offered a hasty salute to Starck as she approached.

Greg wondered how they could tell her apart from everyone else, as the battlefield seemed to mostly consist of DI troops. They made their way into the broad but sparsely furnished lobby. Greg took it all in, backed up by his squad and the other troops they'd passed on the way in. Everything had a bleak, gray, washed-out feel to it, truly indicative of the wasteland the installation resided in. A large desk that once occupied the center of the lobby was broken in half, sprayed with blood and riddled with bullets.

“Take the security center,” Starck ordered as even more soldiers poured into the room. “I want a crew roster, security footage, dig reports, and an answer to why the fuck no one called this in. You hear me?”

There were a string of affirmative replies as the men trooped off deeper into the facility. The sound of gunfire could be heard as they met resistance. Starck led Greg and his crew deeper into the facility, heading through a huge set of double doors and plunging into a lengthy, flickering corridor. He was silent, occasionally glancing at Kyra or Billings. Both wore tight masks of detached professionalism.

He studied Campbell and Rez and couldn't shake the feeling that these soldiers were all too lethal and top-notch to be Disease-Investigations security forces. So who were they? What was their end goal? Paranoia rippled through him.

They came to a T junction at the end of the corridor. Something made a deep, guttural sound around the corner. Starck made quick hand motions to Campbell and Rez, who raised their weapons and disappeared around the corner. A second later there was a loud thud and one of them flew back down the corridor.

Gunfire erupted. Greg hurried forward and peered around the corner. A Berserker awaited him, trying to get a grip on the other of Starck’s men. The DI man was too quick for the titanic brute. Greg raised his rifle and fired off a couple of three-round bursts, all of them scoring hits but doing little damage.

Billings and Kyra joined him, taking shots when they could, avoiding who Greg recognized as Rez as he danced around the beast. Greg saw a good shot, lined it up and fired. The bullets grazed the Berserker's skull but seemed to get its attention. It snarled and turned toward them, giving Rez an opening.

He whipped out a knife, leapt and drove it into the base of the thing's skull.

The Berserker roared loud enough to shake walls and rattle bones.

It thrashed about. Greg and the others fell back. Rez held on, both hands on the handle of the blade, which was sunk to the hilt. The Berserker stumbled and seemed confused. Rez gave the blade a good twist and the beast fell to its knees. It reached out feebly, and crashed to the ground. Rez stood, extracted his blade, flicked it a few times, and replaced it in its hilt.

“
Hey, I'm fine by the way,” Campbell said.

Greg turned and saw the other soldier making slow progress back to them. Greg was shocked to realize that he hadn't given a thought to Baker since their trip between the military installation and here. Guilt seized him as the others gathered in the new corridor, making sure the beast was honest to God dead.

Campbell shot it twice in the head, just for good measure.

They moved again. Greg tried to push the feelings aside. The kid was dead and there was nothing he could do about it. But this kind of tough-love sentimentality was doing little to subdue his feelings. Finally, he determined that Baker wouldn't have wanted dark thoughts spared for him, at least not during a lethal situation.

With a quiet sigh, Greg forced himself to focus.

Kyra nudged him. “You okay?”

He shrugged. “I guess.”

He didn't feel like saying more and she seemed to sense that. They fell silent as Starck and her two lackeys led them to the corridor's end. A pair of doors opened to reveal an elevator. Campbell and Rez went down first, then radioed that it was all clear. Greg, Starck, and the others filed into the cramped lift and rode it down.

The corridor beyond was equally corroded with blood and death. It seemed that it had been hit particularly hard. Light strips either flickered or were dead. One hung at an awkward angle. The walls were marred with dents, blood stains, and bullet holes. Several of the doors had been beaten in. The squad began made slow progress down the passageway.

“
Where are we going, exactly?” Kauffman kept his voice quiet.

“
The mines. My forces have overtaken the control center and are heading in ahead of us,” Starck replied.

“
So why aren't we going through
that
route?”

“
I don't like to let my troops have all the fun.”

Silence again. Occasionally, a sound would come down to them from the vents or elsewhere in the facility: dead echoes of brutal combat. They reached another doorway and elevator. Starck paused here and spoke over her radio, apparently trying to assess the nature of the situation below. She finally let out a short curse and cut the link. She opened the lift and everyone filed in.

“It seems the crew that worked here located a capsule of unknown origins, though they thought it was Cyr. We'll be able to confirm once we get down there. They opened it, started getting sick, tried to quarantine it...you can see where this is going,” Starck explained.

Greg wondered what it must have been like, finding that capsule, as they plummeted into the earth. What must that have been like, to discover it? Or when the infection first began to spread? Who was the first man to realize what they had on their hands? A planet-killer. Maybe several planets or even systems if it got out.

How cold had it turned him?

Or did they even realize what it was before it overtook them?

The lift came to a halt. The door opened to a short tunnel carved through the rock. Bleak light, provided by a string of naked bulbs hung high overhead, painted the tunnel into mute shades of white and gray. Starck and her men led the way, with Greg and the others following. They heard the sounds of conflict.

Despite everything, Greg was excited. For some reason, the idea of an alien civilization, even a long-dead one, enticed him. What would their technology look like? What had the Cyr looked like? The tunnel came to an end, leading into an even larger one that looked as though it saw a lot of traffic on a normal workday. Greg easily envisioned titanic earth-movers and drillers trundling like giant beetles through the vaulted tunnel.

Now it held soldiers and corpses. Occasionally a shot rang out. Starck continued leading them deeper into the mines, past scenes of aftermath and blood. Greg wondered how deep into the earth these mines went. The lift ride had lasted quite a while.

Greg felt more and more out of place the deeper he went. There were virtually no Marines or SI personnel working with the DI soldiers down here. In fact, Greg looked around; he could see none but himself and his squad. He wondered why they were allowed down here. A handful of reasons came to mind, but none of them seemed to hold much water. Greg decided to shrug it off and hope for the best. Part of him felt like he was walking into a trap.

After what felt like ages, they finally came to the end of the passageway and another elevator. They rode it even deeper. How far down
was
this thing? The next time the doors opened, they found themselves standing before a medium-sized cavern ringed with powerful work-lights, studded into the rock both high and low.

Close to two dozen men and women in black armor occupied the space, making it seem uncomfortably crowded. As Greg and the others came into the room, he realized that the only way back up or even out was the elevator they'd departed from. It made his paranoia spike and he paid closer attention...but all that was lost, when he caught sight of the device the miners had dug up. He stared at it as they drew closer.

At first, it seemed unimpressive. The word capsule was accurate though, it was essentially a giant pill, roughly two feet long. There was a pair of windows along the top. What stood out the most, though, was how
white
the thing was. It seemed to glow and its surface was perfectly spotless and unmarred.