Samuel and his troopers joined the fight and began shooting at the Reekers, though with limited success, as the flood breakers were semi-circular and prevented Samuel from flanking the clansmen.
Samuel bracketed one shooter’s position and managed to flush him from cover so that Boss Ulanti could drill him with several short bursts of fire, but a concentrated counter-volley from the Reekers slew two of Samuel’s cor-sec troopers and pushed Samuel back into cover. The marine’s combat rifle had taken several hits, and Samuel was forced to draw his sidearm.
Suddenly Vol’s booming voice could be heard below, shouting an indecipherable ganger war cry and Samuel risked a glance at the spillway.
The Rotted Kings ganger had managed to sneak up behind the Reeker position while the clansmen were focused on fighting Grotto forces on two fronts. The ganger wielded his heavy pistol like a short sword, using the bayonet blade to pierce and cleave even as he fired it point blank into the enemy.
Samuel watched with awe as he witnessed what ganger fighting really looked like. He had been underwater and engaged with the tentacled creature the last time Vol had been on the frontlines.
The ganger was an expert scout. During the weeks in which the Grotto forces had been fighting the guerilla war against the Haggard Sons, he was typically just another shooter during the small skirmishes. This, however, was pitched battle, and just like Patrick had said, Vol was something to behold. He fought in a martial style that looked as if it had evolved specifically for downspire close quarters combat.
The ganger held his pistol in one hand and a knife with spiked knuckles in the other, a living whirlwind of carnage as he carved his way through the Reekers. His wheel gun only carried eight big bore rounds, which he fired only when he wasn’t able to engage the enemy at close range. To their credit, the Reekers did not back down. They drew their own knives and axes as they leapt into melee combat against the frenzied ganger.
Samuel was beginning to understand why they were called the Rotted Kings, as the single ganger wiped out all nine remaining Reekers in a matter of moments. Once the last Reeker fell Vol swiftly decapitated his enemy and held the head up by the matted air, blood streaking down his arm.
“Who runs downspire?” roared Vol, leaping on top of one of the flood breakers. He spread his arms wide in exaltation and challenge before hurling the head against the Basin gate so hard that it splattered across the metal frame. “One for the Stalker in the Dark! The Kings are coming!”
The Reaper engineers were able to lower a gurney to hoist Spencer back up the entry point they’d drilled, and soon the marine was being transported upspire for advanced medical treatment. It was clear that he would be in recovery for a long time, though alive was alive as far as Boss Marsters and the rest of Tango Platoon were concerned.
The settlement took nearly twelve hours to burn completely to the waterline. The Reapers worked tirelessly through the smoke and flames to prepare themselves for the last push through Basin Gate. Samuel was feeling much better after four hours of sleep, a fresh brace of magazines, and a new combat rifle, though none of that could help him shake the growing sense of dread and foreboding he felt every time his eyes strayed to the gate.
Boss Marsters had ordered the bone shrines pulled down and thrown into the water to avoid overly disturbing the new batch of cor-sec troopers who had come to replace the dozens who had died in the fight for Reekertown, though everyone had the memory of what it looked like burned into their minds.
As the new force mustered in front of the gate, Samuel stood before it and took a deep breath, doing his best to ignore the stench of the waterline. Vol walked up next to him and followed the marine’s gaze. Then the ganger looked at Samuel and held his forearm out, waiting for the marine to return the gesture by knocking his own forearm against the ganger’s, which Samuel did, a warrior’s greeting in downspire culture that Samuel and Harold had learned after a night out drinking with Vol and his Rotted Kings brothers.
“We be legends now, chummer,” said Vol with evident satisfaction. He nodded at Samuel, then turned back to the gate while Boss Marsters and Ben struggled with the rusty crank wheel. The keening sound of the metal grinding on metal filled the chamber.
7. BASIN DEEP
Vol called them Stalkers.
When the first of them stepped into a pool of light cast by one of the work lamps, Samuel understood why.
The creature before him was humanoid, and perhaps, at some early point in its evolutionary journey, it had been a human being. Elongated limbs made it adept at climbing, a skill it displayed by scuttling across the pipelines overhead like some four-legged spider, dropping down to face the Reapers and cor-sec troopers head on.
The thing’s flesh was a pale white and even though its eyes were mostly hidden beneath large, handcrafted goggles, the marine could tell that the pupils were huge, which would be perfect for life in the quarter-light of deepspire. Leather breeches and patchwork armor made of what looked to be hides, scrap metal, and wire twine covered its emaciated body.
Samuel couldn’t tell which was more intimidating, the overwhelming stench of the stalker or the bizarre looking gun clenched in its bony fists.
Despite all that they had been through, the Reapers and cor-sec troopers both were nevertheless stunned by its appearance. That pause gave the creature the opportunity it needed to raise the strange gun and fire. A ball of bright orange slime exploded from the muzzle of the weapon and streaked towards the Grotto soldiers, leaving wispy trails of orange gas in its wake.
Samuel snapped out of his shock enough to hit the deck and roll to his right, a move that kept him out of the projectile’s path, but dumped him into one of the sluice pits surrounding the drainage pylon. The marine shouted as he plunged into the foul, knee-deep liquid, scrambling to rise into a firing position. He locked onto his target just as it fired a second round at the Grotto soldiers. The marine began drilling it with disciplined shot groupings. The first three rounds knocked the creature back against the far wall with smoking holes in its chest, the next three shredded its abdomen, and then the final three caught it in the head and neck as the creature bent over in pain before collapsing in a heap.
All around him Samuel could hear the throaty cough of the strange slime guns, the familiar staccato chatter of Grotto small arms fire, and the sounds of dying soldiers. The marine hoisted himself back onto the deck to join Bianca in laying down suppressing fire while Holland did his best to help the wounded. Samuel fired several rounds at another of the scuttling Stalkers as it tried to advance over the edges of the sluice pits, though in the quarter-light he wasn’t sure if he’d managed to score a kill.
“Dammit, this stuff is corrosive!” cursed Holland as he examined a dead cor-sec trooper whose body was already being eaten away, then rushed to the next trooper only to find her dead as well. “Okay, people, whatever it is, if it gets on you it’ll eat a hole straight through, so take care how you position your body if you get splashed!”
Samuel could see by the corroded rents in the decking and the bodies of three cor-sec troopers that whatever these Stalkers were shooting was absolutely fatal if they even managed a partial hit.
The cough of the guns was unmistakable and from the sound of it, there were a dozen or more shooters out there in the quarter-light. The marine spent his last few rounds pushing another Stalker back into the darkness in a cloud of blood before he dared survey the unfolding battle at large.