“Jada, report! What do you see?” barked Womack as he saw Jada and Poe pull ahead of the others who were setting up a defensive perimeter on the terrace, preparing to repel the Helion advance until the dropships could extract them. “I’m looking right at the dais and there’s nothing there!”
“It’s cold,” said Jada as she stood in the exact center of the dais.
“Raid Alpha, I am still seeing the Objective, right where you are standing, the image is heavily artifacted because of the planetary interference, but that doesn’t account for this,” insisted Marcus. “Jada, you’re right on top of it!”
“Najib, bring your skiff around!” said Womack, “Whatever she’s got, we’re only going to have one shot at this before Helion is all over us.”
“Just like the rest of the signals, its cold but there’s nothing here,” observed Poe as he started looking around.
“Tasca inbound, twenty seconds,” said Najib over the comm-bead. “Ellis, get on the net. Jean, ignite the cage. I hope you have something for us, Jada, we’re coming in hot.”
“Look at your feet,” said Poe as he pointed, and as Jada took a step back out of the cold spot, she saw that at the center of the dais was a symbol, inlaid into the stone with the polished alien material of the temple. It made Jada’s brain itch just looking at it, though what it signified she could only guess.
And then she had it.
“This isn’t a platform at all!” she exclaimed, stepping back off the dais and pointed to the underside of it. The dais was actually comprised of a slab of flowstone, reinforced with the heavy alien material, set atop a base of equal dimensions, “This is a coffin!”
The two mercs stepped off the dais as Womack joined them. After a moment of silence, interrupted by the scream of the slaver skiff’s engines and the roar of the Helion barges, the three of them began to push against the slab. It took everything they had, but after a few moments, the slab began to move, and there was a rush of cold fetid air as they broke the seal of the coffin.
An inhuman scream filled their ears, whiting out the chatter in their comm-beads and driving the three mercs back a step. A hand, far too large to be human, emerged from within the coffin, effortlessly shoving the lid back and off.
A ragged figure rose from inside. Even as tall as the mercs were with their enhanced bodies and mag-armor, it still towered over them and it was a walking nightmare to look upon.
Jada had no idea what it actually looked like; her mind painted it as the Stalker in the Dark. The trauma of witnessing the unleashing of this horror of horrors threatened to break her mind. There was a power rolling from this terrible thing they had just awakened, palpable and as cold as the blackest hole in the void.
The stench of burning flesh filled her nostrils and Jada experienced George Tuck dying once more. She had not seen what happened to him, but she’d heard it, she’d smelled it, and in the presence of this alien wraith that had risen from its coffin, Jada was back in Vorhold.
“Contact! Contact!” screamed a voice, perhaps Ranec, over the comm-bead, cutting through the deafening rush of blood in her ears and Jada began to make out the crackle of small arms fire.
“Objective sighted!” bellowed Najib, “Engaging!”
“Just kill it, please, just kill it,” mumbled Womack over the company channel, his voice uncharacteristically small and weak. “Please, make it die.”
Jada screamed inside her helmet and squeezed the grip of her pistol, the feel of the weapon in her hand as she slid it from its holster the only thing keeping her sane.
The Stalker loomed before her. Through the swirl of rags that clung to its body, she caught glimpses of metal, a gleaming mechanical skeleton beneath the flowing ragged cloth and bleached desiccated flesh. She was near to vomiting and she could feel blood seeping out of her nose as she struggled to raise her pistol.
Beside her, Poe lay prone, bright red pouring from his nose and ears. On the other side of her, Womack was curled into fetal position, still begging her, or anyone, to slay the specter. Behind her, she could hear a firefight erupting in the wash of the dropship engines that had no doubt come for the extraction. Najib was yelling something in the comm-bead, but she couldn’t make it out.
She knew that behind this figment of her imagination wearing the face of the Stalker in the Dark, was something more terrible than anything she could even consciously perceive. Every instinct was screaming at her to end this hellish abomination.
“It has to die,” said Jada, realizing that she’d been repeating that phrase out loud. The pistol was in her shaking hand and she raised it level with the putrid thing that filled the horizon of her consciousness. “It has to die.”
As Jada squeezed the trigger, her body was struck violently and pinned to the ground by a metal net. She recognized it as a projectile from the Tasca net launchers. Watching the barbed points drilling themselves into the flowstone snapped her back to reality.
The thing that had been in the coffin wasn’t making a sound, or if it was, the cacophony of gunfire and roaring engines as dropships, barges, and the slaver skiff converged on the ring all at once drowned it out. She could only see parts of the nightmare as it writhed, engulfed in multiple net projectiles. Ellis must have pre-loaded six or seven of the nets, and as she watched, several of what looked like electro-darts slammed into the creature.
For a tense moment, it seemed the thing would surely burst free before the retro-fitted cage slammed down upon it. The cage itself was attached to a cable, and as the skiff continued on its flight path, the cable grew taut and the cage was dragged into the air.
There was little more to see pinned to the ground, and as the cage was lifted, her line of sight fell upon Poe’s prone form. He lay face down, but his helmet’s faceplate hadn’t broken and Jada could see the man within. His eyes were open and blood seeped from his nose and ears. Whether he was alive or not, Jada couldn’t tell. The sight of her battle buddy gave her a renewed strength and she pushed up against the net pinning her to the ground.
The mag-armor ground against the net, but soon her enhanced strength won out against the barbs, and she pulled herself free of the net. It was when she tried to stand up that Jada realized, too late, just how damaging being in the presence of the Objective had been and her legs gave out, sending the merc collapsing in a heap before passing out entirely.
7. ONE FOR THE STALKER
Above her, in a low orbit, lurked the ship Far Rider, a sleek cargo hauler belonging to the shipping magnate Praxis Mundi. The cost of passage had been a small fortune, compounded by the private use of one of the Rider’s exploration craft, though Jada cared little for such details. The Dire Sword’s accounts were bursting with wealth, for such was the bounty of continued success within the elite ranks of the Merchants Militant.
The casual detachment with which Jada now spent vast sums of money was something of a norm among the Merchants Militant who did not have families or causes to support, more common even among the grim ranks of the Dire Swords. It was part of the cosmic tragedy, in Jada’s thinking, that of all the soldiers of fortune in the universe, it was those with the highest pay rate that seemed to care the least about money.
Womack and Jada had recovered from the inexplicable trauma they had endured upon witnessing the Objective. Her battle buddy, Poe, had suffered a brain aneurism and died on those steps. Poe had died without attachment, just like Mors, with no family or heirs to speak of beyond his commitment to his comrades, and so his wealth was folded into the operational accounts of Sword Base.