The Souls of the Dead
"All right, Beta—you know the drill," Snow Leopard said quietly. "I'm in first, left—Three next, right. Cover, advance; cover, advance. Five next, Manlink, left. Nine is backup." He looked back at us. We were all in position, sprawled motionless among the rocks behind our weapons, clinging to the near-vertical cliff like lizards. The entrance was just ahead and above, on a steep slope. It was a black, gaping hole in the cliff face. Warped cenite beams and a tangle of cables dangled from the hole. An anti had touched the caldera here, sheering off megatons of rock and exposing a hardsited, camfaxed entryway leading from the shore of the lava lake. Our corridor had been split in two, ending in a sheer drop, but it had led right to the entryway. The lake glowed off to one side and a fiery sky rolled overhead. We were exposed to whoever—or whatever—might be looking.
"E's on flame," Snow Leopard added. "I want to avoid laser, vac or x—and biobloc won't help us if they're O's. Five, give us smoke."
Psycho aimed carefully, and a smoker exploded with a faint pop off to the left of the entrance. My adrenalin count went up. The wind whipped the smoke over the entrance, obscuring it from view. My faceplate switched to darksight, and I could see it again. The earth rumbled. Snow Leopard scrambled to his feet and up the slope, then picked his way through a tangled mass of wreckage and was suddenly gone, into the dark. I exploded to my feet and charged up the slope and into a nightmare tangle of shattered bulkheads, melted cenite beams, and shredded decking. Snow Leopard lay motionless on his belly near the left wall. I went to ground on the right behind a massive chunk of metal, my E pointed down tunnel. It was dark and quiet.
"One advancing." Snow Leopard was off; I covered him. Psycho stepped into the tunnel in a puff of smoke. I was sweating. There was no sign of life. Snow Leopard stopped, again in position on the left. I advanced, a low rush, passing Snow Leopard by, breathing hard, my E at the ready. I slid to a stop by a pile of wreckage. My tacmod was silent. A power strip ran overhead on one wall, and dead light panels lined the ceiling. There was an airlock ahead on the left. It was partially open, a dead black hole. I suddenly realized this was not an Omni installation—it was human. Systies!
"Open airlock," I hissed. "This is a Systie base!" There was Inter lettering on the power strip: DANGER NUKEFLOW 22TVF, and smaller letters: ERIDOS POWER SYSTEMS. I could make out something on the airlock too: EMERGENCY LOCK—1T AT—DANGER AUTOACT—KEEP DOOR CLEAR.
"Five, up," Snow Leopard ordered.
"What's it look like, Sweety?" I asked my tacmod.
"No life, Thinker. I detect organic matter. Bodies—humans."
"Nothing alive?"
"Negative life."
"You got that, One?"
"Smoke, Five." Normally it would have been deceptors, but normality did not apply to this place. Deceptors were too damned noisy.
Psycho fired right into the doorway and the smoke exploded violently out into our corridor. Snow Leopard and I burst in through an airlock partially blocked with wreckage, our fingers twitching on flame. We skidded to a stop in a room swirling with thick black smoke. It didn't bother us at all. There were bodies everywhere. Nothing moved. Psycho popped in the door, Manlink at the ready. We froze. It was dead quiet but for the hissing of the smoke. There were plenty of rooms and corridors ahead of us. We moved forward, scanning every room. My heart pounded, adrenalin surged, sweat trickled down my temples. We found only bodies, dead Systies, not even in armor. They had been caught completely off guard.
###
"Let's get these stiffs out of here." As the smoke slowly drifted out the airlock, it became clear what had happened. The outer airlock, at the end of the corridor closest to the lava lake, had been shattered in microfracs by our antimat. An explosion of wreckage had shot down the corridor at supersonic speed; one jagged chunk of cenite planking had lodged in the doorway of the second airlock, two emergency doors which should have autoacted instantly to save the installation. But the doors slammed up against cenite metal that blocked the doorway, and all within had died instantly as Andrion 3's poisonous atmosphere rushed in. The twisted slice of cenite, still lodged in the airlock, put a chill to my blood. What a stupid way to die.
Corpses were sprawled across the deck, faces swollen purple in death, limbs already stiff. They were all in litesuits, DefCorps duty uniforms. Some of them had been seated before a large control panel, monitoring the instruments. The first room was the duty station; the living quarters were beyond. There were dead in there, too—in the cubicles and the mess hall and the ex room and the store room. It looked like a neat little world the Systies had made for themselves here, in the Camp of the O's, but it had certainly ended abruptly.
"Move it, Thinker. Get that one." We dragged them outside, into the corridor. I reached down for the corpse.
A female, her swollen face contorted in horror, frozen hands clawing at nothing. A sudden end to her life. I got ahold of her tunic and dragged her through the airlock.
"Give me a hand here." Psycho was helping Priestess carry Redhawk into the room. There was a growing line of dead out in the corridor. A grisly, obscene spectacle. There must have been twenty of them, but I did not have the heart to count.
"Redhawk, can you sit up?" Snow Leopard stood by the control panel, puzzling it out. There were several huge, dead screens and an elaborate series of modules.
"Yeah…Priestess, honey, can you get me in that seat?" I helped Priestess ease Redhawk into the seat. We were all fully suited up, and still jumpy. Redhawk was the closest thing we had to Merlin. He was a tech's tech, and he would understand the panel.
"Nothing outside, Priestess?"
"Negative." She sounded tired.
"We're not leaving without Warhound."
"I know."
"So what is it, Redhawk?" Snow Leopard asked.
Psycho had stationed himself by the open airlock with his Manlink. All the bodies we could find were now outside. Our smoke still hung in the air and the atmosphere of violence and death was palpable. Somebody's dox mug lay on the floor in a blizzard of flimsy printouts and plastic manuals, a pitiful reminder of the lives that had so suddenly ended here.
"Aircars. Damn, this is an aircar control center!" Redhawk was astounded.
"Good," Snow Leopard said calmly. "That's good! Where are the aircars?"
"Don't know—we've got to activate power. Everything's down."
"How do we do that?"
"Give me a little time."
"We've got to do it very, very quietly. We can't tap into any outside power—you understand?"
"Sure, sure—they'll have emergency power. Deadman!" Redhawk gripped the edge of the console with his armored fingers. "Priestess, I need a bit more of your magic." Priestess gave him a biotic charge, slipping the tip into an access port on his A-suit.
"Thinker, Psyco—get that wreckage out of the airlock," Snow Leopard ordered. "I want to seal the lock and blow the at, and get us something we can breathe in here."
I had been lost in dreams, thinking of the Systies who had lived and worked here. It was almost unbelievable, knowing what we knew of the Omnis. How had the Systies coexisted with them? Even as allies, it was hard to believe.
Five and I removed the wreckage and dumped it in the corridor. The doors remained stuck in place. Everything here was dead, dead and frozen in one catastrophic instant of time.
"I want the absolute minimum power we need to breathe, and run these systems."
"That's a ten."
"How about that airlock?"
"I can close it manually," I replied. "The control's right here." I opened the access port and unfolded the manual crank. We were certainly back to basics, but it turned easily and the airlock doors began to move. As I cranked away, I closed my eyes and prayed for the souls of all who had died here. I was not certain to whom I was praying, and I had no sympathy for Systies and certainly none for Systies who had betrayed humanity by aligning themselves with the O's. But I prayed for them anyway. What could they have been doing here? How could they have lived with the O's? Were they willingly betraying their own race, their own species? Did they realize the enormity of what they were doing?