Again we slowed. During the war They had committed atrocities because They did not understand the concept of a war with rules, but not even They had come up with anything this sick. I saw Morag stare at the frozen hackers, her recent tough-girl persona close to cracking.
This drove home something that I had suspected since I’d been captured, something I should have realised after Gregor. Rolleston was completely insane. Even Merle looked disturbed.
‘What is this?’ Rannu asked. I could hear his desperation to make sense of this, but there was no sense to be had.
‘There are few quicker ways to move and process information than the human brain. It’s always been the hardware that’s the problem,’ Pagan said quietly. For some reason I really hated Pagan for knowing this.
‘You mean this is part of Demiurge?’ Morag asked. Pagan swallowed and nodded. ‘But that means that if they do this on a large scale, then…’ Her voice just trailed off.
‘They’ll have access to a lot more processing power and memory than we could ever hope to marshal,’ Pagan said. Because no sane person or organisation would do this, he’d left unsaid.
‘Shut up!’ Merle hissed. Pagan’s head jerked round to look at the other man. ‘They have ears.’
Then there was laughter. It really fucked with my calm. I didn’t want to be here. Many eyes were opening and trying to move in sockets to look at us through the ice. Mouths moved where they weren’t frozen over. ‘You will all suffer. You will all watch each other suffer,’ they said. Multiple agonised voices speaking as one.
‘We need to move.’ I couldn’t remember hearing fear in Mudge’s voice before.
‘The best you can hope for is that this will be done to you,’ the voices said. Then they started naming people we knew and describing what was going to be done to them. They started with Mudge’s mum.
‘Move, now!’ Cat barked, but she sounded disturbed as well.
The next corridor was the same and then the next. After that we weren’t even walking on ice; it was like we were walking through the veins of the beanstalk root system we’d seen in the fissure.
The entrance to the conference room looked more like a sphincter than a door. We were down to our last smart frame of microbes. Mudge was carrying it but he wasn’t sure where to put it. All of us were surprised when the sphincter just opened. Cat and Merle, backed by Morag, advanced cautiously into the room. Pagan and I followed with Rannu and Mudge watching our backs.
‘Stay where you are!’ I heard Cat scream. I had a moment to register the large room. I had this odd thought of a cybernetic room in which high tech had been mixed with the living organism of heavily modified, organic Themtech. It was like modern corporate architecture had caught a disease. One of the Citadel’s roots grew through the room. In the centre was a long table made out of a single slab of thick granite.
Sitting at the table apparently as surprised to see us as we were to see him was Cronin. Standing behind him was Kring. They looked like they hadn’t even realised the base was being attacked. Both were covered in some kind of thick viscous fluid that they had been trying to wipe off themselves and both started moving as we entered, simultaneously seeking cover and reaching for weapons. They were fast.
As they moved I was surprised to see Cat and Merle shift aim to something at the other end of the room. I brought up my SAW to shoot at Kring, who I reckoned would be the bigger threat. He disappeared behind the granite table as I fired a burst. Sparks flew off granite.
Cat and Merle advanced quickly, Merle firing his plasma rifle and Cat her railgun, seemingly at the wall. Behind me I heard Rannu and Mudge firing rapid bursts and a grenade detonate. Morag and Pagan were firing at the walls, ceiling and table. I knew that they were taking out anything even remotely resembling a sensor or lens. Some of the things they were targeting looked like growths.
That left me with Kring and Cronin. I moved forward, firing diagonally across the table. Now I could see what Merle and Cat were firing at. There were things growing out of the walls. They looked like deformed Berserks. They had human-looking, screaming mouths in their bodies but the heads of animals. Some were covered in spikes and other less pleasant features and they were growing from the organic parts of the room with surprising speed.
Kring just stood up. I shot him. A lot. He staggered but the enormous cyborg was standing up to the gauss-boosted fire of a long and accurate burst from my SAW. He raised both massive fists, a PDW in each. That was fine. I was happy to take low-powered rounds on my armour and swap shots with him. Then my world became fire. Every round exploded fiercely, blowing off chunks of my armour and kicking me back into the soft organic tissue of the wall. I was vaguely aware of the granite table breaking in two from the force of his fusillade.
The lunatic was firing concentrated explosive rounds. They were expensive and dangerous to use, and he was using them in a fast-cycling automatic weapon. Red icons erupted all over my IVD. I slid to the ground. The table blocked his line of sight. Kring was firing indiscriminately. He stood and took any fire aimed at him, staggering as shot after shot hit him. I couldn’t figure out who else was firing. The room seemed to fill with rapid explosions. Then I realised he was firing at the twisted Berserks growing out of the wall.
I tried to roll onto my knees but hands burst out of the floor to grab me. I was screaming now as some kind of pincer-like claw tried to prise armour and flesh open. My blades extended from my knuckles and I stabbed them viciously into the floor, tearing at it. The partially formed Berserk mutant went limp, succumbing to the ferocity of my attack. There were more growing out of the wall all around us. Another grenade went off somewhere behind me. Now there were black beams and shards in the air just like back on Sirius. I saw Pagan go down as explosions rolled over him. Then I saw Rannu stagger in the doorway as he was back-shot. Mudge’s head whipped round. It looked like a black beam had taken half his face off.
I’d had enough. On one knee I fired a thirty-millimetre HEAP grenade at Kring. As I did, Cronin shot me with a gauss PDW. He got me in the arm. It penetrated hardening inertial armour and then my subcutaneous armour, tearing into actual flesh.
Kring dodged to the side, the HEAP hitting the wall just behind him. The explosion knocked me back to the ground. The table slid across the floor towards me. Kring was thrown forward over the wrecked table. I felt the organic floor moving beneath me.
Back up onto my feet. I fired a burst at Cronin. He dived for cover behind the table. He was fast for an exec. I pointed the SAW down and fired another burst into the ground because the floor just wouldn’t stop moving. Bringing the SAW back up, I was appalled to see Kring standing again. He dropped the two PDWs and drew two Benelli shotgun pistols. I risked a burst; he staggered slightly, and I hit the ground again. How much fucking damage could this monster take?
Morag was down! No, it was okay, she was tranced in. That was trust in this environment. Everyone else was fighting the Berserk mutants growing out of the floor, the ceiling, the walls.
Heavy-calibre hit after hit on my chest armour and helmet. Almost cracking the armour. There was more pain, more red icons on my IVD. Where the fuck was the fire coming from? Kring. His shotgun pistols were firing saboted gyrojet rounds with smart miniature warheads. Money truly was no object for these guys. The gyrojet rounds would track me regardless of my cover and I couldn’t take much more.
I staggered to my feet, taking more hits. I fired my last grenade at him. He dived out of the way and the blast knocked me off my feet again. Still at least I wasn’t getting shot. Then I did something really stupid. I charged.