Ceaseless (17 page)

She paused and turned her attention to the holographic display. “Now, this is an abandoned refinery. It sits directly in his path, so he'll likely be going straight through it. That's where we're going to hit him him. I've got two jump ships. The plan is simple. Shoot the asshole, secure him, we throw him into the sun. For real this time. I've managed to secure another planet-jumper, and I'm working on drumming up some more jump ships, but...” Montgomery hesitated. She looked slowly around the table. “This is really our last shot. Get it right, or we may not recognize the galaxy tomorrow. Does everyone understand?”

Everyone indicated that they fully understood the situation.

Montgomery nodded. “Good. Now, he's obviously built up a tolerance to the nanotech. So, every forty five minutes, I want it reapplied, so he doesn't fucking wake up and we get a repeat. We can't afford to fuck this up. Everyone ready?”

There was a string of affirmative replies.

“Excellent. I'll be here, coordinating with the locals for more support,” Montgomery said.

The Spec Ops squad began to file out of the room. Allan followed. They slipped out into the desert night and moved to another structure, where they each grabbed a modified pistol. Allan looked it over as the others geared up. The pistol was pretty strange looking. It was sleek and glossy black, with a slightly bulbous muzzle.

“Three shots, that's all you get,” Singer said.

Allan glanced up, found himself momentary snared by the intensity in her gaze. For once, he felt close to comfortable about what was going to happen next. He felt like they might actually be able to pull this off, get it done and over with. He wasn't thinking about what might come next, what challenges he might face tomorrow or next week or six months from now. Just getting this one thing done, finishing off this insane god and stopping him from unleashing his army of malignant, deranged deities would be enough.

“Everyone got their gear?!” Singer called out. Another string of loud, affirmative replies checked off one by one, until the last man was confirmed.

“Move out!”

Allan followed the men and women once more into the desert darkness.

* * * * *

It started raining about half an hour into the flight.

Allan sat on one of the two jump ships, riding out the turbulence in silence, his eyes closed, hidden behind his opaque visor. He felt at home with these people, a certain calm serenity that he hadn't felt in...well, ever, perhaps.

“So you're just SI?” Allan's eyes snapped open. He sat up and looked at who had spoken. It was a Poet. He was seated across from Allan.

“Yes, for a long time now, over a decade,” Allan replied. “Why?”

“I just...it's admittedly a little strange that glorified cop survived all this mess. Also,” Poet held up his hands, as if shielding himself, “no offense. I started off in SI. Did five years before I switched over to the Marines and worked my way up here. I know it can be brutal, but I also knew a lotta goofballs. Guys who'd screwed up their lives and guys who couldn't do anything else. Guys with issues who just liked the way a little bit of authority made them feel. You know, the jerkoffs that were either jocks or bullies in high school.”

“Yeah, I know what you mean. Knew a lot of those types myself. I grew up on Frontier,” Allan added. Poet let out a low whistle.

“Holy shit, that helps explain it.”

Allan knew what he meant. Frontier had been among the original colonized worlds when faster-than-light travel hit. While it had once been a shining example of human ingenuity and exploration, by now it was essentially one giant city that hosted nearly a billion people. History aficionados enjoyed likening it to a massive version of New York City, back when there
was
a New York City on Earth. Being SI there was like a living nightmare.

“I've also invested heavily into this suit of armor. It's far above the standard level that they pass out to standard SI troops,” Allan explained.

Poet was silent for a long moment. Finally, after he seemed to consider something, he spoke up again. “So, this guy...this thing, you've talked with it?” he asked.

The other troops in the shuttle might have been vaguely paying attention to their conversation before, or pretending they were, but now they all stared directly at Allan, and he felt somewhat like wilting under the combined power of their gazes.

“Yes,” he managed, taking a deep breathing and letting out. “I did.”

“What did it say?”

Like most people who were experts in their given field, Allan's life was one of memory. In a way, he remembered things in exchange for a paycheck. He remembered how to take down an armed suspect. He remembered how to drive a variety of vehicles. He remembered how to keep his head during an emergency. There was more to it, he knew, but memory was very key. This was one such memory he wished he could forget.

“He told me that everything that has happened so far is nothing compared to what he's going to do,” Allan said softly.

The silence settled in after that. There was nothing left but the drone of the engines and the soft vibration of the rainfall on the hull.

Allan sat back and continued waiting.

* * * * *

The twin jump ships settled down on a cracked, long-abandoned landing pad beside the gloomy, rain-slicked monolith of the refinery. The ships landed and killed their engines, crouching on the pad like inert metal insects until the pilots ran their scans and, assured that they were alone there, opened up the back ramps.

Allan was the first to the ramp among those populating his jump ship. He stared into the rainy gloom, lit only by the exterior lights of the jump ships in stark shades of white that seemed to give the area a curious, surreal feel of some grainy alternate reality. Allan moved down the ramp, raising his weapon, securing the area, getting out of the way of the others. He listened to them doing the same, moving out into the area surrounding the refinery.

“Kill the lights,”
he heard Singer order over their communications network.

Immediately they were bathed in gloom and almost unbroken silence as the jump ships completely killed their engines. There was nothing but the whisper of the rainfall. Allan stared out into the darkness, using his vision filter, hunting the immense wastes for any sign of the killer. He listened to Singer coordinate with Montgomery.

A moment of cold silence passed.

Suddenly, Singer's voice filled his ear.
“All right everyone, we've got confirmation from the satellite that the target is still on course and will arrive here on foot within the next twenty minutes from the west. Take up positions on the catwalks of the refinery and on the ground.”

Allan moved with the others. They all shifted in near-perfect synchronicity, almost seeming to slide across the darkened terrain in perfect silence. A shell of tension seemed to surround the area as everyone moved into place. Allan took up his own position in the shadowed recesses beneath some towering piece of equipment. He noticed someone join him in the gloom. Allan stood behind one large support strut, and the other person took up the opposite strut.

“Nervous?” He realized it was Poet.

“Very,” Allan replied. After a moment, he asked, “what's with the weird names?”

“Code names. We use them on missions. Kind of helps makes things easier, I think. When you're on a mission, you aren't yourself. You aren't, in your example, Allan. You'd become someone else, someone who exists solely to complete the mission and nothing else. It's a way to let all the worries of real life get tucked away for a while. Also for security purposes,” Poet explained.

“Interesting,” Allan murmured.

They continued to wait in the rainy silence, continually scanning the night for signs of their prey. Time seemed to pass in bloated fragments, seconds bleeding into minutes. Allan had been on stakeouts before, back on Frontier, and they reminded him a lot of this. All that time, spent simply waiting, with so much riding on the outcome. Usually it was a live-or-die situation. Certainly this one was. He wondered how people lived with the stress of jobs like this, then realized that they didn't. Not really. In a way, they became more like a machine.

Drinking or snorting or screwing the time away.

“I have a visual on the contact.”

Allan's thoughts were derailed sharply as he heard that statement whispered through the comms net. He immediately began searching the darkness, his technology-enhanced vision penetrating the midnight curtain. It didn't take long for him to make out the hulking black figure of the killer, marching at a steady pace towards them.

For the next however long, seconds or minutes, he wasn't sure, Allan watched the thing that was not a man, nor a machine, walk towards him. He swallowed, smelling the own stale scent of his fear, his hands trembling. By now, Allan was pretty sure he was beyond feeling terror, but he supposed it was a thing that you never moved beyond, not entirely. He steadied his hands, forced his fear down to a more manageable level.

Not an easy task, but a job requirement when they gave you a gun on a daily basis and expected you to protect other people.

Eternity came and went. Some unseen switch seemed to be thrown, and then the attack opened up. A volley of nano-enhanced bullets shot out as the killer came within five meters of the edge of the refinery. Almost all of the bullets hit their mark. The killer froze up, held his position for several terrible seconds, then collapsed to the ground with a heavy sound. Another long moment of terrible silence passed.

“Okay, bag him and tag him,”
Singer said.

Allan and Poet began to move forward with the others. Allan noted that one of the men high up on a catwalk remained where he was, keeping the whole situation covered from above. As he came within ten meters, he hesitated, hanging back.

“What's wrong?” Poet asked.

“I don't know...something feels off,” Allan murmured as he watched the others.

“What?” Poet asked.

But Allan couldn't say. He began making himself walk forward, moving very slowly, taking into careful consideration everything that was being presented to him. There was the killer, lying on his back in the mud, inert, unmoving. Ten men and women in black-and-silver armor were clustered around him, covering him with their weapons, a handful of them moving closer, preparing to move him as quickly as possible onto the nearest jump ship.

So what was wrong with this picture?

Nothing very obviously, but...

Allan froze as the killer's immense hand shot out and grabbed someone's armored leg. There was a horrible sound of crunching metal, then a sick crack of broken bone, followed by a scream of pure, unfiltered agony.

It was Singer.

Muzzles flared in the darkness as the others opened fire. The killer sat up, pulled Singer down, grabbed her neck and crushed it in an instant. He dropped the body, stood, grabbed two helmets and smashed them together, literally crushing both helmets and the heads inside. Allan fell back instinctively with Poet, both of them retreating to the safety of the shadows once more, realizing that their weapons were now wholly ineffective.

The killer made short work of the Spec Ops soldiers. Limbs were torn off in sprays of blood and gore. Heads was caved in. Necks were crushed. He finished the whole thing off by snatching a corpse a hurling it up at the catwalk holding the trooper that had remained behind to keep overwatch. The body hit the cheap catwalk and destabilized it. The trooper pitched forward, falling two stories directly onto his head.

He didn't get back up.

Allan watched in silent horror as the killer walked over to the nearest jump ship, stalked up the back ramp and disappeared into the interior. A moment later, the engine flared to life and the ship rose into the air. It paused momentarily, then spun around and opened fire on the second jump ship with the minigun attached to the nose.

After twenty seconds of unbroken gunfire, the minigun abruptly fell silent. The jump ship turned and sped away into the darkness.

“You have got to be fucking shitting me,” Allan said after a long moment.

“Fuck,” Poet hissed. “Help me check for survivors.” He began making his way towards the bodies and Allan could hear him getting in contact with Montgomery. Numbly, Allan followed. They had failed. Or rather, they'd undertaken a mission that couldn't succeed. Did Montgomery have another trick up her sleeve? Nothing worked on this killer anymore. Not regular weapons or electrical weapons or even nanotechnology.

Did they have time to piece together another miracle?

He very much doubted it. The next fragments of time passed in bloody lassitude as Allan checked for signs of life and listened to Poet coordinate with Montgomery. After several minutes in the rain, they had found no survivors.

“Let's go check the guy who fell from the tower,” Poet murmured, seemingly satisfied that he would no living personnel among the dead in the heap of bodies. Allan followed numbly. They stalked across the pitted concrete, beneath the rusting husks of the refinery overhead. As they reached the body, Poet knelt and checked his vitals.