Hard Drop (13 page)

As they approached the figure in the middle of the road, a hush fell over the team. One by one they recognized the gruesome detail of the pile under the chair. Blood-spattered bone chips, lay scattered across the floor, snapped and cracked in half by some past violence. The road was littered with broken remains, but the chair itself stood on a bed of dried, brittle bones, each of its legs piercing the screaming mouths of whole skeletons lying in twisted agony beneath it. Judging by the deep brown spatter on the wood, they had been not long dead when the horrible scene had been arranged. Considering the angles of the bodies, Tyco wasn’t sure they hadn’t been alive.
 

One large wall was pitted with gunfire, the word ‘APOCALYP –‘ plastered across it, cut short by a second, finer trail of bullets, reading simply ‘HA HA HA!’ A thin arm of fire had flickered across it, turning the wall a dull, ugly black in uneven bursts.

“Christ, Cap,” Chip mumbled, finally. “This all happened in three weeks?”

Tyco shook his head quietly. He had seen destruction like this many times before, many times since the
Conrad
. He recognized the grim traces of unchecked humanity all around him, the wild excesses of isolation and the brutal power struggles it touched off, and he set his teeth tightly, walking faster as if trying to outrun it. He checked the distance to the beacon on his display methodically, grateful to have something to do. 3 klicks to their target. 15 minutes, at their present pace. For the first time on this mission, as the end of the tunnel approached ahead, he breathed easier.

“No.” He said finally, glancing back at Chip and shaking his head. “This was war.” And he turned to the team, grimly matter-of-fact. “The locals have been fighting here for years.”
 

“They put a classified research facility in the middle of a civil war?” The question burst out of Mac with uncontained disbelief.
 

“Easy to hide out here, with all this going on.” Tyco answered quietly. “As long as the facility was safe, strategic intervention wasn’t considered…necessary.”
 

“Looks pretty necessary from here.” Hog said grimly.
 

“Command called it a regional dispute.” Tyco shrugged. “Not in our charter. Nothing we could do.” From a certain angle, the Admiralty’s reasoning made brutal, efficient sense. Careers were made by such distinctions.

“God I love being the good guys…” Ghost shook his head, staring at another mountain of debris, its slopes littered with old, bloodied newspapers, flapping in the breeze.
 

“But there must have been something here to stop them!” Mac blurted. “A – garrison or something, at least a battalion to protect the facility! What happened to them?”

Tyco nodded back towards the rally point. “As far as I can make out, that was the it. What’s left of it.”

The troopers looked from one to the next, dismay rising among them as the realization hit home. It was one thing to fight wild, bloodthirsty irregulars, militias recruited to maim and kill, but if Tyco was right, the men they’d left in their wake had been Admiralty men. They might have trained in the same facilities as the Legion itself. If Tyco was right, they were very nearly fighting their own men. It was not a cheery thought.

“What happened to them?” Chip grunted between his teeth, unconcerned with the sudden calm. “They go nuts or something?”

Tyco stepped carefully over a skull on the floor, a skeleton hand stuck in its mouth in some forgotten threat or act of retribution. “Intel says they converted.” He answered heavily. The words echoed off the cavernous walls as Tyco started back down towards the sunlight.
 

“What do you mean, converted?” Chip asked, scanning the road ahead.
 

Tyco didn’t answer right away, trying to find the right words. “You saw the scarring on their necks?” He asked. They nodded quietly in return. “I’ve seen that symbol on damn near everything down here.” He nodded towards the graffiti dotting the walls. “When this place went, the facility’s battalion all dropped off the grid together. All of them, the whole unit, went AWOL at the same time. Like they made some kind of pact. I’m thinking that sign is their mark.”
 

Daylight burned brightly ahead, flooding into the tunnel and reaching towards the team. A tangle of city streets and prefabricated office buildings loomed beyond, punctuated at neat right angles by large, wide-open squares. The sun was high in the sky, the shadows it cast short and narrow. Tyco squinted into the sun, already considering the new threats that awaited them in the open air ahead.

“So that makes them, what, a cult?” Chip sneered, turning up his nose at the thought.

“That wasn’t in my briefing.” Tyco answered. “And I don’t really care. Our job’s securing that weapon.”
 

The tunnel ended abruptly, its concrete roof coming to a rusted, jagged point above the road. Shielding his eyes as he broke from its shadow, Tyco took the first step out into the light. He checked his display, then pointed diagonally across the open square ahead of them. “500 yards.” He said, the hard, focused edge coming back into his voice. “We’re on.”

The city was striking up close its buildings evidence of the haste and scale of world-building. Design had barely been considered, it seemed: these buildings had been intended for maximal immediate utility, and it showed. The inner city looked like it had been built almost overnight, its metal girders and foundations forced into rocky soil by men working at backbreaking speed around the clock. Long, unbroken sheets of concrete, metal, and glass sprawled across what had once been a natural valley, covering every square inch right up to a massive, solid granite hillside. Even there, the city continued, spilling up the rocky slope. Where the valley ended, structures had been carved directly into the stone. What had likely been sharp lines in the rock had crumbled now, weathered and smoothed, in stark contrast to the angular city below. Their weathering showed their age: these structures, cut into the ancient rock, were probably the oldest buildings in the city. The workers sent to raise this metropolis from the dust had likely sheltered there, waiting out the storms raised by late-stage terraforming. Crowning the hillside was a second, larger structure cut into the mountain behind it, presiding like a castle over the empty buildings below.
 

The view was as impressive as it was devastating: in its time, according to Tyco’s briefing, this had been a city of 20 million people. But the streets that lay before him were deserted and empty, haunted by a sinister silence.

The team walked across wide avenues, their thick asphalt worried and buckled by the heat. These central boulevards extended the length of the city grid, running parallel and perpendicular, their precise, right-angled design only accented by the destruction that now spilled over and around them.
 

The same rubble that had littered the tunnel covered streets and sidewalks. Smashed and burned roadblocks were visible at intervals, remnants of an eroded order. Missing only were the corpses, the carpet of bullet casings – and any sign of life. The city was silent, but for the wind sweeping down the streets, swirling small strips of paper into dancing circles in front of it. It was ghostly and uncanny, as if they had walked into a city in hiding, collectively holding its breath as it waited for the storm to pass. Hog stared uneasily at the looming skyscrapers.
 

“Either they know we’re coming,” She started, “Or – “

“They’re gone.” Chip said, coming up behind her triumphantly. “I just finished your sentence.” He declared, jeering with satisfaction. He walked away smoothly and unhurried, but quickly enough that Hog had no time to react. She could only shake her head and spit, glaring at his departing back.
 

Chip continued on, making quickly for the far corner of the open square, turning as he reached it to stare down another, wider boulevard, sizing up the dangers in the shadows ahead.
 

The sidestreet he was looking down led to another, even larger square, ringed by a series of low, colonial, bureaucratic buildings. They were squat and ugly, concrete adorned with unnecessary frills in vague, clumsy imitations of the Admiralty style, but against the monotony of the city’s architecture they seemed positively inspired. Only one structure stood apart, towering over the rest: it was a tall, modern office building, its smashed glass windows reaching towards the sky. Flagpoles, clear signs of its former authority, stood near the entrance, broken and skeletal now. Only one remained intact, flying the same, ever-present, blood-red rebel flag. A straw man wearing a white lab coat, red blood drawn around its throat, swung by a noose below.
 

Not that the broken flagpoles below it had gone unused: each stake was crowned with a regulation army combat helmet. And not only that – as Tyco brought his rifle to his eye, the blood running down the short metal poles became visible, the withered flesh under the olive-shaped covers testifying to their grisly contents: their owners were still here, beheaded and on display, facing out into the square in a silent warning. Behind, them, across the shining glass windows of the building above, the words ‘FOR US OR AGAINST US’ had been splashed in blood-red letters, completing the message. And above all, as if crowning the grisly scene, a metallic, sleekly sculpted version of the same twisted Möbius design still presided over the building. It matched the rebel emblem in every detail but one: it lacked the jagged, blood-red lightning bolt that cut the rebel flag in half.
 

Tyco ignored the dramatic scene in front of him, looking down instead to confirm the coordinates on his display. He had not known these men in life, and there was no point dwelling on their unhappy deaths now. They had a mission to finish, and they were very nearly there.

“That’s us.” He called evenly. “Chip, how’s it look?”
 

Chip hesitated briefly, eyes flying across the square before answering with assurance: “Yeah, Cap, it’s safe.” He answered. “We can go.”
 

“Alright,” Tyco said. “Let’s wrap this up.” He stepped forward boldly, cutting across the square and heading directly for the bloodied flagpoles – and the building beyond it.

ELEVEN: GROUND ZERO

The severed heads weren’t any prettier up close, and the team all slipped past them quickly. All except Chip, who gave them a studious once-over. Faces, frozen in horror, stared back at him through blood-stained visors, every lurid detail of their withered expressions visible through the dark glass.
 

“Keep moving.” Tyco said, without glancing back. “Unless you want to join them.” Chip took one last look and followed, shaking his head in disgust.

“Messy.” He muttered under his breath, though it was unclear if he was judging the presentation of the heads or their method of execution.

The building had been a strategic rally point, that much seemed clear from the extent of the destruction to the façade outside, the makeshift defense posts on its marble steps, and the rings of razor wire strung across the entryway and into the lobby. The unfortunates on the flagpoles, Tyco had no doubt, had made a stand here, but it had come to nothing, in the end.

The lobby was a mess of glass, splintered wood, and free-hanging wires. The elevator doors, too, were blown open and hanging loose against their runners. Judging by the splintered reception desk, grenades had done the work. The attackers truly had left no stone unturned in their fury. Tyco ducked under a fallen I-beam, his gloved hand scattering glass shards as he braced himself against the floor. The team followed him quickly, switching on their rifle flashlights as they moved into the dark of the lobby.
 

Tyco's display beeped in affirmation as the coordinates zeroed out. He stood where the marker had led them, in the obliterated reception area of a nameless office building, with no indication of what he was looking for.

"What now, Cap?" Hog asked, playing her beam over the exposed steel.

“I’m not seeing anything here…” Chip added helpfully.

Tyco ignored him and re-checked his display, toggling the settings to adjust the readout. It switched rapidly, bring up a changing array of datasets. He parsed through them until he found the altitude display. The map schematic turned on its side, rotating steadily until the two-dimensional readout broke into layers, showing the building in three dimensions. The beacon adjusted with it, diving through the floor on Tyco’s map and descending until it stopped, a hundred-odd yards below them. They were standing on top of it.
 

Tyco looked around the room quickly, narrowing his focus to the elevator shafts. "We go down." he said, and turned to Ghost. “You got rope?”
 

Ghost had already dropped his pack and was digging through it quickly, producing several coils of heavy-duty rappelling rope. Hog took them, securing them around the few remaining, untouched lobby pillars. She dumped the weighted loose ends down the yawning elevator shaft, letting them fall freely.
 

 
“These things safe?” Mac asked Tyco quietly, eyeing the rope with suspicion.
 

Tyco pulled one of the lines firmly, sizing up the strength of the knot and the integrity of the pillar. He turned to Mac with a wry grin. “You dropped a thousand miles from a low-orbit cruiser. I think you’ll be alright.”
 

He clipped a metal link onto his line, led the way over to the elevator shaft, and dropped down it quickly, disappearing from view. The others followed without hesitation, until just Hog and Mac were left in the lobby. Hog shrugged, picked up her line, and smiled.
 

“See you at the bottom.” She said, and then grinned mischievously. “Either way.”
 

The troopers zipped down the elevator shaft, flying yards at a time, coming within inches of the sheer metal walls. Boots clanged hard at intervals, slamming against the hard metal, and then finally touched down, thudding hard against the floor at the bottom of the long drop. Tyco landed first and immediately pulled up his readout to double-check their position. He shook his head, annoyed: the numbers still didn’t match.