Triangle

Josephine was standing in over a foot of water. Some effort had been made to make the quarters for the Fomorians – the nickname for the Special Boat Squadron troop that Balor commanded – on the Leviathan Carrier Class submarine HMS Vicious look like some fantastical grotto from a particularly dark fairy tale. As a result, she hadn’t been able avoid standing in one of the many shallow pools pervading the area.

All of the Fomorians had been extensively modified and sculpted, though none had gone as far as their leader, to whom they had a cult-like devotion. As she had made her way to Balor in the Sense Booth, the inhuman faces of his troop had stared at Bran. This was not a place where normal-looking humans were supposed to feel welcome. Perhaps not just ‘normal-looking’ – it was rumoured that in order to be accepted as a Fomorian you had to submit to neural surgery designed to change the way you thought.

‘She’s much happier when you’re in there with her,’ the cyborg said, addressing Balor with a voice modulated to sound unhuman. He glanced irritably at the Grey Lady. By now other Fomorians were unfolding themselves from bunks or climbing out of bath-like sleeping areas. It was as if the dark, tunnel-like quarters were suddenly alive with monsters.

Balor looked up to see that Bran had already turned and was walking away. He assumed that she had seen all that she wanted to.

‘Dose her. Run a stronger soporific program. You’ll need to finish the upgrades quickly after the briefing. Whatever nonsense we’re about, I want her with us.’ Eithne nodded then glanced after the Grey Lady. Balor was certain they were thinking the same thing. The Fomorians worked cohesively because they were so close, like a family, or, if Balor was being honest, like a cult, centred on him. This meant that they did not play well with others. Balor did not want Bran along with him, despite her reputation, but sometimes even he had little choice.

The briefing room was kept simple and bare to make it more difficult to hide surveillance devices. There was a table and a number of surprisingly comfortable mono-form chairs, but little else.

Sat on one of the chairs was the cause of Captain Akhtar’s current state of barely contained fury. They had been two days out of the Ultima Thule ice cavern dock, with an escort screen of Falkland class hunter killers, making for a rendezvous with the Somalia 8th fleet, when they’d been hailed by an unknown stealth boat that her sensor people were sure was part biotech. Because of the other boat’s biotech nature she had been tempted to open fire on it – only They had biotech craft – but the boat had been broadcasting the correct codes for a mission override from the Admiralty’s Special Operations command.

The stealth boat had contained Josephine Bran and orders for the HMS Vicious, orders that Captain Akhtar had struggled to take seriously but, due to their classified nature, hadn’t been able to rant about to her Executive Officer. Ranting to the Grey Lady seemed to be a waste of time. She only seemed to animate when it was time to discuss something mission specific.

‘I wish,’ she muttered as she sent a signal to the room’s white-noise generator and other counter surveillance systems. Two of the Fomorians flinched; they hadn’t dialled down the sensitivity on their cybernetic ears, their sound filters not quite good enough to protect against the burst of static. ‘Though this nonsense has little to do with me.’

The farm was dwarfed by a massive sleek, dark, biological-looking craft that had always reminded Akhtar of the media she’d seen of crocodiles, except more streamlined, and thickly armoured. Like all Themtech there was a liquid-like quality to the black, oily material it was made from, despite its apparent solidity. The craft’s various weapon emplacements resembled wart-like growths. Balor frowned.

‘Is that a Kraken?’ he asked. The Kraken was the largest sub They fielded. This one, however, did not look right.

‘This is a composite image taken from picket ROVs …’

‘No footage?’ Conand asked.

Akhtar tried to suppress her mounting frustration at being interrupted. Instead of responding, she just triggered play on the holographic projector. Had not everyone in the briefing room had augmented reactions, much of which was down to the speed of perception, they probably wouldn’t have been able to see the flick of the long, thin, whip-like cilia tentacles as they took out the Remotely Operated Vehicles. There were also a series of rapid black flashes, which suggested that some of the ROVs had been destroyed by black light weapons. Akhtar brought up the static image again, then went and leant against the wall wishing that she hadn’t quit smoking.

Balor stood up and leant over the table, his massive frame looming close to the three dimensional image. The thick tentacles had pierced the superstructure of the farm, but there was some sort of resinous looking material that had sealed the breach.

‘Campbell Farm, it’s more than twenty leagues behind our fleet screen,’ the Captain answered sharply, wondering why Bran wasn’t giving this briefing.

‘This is the rogue Kraken there’s been rumours about? Support and factory boats going missing, settlements destroyed, that sort of thing?’ Tethra asked. Even the monstrous modulation of his speech couldn’t quite hide the railgunner and heavy weapons expert’s cockney accent. He’d grown up in the Roaring Boys, one of the river Thames’ most feared pirate gangs. Akhtar’s family back in London had had dealings with the Roaring Boys. In many ways the Fomorians seemed a logical progression for his particular brand of psychotic. ‘Let me guess, no people were found?’

‘They came from coreward,’ Akhtar told them, pleased to finally get their attention. Material limitations meant that most submarine operations were restricted to the top three miles of water under the ice shelf. Deep diving subs could go down as far as seven miles, but combat operations at those depths were a zero sum game, as the smallest breach would mean a loss of structural integrity and implosion due to the extreme crushing pressure. It was known that some of the Their craft could dive a little deeper, but this was guarded against by solid state ROVs – often little more than intelligent torpedoes – and deep diving augmented guard and attack fauna.

‘What about internal footage?’ Conand asked. Akhtar shook her head. ‘What? Nothing from the security lenses?’ Akhtar glanced over at Bran before responding.

It suddenly went dark. The external lights on the farm had gone out. No, something had blocked them out, covered the port. The floor shook. There was a jarring impact followed by the sound of metal, composite carbon fibre and hardened plastics under extreme duress. Then another more powerful impact and they were flung across the room and into the wall, hard. There was nausea from the force of the blow, the taste of blood in their collective mouth. Then they heard the sound of metal being torn open, followed by the sound of rushing water. Fear turned to terror. The rushing sound lessened but the sounds of screaming intensified. The floor was ripped open, toothed tentacles uncurled, rising up over them. All of them recognised the strangely lopsided physiology of the aquatic Berserks climbing up the tentacles. The Berserks were made up of the same solidified liquid flesh that all of the aliens and their tech were formed from. The liquid flesh was covered in chitin-like armoured plate. Their lack of any discernible features on their heads only added to their alien appearance. Overwhelming terror now, even through the soft-sense link, as one of the Berserk’s raised its weapon gauntlet …

‘Yeah, I got that distinct slimy pants feel from him quite early on,’ Balor agreed, before turning to Captain Akhtar. ‘So, a new class of deep-diving Kraken that’s harvesting people? What’s this got to do with us?’

‘Cool,’ Balor said.

Eithne frowned.

‘A Leviathan class is no match for a Kraken,’ the Fomorian cybertech pointed out.

Balor appeared to be giving this some serious thought.

Captain Akhtar smiled.

‘When we find this Kraken, you four, along with Private Bran here, will be boarding her.’

There was silence.

‘Awesome,’ Balor said.

Moron, Captain Akhtar thought.

‘Why?’ Tethra asked.

‘Because we think we have a way of dealing with it from the inside,’ Private Bran said quietly. Balor’s massive head turned to look at the small nondescript woman.

And that was it. They were prepared to go. Intel was sparse, though it was obvious that Bran knew more than she was telling. As far as Akhtar could tell, Balor and the other three were to act as a fire team – security for whatever the Grey Lady thought she was going to do when she got there. Bran told them next to nothing about what to expect inside, all she told them was the whereabouts of the breach point. She also told them and Akhtar where to find the rogue Kraken. Akhtar would have been very interested in how she knew that particular nugget of information. She was also wondering why, if the Kraken had deep dive capabilities that outstripped the human fleet’s, it hadn’t run deep.

Balor and the other Fomorians had kitted up. Most of what they needed to survive in the near freezing water below the ice shelf was built into their extensively modified cybernetic bodies. They were adding personal weapon systems, more armour that clipped to their already armoured bodies, lots of ammunition and the bare minimum of survival gear and food.

He felt a hand against his chest. Balor looked down to see Bran with her hand out. The Grey Lady was about five foot six. Balor was nearly two feet taller than her. She was not looking up at him.

‘Don’t.’

Just one word. Balor had no idea why he hesitated. She hadn’t even looked up.

‘Little girl, I think you’re fast, capable, but I’ll tear your head off,’ Balor growled.

The Grey Lady looked up at him. Her eyes were grey, emotionless – practically lifeless. There was something wrong with them. It took Balor a moment to realise what it was. It wasn’t just the eyes. It was her facial expression, her body language. There was no trace of fear whatsoever. Balor let out a little grunt of humour. He liked this. It was different. He felt something stirring lower than his waist.

‘Alright,’ he said and gave her his best shark’s grin. Behind him, Dagon’s dorsal fin broke the surface of the Moon pool. Balor turned and headed back towards Conand, Tethra and Eithne who were watching their boss with some surprise.

The Vicious, with its running lights off, was a huge dark shape hovering ominously above them. The sub had a hull of thick armoured plate. Though pitted in places the hull was mostly smooth, with no right angles, to maximise its stealth capabilities. All of them knew that in combat situations it would look as if the hull had exploded as hatches opened to reveal anti-personnel and point defence steel gun batteries, torpedo batteries, sensor systems and weaponised ROV racks, as well as manoeuvring screws. They knew that hatches would open for the massive King Crab class, skin-walking mechs to head out onto the hull looking for enemy targets.

Currently the Vicious was using its nearly silent caterpillar drive, which moved the sub by sucking in water and then jetting it out at higher pressures. With a large piece of armoured plate lowered down to close up the Moon pool, cutting off its faint red illumination, the massive sub’s thermal signature was now minimised.

With a command thought from Balor, Dagon swam past, extruding grips from her armoured hide. Each of the five grabbed a grip.

Water displaced as the Vicious began to move ahead, climbing very slowly towards the pitted underside of the ice sheet. To the five divers being pulled by the shark, out ahead of the sub, in their night vision, the bottom of the ice sheet looked like a dark, inverted mountain range of colossal proportions.

As Dagon moved them through the water, the ropey, seaweed-like dreadlocks that hung down from Balor’s head spread out. They formed part of a passive sensor-receiver network that worked to pick up echolocation and water movements.

Dagon took them up past the Vicious. The cold, the darkness, the pressure of the water pushing in all around them were old friends to the four Fomorians. If the conditions gave Bran pause, then there was no indication of it. As a member of the SBS she would have been trained for deep ops.

The mouth of the cave looked dark. Even their internally illuminated light intensification provided them with little more visual information. Switching from this to thermographics, they found no heat sources. When the only planet in the Proxima Centauri system had been colonised there was initial thinking that it might have indigenous life, particularly coreward, close to some of the smokers. In the event, no such life had ever been found. Some of the initial contact with Them tech or organisms had been thought to be indigenous, but proved not to be. Before they were interrupted by the war, the terraformers had started to seed the ocean with life, but that hadn’t had time to take. There was nothing but darkness to see in the mouth of the cave, which was large enough to dwarf even the Vicious.

As the cavern swallowed them Balor glanced back through the water. Perspective played tricks on him and for a moment it looked as if the massive dark shape of the Vicious in the water below them was falling towards the mouth of the cavern to be consumed.

On the bridge, thinscreen and holographic displays ran through reams of pertinent information, showing sensor data, the projected topography and visual data from the hull lenses, but few paid attention to it. Like Captain Akhtar, they were all jacked in, and the information pertinent to their role was available to them in their vision or already in their mind.

‘Captain, we’re nearing the coordinates you provided,’ the navigator said on the command net.

‘Anything?’ she said it across the command net but emphasised it to the sensor operators.

‘We’re picking up suggestions of differences to the topography from the last survey, but that could be pressure ridges from tidal flexing,’ the commander in charge of the sensor team responded. It could be tidal flexing … or any number of other things, Akhtar thought.

‘Nothing, ma’am.’

‘Full stop,’ she told the crew. The caterpillar down-powered until it held them still in the water. Strictly speaking, this was against her orders. She was supposed to go to the coordinates and wait. That sounded too much like acting as bait. She wished she could have used Balor and the Fomorians as point scouts and forward observers. She had done so before, the Fomorians playing hide and seek in the ice caverns with Them forces.

‘Launch four of the sensor ROVs, tethered, no transmissions, passive scans and lens feed unless I say otherwise.’

They didn’t even acknowledge the order. Information on her Internal Visual Display showed it being done. Moments later, windows appeared in her IVD showing lens and sensor feed from the ROVs. This information would be being repeated in the IVDs of the nav, weapons, pilot and sensor teams. So far all it was showing was more of the long, dark ice tunnel with the jagged stalactite and mite teeth above and below that made for much less clearance than Akhtar would have liked.

Nearly dead on the coordinates they found a suitable series of small cracks in the ice near the tip of one of the stalactites. The three Fomorians and Bran manoeuvred themselves into the crevices, clawed hands biting into ice. They took icepaks from clipped-on pouches which deflated slightly as the paks were removed. They transmitted visual information to the paks from the palm links they usually used to connect to their weapons smartlink targeting systems. The clear paks started sucking in water and expanding to cover the Fomorians and Bran, connecting to the wall of the crevices and then freezing solid, forming a thin sheet of ice over the Special Forces operators that disguised them, but could easily be broken through.

Dagon and Balor had patrolled whilst his people had hidden themselves in with the ice. Now comes the hard part, the self-styled sea demon thought. He found a crevice that would fit them both and sent the suspended animation command to Dagon’s neuralware. An animal that was never supposed to stop moving did so. Dagon’s internal cybernetic systems worked overtime to keep the shark alive, even as they pumped soporific drugs through her system. Balor hated doing it to the magnificent beast but the mission, on this occasion, called for it. He towed the limp shark into position, removed and activated an icepak, then held her tight as ice grew over them both.

He had toyed with the idea of leaving stealthed, tethered, micro-sensor buoys outside the icepak’s covering, but he had come to the conclusion that whatever was going to happen here was predestined. He felt there was some mystical coalescing of events coming to pass. On the other hand, he reflected, he had redesigned his mind to be extensively, but functionally, delusional.

‘What have we got?’ she asked the bridge crew across the command net. Silence. ‘Anything. I don’t care how ridiculous or inconsequential you think it is.’

‘This section appears to have been damaged recently by the flexing, a lot of new pressure ridges.’

‘Yes?’ Akhtar asked, hoping for something unusual.

‘If I was going to hide something …’ Rawlings tailed off, as some of the sensor team, including the section’s commander, turned to look at him.

Just under four hundred years of submarine warfare, all the improvements made in stealth technology, passive and active sensors – it was funny how often it still seemed to come down to this, Akhtar mused.

‘Ping it,’ she told the sensor team. They’d still not invented anything better than sonar for finding things under water. There was a moment’s hesitation; submarine combat was a duel of nerves – whoever broke first and pinged the other one revealed their position first, and often lost. The ping echoed loud through the water; the topographic map suddenly filled out with information from the sonar. Almost dead ahead of them something enormous shifted, uncoiling from around a huge pillar of ice that ran from the ceiling to almost the floor of the ice tunnel. Ice cracked off it and began floating upwards as tentacles let go of the massive ice stalactite. There was a moment of silence from the crew. Akhtar downloaded the classified fields of fire information that she had been given by Bran.

‘Full active scans, bring up all running lights. Weps, I have just sent you field of fire parameters. You may fire at will within those parameters.’ This was a dream come true to the weapons team in a normally frugal navy. ‘Pilot, full reverse. That thing does not touch my boat. Ladies and gentleman, burn the water and melt the ice.’

‘Red to blue wings cleared to launch, target their point defence systems.’ Akhtar said over the command net. ‘Slave your transponders to weps and make some noise. Launch the attack ROVs and I want all crabs walking the skin.’ She sent the field of fire parameters to the fast attack boats, and the six-legged, King Crab class heavy mechs that would walk the hull of the sub. Weps would add the parameters to the automated and telepresence-operated attack ROVs. ‘All call signs are weapons free within provided fields of fire parameters,’ she added. The parameters were pretty loose. Balor, Bran and their team were going to find themselves dangerously close to an awful lot of firepower.

Then came the first orange and white blossoms of plasma fire. It burnt in the water, making steam and bubbles that shot upwards. Even in the crevice some of the ice started to run. Balor prepared to send the command that would inject adrenalin into Dagon’s slowly rousing system and wake her up completely.

Water burned in an ever-blossoming line between the massive form of the Vicious and the front of the Kraken, as repeated plasma torpedoes were destroyed by hydrodynamic shard rounds from the Kraken’s blister-like point defence batteries. The Kraken’s returning torpedoes looked more like fast-moving, thin, spiky barracuda than ordinance. They exploded in crackling black energy as steel gun point defence batteries targeted them. The Vicious had its massive fan-like screws unfolded and they were powering it backwards at a speed that looked positively dangerous in the narrow confines of the tunnel of ice. The Kraken’s huge tentacles reached for the Leviathan class sub through plasma fire and burning water. Balor’s face was full of wonder. This looked like a battle between ancient sea monsters. A Titanomachy. It was beautiful.

They swam down through a forest of the whipping, cilia-like small tentacles towards the black liquid-looking material of the massive Them craft. They hadn’t been spotted yet. Balor had always favoured the strength part of the SBS motto “By Guile and Strength” but he wanted to savour this. Around him water boiled, above him ice started to sweat. He could see Their light mech equivalents, Walkers, patrolling the thick chitinous armour plate of the Kraken. Berserks were growing from the enemy sub’s skin. The water looked blue now, the bright white light from the Vicious’ running lights reflecting off the ice. The blue of the water was shot through with lines of darkness as Berserks and Walkers fired their black light weapons at incoming ROVs and the fast attack subs. A thick line of black pierced the wreath of fire as the entropy cannon in the Kraken’s maw fired and some of the Vicious’ fore-mounted armoured plate buckled and cracked, its structural integrity significantly reduced.

Balor’s audio filter kicked in again, cutting out the thunder of a fast attack boat’s super-cavitation. The brave pilot, falling through the air bubble created by the screws at the fore and aft of his sub, was targeting the Kraken’s point defence systems to enable the Vicious’ bigger torpedoes to get through. The boat was stopped suddenly as one of the cilia-like defensive tentacles caught it. Other tentacles whipped around it and suddenly the thunder was silenced; the fast attack sub became little more than crushed wreckage.

Dagon’s jaws met and the Walker became a patch of black liquid for the shark to swim through. Balor’s internal nav systems superimposed a route to their breach point on his image. It was busy in that area.

‘Concentrate fire,’ he subvocalized over the tacnet. He used his targeting software to lock in an overlapping saturation pattern for the eight micro torpedoes in the grenade launcher and made the information available to the rest of the team. Eithne and Conand also fired eight mini torpedoes from their grenade launchers. All of them reloaded in unison as they continued swimming down toward the Kraken. Bran provided support fire from the Retributor. Tethra had his railgun hanging underneath him as he fired down at targets on the Kraken’s skin. Ahead of them the water was filled with the wake of ordinance. The hydrodynamic rounds set up ripples in the Berserks’ and Walkers’ liquid-like flesh, tearing them into tendrils of black liquid.

There was a series of staggered explosions as black light point defence weapons detonated some of the mini torpedoes, and then the rest hit, their concentrated explosive warheads detonating. Berserks and Walkers were torn apart or blown clear of the Kraken’s hull/skin. The shockwave battered them around.

A tentacle grabbed Eithne and crushed her, leaving a cloud of components and precious little blood hanging momentarily in the water. Another tentacle grabbed for Bran. Strangely bone-like spurs slid from her power armour’s forearms and she cut at the tentacle, using her water jet propulsion system to push her away from it. Balor felt something wrap around his ankle and squeeze, hard. He felt the armour on his leg crack and then a sharp tug. He looked back. The tentacle was gone, whipping in the water, spraying black ichor as Dagon swam away from him, her massive jaws opening and then closing on a Berserk.

They were just over the hull of the Kraken. The breach point was a massive sphincter-like gill orifice. Balor couldn’t understand the reason for the gill-like organ’s existence and had never seen one before on any other Them craft. He sent the signal to Dagon to leave, along with primary, secondary and tertiary rendezvous coordinates and swam into the orifice, pushing against the curtains of thick seaweed-like material that stretched vertically across the sphincter’s opening. It felt like he was pushing up against oily vinyl. Balor couldn’t shake the feeling that he was making his way into an enormous arsehole. The thick curtain-like strips seemed to be some kind of filter system.

Balor felt a sharp pain in his arm as he pushed his way through the curtain forest. Looking down, he saw a faintly oblong shaped creature, roughly fish-like in form, and made from the same strange substance as the rest of Them were. The creature mostly seemed to consist of one large mouth. Balor wasn’t sure whether it was a parasite, a component of the filter system or guard fauna, but he tore it off, leaving a trail of blood in the water. It had powerful jaws and had bitten straight through both his clip-on armour and his armoured skin. He crushed the thing, turning it into a small black cloud. He clipped the Spectre/grenade launcher combo to his back as more of the things swam at him. He grabbed them, crushing them with clawed, webbed hands, even bit at them, tearing into them with rows of shark like teeth. He’d killed Them with his teeth before; he hated it, it left an oily, chemical taste in his mouth that took weeks to get rid of. He tore them off his body as they bit through his armour.

Balor pushed through the last of the curtains and was surprised to find himself looking up at the surface of a pool. Bran was ahead of him, finishing off a few of the biting armoured fish creatures with the bone spurs on her power armour. The others joined them. Conand was struggling, with a number of the creatures all over him. Seeing them attached, Balor decided they looked like armoured leeches.

Focusing his attention above the pool Balor spotted what seemed to be some sort of non-liquid atmosphere. This didn’t make sense. They could operate in vacuum, They didn’t require air, so why would They pressurise a sub when They could fill it with water, which couldn’t be compressed and would thus allow Them to dive deeper.

‘Fire in the hole,’ Bran subvocalized over the tacnet, and went down on one knee in the power armour. The others did likewise, covering their ears and opening their mouths. One of the launchers on Bran’s armour popped open and an egg-like piece of ordinance was ejected from the water.

Above the pool Berserks and two Walkers watched as the egg-like device split open like a flower. Nano fuels scattered as far and wide as they could before the small explosive charge ignited.

Above the pool everything became fire and, moments later, force, as a horrific shockwave drove Balor and the others down face first into the bottom of the pool. Then, as the explosion fed on the oxygen above, further shockwaves hit them. As the air disappeared water rushed to fill the gap, entering through the orifice the team had originally come through, battering them further and washing them up and into the chamber, then out through a tunnel, bouncing them off walls.

The front of the Kraken was still wreathed in plasma fire and most of the water in the cavern around it was on fire, but the Vicious was going to run out of plasma warheads in the very near future. That would leave them just the less effective concentrated explosive warheads. The entire front of the Kraken looked melted. At heavy cost, the fast attack subs had taken out the enemy sub’s point defence systems so the torpedoes could reach it, but still the Kraken kept coming. Still the massive burning tentacles reached for her boat.

‘On me,’ Bran said over the tacnet. Balor didn’t like her taking command, but only she knew the way now. He turned and swam towards her power armour’s transponder location. When the water level became too shallow, he stood up and moved rapidly towards Bran, his weapon sweeping left, right, up and down looking for targets.

‘That was a Fuel Air Explosive wasn’t it?’ Bran said over a private comms link to Bran. He saw Tethra ahead. The railgunner was limping slightly. The other Fomorian raised his railgun and started firing past Balor. Balor’s audio filters kicked in, protecting his hearing from the staccato hypersonic bangs that ran in together. The overlapping shockwaves rattled his teeth. On the window that was receiving feed from Tethra’s guncam Balor saw the Berserks that had just emerged from a corridor behind him. The railgun tore them up as if they were paper. Balor turned and knelt down, giving Tethra a slightly better field of fire, then fired two mini torpedoes from his grenade launcher into the shallow water, giving them target instructions. The torpedoes shot round the corner and exploded. Tethra swung into the entrance of another corridor on the opposite side of the tunnel. Balor followed him. As the water became shallower, he swapped out the grenade launcher’s bullpup magazine of mini-torpedoes, replacing them with more conventional grenades. Ahead of them they could hear the unmistakeable sound of a Retributor firing short but rapid bursts.

Looking down the corridor they had turned into and magnifying his vision Balor could just about make out Bran standing central in a corridor some way ahead. Conand was just behind her. She was moving slightly as she fired, readjusting her aim and then firing again. The footage from her Retributor’s guncam showed a corridor full of alien shapes.

‘Fire in the hole,’ Bran said again, over the tacnet. Tethra shook his head but then crouched covering his head, mouth open. Balor did the same.

‘How’d she know there’d be air?’ Tethra asked irritably over a private comms link. FAE’s were useless underwater. They required oxygen to fuel the thermobaric reaction.

‘They were harvesting humans from the boats and settlements they raided,’ Balor said, shrugging. He was enjoying watching Bran work. ‘C’mon.’

They advanced down the tunnel, Tethra covering the rear. Reaching Bran’s power armour they saw the tunnel ahead was dripping black liquid. Balor noticed that there were only two sealed launch tubes left on the power armour.

Akhtar felt the horror but she had to compartmentalise it, lock it away. Her people were staring at her now, fear on their faces, the stink of it thick on the bridge.

‘Weps set all remaining ordinance to blow, link it to the scuttling charges command.’ She would trigger it when they had got as many out as possible. She switched from the command net to the shipwide comms net with a thought. ‘This is the Captain speaking, all hands abandon boat. I repeat, all hands abandon boat. Use the escape vehicles to the aft of the boat only.’ Then switching back to the command net: ‘This is the Captain to all fast attack boats, we are abandoning and scuttling the boat. I want you to move to the aft of the Vicious and cover the escape vehicles.’ She repeated the order to the remaining King Crab mechs and told weps to use the few remaining combat capable ROVs to do the same.

They had come to another sphincter-like doorway, closed tight shut. Tethra and Bran were covering them, firing their railguns back down the corridor they had just come through. A stray shard caught Balor in the arm, breaching his clipped-on armour but not getting through his body’s own thick scales.

‘Any ideas?’ Balor asked over the tacnet. There was no answer from Bran. Then the sphincter, for no apparent reason, just opened. Balor turned to step through but felt a power-armoured hand grab him by the shoulder and pull him back. There was a moment of fury, which he suppressed, as Bran stepped past him. He followed with Conand as Tethra held the rear, firing burst after burst from the railgun.

Balor had a moment to take in the chamber. It looked like an intersection of four tunnels. The tunnels to the left and right of them stretched out into the distance on either side. The tunnel ahead of them, however, was a short corridor ending in an opening. Beyond the end of the short tunnel was what looked like a large open area. Balor could make out shapes that almost looked like buildings, though they seemed to be moving, as if swaying in a gentle breeze. The whole area was lit by a bioluminescent glow.

Balor started to check above them, but it was too late. From a corridor directly above, a Walker landed on Bran’s power armour. Their light mech’s weapon gauntlet slammed the much smaller power armour into the ground. It extruded claws that slowly pierced the suit’s armour. The Walker’s other weapons gauntlet became spiked pincers that pushed into the power armour and then widened, peeling the armour open. One of the flailing tentacles on its back whipped out and tore a gaping rent in Balor’s armour, cutting down to his internal components and what little was left of his flesh. His internal medicalware flooded his system with painkillers as they did what they could to repair the damage. Another tentacle knocked Conand off his feet.

There were Berserks flooding the chamber from the left, the right, the corridor ahead and crawling down the corridor directly above them. The feed from Tethra’s guncam showed that the railgunner had a target rich environment, and hypsersonic rounds tore apart Berserk after Berserk.

Balor was only aware of multiple hits from shard rounds and black light beams as information on his IVD and, occasionally, little long-forgotten sensations from nerve endings. His armour was a mess of scores, gouges, craters and burns.

There was no communication from Bran as she struggled beneath the Walker. She had her spurs extended, repeatedly gouging at the mech’s skin. Balor calmly replaced his grenade launcher’s magazine, changing from his room-clearing mix to High Explosive Armour Piercing grenades. He staggered as more shard rounds hit him, then levelled the grenade launcher and fired two of the 30mm HEAP grenades into the Walker at point blank range. The Walker shook with impacts. Balor moved away, firing the Spectre. The grenades exploded inside the Walker. Suddenly part of it was missing. A huge crater in its flesh. The light mech flailed around almost piteously. Bran managed to get the leg of the power armour under the light mech and then pushed it up off her, slamming it against the wall, holding it there with her foot whilst she brought the Retributor to bear. The burst was long and ragged as it tore the damaged Walker to pieces.

‘Incoming transmission,’ Conand said over the tacnet.

‘Don’t answer it!’ Bran shouted.

Conand turned and fired a flechette grenade into Tethra’s back. Needles embedded in armour, some of them making through both layers. Tethra would have seen his fellow Fomorian raise the weapon to point at him in the feed from Conand’s guncam. Conand pulled the trigger again. The frag grenade was programmed to explode as it reached Tethra. The force of the explosion staggered Balor and knocked Conand off his feet. Tethra was a mangled mess on the ground, but somehow his badly damaged armoured form was still moving. Conand was sitting up, again aiming the Spectre at Tethra when Balor levelled the Benelli shotgun pistol at the other Fomorian’s head and put two armour piercing sabot 12.5mm rounds into the back of Conand’s skull. Brain, bone, blood, laced carbon fibre and fragments of metal plate hit the wall or flew into the air as a spray. Balor had no idea what had happened and couldn’t care less. Turning on another Fomorian meant death. He tossed a fragmentation grenade down the corridor to finish Tethra off – he was too injured to save.

‘B …’ Tethra managed over the tacnet before he exploded.

Bran’s power armour was too heavily damaged to be of practical use. Explosive bolts blew the chest piece into the air as the faceplate, leg and arm armoured panels opened. Balor turned back to see Bran on her feet. She was lightly armoured and grabbing some kind of canister from a storage compartment on the mangled power armour’s leg. She clipped it to her belt and started running for the open space. The corridor between them and the open space was full of Berserks, and a Walker rose above them.

Bran slid between the legs of a Berserk and threw two discs at the wall. Balor ran after her. He fired the shotgun pistol into the head of the Berserk until it dropped to the ground in a rain of black liquid.

Balor gritted his teeth. Dropping the empty shotgun pistol he brought the Spectre/grenade launcher combination weapon to bear and fired two of the 30mm HEAP grenades into the Walker. The Walker staggered from the impact of the grenades. Balor dropped the Spectre and grabbed the cylinder clipped to his leg. With a signal from Balor’s palm link the cylinder extended into a longspear with a laser sharpened titanium tip. Screaming, he charged the Walker as parts of it exploded from within, showering him in black liquid. Balor leapt high into the air and drove the spear into the staggering Walker. The momentum drove the Walker back before making it topple over. Balor landed, pushing the spear in deeper, sending the signal for the spearhead to grow into a trident and then twisting it in the wound.

Bran had pistols in her hands again, firing burst after burst of armour-piercing hydro shock rounds, always into the Berserk’s heads, the culminating hydrostatic shock setting off a chain reaction that shook them apart. She leapt onto the Walker and threw herself into a somersault just before it liquefied. The pistols gone now, she landed on the lopsided shoulders of one of the Berserks. Black carbon fibre blades extended from her fingers and, in a series of lightning fast strikes, she drove the blades into the Berserk’s featureless face. It liquefied and she landed, rolling forward onto her feet, simultaneously throwing what looked like a small piece of line around a nearby Berserk. The line wrapped itself around the alien. Bran ran up the wall, dodging a blow from a Berserk’s weapon gauntlet. She sprung off the wall and grabbed the back of its head. She swung herself around it, the momentum dragging it to the ground. Balor strode after her as the programmed monofilament line tightened through the Berserk bisecting it, causing it to liquefy. Bran rapidly stuck yet another Berserk in the head. The carbon fibre blades pierced its flesh until it turned into black liquid, soaking her.

It was a moment of epiphany. Balor watched Bran with awe, realising he must be in love. This was the woman he wanted to die with here and now. He thrust the trident forward into the chest of a Berserk as it rounded the corner. He twisted the trident inside it, lifting it off its feet before it turned into a shower of black liquid. Suddenly they were alone in the tunnel. He stepped forwards and looked out over the large chamber. Bran came to stand next to him, unclipping the canister from her belt.

She had felt a thump earlier on. It had shaken the boat. She had assumed that it had been the Vicious hitting the bottom of the ice tunnel. She had prayed to Allah that the tunnel wouldn’t collapse under the weight of the Leviathan class sub. The creaking of the superstructure all around her was sounding more and more ominous, but it was the sound of the slithering noise of the tentacles across the armoured hull of her beautiful boat that was really making her grind her teeth in impotent rage.

‘We need to go …’ the other woman started. The superstructure collapsed above them.

They swayed in some unfelt breeze.

The floor of the valley seemed to writhe. At first it reminded Balor of maggots but as he, almost reluctantly, magnified his vision, he saw it was human flesh. It took him a while to work this out, because they were not normal human bodies. Instead, segmented torsos fused together formed blind senseless worms. Networks of limbs with multiple heads crawled over a living carpet of skin that had been sewn together. There were no Berserks, Walkers or any other Them here. But further down the rocky ledge they were on Balor saw a creature that reminded him of a cybrid centaur. The steed was two fused together torsos with six arms protruding out of it. It clambered over the rock with ease. A third torso stuck out of it with a head whose mouth and eyes had been sewn shut. Behind it, following the horrific centaur, was a torso with legs where arms should be and what looked like a sphincter on its neck stump, with eyes sitting either side of the sphincter.

Josephine put the launcher to her shoulder and fired. The projectile flew out high over the valley and exploded. To Balor it looked as if exactly nothing had happened. A moment’s distraction, nothing more.

Akhtar didn’t think breathing bubbles of blood was a good sign. She tried to move her arm to move the wreckage off of her. No matter how hard she tried the arm wouldn’t budge. Perhaps, she calmly reflected, it was because her arm was separated from her body and lying about three feet away. It was a clean cut. She assumed it was from a pressurised jet of water. The water was rising. Polski’s head was bobbing along on top of it. As blackness rose to claim her, Akhtar could have sworn that Polski’s eyes were blinking.

‘Yaah!’ Balor shouted and shot to his feet. Bran was standing next to the bench. He looked around wildly, his dreadlocks flailing around his head. ‘You shouldn’t be able to do that.’ He noticed that Dagon’s dorsal fin had gone again. Bran shook her head as he offered her the “whisky”.

‘Whatever that was, it could end the war?’ he asked. Balor was surprised by Bran looking up at him towering over her, making eye contact again. She nodded. There was a long silence. ‘I don’t want the war to end.’ Balor said quietly. This time it was him who wouldn’t make eye contact. Bran swallowed hard.

‘Kiss me,’ she said. Balor stared at her. He would have been less surprised if a Berserk or even Captain Akhtar had said that. But there was something there in the face looking up at him. Vulnerability looked alien and lost in her expression.

He opened his mouth. She all but climbed up him as her lips parted and their mouths met.

From the water she saw the heat of the touch. Their maws were touching, joining, seeming to fuse. She could not understand what they were doing but in her simple, ancient, predatory brain she understood the significance. She knew what a competitor was.

Dagon burst out of the water, breaching as she slid across the metal deck. The extensively modified bull shark’s power-assisted jaws closed around Bran, even as the massive shark started to slide back into the water.

Dagon was taking her down at speed. Either the integrity of her subcutaneous armour was holding up, or the shark knew enough to hold Bran in her mouth rather than bite clean through, though Bran reflected that would probably kill her just as successfully.

Dagon had the left side of Bran’s torso in her mouth and had trapped her left arm. This was unfortunate because what Bran wanted was in a pouch on the left side of her webbing. She had already sent a command to the weapon. Without hesitation, she unstrapped the armour from her right arm, using her teeth to pull open quick-release clasps. She reached across herself and pushed her right arm into the shark’s mouth. It took every bit of boosted strength she possessed. More blood clouded the water as forcing her arm past serrated rows of teeth ripped through her subcutaneous armour and deep into flesh.

The pouch was in an awkward position, seeming just out of reach. Carbon fibre blades slid out of her fingers as she tore into the pouch. The programmable monomolecular line slithered out of the pouch like a snake. The line wrapped itself around the upper jaw of the shark and started to squeeze. Dagon thrashed. There was more blood in the water. Bran felt bitterly cold. Felt herself starting to lose consciousness as everything became numb. Dagon’s upper jaw was cut away. Bran, now freed, knew the shark, though probably dying, was still dangerous. She found purchase on its thrashing form by gripping one of its eyes. Carbon fibre blades broke through the hardened plastic lens as the Grey Lady held on for grim life. She braced herself with her feet and then with her right hand she started pushing her bladed fingers into the soft internal flesh of the shark’s bisected head. Even when she reached the brain and long after the shark was dead, Dagon did not stop thrashing.

‘It’s better that way,’ she said quietly. ‘I’m sorry I killed your shark.’

‘The Black Worm virus?’ he asked from the other side of the desk.

‘It worked, they died. Even the Kraken.’

‘As far as I could tell you had control.’

‘You used that on Corporal Conand?’ He nodded. ‘Then it worked, although I’m not sure it was necessary.’ He studied her. It was as close as she got to criticism. ‘The reversing of the meatware interface certainly worked with Balor. What happened on the mission was completely wiped.’

‘The psychological aspect?’ he asked, paying much closer attention to her answer. Bran glanced up at the triptych on the wall behind him.

‘Ineffective,’ she lied. ‘You were dealing with me and someone who’d had themselves surgically altered to live in a high functioning delusion where he was a demon. Veterans are not going to be moved by that kind of thing.’

The Major narrowed his eyes. He hadn’t liked that.

‘Dismissed.’ Bran turned and headed for the door. ‘One more thing, Josephine.’ She stopped. ‘Balor?’ She turned to look at him.

‘He is of no use to us. Too noisy, too interested in glory and fame. He is the wrong kind of monster.’ After all, she had liked him.

This entry was posted on Friday, April 19th, 2013 at 7:01 pm. It is filed under Short Stories – The Veteran Universe. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.