Cyber Dreams 2.19 - What Squints Get Up To

It's been a hectic day! Glad to get this delivered - hope you all enjoy it. Let me know if I did anything boneheaded :)

-Plum

“This is bullshit,” Houston said after a while, spitting a string of brown-tinted saliva onto the concrete pad just outside the facility’s door.

“What?” Juliet asked, leaning against the wall on the other side. She wondered if he was chewing tobacco and, if so, why. Smoking real cigarettes seemed strange enough to her; she couldn’t imagine stuffing leaves of the stuff into her cheek.

“Being on babysitting detail . . . no offense.” He frowned and sniffed loudly, and Juliet wondered what he looked like under that darkly tinted visor. She thought about that, about whether she should get a visor like that for her helmet; it seemed most of the team had them, but they were all a little different—custom pieces, she figured. That thought brought another question to mind: was this gear permanently assigned to her, or was it just for the day’s mission?

“None taken. You didn’t seem too excited to go in there, though . . .”

“Put a lid on that, rookie!” Houston said, some gravity and bass suddenly entering his voice, “You don’t know me well enough to bust my balls.”

“Yes, sir.” Juliet didn’t let her irritation show, keeping her face neutral as she performed another scan of the tree line. “Where are we?”

“Up north—near Flagstaff, I think, your PAI should be able to get a ping from the sat-net.” He stared into the dark hallway for a minute, then said, “Bet you didn’t think you’d see this kind of action today, huh?”

“No, I really didn’t. Is this sort of thing common?”

“Nah, not really. If we have combat, it’s usually against active aggressors—terrorists or corpo sabotage.”

Before Juliet could follow up with another question, Polk’s voice came through comms, “Houston, status?”

“Quiet as a picnic in a meadow full of daisies, Sarge.”

“Like you’d know,” White’s icon lit up as he spoke into the comms.

“Goddammit! Can this shit! Houston, secure that door, lock it tight, then bring your partner and come to our position. Facility map incoming.”

“Clarifying—you want me to lock us inside, Sarge?”

“Correct.”

Juliet saw a new tab appear on her AUI, and when she activated it, a top-down map of the hallways and rooms of the facility appeared, two blinking dots near the southern extremity and five others further in, near a wide T junction. She stepped through the doorway, training her shotgun’s muzzle toward the darkness. Houston followed her in, then turned to start fiddling with the door panel. “Not a good sign that Sarge wants me to lock us in,” he muttered. Juliet wondered if she should reply—they weren’t speaking in the group comms, but the watchdog kept track of everything they saw or heard . . . or said.

“Why?” she asked, feeling she couldn’t get in trouble for trying to learn.

“Means she thinks there’s something going on in here we don’t want to let out.” As he finished speaking, the door hissed and slid shut, then he unplugged his portable battery and hooked it to his gear bedecked belt. “You take point with that shotgun, but if I say to get down or get back, move like you mean it.”

“Roger,” Juliet said, crouch walking into the darkness, though, in her enhanced vision, she could see her environment plain as day. She sidestepped to avoid a big blood stain, not sure if Grave considered this a crime scene.

“Keep a steady heading, rook—I don’t want to guess where you’re going to be when I’m aiming my gun.”

“Right,” Juliet said, angry at herself for overthinking things. She glanced at her map and saw that the rest of the unit was still spread out around the T junction and that they were only a few dozen meters further in. She angled her gun’s barrel toward the ground, not wanting to paint her upcoming teammates with her crosshairs. She and Houston were nearly up to a pair of doors that opened to the left and right, and she said, into comms, “Sarge, are the rooms we’re about to pass clear?”

“Yes. You two are clear all the way to us; put a hustle on it, Houston.”

“Aye, Sarge,” Houston said, lowering his SMG and letting it hang by his side as he hurried past Juliet. She sighed, lowering her barrel further and jogging in his wake. When they came up to the T junction, Juliet saw that the rest of the team had been stymied by more locked doors. The one on the right looked like it had been welded shut.

“Get these doors open, Houston. Start with the unwelded one.”

“If you have a torch, I can get the other one, Sarge,” Juliet said.

“You trained on an oxy-torch?” Houston asked, shrugging out of his backpack and rifling through it.

“Yeah, I know what to do with it.” Juliet almost mentioned the scrapyard but then remembered she was Lydia Roman. “Had a neighbor who did weird metal art.”

“Here.” He handed her a compact unit with two slim, highly pressurized plasteel canisters. She’d worked with similar . . . and much larger equipment.

“Angel, can my implants filter well enough for me to cut metal without damaging them?” While she spoke, Juliet examined the tip of the cutting torch, saw it was well-maintained and clean, and then moved over to the door.

“Yes. I can narrow your ocular input down to less than a single percent of radiated light.”

“Rodriguez, you’ve got Roman's back—be ready; we don’t know why they welded that door shut. White? You locked and loaded?”

“Aye, sarge, Houston, keep to the right of your door, and Roman, cut top to bottom, stay low when you finish.”

“Roger,” Juliet said, pushing the ignition on her torch and focusing the flame before getting started. As she touched the cutting torch to the metal, cranking up the output, she was pleased to see that Angel automatically dimmed her vision, doing a job nearly as good as the goggles built into her old welding rig. She ripped through the welded seam at the middle of the sliding doors in record time, and as she clicked the torch off, she crouch-walked to the side, making sure she didn’t stand up into anyone’s crosshairs.

“That was fast, Roman.” Polk clapped her on the shoulder. “Move to the back; I’m not seeing any heat signatures or movement on the other side of the doors, so we’ll wait for Houston to finish up.”

“Almost there, Sarge. Roman, you better not have slagged my cutting tip.”

“It’s fine,” she replied, stuffing the portable unit into Houston’s pack. She moved back to the long corridor leading toward the entrance and waited as he finished working on the second door. It was only a few seconds later that she heard it click and hiss open.

“Good!” Polk said. “Houston, get the other door powered up and open. Vandemere, you’re with Yang and me. We’ll head toward the living quarters. White, you take the others toward engineering after that door’s opened; get Houston to bring the reactor back online.”

“Sarge, I’m not exactly a reactor expert,” Houston groused, crouching next to the other door’s security panel.

“You’ll manage,” Polk replied as she, Yang, and Rodriguez started down the now-open corridor to Juliet’s left.

Houston waited a few seconds for Polk and the others to move off, then he quietly mimicked her, “You’ll manage.” He glanced at the still-ticking cut Juliet had made in the metal, and he gave her a look, letting his visor linger on her for a minute before turning back to the panel. “Pretty nice line. Looks like you cut a lot of metal for the neighbor.”

“How long,” White asked, moving forward, so the long, heavy barrel of his gauss rifle was trained at the tiny gap between the two sliding doors.

“Couple of minutes . . .”

Juliet watched White and Rodriguez, noticing how the other man had his automatic rifle shouldered, and was keeping to the right side, ensuring that he had a clear shot when the doors opened. Juliet moved to stand behind him, her shotgun aimed down and to his left. She realized she was holding her breath and forced herself to inhale a couple of times, deep into her belly, as she waited for Houston to rewire the door.

Juliet wondered why she didn’t hear Polk and the others speaking as they cleared their way deeper into the complex, and then she realized the watchdog app had automatically split their team comms. She remembered going over that in her training the previous week, though it had only been about a forty-five-minute primer on how to use the watchdog comms.

Juliet felt like she’d already forgotten a lot of the stuff they’d watched on those training vids, even though there had been quizzes afterward. She was trying to remember how to select the entire team channel when the door clicked and hissed open, and Houston straightened up.

“Voila!” he said, but White ignored him, carefully moving forward, training his powerful gun down the long hallway.

“No movement,” he said into their sub-unit’s comms. “Let’s go. Lydia, you’ve got the rear position, be ready to help clear.”

The team continued into the corridor, battery-powered, orange-tinged emergency lights providing enough light for their optics to enhance their vision. Juliet could only imagine how freaky it would be to walk into a place like this if she didn’t have capable optics. The smell was bad enough—stale air with a hint of decay and copper. The silence was also unnerving; all her life, Juliet had grown used to the ever-present hum of machinery inside buildings—refrigeration units, cooling fans, the hum of electrical appliances; none of those were present in this place.

“Something ahead,” White said. Juliet looked past his shoulder, trying to see what he saw, and Angel increased the magnification on her optics and the gain on her audio implants. A junction came into focus, and she saw bodies slumped in awkward positions, copious amounts of blood smeared around the place.

Short, rapid breaths seemed to echo into the air from several different sources as her hearing gain ramped up, and she subvocalized into her team comms, “Breathing. Lots of it. Do you guys have audio?”

“I don’t . . .” Houston started to say, but then Rodriguez interrupted.

“She’s right! Five . . . six . . . seven sources.”

“Hold,” White said, dropping to the floor and flipping out the tripod at the front of his rifle. Rodriguez and Houston took up positions beside him, and he said, “Roman, you’ve got the center. Do not blow my head off, rookie. Keep that barrel well above me.”

“Roger,” Juliet said, feeling her chest tighten as her breaths came short and quick, and a microburst of adrenaline made her hands feel shaky. A stray thought invaded her mind—should she talk to Angel about managing her adrenaline in situations like this? Did she want Angel to do something like that to her? She pulled the shotgun’s stock in tight and stood over White, aiming down the corridor to the bloody junction.

“Are . . .” Houston started to say, then he said, “What the fuck? I don’t think those bodies are bodies! They’re fuckin’ breathing!”

“Attention!” White yelled, his voice augmented by speakers in his helmet. “Grave corpo-sec on the premises! If you are not hostile actors, you have five seconds to declare yourselves!”

“Weird,” Rodriguez muttered, “I can hear them, but there’s no heat sig, and I’m not picking up any . . . . Oh, fuck! Here they come!”

Juliet couldn’t see movement down-range, but she glanced at her mini-map and saw that the watchdog program had used Rodriguez’s sensory inputs to populate the map with a cluster of blinking red dots surging toward the corridor junction, moving at more than five meters per second. She trained her sights on the right side, where the dots were just now coming to the corner, but then she saw that Houston had been right; the bodies lying around the intersection began to leap to their feet.

As the four or five figures charged forward, they were joined by the ones racing up the side passages, and suddenly a horde of hissing, jerking figures were streaming toward them. They were similar to the naked man that had attacked them outside the facility—pale, naked, and moving far too fast with a strange gait that involved all four of their limbs. Juliet caught glimpses of gaping mouths, sharp teeth, and waxen, flaccid genitals. Over it all, she heard a hissing, sibilant language that held no meaning to her.

“Hostiles confirmed,” White said as his gauss rifle *zwapped* and two of the people—creatures—stumbled back, shredded by the super-high-velocity spray of needles. Houston and Rodriguez started to unload, their cartridge-based weapons exploding with fire and noise, and Juliet was glad for her much-improved audio implants; they suppressed the noise nicely.

Juliet pointed her shotgun at the leading edge of the surging hostiles, and when the green ready-light flashed, she squeezed, surprised that the weapon’s discharge was a lot less violent than that of the shotgun she’d used in Vikker’s garage. Still, it buzzed and crackled satisfyingly as the payload of shot pellets whirred down the tube of the barrel. Her vision was starting to fill with steam and smoke from all the rounds being fired, and Angel adjusted for her, switching to the same monochrome, gray spectrum she’d used in the garage fight, back at Doc Murphy’s.

The attackers were green in her vision, with occasional spots of reddish-orange, while her teammates were bright yellow and orange, highlighted with their name’s above their heads—Angel was making sure she could easily avoid firing on a friendly target. The shotgun’s green light was ready almost immediately, and Juliet fired again, watching as the bright yellow spray of heat from the gun’s barrel streaked through the gray expanse to splash against the chest of a charging enemy.

Orange-red streaks of light sprayed out of its back as her shot broke its charge, and it slid along the gray-lit floor to land in front of White. Juliet scanned downfield for more targets, but none of the mutated men and women, as Juliet was coming to think of them, were moving.

“Lock it up,” White ordered, but everyone had already stopped shooting; Charlie Unit seemed to have good trigger discipline. Juliet backed up a pace and pointed her shotgun down and to the side, noting the pellet counter was at 220/250.

“It only discharges fifteen per shot?” she said aloud, surprised. If she remembered right, Vikker’s gun had unloaded something more like fifty per trigger pull.

“It has higher settings, but they’re locked. I could bypass the regulator, but you might get in trouble with your sergeant,” Angel replied.

“Hold off on that, for now,” Juliet subvocalized.

“Team two, did you make contact?” Polk’s voice came through the comms.

“Yeah, Sarge,” White grunted as he scooted up to his knees and folded the tripod under his big gun. “A group of seven. Same as the guy outside. All hostiles down, no casualties here.”

“Keep me posted; we’ve cleared the living section, moving to the clinic.”

“Roger.”

“The fuck are these things, Sarge?” Houston asked, stepping forward with his gun trained on the nearest corpse. A light mounted under the forestock of his gun illuminated the mutant’s face, and Juliet shuddered—the man’s jaw was distended and too broad. His regular, human teeth were still there, but a second row of long, sharp fangs had grown out of his massively swollen gums; she didn’t think there’d be any way for the creature to close its mouth.

“Look at its fucking eyes,” Houston said, and Juliet had to agree with his sentiment; they were freaky—big, bulging, and black, with no whites. “Are they fucking mods, or did they change from whatever the squints in this place did to ‘em?”

“No idea. They look the same as the fucker outside,” White replied, shrugging. “As you said, looks like the squints in this place were up to some freaky shit and forgot to lock a door or something. You heard the sarge; let’s keep moving.”

"Squints?" Juliet asked, too freaked out to be embarrassed.

"Scientists. You know, 'cause they're always squinting through one kind of lens or another. I mean, I think that's where the word comes from." Houston shrugged.

"Lord knows what the squints in this place were up to . . ." White said, marching ahead, clearly trying to get the team back on task.

“You think these things are like this on purpose?” Rodriguez asked.

“I dunno. Do I look like I have much of an education?” White asked as he stood up. “I barely got through fifth grade before the corpos snatched me up on the mil-sec track.” He turned to look at Juliet. “Good work, Roman. Come on, people. Let’s check out the junction up there.”

“Thanks, Sarge,” Juliet said, wondering if anyone ever called White “sarge” when Polk was around. She followed the trio of men toward the intersection, trying not to look at the shredded, naked bodies of the people who’d raced toward them. Averting her eyes didn’t help the smell, though, and she had to take shallow breaths through her mouth, tucking it against the high collar of her vest as a filter to avoid gagging.

More than the scent of blood and the pungent odor of the nitroglycerine in the gunpowder, Juliet could smell a heavy, underlying reek of perforated bowels. White’s gauss rifle and her own electro-shotgun hadn’t gone easy on the naked people, removing limbs and shredding torsos with their direct hits. When they’d passed the last of the bodies and stood in the intersection, she carefully tested the air and took a thankful, deep breath of the—only mildly disgusting—stale, waste-tinged air.

“I shoulda worn a breather, Sarge,” Houston said, wrapping a bandana around his mouth and nose, further obscuring his visored face.

“Yeah, no shit,” White said. “Which way’s the reactor?”

“South.” Rodriguez replied, “Right.” He gestured in the correct direction—another long, seemingly empty corridor.

“What’s that flickering? Is one of the emergency lights down there on the fritz?” Houston asked, and Juliet saw what he was talking about—around thirty meters ahead, where a junction led off to the left, a rapid series of bright, yellow flashes kept repeating. To her, it looked like an electrical short-circuit sparking against something.

“Loose wires?” she guessed. “I don’t know what from, though; the conduits in this place are all well shielded under the floor panels.”

“That’s right,” Houston said. “Shit . . . is it moving?”

“Get set!” White hollered, lifting his massive gun to his shoulder. Juliet raised her shotgun, aiming toward the corridor junction and the weird flickering, sparking lights, and then a humanoid figure came into view, and she had to do a double-take; he was limned with crackling electricity, his flesh looked blackened—cooked—and, as White’s gun discharged, the figure seemed to flicker and jump a dozen feet toward them and to the left.

“What the fuck, Sarge?” Houston screamed, pulling on the trigger of his gun, his voice wailing out the question over the staccato explosions. Juliet lined up her sights on the weird, sparking, oddly shifting, charred man, but as she squeezed her trigger, his electrical aura seemed to surge and expand, and then everything was dark and quiet; her AUI was gone, and the silence was deafening.