The Black Garden: Chapter 25

Neither of us said a word, sprinting back toward the entry bulkhead. Ratty slammed the big door closed behind us. If reinforcements were coming, they would have to run an angry Abyssal drone gauntlet and unlock the door. As I scrambled back up the ladder, Ratty peeled off an explosive charge and threw it to the ground just in front of the entry anyway. Little crab-like legs caught on the floor and gripped it, the sensor on top blinking slowly as it flattened down against the ground.

We could hear the muffled roars of demons from the other side of the hatch. I broke out first, leaping lightly with Tsariel’s spring-loaded assist, and hit the ground running to clear room for Ratty to follow.

“How’s your ammo?” I asked her, skidding to a stop next to the doorway so she could do the check.

“Not good. Still got the flamer, but I’ve never seen drone-type demons soak ADRs like that.” She checked around the door with a mirror to make sure we wouldn’t get jumped on exit, then tore out into the open as soon as our HUDs flagged it clear.

We had dropped about twenty mercenaries during the raid. About ten of them had yet to be burned and had morphed, the parasites feeding off their flesh and numina to transform corpses into demonic necromass. All three Khem had gone into their Warforms again, clashing with half a dozen screeching, hyper-aggressive demons. I watched as Hura grappled one, the entire front of his muscled body unzipping into a spine-lined maw that snapped over the demon’s head and began to chew and crush. The other four demons were advancing on the other Roaches and Pred-5. The two teams were focusing on one demon at a time, shooting on the run as they ran forward on spined, needle-sharp legs, striking with their claws and hawking acid. Gaius’s armor took a hit from one of the globs, which stuck to the composite and began to belch white smoke into the air.

Ratty and I could only trust the Khem to handle the lion’s share as we sprinted past them. I slowed enough to brace my rifle and fire a burst into the demon straggling at the back of the pack. It screeched as the first few impacts struck its skull and the microcharges exploded, ripping huge holes in its carapace. But like the ones in the basement, it didn’t seem to feel pain, and it barely slowed as it whirled and charged.

“Pin it down!” I boosted myself to close the distance, calling the sword and a cloud of hyperfilaments. The threads glinted in the light cast by the blazing fire as the demon swung through them and sliced its own claws into several pieces, the chunks falling to the earth to sizzle and roll like droplets on a hot pan. I dodged around the demon’s stamping feet and brought the blade up underneath it, shearing through its abdomen and the legs on that side. Ratty waited until I’d gotten away before putting two bursts right into the hole I’d made.

The impacts sent the demon staggering to the side - it was still trying to attack with the stumps of its claw-arms, swiping them at me as I danced away from it. I was about to start making fun of it when it partially toppled into the grey goo on the ground - and began rebuilding its amputated limbs with it.

“Oh fuck.” The parasites were mostly nanites. They could regenerate.

“Ratty to all: the deltas can rapidly regenerate. Let the angelhosts and Khem take out the cores.” Ratty’s next rounds took out the reforming limbs, splattering them, and the demon howled just as I leaped in and struck for its head. It swung its mandibles to the side, and the Long Hunt caught its jaws instead of its skull, slicing through it.

“Does this thing even HAVE have a core?” I thought to Tsariel as the demon lurched in toward me. It never stopped attacking, driving me back with its sheer bulk. It was now about twice as massive as the human it had spawned from.

I could feel the angel concentrating, looking through my eyes at the demon as it lost several more legs and fell forward again, relentlessly pushing its delimbed torso through the muck toward me. As my Lifesight kicked in, I saw that every cell in the thing’s body was still dead, animated only by negative energy I couldn’t directly observe. All of it was condensed around a tiny absence right near the site of the dead human’s liver - the exact spot I’d located and extracted my parasite.

The demon sprung forward like a jumping spider, half-formed limbs reaching for me. It lost all of them in a whipping cloud of hyperfilaments, limbs and torso sheared into pieces by thread and blade. I carried the fatal stroke through its body and rammed the Long Hunt up into its belly, leaving it there as Tsariel canceled out the core. Behind me, the demon wailed and inverted, sucked back into the Abyss through a pinpoint of darklight and letting the hilt of the sword drop to the dirt.

Behind me, the others were taking down the three demons so Gaius and Uriel could do the same thing. As one of the demons staggered down under a hail of gunfire, a needle-tipped spike of earth punched up through its body and lifted it squealing into the air, where it writhed before pulping and vanishing. There was still one lurching after them, roaring as it smashed aside Lilia’s borrowed drones and closed in on her and Blackie with its scythe claws raised. I was already running toward it.

The Long Hunt was back in my hands, blade restored, and winnowed the air as I bounded in and landed on the thing’s back. It screeched and whirled to strike, only to spin in confusion when it realized the weight hadn’t flung off its body to the ground. I held on to the thing’s spined, chitinous neck, and as soon as I had a second of leverage, I plunged the blade into its body with the other hand. Tsariel’s wings spread around me, enfolding it - then the whole seven-foot long body of it collapsed into smoking, spitting chunks of nanite-infested flesh that were quickly impaled as Gaius’s angel worked with mine and nailed it to the sky.

“Shibal...” I puffed, bending over to catch my breath. “That was a lot.”

Uriel’s spike and the core of the demon inverted behind me with a splitting, tearing sound, and once again the compound fell still. The Khem had taken out the other six... but they were grumbling, all three of them agitated and unsettled as we regrouped around them.

“Aberrations. These Abyssal entities are abnormal.” The matriarch’s big Khem intoned, their voice booming over us as they swelled in place. “We combat nanorobotic flesh within ourselves.”

“Abnormal,” the other one echoed. It was clearly not used to speaking aloud, exhaling a cloud of chemical speech around itself even as it slowly piped the words. “Aberrant.”

“We are in consensus,” Hura added, far more fluently. He looked swollen and bloated, stretched out over the demon he was busily digesting. “These demons are half-machine, and the machines are pulling from a source of energy we cannot identify. They continue to battle us at the cellular level.”

“Shit,” I said. “Are you three going to be okay?”

“We are winning,” Hura replied tersely. “But it will take time. Longer than is reassuring.”

Lilia turned her head to look at the commander of the other team, then to the rest of us. “I’ve never heard of a Khem needing to work to digest a demon.”

“It is unusual. The machine’s mechanism is one of cellular hijacking and transformation, and it is almost - but not quite - strong enough to issue a challenge to us.” Hura paused a moment as his body rippled, fluxing and crushing down on the demon still struggling inside of his central mass. “This is not a class of demon the three of us have encountered before. We are concerned they are a novel infectious vector.”

As one, my team’s helmets swiveled toward me.

“Z. You SURE you got all those parasites out of your hiney?” Gaius asked. “All the nanites that were in those maggot things?”

“Yeah.” I rubbed at my belly in agitation. “As sure as I can be. Though after this... wouldn’t say no to a voluntary round of dialysis.”

***

We returned to the tunnels as a unit, and as soon as Lilia had the lock open and the bulkhead unsealed, the air filled with wails and futile screeching. The three Ratty and I had shot down were now back up, hissing and hawking acidic slime through the hole in the door, but much like the tadpoles in the jars, they had made no progress in freeing themselves. The demonic eruptions seemed to be confined to the first six rooms - likely all bunks, like the first room that had gone down. The soldiers inside had been sleeping while off rotation.

“At least they aren’t smart,” I remarked to Gaius, talking quietly on our private channel. Pred-5 was upstairs, pulling apart the control center. We covered Lilia while she got to work on hacking one of the doors without any activity behind it. “They act just like the tadpoles in their jars. So we have that going for us.”

“Yet,” Gaius replied. “These things feel kind of half-baked. My feeling? They’re prototypes.”

We on the ground and our controllers in the sky were now in agreement that my experience during my last hunt and the situation on Ideni were connected.

“Yeah. More reports are coming in of these things. I was lucky number one, but DWO-2’s angelhost striker had the same thing happen to her on her last run,” I said. “Another Earth incident. Same thing: a demon much bigger and nastier than it was projected to be within the timeframe of events. At least SEER and SPECTER were able to predict it in advance this time. Whoever’s behind this, they’re targeting humans. Earth, Ideni humans. CEIDR.”

“Yeah. I reached the same conclusion. Seems like the Commander has, too. He’s back at JBT with all escorts in tow,” Gaius said. “Nevermore, Tax Collector, Unexpected Boss Music and Ominous Latin Chanting... The whole command fleet’s rolled in.”

I clicked my tongue. The Nevermore was the CEIDR command ship, a Binah-class supercarrier, and one of the largest manned ships in prime-space. UBM and Tax Collector were the Nevermore’s Hochmah-class Cruiser escorts, while Ominous Latin Chanting was a Hod-class heavy cruiser that specialized in providing orbital weapons support. Those four ships alone held over a million souls; combined with their escorts, supply train, and smaller destroyers and frigates that sailed alongside them, the CEIDR fleet was the largest human community within the Confluence besides Ideni. When they came out of hyperspace and docked at Mareka, you knew shit was going down.

Lilia stood as the lock she was working on turned green. The door clicked and whirred,  and suddenly all four of us were back on alert. There was a sticky sound as the seal released and the door swung in, revealing a tidy little officer’s berth. There were only two beds in here, both pods that could be sealed for privacy, as well as a desk, two narrow lockers, what looked to be a private bathroom to the side.

“Clear the bathroom and those beds,” Lilia ordered, moving toward the desk. “If it moves, plug it.”

Gaius let me, Ratty and Blackie pass by. Ratty and I headed for the pods, Blackie for the frosted glass bathroom door. Our biggest teammate held the entryway while Ratty and I signaled to each other. She hit the pod’s open button while I kept my rifle trained on it, ready to fire.

The pod unsealed, the top cover sliding open to reveal a new, clean gel mattress, hanging pouches full of personal effects, and several inset drawers.

“Clear!” I called to Lilia.

“Clear!” Blackie’s voice rang from the bathroom.

We did the same for the other pod, which was also empty. The people who’d bunked down here had been out in the fight.

Once we were sure the room was free of bogeymen, we began to rip it apart. The drawers were full of the usual things you expected to find in a soldier’s bunk: snacks, squirreled away for a rainy day; condoms, regular AND large sized, a deck of Tzor playing cards, a few knives. There was also printed, plastic-laminated handout about the size of a greeting card. I plucked it out of the other items with a frown.

At this point in history, almost all data was cloud-based, stored in hypernets in the Confluence and elsewhere. The noosphere, the Nu-suht’s q-net... but now and then, there was information so vital that it was still printed and sealed against the elements, just in case the unthinkable happened and the net went down or you were somehow disconnected from it. Like everything else in the room and the underground bunker complex, the card looked new. It was printed in the blocky Nu-suht script:

[CONFIDENTIAL: S18 OUTBREAK PROTOCOL

ISSUED TO: All 0E3 - 1E4 ranks, B-1 to B-21.

SUBJECT: Containment and management of S18 outbreak (also known as ‘The Rage’, etc)

In the event of an outbreak of S18 among personnel, immediate containment and isolation are critical. The virus spreads via bodily fluids (saliva, blood, etc.) with an incubation period of approx. 30 minutes for living hosts and 2 hours for deceased hosts. IF INFECTION IS SUSPECTED, IT IS BETTER TO SHOOT EARLY THAN NOT AT ALL.

Primary symptoms: excruciating headache, high blood pressure; flushed, scarlet skin, panting, increased respiration, disorganized speech, sudden uncharacteristic sadism.

Secondary symptoms: extreme aggression, complete loss of inhibition, spontaneous self-and-other mutilation, immunity to pain and greater resistance to injury...]

The bile rose in my throat.

“Oh no,” I said. “No, no.”

Ratcatcher looked up from the pile of debris on the bed in front of her. “Z? What is it?”

I kept reading. The card detailed the protocols the Hellions had in place to deal with an outbreak of the Rage. The protocols were nearly worthless: intended to keep the soldiers calm. Because none of the suggested preparations were enough. None of it would ever BE enough. If the Rage got into a closed space like this, even with strong doors... the place would be strewn with viscera, the lights shot out, the tunnels filled with the insane, hysterical barking of Ragers—

“Min-joon. Hey.” A strong hand reached out and gripped my shoulder.

I drew a deep breath and grounded on Ratcatcher’s touch, even as the flashbacks kept rolling. The Seoraksan clinic. Sokcho. The Gangneung military base. The mad flight into North Korea, then the even more desperate journey back South as the whole world collapsed into cannibalistic madness. Not even Palae’an-grade therapy could purge those ancient ghosts.

“I’m alright.” I reached up and gripped Ratty’s hand with my own, took a snapshot of the card, then wordlessly handed the physical card to her so I could go walk it off. I sent the image to the others while I paced up and down, tweaking my CNS and adrenaline to ramp down the visceral response and get some distance from the horror movie unwinding inside my head.

“This is...” Lilia stood in front of the terminal. She had jacked into it using a device that created a defense buffer between the computer and her wetwear. Her eyes gazed vacantly up toward the ceiling as she concentrated. “This is... not good. I must relay the information to CENTNEX and confirm the data before I speculate, but… God preserve us all if it is true.”