[Preview]Renegade Ravager Vol. 3 -- Chapter 9

Chapter 9 – 01738.101 AA

The hole we’d blown through the bottom of the shaft led us to the infrastructure levels that wrapped around the hollowed-out heart of the moon. We were surrounded by huge, rusting pipes and aging power conduits.

Condensation dripped from every surface. A constant thrum ran through the catwalk we were standing on.

“The air down here is completely toxic,” Xarl warned us. “The more corrosive gases present might eat away at our armor if we give them enough time.”

“Best hurry then, old man,” Iuno joked.

“I can still kick your ass,” he countered.

“Want to take it to the ring when we get back? Three rounds, winner –”

I let their banter drift at the back of my perception. Their back and forth was a comforting reminder that I was not alone, that despite everything that had happened – part of my legion had survived.

Sure, I had Aggy, Josefine, and Elspeth. I treasured them beyond words – but they could never feel that hollow gap where my battle brothers and sisters had once stood. Gregor, Leysen, Gwendolyn – they were gone – but as long as I had Iuno, Victor, and Xarl, the Star Ravagers lived on.

Following the navigation path set by Aggy, we pushed deeper into Valeur Mineure. Here and there we could see exposed rockface, showing where the Republic had carved away at the core of the moon to build their graveyard for the truth.

“This equipment is ancient,” Xarl observed as we paused by a junction. “It must date to the founding of the Republic.”

“From what I’ve been able to uncover, Valeur Mineure and its sister facilities – sites dedicated to censoring or outright erasing the truth – were first constructed shortly after my mortal death,” Aggy said.

I could sense the hurt, the rage, in her words. The Saints had betrayed her, then immediately set about destroying the truth of what she had done, twisting the Republic to its corrupted state.

We slunk through the grinding, leaking machinery. I felt like we were crawling the gullet of some great, rusty juggernaut, an ancient, dying mechanical beast. The central reactor, its moribund heart, steadily beat ahead of us.

Ducking into side passages or behind machinery, we avoided the few human staff members we saw. They were a sorry lot, wearing poorly maintained safety gear and stained overalls; many were missing digits or limbs.

Aggy was still getting all her pieces in position, so we wanted to avoid being seen or setting off any alarms prematurely.

My cybernetics kept track of the operation, watching as the pirate ships got into position. They hid in holes and blindspots in Valeur Mineure’s detection systems. Most of the ships and fleets assigned to the facility had been stripped away by our feints, but there were still thousands of defense platforms in place.

Josefine’s bioships had been towed into position as well. At Aggy’s signal, the tow ship would make a short sub-reality jump, dropping the xenos directly into Valeur Prime’s atmosphere. More would make landfall on the moon, assailing the facility directly.

“Tee-minus ten minutes,” the AI warned us.

I checked our progress, confirming we were on track. Dodging another maintenance group, we set down a utility passage.

Balan’s voice rasped through the comm link. “Wait!”

We stopped, weapons snapping outward. My tacnet buzzed, creating firing vectors looking for targets.

“What’s wrong?” Xarl demanded.

“James, can you turn to your right?” the cyborg asked.

Turning my head, all I saw was a plain, concrete wall, identical to everything else we’d seen in the facility.

It took me a second for my HUD to pick out a strange pattern set into the material, a greatly faded stencil that had been painted ages ago. It was hidden behind a series of pipes, invisible to the naked eye.

“There’s a hidden chamber there,” Balan spoke with complete certainty.

I could hear the incredulity in Iuno’s voice. “A secret chamber? What the fuck is this, a haunted house?”

Giving Aggy greater access to my cybernetics, I watched as the AI ran a broad spectrum of scans. The stencil snapped to life, its faint outline restored in my HUD.

It was two cross knives – the iconography of Section X.

A second, fainter stencil was below it. A scalpel and a syringe set in a V shape – Section V?

“What the fuck?” Xarl muttered.

“Balan is right, there’s something there,” Aggy said. “My scans are detecting a small space.”

“What’s inside?” I demanded.

“I don’t know,” Balan answered. “But you need to open it. Please.”

I slapped a breacher grenade in the middle of the stencil before ducking around the corner with the others. The blast rattled the machinery around us; several pipes ruptured, throwing toxic water everywhere.

“Somebody is going to notice that,” Victor murmured.

“Too bad they’ll be up to their eyeballs in autonomous attackers and xenos in a few minutes,” Iuno replied.

The blast had created a small opening. I ripped the charred concrete away from the hole while the others kept watch.

It took a bit of effort, but I was able to climb inside.

The hidden chamber was completely dark. It was a square prison, only a few meters across, chipped out of the facility’s foundation. Within was a nightmare long buried and forgotten.

“Is that what I think it is?” Elspeth gasped.

Directly across from me, a corpse was propped up against the wall. Around it were bloody, scrawling, esoteric characters that seemed to squirm and wiggle in the dark.

Hunching my shoulders and crouching down, I moved closer to the body. I did my best to avoid stepping on the weird writing; I could almost feel the others, crowding my cybernetics, as they watched with bated breath.

The body was little more than a husk, a withered skein of broken skin over desiccated bones. It appeared human at first glance, but I realized the anatomy was wrong. The skull was too large, the eye sockets yawning through paper-thin bone. The limbs were too long, and there were vestigial bits of flesh hanging off its back, like a cloak of mutated arms.

“What the fuck is it?” Iuno whispered.

None of us had an answer.

“James, can you get some tissue samples for me?” Aggy asked.

Reaching down, I broke off one of the creature’s fingerbones, nabbing a bit of papery skin as well. I put them in a sealed vessel, part of the kit all légionnaires carried. Normally it was used for analyzing alien environments and hostile lifeforms, but I didn’t mind repurposing it for my grim task.

If nothing else, I knew the vessel was shielded and virtually unbreakable. I could only shiver in revulsion, thinking of handling the broken bones and dried flesh with my bare hands.

I took several more samples, including one from the corpse’s chest cavity, a mushy pile of organic matter that nearly made me sick. There was something wrong, something horribly twisted, about the corpse. It filled me with deep-seated dread.

I couldn’t wait to get away from it; I had to resist just crawling out of the chamber as soon as my gristly work was done.

“What is this?” I demanded from Balan as I backed away from the body. “What is this thing?”

She was silent for a moment. I could hear her respirator rasping through the open comm channel.

“I don’t know what that creature is – or was. But there was a rumor I heard, ages ago,” she began, purposefully keeping the details vague. “Section X – they hid their secrets in the foundations of buildings and installations. Some kind of macabre tradition – a kernel of truth to support a mountain of lies.”

“And their involvement with Section V?”

“I’ve never heard of them before,” she answered again.

I didn’t press her further, there wasn’t time for it. I’d demand my answers once Valeur Mineure was in flames and we were safely back onboard the Liens Lumineux.

There wasn’t much more that I could gather from the body, not even how the creature had died. Had it been a mutated human? It seemed unlikely. Even with the variety of genetic ailments across the Republic, I had never seen anything like that.

It felt xeno – inhuman and alien – to me.

Turning to leave, I noticed a message painted on the wall.

Here lies a true child of the gods – may our masters forgive us.

Stepping through the hole, I threw a grenade behind me.

We sprinted down the passage, hurrying to make up for the time we lost. A super-heated gust of wind followed us as white-hot plasma destroyed the secret room and its heretical contents.

=======================

“I don’t suppose we could just tell them we got lost, can we?” Iuno joked.

We stood on a catwalk over the lowest level of the facility. Below us beat the burning heart of Valeur Mineure, the ancient reactor core. The machinery was positively ancient, crusted over with corrosion and rot.

A handful of maintenance personnel labored over the reactor, working on keeping the struggling machinery alive. The reactor body was spherical, with hundreds of pipes and conduits leading in and out of it. I could hear the steady thrum as plasma cycled through the central crucible.

“Shit, do we even need to sabotage it?” Iuno joked. “Everything down here looks like it’s on its last legs.”

Xarl grumbled something about improper maintenance.

Most of the workers were clustered around the reactor’s central control console. Arranged around it was a group of heavy combat drones, relics in their own right. They were roughly humanoid in shape, their bodies bristling with plasma weapons.

Turrets were arranged behind them, granting a nearly unimpeded firing arc across the cavernous space. Shield generators glimmered here and there, defeating our original idea of simply blowing the whole reactor to smithereens from a distance.

These critical defenses were completely autonomous, they weren’t part of the facility’s network. Even if Aggy had the concentration to spare, she couldn’t hack or disrupt them.

“Tee-minus forty seconds,” the AI announced, her voice strained.

On my HUD, I watched the autonomous pirate ships make their final approach. Aggy was doing her best to blind the defenders, but I saw a few Republican ships making emergency maneuvers. They were desperately firing their engines, trying to intercept the unknown boogies approaching Valeur Prime and Mineure.

As far as I could tell, they were blind to the Yord who had already jumped into the system. Josefine was completely focused on directing them, her orders relayed through Zoto.

“Ready?” I asked the others.

“Glory and Honor,” Victor said.

In the corner of my vision, a countdown appeared. All hells was about to be unleashed.

“Three – two – one,” I murmured.

Distantly, in orbit, ships exploded and died as the battle began. The Yord made planetfall, crashing into the moon’s surface. I could only imagine the Republican soldiers and sailors’ fear, the chaos we had set loose.

The reactor room went dark. Alarms and emergency lights instantly kicked on. The maintenance personnel panicked and began to run as the drones and turrets spun to life.

We struck as one, utilizing legion tactics that had carried us across countless battlefields and had crushed countless foes.

Xarl and Victor maintained the high ground, firing from the catwalk. Their initial salvo smashed into the foremost drones, their rounds punching through the automatons’ metal bodies with ease. Two of them went down, their central processors shredded by pinpoint, concentrated fire.

But the remaining three automatons managed to get their shields up in time. Their barriers flashed as they deflected the incoming fire. The turrets came online, blasting out gouts of plasma channeled directly from the reactor.

Trusting our shields to keep us safe, Iuno and I charged. We rapidly closed the distance, hoping we could move quicker than the turrets could spin and aim.

Our rifles chittered loudly as we fired at the shield emitters around the turrets. The energy barriers shivered under the barrage.

The turrets drew on more of the reactor’s power, desperately trying to reinforce their shields. Several nearby conduits burst into flames the ancient machinery overloaded by the sudden power draw. Sparks erupted as the machinery overheated and caught fire.

The chamber became a hellish nightmare of orange flame. Balls of blue-white energy flew all around us. My tacnet screamed in warning as the blue enamel on my armor began to bubble and melt.

But Iuno and I pressed the attack, ducking and covering one another as we advanced. I would throw myself behind a piece of machinery and reload while Iuno raked the enemy’s shields. As soon as her magazine was spent I’d resume the assault.

Xarl and Victor moved from vantage point to vantage point, focusing on taking out the remaining drones. One of them toppled, its legs riddled with bullet holes.

We didn’t trade a single word over the comms. We didn’t need to – we were born for the battlefield, the coordination more akin to instinct and muscle memory than conscious tactics at that point.

I fired a nearly point-blank shot into a turret’s shield emitter. It overloaded, triggering a violent chain reaction.

A series of plasma blasts ripped through the sides of the chamber as the equipment exploded. Burning shrapnel and toxic smoke filled the air.

Two of the remaining drones charged out of the hellscape, guns blazing. Their metallic limbs were melting, but they continued to fight with programmed furor.

Victor drew them to a violent halt, hammering the bots with a burst of withering gunfire.

Iuno ducked behind a wall of pipes while I broke to the other side of the room. I threw my remaining grenades in my wake.

Blue-white light flashed against the orange flames as the grenades went off. One of the automatons was blown to pieces while the other staggered, the side closest to the blast slagged.

It tried to get a bead on me, but Xarl ripped it apart with another round of precision fire.

The last bot fell, collapsing into a broken heap.

The firefight had taken less than thirty seconds. The reactor chamber was aflame. The huge sphere rattled loudly, I could hear bolts and rivets straining to hold the plasma crucible together. Pipes burst, overwhelmed by the crushing pressure emanating from the reactor’s failing containment fields.

“Well, that worked out better than expected,” Iuno panted.

I was sweating in my armor; my HUD screamed at me that we needed to evacuate. I could feel the overwhelming heat even through the induced chill of my combat stims.

“Quit loitering around and get to work!” Xarl yelled as he jumped from the catwalk.

We scrambled to complete our sabotage. Safety systems had already been engaged as the central reactor tried to stymie the bleeding and keep it from going critical. Valves fused, turbines shuddered still, and containment protocols clamped down.

Alarms were blaring across Valeur Mineure. During our skirmish, Aggy and Elspeth had launched their assault. Our automated starships made suicidal runs against the system’s defenses. Ships exploded and died, leaving flaming trails of debris across the black expanse of the void.

But it was too late for the defenders. Comm intercepts from Valeur Prime were full of panicked screams as the Yord made planetfall. Several bioships had also made it onto Mineure. The xenos were assailing positions across the moon, but comm traffic was jammed. Soldiers and sailors screamed for reinforcements and aid, but no one was coming.

I turned my rifle against a cluster of power couplings, ripping them to pieces, while Xarl and Iuno planted their remaining grenades. Victor smashed the command console, planning his explosive deep in the heart of the machine.

“Twenty seconds,” he warned us.

“Move out,” I ordered. “We’ve got a long trip back to the surface, but we’ve got what we came for. We’ll leave this place an inferno in our wake!”