DEEP SEA FACILITY CODE "ROSEMARY"
LEVEL 9 ALERT DETECTED
CODE G IS IN EFFECT
FULL CONTAINMENT PROTOCOLS ACTIVE
…
…
…
FATAL SANCTION HAS BEEN ISSUED.
COMMANDO HAS BEEN DISPATCHED.
* * *
What was the Cataclysm, truly?
Some would say that it was a great evil, but that's not quite right.
It was the final shedding of humanity.
No method too cruel, too heartless or to vile to be used. The only goal was victory, and the only victory was total extermination. In the end, even the old allies turned against each other in a festival of bloodshed, last remnants spared more because of oversight than any implication of mercy.
It was death so great, even after a thousand years it still hasn't been processed.
What, then, of soldiers born to fight that war?
They were living in a man-made nightmare, and they could not wake up.
None of them could.
* * *
Deep beneath the ocean, there was a vault.
Once it was meant to safeguard the elites of the Earth Federation, members of its parliament that helped to put a gun to the head of the world and emptied the magazine.
Now, it was but a tomb, and nobody could even tell if the ones it buried were the ones it was made for. Did they reach this place and end up staying here, knowing the outside was doomed, slowly becoming their own culture across the generations? Did the staff and the garrison wait here, day after day after day, for those who would never come, years turning into decades, slowly being driven insane by the drip-fed news of the dusk of humanity? Or did they turn into more of the vampires, minds scoured by psychic lashes until they could do nothing but howl and escape, deeper and deeper and deeper, deep enough that voices could no longer get to them?
Was this the final grave of the Prime Minister Algernon Triangle?
But not even the bottom of the ocean was safe.
A shuttle was passing by, a tiny dart compared to the whale-like leviathans of ZOLON's Deep Sea Fleet that loomed over the facility, the lights of their mobile suits sweeping the oceanic floor bit by bit, looking for any sort of explanation, vague humanoid forms flickering in the hadean depths, weapons at ready.
The shuttle passed by all of these unchallenged, a pair of matte-blue clawed machines escorting it in under watchful gazes of the carrier submarines. The fleet was informed of what was about to happen, and having seen the horrors within, even if barely a glimpse, was enough to silence any doubts.
They would put an end to it all.
Ghosts of the past, reborn to fight once more.
* * *
The vault was emptying now, dozens of technicians and researchers in fully-sealed suits taking their trips back to the Whales, bright yellow colours present for both visibility and to mark potential hazard. After all, one of the current leading theories was that the horrible events within the bunker were related to the contents of lower levels, and nobody wanted to stick around and find out for certain.
One had to be pretty tough to make it far in the field of what gets kindly called applied archeology and less kindly industrialised grave-robbing, but the parliamentary vault proved to be too much even to those already used to finding corpses in their final moments, so nobody particularly complained at their work being interrupted, either.
The shuttle touched down in the middle of the dock, evacuation overseen by several of the ZBs, their beam assault rifles pulled out of the water-proof containers and kept at ready, colossi looking uncannily like enormous infantrymen compared to even the Aqua-Guns, much less the bestial forms of other aquatic suits.
Nevertheless, someone was still waiting for its cargo.
Wearing her matte-silver powered exoskeleton, Lena-I-Korolev, the sister of ZOLON's queen and the commander of the Safeguard's special forces, glared at the first of the four cyborgs that stepped out of the miniature submarine, golden eyes covered by aviator glasses. They even had the regulatory berets.
It was not the first time they met, but it didn't take long to figure out there was something wrong with them. After all, it was pretty similar to the problem with Laevateinn, just worse.
If you looked too closely into their eyes, all you could see was the world aflame.
There was, admittedly, also
the incident with Lan.
* * *
It was still so soon after their return that the Covenant's engines haven't even properly finished cooling yet, but Lan – ever the tornado of a woman – took off the moment when she heard what happened, storming into the royal colony's cybernetic facility.
"Fight me!," she said as she almost smashed the doors aside, which in a way was rather impressive given they were supposed to be a reinforced airlock.
The woman inside was sitting in a comfortable chair, wearing hospital scrubs, a pair of slippers and reading something on the tablet that seemed to be technical schematics, not quite bothering to look at the crown princess as she finished the page.
"I can do that, but where's this coming from?"
"I've heard they finally found someone as a pilot for this program, and I couldn't just stay put and keep going through debriefings when I found out it was
you. You can't meet a living legend and not want to have a go!"
Lan replied with a grin that, after a few seconds, the white-haired woman shared. This wasn't bad, either.
"I'll humour you then. Rules?"
The crown princess tossed one of the two brooms she was holding to her.
"Nothing irreversible. It's just a friendly spar, right? Let's get to know each other!"
…
…
…
"And that's why my arms are gone, Aunt Lena!"
"...with a broom?"
"Well," Lan laughed sheepishly, "we
started with brooms."
"...right. I'll make sure to punish her properly for this."
"What? No! It was awesome! I'm gonna have a rematch later once I slot some of these new models in!"
Lena looked at her niece's sparkling eyes and bright smile and slowly felt her blood start to boil.
* * *
God, that fight junkie was going to be the death of her even before she'll be the death of herself.
"Right then, welcome to Rosemary. Let's not waste any time, everything's prepared for the breach on our end. I'll brief you on the things that came up while you were in transit as we go."
They walked through the bunker towards the chosen entrance to the sealed sections, Lena recounting the information the technicians have been pulling from the base's computer network – which was a lot more than they expected but a lot less than they hoped. ZOLON crews were pretty experienced in crowbaring their way into systems, but…
"A lot of the information we can get up here is very vague. We do have the name for the aquatic biotech research they've been doing now – Project Lucifer. Terribly encouraging."
The cyborgs nodded in approval, entirely immune to irony. This was starting to look actually promising.
* * *
On the way, they cut a shortcut through the cafeteria – or the parliamentary restaurant, rather.
The gnawed bones, bearing the marks of human teeth as they were cracked and licked clean of marrow, still littered the ground and the tables, ZOLON crews trying to pretend it did not exist when trying to catalogue the casualties, but that was not the worst part of it.
The dissonance of a table with a bottle of fine wine, an impressive vintage prepared, bottled and aged in Californian wineries, put on a perfectly set table next to plates with human ribs and a half-devoured skull.
The scratch marks on the ancient wood, the ropes and the bones nailed to tables with silver cutlery, as living humans were dragged here and eaten alive in ghoulish feasts, when they weren't consumed on the spot like in some of the barricaded offices, trying to escape until the last moments.
The pantry, full of perfectly fine food, some newly-processed from surrounding sealife and some still left from the surface, kept fresh at excessive expense of power in stasis rather than frozen as normal.
Every step they took, there was another horror, evidence of madness and unnameable cruelty that could only come from a mind that does not consider its targets to be human at all.
"Far as we can establish, this all took place about the time the lower labs got sealed. Currently we're going with the assumption that whatever's down there caused it, hence the evacuation, but it's possible enough people remained sane to realise there'd be nobody left to contain whatever's in there. We haven't found any internal monitoring recordings yet, but my guess is the vampires wiped them clean for whatever reason when they set up the tripwire alerts."
The four ghosts passed by in silence – they, least of all, were in position to judge this sort of scene, after all – when one of them, Four, tilted her head in curiosity as Lena started opening the doors.
"Then why are you staying here?"
"Well," Lena answered, in her perpetually slightly-irritated voice, "I'd be a pretty shitty special forces commander if I went running at the first sign of trouble, no? God knows there's no shortage of places like this being found nowadays."
* * *
Inside ZOLON's primary research complex, a scientist and a soldier-turned-politician watched a newly born cyborg on the training field. Physical exercise was of course pointless for a full-body cyborg – but with the gap in capability between their old body and new, an adjustment period was natural.
Director Laevateinn was deep in thought as she watched the white-haired woman move, almost too fast to track even for her eyes, like a blur holding two assault rifles, scoring headshots on training dolls one after another while leaping through the air and running on walls, shooting down thrown grenades like they were in slow motion. She was sure that at least half of it was showing off, but it meant that the Ghost already felt confident enough to do so.
At first, it wasn't like this, of course. But this body was designed to be the strongest individual combatant in the Solar System, and who else could be better to operate it than its strongest soldier? It only took mere days to begin mastering it.
"I see he's been making considerable progress. If this keeps up, we should be able to deploy him ahead of schedule."
"Ah, Madam Director," the scientist, Irina, a younger woman left in charge of the testing, coughed, "I believe that should be 'she', actually."
In one of the rare moments when the Director of ZOLON lost her almost legendary composure, she looked completely stunned for a split-second.
"...pardon? Isn't this just the only body we had available?"
"It came up while we were analysing the engram, and, well… one thing led to another. She responded surprisingly positively to it and requested to keep it instead of the planned replacement we based on the recorded bio-data."
"...well then. Her it is, then. If only they knew… ah, no matter."
This was not the first time she heard of that ancient program, of engineered supersoldiers who possessed unrivaled combat power but were almost uncontrollable, until the Federation defunded the whole project and scrapped all existing samples. Was it just an excuse for the Twisted Tree to get their hands on it for their goals to bring about the final end, after all?
"Most Dangerous". It was a well-earned name.
She remembered the face the Ghost had when she came to her, research teams unable to offer her anything that would have interested the ancient soldier.
She told her about the wars on Earth, where each quarter millions died without an end in sight, driven by increasingly reckless salvaging and enormous arms sales, the first and most desired thing for humanity still being the means to kill one another. The army of the dead waking up in Australia, beginning its march to end mankind once and for all.
She told her about the interplanetary war in the outer system, waged with ships and mobile suits and antimatter bombs across Saturn, Jupiter and Uranus, a struggle before which the conflicts in the Earth Sphere were like knife fights inside a phone booth.
She told her about Venus, about the Chrome Lords and their legions of undead cyborgs and countless slaves, about the hollowed out planet and the half-ruined city and the monuments to torment, thousand years of detritus of madness and violence.
She told her about Mars, a millenium of war between self-evolving robot armies even after the hands that put them into motion were long gone and forgotten, an eternal, never-ending war, machines perfecting machines to kill machines; death without life, a null ouroboros. War without reason beyond war itself.
And in the end, when they shook hands, a pact made, she remembered the feeling she could sense from the old ghost and her smile.
Anticipation.
* * *
They could hear them, moving in the shadows. Eager skittering in the dark, lightless eyes watching them, heralds of the army of the world's end.
Dozens upon dozens of the massive machine-eels of the Death Force waited for command, guarding the doors to whatever hell awaited below.
"Right. We've brought these just in case something like this happened, so if you run into something you can't handle-" Lena briefly paused as Four patted the head of a nearby eel, as if it was some favoured hunting hound -"then you can call these in. We'd rather secure enough of the labs intact to find out just what happened here, though, so for now they'll be on guard duty up here."
As the team of reborn ghosts started double-checking their equipment and protective gear, seals, masks and visors snapping on, First, the closest thing to original, looked at the ZOLON commando. With the aviators off, she felt like the golden eyes stared into her soul.
"What's the procedure for extraction?"
"Technical team has set up a plasma decontamination chamber, so that should take care of anything biological that you might have brought along. Your bodies and gear can take it, no worries."
"Right. Well then," her mouth was already hidden under the mask, but Lena could swear she could
feel her grin, "it's time for another game to begin."
* * *
The four descended down a shaft, the cargo elevator that once ran up it thoroughly destroyed, passing by row after row of gun turrets, silent sentinels whose ammunition has long since ran out.
There was no trace of what they once shot at, however.
They were things of black, gold and matte silver, supersoldiers in body and spirit, most powerful cyborgs that all of ZOLON's science could produce, armed with the finest of weaponry. Fruits of a project meant to create infantry powerful enough to destroy mobile suits.
They were also copies, engrams of the original legend burned into the computers of that terrible machine in the deep reaches of the Evil Mountain, tasked by the Twisted Tree to be the vanguards of the greatest and last war that would be fought in human history.
For now, however, that plan got somewhat derailed.
For most, this – not only the awareness of being a copy, but part of an entire group of them – would be a cause for distress, doubt, even identity crisis. Minds reduced to patterns, copied and repeated over and over again as seen fit by distant architects of war.
For Geist, it was an opportunity. Her heart only beat for one thing, and one thing only.
ZOLON dragged her back out of the abyss of oblivion and gave her a new war to fight. And if she was to be used and disposed of again, two-faced superiors treating her like an inconvenient munition…
Well, there
have been lessons learned about that.
They landed silently, black pillars of beam launchers in hand, and through destroyed doors, finally saw what it was that filled the lower levels.
Light in the dark forest.
Everywhere, they could see vines and seaweed creeping up walls, even the lack of water incapable of stopping the bountiful life from reclaiming the Federal bunker for the sea, sometimes so much so they could barely see the metal and the concrete.
Power seemed to be failing in those sections, technology finally surrendering to age and overgrowth, but it was not dark.
All of those plants – all of that life – light flowed through it, gently pulsing, as if they were veins, to some unseen heartbeat.
The four moved through the warm, bright radiance, as if they were taking a walk on a sunny day.
It was beautiful.
If only the biological warfare alerts haven't started going off immediately.
Four, the designated technician, tried opening some of the doors they were passing by, but it seemed like even if the electronic locks were still working, the entire level was on full lockdown. Not that this helped very much, clearly.
After the fifteenth attempt, they nodded to each other. This wasn't going anywhere, and they weren't here for sightseeing; there was a very straightforward way to see exactly
what went wrong.
Two, demolitions, took her launcher and smashed it into the doors to something called "Agricultural Lab C9", switching to blade mode. Within a moment, megaparticle discharge meant to pierce through mobile suit armour melted a hole right through, bright, glowing liquid from the plants spilling and evaporating, bathing the corridor in an unearthly radiance.
Inside, they saw tanks filled with stale water that probably, once upon a time, held lab specimens, now long since spreading out and through the vents, seaweed crawling, pulsing, seeking. Artificial lighting finally gave out here, leaving them as the only source of light inside.
And then, within that light, with almost gentle rustling, glowing patches started to move.
There were no shrieks or screams, just quiet sounds as lidless eyes turned towards the intruders, squamous bodies slithering forwards, as they saw creatures that might have been fishes and might have been people move, great smiles that split their bodies in half showing teeth, so, so many teeth.
Light, too, flowed through them, almost blinding as they rushed, movements nothing but distorted blurs like moving car lights on a photo.
The first horror burst into a brilliant cloud as Two's miniaturised beam sword slashed through it in mid-leap, bodily fluids instantly evaporating into an explosion.
Three grabbed the nearest one to her by the throat and smashed it into the ground, the slam driven by the machine-body's strength almost obliterating its skull and half the torso, shattered teeth sent flying even as her other hand swung the launcher, metal pillar crushing another trying to sneak upon her against the wall, cutting it in half.
Four and One smoothly switched to conserve power, multirifles coming up, nano-enhanced carbines dynamically adjusting to close combat, buzzsaw-like noise cutting through all other sound as rapid bursts dismembered the creatures, luminous ichor spilling all over the floor.
Within a second, the lab was turned into a charnel house, plants burning and the mutated things lurking in ambush scattered into pieces, air itself turning strange.
Outside, there was more noise, rustling, slithering and stranger, worse sounds, the ancient undersea crypt waking up, as if its inhabitants waited decades, perhaps centuries, untouched by time, for anyone foolish enough to come visit.
The four Geists grinned under their masks.
Yes.
This was going to be good.
* * *
The corridors filled with death. So much death that you could choke on it, slippery ichor covering the ground, smell of burning flesh and glowing gas filling the air along with some unnameable bacteria and worse things only kept at bay by the nanotech filters the four ghosts were using. Anyone else would have long since been taken over and corrupted into whatever one could truly call this procession of nightmares.
But if death was an ocean, then Geist herself was a fish.
Tentacles the thickness of tree trunks grabbed Three and pulled her towards an enormous giant squid, luminescent lines all over its body forming a spiral that culminated in a mouth that seemed more like a grinder than any sort of beak, the monstrosity filling the whole corridor as muscle spasms dragged it forwards, dragging and tearing vines all along the way, spilling even more light on itself.
She felt great.
Rather than trying to escape, she ran forwards and leapt in the split-second before tentacles could adjust to the unexpected move, bringing her beam launcher down onto the squid's head with a feral grin, crushing flesh inwards like she was wielding a giant hammer. She let the creature's eight eyes focus on her as dozens of beaks snapped and bit trying to reach the cyborg, then fired, the blast and the explosion of superheated blood shaking the facility.
The burning golden eyes was all you could see amidst the shower of gore.
Two was putting one micro-grenade after the other into swarms of oversized flying fishes, moving through the air as if it was water with razor-edged fins, filling the corridors with chunks of mutated organs and flesh.
One stabbed a knife into the head of a distorted pelican eel almost the size of a horse as it tried to swallow her, kicking it into the crawling fish-things behind it, the sound it made as it hit the wall dwarfed by the noise of the detonation as the attached grenade went off, shockwave and shrapnel turning flesh into mince.
As the four made their way through the den of nightmares, deformed flesh clashing against the machinery of death within the dark forest, two invaders fighting over the lost bunker – Four made her own discovery.
They ran into bodies before, little more than bones – gnawed or otherwise – or even the signs of Federation soldiers in sealed suits that perhaps tried to contain the situation back when it all started, their guns far too corroded and wrapped up in crawling seaweeds to be worth anything.
Here though, by a blast door that had been painstakingly cut through, the corpses were wearing powered armour bringing to mind the mobile suits guarding the docks, stylised stahlhelms and skull-like faceplates hiding the cadavers within, plasma throwers and machineguns left by them emptied out. The unit was probably the rear guard, left behind and overrun when the ammunition ran out.
And, of course, they bore the symbol that the Geists knew all too well. Something that should not have been here, by any means.
Stormtroopers of the Twisted Tree.
She shared the image on the squad's network, communication lasers flashing, and the other three cyber-commandos started to silently withdraw towards her. Fun as this fighting might have been, now they had a trail.
Three?
The other ghosts looked at the melee specialist of the group, and she looked at them, golden eyes glowing a little too bright, posture a little too loose, her mask slightly displaced by the detonation.
In the same moment, her and One started raising their weapons, artificial muscles of the legs of the contaminated soldier preparing to bolt, perhaps to rush back towards the containment gate that could not hope to hold against one of ZOLON death commandos.
But the first copy was faster, mind not clouded, body not warring against itself; she smashed Three in the chest with the black pillar of her launcher, pinning her to the floor, and immediately fired. A needle-thin megaparticle beam pierced right through the body's defences, spearing its energy core. Three's struggle to get free stopped before it could even start, over-engineered body shutting down as the power cut.
Hesitation was defeat.
For the first time, One looked down at the motionless corpse of herself with irritation. It was one thing to lose in battle. It was another entirely to see yourself get corrupted like this, some result of bizarre inhuman research worming its way into you to puppet you.
Disgusting.
"Four, bag her and let's go."
Silence broken, creatures temporarily pushed back by the sheer violence of the ghosts, the last of them wrapped the disabled copy in an elastic coffin, slinging her over her shoulder even as nanite-enriched liquid inside started its work with decontamination, two substances now locked in a struggle.
They were steel, body and soul. As long as they got clear of here, reviving Three would not be a problem.
But first they had a mission to do.
* * *
There were even more weeds here, and even more corpses – whatever the Twisted Tree team ran into, it seems to have started chasing them down after the blast doors were breached. Many showed signs of infection and bullet wounds, gunned down by their comrades. But others... armour pierced with spines or outright torn open, limbs twisted and shattered and then the body discarded like a broken doll. Was it the doing of that monstrous squid, or some other super-mutant, sealife transcended far past its original biological limits?
Hopefully, they'll be able to find that out in person.
This explained why some of the labs they've cracked open seemed like they've been ransacked though, and the empty high-security containers some of the stormtroopers still held onto – the Tree must have been here for the samples of whatever was being researched here, and just kept shedding bodies to distract the pursuit while the main group made their getaway.
Brief investigation – also known as Two being very enthusiastic with her can opener – confirmed that they weren't that different from the ghosts themselves. Same faces, repeated dozens of times over, preserved when the seals sufficiently held by the sterile atmosphere inside the suits, anything that could have caused decomposition removed by internal filters.
Time still took its toll, but the Geists could recognise them – after all, they've seen those same faces on the Twisted Tree propaganda posters.
And post-Eleven Months War war crime trial recordings.
Army of racially-perfect clones, biologically and cybernetically augmented but just so it would not break their ideal aesthetic, ideology, mad science and unshackled fascism combined.
Sadly, their systems automatically wiped, so they could not confirm just when they came here, but it must have happened a long time ago, just from the state they were all in.
The remaining three could feel the creatures behind them, but even blind aggression had its limits, and for now, it looked like the monsters had their fill of death.
Or, perhaps, were just waiting for something else to come.
It did not take too long for them to follow the trail of corpses to their original source – a secondary submarine dock that ZOLON's investigation teams missed, or perhaps was sufficiently concealed on the outside.
Now, it was all empty, aside from one final corpse, bearing the insignia of an officer of the original Twisted Tree's elite paramilitary, armour shot through in several places after the light started to become visible through its cracks, but it still kept him alive for long enough to write on the wall with his own blood and contaminated ichors, still faintly glowing in the dark even after so very long. A final message of a man, pouring out his last thought as his humanity faded and his comrades left him in the undersea forest to die.
BIOLUMINESCENCE IS REAL.
