GRIDER

 

Tuesday January 14 - 1858 MST

One day until Turbocharger activates

 

Wherever the hell we were it wasn't the Delta site we had been practicing at. This place was hundreds of miles to the north. I could tell by the direction of the sun outside the chopper's window before it set over the horizon. Probably in Canada judging by how far we went. Though we were hundreds of miles away it was eerily similar.

The shape of the camp, the roads and parking spaces cut into the side of the mountain, and the stench of cordite in the air from when the Apaches unloaded their ordnance into the hapless defenders. All that was the same as our fake Delta site. The place was even in the Rockies just like our site. The Rockies were that huge. The people that built our own knew what they were doing. Everything was the same, except for the bodies. These weren't mannequins or paper cut outs. They were charred and bloodied corpses that had been absolutely shredded by overwhelming firepower brought to bear by our gunships. All I could make out of the few bits that were left of them was that they wore snow camouflage. Other than that there was just the stink of barbecued people. That was one thing they didn't recreate in our exercises.

My radio crackled to life in my ear. "Controlled det in five. Taking cover is advised."

It looked like the big steel door was closed. Good thing we practiced blowing it up.

The snow crunched under my boots as I hustled over to the nearest boulder taking a knee beside another soldier bundled up like an eskimo. I didn't know who it was until I heard the thick Russian accent. "Boom-boom! Is best part, no?"

It was hard to believe he was a hardened veteran of the Spetsnaz, but it was probably just a cultural thing I didn't quite understand. After a five count over the radio the mountain shook with a force that jiggled the van sized boulder we were hiding behind. Even with ear pro in and my hands over that I was still left with a ringing. The pitter-patter of falling debris drummed away on the boulder and the snowy ground around us. After the largest rocks of the debris storm stopped falling Kuzmin raised his voice to speak into the radio, like he expected everyone's ears to be ringing.

"Move-move-move. We have less than ten minutes now."

Shadowy forms ran across the snow towards the gaping hole we'd blown out of the side of the mountain. Small fires burned in little patches that backlit our people as they sprinted by. I saw mostly the puffy outlines of guys in heavy snow gear. Sprinkled amongst them were the three Primes in their space suits. The fire light backed up by the Moon's own light weren't enough to see by in the ever growing column of smoke that was spreading over the site.

My NODs came down and the world turned into fuzzy shades of green squeezed down into a narrow pipe that was only sixty degrees wide. While night vision was an awesome advantage to have, the slim field of view was a real pain.

Snow crunched under my feet giving way to the metallic thumping of the short ramp leading up into the Delta site. It was pitch dark inside. The blast was so violent it had shattered every light bulb in the structure and blown out the glass of the office space off to one side. There were bodies strewn about from the poor slobs who happened to be standing in front of the heavy door when the blast charges went off. Another guy came staggering out bleeding from the ears and nose. Blast overpressure was a real bitch and had really screwed this guy up.

BANG-BANG!

One of Kuzmin's men double tapped the unfortunate guard ending his misery immediately. Normally, I'd feel sympathy for a guy in his position but he had a pistol strapped to his belt and was standing guard over some seriously evil stuff that couldn't be left out in the wild in the control of underworld thugs. I was never formally told who these slobs worked for, other than Basser telling me once they were "bad news". No matter who they worked for though, this relic they were holding onto, a thing called the Keystone, was so filled with evil ju-ju that we had to take control of it. It was described as the supernatural equivalent of a nuke, and if it was released on a place like Washington D.C. it could end the nation. That wouldn't happen if I could help it.

Flashlights came on and the NODs came off as we fanned out to secure the area around the pit and got ready to descend. With the descent team strapped into their harnesses and lines clamped tight we went over the edge and into the pit. Just like our Delta site this one had steel grates over the bottomless pit and those were pulled aside so we could go down. One by one we went in without hesitation. The clock was still ticking and it was way too late in the game to have cold feet about dropping into the unknown.

Our lights scanned the walls as we dropped. There was a circular path that spiraled down the edge of the pit like a corkscrew, but as lights danced back and forth across it we didn't see any angry guards looking back. I didn't blame them for not posting any sentries in there. The bottom of the pit had unknowable horrors stored away and no man with a brain wanted to be any closer to them than he had to be.

"Frag out!" One of Kuzmin's men called out before dropping a grenade into the darkness below.

There probably wasn't anyone waiting at the bottom, but we wanted to be sure. Every descent we practiced we dropped a frag about halfway down the several hundred foot drop. I watched the grenade fall and was surprised to see light emanating from the ground below us. That never happened at our Delta site.

This light wasn't from fluorescents though. It meandered anemically across the spectrum going from a weak red to purple to green. No lighting I'd ever seen before did that. As my eyes adjusted to the faint light I could barely make out a shape. It was a large circle with smaller forms of light glowing within. They were runes like what I'd seen a hundred times around transient related activity. That was always a bad sign and I didn't mind that we were dropping a grenade on it.

BOOM!

The impact fuze on the grenade set it off when it contacted the hard bedrock of the pit's bottom. It was reassuring that we didn't hear any tentacled monsters cry out in pain. Just to be sure nothing was waiting for us, about a hundred feet up we tossed a couple flares. Thankfully, nothing slithered into the circle of light around the flares. A few seconds later we reached the end of our drop.

The ground was solid bedrock, completely flat except for the divot our grenade dug out and the pattern of ancient ruins carved out around us. Those runes glowed with an unnatural light akin to radioactive rocks. It goes without saying that those lights gave me a serious case of the willies, and we set down right in the middle of them.

The bottom of the pit was dead as a cemetery and the smooth rock surfaces echoed. Talking at normal volume might wake up something that was better left asleep.

"Three sixty. Sparklers out." Kuzmin kept his voice low as he barked out his orders.

The team formed a circle just like we practiced. Rifle barrels pointed in every direction covering a 360 around us. This was where things differed from our mockup. There were only five caves leading away from our landing spot. Caves might not have been the best way to describe them. They were shafts carved out by human hands and worn smooth by time. They were deep and foreboding, swallowing up the white light of our flares like a meal.

"Green here." One of the Praetorians called out.

"Blue." That was Priestley, and his sparkler glowed a deep blue in his hands.

Mine shimmered a cheery gold. Out of all the colors that was the weakest and that was frightening. Gold was the color of a Category 3. "Yellow to the south."

"Looks like I win." Kuzmin held up his sparkler so we could all see the sickly violet light pouring out of it. That was strong. Like end of the world strong. "We go this way."

"The light's going out." The female voice was jarring to my ears. I'd gotten so used to only hearing men when I was in full-on mission mode that I'd forgotten the female Prime—Carlie—was with us. Her eyes were hidden behind that opaque helmet, but we all knew where she was looking. The rune carved into the bedrock at our feet was losing it's light. "I think the grenade damaged it."

And she was right. The shallow divot dug out by the frag's blast had cut right through one of the big lines in the etched symbol. Tiny motes of colored light drifted out of the hole like embers wafting up from a bonfire. I couldn't help but feel that whatever mystical mojo was bottled up in that etching was flowing out through that scar.

"Doesn't matter." Kuzmin wiggled the muzzle of his Kalashnikov down the shaft that made his sparkler go all purple. "We go this way. Quickly."

And it was probably better that way. Because if we hung around that would give the guys time to think about the creepy rune on the ground and what those particles of colored light might do to them. Or worse, thinking that the magical carving was holding something back, and we'd just released it.