STERLING

 

Wednesday January 15 - 0239 MST

Fifty one minutes until Turbocharger activates

 

The boom of the shotgun reverberated in the confines of the corridor. With poured concrete floors and flat plaster walls there wasn't anywhere for the sound to go except right back at us. Even with ear protection on, my ear drums felt like they'd been pounded like a musical drum. I'll admit I jumped in surprise. But so did just about everyone in our group. All except Doctor Johnson.

He had a smoking Mossberg 590 shouldered and pointed up at the ceiling. As I followed the line of his aim I saw something move among the web of pipes and conduits that ran above. Before I could take aim with my own rifle it fell lazily out from between the pipes and landed in a heap on the floor. Every gun barrel in our group was trained on it, but it was very dead by the time it hit the concrete.

"What the hell is that?" Joe Morgan waved the muzzle of his rifle at the pile of black legs.

It took my mind a moment to make sense of what it was we were looking at. All I saw was spindly legs and black and brown fur. After I steadied my light on its body I finally put it all together. What I was looking at was an enormous spider with a body as big as a basketball. Just like a spider it had curled its legs up around its abdomen as it died.

"Not everything we face down here will walk on two legs." Johnson pointed up at the pipes running along the ceiling. "We'll have to keep watch above us from now on. But at least we can confirm now that Joszef's special shells work."

The sizzling sound coming from the spider's corpse was the confirmation he was talking about. Madarasz had custom made these shotgun shells using iridium pellets as projectiles. Our research had shown that the rare metal would have an adverse reaction with the physiology of most exos, but we'd never had the opportunity to test it out. This was our trial by fire and it worked. Perhaps a little too well.

Joe Morgan pinched his nose. "Gah! That smells like someone set an open sewer on fire."

Everyone was pinching their noses and it was exactly as Morgan had described. We all gave the smoking corpse a wide berth as we skirted around it. The last to leave was Jessica Brighton. Her eyes were locked onto the spider's body and she looked a few shades paler than when we started.

"Airman Brighton, are you alright?"

My voice seemed to snap her out of her haze. "Y-Yessir. I'm okay."

Everyone was a little jumpy, but Brighton seemed to be a little more so. My guess is it was a case of "buck fever". Among deer hunters it's common that the first time a hunter spots a deer during hunting season they fumble and lose the deer before they can get a good shot lined up. This can happen to experienced hunters too. But after that initial anxious moment of the season passes the rest of the shots are good. Now Brighton was making the transition from the academic knowledge of fighting exos to doing it in practice. This was her first buck of the season and it was only natural to be a little anxious.

Johnson waved me forward. "Steven we should keep moving. Time is of the essence."

He was, of course, right. We still didn't know where these creatures were coming from. None of the ones we had encountered so far were exos we had brought back alive. They were coming from somewhere. It was possible we had a portal open in C-Watch and these things were pouring out of it. The longer we took, the more monsters spewed out.

As we hit the Y shaped intersection of the main corridor I could see the deep gouges in the wall left by the fifty caliber clearing fire from earlier. It was a stark reminder that the Underground would be changed forever by this incident. As we passed the intersection one of the Gunsmoke teams remained behind and took up a defensive position. Not only would they be providing security for that intersection but also becoming a link in the chain of communication back to the surface.

One of the challenges of fighting underground was that solid rock and earth blocked radio communications. We got around that obstacle in the past by operating a network of radio repeaters throughout the Underground. Unfortunately, that was one of the systems Madarasz's engineers couldn't get back online. So we were making a radio net the old fashioned way: one link at a time stationed at each intersection.

The communications link back to our forces was absolutely vital. But at the same time it meant losing a bit of security each time we took a turn. As we went deeper into the depths of the Underground my group had fewer shooters.

And we would be going deep.

Doctor Johnson's words echoed through my thoughts. Time was of the essence. The sooner we got this done and cut off the source of exos, the safer I would feel.