“Find us an exit!” I’m not sure who I directed that command to, but Ada was first to respond.

  “Elevator is offline, emergency stairway is straight ahead.”

  “Boss, what about your meds?”

  ROK soldiers are an elite bunch. Some of the toughest warriors I have ever encountered. And Gi was as committed to the mission as anyone I’d ever fought with. This time, though, the MO was out of reach, unattainable, and I knew it.

  “Forget it!” I yelled. These mechanical demons are going to end me way before my own body has a chance.

  We both were reverting to battlefield tactics intended for a larger force. I stopped to lay down, suppressing fire while Gi and Voss ran ahead. Gi would then return the favor, covering me while I ran to catch back up.

  So far, we hadn’t seen any returning fire from the robot warriors. They were just hulking giants smashing their way toward us. When I caught back up to Voss, I intended to quiz her on the load-out for these things, then something caught me in the chest, flinging me back a solid fifty feet. The impact felt like getting hit by a truck.

  My breathing became labored, and looking down, I saw a large dent in my chest plate. My armor was not supposed to deform like that, no matter the impact. This indention was so deep I could no longer expand my chest fully to take a breath. Slowly, I leaned up only to see one of the Warbots unleash another of the objects. It spun out of a side on the arm of the thing. It looked like a grappling hook but flew with tremendous speed. Then, the heavy metal hook retracted just as fast. I ducked just below it, or it would have removed my head at the shoulders.

  “These are considered unarmed. Most down here are mainly used for loading and unloading.” Ada said, in response to my unspoken question.

  I recovered my gun from nearby and unleased several of the carnage rounds at the bot that was positioned closest to me. The plasma rounds dissipated harmlessly against the black exoskeleton.

  “Can you shut them down, find me a weak spot… something?”

  “They are all autonomous, no central command in their system architecture,” she responded.

  “Shit!”

  “Prowler!” Gi was yelling for me, then I knew why. One of the Warbots was uncoiling itself right behind me. Its full height had to be close to twenty-five feet. I was scared shitless, and I was impressed. Whoever designed these things had been a genius. Every joint moved independently, allowing them to change direction on a dime. Shoulders looked just as maneuverable as the hand joints, which on this one also ended in a claw. Others possessed pinchers, and a few had what looked to be forklift blades. They were adaptable, tough, and worked together as a team.

  I saw the movement of the open claw, which this close looked more like a giant serrated carving knife. Just before it hit, I saw Sumo lunging for the thing’s groin. The arms sliced down, just missing me, but getting hung up momentarily in a shelving system that had toppled over.

  “Move it, Sumo. We gotta haul ass!”

  Running headlong for the door Gi was holding open, I glimpsed Voss already running up the stairs. This woman’s loyalty was only to herself. Had to respect that in an evil bitch kind of way.

  “I have an important update from Bayou. Would you like to hear it?”

  I was covering the rear as we side-walked up the steps. “Well, shit… why not? Send it.”

  CHAPTER

  SEVENTY-SIX

  I listened to the message and immediately wanted to call Riggs back, but this wasn’t the time or place for a conversation. We could still hear the mechanical beasts outside in the corridor. We’d climbed at least four stories but still hadn’t cleared the bottom cavern.

  My legs were trembling, and the gun I held was nearly useless in my failing grip. A crash a dozen yards below us shook the metal stairs loose on one side of the shaft.

  “The things are breaking in,” Gi said. This was the first time I had seen the man’s stoic demeanor show any signs of stress.

  I smiled. “Welcome to Banshee.”

  I pulled him closer. “I am about to be a liability; my body is shutting down. If that happens, take Sumo. Get out, shoot Voss if she gets in your way. Bayou needs to know about these Warbots.” I sucked in a painful breath, the polyceramic casing pressing in on my sternum still making that difficult. “Riggs also has some news for us. The plant and animal life that is mutating, apparently, we created it… our government.”

  “It’s Alliance tech?” Gi’s face showed the evident shame of that revelation.

  “Transgenic or transmorphic genetics, something like that. Too many pieces, too little time, friend. None of this is making sense, and I have no idea who the good guys are. We look out for each other from here on out, screw the rest.”

  “Ne,” he said in agreement. “By the way. The girl. I no trust her.”

  “Smart kid,” I answered. Voss was a very big question mark, but I was beginning to come to terms with my suspicions about her. I would never trust her, but she had answers I wanted to get before I faded away.

  “Follow her.” I pointed up the steps, the woman’s footsteps still echoing on the metal stairs. Gi looked at me, then took off at a run. I slowly began climbing at my own pace. The tapping sound was back, as were the sounds of obvious destruction from the Warbots below. Sumo looked at me from the next landing as if to say, ‘Hurry the fuck up.’

  “I’m trying, partner.”

  I was grabbing the rail and pulling myself up each step. My legs were feeling like leaden weights. I heard a crash and a woman’s shriek from high above. Then the tapping was louder and even more ominous.

  “Ada, I need something. I can’t quit now.”

  “I’ve been monitoring your deterioration, Prowler. The best I can do is give you a stimulant. It won’t help you for long, and when you come down, it will be even worse.”

  “Do it!”

  I felt the needle prick from my suit’s med pack and the cold liquid draining into my veins, then a flush of heat as it began to mix with my bloodstream. The pain began a slow retreat, but a baseline ache remained. The tremors also began to fade, but I knew I was walking on a virtual landmine. How long would this reprieve last? How much would it cost me in the end?

  The end… I was literally facing that now with every step I took. Somehow, I had to pack that away along with all the other events of the past few weeks. I’d always done that with missions. No matter how bad they had been, I never thought about anything but the end result. Did we succeed, did we fail, could we have done it better? Now I had my entire life to pack into that same box… was it worth it? Did you improve your tiny piece of the planet or just make things worse?

  My mind was drifting. The pounding wreckage going on below was being matched in intensity with the thunderous tapping of tiny metal claws up above.

  “Weapons free, Gi,” I said, reminding him not to worry about me, take care of himself and get to Voss if he could.

  CHAPTER

  SEVENTY-SEVEN

  Sumo raced up the rapidly crumbling staircase. “Take down,” I yelled up to him. He would not leave me like this unless it was a direct command. He knew I meant Voss. His ice-blue eyes briefly met mine, and I swear he nodded before turning and running on, his footsteps lost in the heavy metal echo chamber of the stairwell.

  The adrenaline hit my system like a sledgehammer, anchoring my feet back to a standing position and forcing my body to climb. I heard a section of the stairs collapse with a thunderous roar behind me. We may have made the monsters, but was I the enemy that turned them loose on us?

  I moved faster.

  Above, the rhythmic tapping was getting louder and more ominous. I heard a gunshot, then another. That had to be Gi. I tried to run, then my feet were detached from the world as the stairwell caved in on itself. The only chance for escaping this hell hole disappeared in a cloud of dust and concrete as I fell back toward the ominous black machine beasts far below.

  I landed with a crunch that I knew would ruin the rest of my day. I was, however, not at the bottom level of the chamber as I’d expected. I was on top of the growing rubble pile. One side of the stairwell had collapsed at an angle, revealing a tear in the wall leading to another dark chamber. Feeling the rumblings of the machines somewhere below me, I achingly rolled over. Ada was assessing my damage, but I ignored her. I know damage—we are old friends. I wasn’t dead, so I raised up on my good arm, then pushed up to a knee, then finally to both feet. I sipped water from the suit’s tube and stumbled forward into the crack of darkened space.

  Turning around after climbing through a gaping hole in the polycrete wall, I saw I was in another chamber. The beam of my helmet light cut a pale line that pushed the shadows back, but not much. I stumbled forward and quickly ran up on a solid rock wall. Turning to either side led me to a similar dead-end. With no other hope of getting out of this dungeon, I began exploring every inch of the space. Some walls had tool marks and seemed to have been made or at least enlarged by humans. That was good. There had to be a reason for the chamber. After ten minutes, I was ready to abandon the search, but my eyes had taken in something that my brain was trying to process as a clue. Not sure if it was the meat-sack part of my brain or the computer portion, but either way, it worked. A scuff mark at the base of one section of wall. To be honest, it was more of a line that was nearly devoid of dust and loose rock.

  I tapped on the wall with my armored fist. It felt like the real thing. It looked like the rest of the wall, but when I applied all my weight, it shifted. Just a fraction of a centimeter, but I noticed it. Within minutes, I had located the release. There was something behind this wall, something they preferred people not easily find.

  The entire wall swung inward on silent hinges, revealing a long narrow corridor ending in more of the metal stairs. These went down into blackness. An odor of death wafted up at me. My suit’s filters cut in at once, but it was already inside my helmet. Putrid decaying meat. Human waste. And… something else. A smell of chemicals, ammonia, urine maybe, and something that reminded me of a hospital., antiseptics that were failing to do their job perhaps.

  My auditory sensors picked up unfamiliar sounds, too. The familiar tapping was subdued, but other machine noises took their place. The whir of electric motors. Rhythmic gurgling of pumps. There were other mechanical sounds, a confusing mélange of soft, unnatural noise, all muted. At the very faint edge of even the suit’s auditory range I thought for a moment I heard…. music? Tinny, old, and very surreal in the dark place of horror.

  I drew my pistol as I descended the first step. “What’s down there?” I asked my super AI. Ada offered no answers.

  The stairs were long, and at each landing a metal grated floor zig-zagged away into the darkness, and with each step the putrid smell of decay and an acrid ozone smell increased. My spidey sense gave my system a little jingle as sweat ran down my back to make a puddle at the base of my spine. It would be nice to just pretend and say it was because the corridor was hot down here, or my suit’s ventilation system was failing, but that would have been bullshit. I was scared. Oh, yeah, really damn scared. Anyone that tells you tough-guys don’t get scared is out of their mother-fucking minds. We just learn to work through it.

  The Nightmare Factory, whatever it might be, lay ahead. Whatever horrific form the madmen at Hammer with their perverted science, had conceived, was down here. I had a feeling I had not seen the worst of it yet. My dad had warned me not to come here… he had been right. I didn’t find my meds; I didn’t even find anything helpful. These dicks were bioengineering weapons of war.

  What kind? All kinds… every kind. From what I could tell, there was no area of exploration off limits to them. And they were on our side, or at least had pretended to be. I was standing inside what was likely a multi-billion-dollar facility that our tax dollars had paid for. A place so vile, so evil, that I was about to shit myself before learning what psycho-horror beast was going to jump out at me next.

  Since I joined the special operators of Banshee team, my optimism for humanity, decency, and basic common sense has taken a real beating. After seeing the bizarre shit in some of the labs we’d raided and eventually what my own people had done to me, I knew our abilities had outgrown our capacity to control it.

  That thing Jeff Goldblum had said in that old movie about the dinosaurs rang true, every time. “Our scientists were so preoccupied with whether they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should.”

  As I moved through the labyrinthian maze of walkways, the darkness seemed suffocatingly close. My tremors were back, and I wasn’t sure if it was my body reasserting its scheduled death march, or if it was just the sheer terror. I must be the worst super-soldier in the history of super-soldiers. Which sucks because, as far as I know, I’m the only one.

  I’d tried to get G-Force on comms, but our systems were satellite based, or line of sight. Down here, they were utterly useless. I could only hope he and Sumo were nearing the surface.

  Ahead, the darkness became fuzzy and indistinct, and slowly it gave way to the glow of a flickering, sickly, green light in a metal cage mounted on the wall beside a big metal door.

  Really? Billions spent in research money, and this was the best lighting you could come up with? Hell, I bet the Holiday Inn down the road has better emergency lighting.

  The door was a massive ugly piece of metal, easily a foot and a half thick. It was solid and as impenetrable as a vault door. Beside the odd colored security light was a bio scanner for entry. I was certain Ada could bypass it, but that was not going to be necessary. The massive door was already cracked open, and the remnants of a bloody arm were hanging through the opening.

  The foul-smelling air was much worse here—this was the source. Even with my suit’s filters, the stench was strong enough that I had to consciously force the gag reflex back down.

  I pulled the door, and it smoothly opened. The thing lying just inside was very dead. I think it had once been a man. But it was impossible to tell. The arm did not go with the body, unless he’d originally had three, which, as I considered it, wasn’t totally out of the question.

  The body was shredded with deep wounds which had flayed the muscle right down to the bone in various places. Other wounds were scorched, the flesh blackened to a crater of red meat seared by something hot and deadly. The body was swollen, and just under the skin a spider web of purplish-black veining showed, the putrefaction process having had days to dissolve the tissues and horribly swell the corpse.

  The more prominent thing was the head… it had none. The shoulders ended in a very clean, very precise line of flesh that seemed to have been removed with surgical precision.

  “Jesus,” I said. “Did the battle bots do this?”

  Ada said nothing. I was beginning to seriously wonder if Voss had some sort of leverage over my built-in AI. It was definitely something I was going to find out… if I survived, that is. And if Sumo didn’t kill her when he tracked her down.

  “Hello, Warrior.”

  I tore my eyes away from the body, my light barely penetrating the darkened space ahead.

  I knew that voice.

  CHAPTER

  SEVENTY-EIGHT

  “My God,” I whispered.

  I moved deeper into the room; more bodies littered the floor. Bodies and… um… remnants of bodies. Overhead, lights flickered on as I moved closer. They glowed with the same sickly green as the one outside. The ceiling rose high above, fading out into shadows. I holstered my sidearm and switched to the MK4. The night optics on the scope lit up the room even better than Ada could currently do.

  The lab was a charnel house of death and destruction. Desks, chairs, and more bodies littered the passageway. “I think we know where the missing staff are,” I mumbled.

  In the middle of it all was a man sitting awkwardly in a chair. As I moved in closer, who he was became clear.

  “Doctor Reichert?” I asked.

  I heard a rasping intake of air, the breath a ragged and jutting sound ripping out from the sickly green shadows.

  “Yes, my boy. Please come closer.”

  The last time I had laid eyes on this man was over a year earlier, as I finished up the last of the tests required to be medically cleared to return to active duty. Tests given to make sure his enhancements on me had not produced any anomalous results.

  I cautiously advanced on the man, increasingly doubting myself and my AI. She’d been strangely silent and hadn’t giving me any advanced warning on immediate threats. Perhaps whatever Voss had done to her had left her damaged as well. Right now, though, I had other issues.

  The smell of death was everywhere. I did not know how the man could still breathe this air. He sat partially slumped to one side in an old metal folding chair. Blood stains riddled the white lab coat, and one mangled arm rested in his lap.

  “Love what you haven’t done with the place,” I said.

  “Ah, Joseph, glad to see it is you.”

  The man seemed delirious. “What the hell happened here?” I asked.

  “They’re out….”

  “What’s out?” I demanded, but he simply shook his head.

  “Everything… all of it.”

  He was in pain, more so than even me. The weird lighting made green, jewel-like beads of sweat glisten on his forehead.

  “What happened here, Reichert? What were you people doing?”

  If the man heard me, he didn’t bother to answer. He was in his own personal hell. I placed a gloved hand against his neck and the suit’s bio scanner gave me a basic diagnosis on him.