The crawl through the vents was anything but pleasant this time around. The smell was getting worse than ever, an awful reek of blood and murder and, hidden beneath it all, the foul odor of the Slugs and the corruption itself. On top of that, Enzo was forced to kill two Slugs along the way. Not an easy tasked in close quarters. They'd managed to climb up to the next level, the Military Headquarters. The radio chatter had been light since then.

"So, tell me about Stern," Enzo said as they crawled on.

"He's great. Among the best I've ever worked with," Lee said. "He has a good career, fought in the Systems Wars, led his men to a lot of victories. He ran everything with perfect efficiency, never fails to notice everything."

Enzo sighed. "So he's a jerkoff, huh?"

Lee hesitated. "Maybe from a civilian's standpoint."

"I told you I was former Spec Ops, and Marines before that," Enzo snapped.

"Yeah, former. You washed out, because no one just leaves Special Operations."

Here, Enzo openly laughed. "Is that what they tell you? Is that what you believe? No one leaves Spec Ops? You're dumber than you look, Lee."

He paused as he rounded a turn in the vent. Up ahead, debris blocked the path. There was an opening along the right side. Enzo moved up to it and glanced through the metal mesh. A small, ruined infirmary waited below.

"We're getting out here," he said. The morphine was already wearing off and his shoulder was throbbing with all this crawling.

"We can just take another route-" Lee began.

Enzo opened the grille. "I said we're getting out here." He slipped through.

Landing with a grunt, he moved out of the way, making room for Lee. She came through a moment later. He was worried she'd just keep going.

"What's the problem?" she asked, her voice now edged with frustration.

"The vents are too dangerous. Too easy to get ambushed in there. You saw how fast those Slug things are," Enzo replied.

"Fine," she said, moving across the infirmary, "we'll have to head through a few storage rooms to get to where we need to go."

As they made their way through the infirmary and into the first of a handful of storage bays, Lee explained the situation. "The Military HQ is essentially a giant square with a smaller circle placed inside of it. That circle is a corridor that grants access to everywhere in the area. Along the outside of the perimeter, where we are now, are things like mess halls, storage bays, barracks, infirmaries, shooting galleries, the gym, stuff like that. Support stuff. The interior holds the Control Room, the primary communications relay, central security network, the important stuff. From what we can tell, the big Altered thing is roaming that main corridor."

"Fantastic," Enzo muttered unhappily.

They continued to navigate the disused storage rooms, through narrow alcoves between stacks of crates. As they did, Enzo realized he could hear it. A thudding sound, like heavily plodding footfalls of what might have been a fucking dinosaur, growing louder. As it seemed to reach an apex, out of instinct, Enzo froze, Lee doing the same. The thudding became so loud and powerful that several smaller items, previously perched on a workbench, fell onto the floor. The footfalls stopped for a second and Enzo felt his fear ratchet up another notch.

Whatever it was, it must have been close by, possibly just on the other side of the wall he was looking at, past the crates. After a long moment, the footfalls started up again, retreating, the thing making its continual slow circuit around the corridor, no doubt killing anything and everything in its path. Enzo let out a long, shuddering breath.

He and Lee kept going, heading through the door at the opposite end of the storage bay. The next room was, thankfully, the mess hall they were looking for, Mess Four. It was also, unfortunately, already occupied by a less than thrilling reception committee. As Enzo stepped into the room, moving out from behind Lee, he spied a dozen Mutants and a pack of Harvesters thrown in for good mix. They were all spread out across the room, as if they were taking refuge from the huge creature roaming the main corridor.

Silence fell across the room.

Seconds of tension began to pass and Enzo and Lee readied themselves. The whole room seemed to be holding its breath, as if waiting for some unseen event to pass. Then the far door opened up and two more Marines stepped into the room.

That did it.

Chaos exploded as four guns spoke. The dozen and a half Altered shrieked as one and split up, dividing into two groups to deal with the fresh flesh that had stepped into their fields of vision. Enzo squeezed the trigger, blowing the top of the head off of the nearest Mutant and, while it was still falling, putting another three-round burst in its chest as that particular fact returned to him. It was difficult to re-learn the notion that headshots no longer got you confirmed kills. He turned his rifle, took aim and fired again.

Thick, crimson blood sprayed from another Mutant's chest and it fell, shrieking. All around him, he could hear the others firing rifles and shotguns. Mutants fell, Slugs were exterminated, and Harvesters were put down. Thankfully, they were all of the skinny variety, not yet allowed the opportunity to fill up on dead flesh. Within two minutes, all the hostiles had been put down. They spent an additional minute taking care of the Slugs that had survived the slaughter and were attempting to escape their now dead host bodies.

When that was all taken care of, the four survivors met in the center of the mess hall. Right away, Stern and Enzo began sizing each other up. Stern looked every bit a career Marine. Tall, broad, buff. He wore a high-and-tight of black hair and combat gear over traditional military fatigues. Even through the blood and the burns, the rips and the tears in his uniform, he looked ready to stand tall and dole out orders. Tell other people what to do.

"Brooks told me about you," was the first thing he said.

"Lee did likewise," Enzo replied.

"You're a mercenary. Unsurprisingly, you sound like a jackass who could get us killed."

"He's former Spec Ops," Lee said suddenly.

Enzo laughed. "Oh, so now that means something?"

"What happened? Were you honorable or dishonorably discharged?" Stern asked.

"Neither, I walked out when I got fed up with the bullshit."

Stern frowned, clearly not liking the answer. Finally, he heaved a sigh and pulled out his radio. "Whatever. Beggars can't be choosers. Brooks, we've reunited in Mess Four. You said you had information on this thing and how we can kill it."

"Yes, I do. I've been digging through the files on the research they were doing and it seems that there were two kinds of the Slugs. The kind we've all seen so far are the most common, they comprise about ninety nine percent of the Slugs that were on the vessel. But the other kind make something different entirely," Eve began.

"The thing out there?" Stern asked.

"No, not quite. All the Altered are being controlled by something. From the lowliest Slug to the largest Ire," Eve said.

"Ire?" Enzo asked.

"Ires are what they call the big ones, I don't know if any of you have encountered Ires yet-"

"We have," both Enzo and Stern said at once.

"-fine then. They're all controlled by something, what the researchers called the Alpha Beast. They grew an Alpha, kept in captivity, trying to use it to control the Altered they created. But it was too strong-willed, it wouldn't be bent. So they tried to clone it. What they got was the Bio Creature, or the Beta. It's not as big as the Alpha, or as powerful, and it didn't work. It couldn't take control of the Altered from the Alpha. In all the chaos, it ended up here. Now, as for killing the damned thing, as I'm sure all you boys and girls in green remember, Military HQ comes equipped with a killzone near the main entrance."

"Yeah, four heavy-duty drone guns," Stern said, smiling. "I was under the impression they were offline, or broken."

"They are offline. They'll need to be repaired. You will need to split up into two groups. One will have to make their way to the defensive network room to make repairs as quickly as possible. The other will have to shadow the creature and, when the time comes, lure it to the drone guns. Let them do the work and shred the thing."

"Rains, you're volunteering for shadow duty," Stern said.

"Oh, am I?" Enzo replied.

"Yes."

Enzo glanced down at his rifle, presently pointed at the floor, and shifted it, so that the barrel now pointed at Stern's midsection.

"Consequently, I could also volunteer to give you an emergency vasectomy."

Stern didn't move, but Lee and the other man, who Enzo realized must be Beam, raised their rifles, covering him.

It was Lee who spoke first. "Despite what you might think, Enzo, we don't have time for a dick-measuring contest. And besides, you'd be best suited for this, if you were really once in Spec Ops." A moment of silence passed.

Enzo sighed and lowered his rifle. "Fine," was all he said.

He listened to Stern outline the rest of the plan in further detail, then prepared himself for his dangerous task.

* * *

Shadowing duty.

This was extremely stupid, but there was a part of Enzo that liked the job. It was absurdly dangerous, generally the kind of thing he did. He listened to the radio chatter as the Marines made their way toward the defense network room or wherever the fuck they were going. He was in the main corridor, moving towards the sounds of immense plodding footfalls. The corridor bothered him, it truly was a circular tube, which meant no corners. No corners made it that much more difficult to comfortably hide yourself.

He was toying around with the idea of just leaving. There was a decent chance that he could figure out some way to climb the rest of the way up, break out of Syberia Installation and hot-wire a space-worthy craft of some kind. It'd be easy to punch it and jump halfway across the galaxy, provided it had an FLT drive, and then what? Keep drifting. Drifting was fun. It offered the greatest chance of pain-relieving activities.

Speaking of which...

The pain was spiking.

Enzo rubbed his shoulder, gritting his teeth against the agony. He stopped, knelt in the corridor for a second. His vision began to white out, the pain growing teeth. Enzo glanced down, realized his hands were shaking.

He clenched them into fists. "Please..." he moaned, his fists now trembling.

"Rains, do you have eyes on target?" He barely heard Stern.

Enzo groaned, squeezing his fists tighter, feeling the fingernails of his left hand digging into his palm. He realized he was grinding his teeth slowly back and forth.

"Rains? Do you have eyes are target?"

The moment passed, the pain began to abate, slowly simmering down to a more tolerable level. He took a deep, shuddering breath and stood back up.

"Rains!?"

Enzo broke into a light jog, catching up to the creature.

"Almost," he whispered, still feeling slightly sick from the pain.

Sometimes it got like this. The pain would spike for no reason. There were no warning signs, nothing consistent to tell him it was coming. He was never doing the same thing when it happened, he could be dead asleep or in the shower or gunning some bastard down. It was totally random. Enzo couldn't remember the last time he'd gotten a good night's sleep that didn't result from getting blackout drunk or taking a near-fatal dose of sleeping pills: Hypno, Drowze, Drone, or any of the other dozens of new designer drugs on the market.

He'd largely come to terms with the fact that he'd deal with this shit for the rest of his life. It was what fueled his fundamental lack of fearing death. Sometimes dying looked dangerously seductive. Something to make the pain stop, really stop, even for a fucking minute. If he was dead, there'd be no more pain, no more suffering or burning agony. No more waking up in the dead of night screaming. No more misery.

Of course, there'd be no more women, no more booze or drugs or the adrenaline rush, the thrill of combat and danger.

The only things worth living for at this point.

Enzo rounded the final stretch of corridor between him and this Bio Creature. He finally got a good look at the thing. It must be, he realized, the thing that had escaped from the massive cage he'd come across a floor below. Either that, or that had been the Alpha's cage. This thing had to hunch to fit in the corridor as it was. It easily reached fifteen feet in height. Its flesh was a pallid network of crimson lines, like a roadmap of hell, stretched tightly over a collection of thick, powerful muscles. It still retained a vaguely human shape, though each of its hands seemed to end in pincers that snapped close occasionally.

It was facing away from him and even from this distance, he could hear the massive huff of each breath. It was growling gently, a low, incredibly deep bass rumble that prickled Enzo's instincts and touched him on a very primal, ancient level, making him bristle in an utterly basic response. A throwback to caveman days when some particularly deadly animal cut loose with a growl. He took a few steps back, waiting.

"I have eyes on target," he murmured into the radio.

"Good, we've hit the network room and are beginning repairs. We'll let you know when we're ready to initiate," Stern replied.

The Bio Creature paused. Enzo tensed, waiting for it to pick back up its pace. A long moment passed. Finally, it set off again. He wondered what it was looking for, or how it had even gotten into this situation to begin with. Minutes passed while he played this stupid game with a monster that had two thousand pounds on him. It kept stopping every thirty feet or so, and he had to stop too, falling back each time until he actually lost sight of it. Not that it really mattered whether or not he could see it, he just didn't need it seeing him.

Finally, the call came through. "We're ready. Drone guns are repaired and we're in position. Bring it to us," Stern said.

"On it," Enzo replied.

Now came the fun part.

Enzo raised his rifle, flipped it to full auto and tucked the butt of it against his shoulder. He jogged forward a few meters and aimed at the thing's broad back. It stopped again. Good. He squeezed the trigger. The creature let out a roar that shook the whole of the area as he emptied the entire magazine into its back, spraying a thick ooze of deep crimson blood across the walls and ceiling. The creature spun around as Enzo hastily reloaded.

"Come get it!" he screamed, then turned and began running.

The entire area shook as the beast came for him, the floor trembling with its approach. Enzo sprinted down the corridor, orienting himself. He'd made two complete circuits at that point, having neared his original point of origin where he'd stepped out from Mess Four. He had to go a little over a third of the length of the entire corridor, back to the massive, vault-like doors that admitted access to the whole complex.

Enzo glanced over his shoulder and felt his heart leap into his throat. The Bio Creature was faster than it looked. It was gaining on him, already killing half the distance between them and coming closer. He picked up the pace, breaking into a flat-out dead run. He dodged slicks of blood and the occasional bit of debris or body part that hadn't already been crushed to paste by repeated trampling from the thing as it wandered the corridor.

Within a moment, he had it in sight. The doors were opened and Stern was waiting for him. The Staff Sergeant urged him on, sighting the Bio Creature with his rifle and firing over Enzo's head. Enzo ducked and kept going, listening to the beast howl and rage as it gave chase. He almost crashed directly into Stern, instead managing to get around him at the last second. They both retreated into the lobby and Stern began screaming for them to hit it.

The beast began ripping the door frame out of the wall trying to get in. Enzo took in the lobby at a glance. The central area was a broad, wide-open section beset on both sides by security checkpoints, where Lee and Beam were waiting. Enzo and Stern split up, each of them heading for opposite checkpoints as the creature tore its way into the room.

"Well?" Stern called.

"Working on it!" Lee shouted back.

"What's the problem!? You said you had it ready!" Enzo said.

"We ran into some technical difficulties!" Lee snapped.

The creature roared, silencing all conversation. Enzo trembled in anticipation, his gaze snapping back and forth between the drone guns and the Bio Creature. It was looking at him and Beam, then across the room at Stern and Lee, as if deciding who to go for. A sharp whirling sound suddenly filled the air and Enzo felt relief pour through him as the quartet of huge, dark drone guns sprang to life, tracking the monster.

A second passed, then another.

Abruptly, the drone guns died, the sound falling silent.

"Lee..." Stern said, the fear obvious in his voice.

"Shit! They're not going to come online! Everyone out! Plan B!" Lee called.

"What the fuck is Plan B?!" Enzo cried as they left the security checkpoints and raced past the monster, towards the exit they'd just led it through.

"Run!" Stern screamed.

The Bio Creature roared once more, making a grab for Enzo. He narrowly ducked beneath its pincer hand, feeling the displaced air as it came within inches of the top of his head, and ran out into the central corridor. The quartet of them sprinted away. The Altered titan came after them, crashing back into the main corridor.

Enzo had no idea where they were going, but figured it must be somewhere with guns. Big guns. A backup plan they had failed to mention to him. Sure enough, a dozen meters ahead, almost out of sight, Stern was the first to disappear into a doorway.

Beam was next, then Lee.

"Give us some cover fire!" one of them shouted.

Enzo growled, spun and shouldered his rifle. The Bio Creature was coming for them. He aimed for its twisted caricature of a face and loosed a volley of bullets, squeezing the trigger until the gun clicked empty. The spray of lead took it mostly in the face, small eruptions of crimson gore spraying the ceiling, dripping onto the floor.

The behemoth stumbled, came to a stop, its pincer hands brought up in a defensive gesture. He must have hit something vital, maybe an eye. Enzo hastily reloaded and kept up the fire now that he had it on the defensive. Half a minute passed, then a full minute. The gun was getting hot in his hands. The creature made slow, inevitable progress against the stream of bullets. And then Enzo reached for another magazine, ejecting the freshly spent one, and found nothing waiting for him. He quickly checked his pockets, but realized he'd run dry.

"Any fucking day now!" he screamed.

"Coming!" Stern called. "Clear the way!"

A second later Stern emerged from the room they'd all disappeared into. The Bio Creature was closer now, much closer. Stern was holding a double-barreled rocket launcher. He dropped to one knee, shouldered the launcher and fired both rockets simultaneously. Enzo barely had time to fall back and cover his eyes before the twin rockets shrieked from their metal nests and smashed directly into the Bio Creature. A wave of heat washed over Enzo, pushing him back several steps as he twisted instinctively away from it.

When he opened his eyes back up, he stared in horror. The creature was still standing. Its right arm had been blown off, but it was still standing, and coming for him.

"Beam!" Stern called.

The Marine shot out of the room. "Found them!" he called, handing a pair of a small, silver rockets to Stern, who quickly fed them into the launcher. He raised the weapon a second time and fired again. Another wave of heat and light and fire tore through the corridor, forcing the survivors back into the armory they'd grabbed the weapon from. This time, when the dust and smoke cleared, they were relieved to see that the Bio Creature was down and out. They cautiously approached it, studying the body, and saw that one of the rockets had hit it dead in the face, the other in the chest. Twin craters had opened up, killing the creature.

"Damn," Enzo breathed, letting out a deep breath. "That was fun."

"Not exactly what I'd call fun," Beam muttered.

"Come on, let's go see Brooks," Stern replied. "After we raid this armory."

Enzo followed the three Marines back into the armory. His rifle was tapped out for ammo and his pistol wasn't far behind. What was worse, he couldn't seem to find any magazines for either. What he did managed to find was a shotgun and a box of fat blue shells for it. He let his rifle hang across his back and added the shotgun to his arsenal, loading it up and pocketing the rest of the shells for future use. It had been awhile since he'd used a shotgun.

After picking the armory clean, they returned to the corridor and followed it around until they came to the big door that led to the Control Room.

It was still firmly closed.

"Come on, Brooks, we've taken care of the big monster. Open up," Enzo said.

"Fine. Opening the door now." She sounded reluctant.

After a moment, the door slid open, revealing the technology-packed interior of the Control Room. It was spherical in nature, the exterior ringed and utterly crammed with all manner of workstations, consoles, and terminals. The floor was littered with infopads and spent shell casings, and not a little bit of blood. A lot of the screens were either dead, cracked, or registering only static. In the exact center of all this was a raised dais with a single chair and workstation built around it in a half-circle. This is where Eve Brooks sat.

Enzo took her in at a glance. She was about as hot as she sounded over the radio. She was a little under average height, trim and fit, she looked like she did a lot of cardio. Shoulder-length red hair, startlingly blue eyes, clear, pale skin. No, forget that, she looked better than she sounded, Enzo decided as he came closer.

"So," she said, looking up, finishing whatever it was she was doing, "we're all finally here."

"Yeah. Did you get to what we discussed?" Stern asked.

"Yes, I finally managed to fix the BioScan," Eve replied.

"And?"

"There are, by my count, forty nine people left alive in this base. Five of them are in this room, and twelve of them are clustered downstairs in the holding area, which means that the remaining thirty two are either all Dark Ops or random survivors we haven't encountered yet. But this late in the game, I'm willing to bet they're all Dark Ops. Only a few of them are on the levels above us anyway, and I don't have access to the abandoned mines or the topside weather base. There's a solid chance that those people above us are scouts."

"So there's a dozen still in stasis?" Stern asked.

"Yes."

Stern was silent for a moment. Enzo simply leaned back against a wall and waited, watching everything play out. Finally, Stern seemed to come to a decision.

"How long will it take to get all the relevant data on this godforsaken hellhole into a mobile data storage unit?" he asked.

"At least an hour if we want multiple copies. I can do three in an hour," Eve replied.

"Fine, then. Start the process."

"That's what I was just doing when you came in."

"Good. Beam, Lee, stay here, guard Brooks, make sure everything goes to plan." Here, he turned to Enzo. "Rains, if you really were in Spec Ops and if you've got a shred of honor left in you, you'll agree with me that those people can't be left behind. It isn't right."

"What if they're all prisoners? Death row convicts?" Enzo replied.

"What if they aren't? What if they're guards, techs, pilots? Does it matter? You could have just as easily been left to die down there, but you weren't. We owe those people."

Enzo considered his words. Roughly ninety nine percent of him said to hell with that, he didn't owe anyone anything. He hadn't gotten to where he was today by doing unnecessary favors that could get him killed. But there was a very small part of him that seemed to be gaining traction ever since waking up in this horrible place that remembered that he was still in the red in his life, he'd done a lot of bad things over the past few decades, and that maybe something like this could help him get closer to being in the black.

And besides, it sounded dangerous, and he liked dangerous things.

"Fine," he said. "Let's go."