Earlier that day.

  Richard's back was on fire. Thousands of hypodermic electrodes had been forcefully ripped from his spine then reimpaled in slightly different spots, no longer properly touching their assigned nerves. When the warp weaver had ripped off his exo-arm, it caused a short circuit, pulsing the tiny needles with electricity and cooking his flesh. He was curled on the ground, unable to stop his muscles from spasming and clenching. His nanites attempted to suppress the pain, but new waves of agony flared through him with every jolt. They droned monotone damage reports with every passing second.

  Avery held him down. Kumiko was talking but he couldn't focus on the words. She had already doused him in cleansing acid. It melted flesh and killed warp, typically used for clearing warp from armor or wounds in emergencies. It had to be applied immediately in a hazmat breach or the infection would spread too deep to kill without killing the soldier. Richard had seen it happen once, on a joint mission like this one. He could still hear the screams as her flesh had dissolved. Was his armor compromised? He couldn't tell through the pain and the heat.

  Quick was standing over him as well. They were arguing. He felt her knee press into his back in an attempt to still his convulsions. She was trying to fix the exo-kit, or maybe just stop it from cooking him alive. The technology that enabled these machines was miraculous, letting soldiers fight with the strength of ten men, feel through synthetic nerves, use weapons too unwieldy for ordinary deployment, and wear armor built like a bunker, but even miracles became nightmarish when butchered.

  There was a pressure on his spine then an explosion of pain as Melony ripped something forcefully off his exo-kit, causing all the electrodes to jump before repuncturing deeper into his flesh. The exo-kit went limp, relief bloomed in him as the constant electrocution subsided. The electrodes retracted in unison, leaving his back raw, bloody, and cooked, but free of hypodermic splinters. The weight of the kit and his armor became crushing as the exoskeleton powered down. It was bearable, and far preferable to electro-shock therapy. His muscles could finally relax and he let them, sprawling out on the floor. He let out a half-sob half-sigh at the dull ache that was his entire body.

  “Well, he's no longer screaming,” Melony commented. “You can let go now, dillweed.”

  The pressure restraining his shoulders released.

  “Are you still with us, Richard?”

  “I'm alive, Sasaki,” he moaned, face pressed against the inside of his visor.

  “Okay, uhm, Melony is going to get your exo-kit working again. How are your energy reserves, are they good?”

  He'd not been keeping track of all the injuries his nanites rattled off. Its voice tended to fade into his subconscious, but he knew he'd rebroken his leg grabbing that table. Even if it had been healed to usability, it wasn't as strong where the break had been. He'd also suffered a myriad of other injuries that his nanites had been healing. Nanites weren't magic; they used the energy from the host's body to function. They were closer to hyper intelligent, artificial, and industrial strength microbes, able to mold their form to suit the needs of the body. And all that healing took a lot of energy.

  “Not great.”

  “That’s not good, let's see,” she muttered before coming to a decision. “Command your nanites to repair essential functions only and restrict blood flow to ruptured blood vessels.” She paused, hesitating before continuing more softly. “Sorry, Richard, but you'll have some pretty ugly scars from this.”

  Kumiko was a gentle soul, but it was wasted on him. He knew it was only a matter of time, fighting the warp was a lethal business. He'd gladly take the scars over a quick death.

  “I'll live?” he asked. With the weight of the exo-kit pressing on him, the most he could do was turn his head.

  Kumiko met his eyes. “Yes sir.”

  “Good enough for me,” he took a moment to verbally relay his doctor's instructions to his nanites. After getting Sasaki's nod of approval, he asked, “What about the warp weaver?”

  “I'm keeping an Eye out for it,” Quick reported, referring to one of her drones. He'd thought the names were confusing, but Yeva liked them. “It seems to have left for good this time. My guess is looking for easier prey. It bailed as soon as we got here.”

  “And the captain?”

  “Still no word, boss,” Avery said.

  “I'm doing my best to scout out these tunnels, but there's tons of them,” Melony added. “I've had two of my Eyes searching the passageways and still haven't found anyone.” Pain twinged as she reattached something to his exo-kit, causing it to jostle the raw skin below. “Sorry.”

  “It's fine.”

  The exo-kit came to life. Its numerous straps repressurized, causing the kit to squeeze his raw skin again as it adjusted itself. Once securely in place it redeployed its hypodermic electrodes, which went in more painfully than normal. He probably had some pretty severe nerve damage, but his nanites were suppressing the bulk of the pain. He felt the previously limp exoskeleton begin to support its own weight again as synthetic muscles tightened, moving the weight onto the exoskeletal ribcage that cradled his chest.

  “Don't move yet, Richard,” Kumiko warned. “I still have to patch your armor's seal.”

  “My seal was broken?” His exo-kit was worn under his armor, but the exo-arm protruded from the back, meaning there was a large sealing gasket around the bulky kit itself. He had known it might have been compromised, but it was chilling nonetheless.

  “You didn't know?” she said, surprised. “You got lucky you landed face down. The warp weaver really did a number on you, but it left nothing behind when it ran off. No warp ichor made contact with your skin.”

  Had the beast stayed for even a few more seconds it could have easily killed him with nothing more than a splatter of its tainted blood. He shivered, imagining flecks of warp spores drifting through the open air, centimeters away from his exposed and raw skin.

  “Patch me up, doc,” he said, his voice steadier than he felt.

  ***

  They were quick to leave the biolab after they'd gotten him walking again. His back was still a bloody mess, even breathing hurt, but staying still in a breach zone was suicide. The warp weaver would be hunting down isolated squad members even now, trying to pick off as many as it could before mustering an all out attack on the remaining groups. The only way to avoid this would be finding as many of their wayward allies as possible. Even if it meant limping around a breach zone with severe burns, nerve damage, and broken bones, not to mention compromised armor seals and a missing exo-arm. He'd at least managed to get his nano-blade working again, Sasaki's medical solvent doing wonders where fire and strength had failed.

  Corporal Quick was attempting to establish a relay link with her drones while they moved. If they came anywhere near another squadmate, the drones would pick up their radio signal and relay it back to them, but so far, nothing. The original briefing had indicated that the main breach tumor was likely deep in the facility, so their little slide to the lower levels wasn't all bad. It was possible that they had managed to slip past a few of the warp’s earlier defenses. Though if no one had finished off the tumor in the mess hall then they'd still have to back track to deal with it before the warp at this location would start dying. Richard's guess was that there would be three, if not four, total breach tumors to deal with. The cafeteria made one and the warp weaver was the second, meaning they still had one more to track down and destroy before they could start retreating. If they hadn't been split up so early on, they might have fallen back already to call for reinforcements. In ideal circumstances, there was a squad for each tumor, meaning they were pretty out gunned. But with Yeva and Captain Coldwell lost somewhere down here, Richard couldn't just take the team and leave them on their own.

  The whole situation was nostalgic, the squad and him chasing after Yeva, unable to catch up. He'd half expected it to be her that showed up at the end of their fight with the warp weaver, returning to literally pull him out of the fire again. She hadn't made it easy to like her at first, but she never made anything easy for anyone, let alone herself.

  “Got something,” Quick said.

  “Where?”

  “Just ahead, it's in the hallway. Friendly, but just static, like someone left their comm on. They aren't responding.”

  Love what you're reading? Discover and support the author on the platform they originally published on.

  “How could we not pick it up earlier?”

  “My guess is electromagnetic interference. We could be dealing with a screecher.”

  “That would explain why the warp weaver wants to split us up so badly.” A screecher was a class 12 breach tumor that could warp electromagnetic waves. It wasn't quite the same as an EMP, as it didn't completely fry electronics, but it did severely limit the use of anything wireless in the area around it. Worst of all, its range of influence was way beyond that of any other warp beast or breach tumor. They tended to be hidden away somewhere hard to reach, as their offensive and defensive capabilities were limited, but that wasn't as much of an issue with a warp weaver on the prowl.

  “We should hurry, they could be hurt,” Sasaki said.

  “It could be a trap, they won't identify themself. Screechers can sometimes spoof our radio frequencies,” Quick warned.

  “We go, Corporal Sasaki is right, it could be Yeva, hurt and unable to respond.”

  “But if it's a trap-”

  “We go,” he snapped. He'd accepted long ago that he had a hard time making the right calls under pressure, but it still stung that even after all these years, they still questioned his orders. Under normal circumstances he might've let it slide, but his injuries had him in a foul mood.

  Just ahead they reached a section of the hallway with a large and heavy plexiglass door. Signs indicated they were entering what had once been a clean room, but the ventilation that would have supplied the lab with a constant supply of filtered air were all shut down, as evidenced by the stagnant haze of black spores that drifted lazily through the air on the other side. Once through the threshold, the warp's influence became thick. The air was humid like the hot breath of a mammal in winter, fogging up their faceshields. Warp feelers and ichor grew across the concrete walls in vein-like patterns.

  Whenever Richard entered a breach zone like this, he got the distinct impression of walking into a monster's open maw to be swallowed whole. Human instinct screamed to turn back with each step and had to be pushed aside. He had his team at his back, Yeva didn't, wherever she was. He had to tell himself that, forcefully willing what he saw in front of him to not be her.

  Leaned against the metal door of a large standing freezer was a mound of hazmat armor, crumpled and deflated, only supported by its own rigidity and the exo-kit left inside. The whole thing was grown over by a mass of warp feelers that clung to it like mold. Black ichor splattered the inside of the yellowed glass faceshield, and the torso was sliced open, spilling forth a bundle of stringy, pulsating black veins.

  The sight churned his stomach but he forced himself to look. He had to know. The armor, she wore medium class armor, if it was heavy, it had to be someone else. It was too damaged and overgrown to tell at a glance. He stepped forward, he had to check the back.

  “Richard,” Kumiko called after him, but it was concern in her voice, not warning. He ignored it.

  Grabbing the armor by the shoulder, he pulled it free from the feelers’ embrace. It sprawled face down on the floor, splattering warp ichor where it landed. Richard let out a sigh. It had an exo-cannon. It was a grenadier, one of Coldwell's two, not Yeva. Somewhere on the corpse they'd find a solid lead dog-tag, but Richard didn't care to search for it at the moment. He'd learned what he needed.

  Across from where the body lay, there was another of the warp weaver's tunnels. Richard could surmise what had followed. The CBRN launched from the opening at a bad angle, hitting his head on the metal freezer door and blacking out. The warp weaver finding his unconscious body, opened his belly with a single slice of its bladed forelegs.

  It was only because he'd been looking at the tunnel mouth that he saw it. Movement, oily and sibilant.

  “Incoming!” he warned. He drew his nano-blade and muttered the activation phrase as the creature emerged. Its tendrils came first. Ten groping fingers feeling at the portal's edges dragged the rest of its bulk through like an octopus squeezing through a narrow tube. The squad opened fire. The decanid retaliated in kind, its gravity warping unneeded in the confined space. Already his team was in its reach. Tendrils flew towards Melony and Kumiko, looking to crush the two sources of stinging assault-rifle fire. Their bullets were the least effective of all their weapons against a warp beast of the decanid’s size, but the monster didn’t know that, not yet.

  Richard dashed to intercept the attack, slicing through two of the decanid’s limbs with a single sweep of his blade. He couldn’t get them all, however, and it was dangerous to be this close with a decanid for a reason. One of the grasping appendages made it through and wrapped around Kumiko’s ankle with crushing strength. The combat medic screamed, and the decanid pulled, flinging her across the room like a doll. She crashed into the far wall even as more tendrils came for Richard and Melony. He advanced into the assault while she retreated towards the entrance, firing as she backed away.

  Richard cut down tendril after tendril in an attempt to get through to Kumiko, but the decapod always seemed to have more and his injuries were slowing him down. Aiden, who had been ignored by the beast so far, finally got his first exo-cannon shot off. The decanid sacrificed another limb to block the ball of charged plasma. It would run out eventually, but it was going to be too late. The beast had wrapped a second tendril around the struggling Kumiko’s head and neck. It was going to twist her apart.

  The warp shivered around them in perfect unison, from decanid to feeler to ichor, like the world itself had shuddered. The decanid dropped Corporal Sasaki, its prey forgotten, and started to retreat back into the tunnel mouth. Something must have happened elsewhere in the facility. It was being called back to defend a breach tumor. Richard didn’t intend to let that happen. Aiden was still charging his second shot, so he leapt at the rapidly retreating form, grabbing hold of tendril slithering through the air. The limb attempted to wrap around him, so he cut it off just below where he was holding. If he’d had his exo-arm, he could have climbed it like a rope, even while wielding his exo-blade in one hand, instead he had to just cling to the beast as it dragged him along.

  Melony thankfully stopped firing when she saw what he was doing. The decanid only had a few limbs left at full length, most had been cut short by the fighting, so it would have to pull him closer if it wanted to crush him. It did so, pausing in the tunnel mouth to curl the tendril he was holding onto so it could drag him in reach of its other arms. In the air, he was at its mercy, and even with a nano-blade, he would soon be overwhelmed by the beast's attempts to crush him. But he’d bought the time they’d needed. He let go, allowing himself to drop. Whomp. Boom. The decanid’s core overhead burst like a watermelon, showering black and red gore across the walls and ceiling. Its artificial gravity failed as it died, and Richard dove out of the way to avoid getting crushed as it fell.

  “Sasaki, you alive over there?” he called.

  “Mildly concussed but still breathing,” she said. She had slumped against the wall and was breathing hard. Her leg was twisted at a wrong angle where the decanid had grabbed her, clearly badly broken.

  “Avery, help Sasaki set the bone,” he ordered, sheathing his nano-blade. “Quick, have you had your drones sweep the tunnels above our heads?”

  “Not extensively, otherwise I wouldn’t have missed the decanid.”

  “Call them over, I have a theory.” He gave the dark, open maw an appraising look. “If I were an evil, intelligent alien spider monster capable of boring tunnels in solid rock, where would I hide my screecher?”

  “Somewhere it couldn’t be reached?” she offered with a raised eyebrow.

  “Like a nearly vertical tunnel full of slippery warp ichor?”

  “What did you have in mind?”

  “Avery hasn’t used his thermal reactor yet.” It was standard issue for a CBRN, the inferno generators were primarily used to cook anything in a given room, but unlike his pyro grenade, a thermal reactor was too big to throw and was equipped with a timer or remote trigger. “Think one of your Eyes could take the weight?”

  “It’s worth a shot,” she shrugged.

  ***

  It took longer than Richard would have liked, but they found it. The main issue had been commanding the drones. An on-board Ai controlled their flight systems so that Melony didn't have to pilot them herself, but without the ability to wirelessly communicate with each other the drones had to return frequently to report their findings. Once they located a warp wall, it was all a matter of proper planning. The membrane was blocking the drones from surveying the breach tumor directly, but it was suspected to be securely within the chamber beyond. So they would have to do a series of bomb carrying drones, three to be safe, in case this first one didn't make it all the way through to the screecher. Fortunately, Avery always carried a truly egregious amount of explosives in his pants.

  Technically what they were doing broke several international laws, as Ai controlled weaponry had been banned by the Geneva Convention after the now defunct Adonis Tech accidentally massacred over a hundred thousand people in Madrid with their Ai controlled police drones. Nowadays, all drones were specifically programmed to shut down if rigged with firearms or explosives. Normally, they would get around this by having Melony take manual control of the drones and pilot them herself, but with the screecher blocking wireless signals that wasn't an option. So Melony had to download their nav data and write a basic routing algorithm to path the suicide drones, rather than rely on their built in Ais or her own flying skills. The final one was rigged with a heat signatures program that would have it lock onto anything with a similar temperature to that of a breach tumor. They ran hot, typically around 45°C. All the bombs would have to be on timers - another work around for the programming - which meant doing a lot of math that was over Richard's head. But it was charming to see Aiden and Melony getting along as they worked on the problem together. The two of them had an on again off again relationship for years that their Captain had never caught onto - Yeva wasn't very good at social cues, much to Richard's chagrin. He had never understood how the two corporals made it work, as even when they were sleeping together their chemistry was toxic at best. He could only suppose that Aiden was a masochist and Melony a sadist. With that kind of nuclear chemistry, however, it was only a matter of time until their relationships imploded. He let it slide so long as it didn't interfere with their work, which it never had.

  With preparations finished, Richard admired his squad’s handiwork. Three sleek, lightweight quadcopters - Melony's entire fleet - were loaded with all of Aiden's C4 and his only thermal reactor. Truly a sight to make the UN quake. Richard didn't enjoy breaking rules. In fact, he had been called rigid and worse on numerous occasions, but this screecher was in his way and Yeva was in trouble. Besides, if there were another option to take it out, he didn't see it. He just had to hold their breath as the murder drones launched, electric motors whining under the strain as they disappeared into the darkness. If this didn't work, they were screwed.

  It was rather anticlimactic, all the action happening out of reach and beyond sight. After about two minutes of silence, the ceiling shook slightly with the reverberations of a distant explosion. The blast was followed by another then a third. The warp feelers around them shuddered in a wave that traveled out from the tunnel’s mouth. A breach was like a single living organism, and they had just bombed one of its hearts. The beasts had been ignoring them for a while now, but like an immune system reacting to an infection, soon they would be swarmed by angry defenders. It was time to go.