Fortress Purgatory (Helltroopers Book 2) Read online

  They waited for a few minutes until Char could get the seal open from the fortress side. There was a slight hum as the AI, safely stored in a secure box that dangled from Theo’s utility belt, found a way to get it unlocked. Once again, they stood outside a door that held secrets on the other side.

  One the door unsealed, Ash marched casually inside. This time he wasn’t greeted by flames, that was a good start, even if it was quiet as a tomb.

  The terminal was in a state of chaos. Boxes were strewn everywhere and shelves overturned. Pre-packaged food and other sundries were scattered everywhere from the various scattered crates and boxes. No one was around, but the mess couldn’t be more than a few hours old.

  “Looks familiar,” Costa observed as he entered behind Ash. “No crazy people running around this time, but someone went nuts. Place is a mess again. Wonder what happened here?”

  “Someone had a break down,” Makulah commented. He kicked a metal box out of the way.

  The rest of Team Omega spread out into the terminal control room. It was a mess. More parts scattered to the floor, small counters overturned and even sensitive equipment smashed. A faint light illuminated the place. It was easy enough to see whoever came through this place had no love for it. Footprints of boots were all over the floor, some of them tracking in dust, others mud. It was hard to figure out since the corporation hadn’t said a thing about this happening.

  “You think we should call the corporation and ask for an update?” Kris inquired. She walked along a series of cubicles to the rear and tried to figure out what took place before they arrived.

  “We could, but they wouldn’t tell us a thing,” Ash responded. “My guess is that knew what we were walking into and told Royce to be silent about it. They knew we would want more information if they told us the terminal was trashed and deserted.”

  A large plastic crate sat in the middle of the floor. Someone had tried to rip the top off, but hadn't been successful. Jack walked over to it and pried at the lid. Inside was a slip of paper. He managed to pull it out just as Ash walked up to him.

  “What is that?” Ash wanted to know. He looked over Jack’s shoulder at the paper.

  “Some kind of packing slip,” Jack responded. “Something leaving the facility. I can’t make it out; can you see if anything is visible in the crate?” He held the paper up to the light.

  Ash pulled a flashlight from his tool belt and shinned it inside the crate. He could see a row of small objects separated by paper. One pull of the packing material revealed a stack of them. They descended down to the bottom of the crate. With a gloved hand, Ash reached inside and pulled one of the objects out.

  He held it up to the light and looked at it. It was a small piece of polished rectangular stone, not more than three by one inch in size. It was no more than half an inch thick. He brought it to the light and noted a green crystalline structure to the stone.

  “I have no clue what these are,” Ash commented and looked at it again.

  “Packing list is no help at all,” Jack told him. “Everything is coded by numbers.

  “They are slip stones,” Barbara Ann announced from her side of the room.

  Ashes watched her glide across the room and take the stone from him. She held it in her left hand squeezed it. From where Jack stood, he saw a look of absolute pleasure rise from Barbara Ann’s face. He was surprise as Jack didn’t know androids could experience this feeling.

  “What are slip stones?” Ash questioned.

  “Small crystals which provide the energy for the power packs the corporation sells all over the system. These are charged, but haven’t been placed inside their sealed power pack containers. If you open up an EAC power pack, they will disintegrate because the slip stone is charged to the power pack, this is why nobody knows about the crystals. Patent pending of course.” She handed it back to Ash, who returned it to the crate.

  At that moment, Ash heard a sound of men yelling outside the control room door that led into the old fortress. The sounds increased in volume by the second. He wanted to have a good look at what caused them, though he thumbed the safety off his impact rifle to be on the safe side.

  At a signal from Ash the other members of Team Omega did the same. Ash watched their vital signs light up on the inside of his helm monitor. The only one who wore no suit armor was Barbara Ann, but she didn’t seem to need it.

  He pushed the door open found a staircase. The noise came from the bottom of it. Ash shrugged. A walk down a staircase seemed to go along with the places EAC sent him into as of late. He began to descend it, the boots of his crew thumping along behind him. The staircase was illuminated with a faint bulb, which allowed them to see the way forward, but not much more.

  Another door was at the bottom of the stairs. Now the yells were very strong and all of them came from beyond the door. Ash waited until his people were behind him and shoved the door open.

  He walked into a riot in progress.

  The level was vast and illuminated by fires from barrels and some old ceiling lamps. It was full of equipment used in the manufacturing process. The floor was filthy and covered with metal shavings. Ash knew a man who worked in a machine shop when he was younger, back on the Mars Colony. He visited him once and couldn’t believe the level of filth. The filth in that machine shop didn’t come near the condition of this level.

  Thirty yards away, a mob of men in blue overalls and dirty shirts where screaming at a small office mounted on risers. They had it surrounded. Every so often, another object would be hurled in the air, only to smash against the side of the office. He could see shapes inside it that moved with apprehension. More fires burned around them, started from fuel dumped into buckets and torches made from pipes soaked in resin.

  “Fuggin scabs! Bastards! Rats!” the voices yelled at the office. Another bottle was thrown in the air, this time with a fuse that served to ignite the contents when it shattered on the office side.

  Several men held a large banner at some security cameras and shook their fists why screaming. The banners read with slogans like ‘United We Stand!’ and ‘Restore and More!’ In the distance, a group of men was at work tearing apart a large machine with crowbars. A few more sat on dirty benches and cheered the mob around the office.

  “I think we’ve just walked into some kind of labor riot,” Costa said to the team as they starred at the scene in front of them. “Would have been nice if the corporation mentioned this possibility.”

  “You know, Ash,” Jack brought up, “I just had a notion. If this is a real labor riot in progress and not some kind of theatrical nightmare like on the orbital, then then we’ve walked into it with guns and armor. This could be taken the wrong way.” He spoke as another burning glass bottle ignited on the office with a loud crash.

  Jack’s words were transmitted to the rest of the team two seconds before several of the mob noticed them. They turned around to look in Team Omega’s direction. For a few more seconds the screams and yells of the rioters died down as their friends nudged them. The entire mob turned around to face Team Omega.

  “I don’t like the looks of this at all,” Kris said to the crew. The mob looking at them as if it didn’t matter that they wore armor and carried devestating weapons.

  “I see trouble,” Makulah agreed.

  “Corporate scum!” someone screamed and the air was filled with flying objects. Blocks of aluminum, various rocks, and chairs were thrown at Ash and his crew. He felt a thud on his helm as a metal block bounced off it. The mob surged in their direction, as they threw whatever they could get their hands on from the level. These appeared to be desperate men with nothing to lose.

  Ash set his gun to single action and aimed it up in the air. With a few pulls of the trigger, he blasted the ceiling with the miniature shells the portable cannon fired. The screams and yells were drowned out by the roar of his impact gun as it blew rock out of the ceiling overhead. Shards and fragment showered everyone.

  The front line of t
he mob froze, realized the guns the armored group carried were real, and ran in every direction except at Team Omega. Ash stood still and waited for them to scatter all over the level. In seconds, the mob disappeared behind machines, crates and whatever else they could find. The way was open to the office on the raisers.

  “To the office!” Ash yelled. “We need to find out who is in charge around here! Everyone move it!” He ran in the office direction with his crew in pursuit.

  The mob stayed out of the way until they realized Team Omega was headed for the risers. The voices began to merge out of the many hiding places as they ran past them. The mob was too far gone to care about what those guns could do. They had the notion armed guards were sent in to rescue the people trapped in the office.

  “Manage this!” a man in a dirty shirt yelled as he ran out in front of Ash and hurled a block of cement at him. Ash deflected the block and knocked the man out of his way in one move.

  Minutes later, they were at the base of the stairs that led up to the office. It wasn’t a very large one. The metal sides of it were bashed in by what the mob had done before Team Omega arrived. Ash peered up at the door, obviously locked, which had the words “Human Resources” written on the outside. It was decorated by obscenities and the words “Rise Up!” painted on it many times. Yes, people were very angry in this place.

  “How do we get them to open up in there?” Theo asked. He watched a few faces in the dirty windows stare down at him.

  “We have a bigger problem right now,” Ash pointed to the rear.

  The mob was reassembling. The same men who’d randomly tossed rocks and chunks at the office formed a phalanx between them and the door to the terminal. Most of them carried makeshift weapons in their hands and had the burning eyes of men pushed over the edge one time too many. Ash cradled his gun and ran the numbers in his head, if this mission turned out to be similar to the orbital, then they didn’t have enough ammunition to get caught up in this sort of thing. Eventually they’d run dry and as they team reloaded with fresh magazines the mob would swarm over them.

  Ash saw some movement from the top of the stairs as the door to the office opened slightly. He saw a very scared women look down at them from her vantage. There was time to do one thing only.

  “We need to get up there now!” Ash yelled and ran up the stairs. He pulled Barbara Ann along with him as his boots clamored on the metal stairs.

  They almost made it. Ash kicked the door open and pulled the android in with him. In one motion, he tossed her into the room and turned around to grab the next member of Team Omega, Makulah. Jack was the next one up the stairs and Makulah pulled him inside.

  But the strikers realized someone might try to get up those stairs and rescue the people inside. They’d rigged the stairs to collapse should that happen. The moment Jack was inside the office, someone pulled a cord and the stairs, with the rest of Team Omega on it, collapsed to the floor.

  3

  Ash watched in horror as the stairs collapsed from one cable tug. The rest of Team Omega fell to the floor. It wasn’t the fall that concerned him; the armor was designed to protect the wearers from this kind of incident. What horrified him was the mob that swept over the crew, obscuring this comrades with their own mass of bodies. He stood up there with the impact gun and felt helpless. The weapon was far too powerful to risk using on the mob, as they were unarmored and so the rounds would bore right through them and quite possibly bash into his own team.

  In seconds a shower of thrown projectiles smashed into the office. Ash turned around and faced the people in the office with him just after slamming the door shut to take cover. Barbara Ann, Makulah and Jack where to his rear.

  The office wasn’t that big, about seven hundred square feet with a washroom at back. It was somewhat cleaner than the factory floor, but not by much. What concerned him the most were two older women and young man who stood at the back. All three were smartly dressed which showed they could afford it. These had to be the managers the men on the floor hated with such ferocity.

  “Are you with security?” the man asked them. “We haven’t seen any security guards all day. We think they’re hiding someplace in the lower levels.” He was pale from the fear of the mob.

  “Oh, shut up, Harold,” one of the older women said. “You know as well as I do the security guards joined up with the strikers as soon as the trouble started. I never trusted that bunch to hold the line.”

  “And I said none of this would have happened if you hadn’t cut their hazard pay!” the other woman screamed at the man named Harold. “We’re screwed unless these guys are with the corporation.”

  “We’re not security guards,” Ash explained to her. “We were paid to come down here and find a man named Simon Haddo. Do you know anything about him?”

  One of the women turned and looked at Harold. “Wasn’t that the guy the guards told us they found wandering around at our level?” she asked. “We let HQ know about him a few hours ago. We’ve had a number of security teams fail to check in, though it could just as easily be this riot in progress. As you see our staff have become somewhat unruly.”

  Kris and Costa were already on the staircase when it collapsed on them. Kris was just behind Jack when she felt the metal frame start to buckle. At first, she thought it was from the weight of their suit armor. Then she remembered the actual armor wasn’t very heavy. It was hard and padded from the other side to protect them from bullet hits, but the mass wasn’t that great. A typical set of suit armor only weighed 65 pounds. It was evenly distributed over the body.

  She saw Jack pulled into the second tier office as she fell back. Kris grabbed on the railing to anchor herself as she went over. Costa was right underneath her and she went down on top of him. Theo jumped out of the way when the stairs collapsed.

  “I’m good,” Kris let him know over the transmitter since their visors were down.

  “Me too,” Costa added as he picked himself up from the factory floor. He helped Kris recover her gun as they both stood up.

  “Nice to see the armor is impact resistant,” Char commented from the box where he was stored on Costa’s belt.

  As they picked themselves up from the floor, the mob swarmed over them, each of the troopers being tackled by several workers at once.

  Kris felt hands grab her and pull. Costa tried to strike back, but there were too many men who punched and kicked him. Theo was picked off the ground and hauled off the floor of the factory to place behind the production machines. Only Char was unmolested as the mob thought the box in which he was contained was some kind of tool.

  The mob was unable to get their helms off, but they did pull the guns away from them. In minutes, Theo, Costa and Kris were bound with steel cable to a bench in some kind of filthy break room. Theo could see the disgusting vending machine across from him that hadn’t known service in years.

  The yells of the angry workers died down when a trio of men entered the room. Kris realized these were the ringleaders of the strike and the only way they could negotiate a release. The man in front was huge, easily six feet six and the color of old leather. He only had one eye and a scar ran down in front of his face.

  The man walked up to him. Costa assumed him to be the leader for some reason. He then banged on Costa’s helm with a piece of metal. Costa knew the man couldn’t see through his helm faceplate from the grime over it, but glared back anyway.

  “Hey, what’s this?” the man spoke. “We got some new bulls here! You feel like talking or do I cook you out of that suit?”

  Costa didn’t say a word. They weren’t in a position of strength at the moment. He kept his eye on the impact guns the mob took off them. The guns were piled up in the corner. He needed to remember where they were located.

  Clang! It was a wrench to the side of the helmet this time.

  “Hey!” the big man yelled. “You got a name bull?” He reeled back and slammed the wrench on the helm again.

  “Yes I do,” Costa told him
through his external speaker. “You can call me Oh Baby. Same as your mother.”

  The big strike leader was ready to slam him with the wrench a final time when someone came running into the room.

  “Sands!” he yelled at the strike leader. “They’re yelling down from the tower! The rats want to make a deal!” He was just as filthy as the other workers and out of breath.

  The big man turned and looked at the new comer. “Deal? He said to him. “Deal? Those fucking rats want to make a deal? Hell, yes I’ll make a deal. First, they’re going to pay for the men who died out on the surface last week and then they’ll start cleaning this shithole up. If they don’t I’ll deal their asses out the door!”

  “One of the supers says they’ll come down if we put the staircase back up. Says we have to bring the three bulls with us or no deal.”

  “Sounds like they’ll listen to reason for a change!” Sands observed. He grumbled and rubbed his shaved head, thinking for a minute.

  “Okay,” he announced. “You, you and you, push these three behind me. You four go get their weapons; we might need them. Everyone else follow me, and none of you shoot those guns unless I say the word, we gonna show them a united front!”

  The cheering crowd pulled Kris, Costa and Theo off the bench, but left the steel cables in place around them. A few more picked up the large impact guns and began to follow the mob back out to the factory floor. Some of them carried burning torches.

  Sands stopped at the door to the factory and shoved his visage into Costa’s faceplate. “See this scar, bull?” he said to him. “I got it because one of the supers didn’t think the machine needed a shield. Claimed it worked just fine for the last three assholes that ran it. Worked good when it jumped its bar and ripped into my face. And you know what? You goddam corporation charged me to stitch it up. Said complain one more time I’d be shipped off to Inferno, and if you ain’t heard of that place then you don’t wanna. I’ve got every reason in the world to see you and the supers in the office burned alive. Don’t give me a reason to make it happen. Now come on!” He began to pull Costa along from the front as two more workers pushed him from the rear.