FREEFALL: A LT FREYA NOVEL - CHAPTER 4 - Hallow

Chapter 4

Hallow

Freya did not trust her eyes showed her. Frantically, she scanned and rescanned for any signs overlays, holograms, or projections of any kind. She zoomed in and her HUD mapped the scene as a physical three dimensional environment. She could calculate the distance between objects, render their depth, and…

“There’s a horizon.”

As the rest of the unit’s eyes adjusted to the light they too gasped at the landscape. At first glance it appeared to be a city. Rows of gray buildings covered with sparkling neon spread off into the distance, terminating in a distant horizon. However, the infinite rows curled up and around. Where a normal city would have sky this city had more buildings which hung down like daggers from the rock above.

The city was built on the inside of a sphere. A sphere so large that the other side of it could not be seen. Just the lights and rooftops vanishing into an indeterminate gray fog in a circular horizon.

Freya stepped out of the oversized elevator first, trying to make sense of the scene and hoping that getting even just a few meters closer would unravel the mystery. Her paws landed on a rocky ledge that met a concrete dock. The ledge led to a steep slope which spired out from the elevator in three compass directions. At the top of each slope a chest high security gate prevented entry or accidental egress. She leaned on the gate which faced the spherical city before her and turned her ears to the distant but distinct sounds of the impossible metropolis.

She looked down and saw three story tall machines bound down streets on hydraulic legs. The machines towered over the smaller buildings they passed, but were dwarved by the interminable skyscrapers which connected with the ceiling above. Every few meters the walkers would emit a bright pink beam and scan the ground. The impact of their stomping feet echoed in the cavern and she could hear it all the way up from her vantage point, nearly a kilometer above the city. Then she looked up. What she thought had been echoes had been more walker machines, stomping their way across the ceiling.

“This place is giving me vertigo,” said one of the humans behind her.

They approached the fence where Freya was observing the city. The general stood beside her and followed Freya’s gaze.

“Is that thing up there walking on the ceiling?”

John answered, “The floor. From it’s perspective.”

Freya wanted to argue that gravity could not work like that. Especially when just a couple miles above those walkers, gravity kept the rebellion’s feet firmly set upon the antipodes. But she couldn’t deny what she saw. However it was happening it was indeed happening.

“Some kind of local gravitational… something?”

The general piped up, “Miss Freya, how long have the Vulps been space faring?”

“About 70 years now. My grandfather remembered the First Fleet.”

General Kiniro gestured, “And you’ve been on Roth for two generations. Almost the entire time you’ve been in space.”

“Unfortunately, General.”

“The humans are the Vulp’s primary labor force here on Roth. Do you think all of this was built in 50 years and no one noticed? All of our population twice over couldn’t gett his done in a century.”

The point was clear. The interminating city with it’s own unique physics was too large, too strange and too complex to have been built by the United Front.

“I don’t think we even could engineer this. Unless...”

John patted her on the shoulder, “Yeah. I was thinking the same thing. We’ll have to get a closer look.”

The General raised her eyes to see the walkers scanning the floor above them, “Whatever we do, I got a feeling we should steer clear of those things.”

Instead of descending the ramps the unit opted to take a more secluded snaking staircase to the side. The ramps, it seemed, were most likely used for equipment transfer and, when the city had been alive, for resources and goods. As their boots echoed on the metal steps, each of them commented on the same thing.

“It’s… quiet. But not.”

The crunch of the walker’s feet and the hum of their hydraulics was a constant dull thrum in the chamber. And somewhere in the distance a rhythmic churn echoed out. But for a city this size- it was quiet. The sounds of life were nil. There was a sense that it had been a thriving and living city until the exact moment they stepped off the elevator, at which point every living thing had been vaporized. The city was running on pure entropy.

When they reached the bottom they all stopped to slowly take in the view. Their eyes passed from the concrete and metal flooring to the bright blinking skyscrapers and finally to the void between.

One of the humans gestured to a path, “So if we kept on walking straight, all the way, then we’d end up directly above us looking down?”

“Looking up, I imagine. But it appears so,” the General answered.

“Fuck, this is messing with me.”

“Keep your eyes on the ground then.”

“So if we think Kiira is down here then,” John started.

“Then where do we start?” Freya finished.

Freya felt overwhelmed and opened the long silent channel to Captain Morrison again.

[You wouldn’t believe this place, Fox. She’s here somewhere. I feel it.]

She sighed audibly.

[I have no idea where to begin.]

Sudden darkness fell on the chamber, the neon lights of the buildings blinking like stars in the space before and above them.

Freya dropped to her knee and peered through the sights of her Mark I. The rest of the unit took defensive positions. Her canid ears swivled, listening for the sound of the walker’s stomping, mechanical whirrs, or boots on metal. Anything to indicate a pending attack. But nothing came. After a breathless moment streetlamps slowly illuminated and cast the city in a dull sepia.

“Night mode?” Someone asked.

“I guess so. I hope so,” Freya answered.

The streets were lined with rows of dim beams. A fine mist swirled beneath each spotlight. She reasoned it was exhaust from the walkers, the only moving then they had yet seen. Her eyes followed the length of a road in front of them them which curved up and terminated in a singular building with a bright blue neon peak.

She gestured to the two story building which stood out from the others, “As good a place as any to start.”

John whined, “Looks like it’s all uphill from here.”

The general patted him on the shoulder and spoke condescendingly, “Optical illusion John. Everything in here is downhill and uphill, depending on where you stand. Quit complaining and come on. Freya’s right. It’s as good a place as any to start.”

Most of the unit had never seen anything resembling combat until six weeks prior. But Freya found herself impressed. As they moved through the strange city block by block, they adapted almost instantly from the type of woodland combat of the surface. Every window was covered, every bisecting alley was cleared, and eyes were kept in every direction. Walk. Cover. Clear. Repeat. It made the going slow but the distant beat of the walkers kept them on alert. With two thirds of the distance to the structure covered and not a sign of life to be found, tensions lifted.

The general spoke quietly, “You and John seemed to have some idea what this is.”

Freya peered down an alley way through her scope. No targets identified.

“Well. Not quite. Not really. Just a thought. Almost not worth mentioning.”

“But you’re going to.”

It was a command not a prediction.

Freya stopped, letting her Mark I hang by her side, “Tangi and the UTF has been space faring for 70 years now, General. But do you know anything about us before then?”

“I have some knowledge of your history. Not enough to be useful. Roth was vaguely aware of Tangi before the occupation. We’ve forgotten more than we’ve learned since then.”

“Ah.” Freya answered with a pang of shame, “A hundred years ago we were a tribal planet. Electricity was brand new and used mostly in factories for small tools to make weapons or vehicles. Steam, steel and combustion. Too busy fighting each other to look up. What we knew about the stars fit into a single book.”

The General raised an eyebrow as they walked several meters and stopped to wait while John and the rest of the unit cleared another alley.

Freya continued, “So you’re wondering how we went from primitive combustion to warp speed and cyber brains in two generations. We didn’t.”

“Freya, is now really the time to pause for dramatic effect?”

“Sorry. 70 years ago we had first contact. A race of aliens landed. They said they had pity on us for all the suffering our endless wars were causing. They wanted to help. Apparently, they did this quite a bit. Most planets, upon learning their place in the universe and becoming a post scarcity society in the matter of a single night, united. We united, too. But we united against the visitors. We called them the old kings. And we killed them. Took what they had to offer. And their ships. Apparently they just… never expected this to happen.”

The group moved again and John drifted closer to Freya and the General.

“History lesson?” He asked.

“Freya was telling me what you think this place is and how it got inside my planet.”

He nodded as Freya continued, “They had good documentation. I swear they were a race of engineers, whoever they were. We worked out how their tech functioned, how to build our own, and all that, within twenty years. That’s how we skipped ahead a few thousand years to what we are today.”

“And the first thing you did was go out and start a galactic empire?”

“That’s a whole other story. But more or less. We stole tech. Then used it to steal resources. We’re the least clever species out in the stars. We’re just also the meanest.” John answered.

Freya cut in, “But, to answer your question. I studied the original tech while getting my degree. The work of the old kings. And I’ve spent my entire adult life working with our version of it. This place here? Well… here, look.”

Freya crossed the street to a terminal which blinked silently on a corner.

“This design? This material? This is UTF. This was made on Tangi. Hell. I’ve probably been to the factory that assembled it.”

She gestured to the larger structure it connected to, a tall series of concentric cylinders which rose sixty meters before spiring out to form a spiderweb of metal.

“That? That looks like the old engine room I've seen in schematics of the ships of the old kings. So my guess is that this place has been around for centuries. Probably aeons. And sometime in the last 50 years the UTF found it, and retrofitted it for whatever it is the Ghosts are doing here.”

Freya’s paw swiped across the terminal which sprang to life.

“Oh, fuck…”

A nearby clank echoed off the steel and concrete around them.

The group fell into formation as the General asked, “Walker?”

Freya’s ears swiveled toward the origin of the sound, “Much smaller, general. Whatever it is I-”

The neon mist swirled around Freya’s body and she collapsed to the concrete, paws clasped to the back of her neck. Her shriek echoed through the empty city streets. As the General knelt by her side the rest of the unit took a defensive posture.

“Is she hit? I didn’t hear a shot,” John shouted, scanning the dead streets through the scope of his Mark II.

“I can’t tell, she won’t stop… Freya! Freya! Stop!” the General shouted as Freya writhed in the street, twitching and screaming.

The rest of the unit took cover, each one fanning out and searching for the source of the shot none of them had heard.

Freya’s screams were interrupted by sudden, brief, growls. The sounds came faster, louder- each stuttering into the next. The ragged jittering became so violent that the General held Freya down, forcing her muzzle opening to look for a foreign object. She imagined some type of cruel bladed device shredding her vocal cords. But there was nothing.

The small clank of footsteps edged closer between Freya’s glitched vocalizations. Finally Freya went completely still, mouth agape. The General tried to grab her attention by waving a hand in front of her glassy, unfixed eyes.

“She’s out… What the fuck happened?”

John turned and ran across the alley to Freya’s side. But before he could reach his friend he stopped in his tracks and raised his rifle toward the darkness of a mist choked city street.

“General… I… what the actual fuck is happening here.”

General Kiniro motioned for the unit to follow John. By the time they arrived he was already stepping slowly backward from the alley. As he stepped back- something else stepped forward. The small clank and the scrape of metal on concrete grew closer until the mist parted and a figure stepped through.

Each member of the unit raised their weapon as they waited for orders to engage.

General Kiniro lifted Freya’s head into her lap, slapping the girl’s face and trying to get any sort of response. The screaming started again. But not from Freya. The glitched, jittering and gutteral sound of a living thing making every possible sound at once. Identical to the sound Freya had made before falling silent.

The General finally looked up to the source and saw why her entire unit had begun a slow retreat.

It was mostly human in it’s proportions. However, jagged metal spires extended from the skull, pulling and stretching the skin until the features became a warped parody of humanity. Fresh blood seeped from between the flesh and metal, spilling over long dried scabs and scars. A bright neon box pulsed where the heart had been. With each beat of her “heart” the circulatory system of the thing glowed. General Kiniro recalled books on human anatomy that her grandmother had shown her as makeshift medic training.

The lower half of the thing’s legs was metal and gears. The mechanical legs were jjammed directly into fleshy stumps. Veins, muscle and viscera hung loose over a steel frame. Fresh iridescent blood pulsed from the opened veins and leaft a trail of toxic footsteps as the thing edged closer. The one eye which remained in the thing’s head, though milky and dry, scattered in every direction until it met Kiniro’s gaze. There was something like recognition between them for a moment before it began it’s jittering sounds again.

“What are you waiting for? Light it up!”

All five emptied a magazine into the thing. Kiniro watched as some bolts found their mark, sending chunks of flesh flying amid a mist of glowing blood. Other’s hit metal either extending from the thing or hidden just beneath it’s skin. The thud of each impact followed by a spark. By the time the hail of gunfire ended, the part of the thing which had once been human had been wholly obliterated. The mechanical remains twitched and whirred. John walked up to the thing and examined it closely for the first time.

With the spires on it’s skull knocked loose he could see into the thing’s brain pan. A small cluster of flesh pulsed amid flashing violet lights. Maybe, he thought, it was a chunk of brain. Or something grown in a lab to resemble gray matter. Regardless of what it was he placed the Mark II directly against it and fired a single bolt. The machine stopped moving.

Before anyone could ask if it was dead heads turned to the sound of Freya gasping for air as she shot up in Kiniro’s lap.

Immediately she doubled over to vomit, paws still pressed against her head. When she had nothing left to expel she nodded at Kiniro who then helped her to her feet.

Kiniro looked to Freya and John, “Don’t suppose you two have any answers on what the fuck just happened.”

Eyes turned to Freya as the events had started with her.

“I think my cyberbrain crashed. I’ve never.. I mean it’s a guess. Maybe something in this city…I … I don’t know. It’s based on the old kings technology. Something here might have interfered and…” she grabbed her head again, “It hurts like a motherfucker.”

John, realizing she had been offline for the past minute, motioned with his rifle to the mess of gore and circuits at his feet, “Something like this?”

Freya swallowed loudly as she looked at the remains, “Thank fuck I already threw up.”

She walked towards it and knelt to inspect the thing.

“Some of this is familiar… it’s like cyberbrain parts, but… some of this. I don’t know.”

“That was human at some point, right?” Kiniro asked.

“Humans, I think. There’s several… I mean. I don’t have a word for this.”

“Frankenstein,” one of the unit said.

“Hm?”

Kiniro answered, “An old human legend. A scientist who sewed different corpses together to make it walk. Used lightning I think.”

“Hm. Well. That’s what you have here then. It was a Frakenstein.”

She looked up to John, “The Ghosts ever talk about something like this?”

He shook his head, “Not to me. But, like I said. They didn’t really trust me. I knew they were working to improve cyber brains to animate soldiers. But… this is a far cry from what I imagined. Central Command prefers elegant solutions. This is a far cry.”

Kiniro joined them to get her first close look at the Frankenstein, “Looks like the Vulpls are experimenting on us before they hack up their own soldiers.”

She turned to the rest of the unit and spoke loudly, “You see a Vulp who isn’t John, Freya or Kiira and you shoot them on site. They know we’re here now if they didn’t before. We find Miss Lang. We get her out of this place. And then we come back with everything and burn all of this to the fucking ground.”

Freya looked up at the hanging buildings above them, the spires which stretched farther than she could see, and the digital glint in the perpetual mist. The girl who had once been an engineering student felt a pang of remorse. This place could be studied. Understood. Maybe even used for the rebellion’s benefit. But she knew Kiniro was right. The technology of the old kings had turned her species tribes into galactic imperialists within one generation. And that was just one landing party. Something like this place? The UTF had already gone into the realm of the unnatural. It was best the knowledge died with the search party.

“Let’s go,” She said, returning her attention to the structure which had drawn all of their attention, “She’s there.”

“You sound rather sure of yourself,” Kiniro remarked, gesturing for the unit to proceed.

“He wouldn’t lie to me. It was a rule we had.”

“He?” Kiniro asked, “He who?”

Freya pinged the silent channel she had once shared.

[We’re going to get her out. Fox, I’m going to save her for you.]

When they finally reached the structure Freya felt a small bit of relief. It was a familiar design. A long rectangular base with a pyramid atop a small tower at the front. Blue neon formed the insignia of the United Tangi Front at the top of the tower. A standard research laboratory like the kind she had studied in back on Tangi.

“The Front built this. Which means…Come on.”

They followed Freya to a hatch on the side of the research building. She pulled a knife from her belt and knelt beneath a small biometric access panel.

“John, plug me in, would you?” She asked, using the knife to pry off a thin plate revealing a secondary terminal.

“You sure you should be messing around after what just-”

“John, fuck off or help me. Don’t second guess me.”

He shook his head but complied. He plugged one end of Freya’s ribbon cable into her access port and the other into a port on the panel. Again she provided Captain Morrison’s credentials. With a moment’s work the interior security feed was overlaid on her HUD. Nine cameras showing nine of twelve rooms in the facility. The unshown three would contain the most sensitive research and records. Before scanning the feed she overlaid the building plan and highlighted where each of the nine feeds originated. One of the three remaining rooms would contain Kiira. The first was a small office, likely the administrator’s. It was too small and lacked sufficient physical security for a prisoner. The next room was the typical size and shape of server farms in UTF research branches. The final one, however, seemed just the right size to be a small research lab. It was in the absolute rear of the building, the point farthest from.

“What are you doing?” Kiniro asked.

John answered for Freya, “She’s hacking the building, checking security feeds, getting a floor plan.”

“Handy. And here I was just going to storm the building blind.”

John gave her a skeptical look, “You were? Didn’t think blind rage was your style.”

She answered him with a stern glare, “With what they’ve been doing to us down here? I want to fucking rip these Ghosts apart… and any other fucking Vulp who isn’t-”

“FUCK!” Freya gasped.

“What is it?”

“This building isn’t empty.”

Freya had finally scanned through the live security feeds.

Kiniro grinned, her excitement betrayed in her voice, “How many of these fuckers do I get to-”

“I don’t know. If Ghosts are in there then they’re cloaked. But…”

Collective attention focused on Freya.

“Let me put it on the terminal screen. I can’t…”

Freya displayed security feed number 5 on the small access terminal display. The unit crowded around as she unplugged from the sub-terminal and readied her Mark I.

“This is now a bigger rescue mission than we thought.”

The screen displayed the largest lab room in the facility. Housed in that room were 30 or more humans in various stages of annihilation. Gaunt and dizzy men and women leaned weak against the walls, cradling the augmented and destroyed remains of what had once been human bodies. Still others lay twitching on tables- still tethered to computer terminals. And finally several resembled an incomplete version of the thing they had killed in the streets. Spires of black metal jutted out from their brains as they stumbled blindly through the bodies.

“Freya, is this hatch unlocked?” Kiniro asked firmly.

“You know it’s a trap right? This place is almost certainly full of cloaked Ghosts.”

“I’m fucking counting on it. We’ll go in and take care of our own. You find Kiira.”

A mental image of Kiira, ripped and torn and turned into one of the Frankensteins they had just killed flashed through Freya’s thoughts. She slapped her paw against the terminal, her Vulpine DNA triggering the hatch to open as the small unit rushed through. Freya followed them, her Mark I slung over her shoulder, and a loaded micro-bolt sidearm clutched in her paws. The layout of the building was simple enough- one long hallway with rooms on either side. The lab with the human test subjects was near the front of the building.

The hall between the rooms was cold steel and glinting screens. They proceeded through the building the same way they had through the mega-city’s streets. Each door they passed was opened. The room cleared. And the unit moved on. After several empty labs, offices and storage rooms they came to the Lab Prime, where the fight they expected would come.

“This is it General. Your people are inside.”

“Go find Kiira. If you two can come join us- great. If we don’t make it out? Get her back home and let the council know. Let them know …. All of this. No one else. Do you understand?”

Freya nodded and patted Kiniro on the shoulder before leaning over to John and kissing his cheek, “You go with the humans. And… come back alive, okay? You still owe me your Mark II.”

Before he could respond Freya set off toward the rear of the building at a full sprint. The farther she got from the unit the fewer and fewer active lights and terminals she saw. A dark abyss swallowed her whole. As she bolted towards Kiira she felt guilt tugging at her heart.

[I couldn’t go with them. Those Frankensteins were in there.]

Far behind her the sound of a hydraulic door opening was followed by the sudden and rapid fire of plasma bolts. Screaming. Metal tearing. The scent of burnt flesh and ashen fur.

[I sent them into a trap… but what else could I do, Fox?]

As she covered the distance and tried to put thoughts of John or Kiniro out of her mind a realization came to her.

“Sure is lucky I saw that Frankenstein on the street, rather than shorting out in a firefight.”

She came to a dead stop at the end of the hall. A large set of double doors loomed in front of her. A single access terminal blinked, awaiting input. Fully functional. The only source of light.

[Fuck, darling. I fucked up.]

She stepped to the terminal, the only functioning one in that part of the building.

[I’m the one who's going towards the trap. This whole thing was to get me away from the unit.]

She lifted her paw to the terminal anyway. Before she could press her paw to the biometric reader for access, however, the display changed.

Instead of the typical security access dialogue the terminal now displayed a single word:

[YES]