"It's here." Peering around the corner, I spotted a couple of already familiar Mantises guarding the entrance. The huge Brutes greedily moved their muzzles from side to side, practically licking their chops at the rare passers-by who were unlucky enough to walk down this grim T-shaped alley with a dead end.
Somewhat covered by cloaks, they were talking in their native language, which sounded more like chirping and clicking than speech. Occasionally they would growl loudly at each other, then calm down, invariably rubbing their huge front legs, which looked like sabers with hooks.
"And you are incredibly perceptive, Sam." The strange address threw me off, and just as I turned to respond, Fay stood close to me, leaning on me to also peer around the corner. "It's definitely them... and emanations of the Dark Side... here they break to the surface most strongly."
Stepping back a couple of paces, the girl ignored my indignant look and, biting her lip, walked over to our other companions who were silently awaiting further instructions.
They certainly looked colorful. Four Brutes in armor with varying degrees of weaponry. A frog-doctor, blinking and rattling on about everything out loud. And next to them, Fay in Jedi robes, acting like her usual self again... well, usual for me.
And the final chord of our gang was your humble servant, towering over everyone else—fortunately, I wasn't shortchanged on height in this world. Plus, the armor—thanks to commander's perks—was better and sturdier.
"So there's a descent underground? Good," pulling an assault blaster from behind my back, I switch it to high-rate-of-fire mode at the expense of charge power. Then I address the Helldivers, who had perked up and cast aside their boredom, "Alright, boys. Finally, there's work for us according to our profile. The plan is simple as a stick. We go in, waste everyone, and then carry out the most valuable stuff..."
Just as I wanted to dash around the corner, I was lifted into the air. Fay, with a dissatisfied face, dragged me further away but was in no hurry to relax, continuing to hold me in the air.
"This is madness, Sam! There could be a lot of guards there! Droids! Turrets..."
As she listed them, my team of psychos began to look like hungry hounds seeing a piece of meat. Listening to Fay's reproaches with both ears, they practically started drooling, already imagining getting down to business.
"You... this is somehow..." Trailing off disappointedly, the girl furrowed her brows and, losing concentration, released me from her telekinetic grip. "Is it really impossible to do it differently..."
Cutting herself off at the very end, Fay closed her eyes, placing the index and middle fingers of her left hand to her temple. Slowly shaking her head from side to side, the girl dejectedly made a decision.
"Fine... let's do as you suggest."
Before she could finish, I pushed off the ground and flew into the alley on jet propulsion. Falling to my knees, sliding on the dirty asphalt, I open fire to kill, dumping the entire Tibanna battery into the first bug, whose eyes nearly popped out of their sockets from such a dramatic entrance.
"AHA-HA-HA-HA-HA!"
"LIBERTY!" Running past me, Booker opened fire on the move, shooting at the legs of the second bug. Heavy bullets tore through the chitin, drenching the walls with green blood. The roar of the heavy machine gun was met with panicked screams from civilians in the houses and the nearby street. "Take that!"
Tossing the machine gun back, Billy lunged at the bug that had fallen to its knees. Deflecting a huge blade-leg with his bracer, he snapped it at the joint and then ripped it out by the root. Grabbing the new weapon with one hand, Booker drove the leg into the bug's head with all his might, then kicked the body into a puddle of blood and filth.
"Oh, yeah!"
Throwing his hands to the sky, the Helldivers veteran caught his weapon without looking as one of the boys returned it to him. A slightly dim-witted lad with a flamethrower.
"Blow it up, sweetheart!"
My personal squad of ass-kickers didn't think twice before placing a demolition charge on the wall and immediately detonating it. The explosion was so powerful that we barely managed to run back around the corner, and the windows in the houses were blown to hell.
"Forward! Go, go, go!" Turning around, I slow down Fay, who had dashed after us. "Look after the fro... Mordin. We'll clear the way."
"Understood." Instead of her usual antics, her mask changed again, showing seriousness and an understanding of the situation; without arguing, Fay obediently ran back a dozen meters and, grabbing the scientist who was sweating from what was happening, dragged him after us.
"CONTACT! BOLT-BUCKETS!"
Something exploded up ahead again. Shreds of metal threw a couple of dozen fragments of B-1 battle droids at our feet. Products of the Trade Federation—the local hegemon of space transport. Primitive, with dull brains and simple commands hardwired directly into their minds. But it was quite enough to pressure debtors and chase pirates.
But not us.
Flying inside the breach, I found a heart-warming sight, and memories of my past life flashed before my eyes again.
From all sides, crooked, lopsided bolt-buckets were advancing on the Helldivers squad. Beeping vilely in their foul language, the metallic Brutes showered my people with fire, receiving a real storm of bullets and plasma in return.
Climbing onto a disabled cargo Speeder, four soldiers were firing back from all sides, generously drenching the enemy.
Shots.
Streams of lasers and bullets.
Explosions.
Screams.
The screech of mechanical legs.
And that damned Binary language...
"Automatons... Automatons..."
"FOR SUPER EARTH!"
Holding the rifle with one hand, I pulled out a bayonet-knife with the other and, jumping toward the first droid, drove the blade through its head, piercing it through. With a jerk of my hand, I toss a stream of sparks and debris toward the other mechanical bastards.
Dropping to one knee, I begin to spray the advancing wave from the hip until the trigger starts clicking empty.
Snatching a blaster from my belt, I rush forward, alternating between the knife and the blaster pistol.
Sparks everywhere. Lens fragments, wires, and microchips flash before my eyes.
My blows dent the fragile metal, throwing unreliable constructions meters away in different directions. Droids die in heaps; they fall at my feet, leaving a trail of mangled constructions behind me.
The Tibanna ran out again, and I just grab the next droid by the neck and, with a sharp jerk, break its neck drives, then lift it in front of me, using the small pest's body as a shield.
"The Boss showed us the way! See that, boys?! Hand-to-hand!"
"A-A-A-A!"
The Helldivers were beside me. Wielding buttstocks, shooting at point-blank range, they followed my example, often grabbing droids and holding them aloft. Like a knife through warm butter, we entered their ranks, breaking their formation and causing a chaotic pile-up.
Blaster shots flew everywhere; armor was covered in charred streaks, decorating our suits with fresh notches.
Flame roared to the left. High-temperature sticky liquid coated the flimsy machines, burning out glass and internal parts. Crawling through cracks, getting into every corner, the fuel did its job, consuming more and more.
Battle madness took hold of us. Amidst the noise and screams, the roar of fire and explosions, we descended, down to where the useless bolt-buckets were coming from.
No one reloaded. No point in wasting ammunition on this trash. The droids' rifles would do just fine for killing them...
Ripping off a machine's arm, along with the carbine clutched in it, I bash a neighboring B-1 with all my heart, breaking its face. To panicked cries of "Roger-Roger," the droid falls to its knees and reaches its manipulators to its face, but the body of its comrade collapses on top of it. Smashing one bolt-bucket with another, Booker simply broke them into pieces until two humanoid robots turned into piles of junk with oil smudges.
"LIBERTY!"
Overcoming a long, winding descent parallel to the elevator shaft, from where Fay stared at us with shock and wild bewilderment, we continued further, crushing the flimsy resistance.
Practically ten minutes of non-stop destruction, full of delight and wild adrenaline.
And only when we reached the very bottom, and the elevator with Mordin and Fay stopped nearby, did the battle pause. There was no one else around, and the last machine twitched feebly in Salco's hands, scraping its manipulators against his armor, leaving thin scratches.
Finding no new opponents, the Jabiimite squeezed his fist, breaking the droid's neck and ending its misery.
"That... that was..."
Walking around us, Fay looked behind our backs, where a rather grotesque path of destroyed machines was laid out all the way to the top. She glanced at the oil smudges on the walls, at the torn limbs and crushed heads, at the sparking microchips, and then looked at us with a strange gaze.
And while I noticed this and was now shushing and shoving the cheering boys with my hand, these fools were jumping, bumping heads, giving each other "high fives," and all that. "Reed" was even posing and taking a selfie against the background of the spiral path upward.
"Um... Ahem. Yeah. So, what do you feel? Dark Side, Light Side? What other colors do you have there?"
Choking on her initial answer, the elf walked closer to me, carefully peering into the helmet slits.
"Your rage... bloody, hungering, so eerie and frightening... it's gone. As if a hidden artist wiped it from your personality with a single stroke." Walking closer, she took my palms and, turning them inside out, began to feel my fingers and hands. "So strange, unusual..."
Suddenly, a camera click sounded from the side. And with the screech of a poorly lubricated mechanism, I turned toward the photographing Merak. The guy even dropped to one knee, and even through the helmet, I felt his delight and amusement.
"Delete it. Now." In clipped phrases, I spoke with the voice of a dead man raised from the grave. "If you value your life..."
"Um, Boss. Take it easy! It's for the memories! Such a holophoto came out, just top-tier!" Faltering, "Reed" hid behind the commander's back, who raised his head sufferingly, already preparing for a dressing-down, while the others snickered quietly in the background. "And I can't delete it. It's already gone to the general cloud..."
Glancing at his PDA, Merak pressed a couple of buttons and then turned to me in fear.
"More than eight thousand people have already downloaded it..."
"You're fucking dead."
****
Having eased my soul by beating a subordinate who had drawn problems to my ass out of nowhere, I walked ahead of the others, studying the shit found underground, under Fay's satisfied smile, the squad's grim silence, and the composed doctor.
And there was a lot of this shit. You didn't even know where to start.
Test tubes with bodies. Pieces of organs. A bunch of different liquids of suspicious colors and much more. Spending only ten minutes on the primary inspection, Mordin came to a not-so-pleasant conclusion: in this laboratory, they were breeding a new strain of the dangerous Biological Weapon "Blue Ghost."
"Dangerous. Terrible. Wholesale destruction of all living things. Any organics. Even plants and bacteria. A genius. A madman, but a genius." Reading the journals, as he was the only one who understood anything in them, Mordin delved into the records, clutching his head more and more. "Finished samples. Placed around the city. An experiment? Testing effectiveness... Oh Spirits."
Just a few flasks of this filth would be enough to halve the multi-million city above our heads. And if you let this shit loose in the galaxy, for example, in some large port or station...
It's scary even to imagine. From Mordin's stories, it became clear that this thing was extremely dangerous and resilient, airborne, and killed within a couple of days. A real biological weapon of mass destruction.
But besides the Blue Ghost, there were other frightening things here. For example, some strain of the Jurrineкс-6 virus, a nerve-paralytic effect that disrupts the functioning of brain cells. Practically imperceptible, intangible, and undetectable without incredibly rare and precise equipment.
There were documents with the start of work on some space ticks of a creepy type. Vile Brutes, even in pictures, and I didn't even want to imagine what they look like in reality.
There were also several Yam'rii eggs—or as they are called in the galaxy, Yam'rii—floating in special reservoirs with green liquid. The eggs were experimental and apparently with defects, so they were left here.
But the rest of the batch, numbering four hundred, was taken to the bugs' home planet. Reading everything described in the documents, I was already imagining a wave of clicking jaws and claws that would descend upon the galaxy...
"No, this cannot be allowed. I've had enough of Terminids and their kind."
"Collect everything you find. The Judicial Forces will clearly be interested in what was studied here." Issuing commands, I grabbed the virologist by the shoulder, turning him to face me. "Can you create an antidote? Can you save the city?"
"Doubtful. Little time. Little data. Little... of everything. Only a lot of stimulus. That will be enough..."
Here, a cleaning droid caught my attention. The little scoundrel rolled right under my feet, then dropped a couple of vials from its small manipulators and, beeping in Binary, rolled back.
"Filters! Fay, Mordin!"
The girl surrounded herself with a cocoon of Force, into which she pulled the toad-doctor a moment later. Holding her hands out to the sides, she poured so much Force into the barrier that it began to manifest even to our commoner eyes.
"Go! Trace where the droid went!"
"Exactly!"
Without saying anything—they're not little children, they'll figure it out—I beckoned the soldiers after me. Clattering our sabatons, we raced through the corridors after the little bastard who had just released a literal galactic plague under a city with a huge number of inhabitants and significant cargo traffic!
Corridors replaced each other, and we continued the race. Someone tried to contact me a couple of times, but seeing that the signal was given in normal mode, I didn't even answer.
The last turn, and we run out onto a small platform with an open sky. A small two-seater fighter, into the belly of which boxes of data and PDAs are being hastily loaded. The pilot—a young girl with familiar purple hair—sticks her tongue out at us and then starts the engines.
Beside her, digging into a tablet, stands another acquaintance from the past.
A tall, stout figure, covered in a cloak, shielding his eyes with the brim of an old, torn hat. Turning slowly toward us, he says nothing, just silently climbs into the tail gunner's seat, but doesn't even try to shoot at us; he just closes the cockpit, throwing one last phrase into the air:
"Deal with them."
The fighter lifts off the ground. With glowing nozzles, it immediately tears away and flies into the sky, leaving us alone with the last inhabitant of the hangar.
All this time, he had been sitting in the shadows, a bit further away, clearly waiting for us.
Leaning his hand against the side of the second ship, causing it to tilt almost to the floor, a massive, fully armored monster rose to his feet, clattering his heavy-looking boots.
Straightening to his full height, he squared his shoulders, picking up a huge halberd that had been leaning against the wall. Slowly, without any rush, he stepped into the light, gradually blocking our view of the entire hangar.
"Fucking Primarch..."
Craning my neck, I peered into the black strip where the visor should be and saw only two glowing eyes that stared right at me without blinking.
Spinning the halberd, creating air currents and a distinct whistle, the giant struck it against the floor with all his might, denting the durasteel sheets and creating a network of cracks.
"What interesting specimens..."
The Brute's voice was a match. Powerful, frightening, and heavy, completely corresponding to his build.
"Now I will crack open your flimsy shells and feast on such interesting flesh, to the sounds of a Kashyyyk flute." Glancing behind our backs, he loudly inhaled air, then smacked his tongue. "After which, finally, I will taste Jedi flesh... I wonder what their Force tastes like? Do midichlorians affect the taste of meat? How interesting..."
After which, without any warning, he rushed straight at us, sending Booker flying with a light push of his hand and raising his monstrous weapon over my head.
***
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