Space Marine Loki (Extinction Fleet Book 2) Read online

  “This place just became a death trap, mobility is null, and I’m not getting anything on the company channel. First team, pull security!” said a marine with the name Quinn stenciled across his chest. Ajax recognized him as one of the defacto Manticore leaders, functioning much like Sharif did when Jarl Mahora wasn’t around. “Lead on, Ajax. Pick your tunnel and we’ll stack you with a full platoon. The rest of us will fan out and purge the rest of the hive.”

  “By the gods, this is a hive!” breathed Rama as he swept his gaze across the chamber and upwards into the ancient vent.

  “You are such a grunt,” groaned Sharif, rolling his eyes, but smiling.

  Ajax turned from the three marines as the other warriors scrambled to secure the entrances to the side tunnels that were level with the bottom of the chamber while others aimed their rifles up to cover those that were out of reach.

  The marine began to control his breathing, and slowly worked to clear his mind with the meditation techniques the skalds had been teaching him. The psychic pressure was there, though now it was more of a delicate pulse than anything. Rather than fading though, the pulse was a small and growing thing, as if it was slowly building itself up in his mind. It was not the explosive rage he’d felt earlier, no, this was something more juvenile, a hunger without malice, and yet, that hunger already had the bottomless sensation that threatened to swallow him every time he got too close to the Hive Mind. The trick was engaging with that psychic pressure but not allowing it to gain too much of a foothold in his consciousness.

  He reached out with his awareness, his eyes closed, and focused on the pulse. His hard-won gift did not tell him which tunnel to take, it had never been anywhere near that precise, though he did begin to feel a pull in the general direction of left and down. The marine gently turned his body to face where he felt the pulse, not allowing his other senses to create static, purging himself of as much incoming data that wasn’t the psychic pulse as he could.

  Ajax slowly opened his eyes and looked in front of him.

  He was standing at the mouth of a side tunnel. He felt it more than he knew it, that down that passage lay whatever nightmare they’d come to find. Disturbing as these mutated ripper drones might have been, the real horror was further down. Ajax squared his shoulders and took a step towards the tunnel, prompting Sharif and Rama to fall in behind him.

  “Second team, on me, third team break out into squads and start securing the lower tunnels. Watch out for friendly fire, the other fire teams are going to be wandering around as blindly as we are,” ordered Quinn as he began directing scores of troops who moved with some difficulty through the corpse clogged waters to fall into their formations.

  As the marines struggled to cross the chamber and enter the tunnels, Ajax himself pushed past several floating bodies to reach the tunnel he was positive led to the goal of this mission. What that might be, he could not say, whether it was another monster like Grendel, this Jormungandr that Omar and Hart spoke of, or something worse.

  THE CLUTCH

  The growing hunger built up pressure in his consciousness as Ajax entered the tunnel. He’d only gone a few meters before the psychic residue of the dead and dying ripper drones had been completely replaced by that hunger. The water got deeper, and soon the marines were up to their chest. Their submerged body lights gave the water an unearthly glow that in any other circumstance might have been considered beautiful.

  After several more meters the tunnels began to splinter off, some going straight down and others angling upwards. It was becoming more and more difficult for Ajax to sift through the waves of sensation he was getting from whatever garm horror lay in wait for them.

  “Contact right!” shouted Sharif suddenly as he turned and began firing.

  Ajax bent his knees slightly, fully submerging his head in the water of the tunnel and saw in the eerie glow that they’d moved into another small chamber. Most of the new tunnels led further down and unless they’d been looking for it they could easily have fallen down one of the handful of openings large enough to swallow a man whole. For what it was worth, Ajax found that he could see much better under the water than he could above it, something about the sheen of the light against the surface of the rocks.

  The marine saw Sharif squeezing the trigger of his pulse rifle and a hurricane of bubbles and billowing steam rose as his plasma bolts streaked through the water and impacted against the thick hide of a ripper drone. While Sharif pounded one attacker, another surged upwards out of a hole in the chamber floor.

  Before Ajax could level his weapon at it, the beast wrapped its claws around the legs of a marine, jamming a bio-blade through the man’s thigh. Ajax watched helplessly through his iron sights as the marine disappeared into the hole, dragged down by the garm. Another emerged from a side tunnel entrance, heading straight for Rama, only this time both he and Ajax were ready. Their combined fire filled the chamber with steam and carnage as the beast flailed in death.

  Ajax was about to squeeze the trigger and slay another when he was yanked off his feet by something below him. He looked down to see that a ripper drone had dug its claws into the armor of his left leg. Instantly, it sped downwards, smashing Ajax into the floor of the chamber before dragging him across the rough surface, into a deeper part of the chamber towards one of the fully submerged holes. Ajax scrambled for purchase with his left hand, desperately clinging to his pulse rifle with his right, knowing in the chaos that his comrades would not have seen him go down, too busy defending themselves from the sudden close quarters assault.

  The garm disappeared down the hole and in the last second before he, too, went down, Ajax quit grabbing rocks with his left hand and gripped the pulse rifle with both hands. The garm wasn’t expecting the resistance, so when the rifle slammed into place across the mouth of the hole, smashing the mounted light, the alien beast lost its grip on the marine. Ajax knew his left leg had been savaged, and he’d lost some of the armor there, but the pain meant he still had a leg, and that was something at least. He kicked his legs fast and hard pulling himself up on his rifle.

  No sooner had he escaped the hole than another drone slid through the water above him towards his comrades. Without thinking, he ripped the trench spike from his belt and thrust it upwards. The momentum of the beast and his own sudden fury drove the point hilt-deep just under the beast’s chin. Ajax pulled himself up using the handle and pressed his feet against the drone’s chest.

  He knew that despite the garm’s tiny brain being pierced the beast was still dangerous and he needed to get clear of it. He wrenched the spike free of the wound, simultaneously pushing off the creature’s chest, sending himself down while sending the thrashing monster up to the surface. Ajax smacked into the rock floor of the chamber and rolled over quickly to wrap his fingers around the grip of his pulse rifle.

  He let out a shout of victory that quickly died in his throat as the ripper that had first grabbed him lashed out from just inside the hole. One of its bio-blades buried itself in the gap in the marine’s armor where forearm met elbow. In an instant Ajax was pulled down the hole and dragged into darkness.

  Without his body lights, he had no idea beyond the rush of water which way was even up. Ajax fought through the pain and forced his finger to squeeze the trigger repeatedly. The first round must have gone wide, as the drone kept swimming down, it was impossible to tell for sure in the rush of vaporized water from the plasma discharge. His second shot, and perhaps even his third, were enough to end the creature.

  The drone released its grip on Ajax a moment after they entered a fully submerged chamber. As the bloody corpse floated past him in charred pieces, Ajax could see the low, sloping walls of the chamber and decided it was much larger than even the first they’d seen. His body lights created a soft orb of light around him that extended out several meters. He knew he was seeing only a fraction of the interior. Regardless of what he could and could not see, the marine was filled with absolute certainty that he’d found what they
were looking for.

  The psychic pall of hunger buffeted against him, and the marine fumbled with his flare in a desperate attempt to have light. He pointed one flare upwards and shot it back into the hole he’d come from, hoping that the others had survived the ambush and could follow him down. He aimed the other into the darkness and fired.

  Seconds later he wished that he hadn’t, some things could not be unseen.

  The green light of the flare bathed the large chamber in a glow that clearly illuminated the abomination that occupied its center. The walls were curved in the way one would expect of a cave formed by volcanic activity as opposed to the more jagged caves made by the endless motion of waves. Ajax could see a veritable forest of active stacks, each one the size of a small tree, belching super-heated minerals into the briny water of the cave. The sight of that alone might have given a man pause, but it was the presence of the alien menace that twisted the marine’s guts.

  What he could only assume were clutches of egg sacks had been affixed to the vents throughout the stone forest. They clustered like barnacles around the vents, the larger ones at the base and the smaller ones near the top. As he watched in horror he realized that the smaller ones took in nutrients, and as they grew they slid down the vent to the base, where they hatched. He swung his rifle in a wide arc to cover the room as he looked down his sights to see that the floor of the chamber was completely obscured by what had to be hundreds, if not thousands, of hatched and discarded eggs.

  More than even that nightmarish sight, what drew his eye and his aim was the pool near the largest of the vents. Whatever amniotic fluids were present in the pool had a different atomic weight than the rest of the water in the cave, as it remained contained within the pool.

  While there was no garm organism in the pool presently, he recognized it for what it was. He had been aboard Grendel’s hive ship, and he knew that he was looking upon the brood home of the beast that Command and the skalds had taken to calling Jormungandr.

  As the realization struck him, something moving below his position caught his attention. He shifted his aim towards what appeared to be a giant snail-like creature moving among the smoking stacks. It was pressing a proboscis from the front of its body into the smaller egg sacks, filling them with some manner of fluid from its own body. Before Ajax had time to process that particular horror the dull thud of weapons fire reached his ears.

  He was sinking fast, the weight of his armor pulling him down towards the heaps of hatched eggs. Without any propulsion system, there was little he could do but kick hard to ensure he landed on solid stone.

  The company channel still bled static, and he could not even fully make out the garbled voices of his comrades a mere level above. These mineral rich sea caves might be a perfect breeding ground, but they severely disrupted conventional communication networks.

  Ajax had to wonder whether or not that had been a factor in the garm brood choosing this place. There were thousands of such formations throughout the watery planet, so picking this one to assault was truly the finding of a needle in a haystack, as the saying went.

  More gunfire echoed thunderously off the thick walls of the cave, and a sudden increase in the psychic pressure brought the marine’s attention to a small tunnel opening ahead and above him. Several thick tentacles with large suckers slid out of the darkness of the entrance and were soon followed by a beast so hideous the marine’s mind struggled to cope with the sight.

  It was serpentine, much like Grendel had been on Heorot, though where Grendel was clearly a creature adapted to land, this one appeared to have been born for a primarily aquatic existence.

  It had the same cockroach-meets-reptile visage as the other garm broods, though in place of the scything blades of Grendel, reminiscent of the ripper drones, this nightmare sported undulating tentacles, each of which ended in a barbed tip.

  As it cleared the confines of the tunnel, the creature folded its tentacles tight against its body and streaked through the water to splash into the viscous amniotic pool.

  Briefly, Ajax thought it had not noticed him, despite his body lights and their apparent psychic connection, but no sooner had the surface of the pool grown calm than it erupted with waves again as the beast rose from its depths.

  The reflective black eyes of Jormungandr locked with those of Ajax as the marine’s boots crunched through the shells of hatched eggs and came to rest upon the stony floor.

  The beast’s dark eyes flashed impossibly with recognition, and the dull ache of the psychic pressure suddenly jabbed into Ajax’s mind like a spike.

  Ajax snapped his rifle to his shoulder and tried to squeeze the trigger, only to discover that his armored digit would not obey his command. The pain in his mind moved to his hands and he felt with all certainty that Jormungandr was exerting control over his body. Even Grendel did not have that power, else it would have done more against him when he and Boone had finished it off. The hesitation lasted but a moment as Ajax powered through the psychic wall put in his way and forced his finger to apply pressure to the pulse rifle’s trigger.

  The moment the pulse rifle kicked with the first salvo of super-heated bolts, Jormungandr launched itself from the healing pool. Ajax’s rounds went wide as the aquatic nightmare streaked through the water. He could see the bioluminescent fluids still glowing as they worked to bind the multitude of wounds he now saw on the garm’s body. He had not noticed them before the beast had submerged itself, and now here, in the half-light of the chamber, the beast named Jormungandr had clearly been in a hell of a fight. The fact that it was here with him, exchanging bolts for barbs, meant that somewhere in this cave network floated the corpses of untold scores of marines.

  Ajax kicked off of the stony ground and angled his body to the left, the opposite direction he’d have gone if he’d moved on instinct, and his choice kept him alive.

  At least four, perhaps more, barbed projectiles sliced through the water where he’d been standing. Jormungandr knew that much about him at least, and the thought gave Ajax the chills.

  Could the Hive Mind possibly read him so accurately despite his inability to track the swarms much beyond intuition and the most basic regions on a map?

  He had little time to consider such things, still squeezing the trigger as he attempted to track the aquatic beast’s progress through the cave.

  He knew that he was no match for the creature, and without the bracketing fire of other marines he would have little hope of achieving a clean hit, much less killing the beast. As if in answer to his plea, more jets of bubbles and vaporized water appeared in the cave as multiple green lights suddenly illuminated the entire space.

  Ajax risked a glance sideways and saw Sharif, Rama, and Quinn, followed by more marines, emerging from the tunnel he’d first entered through.

  Jormungandr swam low, putting the multitude of egg-crusted vents between it and the attacking marines as the cave was suddenly filled with activity.

  The vents exploded as their delicate pressure was disrupted, lending their own steam and bubbles to those being created by the pulse rifles of the marines as more poured through the hole while the first arrivals sank to the floor.

  A psychic howl rose from Jormungandr, buffeting Ajax with a distinct sensation of rage, and he knew without a doubt that the beast had summoned every last living garm to return to the breeding chamber.

  Ajax was sickeningly positive that had he been anywhere but in the chamber already, he’d have struggled mightily to resist the call himself.

  As the marines continued to wreak havoc upon the thick forest of vents, destroying eggs and stone formations in equal measure, the serpentine beast returned fire from within the growing cloud of dust, gore, and vapor.

  Ajax clumsily waded through the waist deep piles of discarded eggs, doing his best to sight in on the beast, though like the others who had reached the bottom, his angle of attack was poor. Above him he saw several marines spasm violently as the ten inch barbed projectiles impaled them, pu
nching through the gaps in their armor like miniature harpoons.

  The crushing cold of the depths allowed Ajax to get twelve shots off before being required to vent rather than the traditional ten. As he worked, his view of the battlescape was temporarily obscured. Only the armor prevented him from being cooked by the sudden spike in water temperature caused by the pulse rifle.

  When he looked up again, Ajax witnessed the result of Jormungandr’s call for aid as dozens of the aquatically adapted ripper drones rushed into the chamber. Ajax noticed that many of them were already wounded or missing limbs, but after the first wave filled the sea cave he saw that no more attended the great beast.

  This was the last gasp of a dying swarm, Ajax suddenly realized. It could only mean that Jormungandr intended to escape.

  Sure enough, he saw the beast disengage from exchanging fire with the marines and flow across the base of the now much damaged vent forest. Jormungandr was no longer on the attack, or even the defense, that much Ajax knew with clarity, and he realized that he had to follow. Garm swarms never retreated, and even the higher organisms only disengaged if they were being redeployed elsewhere on the battlefield. These alpha garm were different, the likes of Grendel, and now Jormungandr.

  Ajax sprinted at the best speed he could managed despite the less than ideal conditions, and by instinct, swapped out his mostly spent carbon magazine for a fresh one.

  All around him the sea cave had become a roiling bloodbath as the marines fought against the remaining ripper drones. Ajax ignored them in pursuit of the great beast. He entered the vent forest and kept his rifle at the ready as his movement were suddenly hampered by the close confines.

  Jormungandr would have the advantage here, given the close quarters environment, though he knew, somehow, that attack was no longer the nightmare’s prime directive. It was after something in here, and he had to see it with his own eyes before either Jorumgandr was dead or achieved whatever its goal might be.