PROLOGUE
0912 hours, Jacinto City. Twelve years after emergence.
The old man slowly massaged the dark smudges of tiredness under his eyes before sliding his hand up his creased forehead and over his shorn scalp. The sound of stubble brushing against his fingertips rustled faintly over the chatter of voices and equipment beyond the confines of the ready room.
He turned his back on the dog-eared maps on the table in the centre of the small room and the woman standing on the other side of it, bent over an imposing wooden desk, fished out an unmarked bottle and a couple of chipped glasses from a drawer on the opposite side.
Placing the glasses on the desk, he held the bottle up to the morning sunshine stabbing into the room through the open blast shutters covering the windows. He swirled the amber liquid generously around the bottle before unscrewing it and pouring a measure in each glass. Turning, he offered one of the glasses to the woman who accepted out of politeness but refrained from drinking with a wary eye.
The old man curtly knocked the drink back, his eyes closing for a few seconds as he savoured the rich taste and the rush of warmth coursing down his throat that accompanied it.
"It's all right," Victor Hoffman said. "It's whiskey."
The woman raised a quizzical eyebrow but continued to hold the glass at arms length.
"Made from wheat. Not Dizzy's moonshine," he explained.
The woman visibly relaxed and downed the whiskey before nodding her appreciation.
Hoffman leaned against the desk and reached behind him to place the glass down on it. It was as his arm returned and joined the other in folding across his chest that Sergeant Beyla Vansen noticed a computer internal hard drive incongruously sitting on top of a pile of paperwork. The mounting brackets still attached to the drive were bent out of shape, like it had been ripped free of its mounting.
"I saw the reavers on my way back," Vansen said looking back to the Colonel. "How bad was it?"
"Slow night," Hoffman said soberly. "Casualties were only in double figures."
The pair looked at each other levelly over the table for a few seconds – there just weren't words any more – before Hoffman gestured at the distressed map of Jacinto City.
"Now, you're sure that it wasn't a raiding party?"
"No, Sir," Vansen shook her head, a ponytail of slender dreadlocks whipping back and forth behind her head. "They had no kit, just weapons. Short-range recon definitely."
Hoffman's hand made another exploration of his scalp.
"This morning?"
"On my way back here. Waited out in the ruins of an old bakery on Claremont and Rose until dawn to be sure," Vansen nodded gravely as she looked at the map.
"In all the time the grubs have been camped out on our doorstep, they've never gone into the industrial district," the old man said thinking aloud.
"They're too far into the granite plateau there, emergence holes can't get through," Vansen offered. "They'd have to move over ground, exposing them."
"So they must be based somewhere close by. Which means they're either path-finding, looking for a new line of attack on us, or they've found something that interests them," he said gruffly.
"If they stay there much longer, they're going to find something that disagrees with them," Vansen countered.
Hoffman looked up at her, his strategic musings forgotten momentarily.
"The industrial district is Rask's territory," Vansen said simply.
"That son of a bitch," Hoffman cursed. "He's been quiet for months. I was hoping the grubs had done us a favour and taken him out."
"I don't think so," a look of disgust wrinkled Vansen's dark skin. "There were fresh signs of his handiwork marking his territory. Bodies used as a warning."
"Shit."
Hoffman's eyes fell back to the map again and he was silent for long moments, lost in thought.
Vansen waited patiently, shifting the strap of her Halberd semi-automatic rifle to stop it from digging in to her neck. She slowly flexed her tired and aching muscles, conscious of the greasy tint to her exposed skin and the smell of stale sweat that clung to her armour.
"I don't like not knowing what the grubs are up to," Hoffman said finally. "And I like Rask being involved even less."
"So let them take care of each other," Vansen shrugged folding her arms stoically, her hands brushing the grips of the twin Stub pistols in shoulder holsters as she did so.
Hoffman smiled sadly at her.
"Not that easy," he sighed. "If the grubs take out Rask, assuming there's nothing of interest and they're just scouting, they may end up with a forward position that they can reinforce and hurt us with."
The Colonel retrieved his glass, poured another measure and gestured to Vansen to give him hers.
"And if Rask beats them, he ends up with an arsenal of Locust weapons," she reasoned as he poured.
"And that's a best case scenario right there."
"Meaning?"
"Rask and his butchers might very well figure out that life on the right side of the barricades is preferable to toughing it out in no man's land."
He knocked back the whiskey again before returning his gaze to the map.
"We're hanging on by our fingertips fighting the Locust as it is, I don't rate our chances too highly fighting on two fronts."
"You want me to go back out there," Vansen said before draining her glass. A statement, not a question.
The old man looked up.
"Want's got nothing to do with it," he said gruffly. "The industrial district is entirely too close for comfort. I need to know what's going on out there and I don't have anyone else to spare."
Vansen nodded.
Hoffman circled the desk and put the whiskey bottle back in the drawer before taking a seat in his distressed office chair.
"How long have you been out there?"
"Two months," Vansen looked thoughtful as she ran some mental arithmetic. "Give or take."
"Two months? Salton started out like that. Then months became years."
"I miss the 'luxuries' of civilisation too much to disappear that long," Vansen gave a humourless smile. "Have you heard from him?"
"Sharle got the hot water back up and running a few nights back," Hoffman ignored her question as he began organising the countless reports on his desk. "Grab yourself a shower and some rack time. Then I need you back out first thing tomorrow morning as soon as the damned Krill are out of the air."
"I need to drop by Baird first, get him to look at my com-link."
"You do realise," Hoffman said distractedly as he sifted through paperwork, "that we have a quartermaster and an armoury? Such as it is."
"I do," Vansen said. "And I also realise that they are pushed to the wall most days. The reception's going South, I just want him to give it a quick once over. The geek's fixed it before so it should be done for nightfall."
"If you must," Hoffman growled over the top of a report. "I should warn you though Baird's not exactly been his usual charming self recently."
"I doubt I'll even notice the difference," she said flatly. "Has he been misbehaving?"
"Other than obsessing over fixing Alpha's busted bot and getting into fist fights with his CO, it's just Baird standard operating procedure I think."
"Rictor's still alive and kicking?" Vansen said with a tinge of admiration.
"Still," Hoffman continued to read the report in his hands. "The thing about us twenty-six RTI dinosaurs is that we don't know when to lie down."
Vansen was acutely aware that the older man had work to do and was happy to let him catch up with the cost of the night's activities. The promise of a hot shower was proving too alluring to ignore. She'd see Baird afterward.
"If you're finished up with me, Colonel?"
"Dismissed."
Vansen gave a loose salute and turned to exit the ready room but was stopped at the door to the Command Information Centre by Hoffman's final words.
"I know the lone wolf shit comes part and parcel with being a scout but I need intel, not another casualty," he was still looking at the report as she turned to him. "Get me what you can, stay away from Rask and his degenerates, and get out of there."
The Colonel met her gaze evenly as he spoke these last instructions.
"Sir."
Pain roused him from the warm murky depths of unconsciousness.
The pain swelled and contracted as if someone were inflating and deflating a balloon within the confines of his skull. At first, as his brain slowly attempted to connect disjointed stimuli, his symptoms pointed to a hangover, except that he wasn't much of a drinker so the odds of that were unlikely.
Then he realised he was upside down.
It was subtle at first, just the pull of his knuckles dragging lightly across dirty concrete. Then he realised his whole body was swaying gently to and fro, caught in an unseen tide.
The regular pulsing in his head had up until now masked the sensation of all of the blood in his body occupying it (his arms felt similarly leaden now that he thought about it), but now that his senses were awakening he became acutely aware of his vulnerability. His spine felt stretched and brittle, with all of the give of a dead and desiccated tree branch, and his ankles were bound painfully together, numb from blood loss.
His mind raced to retrace the events that could have led to his current predicament and panic set in, his heart making the jump from stand still to breakneck speed in seconds. He remembered fighting and running and swearing: daily occurrences for him, none of which could immediately explain why he would be hanging upside down and unconscious.
He tried to open his eyes and was rewarded with a bolt of pain running down the left hand side of his face. After several tentative attempts he succeeded in opening his right eye. His left ached terribly and the flesh around it felt swollen and tender. A slight breeze wherever he was told him that that side of his face was at the very least covered in congealed blood.
The breeze bore new information: the putrid smell of refuse and effluence. There were further familiar rank undertones to the stench but his gag reflex kicked in before he was able to identify them.
As involuntary purging spasms coursed through his body, he twitched and danced in his suspended state, the bindings cutting deeply into his trapped ankles. With considerable effort, he suppressed the urge to vomit, focussing on breathing through his mouth. Craning his neck to get a look at his bound feet, he found he was only able to exert himself for precious seconds before fatigue and incorrectly distributed blood flow snapped his head back to its dangling position.
Long enough to see the dull glimmer of razor wire wrapped around his ankles.
That, his brain told him, is why your hands are free. Any attempt to free yourself will cost you your fingers. And what good are you without those?
He had a mind to tell his brain where to stick those sorts of comments but he didn't have the energy to fight its reasoning. Especially when it was perfectly correct. And at least he had gained some information about his captor or captors: they weren't stupid.
Several amorphous clusters of semi-melted candles created soft flickering pools of light that lit his surroundings poorly, leaving great oppressive shrouds of darkness that prevented him from guessing the true size and shape of his cell. Ochre halos of grimy tiles sputtered adjacent to some of the candles giving him some sense of a large medical or cleaning room, a space that required regular and thorough cleaning. Unidentifiable metal skeletal shapes guttered in and out of the shadows, hinting at mechanical apparatus in a state of disrepair.
He risked a painful look back up at his ankles, looking past the razor wire to the metal hook that his feet were bound either side of by the wire. Just out of reach of the candle light, he thought he could see a track that the hook was secured to but he couldn't be sure before gravity and weakness pulled his head back down.
He closed his good eye as the pain continued to expand and contract within his skull. It was like a living thing trying to escape from a prison made of thick cranial bone, pushing at the confines and testing for weaknesses. The irony was not lost on him.
As he ceased his exertions his heart rate slowed from a thunderous staccato to a more pedestrian rhythm.
"This place used to be a meat packing plant back in the day. Before the locust, before Prescott dropped the hammer on us."
The voice was thick, rasping. Low in pitch and dark of intention. Almost as low as the sound of metal being dragged across concrete that accompanied its appearance.
He opened his eye and saw a monster of a man emerge from the shadows and walk across the 'ceiling' towards him. The grating sound advanced with him.
He was huge, the candle light accenting his powerful physique and his semi-clothed state. A soiled rag that may have been an apron long ago covered his bare chest but not the dirt and gore that smeared his thick muscled arms.
The grating sound belonged to an enormous metal cleaver, the kind that larger locust favoured as melee weapons, that the man dragged one-handed behind him.
The man crouched low in front of his captive, enveloping him in the same rotten fetid stench he had smelled earlier.
"I bet you can't guess what that makes you?" Rask all spat inches from the upside down man's face.
The veneer of old blood and dirt wasn't quite thick enough to hide the off-white war-paint skull that daubed his face.
"Judging by IQ alone," Damon Baird smirked. "I'd have to go with your supervisor at the very least."
The man stood with a sneering grunt before planting a boot firmly in Baird's chest and propelling him into the tiled wall behind him.
Baird felt the skin on the back of his head break and something viscous trickle its way to the top of his skull before he lost consciousness again.