Kali's Tale: A Breath of Fresh Air

The hive awakened.

It was never completely still in the hive. It constantly seethed and murmured to its own myriad rhythms of life and death, a world apart from whatever passed as normal on the rest of Pandora. The world behind the hidden doors was always thought of like that by its inhabitants. Inside was home, dark and warm, while Outside was the place of feeding and light and slaughter and terrifying horizons. Inside was meant to be safe, meant to be secret. Kali's arrival changed everything.

If you listen carefully, you can hear them move.

"Oh perfect!"

The light flooded into the furthest recesses of the room. With the sound of the slamming door still echoing, Kali forced herself to ease her grip on her combat rifle. She continued to silently curse her rookie mistake as she scanned the space for threats. She was near one end of a huge split-level vehicle bay, easily 200 metres long and 40 deep by 20 high, littered with garbage. A big drop barge loomed at the far end, while the intervening area held several utility vehicles and, of all things, a TL-27; a Buzzard. Smiling, she walked over and laid a hand on the fuselage of the compact killing machine. She'd spent a lot of hours at the controls of the tough little tilt-jets in Promethea's unfriendly skies. She turned to examine the near end of the hangar. Involuntarily, she took a sudden step back.

The Vault Hunter leapt into the room.

The image was famous across the worlds; Lilith, face aglow with the joy of combat, arm outstretched as she conjured her Siren power. Here, in this unlikely place, an artist had created a Lilith stern and beautiful, strong and desirable. Six metres tall she stood, dominating the near wall of the hangar. Her hips and long elegant legs were painted in perspective, while her upper body and profiled face emerged from the wall, sculpted in relief from a composite of whatever materials the artist had been able to scrounge from the litter and garbage that cluttered the former vehicle bay. On the one hand the image could be called crude, both because of the roughness of its finish and the exaggeration of Lilith's breasts. On the other hand, there was an undoubted power in the depiction. The eyes in particular…

A scuttling noise from amongst the litter behind Kali brought the incendiary rifle's barrel into line without conscious thought. Nothing stirred; the seconds stretched out in pregnant silence. She slowly prowled forward, cat-footed, eyes everywhere. The volume of garbage she was seeing was starting to worry her. Weapon crates, broken machinery and general crap littered the whole space. Given that the fall of Atlas was only two years in the past, this amount of debris said that a significant number of people had occupied the facility since the evacuation. She paused next to some rotting food remains. Correction; were still occupying the facility…

Footsteps clattered on concrete.

Effortlessly, she leapt to the roof of a car and then vaulted over the railing of the upper level of the hangar to take cover behind a bank of machinery. Two tunnels gave access to the hangar from the interior of the mine. Unfortunately she didn't have line-of-sight down either of the darkened shafts because of the short range. The tempo of the footsteps increased. She'd just settled into place when the neighbours arrived.

The brothers ran screaming into the light. Startled awake from the haunting and terror called sleep, they had been put to the hunt. The little ones, good dogs, had led the way. Away, away from the shelter and comforts of darkness and running, leaping into the brightly singing Light. Where oh where was the prey? Their hunger was a flame and an agony as they fanned out into the space. What was that? A scent, a rainbow of colour and music that came from…

There she was.

Half a dozen psychos erupted from the far entrance. An onrushing jabber of voices filled the near tunnel. Kali flung a grenade into the narrow darkness by way of discouragement and brought her rifle to bear on the nearest hunter. Disciplined bursts of incendiary rounds punched into each man, her shield shivering under a rain of buzz-axes. One, two, three down…the corridor vomited flame and charred body parts…the other psychos coming on, unflinching…trigger held down and full automatic hell spitting forth…four, five down and the last man right here now and the noise of his axe the loudest sound in the world as flame washed him like the Devil's baptism…

He fell. Kali took the opportunity to reload, patting the weapon's receiver and chuckling fondly when she was done; Glorious Havoc indeed.

A shrill, inhuman squealing broke over her. Streams of figures large and small spewed from both tunnels: more tattooed psychos, a horde of Pandora's infamous midgets, couple of steroid abusers and a lumbering giant of a man in a metal full-face helmet slowly bringing up the rear. The entire giggling, shouting carnival of the damned paused for a fraction of a second and then hurled themselves headlong at her, a wave of axes and bullets preceding them. Kali backpedalled furiously, tossing two grenades as she went, trading time for distance, for fighting room.

Kali triggered her combat system, and felt the familiar eye-blink thrill of electricity washing through the nano-scale circuitry that pervaded her body. The sheer power of her gene-engineered musculature and reinforced skeleton was now enhanced by the superhuman speed and spatial awareness that Augmentation provided. The twin MIRV explosions turned a double handful of her twisted assailants to hamburger and momentarily cleared a space in their midst. Rolling another grenade under the feet of the leading edge of the crowd, she crouched and leapt clear over the first two ranks of attackers to land in the grisly circle, revolver now in hand and a smile illuminating her face.

"Hello boys" she yelled, as the detonating grenades highlighted her in an aura of flame and broken flesh.

Ticktock watched as She danced.

When he'd been lured from hiding by the sound of his kin at play, he'd had no idea that he would see…Her! He felt himself swept away by passion. His dreams, his waking world too, were ever-filled with thoughts of Beauty; sweet female shapes and movements and sounds. His burning imagination had driven him to lovingly, oh so lovingly, grace the wall of his world with the loveliest image he knew, to bring joy that much closer to reality. But now She, this she, a new she was here! Oh, Beauty made flesh, Beauty so much greater and more compelling than his dreams, his poor art.

There she had stood, that first moment of seeing her. The fierce joyful face, curves that filled the eyes, rich incomparable inviting laughter! Standing over the charred remains of his kin, rifle butt poised on shapely hip, she had seemed the very incarnation of Desire. Then more of his brethren had emerged from the hive. Ticktock had not feared for her, though murder was surely the least of what filled their minds. He watched with adoring eyes as she had again filled his home with flame and thunder, suddenly to soar above the mere mortals. Of course she could fly! Was she not Death's very own angel? Landing lightly amongst them, she had challenged them to dance...

For that was how she moved. She flitted now with quicksilver speed amongst the ponderously groping attackers, her unearthly grace haloed by the shimmer of her shield. Her dull, close-fitting garb served only to highlight her sweet shining face and the rich curves of her body. Some of his kin fell to the thunderous shots of the potent handgun she bore, bodies spinning and cratering under its impact. Others, more fortunate in Ticktock's mind, felt her actual touch, their flesh and bone breaking wetly under the fierce caresses of fist or elbow, boot or knee. The fall of their lifeless bodies was a deadly increasing tempo, voices, screams and shots decreasing with the passage of every second...

Kali perched a hip on an engine block and mopped the sweat from her face. That had been a busy little passage of play! She looked again at the nightmare zoo of twisted humanity that littered the floor in every direction. Psychos, midgets…and now this, whatever the hell it was. She rested a foot atop the gigantic corpse of the helmet wearer and studied it more closely. It had been damn hard to kill, and the shrivelled head atop the withered neck was a thing of special horror. Nothing about that in her mission briefings! Compared to this lot, a group of homicidal bandits would have been positively comforting. She shook her head and wondered what she had walked into. She was getting a bad vibe from these bodies, each twisted in its own particular way. There seemed to be a theme at work here that left a truly bad taste. If this was a foretaste of what was yet to come, this would be a special expedition indeed.

She trod carefully amongst the wreckage of almost thirty bodies. Searching for suitable ammunition, Kali was gratified by the range of weapons her attackers had used. There was no standardisation of type or manufacturer. It was just the usual random equipage of Pandoran bandits; not an Atlas weapon in sight. She grunted satisfaction; it seemed that there was still a good chance of bringing this mission to a successful conclusion.

Kali stretched, took a deep breath. Her eye was caught once again by the great image of Lilith that dominated the room. She gave the Vault Hunter a salute and wondered for a moment at the nature of the artist, a denizen of this…special…place, and his motivation. Another Pandoran mystery! She shrugged and loped off into the darkness of the corridor, infra-red sensitive eyes picking a way through the rubble.

The world was silent once again, but Ticktock's hands clutched at his head, mind awhirl at what he had seen, what he'd felt. His heart beat like a machine gun with excitement at the thought that this astonishing woman had come into his life. Eyes lost in a vista of his own imagining, he was slow to react when he saw her entering the corridor. He jumped to his feet as she stepped into darkness. He needed her, wanted her, had to feel her touch! Afraid yet elated, he looked around at his home. Once so comforting and safe, it now felt empty. He stared at the entry to the hive. Where she went, he had to be. He padded past the broken bodies of his kin, and slipped into shadow, heart aflame.

Coming to a branching of the corridor, Kali brought up the map from her downloaded information of the facility. The 3D image hovered in her vision, the scale large enough to show it in its entirety. The map described this place as a mine, but Atlas had excavated and built on a massive and elaborate scale here. From the cliff-face entrance, the complex expanded in all directions. From her position near the vehicle bay here, tunnels led further into the cliff before opening into the vast refinery space. Beyond that again, the eridium mine-workings drove deeper and expanded into a network that honeycombed a cubic kilometre of rock. Overlying this, extensive accommodation, laboratory and administrative spaces occupied much of the remaining volume of the cliff to within a few tens of metres of the surface. She shook her head and smiled grimly at the journey still to go.

Atlas' code name for the place should have been Moria.