Three months without an update... I seriously have to give this fic a little more attention, no?
Well, here's an update.
The woman smiled; she was amused by his confusion. She seemed comfortable talking and staying within the reach of the Terminator. Again, Virgil remembered that few beings in the universe were. His head turned to follow her as she began to walk this way and that, as the little girl ran rings around the two of them.
Tenenbaum reached into a large bag at her side, and pulled out a small cylinder – it was a tox-stick, Virgil realized; usually a roll of mild depressants, ignited for their fumes which had the effect of calming the nerves – and lit it with a small pyro-box. Virgil flexed the fingers of the power fist in his hand, which attracted the attention of the little girl. Anna immediately jumped up to cling onto the stylized skull fixed onto the back of his metal fist.
"Hey, you've got a little babyface on your arm, Mr. Bubbles!" She giggled.
"Who is this... Mr. Bubbles that she speaks of?" His plasmid augmented voice sounded rather mangled. It was as if he were trying to speak while someone clamped their hands around his neck. Tenenbaum smiled slyly as she paced around him.
"You come from far away, yes?" She queried, and when the man remained silent, she continued on. "Mr. Bubbles is the endearing name given by Little One. They are known as the 'Big Daddies' to normal people. They are the Guardians of the Little Sisters."
Her pitched accent reminded him of a Kreiger, a Death Korpsman. Virgil pushed on with his questioning.
"And why do they need to be protected?"
The woman looked up from her glowing tox-stick. Her face no longer held humor in it, but instead an agonized sadness.
"Because... this place has gone insane, my dear Virgil."
- - - - -
Please... take care of little Anna.
Virgil held the small handheld vox unit that Tenenbaum had given him. He opened up one of his ammunition pouches and stowed the 'shortwave radio' inside.
This was a city gone mad, Tenenbaum explained.
Rapture. An underwater world of chaos and ruin. Formerly a hidden paradise, the epitome of free trade, this place had now become the apex of instability, anarchy and insanity.
The mutants were victims of their own voluntary gene-splicing, and they were now no more than animals, these... Splicers.
Virgil looked at his own self in thought, wondering about his own modifications on his journey to becoming a Space Marine. He was – technically – a Splicer as well. A slight aeons more refined, if he were any judge, but an augmented human nonetheless.
These Splicers warred between their two factions, that of Atlas and that of Ryan, the usurper and the governor respectively. Tenenbaum, when asked what faction she fought for, had simply responded.
"To Ryan, they are tools. To Atlas, they are monstrosities. To me, they are my Little Ones. I fight for the Little ones."
The grizzled Terminator, victim of a hundred betrayals and thousands more double-deals, had nodded his head, approving of this mindset. He now found purpose. To help the Little Ones, as Tenenbaum had called them. Something about those little girls intrigued the veteran Space Marine. They weren't afraid of him, and he had found that comforting.
Years ago, maybe centuries now... there had been a young girl.
She was a hiver, simple in her service to the Emperor. When the Hive had been invaded by the forces of Chaos, she had managed to survive the madness that was a daemon incursion, and when Virgil and his Brothers had driven them back, only she and a handful others remained alive, curled up in a ball of tense muscle in the blown out cellar of what had been her home.
When the Adeptus Astartes had come to save her, she had been scared out of her mind. The guardian angels of Mankind, the offspring of the Emepror himself, could not inspire the feeling of safety in a human.
He still remembered the blood on his hands as she battered herself to death on his armor.
It was then that he – then a mere scout – learned that the Astartes were not only respected, but feared by those that they protected.
Maybe that was why he found himself wanting to safeguard these Little Sisters.
- - - - -
"Look, Mr. B! More angels!"
The duty of a Big Daddy was to protect the Little Sister that he was with. Virgil crushed a fist sized chunk of concrete that had fallen in during the decay of this underwater city in his efforts to catch up to the little girl.
Silently, Virgil escorted his young charge as she skipped over crumbling concrete. The broken remains of a chair sat behind a cage of metal, and around him, Virgil recognized the signs of a battle recently fought. The running waterfall bisected the stairs neatly, and in the pool at the base of the shattered stairwell lay a good half-dozen bodies, their weapons still clutched in their hands.
Splicers lay wounds were mostly flash-burns from electrical discharge, as well as the lead slugs that made up their primitive slug pistols and simple autoguns. A few also featured blunt trauma to their chests and faces. Judging by the random placement of the wounds, and the sheer brutality to the hits, the ones who had done this were either insane or new to combat.
Standing beside Anna as she went about her grisly work, he began to fiddle with his already complaining auspex. It was reading maybe five contacts in the room, when there were only two. Scanning the floor, Virgil saw a rodent scamper over the dead. He clicked off his auspex, satisfied with using his own senses over the near-broken scanner. Brother Virgil contemplated his situation as he cast his gaze over to the girl.
He was trapped, in what appeared to be an underwater city. The power cores for his suit would last a long while, but the more sensitive functions of his Tactical Dreadnought Armor would soon deteriorate without the attentions of a Techpriest. His Storm Bolter was nowhere to be found, although his Power Fist was more than sufficient for the enemies that he had encountered thus far, the double-barreled grenade launcher was still a venerated, priceless relic of a thousand battles and in a way one of the few things he valued more than his life.
Such a shame... the Terminator wondered what had become of his weapon.
Anna screamed as one of the bodies grabbed her device.
There was a sudden flash of lightning, and Virgil felt himself howl in pain as electricity surged through his armor. In a series of hisses and pops, his Black Carapace – the interface layer between man and machine - disconnected from his suit to preserve his own life, as white lightning skipped across the panels of his armor. His head-mounted displays fizzled and sparked, began flashing warnings, then ominously fell silent.
Virgil gritted his teeth as the suit hunched over, dormant. The muscle mimic system was offline, as were many of the systems. His Terminator armor had just become his own prison. Movement was difficult, and the Marine Veteran struggled against his own suit's weight. He managed to slap a manual override, and the helmet lenses opened, giving him a restricted view of the outside world.
A Splicer stood triumphantly in front of him, his arm still crackling with the gene-given energies of lightning. Seeing the helmeted head lock onto him, the Splicer hissed and began to back away. His friends were arriving, their primitive autoguns chattering like a scribe-servitor as they spewed out their leaden bullets.
In the darkness inside of his helmet, a small line of sigils scrolled across a screen.
System overload. Rebooting in 5...
Damnation!
4...
A lead pellet skipped off his forehead. Virgil took a step forward.
"Unzip him, Mr. B! UNZIP HIM!" Anna's shrill cry alerted him to the other mutants streaming in from their hiding spots.
3...
Another blast of elemental energies froze his arms. The ice on his torso was of little concern to him.
More of the bodies picked themselves up, fingers dancing with elemental discharges, and only now did Virgil realize his error: The auspex had been targeting human-scale life signs, and would have ignored the rodents.
2...
Shifting his weight, he threw his frozen limb in the path of a fireball, melting the ice around his right arm.
He felt like he was trying to work against his suit as his sore and tired body fought to close distance with the already fleeing madman. He was dashing away, between two mutants that were pouring a steady stream of the tiny metal slugs at the near-impenetrable armor.
1...
System reboot.
The status displays inside of his darkened suit reignited as his Black Carapace reconnected to the ports on the suit, and it was as if a huge burden was suddenly lifted off his body. He sent a pulse of energy running down to his power fist, and the ice around it shattered as the power field popped into place, sending the ice scattering out in a fine mist of crystals.
Virgil grinned at the faces made by the mutants as the armored giant accelerated, all but doubling its speed in the space of two steps. The two autogun-wielding mutants were swatted aside as Virgil chased after the one that had stunned him. The man turned around to face the Terminator, arms crackling with energy.
He was treated to a pauldron connected to nine hundred pounds of Space Marine.
Virgil did not stop as he felt his shoulder pick up the mutant, nor did feel the lead slugs bouncing off his armor as he charged past a pair of Splicers. Neither did he realize that he was roaring a battlecry as he saw the wall rushing forward to meet him.
There was a dull thump and a crackle of masonry as the Space Marine smashed into the wall.
The world went dark.
Silence, only broken by the sound of broken stone falling, like the dull rattle of rain, filled his helmet.
Behind him, the Splicers gathered.
"Holy... did that Big Daddy just do what I think he did?" That was the closest voice so far.
"He killed Ken! The bastard!" A shrill voice reported. Virgil's rear-view camera showed the Splicer talking, hunched over the mashed up figure of a Splicer that he had battered out of the way.
"Right through the frikkin' wall... no way Saunders survived that."
One of the other Splicers strayed too close. Bursting out of the hole, Virgil slapped the frail man down, crushing bone and flesh alike.
"He's back! Grab the brat and run!"
Anna screamed as a Splicer picked her up. Another hurled a smoking box at him. The explosion rocked the room, and managed to send Virgil back into the hole from which he had ambushed them.
The Terminator blinked at the potency of the explosive. That had been unexpected. He clawed his way back out of the hole he had smashed into the wall, past the red concrete and scraps of fabric that was all remaining of the mutant sorcerer.
There was a severed arm at the mouth of the entrance he had just created. And the back of a retreating mutant was just visible.
Switching camera feed to the fingertips, the Terminator bent over.
Benjamin Tomilson was not the most intelligent of people, but when he felt the dull thump of Saunders' arm hitting the back of his head and knocking him over, he decided it was a good time to stop moving.
The unmistakeable ground-shaking vibrations of an approaching Big Daddy caused his breathing to hasten.
Hey... I ain't botherin' that Big Daddy's lil' girl... it won't go afta' me... they ain't wired like that, arn't they?
The pondering mass of metal and man stopped beside the fallen body. Avoiding Big Daddies was easy, the man tried to rationalize, against his growing panic. This was nothing new. He'd done this hundreds of times, every time one tried to get its brat back. Big Daddy was gonna just move on, wasn't it? Big Daddies were dumb.
He was used to the low rumbles of these monsters. Yeah, that was what he was hearing.
Strong fingers grabbed his arm, and bodily heaved him up, slamming him into a wall.
"I know you're alive, so stop playing dead, Splicer."
The mutant was squealing like a stuck saber-tusked boar, Virgil observed. His fingers tightened slightly around the neck of the pathetic excuse of a human. The Splicer fell silent.
"Where are they taking the girl, mutant?"
"M-medical Pavilion! B-b-by Steinman's office! N-now let me go, ya big lug!"
Virgil squeezed.
"Tenenbaum? I require directions to the Medical Pavilion."
I hope you guys have been enjoying this! I'll appreciate any reviews that you'll give me, and as with ToyHammer any critiques will earn a cameo, so long as it fits in with the plot and lore of the story.
If you're wondering, the scene of destruction that Virgil visited was the battle that Jack fights just after he get shut out by Andrew Ryan, and that flamethrower turret starts trying to kill him, forcing him off to the Medical Pavilion.