The hallway led down, deeper underground, ending in a doorway that opened up into a cavernous concrete room. The flashlights of the soldiers barely pierced the deep darkness around them. The place resembled a forest of rusted metal, steel girders and support columns holding up a damaged concrete ceiling about five times taller than the Spartans. The faint drip of water from a broken pipe echoed across the room. Metal let loose a ghastly groan as the weight of the concrete pressed down on it. They didn't know how far down they were.
The team slowly advanced, their footsteps barely audible as they scanned everything from the walls they could see to the darkness itself for movement. As they advanced to the other side of the room, they caught sight of three more tunnels, one of which had an intersection farther down, as far as they could tell. Nadya moved her flashlight around the frames of the tunnels, until she saw writing in cyrillic.
It was Russian writing, of course. She sighed, then said "Anton, can you translate this for us, please? And no, Ukrainian isn't Russian..."
Nadya didn't know, but Cortana was already grinning as she parsed through an old dictionary. She whispered to the Chief "Tunnel 01 leads to the generator room, 02 leads to the storage area and 03 leads down to the lower levels. Just so you know, I'm detecting faint motion signatures below us, so I'd advise we scout out this place before we move down."
Blue Team exchanged quick glances. A hand signal to Nadya brought her forward and the Spartan spoke calmly "01 is the Generators, 02 is the storage and 03 is a descent into the lower levels."
Nadya smirked "Well, I'll be. Your armor translates old Earth languages?"
Chief gave a nod. It wasn't a lie, more of a half-truth...
"Very good." She nodded, then started "We'll split the team in two. One team heads for the Generators to see if we can get power back on to this whole place and the other goes to check storage. We meet back here once we're done. That good with you?" and she got a nod from the Chief. After a brief moment, the teams were decided, with Fred and Linda moving with Jessie and Talbot, while Chief took the others. Team 1 was going for the generators. Two, for the guns.
Chief and Kelly took point, while Anton and Cole hanged back, scanning the rear with their rifles' flashlights. The Corridor went on and on, deeper than the Spartans expected. Graffiti in Russian and even English lined the walls, mostly made up of expletives and other such wonderful words from both languages. The tunnel soon opened up, yet again into another massive room. This one, however, was lined with dozens of airtight crates and pallets of large, metal weapon boxes painted in olive green. Faded Russian writing on some of the wooden boxes denoted multiple ammunition calibers from 9x19 to 12,7x108.
"Woah..." Anton said, slowly panning his flashlight around. On two boxes, low tripods with mounted HMGs sat, dusty, but untouched. Farther back, there were even mortar tubes for 80mm Mortars. Cole grinned, approaching one of the crates and popping it open with the butt of his SMG, breaking the airtight seal with a thunk and a wet hiss. He whistled, pulling a fully-functional, matte-black AK rifle with plastic furniture from the box. He racked the bolt, looked down the barrel from the back, then tossed it to Anton.
"AK-103. 7,62mm rifle, standard-issue." The Ruski smirked, leaning it on his shoulder, "Looks like our data was correct... How the Combine did not spot this place, I do not know."
"All the better for us, pal." Cole nodded, picking up another AK and a few magazines, "Damn, look at this place. Must've been Federal Reserve armaments, or something. Post-Nuclear War, ya know?"
"Probably, going by the writing." Anton sat himself down. He looked to the Chief and Kelly, then asked "See anything you like?" with a grin. He popped open another box, grabbed a shotgun with a heavy barrel and an extended mag and tossed it Kelly's way. She caught it and Anton explained, "The KS-23. Going by American designations for Shotguns pre-war? That's a 6-gauge Shotgun. 23mm, fires a multitude of ammunitions. That's a really late mod meant for hunting monsters... Has a six-round tube magazine instead of a 3-rounder."
Chief looked to Kelly as he saw a visible shiver run up her spine. Her visor depolarized, to reveal the grinning, blue-haired fast-mover of Blue Team. He stifled a chuckle at his friend's expense, simply giving her a nod and tilting his head to the ammo cans. The girl bounced happily toward the cans, taking fistfuls of the 23mm Shotgun Shells and separating them by color and type, with Anton translating.
"Hey, Chief." Cole started. The Spartan looked to his allied Rebel friend and saw him with the loaded AK in his hand. He leaned it against his shoulder, then asked "How's it look to you?"
Chief gave a simple nod, before watching Kelly step up and away from the line with belts of shells strapped to her. He nodded to her as well, just as the lights flared and turned on with a deep buzz. They looked up, to see the lights were neon tubes, flickering and almost dead, probably having gone unused for decades now. A loud groan echoed across the halls, like the cries of the damned... The team quickly rallied back up and went out to meet with the others.
"The fuck was that?" Nadya asked as they turned the corner and all stopped in front of tunnel 3.
"No idea..." Anton started, racking the bolt of his own AK, "But the guns are safe. Locked in airtight, sealed boxes for the better part of their stay here. Lower decks must be supplies and garages, I'd guess."
"I'm gonna say it's Zeds, ma'am." Cole noted, looking down at the tunnel, "Sounded like Headcrabs with hatred for light."
"Mmm... Don't like it." The woman said, checking her own rifle, "Well... We're going to have to go down there and clear it out if we want to set up some sort of base here. Blues, mind giving us a hand?"
Blue Team responded by shouldering their guns and readying themselves. The Rebels felt calm at the simple fact that the four uparmored titans were on their side. Marching down the tunnel, to the next sublevel, the team were greeted by moans of suffering and chittering claws. Kelly was the first in the wide room, raising her shotgun and catching a glimpse of a stumbling mess of rotting flesh and torn cloth in green camouflage. She aimed for the massive, animal-shaped lump on the top of its head and fired.
The recoil of the Shotgun made Kelly stagger. She'd have thought it was like any other 12ga, but the sheer force with which the ammunition hit the target tore it in half from the head down. The ammunition, a slug, she assumed, then punched through into a concrete wall behind the creature, after blasting two more of the monsters through the gut. The others joined in, firing upon a horde of the creatures with automatic 7,62 rifles and SMGs.
Gooey yellow blood stained the floor as the team moved forward, with Kelly's shotgun barking like a mad hound whenever she managed to track a target. One monster that got too close got the butt of the rifle, a reinforced wooden stock, right to the top of its head, cracking bone and splattering the strange animal that occupied the host's head. They swept the area calmly, advancing in a wedge formation with the Rebels covering their rear.
By the time they'd made it to the other end, the place had been littered with the corpses of almost a hundred of the damn things. Kelly hummed, reloading her shotgun, then quipped, "That wasn't so bad..." before stomping down a still-living Headcrab.
"Jesus Christ and lords above..." Murmured Nadya, "You and your squad are terrifying."
"Training pays off..." John murmured, approaching a massive bulkhead Door with writing above that Cortana had translated as 'Command Center'. The armored door slid open as the Spartan interacted with its controls and the team trained their firearms inside, finding nothing but cobwebs and dust covering the consoles, with one single skeleton dead at the center console. Half of Blue Team entered, Fred and Linda hanging back and providing cover with the Rebels. Nadya also followed.
Approaching the chair, they found three things:A big hole drilled into the man's skull, a Grach pistol covered by dust and a spent casing on top of one of the screens. The man's uniform was torn, partially shredded due to the decomposition, but his dog tags, although partly rusted, still remained around his neck, much like his rank pins. Chief hummed, then looked to Nadya.
"General Augustin Dedov, Russian Armed Forces... Guess he didn't really like the fact his men were being turned into monsters." She noted, following his left hand to a black key that he did not manage to turn. She hummed, then said, "He was damn near ready to blast this place to hell... With everything inside it." before pushing his hand away and gently removing the key. It broke in her hand, leaving the front stuck in the hole... She murmured, "Let's hope nobody manages to turn that. God only knows what the state of those explosives is."
"Mhm." John nodded. He looked to Kelly and showed her to fall out, before asking, "Anything we can find out here?"
Nadya hummed, then she waved Anton forward, ordering, "Get on the computers and give me whatever you can. Maybe we can get a manifesto of what was in this Reserve bunker... Hell, if intuition serves me right, we may even find armored vehicles in here."
Anton snorted, "Well, your intuition is right, ma'am... It's just too bad that most of them are probably broken by now. At least engine-wise..." And he turned to the two, before adding, "They were preparing to deploy them, engage the Combine when a bunch of Headcrabs popped in. The vehicles were fueled and just about ready to go, so I'm gonna go ahead and say that the gas or whatever cheap replacement they used broke parts of the engines."
"Damn..." The woman sighed, "Alright. We should probably call up Eli, tell him we've secured the bunker."
"Right on that." Anton noted, pulling the equipment out of his bag, putting them up top and linking them to the computer system of the place.
Nadya looked to the Chief, then said "You and your team will probably have to hike back to the city again. 'Till then, though, I'd suggest you duck and stick around... Hell, maybe we'll find some MREs somewhere that haven't gone bad."
"In this place..." Cortana murmured, "I'd be amazed."
"Thanks." John nodded to Nadya, who stepped off to the side to talk to the rest of her team. The Spartan turned to Blue Team, finding Kelly admiring her new weapon with the widest grin the Spartan had seen his comrade bear in a few decades of working together. She shouldered the Shotgun, then looked to Fred as if asking how it looks. He gave a clear-cut, simple nod, before turning to Linda, who was now looking over her sniper rifle.
"John." Fred started, approaching the team lead.
Chief raised a brow as the Spartan stepped up, before asking, "Everything alright?"
"Yeah." John nodded, "I'm just... Concerned."
"Over Earth being occupied by these Combine?" Kelly chipped in. The Chief gave an affirmative hum. He heard Cortana murmuring something to herself, before he cued his com and showed the team to follow him. They moved down to the vehicle bay below, where two massive armored doors had opened when the place had been powered back up, revealing several dozen 21st century AFVs belonging to what once had been the Russian Federation.
"I'm counting at least twelve T72s and eight T90s." Kelly commented, slinging her shotgun on her back, "As well as maybe 10-odd BTR-7 amphibious transports in the back... Man, this place must've been the staging area for some major armored battalion of theirs." and she climbed atop one of the T90s in the place, before taking a knee and propping open the hatch atop the turret, M6 Magnum in one hand. She trained the gun on the hatch, poking it inside and scanning the inner hull of the tank with her VISR on.
She turned to the Blues and gave a thumbs up. The vehicle was clear. Kelly jumped back down, then went on to check the others while the Spartans peered around, noticing ammunition racks with rounds of varying calibers lined the walls. Reaching the back of the massive garage, they wound up facing a massive steel door with a collapsed tunnel leading to the exterior.
Well, that answered that...
The team of four returned to the command center of the place, finding the squad of Rebels settled in. The place had bunks just across, so it was unsurprising they found the Old Man and Jess looking over their new bounty of AK rifles. Jess looked to Chief and his team, then quipped, "You guys and gals just helped us get the biggest haul of kit that we could've asked for. Hell, we even found old RPG-7 and RPO launchers here."
"Ah, the Bumblebee..." Laughed Anton as he brought a tube with one of those napalm rockets in and set it down by his bunk, "I still remember hearing the news about Beslan..."
Chief looked toward Nadya, watching her walk up to them, a smile on her face. She spoke, "Well, Blue Team. Good news is you'll be sticking around this place a bit longer, since it'll take the strike team some time to meet up with us. You don't mind hanging around with an Uke and her squad some more, do you?" and motioning to the metallic bunks still having mattresses.
"Not at all." Kelly said, slinging her KS-23 off her back. She looked to the Chief, who nodded and showed them to sit down.
Nadya showed Chief to follow, taking him out of earshot of both teams, before whispering, "We've got more news as well. And I'm not sure how to feel about them just yet, Chief. The few sensors one of our scientists, doctor Isaac Kleiner, has set up around the city, have detected a continuous stream of radiation in and around our location, ranging from a few kilometers to several dozen klicks out... They apparently detected a similar one just hours before we recovered the rest of your squad."
The Spartan hummed. That complicated things... He cued his radio to a random frequency, listening in as static began to stream through. He tapped his mic twice and Cortana whistled, starting a decoding and a cleanup of the radio chatter. It seemed as if they were about to have a helluva lot more incoming than just BLUE Team. And the Combine?
... Well, the Combine were already figuring that out.
In a clearing about twelve kilometers away from the bunker, a Spartan fireteam, 6 members, engaged a Combine patrol with extreme prejudice. Commanding the attacking unit, a Spartan-III of Alpha Company shouldered his DMR and blasted away at the Combine Elite and his troops. Meanwhile, his sniper picked off the advancing ones through the treeline, with the HMG-carrying heavy of the team letting loose a stream of rounds to pin down those just in front of them. Three others, two girls and a berserker of a Spartan, surged through the left side, flanking the enemy troops.
The leader of the trio, a woman in a white armor with mixed parts ranging from a RECON helmet to a COMMANDO Chest pad, swept the area ahead with the AR in her possession. A shotgun barked to her left and a Magnum to her right and most of the squad hiding behind a wall of dirt. The woman and her two allies, fellow Spartans, pounced over the edge of cover and hosed another squad of retreating bastards with bullets.
Following them in, the others began setting up a perimeter. Gunfire raked the treeline, halting any retreating stragglers from making it anywhere farther than five feet. The sniper also dealt with the other Combine elite squad leaders easily, the high-caliber bullet punching through their helmet like an armored fist. The leader of the Fireteam nodded to his comrades, before signaling them to continue putting pressure on the foe.
They'd been engaged by heavy fire without provocation. They'd engage right back, with no issue to them whatsoever. It was only natural for a Spartan to fight back when fired at. And they, NOBLE TEAM, were all too familiar with that. Noble Six led the team formed of Kat and Emile, Two and Four. Meanwhile, Noble One, Three and Five followed closely, with Five toting the HMG he was famous for.
The enemy, whoever they were, were gonna be sorry for engaging this Spartan unit. Six, however, still wondered silently how they had all wound up here. She figured it best to ask the questions later, as most of the team seemed silent, processing the events themselves as they surged forth. And going by the armor's warnings regarding rads around them, they weren't gonna be the only ones with those questions.
At least she felt that way.