Ashes of War (Satori's War Book 1) by Kevin McLaughlin

Author:Kevin McLaughlin
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Role of the Hero Publishing
Published: 2017-07-25T06:00:00+00:00

16

The team’s movement was deliberate as the ascended the stairs. None of them spoke, using hand and arm signals to communicate with one another. They’d seen what this thing they were hunting was capable of, now. They knew what they were going into. This wasn’t going to be pretty, or easy, or clean. If they ran into the thing, odds were not all of them were coming back.

Beth went up the stairs fourth in line. Her rifle was aimed up, tracking each new flight as she climbed. What could this thing be? She’d seen monsters before. Ratlike lizards, genetically engineered by the Naga as bio-weapons. Massive centipedes with jaws a meter long. She supposed there was very little limit to what sort of horror space could throw at them. If there were infinite stars waiting for them, then those stars likely housed an equally infinite array of dangers. But how had this one arrived here?

They’d reached the level where the team had been killed. Officially, they were still using the term ‘lost contact’, but Beth knew better. Those people were dead. The red dot blinking on her tablet still showed the killer’s location. It was on this floor. Not far away - the tracker’s placement showed it at the far side of the main machine workshop.

The team had paused by the door, gathering themselves on the stairwell landing. One had a hand on the doorknob. They looked to Beth for a signal. She was about to order some of these people to her death. Beth knew that and wondered which of them would be killed as she glanced from face to face. She would do her best to bring them all back, but that wasn’t always how combat worked. It didn’t matter. This had to be done.

“Go,” she said.

The door flew open. Her soldiers entered, the first two taking sharp corners left and right. The next two went up the middle. Beth followed those two in, the remainder of the team flowing into the room behind them.

It was a big chamber, about the size of a high school gym. They’d built the ceiling a little high, so they could move things around with a small fork-lift if they needed to. The lights didn’t flicker anymore. Charline’s team had done their job on the power station. But not all of the lights were operational, even with full secondary power restored. The absence of lights cast dark pools of shadow in places, darkening a room which had always been a little gloomy even at the best of times.

“Found Drummas,” one of the soldiers ahead of Beth called out. “What’s left of him, anyway.”

Beth reached the spot. She looked down, the flashlight on the barrel of her rifle illuminating the headless body. A patch on his chest with the man’s name was the only way she could identify him, now. She checked her tablet. The thing was still over by the 3D printer. It wasn’t moving.

“Stay sharp!” she called out. “It’s in this room with us.

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