fun house than a video screen but the picture came through clear enough, causing a flicker of light through the wide round room.
The surveillance drone relayed images of Voggoth’s slaughtered children: a monk in a corner near an open door; two of his expert Commandos reduced to sparking heaps behind an overturned desk in a supervisor’s office- turned-ambush point.
But no sign of their attacker.
The body of a young man who had been turned into a Missionary hovered at the Bishop’s side and listened as his master extrapolated from the trail of bodies, “She is moving toward the fuel depot. Toward me.”
“I shall send our forces to intercept.”
“Which forces are those?”
The Missionary man glanced toward the skin-like door leading away from the Bishop’s refuge. Outside, in a wide corridor and surrounding office-space, waited some 100 monks and a pair of the brutish Ogres.
“No,” the Bishop read the Missionary’s intention. “We transferred the bulk of the garrison to Excelsior Springs. They are all that remains to guard this sanctuary,” by that, the Bishop most certainly meant himself. “You will go, personally, and use the tools with which Voggoth has blessed you. Intercept her at the entrance to the depot.”
The Missionary man hesitated.
The Bishop glared in disdain for what remained of the human instinct for self-preservation inside Voggoth’s vessel. The Missionary relented and retreated from the room.
At one time the warehouse housed frozen foods in a freezer hundreds of feet long and thirty yards wide. In those days a massive cooling system maintained a frigid temperature to keep everything from chicken tenders sticks to ice cream bars in stasis while waiting to be shipped across the Midwest to restaurants and cafeterias.
That time had long past, but The Order found new use for the gigantic freezer, albeit with a temperature much warmer and humid than before.
Growths of dark green and brown covered the concrete floor in something akin to a shaggy carpet and continued up the tall walls on either side in a kind of otherworldly ivy. A handful of luminous bulbs sprouted from buds mixed in with the ivy creating starlight specks from the upper reaches of the terraformed walls.
The young Missionary man walked along the wide, open, and dimly lit warehouse aware the enemy might lurk in one shadow or another. And while he did not fear death, he did fear the wrath of Voggoth. Of course fear was an emotion useless to the machinations of The Order except when utilized as a weapon. Inside the converts to Voggoth’s legions, that remaining trace of humanity served as a detestable obstacle to purity.
Along the walls of the frozen foods section of Sysco-Olathe stood a dozen vats twenty feet high constructed by Voggoth’s engineers. The bloated containers pulsed and gurgled with the occasional hiss of a what might be considered steam.
Thick hoses traveled from the top of each vat into the ceiling high overhead, then across that roof where they met at a solitary sphere. From there fuel traveled topside for collection by passing Chariots.
Chunks of charcoal gelatin surrounded the base of each vat, spilling out on the otherwise flat and vacant center of the huge chamber.
The Missionary man passed the array with his eyes darting from side to side, waiting for the predator to pounce.
She did not. Instead, Voggoth’s convert reached the southern opening of the gigantic freezer. A particularly thick membrane dotted with tiny purple and red veins withdrew and he stepped into a wide passage running east to west in front of the bulkhead.
The thing that had once been human pulled two small balls from the pockets of his black jacket and dropped them to the floor. The balls expanded as if filling with gas until reaching the size of a beach ball. Then the spindly legs of Spider Sentries poked out from the spheres, followed by the sharp pointed nose of their jagged skewers and the rows of barrels across their ungodly faces.
The Missionary-flanked by the Spider Sentries-stood and waited. His eyes ran east up the hall. Doors lined the corridor there, some open and leading to dark passages; others closed tight, all tainted by the spread of sickly ivy.
His eyes ran west to a t-section where a garage door stood shut and corridors led off to other parts of the complex. No movement there, either.
A noise grabbed his attention; a sliding noise. Something scurried along the concrete floor directly for his feet.
The Missionary jumped back a step, bumping into the heavy membrane protecting access to the depot. His eyes darted to the floor in front of him where he saw some kind of backpack; something thrown across the floor at his position.
The Missionary reacted faster than the Spider Sentries. In a moment’s time he re-traced the flight of the backpack to one of the dark doorways to the east. His new eyes-accustomed to the dim lighting of Voggoth’s den- saw the silhouette of the enemy stooped low by one of those doors.
He raised his arm to command the sentries to assault.
The detpack at his feet exploded.
A volcano of concrete erupted form the floor and radiated outward turning the Missionary into a blob of gore and ripping the legs off the Spider Sentries. Their ball-shaped heads flew away and shredded apart in layers like peeled onions. Their charred remains came to rest dozens of feet away from the blast zone.
Most important to Nina, the explosion tore a hole in the bulkhead.
With her Colt M4 pointed ahead, she hurried across the hall, stepped carefully around the blob of gore on the floor, and moved into the vast darkness of the old freezer chamber.
There she met the constant, rhythmic glug and hiss of the vats converting raw nutrients into fuel. A whining noise drew her attention from the vats lining the chamber to something overhead. There she saw two eye-like lights fixed to a spinning disk.
She took aim with her rifle and fired. The drone zigzagged to avoid the shots and circled high into the darkened rafters.
Nina tried to track its movements, but a more immediate concern grabbed her attention: a chorus of electronic hums from the far side of the chamber. She watched as pinpricks of yellow formed over there like a cloud of angry gnats. That cloud turned into a storm streaming across the open space at her, fast and then faster; loud and then louder.
Nina raised her weapon and fired.
One of the yellow balls exploded in a shower of liquid that engulfed another of its number. Both flickered dark. The rest kept coming.
Nina instinctively retreated a step, and then two, but her eyes remained fixed on the approaching targets.
She fired again.
One of fourteen disappeared.
She fired a three-round burst.
Two misses-one hit.
Louder; close enough now that she could see the tiny licks of flame-light dancing on the surface of the sun- like glowing balls.
Another-another-another dropped to her shots, but time ran out.
Nina switched to full automatic on her rifle and met the storm with a storm of her own. Quantity over quality; metal against burning acid.
Three more of the glowing projectiles exploded into mists of acid. Where every drop of spilt acid fell, puffs of smoke sizzled form the mesh-covered floor.
Nina ran toward the side of the complex. The six pursuers changed course not so much in a straight line, but sluggishly as if in battle with their own momentum.
She switched out her magazine while in the midst of a full sprint. The glowing spheres screamed their electronic hum just over her shoulder. Nina dove-straight to the floor into the soft surface of intertwined vines. The balls of acid swooped over her prone back by the nearest of margins, flew forward, and tried to turn for a second pass but another could not stifle speed fast enough and hit into a gurgling vat of fuel. Its corrosive juices splashed
