Blue Resurrection, page 34
And then... silence. A sharp, total silence, broken only by dripping fluid and a choked, wet breathing.
The corpses of the Architects lay in heaps—a formless biomass.
They no longer resembled killing machines, but filthy debris. Eliza dared to draw a breath. The air carried the scent of copper and something burnt. The taste clung to her palate, metallic and bitter.
"They're gone," she whispered, more to herself than to Maya.
Her hand slowly slid from her daughter's eyes. She wanted the child to see the danger had passed. She wanted to see relief dawn on that little face.
The figure at the center of the butchery straightened. Her back was to them. Her helmet was gone—when? Eliza hadn’t noticed. Her body trembled with fine spasms, muscles twitching under her skin.
The woman turned.
Eliza felt her stomach coil into an icy knot. The relief died in her throat, choked by a new, more primal fear.
The woman’s face was pale, almost translucent, covered with a network of raised veins. They weren't blue from lack of oxygen; on the contrary, they glowed. They shone with a bright, unnatural light that writhed beneath her skin like a living infection. Their branches were unnervingly numerous, too fine, interlaced in a dense web across her entire face.
Her eyes were devoid of irises and pupils. Two lakes of pure, blinding blue radiance, devoid of reason or mercy.
These aren't people. My God, what are they.
The woman took a step forward. Her boot stepped into a puddle of violet blood. She snarled—a low, guttural sound that spoke of a predator whose hunger was yet unsated. Her nostrils flared. Her breathing was quick, shallow, animalistic.
Beside her, the massive frame of Nara K'Shaan loomed. Her helmet was also off, revealing a broad face with a square jaw and short hair plastered with sweat. She slowly turned her head toward Eliza and Maya, the movement stiff, artificial.
This gaze promised no peace, nor the soothing "It's all right, ma'am."
K'Shaan was breathing laboriously, exhaling steam into the cold night air. Her eyes darted wildly, unfocused, skipping from Eliza to the child, then to the bloody mess on the ground. Her pupils were dilated to the extreme, swallowing the blue light, and the veins in her neck throbbed, enslaved to some chemical trance.
She clenched her bloodied fists. The joints cracked.
Eliza pulled Maya back, her own back scraping against the concrete. Salvation had come. But it had teeth. And it was looking right at them.
* * *
Eliza pressed Maya's cheek to her collarbone, shielding the child's eyes with her palm. The air tasted bitter, of copper and burnt plastic—the aftertaste of violence that clung to the roof of her mouth and refused to leave. Before her stood death. Not the ephemeral kind from news feeds, but a living, breathing threat encased in armor that fractured the light. And it bore the name Nara K'Shaan. Or whatever was left of her.
The warrior-woman took a step forward. Her boot landed in a puddle of machine oil mixed with blood, but she did not look down. Her eyes—two black voids with dilated pupils swimming in a frost-blue iris—were nailed to Eliza. There was no recognition. No humanity. Nara's face was etched with spasms, as if the muscles beneath her skin were straining to tear themselves apart. The veins in her neck stood out like taut cords, pumping a toxic cocktail towards her brain.
Eliza stopped breathing. Her lungs shriveled into a hard knot.
The end. This is the end.
They were saved from the Architects' patrol only to be torn apart by their own. A predator's logic.
Nara's gauntlet, covered in composite plating and dried black sludge, clenched into a fist. The servos in the joints whined with a high-pitched screech that tore at Eliza's eardrums. She felt Maya's body stiffen in her embrace. Instinct screamed to run, but her legs were leaden. The dead-end alley offered no escape. Only dust, shadows, and that blue gaze that promised nothing but pain.
Nara raised her hand.
The world exploded. Not from an impact, but from sound. The vibration hit her stomach first, then her teeth. A low, grinding roar that for a split second morphed into the shriek of rending metal. The sky above them darkened. A shockwave slammed into the intersection like a hammer. Eliza curled over, covering Maya's head with her body. Dust from the ruins rose in an impenetrable wall, swallowing everything. Dumpsters overturned; chunks of plaster peeled from the façades.
Nara staggered. The monster lost its balance.
Through the veil of gray dust, a shadow sliced across the space. A black, angular silhouette flying so low its belly almost scraped the buildings' antennae. Its engines spewed a shimmering haze that warped the reality behind it.
In a sharp, almost suicidal maneuver, the craft's nose shot vertically upward. The thrusters screamed with such power that the windows in the surrounding buildings shattered. The black fuselage—serrated, predatory, bearing no markings except streaks of scorched metal—shot toward the stratosphere, leaving behind a vacuum and an ear-splitting howl.
Eliza knew that howl. She lifted her head, her hair, matted with dust, whipping in the turbulence. Her eyes followed the contrail splitting the smoke.
No one flies like that.
Her heart stalled. The maneuver was insane. Irrational. The g-forces on such a climb would turn a regular pilot into pulp. No military regulator would permit that risk over a populated zone unless the pilot was arrogant, mad, or a genius. Or all three.
Caelan. The image of the man she loved surfaced in her mind. That style. That aggression against physics. She'd seen it on the simulators, read the files he hid. She had felt this same vibration when he pushed prototypes to the edge of disintegration.
That's the Phantom. His bird.
Eliza lowered her gaze to the ground. The smoke was slowly clearing, revealing the figures of the armored soldiers. They hadn't moved. They weren't firing at the ship. They stood like statues amid the chaos, waiting for the dust to settle.
A thought pierced Eliza's mind. Caelan is in the air. Caelan is providing cover from above. He wouldn't protect the enemy.
Her gaze shifted to Nara, who was now slowly rising, shaking off the blast wave. Beside her, another armored figure—bulkier, with bony spines jutting from the shoulders—had a civilian man by the collar. The man dangled in the air, his legs kicking helplessly, his eyes bulging with terror.
Eliza expected the execution. The neck would snap. The body would drop.
Instead, the soldier spun and, with a rough, almost animalistic motion, hurled the man behind a concrete block.
"GET DOWN!"
The voice issued from a vocal synthesizer like the grinding of gravel.
"MOVE TO THE TOWER. NOW!"
He didn't kill him. He gave him cover.
The man curled into a ball, trembling, but alive. The soldier raised his weapon—an assault rifle that looked like a natural extension of his arm—and began scanning the perimeter. The movements were jerky, jagged, lacking any fluidity. But purposeful. Defensive.
They are his.
Stronger than the shockwave, the realization hit her.
These creatures, these killing machines with ruptured veins and demon's eyes... they were his burden. They were what Caelan had brought to tip the scales. They weren't here to hunt civilians. They were here to hunt those who hunted civilians.
But between "hunting the enemy" and "protecting civilians" lay a difference as fine as a razor's edge.
One of the figures detached from the group. Smaller, with denser armor, crisscrossed with cracks from which a strange blue shimmer leaked. Her helmet lacked a faceplate—Anika's face was exposed.
Eliza swallowed. The woman's skin was washed in the colors of an overheating engine. Bright red across her cheeks and forehead, where veins bulged like overcharged electrical wires. Blue around the sclera of her eyes, where capillaries had burst into a lacework of delicate spots. Her face was contorted, clenched, muscles trembling as if fighting to contain something vast, alien to human scale. Her lips were drawn back, teeth clenched in a bared grin that had nothing to do with joy. Her nostrils flared with each inhalation, not from exhaustion but from overstimulation. Her breathing was shallow, rapid, like an animal that had just torn its prey apart.
Eliza instinctively recoiled. Not from Nara. Not from the Architects' soldiers.
From this thing. From Anika.
She pulled Maya tighter against her chest, her feet dragging over the broken pavement. Her back hit a wall. All around them, dust still swirled, but this image—the face of the rescuer—was clearer than anything else.
This thing will devour me.
Anika took a step forward. Her boot struck the concrete with a thud. Her head turned toward Eliza with an unnatural uniformity—too slow for a human, too fast for a machine. Her eyes—those inverted universes of blue and red—locked onto her.
Anika's mouth opened.
"GET... OFF... THE STREET!"
Her voice was distorted, grinding, emerging from a broken vox-unit. Each word sounded rehearsed, repeated, yet devoid of meaning, as if human speech was now foreign, painful, and awkward to her. Violence was her native tongue now.
Eliza flinched. Maya whimpered.
"RUN! NOW!"
Anika raised her hand and pointed toward the ruins of the communications tower. Her fingers—thick, reinforced by an exoskeleton—splayed and clenched, wavering between striking and directing. Her head tilted to one side, her neck straining impossibly, the veins in it pulsing as if alive.
Eliza didn't think. Her body moved on its own. She turned and ran—not toward the street, not toward the light—but into the shadows where the other Blues were withdrawing. Her footsteps echoed, her heart hammered wildly, but her will was unwavering.
Better to follow the devil than be in his path.
The Blue Squad was already pulling back. They moved like a wolf pack—swift, silent, covering each other. The lead soldier gestured with his arm, pointing toward the shattered entrance of the old communications tower. The path led through the ruins, through places where fires still smoldered.
Eliza stepped onto the shattered concrete. Her shoes crunched. Instead of fleeing back toward the illusory safety of the shadows, she moved forward, following the bloody trail, following the monsters.
High above, above the smoke, the roar of the Phantom echoed again, this time farther away, a harbinger of the storm to come. Eliza held Maya tighter and quickened her step, disappearing into the bluish gloom the squad left in its wake.
CHAPTER 32
General Khyron De Las was the first to sense it. It wasn't a sound or a light that reached him, but something much older and deeper. A feeling that his skull was turning into an empty cavity which some force was trying to fill. A presence that squeezed him, scratching at the backs of his eyes, seeking a breach.
"Kaelan," he called out from The Phantom's gun turret. "Full spectral analysis. Complete range. Check for anomalies in the non-visible spectrum."
Kaelan spun from the navigation console. Without questions, his fingers flew across the interface, inputting the necessary commands to the ship's AI.
"Already underway, General," Kaelan answered mechanically, his fingers still tapping out the commands.
A second later, he was reading the data from the screen.
"Confirmed. Detecting a low-frequency modulated wave, emitted from a structure five klicks west. Marked on the map as a relay tower. According to the ship's intelligence, it has a psychoactive effect. It's synchronized with the beta-wave range. It's safe for us, General."
"For you, yes. But not for the squad, Lieutenant."
"My apologies, General. I didn't consider that."
"Show me."
The small holoscreen in the gun turret came to life. A spectrogram—layers of colored lines weaving into hypnotic swirls around a dominant frequency. Red zones pulsed in a strict rhythm. Warning markers filled the periphery.
"According to the report," Kaelan continued, "the tower is emitting a signal that would theoretically affect the neocortex, the limbic system, and..." He drew a breath, realizing the danger. "It targets gene carriers flagged in Seila's databases as 'The Blue.' This is manipulation at an epigenetic level."
Khyron's jaw tightened to the point of pain.
"Speak plainly."
Kaelan turned fully now, his eyes wide.
"The tower is trying to rewrite you, General. Not just you—everyone carrying the blue gene. It's... seizing cognitive functions. Overwriting will."
"Puppets," Khyron uttered.
The word sounded like a verdict.
"Exactly."
The ensuing silence was more terrifying than the roar of a crashing ship. Khyron didn't move. He didn't breathe. His mind raced frantically—reviews, assessments, conclusions. If the tower kept broadcasting, everyone in its range would be controlled. Not just the squad. The Architects... the signal controls them too.
"How long do we have before it establishes full control?" the General asked.
Kaelan immediately relayed the question to the AI and got an instant response.
"At current emission intensity: between two and four hours. Acceleration is possible."
"Not enough time to find and extract your family. Is it?"
"No, General."
Khyron closed his eyes. Then opened them—and they were different. Colder.
"The tower must be destroyed," he stated quietly. "Whatever the cost."
"General," Kaelan began, "if you go down alone..."
"Not in The Phantom—it will be subjected to massed fire. I'll go down alone. You stay. Under the cover of your shields. Unseen."
He turned. He wasn't waiting for permission. He wasn't waiting for support.
The cold, cruel regolith crunched under his boots. The Phantom receded behind him—a dark shadow on the horizon. Before him—only the wasteland and the tower. Up close, it was clearly almost engulfed by a viscous, organic mass.
And then he saw them.
Silhouettes, emerging from the dust like ghosts. Leading them was Anika—her eyes glowing in the dark, teeth clenched, her body stretched to its absolute limit. Behind her—the rest of the squad.
She stopped meters from him. They looked at each other.
"You felt it?" she uttered.
"Yes. The tower is emitting a psycho-signal," Khyron replied. "If we don't stop it..."
"I know," she cut him off. "We discovered it minutes ago."
Khyron gave a sharp nod.
"Then we move."
General Khyron De Las's lungs burned with the chemical bite of recycled air and the metallic taste of blood. There was no rhythm to their run. It was a desperate, ragged sprint across the crater-pocked wasteland leading to the tower.
The soles of his boots bit into the gray regolith, kicking up clouds of dust that smeared his visor. Every impact with the ground sent a jolt up his spine—a reminder that his body, though enhanced by The Blue and drugged with combat stimulants, had its limits.
Anika ran ahead of him, a silhouette carved from darkness and fury. She wasn't breathing like a human; her breath whistled like overloaded hydraulics.
Milo and Nara moved on the flanks. The peripheral sensors in his helmet registered them as blinking green dots, their biometrics flickering in the red spectrum of critical strain.
The tower loomed, no longer just a structure but a yawning wound in the sky of Europa Prime.
"Movement!" Anika's voice crackled over the comms, shredded by static. "Directly ahead!"
De Las looked up. The others also ground to a halt. Inertia nearly toppled them.
The path ahead wasn't empty. The passage between two collapsed habitation sections was blocked.
Something rose from the shadow.
Massive. Grotesque. Bio-architecture, created by The Architects for war. Classified by The Federation as a "Guardian."
The General had read the reports, but text on a holoscreen was just text. Reality was different. The creature towered four meters tall—a mountain of black chitinous plates interlaced with sinewy muscle fibers as thick as ship cables. It had no face, only a dense bone mask behind which pulsed a pale, sickly glow.
It wasn't just an opponent. It was an uncompromising obstacle.
A living embodiment of denial.
"Fire!"
De Las gave the command before he even processed it. Four muzzles erupted simultaneously. The air sizzled. Plasma charges, the bright sparks from their power cells, slammed into the Guardian's chest. Blue and orange flashes illuminated the grim canyon of concrete and steel.
Nothing.
The plasma splashed across the black chitin without leaving a trace, like water on hot metal. No explosion. No breach. The bio-armor absorbed the energy, dissipating it through a network of glowing capillaries across the creature's surface. It didn't even flinch.
"We're not penetrating!" Milo screamed.
His voice, usually cynical and steady, now sounded shrill.
The Guardian moved. Slowly. One of its upper limbs—a massive bone hammer wrapped in spines—rose.
"Scatter!" Anika roared.
Too late.
The creature didn't strike. It fired.
Organic projectiles, sheathed in acidic slime, shot from its shoulder joints. The air hissed, torn by their velocity.
Nara K'Shaan took the hit.
Not because she wanted to. Because she was the biggest target.
The sound was sickening—a wet crunch of ceramic armor meeting immovable density. The corporal flew backward. Three meters, four. Her body hit a concrete column and slumped down, leaving a wide, slick trail.
"Nara!"
De Las saw her life signs on his display plummet vertically. Her chest armor smoked. The acid was eating through the composite, reaching the flesh. Bright cyan blood—unnaturally vivid against the gray world—gushed onto the white dust.
Anika didn't look at the fallen woman. Her eyes were locked on the monster.
"Cover me!"
