Area 12 - The Descent

 The Descent

The lift didn't just stop; it slammed into the base of the shaft with a bone-jarring impact that sent a cloud of pulverized concrete into the air. As the dust settled, the squad’s tactical lights cut through the gloom of the Chimera Laboratory.

The scene was a visceral nightmare. The room was a graveyard of high-end science and low-end butchery. Broken centrifuges lay toppled like fallen monuments, splashed with arterial spray.

"God's sake," Somers whispered, her light passing over a researcher slumped over a desk; where a head should have been, there was only a jagged, cauterized stump. Nearby, severed limbs were scattered across the floor like discarded mannequin parts, but the meat was all too real.

"Captain," Vance called out, his voice tight with professional confusion. He pointed his barrel at a cluster of lab benches. "Look at the workstations. The sequencing arrays, the high-speed processors... they haven't been smashed. They’ve been harvested. Someone—or something—carefully unbolted the hardware and took the brains of this place."

Miller, crouching low near a pool of tacky, rust coloured floor, tapped his comms. "Got a trail. Footprints in the blood. Heavy, uneven... like a limp, but with too much weight behind it." He tracked the line of prints with his beam. They led straight to a reinforced door on the left wall.

Sheridan signalled the stack. "On me. Quietly."

They moved with the lethal grace of a hunting pack, but as they neared the door, the silence was shattered. A heavy, rhythmic thud-clank echoed from behind the steel. The door hissed open.

The First Construct

A monstrosity stepped into the light. It was a tower of stitched, greyish flesh, at least seven feet tall. Its torso was a roadmap of jagged surgical staples, and where its left forearm should have been, a Gau-19 rotary machine gun had been fused directly into the bone and sinew. Belts of ammunition snaked into a backpack welded to its spine. The creature’s face was a ruin—vacant, milky eyes staring out from a head that had been partially scalped to make room for a neural interface.

"Welcome... to... the... future," 

A synthetic, stuttering voice grated from a speaker implanted in its throat.

Sheridan’s rifle was up in a heartbeat, her red-dot sight hovering over the creature’s dead eyes. "Contact! Hold the line!"

Suddenly, the creature's jaw slackened, and a different voice—deeper, colder, and bearing a horrific resemblance to the recording of Dr. Stenn boomed through the lab’s intercom.

"Sheridan. You will serve. Your raw materials will be integrated. Do not resist; resistance will lead to the loss of needed materials."

Surrounded

"Captain! Behind us!" Frosty and Hudson roared in unison.

Sheridan and Miller spun, their hearts hammering. Two more horrors had emerged from the shadows of the server racks. One limped on a massive, piston-driven mechanical leg, its right arm ending in a set of hydraulic jaws that snapped with the force of a car crusher. The other was a spindly, twitching nightmare, its entire left side a mass of exposed wiring and humming capacitors—a walking electrical storm.

The first construct, the one with the machine gun arm, pulled its lips back in a wet, hideous leer. The skin around the staples groaned with the effort.

"Submit... now," it wheezed, the barrels of its arm-mounted gun beginning to spin with a predatory whine. "Or... die."

"Vance, tell me you have a backdoor out of here!" Sheridan yelled, not taking her eyes off the lead construct.

"Ma'am, the lift is dead and the emergency stairs are behind those things!" Vance shouted back, his rifle shaking slightly.

Sheridan’s grip tightened on her L85A3. She looked at the monstrosity in front of her—the "future" Stenn had promised. Her blue and red hair caught the flicker of a dying fluorescent bulb.

"Miller, Frosty, Hudson—concentrate fire on the legs of the big one," Jane commanded, her voice dropping into a lethal, low register. "Somers, Vance—watch our six. If they want our 'materials,' they’re going to have to pay for them in lead."

She stepped forward, a defiant smirk crossing her face despite the odds. "Sorry, Doc. I never was very good at submitting."