Thunder

Chapter Eight - 3

The room was dark and barely lit, nothing more than a large store-cupboard. Z9 closed the door behind her, sweeping with gun outstretched. Before her, the three Z agents that had been previously sent in to deal with a bomb threat, were slumped forward in small chairs, bound to them with cheap-looking rope. All of them had their throats slit, fresh blood still running from the gashes onto their legs, dripping onto the floor in new pools.

'They're dead,' Z9 said into her Halo-Chip. Over in C.A.T she heard swearing being spilled from the lips of her bosses in a torrent greater than that of a stampede from an explosion.

Z9 moved past the bodies, not bothering to check them. A small door at the other end of the room attracted her attention. It hung slightly ajar, leading into some bowels of the underground of the station no doubt. She made sure the gun was primed; exhaling slightly as she swiftly fell up against the wall to the right of the door. After a second, she spun in front of the doorway and kicked hard, sending the door banging open.

The corridor was dark, the flickering lights a clear sign that this section of the infrastructure was barely used. She hastened down it, not running but not walking either. She cleared her mind of anything she had been thinking up until that point, simply putting in one command. Seek and destroy.

The strips of neon that ran like the sidelines to the chutes for the Magna-Trains took a bend to the left ahead of her, and Z9 leant up against the wall.

'Anyone around the corner?' Z9 asked into the Halo-Chip.

'Not that I can see, Z9' Mark23 said to her, 'but don't trust us. There might be something jamming our signals.'

Z9 frowned. That was just what she needed. Someone specifically jamming any technology from C.A.T, after killing three of their highest operatives, possibly leading herself into a trap from which she would not escape. Just what she always wanted.

'Well get your technology un-jammed,' Z9 hissed.

She braced herself before turning the corner. Another corridor, this one even darker than before. The overhead lights that usually lit the interior workings of the station, or had done up until that point, were extinguished, leaving the neon runners either side of the ceiling Z9's only means of illumination. 'Next time, get me a torch as well with your numerous gadgets and gizmos,' Z9 whispered into her ear, 'or would that be too tough for you?'

Z9 opened the door at the other end of the corridor and found herself in an ancient shaft leading into the depths of Celestria, it seemed. Water dripped constantly from a broken pipe above her head, and a rusty ladder led down to a series of interconnected platforms down in the shaft. Any sounds of the station had now gone, muffled by several corridors, over half a dozen dead bodies, and the echoing of a hole into what looked to be the inner workings of the planet.

'Where does this thing go?' Z9 asked.

'Let me see if I can find out,' Mark23 replied, and in her ear she heard a lot of beeps and blips as he obviously scrambled to pull up some kind of map of the place.

As she was scanning the darkness before her, she made out a small blur down in the darkness. Her hands pulled the gun to aim at it, but before she could make any decision as to whether or not to fire, the mass had gone, fading into its surroundings like tears into an ocean.

'It eventually leads up to the surface,' Mark23 told her. 'Well, a few of its thousands of junctions do. Others go pretty much everywhere. You're getting towards the beginnings of the inner chambers of the surface, Z9, so...'