Sean-Michael Argo - Ghost Faction

Jada walked down the exit ramp of the small craft as she marveled at how thorough the liquidation of this civilization had been. She had done her part, with both rifle and blowtorch, to see this place torn apart and had been well paid for her trouble. Her boots made the gravel crunch as she consulted her nav-unit, having done her best to use the shoddy long-range scanners to create a rough map of the forgotten city.

Much like the other wasteland worlds that comprised necrospace, this planet proved difficult for long-range scanners because of all the environmental devastation, and in this case, industrial pollution.

When Grotto had been liquidating Vorhold, very little care was taken to manage the waste materials throughout the planet. Factories were stripped and toxic runoff was allowed to seep into the raw earth. Entire sections of Downspire were simply buried under rubble, only to have the various pollutants fester in the dark and worm their way into the environment at large.

She had been a scavenger when last she had set foot on this planet. Jada Sek had since transformed herself into a predator and she stalked the ruins with a new perspective.

Jada picked her way through the remnants of the city, which were little more than concrete shells, everything else had been stripped away. In her hands, Jada carried one of the large assault rifles that the Dire Swords used before they were supplied with the modified Gedra weapons. Given her meta-human stature, she towered over unenhanced human beings, and with the weapon and billowing cloak, she knew she cut an impressive figure. The red hazard goggles and menacing armored re-breather certainly gave her a monstrous appearance.

She was unarmored, not having bothered to request the use of mag-armor for this personal journey. Womack had understood that this was something she needed to do. Neither he nor Marcus, who had given her the rifle, were going to allow her to wander the galaxy unarmed considering how much of an investment the mercenary company had made in her physique. Not while she was still in possession of a functioning body.

She saw on her nav-unit that she was close and Jada could tell that the ground was sloping downwards. When the craft was landing, the pilot had seen signs of several groups of people in the area, likely small bands of hardened survivors.

There was nothing of value left on Vorhold. Those few people who had elected to stay planetside had been placed on the Red List, so they were completely on their own. Slavers would never come here. Jada checked her rad levels and saw that there was certainly enough in the area that prolonged exposure would be damaging. The people who managed to survive here would be spoiled in the eyes of a slaver, as they would be too feral to make for reliable chattel and likely too medically hazardous to be worth scooping up in the first place.

Little to nothing could grow here, so anyone who remained would have to build greenhouses, fungus farms, scavenge the limited bits of stored goods, or resort to cannibalism. Likely, everyone engaged in some mix of everything, mused Jada as she climbed the stairs of a severely leaning concrete building which overlooked her destination.

She was obviously hard meat and even here, in this blasted place, nobody seemed desperate or crazy enough to raise their hand against her. In fact, thought Jada as she saw a few humanoid shadows fleeing in the other direction through the labyrinth of ruined buildings, her size and appearance just might remind her observers enough of the Stalkers that they didn’t even want to be in the same area. The thought of the Stalkers shifted Jada’s attentions back to her destination, and she looked out across the ruined ground.

The section of Deepspire where she and the others had faced the Stalkers in the Dark was, by her recollection, miles below the gigantic debris pit that lay not far from her current position. She could see where the subterranean blasts had collapsed this entire section of city inwards, filling the hollow pits of the Stalkers with incalculable tonnage. She recalled watching it from a similar angle, high in a still as yet unscrapped medical facility.

Jada turned to look behind her, overwhelmed by the memory, and could almost see the ravaged body of Ben Takeda lying in a hospital bed before her. A cascade of sensations and memories buffeted her psyche, and she was vividly assaulted by her own mind as she struggled to engage her breathing techniques.

When a single gunshot rang out and a bullet tore a piece of concrete out of the wall next to her, Jada hurled herself to the ground. For a moment, she wondered if her hallucinations had become that powerful considering that she was retracing some of the worst moments of her life and then baleful howls went up all around her.

She may have been awash in memories of the past, but her keen hearing took note of the unmistakable sounds of several hostiles rushing across the broken ground towards her. She scampered across the crumbling concrete as two more shots nearly struck her, this time realizing that they were coming from the half-demolished building on her left. Jada scolded herself for the oversight, so focused was she on her destination and coping with her troubled mind that she’d neglected the basics of terrain awareness.

From the sound of the report, the shooter was using a pistol, which accounted for how the enemy had managed to miss three times in a row. At this distance, even a crack shot with a pistol was likely to miss at least once.

The merc reached a massive hole in the floor and poured herself through it, taking a firm grip on the edge, and going in headfirst so that she could swing her body around and land on her feet when she let go. Jada stuck the landing and unslung her assault rifle just in time to realize her mistake.

Whether the shooter was trying to hit her or not, he or she had successfully driven the merc back to the ground floor where she now stood surrounded by enemies. Their elongated bodies were slick with mucus, their weeping mouths filled with rows of barbed teeth.

Four of them writhed in the shadows of the broken room, each one long enough to wrap itself around her with ease. They were poised to strike, but just as they surged towards her, they were stopped short by a high-pitched keening sound that was all too familiar. The giant bone worms that had once served the Stalkers had managed to tunnel their way to the surface, where she presumed by the familiar keening sound they’d found new masters.

Jada bitterly accepted the cost of her hubris. She might be hard meat indeed, but what soft things could possibly have survived in this harsh place? In this wasteland, only the hard remained, the scavengers had long been devoured, and now it was predator against predator. She knew that the moment she moved, they would attack, for even with the mastery of the whistle, she could feel their hunger positively radiating from them. It would only be a matter of moments before whoever controlled the worms revealed themselves. Jada slowed her breathing and stood perfectly still. The most likely tactic at this point was to salvage her equipment and the choicest cuts of her meat before the worms annihilated her body.

Jada recalled vividly from the last time she’d fought these creatures that they were able to swiftly batter their way through the flak boards that the salvage marines had brought to use as mobile defenses. The creatures were incredibly strong, their undulating bodies essentially thick ropes of muscle with a digestive track, tipped with a hardened area at the front of the creature that allowed it to smash and chew through just about anything. She had come to this planet to face her past and now here she was, surrounded by beasts all too real and all too eager to give her closure one way or the other.