Exterminator : The Dark Beneath

“Of all the mega corporations that arose during mankind’s spread to the stars, Gentech’s dedicated pest control operatives, or Exterminators as they are often referred to, are an interesting topic in the corporate world, both vital employees and pariahs at the same time. Tasked with exterminating the various pests and errant creatures humanity brought with it to its various colonies, these men and women use ex-military environmental suits and equipment to hunt the various pest species in the often unfriendly and hazardous environments of the colonies, and are vital in controlling their numbers. However, as the work is so demanding, hazardous and distasteful, finding workers was formerly an issue. Other companies introduced drones to deal with the problem, but these often met with limited success due to the lateral thinking so often required for the task. This strategy also faced the understandable aversion of the public to arming autonomous drones with potentially hazardous weaponry. Gentech, however, came up with a different approach. Keep the pest controllers human, and offer the positions to criminals in exchange for mitigated sentences. The scheme was successful in providing an ample supply of staff, but remained unpopular with the public who disapproved of the employment of criminals Thus the conundrum: Exterminators are both highly necessary to the working of colonies, but are looked on with some distrust and hostility by the colonists themselves.”

-Humans and their Pests in the 21st Century by Doctor Myron Addams

9thSeptember 2092, 2 km under the Gentech Arcology on Ares, Saris system

The dark and silence of the tunnel was broken by the whine of the suit’s servos and the water sloshing around the metal and ceramics of his leg armour as they ploughed through the filthy runoff leaking through the walls. Pushed upwards by the geothermal vents scattered through the rock the water and steam forced its ways through cracks and fissures, only to cool long before they reached the parched red desert far overhead. Humans collected some of it for their various purposes, before the waste was released back into the fissures to drain away.

The wet, dense, fetid air of the tunnel seemed to muffle the sounds, and he was barely able to make out his surroundings in the dull red glow of the few working safety lights spread out along the ceiling, although the fact that any still worked this far down was a minor miracle.

Jack glancing at the Heads up display projected on the inside of his Plexiglas faceplate and focused, triggering the floodlights built into the sides of his helmet and armoured chest-plate, causing beams of harsh white illumination to play across the filth covered mix of rock and concrete that made up the walls. Ahead of him, the cramped service tunnel he was travelling down opened up into a larger space, and he hurried along, his servos humming slightly as he moved, as if the suit shared his desire for more head room.

Reaching an intersection he found it to be a T-junction, joining his smaller tunnel to larger one, roughly four meters wide and stretching either side of him beyond the reach of his light. As he played his lamps over the walls of the slightly oval tunnel he saw patches of concrete inter-spaced with swirling patters of the red and grey that typified the local rock. Below him the bottom of the tunnel was filled with a river of crud filled water and pollution, the remaining run off of the old heavy metal mines and smelting plants, now long closed.

Hanging above the gently flowing crud below was a grilled metal walkway running along the length of the channel, its once sturdy frame corroded from the environment and neglect. It hung above the filth from metal sanctions bolted into the ceiling above. Jack glanced around, but saw no other pathway. He eyed the walkway and judged that he could step from his tunnel onto it relatively easily, but whether it could hold his weight was not so clear.

He gingerly stepped out onto the corroded metal walkway, its square grills encrusted with mineral deposits and waste. The metal creaked slightly under the combined 280kg mass of man and powered Exosuit, and shifted slightly as he took a gentle step forward. He grasped a nearby support with his armoured gauntlet, the sensors on the textured finger surface giving him the sensation of grasping the rail, its crunchy surface of gunk cracking to reveal a gooey under layer covering the metal. He withdrew his hand and stared at it in disgust, noting how the grey-white mess clung to his yellow and black Gauntlet.

“Great,” he muttered in annoyance, ineffectually flicking his hand to try and remove it “As if I don’t have enough cleaning to do when get out of here!”

The yellow and black paint of his suit was already stained with the grey and red dust that lay throughout the tunnels, and coupled with the water and gunk that had already splashed over him, his armour was already filthy.

His MUTT, or Multi-Utility all Terrain Transport drone clomped to a halt in the tunnel behind him, the rubberized ceramic pads of its feet clinging to the slick tunnel floor. Designed to carry heavy equipment for a squad of soldiers on the move, the quadruped drone only reached Jack’s waist, but the sealed compartments built into its flank could store his supplies and spare parts for his suit securely out of the filth. The study drone did bear a passing resemblance to its canine namesake, like a Doberman but with a wider body, stocky legs, hinged and articulated like a dogs. It stood a meter tall, and almost that wide in the “shoulders”, its upper body heavily built to let it climb. Designed to traverse a range of terrain types, the MUTT had supported Gentech cooperate military division for decades until the new generation of repulse drones came into service, whereupon the MUTTs were scrapped or sold off.

Fortunately for the sturdy hundred-kilo drone, its frame and mechanisms were hardened against a range of chemical and environmental conditions, and so were picked up en mass by Gentech’s Exterminator Departments to accompany their operatives as logistical support. Unfortunate for Jack, MUTT’s solid frame, blocky segmented lags and hermetically sealed compartments made the loyal drone heavy, 100 kilograms of actuators, frame and armour even before counting its payload. Jack was heavier in his suit but was better able to deal with potential collapse.

“SAM, order the MUTT to hang back, I’m not sure how stable this walkway is!”

“Agreed.” his suit AI monitor, or SAM replied, her soft husky voice piping thought the speakers built into his helmet. “I recommend caution. Preliminary scans of the liquid below suggest several hazardous materials, and local atmospheric content is not optimal for humans.

“Thanks SAM; assess suit integrity and confirm full seal.” His suit plates shifted slightly as his AI reconfigured the layout.

“Full Seal confirmed Jack, all ports sealed. I have increased internal reassure by zero point two bars in case of breach.”

Jack smiled slightly as SAM spoke, pleased at his changes to her system. He’d hacked his on-board AI’s voice modulator a few weeks after receiving the suit, the standard AI having been a basic military model, a loud abrasive male voice apparently designed to instil discipline (or possibly fear) in new recruits. He’d quickly found that when you were burning out pests after spending hours traipsing through underground pipes and tunnels, being shouted at by a voice like a constipated drill Sergeant quickly lost its appeal.

“SAM, check our location against the workers’ report will you? I can’t see the rats having moved this much further from the last nest site.”

“Checking,” SAM responded, a small spinning orb appearing in the bottom left of faceplate, just above where his cheek plate was visible in his view. Waiting for confirmation he checked his other readings, seeing how the mission had taken a day and a half as opposed to the “Quick in and out,“ that his boss had assured him was all that was needed.

“Display suit data for analysis.” His HUD lit up, the normal displays of local radar mapping and power status joined by a model of the suit on the right side of his visor. All the segments of the bulky segmented armour gear showed one hundred percent integrity, apart from his boots and lower legs, which were reading around ninety-five percent each. He wasn’t overly alarmed, the suit was simply detecting the filth encasing his boots and calculating the possible adverse effects on the sealed joints, but he would be out of this shithole and back in the Arc long before it became a serious issue. The rest of the suit was showing green across the board, the internal soft-suit he wore underneath the metal and ceramic mass of the Exosuit was keeping him at optimal temperature, the fuel cells encased deep in the back of his bulky torso armour were still at healthy levels of hydrogen for power, and the environmental systems were filtering out the small traces of O2 in the air to maintain his supply. The suit was doing great, it was the squishy human filling that was feeling sore, tired and disgusting even with the soft-suits hygiene functions active.

“My analysis had confirmed our approximate location to a one-hundred-metre area, further precision is impossible due to the interference and lack of accurate mapping of the mines this far into the older works. However, we are within search area parameters. “SAM informed him, his map showing his approximate location. He was almost half a kilometre beneath the bottom level of the Archaeology, where hundreds of Gentech’s scientists, workers, or executives lived and worked amidst the hustle and bustle of the huge purpose beacon of modernity and progress

But down here, in the abandoned mines where the older mine and industrial tunnels and workings met together in a confused hodgepodge of tunnels and rooms, it took hours or even days of moving through tunnels, old excavations, pipes, and abandoned rooms that might date back forty or more years from when the colony, had been founded. Few people ventured into the under working anymore, as most of the utilities they had been designed to provide had been updated and integrated into the Arc itself.

A few remained, however, as it was pretty hard to move a geothermal power plant from underground, and some systems remained below the arc for simple convenience. This meant that only a few key areas in the whole maze of underground space regularly used, with direct access lifts the surface. To reach other areas required moving through the abandoned sections, where the atmosphere was a brutal combination of the planet’s thin carbon dioxide, volcanic gas from below, and the remnants of the fumes and pollutants spat out by the mines and factories that once littered the area. No one ventured into these areas without good cause and an environmental suit.

His radar suddenly pinged, alerting him to movement along the tunnel, and he spun around to aim his lights, finding one of his targets scuttling way from him along the walkway; a rat, although not one that his earth born ancestors would have recognized.

When mankind had reached into the stars in the 2030s, carried on the back of ships powered with the recently developed Noland/Hawkins FTL drives, they took with them their art, poetry, science and culture, everything they needed to start afresh in the promise of space. They hadn’t left alone however. Along with the crops, food animals, and pets they took came mankind’s oldest stowaway, the rat. Able to survive almost anywhere humans could, the colonists at the time had assumed that the pests would die off in many of the unwelcoming environments the colonies where set up on, but they hadn’t accounted for two things. The amazing adaptability of the Rattus Genus, and its unplanned exposure to EVO, the miracle cocktail of gene therapy and drugs developed to aid human adaptation to the differing environments of new worlds.

The creature in front of him still vaguely resembles the furry earth rodent it descended from, but wouldn’t look out of place in one of the 20 and 21st centuries 2D sci-fi movies he loved. It was sized more like the small dogs once favoured by earth’s socialites. Weighing two to five kilograms and covered in pale grey skin, the rat sported six limbs, the four larger for travel and climbing like its ancestor, and a smaller more dexterous pair sprouting from its breastbone, which it usually crept tucked securely to its chest. Its tail was prehensile to allow anchoring and to aid climbing, its eyes were larger than its forbears but covered in a thick membrane to preserve water and protect from harsh environments.

They could exist almost anywhere with even trace oxygen, had wide temperature tolerance and could even survive a vacuum for several hours by becoming dormant. Once again anywhere humans had reached so did the rat. And, due to their high reproduction rate and EVO’s ability to encourage stable adaptations and mutations, they tended adapt to new planets better than their human neighbours.

“SAM, load and fire tracker” he ordered as he cautiously began to move after the creature, noting that it appeared to be limping. A plate in his shoulder armour slid open with a soft whine of servos, a small launcher elevated from its armoured compartment and puffed, propelling a small carbon fibre dart along the tunnel. It struck the rat in its hindquarters, causing a warbling shriek that set Jack’s teeth on edge. The rat took off as fast as its injured body could move, and Jack cursed and began to run after it, boots banging on the metal gangway, causing booming clangs to echo up and down the tunnel. The powerful servos of his suit shifted as he ran, propelling him forwards and allowing the heavy plates of armour covering the spun diamond and tungsten composite of the protected exoskeleton to shift with his body. He quickly began to gain on his quarry.

“Oh no you don’t you little shit! I haven’t spent this long down here just to...oh FUCK!”

A stanchion supporting the section of walkway he was on broke free of the ceiling as his weight caused a bolt overhead to shear. The support pulled free and sent the walkway in front of him plummeting into the filthy liquid below. For a moment Jack’s momentum carried him forward towards the next platform, but gravity overcame his momentum, pulling him down to smash into the next hanging section. His chest Plate crumpled the metal of the walkway, leaving him scrabbling for purchase, his boots flailing inches above the liquid. He desperately locked his armoured fingers between the squared openings of the walkway, but the corroded metal snapped under the pressure, and he plunged into the thick slop below, helmet plate going dark as it flowed over him.

He panicked for a moment and thrashed his arms, but almost instantly felt solid ground beneath him. He hastily stood, triggering his visors cleaning mechanism, a burst of compressed gas slewing the filth of the Plexiglas visor allowing him to see that he was standing in the gunk, the liquid only rising to his chest. His suit alarms were chiming gently, reporting hazardous and toxic materials in the surrounding liquid. Sam chirped in his ear.

“Suit integrity remains at 100 percent, and only slight cosmetic damage has occurred to chest-plate. I am reading no injuries.”

“It’s OK SAM, nothing’s damaged except my pride.” He raised a grime-covered arm and groaned “Oh for fuck sake! This is going to take ages to clean off! And we’ve lost the bloody rat!”

“Actually Jack, the rat is currently two metres to your left.”

He turned with a start to find a sub-tunnel beside him, about a metre wide, half submerged, with a heavily corroded metal platform sitting just above the filthy runoff. On it lay the tagged rat, its chest labouring to rise as ropy strands of intestine slipped out of its belly onto the metal. The tunnel behind it was filled with the pale oozing jellylike sacks of rat nests, far too many for one rat to produce.

One of the unique ways the rapidly mutating species had adapted to Ares was to develop a symbiotic relationship with the most abundant indigenous organism, a lichen-like species that inhabited the moist cave systems that ran below the surface, carved out long ago when oceans once covered the planet. The lichens existed by utilizing energy from radioactive sources and heat to convert the atmospheric CO2 into food. When the rats first ate the lichen, the EVO in their system allowed the two to enter a symbiotic relationship and somehow this triggered a significant change in the rat’s reproductive cycle, allowing them to birth their young in a kind of fleshy sack for the last few weeks of development. This allowed the mother rats to collect food, which they fed to the young through the nest’s surface membrane. These sacks could be found stuck to the sides of walls, in vents and pipes, even underwater if sufficiently provided with CO2. The nests inside the pipe were attached the inner surface along the sub-tunnel by a thick mucus resin the rats secreted, anchoring the nests in place.

Jack grinned and reached over his shoulder, triggering his lance to deploy from its magnetically locked home on his back plate. Bringing the bulky weapon forward He slid his gauntlet into the cuff that acted as a trigger guard. Another tool originally developed for the corporate military, now a victim of modernization and the vicious competition between military suppliers. The lance was a multi-purpose weapon. Compacted it was only a half a meter long, a forty by thirty centimetre hexagonal box, wider than it was high, outer frame narrowed towards the end. Ports and housings for different attachments ran along its side. Its body contained its power core, fuel cells, processors and micro fabricator, as well as space to contain several smaller additions depending on creature being combated. Although it no longer housed military grade weaponry, it was still a hefty piece of kit.

Jack placed his hand around the joystick that deployed from the housing, triggering semi-circular anchors to rotate out from the housing and secure his forearm to the weapon. These also acted as a hard link to his suit’s computers, updating him on weapon telemetry, fuel, and status. He flexed his trigger hand, causing the barrel to deploy from its port, extending the weapon length from one metre to two. He aimed at the nest, not bothering to use the projected sight, experience telling him where his aim lay.

A deft command triggered the lance’s bayonet, a 30cm long assembly of rotating, mono-edged, triangular blades that spun in front of the barrel. Held in place by a powerful electromagnetic field, the lance fed a stream of ignited gas into the rotating blades, heating them to over a thousand degrees and causing the outer edge to be covered in a thin stream of hot gas. He moved the bayonet forwards, carefully. The superheated blade of buzzing metal sheared through the resin holding a nest in place like a hot knife through butter, causing the sack to drop beside the expiring mother. He shut down the bayonet, causing the blades to retract into the barrel, and triggered the flamer to deploy. He aimed the barrel at the mother, but hesitated and moved the barrel to the side. Leaning forwards slightly he used his free hand to turn the body, curious as to what killed the creature.

Its underbelly and rear leg were a mess, tough rubbery skin rent and torn, the shredded muscle of its abdomen barely holding its intestines together. Apparently its last run from him had been too much, causing the intestines to rupture outwards, spelling the end for the creature. From its wounds Jack guessed that claws and teeth had caused the damage, but they seemed to have been larger than he would normally attribute to another rat, though it surely was the sole explanation. The only other species on the planet were the psuedoscorpions, another mutated earth species that had somehow spread to the stars, but they hunted with venom and crushing pincers, not slashing teeth. Since there were no other life forms on the planet it had to be another rat, albeit a unusually large specimen. It made sense; lack of natural predators meant that rat populations usually ran high, with the main cause of rat mortality being humans or other rats.

“Now why did you start a nest this high up?” he muttered to the dead rat, “it’s colder here than your pups like.”

He moved his hand over to his thigh and released the serrated utility knife from its sealed compartment leaned forwards to take a look at the nest, carefully slicing the tough surface membrane to look inside. A handful of gestating rat pups clustered inside, their partially formed limbs showing signs of birth defects. Jack considered for a moment, before glancing back to the mother. Most likely the young were in such a bad state due to the parent being stressed, either from her injuries or the change in environment. He reached his storage compartments to find something to hold a sample but paused for a moment before letting his hand fall back to his side. It wasn’t his job to look into this; he wasn’t a scientist. Not anymore.

Readying his lance, he triggered the flamer, sending fire flooding down the tunnel to incinerate the nests. He released the trigger and waited , listening to the hiss and pop of burning nests and the pinging of cooling metal.

Suddenly there was a large splash to his left and he jumped in shock, swinging his lance around and almost triggering the flamer before his HUD informed him of the cause.

“MUTT, God dam it! What are you doing down here?”

The drone was mostly submerged by the filthy liquid, and had extended the sensor housing that served as its head over the surface, as if staring at him. It emitted a series of beeps and warbles, and SAM spoke in his ear.

“When you fell its recovery program was activated. It’s here to offer aid in case you’re injured.”

Jack deflated somewhat, and felt guilty for a moment before laughing softly at the futility of feeling guilty over thinking badly of a drone.

“I have been spending waaaayyyy to much time down here alone,” he said softly, ”Must be losing it”

He looked at the drone, before snorting as he compared it to a classic movie his mother had been obsessed with.

“Come on R2, let’s get you out of this swamp before that little green Yoda dude turns up!”

He waded over to the drone, returning his lance to its shoulder rig. Moving below the metal walkway he diverted extra power to his legs and reached down into the muck. Grasping onto the contoured hard points on MUTT’s torso he heaved, suit straining as it helped him lift the heavy drone up to the walkway.

“Heavy..you ..are..” He gasped as man and machine struggled to make the last few centimetres.

MUTT’s forelegs scrabbled on the contoured metal for grip, finally finding purchase, and pulling itself upright. Jack took a few deep breaths and shook his arms before jumping and hauling himself up behind it, turning to sit on the edge of the broken walkway to leave his legs angling over the edge, allowing the filth to dripping off them to splatter into the liquid water below.

Panting after the exertion, he rested for a moment before doing a quick self-inventory of his status. He’d managed to cull what rats he’d found at his target location, so that was a plus. However, he now had to walk back up to the surface, covered in muck that was rapidly hardening and most likely attacking the seals of his protective suit, with a MUTT unit in a similar state. He looked upwards, imagining for a moment that he could see through the hundreds of metres of metal, rock, and concrete between him and the surface, before summing up his feelings as eloquently as he could.

“Fuck my life!”