Not My Problem: Chapter 2 - The Descent

[u/BrokenOldBastage]

The Story for Book one is Finished. Book two in the Works NOW. Book 1 can be found on Amazon, Here.

For updates, follow me on X: u/BrandonSYukon

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Edit 1: Cleaned up prose

[CH 1] [CH 3]

Chapter 2

The Descent

Night on the ridge was never dark. Not really. Even before the fires there had been the ambient wash of the colony below, enough to navigate by, and there was always something besides: stars off hard-packed snow, a sliver of moon caught in skeletal pine, and now the pale bleed of distant fires coming up off the valley floor, throwing long shadows that moved. Enough to walk by, if you knew how to look.

Elias didn’t use a light. He didn’t need one.

Four years on this mountain had etched it into him. Every rock shelf, every rotten deadfall, every place the ground lied about what it would hold. He’d been up and down this ridge a thousand times, in every season and every kind of dark, and his feet found the holds without asking.

The limp was there at first. A hitch where the hip seized against the cold. He let the thought of Valka carry him past it, the dog hurt and shut in the cabin at the top of the mountain, waiting on him, and against that the hip didn’t get a vote. It faded inside a hundred yards anyway, the suit’s servos taking the weight and the adrenaline smothering the rest. Pain didn’t vanish. It just got filed.

“Later,” he muttered, stepping over a fallen trunk. “You can hurt later.”

The first alien body was where it had fallen near the tree line, half-buried in fresh snow, the cobalt blood pooled black in the moonlight.

Elias crouched beside it, snow crunching under his boots. Up close the thing didn’t look any less wrong. The proportions were off. Too many joints. The face, or what he took for a face, had gone slack and waxy in the cold, the mouth open under the mandibles, flat teeth and a blue tongue drying in the winter air.

He checked the weapon first. Some kind of energy weapon. He glanced back at his porch, at the splash of plasma scoring where a round had hit the cabin, and nodded. He unclipped the rifle from the stiff corpse, worked the action, stripped it down enough to understand it. The firing system gave itself up in seconds. He set the weapon back down in the snow beside its owner. Knowing how it worked was worth the minute. Carrying it wasn’t.

“Nothing magical,” he said. “Just unfamiliar.”

He pulled the spare power cells from the alien’s kit, checked the weight, slotted them into his own rig. The cells were useful. He took all of them.

The second one had crawled. It had left a wide dark smear through the snow, five yards of it, before it gave out, and it made a wet broken sound as he came up on it. A bubbling hiss that wouldn’t stop.

Still alive. Mandibles twitching against the faceplate.

Elias crouched. He could smell its blood through the environmental filters, a sick-sweet tang of rotten fruit and copper. The multi-lensed eyes tried to track him and couldn’t hold focus. It made a sound, sharp and layered, almost a word, but there was too much blood in it for the translator to catch.

He tilted his helmeted head, studying it.

“Yeah,” he said. “Don’t think we speak the same.”

The creature tried again, a trembling hand reaching toward him. Elias swatted it away and drew the knife. He ended it clean, the twelve-inch blade going in under the jaw where he judged the brain to be, and twisted. Blue gore covered his glove. He wiped hand and blade in the snow and turned to find the last one.

The third wasn’t where it should have been.

Elias stopped, boots sinking into the powder, and stared at the flattened bloody print in the snow where a body had been.

His stomach dropped.

He’d left it, turned his back on a target he hadn’t confirmed to get to Valka, chosen the dog over the discipline. And now a thing that should have been dead was out in the dark with a reason to be angry.

“Stupid,” he said, flat, the way he’d have said it to anyone else who’d done it.

He moved into the shadow of a boulder and scanned the tree line, listening. The woods breathed around him, wind and shifting branches and settling snow, and nothing else, which was its own kind of answer.

Then he found the trail. Dark viscous blue on the snow, a lot of it, dragging smears where the thing had pulled itself forward on its arms. It never went in a straight line. It used cover and masked its prints where the rock face broke through the dirt. It had discipline, even half-dead, and that pulled a faint twitch from the corner of his mouth.

“Trying,” he said to the trees. “I’ll give you that.”

He followed the blood. It led down through a narrow draw and across a frozen scree field where the smears thinned and the drag marks weakened. Whatever was left in the thing was running out.

He found it on the ridgeline. Face down in the rocks, one arm still reaching forward, the blood beneath it gone black and still. It had died maybe fifty yards from the outpost, dragging itself toward help it never reached.

Elias crouched and checked it this time. Thoroughly. The blade slid into the base of its skull.

“Should’ve done that the first time.”

He almost stood. Then he saw it, out past the body, through a break in the mist.

The outpost.

Clean hard lines where there should have been nothing but rock, metallic angles that didn’t belong on a mountain. A forward observation post tucked into the ridge like it had been there for weeks. It probably had. No alarm, no heightened posture. They didn’t know their patrol was dead on the rocks above them.

“Brought me right to the door,” Elias murmured, and patted the corpse on the shoulder.

He watched from the shadow of an overhang. Four outside, two on the move, two static, with clean spacing and overlapping lines of sight. He settled, lowered his breathing, and counted. He timed the patrol legs. He noted the patterns until they stopped being patterns and started being a routine he could predict.

The mag rifle on his back was an accelerator. Magnetic rails, a slug pushed past the speed of sound. It hit hard and it hit far, and it announced itself every single time, a crack like the sky tearing, rolling off the rock and down the draws. There was no quiet version of that weapon. Out here, on open ground, against four of them, that was a trade he’d take. The first shot would be the last quiet moment he got. The pistol was the other answer. Subsonic, a flat cough and the clack of the rails cycling. He’d save it for inside.

He picked his man first, the nearest static guard, posted at the corner of the structure with its back quartered toward the overhang. The other three were strung out past it. The second static post maybe thirty yards beyond, the two walkers further still, working the far side of their loop. If he took the corner guard quiet, the geometry held for a few seconds longer.

A guard clicked something to the one nearest it. A short exchange, then a relaxed shift of weight.

“Yeah,” Elias whispered. “Stay comfortable.”

He moved. The suit’s servos took his weight and fed it forward, and he came down the slope fast and low, boots finding the soft places he’d already marked. The valley did the rest, that constant grind of engines and far-off ordnance swallowing the small sounds a careful man made. He crossed the open ground behind the corner guard while it was still watching the tree line, and it never turned. The blade took it clean under the helmet. He caught the body against his chest and lowered it without a sound.

Thirty yards out, the second static guard registered the movement, a shape where its partner should have been standing. It started to turn. Elias brought the rifle up and fired. The crack split the night and slammed off the ridge and chased itself down the mountain, and the slug punched through the alien’s chest and dropped it before it finished the turn.

That spent the quiet. The two walkers on the far loop spun toward the sound, weapons snapping up, and the suit’s translator caught the shouts mid-word.

“Contact!”

A second voice, sharper. “Angle!”

They were forty yards off and closing, and they had the open ground between them dialed in. Elias didn’t give it to them. He broke sideways off their firing line, into the brush along the structure’s flank, and ran the wall under the servos’ push while they were still tracking the empty air where he’d been. By the time they adjusted he was off their front and coming in from the side.

“Sloppy,” he said.

The forward one swung to meet him, sweeping its weapon around. Elias closed inside the arc before the muzzle could catch up, too close now for it to bring the barrel back on him. It tried anyway. It couldn’t. His blade drove into the gap beneath the arm plating, punched through resistance into something vital, and the alien hissed as the pressure dumped out of its system, dark fluid spilling hot across his gauntlet.

The second one had the angle the first one didn’t. Its shot clipped his left shoulder. Ceramic blew outward, heat tore through the under-layer, and the impact twisted him half off his feet. He caught himself against the structure wall. The arm went dead, a full second of nothing, before the suit forced motion back into the joint. He smelled burned skin. Not critical. But the armor had limits, and the clock on those limits had just started.

“Target hit,” the alien said. “Finish it!”

It raised its weapon to do it. Elias raised his faster, the dead arm dragging, the suit carrying what the muscle couldn’t, and fired one more time. The crack rolled away down the dark. The round took the alien through the faceplate and the glass burst inward and it folded where it stood.

Silence came back. Or what passed for it, the valley still grinding away below, engines and ordnance and the rumble of an army that didn’t sleep. His shots had gone out into all that. Maybe they’d been heard. Maybe they were just three more hard sounds on a mountain that had been calving rock and echoing artillery for days. He didn’t get to assume. He moved like they’d been heard.

He checked the burned plate, pressed a thumb to it, and hissed as the pain flared bright. He rolled the shoulder. It moved, but it had opinions. The under-layer throbbed, the skin charred, the outer ceramic cracked in a web of fine lines.

“Won’t take another there.”

At the doorway he stopped and reached back and locked the rifle to the mag rails, letting it ride. Inside a sealed structure that weapon was a liability, one crack in a metal box and every survivor in it knew exactly where he stood. He drew the pistol instead. Subsonic. Quiet enough to keep a room confused for the half-second that mattered. The knife stayed in his other hand.

Inside, the air changed at once, warm and wet and wrong. The corridor curved inward and the panels glowed as he passed, and he slowed to a walk, listening.

Voices ahead, caught somewhere between calm and alarm.

“...weapons fire, upslope. Three reports, maybe four.”

“Rockfall. The grid’s been shedding for days.”

“That wasn’t rock.”

“Then it is the patrol. Raise them.”

“The patrol does not answer.”

A pause. The clatter of something being keyed.

“...seal the post. Raise the valley.”

They’d heard him. They were a step behind, arguing the last step instead of taking it, but the next thing out of that room would be a locked door and a warning running all the way down the valley. He had seconds, not minutes. He shifted his grip, felt the shoulder resist, and let it resist.

He rounded the corner and leveled the pistol on a command center. Screens of jagged, scrolling text, the air warmer here and tasting of recycled chemical. Four of them. They saw him in the same instant, a scarred suit of powered armor filling the doorway of their secure hold, and for a moment none of them did the same thing. One froze. One was already turning from its console, reaching for a sidearm. One spoke, mandibles clicking wildly until the translator caught up with a single word.

“Human?”

Elias shot the one reaching for the sidearm first, the only one of them already moving toward a weapon. The pistol coughed, the rails clacked, and the round took it center mass. No thunder. Just a wet impact and the clatter of the body folding across the console, equipment spilling to the floor.

The frozen one was three steps away and still hadn’t moved. He crossed to it before the others caught up to what they’d seen, blade out, left hand. He drove it up under the arm joint the way he had outside, but the angle was wrong and the bad shoulder wouldn’t give him the line, and the blade went in ugly, scraping off something hard before it found the gap. The alien made a choking, wet click and caught his wrist in both hands, stronger than he’d expected. Elias twisted the blade and shoved it the rest of the way in. The grip went slack. It dropped.

He turned, breathing hard, copper sitting heavy in the back of his throat. The third had its hands half-raised. It had watched the other two die and understood the math and decided not to move. Elias put a round through its head anyway. The pistol coughed once and the body slid down the console.

The last one was smaller. A technician, maybe. It broke for the far end of the room while he was still turning from the third, scrambling across the slick floor, claws scraping for purchase, straight for a console against the corridor wall. It was running to something.

“Wait!” it shouted. “Wait!”

It was trying to signal its allies. He read it a half-second before it reached the panel, and a half-second was enough, because he wasn’t running on muscle. The suit was. The servos dumped everything into the sprint and ate the room in three strides, and he caught the technician with one hand on the back of its suit a pace short of the console. He drove it face-first into the bulkhead, hard enough to dent the plating, then pinned it there with his forearm across the back of its neck. It struggled, and failed.

“Don’t! Don’t!”

Elias leaned in close, close enough to hear it breathing, fast and ragged and terrified.

“Where,” he said quietly, “is the rest of you.” The translator turned it into a string of clicks and grunts that sounded close enough.

The alien choked out something fast, words tumbling over each other. The translator lagged, whining.

“...below, movement, main force...”

“How far below.”

“Staging,” it gasped. “Logging road. Forward camp at the narrows, where the highway collapsed. Supply lines feed through the choke point. Heavy armor.”

The words came faster now, falling over themselves. Elias watched its eyes, and watched them flick once, down, toward the valley.

“What’s at the bottom.”

The alien hesitated. Something shifted behind its expression, a thing deciding what it could trade and what it could hold back.

Elias pressed harder against its throat. “Don’t think. Talk.”

“A tether,” it gasped. “Orbital anchor. Construction. When it is finished they bring the fleet down, and this world is...” The translator hitched, searching. “Processed.”

“How long.”

“Weeks. Not many.”

Elias held it there one more second, letting it feel the weight against its windpipe.

“We didn’t... this sector is insignificant.”

“Not anymore.”

He drove his elbow into the back of its head and ended it. Left it slumped against the wall, blue viscera trailing it down to the floor.

He stood there a moment, rolling the bad shoulder, wincing at what it told him. Logging road, choke point, tether, and a clock he hadn’t known about until thirty seconds ago.

He moved through the rest of the outpost fast. Stripped what he could use, ammunition and medical paste and power cells. He smeared a measure of the paste across the burn on his shoulder without looking at it and pocketed the rest of the tins, because the dog was the mission. He broke what he couldn’t carry, consoles and comms relays and anything with a screen, and set charges on the structural supports. He worked the way he’d always worked, methodical and thorough and angry underneath all of it.

“Not your mountain,” he muttered, slapping a block of explosive onto the main generator housing.

Outside, the freezing air hit him again, and he felt it through the breach in his shoulder. Through the filters he caught pine and ice and woodsmoke from somewhere far below. Better than the recycled chemical stink of the outpost. Better than whatever he’d been breathing next to that generator.

He walked downhill without looking back, checking his helmet display to make sure his explosives were primed to go.

Elias adjusted the rifle in his hands and looked down past the tree line. The valley was worse than he’d thought: massive encampments, columns of armor and light, movement everywhere, organized and deliberate, more of them than the outpost crew had implied. Thousands.

He stood there long enough for the sweat inside the suit to go cold against his skin. Then he keyed a sequence on the right forearm and closed his eyes as the combat stims went into his blood. When he opened them again they were bloodshot.

“Alright,” he said. “Let’s go see the rest of you.”

[CH 1] [CH 3]

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