The Foundry | Part Three | Chapter Thirty-Five
the next chapter of my forthcoming novel
The Foundry
by Daphne Garrido
Part Two | Rebuilt; Refound; Reclaimed
Part Three | Dominion
Part Four | Unmasked; Unbound; Unleashed
Chapter Thirty-Five
“Why does this keep happening!” Poe screamed full-throatily, firing a needless spray of sparking rounds into the impenetrable blast doors obfuscating their path forward.
Much the same could be said for that way now left behind — The Consoler’s seemed marred in this moment of space and time, stuck in blindness, grasping towards the future for solutions; struggling to process all which came before.
Echo could feel the frustration coursing through her companions, yet she’d recently discovered herself most apt to thrive in these type-situations. She was in fullest form while exploiting the weaponry now at her disposal, sensing out to some moment of transcendent heroism she could feel in the nearest future, trusting that her instincts would carry her forward to that place in the style to which she’d become so accustomed; near-almost perfection.
All would unfold in due time, and Echo had come to find that a universal truth.
“Let’s just take a second, guys!” She’d shouted, catching them all grateful for the chance to ground after everything they’d only just been through.
Each of the four had taken place around Rory, herself still bleeding from that shot which had violently taken a grazing piece from her side. They’d all been checking in on her while making way to the hangar, and it seemed that quickly applied bandage wasn’t holding-in the spill throughout.
Leopold went to his knees beside her without hesitation to ask, “Can you lift your arms, hon?”
Rory groaned her eyes closed in exhalation, then did just that, fighting through great amounts of pain in the process of raising her left arm. Poe was hovering over with a sour look on her face, and Echo couldn’t watch as Leopold rolled up that side of Rory’s shirt.
Echo used her time spent avoiding the sight productively — unable to witness the wound without feeling it all again herself most completely — scouting ahead in search of some way she might bore to freedom from within this corridor they seemed trapped inside.
Directly ahead were those hangar doors now riddled with hapless markings borne from Poe’s machine-gun fire. Side passages were barred, heaviest metals all, everything locked down, and there seemed no hope. Poe had seen Echo’s intent and taken up to help from the far-end of that passage. They’d met back with Rory and Leopold, just as he’d finished a better take on her bandage.
It was in the very moment Rory’s eyes fell upon hers, carrying such weight of knowing beyond that Echo could feel in her chest, when the blast doors had begun opening. It was a rurring at first, building to the clicks of its servo motors kicking into gear, followed by the low-end rumble which the door itself birthed from its tightest constrictions of form that provided such strength.
Rory leveraged her assault rifle in hoisting from the ground on sight of this happening. Echo knew there was something in them which had spoken of it coming, or what now lie beyond, and sensed a fateful happening she’d not foreseen.
Leopold threw his own rifle over-shoulder by its strap and begun immediately deploying the drop shield spikes. Poe was showing her teeth in both spirit and form when Echo looked her way.
Finding Leo’s work done quickly, they’d each taken place as he’d finished setting and extending the spikes. He’d activated their energy barrier which spread between, itself two-meters high, forging a protective shielding which would deflect anything of caliber below that of the rail-driver Echo held so firmly in grip.
They’d not lose this chance to fight for what they believed in most; each other.
Fire was raging in the dining hall after they’d made their way back from the bowels of The Foundry. There wasn’t a soul in sight who wouldn’t prove worth a shot in the back. Every innocent person but these four was hiding from those prowling the hallways.
These goons didn’t seem to be of The Foundry at all. Whether they would prove some force of invasion, or foes who’d hid within their walls for some time, it wouldn’t matter as Echo had called out in mistake of their unformal presentation, causing need to dive onto the ground in evasion of their immediate fire laid upon her.
Poe’s machine gun had ended that conversation in that cafeteria most quickly. Although, it spurred a needed reminder from Rory of how they were working with weapons which wielded consumable ammunition.
From there it had been easy to identify those who’d be in no need of further attempted pleasantries upon their meeting. Poe would simply go to ground with her most awesome weapon of human-mulching firepower, its spinning barrels so capable of pounding lead through any armor a person might ever hope to hold themselves upright within.
Then they’d wait. Everyone had proven an enemy at this point, catching first with their eyes that tallest form of Echo, and instinctively raising their weapons meant to maim and stun.
Poe was doing more than disabling them in return.
Assumptions were made in the cafeteria regarding the lethality of their enemies’ weapons, because it hadn’t yet been known all of what they’d been planning. It was as Echo saw them carrying Chloe — unconscious on a motorized gurney made for half a dozen, beside none other than Jocé Remance in much of the same state — when she’d realized they were abducting people.
It had been that fight, in the struggle to free those two who seemed so precious under these circumstances, where the force they’d struggled against had used the advantage of their peers as cover.
The approach had been one of fits and spurts. Each volley of spray from Poe would birth the windows within which they might run to that next spot forward.
Leopold and Rory had made it ahead, sporting far lighter weapons, each on opposite ends of the hallway, just before it opened to its intersection with another, where those three soldiers of their enemy’s force had been hiding behind that gurney.
Their adversaries were firing around its lower outside edge in steady bursts of concentrated laser fire. It was burning bits of cover away from where Rory stood occluded. Leopold had made the bold move, himself to offer their ultimate solution towards victory. His rushing sprint and slide had caused one to rise and fire upon him.
Echo had taken them at the sternum, smoldering a hole bore by heated metal the size of a fist, exploding excrement into the widest splay of brutality upon that longest stretch of floor, then up onto the wall of the adjacent hallway. It had seemed to shock everyone but herself and Rory, each knowing exactly what she was choosing when she’d taken so long to clean that one, rusted, ancient-model rail driver found stowed in near ceremonial position within the storage locker.
The space created by that shock was utilized by Rory to ply towards Leopold and the gurney. He’d taken the sight of her sprint as a sign to act, and threw himself around its outer edge, back crashing upon the floor with his rifle drawn upwards.
He’d fired a burst of rounds which appeared to throw thin streaks of blood across the length of the chamber to Echo as she’d worked at that longest reload of her single shot weapon-choice. It was quality over quantity with the woman — always.
The last living enemy emerged on full bore, happenstance having him round that other edge of the gurney to find Rory directly ahead. His rifle had been more ready than hers, yet she’d the speed to make that distance before he lifted it, tearing him to the floor from the helmet. Her grip had ripped his neck back and forth, until the covering broke free to reveal the man’s tortured and terrified face looking up at her.
Rory froze — it wasn’t who she’d expected to see — Simion Hareth, and the pilot of Epoch. They’d been friends, or so she thought.
He’d utilized that broken moment of stillness to rise into her with enough force to take Rory from her feet. They’d struggle for a longest time while Poe and Leopold grew near, both with their weapons drawn, yet clearly unable to find clear shots or the will to take one.
Simion had been beneath Rory, themselves crisscrossing each other by the torso, struggling for some way to contain the other’s wrath. When he’d found a free hand to draw his sidearm, lifting it in a curling motion, as if to turn it back on Rory’s head.
There wouldn’t be another shot, having only just finished that reload, and Echo felt the need to take it. While it removed that man’s head quite fully from his body, preventing him from enacting a most terrible fate upon Rory, Echo had wounded her friend most viciously. It wasn’t a mistake Echo wouldn’t ever forget, or feel good about, but she’d take that shot over again if she had to.
The medical wing was a short stop despite the importance of it. Rory’s wound needed seeing to, and while that had been the purpose of their appearance in the first place, it was Orator Coriseau who’d proceed to set them forth from there.
They’d been seeing to wounded, and there’d been great relief heard in their voice, and felt through Echo’s heart, as they’d spoken through the intercom. Having barricaded themself inside to face such consistent opposition, they’d seemed to have been losing hope.
Once Rory was patched, and all four of the Consolers had taken time to nurture their bodies quite briefly, it was the Orator who’d told them of the objective they could see to which might turn the tide.
A battleship de-camouflaged in nearest presence of The Foundry, before having taken to a number of causes simultaneously. There had in-fact been a ground force which was able to burrow itself within ahead of time, through that blown upon space-side entry gateway, and down into the lower reaches of the great vessel where they’d been waiting for cycles.
They’d also attempted to take The Great Generator. It’s stuttering waves of start and stop, screeching howls which had ceased entirely by the time these four had reached that storage locker now proven most incredibly useful.
One objective of their enemy’s plan had failed, because warships with pilots trained by the ways of The Foundry had been launched, and they’d found their warrior forms most capable of securing and holding the arena.
Those heroes were still holding it, stranded, without a way home.
The hangar had been taken. No return would be found for their most needed peers if this insurgent force got its way. There was thought within them all at once, each one of The Council’s Consolers were aware through some innately borne and shared intuition.
“They’re blowing the hangar,” Rory had spoken for them all, to the confirming chagrin of the Orator before them.
The carrier shuttle was almost done being loaded by the time Rory was leading them into the hangar. That spread before her was brutal; Echo had been reloading quicker — Poe was ‘done fucking around’ — and Leopold had kept them steady while Rory picked off the leftovers.
Despite her injury, something within Rory — perhaps a will borne from that which seemed so understood by her eyes; the unclear perception of her knowing witnessed by Echo — was having her take point on their final assault.
As Echo emerged behind them, she’d seen how not a foe was left but one, along with those few still loading their final gurney into the carrier shuttle.
Alan wasn’t firing, and he wasn’t running, but he’d not been standing down either. He was only watching as Rory stormed forwards. Something profound was witnessed in Echo’s feelings at that moment; she’d only cared for the safety of Rory in this circumstance.
Still, there was a brightest glint of hope, held close within, speaking of how he might be saved. That there’d be some chance of redemption for this man she loved. He’d been the same as all the rest of her friends, so unseen in who he was since childhood, and there was no more deeply grasped prayer than him somehow coming to stand beside them one day. If only for himself.
That wouldn’t seem to be the case, however.
Before they were able to get close enough and inflict whatever carnage they’d hoped to, or retribution Echo would believe fate owed him, those compatriots of his had opened fire on Rory.
Echo saw it coming, and they’d missed — she hadn’t.
That one shot took the two of them, its force upon the shuttle had shaken it whole. Their blowback into the hanger almost made it to her. She’d not quite believed that.
Rory had speared Alan in the gut while he was standing in frozen witness of the steaming viscera dripping off that carrier, most entirely borne of those he’d so clearly been working with.
The two crashed down into a heap of continued brutality. Any other time — under even circumstances — Echo knew who would win that fight.
Rory was injured, and Alan found means to exploit it with a penetrative stab of his fingers into her wound. Her howl almost had Echo blow his head off clean. She couldn’t do it though, and Echo had been praying as she watched him get upon the shuttle — not only that she’d done the right thing to release her finger from that trigger, but the bigger one — that Rory could forgive her for it.
Echo ran over to Rory and helped her friend to their feet. She’d looked back to see Poe readying her machine-gun to explode the shuttle outright with a volley of its miraculously remaining rounds.
“Stop!” Echo shouted, knowing there’d been many peers aboard.
Poe looked confused as she’d pulled back on the trigger, causing those surging machineries in her weapon to lull, reluctantly abiding the request.
Leopold was already working as the shuttle’s engines hit fire, deploying his box-scanner on the hangar floor. The flash of its infrared light-blast felt nearly blinding to the Consolers, himself having known they’d abide the damage done for quickest results.
He’d report in time that no bombs had been placed, one part of their enemy’s plan thwarted by their arrival.
They’d still not known that, as the rotation of the carrier craft made clear its viewing portal, Echo to see Alan just inside, leaning there against the clear-pane polymer, such unreadable blankness in his expression, but only feeling sorrowful regret from his heart.
Echo felt an arm slip around her waist, a pressure of presence about the right side of her body, and she’d watched his expression change.
There was a second where she hadn’t understood what they were doing, but something had her see a flash of vision from Darkside, and there was reason found at last in her heart. She’d hoped it truly happening before it did, waiting until she was entirely certain Alan’s eyes were trained on them both.
When Echo finally broke his gaze, turning to face that one now standing beside her, it was Death’s Kiss which inflicted the most brutal wound of their battle.
🫶