Inferno

19 - The Bitter End

Tobias' hand scrabbled to his midsection, on the right side of his stomach. He felt a large hole in his suit which the bullet had blown out of. It had gone straight through. He twitched a bit in pain, hearing the splashing sounds go blood pooling underneath him from the similar wound on his back.

"Tobias, I heard gunfire. Is everything alright?"

Before he could respond to KT's question, Dimitri stepped forward to tear the transceiver he borrowed from Gates off his helmet. He threw it on the ground, and crushed it with his boot. Then he held his wrist up to his mouth, and typed in some kind of new frequency. "Blisk, this is Dimitri. I've got the info we need. The Ark is in the southern aisles, in the site we marked off a few months ago. That temple in the water."

"Copy that, I'll notify Marder. Good work."

He looked over at Tobias' data knife lodged in the console. "What a shame, but I'm afraid that I can't have you disabling those generators." With a powerful swipe of his hand, he hit the knife and snapped the blade off, leaving half of it stuck in the slot as the handle flew to the far corner of the room.

It was taking everything Tobias had to not pass out. "H-how ... do y-you know where the A-Ark is ... j-just from...?"

Dimitri shrugged. "We've known which planet the Ark was on for awhile now, a nice little isolated rock out there we call Typhon. But still, scouring an entire planet is pretty difficult as you've seen by our efforts to find the Inferno." He shook his head. "I knew that they'd found it, but couldn't get it to work. We'd never have been able to do so without your help, so I suppose I should thank you." He gave a mock bow as Tobias writhed on the ground. "We knew where it was alright, just couldn't work the damn thing."

"You son of a bitch!" Gates screamed from the side, still locked to the pipe. "I've trusted you more than anyone for years!"

He shrugged. "That's why it's so easy to avoid detection. As dear Four here so eloquently put it," he said, gesturing at Tobias, "trust is a very hard thing to come by in these times."

Tobias grunted. "Why d-did you ever h-help me?"

"I've been trying to get you killed since the beginning, ever since I knew you were a former IMC. Accelerating your pilot training, telling Gates that you'd probably volunteer to be KT's pilot, getting you assigned to an defense op on a refueling raid when most wouldn't get that job for months ... I've been trying to keep you from spilling any secrets, and to kill two birds with one stone by taking out that Titan as well."

He made a 'tsk' sound. "But then you crashed on Tyche, and heard about Erebus... and goddamn, you are one determined person. I stuck close to you, trying to keep an eye on you. In fact, I encouraged you. I figured that this plan of yours to raid the Kraken was so dangerous, you'd die in the attempt." He shook his head. "But you survived. And then you kept surviving. And dammit, you just don't know when to die, do you? One mishap after another, but you always manage to come back on top. Well, not this time."

He turned his aim to Gates, forcing her to freeze lest she get shot. Slowly, he walked up to her, and grabbed her sidearm from her holster. "You won't be needing this."

Placing her weapon in a pouch at his side, he then turned towards the only other exit of the room besides the one that led back into the trenches; a tunnel that led back to the main hexagonal complex. As he walked out, he turned back to Tobias one last time.

"It's a shame, Four. Someone with your skills could have really made a difference in the IMC. It's a waste."

Then he walked down the tunnel.