Chapter 479
Chapter 479
The Commander began by repeating what he had told them before. After the Ravage Contamination swallowed the city, the surviving humans under his command fled deep underground and established a base far below the subway, where the ravagespawn never voluntarily ventured. They found a massive chamber large enough to hold all of them and their belongings and set up their base there.
Over the following months, they made numerous trips to the surface, scavenging whatever resources they could and hauling them back underground. With the entire city consumed by the Ravage, supplies were scarce, so they took anything remotely useful, no matter how insignificant it seemed. This part of the story matched what he had already told them, so there was little new to learn from it.
At this point, Jake interrupted his story to ask when exactly they had created the tech lab. Had it existed before they settled in the cavern, or had they built it later? And if it was the latter, then how had they even managed to construct something so advanced, especially considering the limited resources they had access to? Even though it was now wrecked, the place had clearly once been quite impressive.
The Commander answered that the tech lab had come later, after they met Mad Mick. That was when his account began to diverge from the version he had given them before.
Initially, when Jake and Catalina had first met the Commander, he had told them that Mad Mick was one of the Spartans and that he had eventually decided to leave. He had said that Mick’s engineering skills were off the charts, that he could create a lot of amazing things, but that it came at the cost of him not being quite right in the head. He seemed to lose his grasp on reality with every passing day, and at some point, he decided to leave the Spartans altogether. There was nowhere for him to go, as the whole city was covered in the Ravage, but the Spartans had let him go nevertheless.
At the time, that explanation had never sounded entirely convincing, and now the Commander admitted it had been a lie. He added that he had decided to lie to them because he had just met Jake and Catalina and didn’t fully trust them, so there had been no sense in revealing everything at once. Jake decided to leave it at that, even though he was sure there was another reason for the Commander’s reluctance to reveal the truth.
So after that, the Commander told them what had actually happened. As it turned out, Mad Mick had never been one of them, never belonged to the Spartans to begin with. Instead, they met him after the Ravage overtook the city.
Just like them, Mad Mick had holed up in the subway, but in a different spot from where the Spartans had established their base. At first, they assumed he was just another survivor scraping by in the ruins. But they soon discovered how wrong that assumption was. Mick already had a functioning base hidden in the subway, one he had built before the Ravage even overtook the city. And despite how technologically advanced it was, that outpost wasn’t even his primary base. It was merely one of several smaller secondary sites he had.
Mad Mick wanted nothing to do with the Spartans, though. They tried appealing to his humanity, urging him to help them survive, but he obviously didn’t care about them or their troubles at all. Unlike them, he was in a much better position, as his machines provided him with everything he needed. But more important than that was the fact that he was building a machine that, if completed successfully, should have been able to teleport him out of the subway and back to his main base.
So that was what he had been doing before the Spartans stumbled upon him: he had been exploring the subway, collecting any valuable resources he could find and making use of them at his base. Bit by bit, he was bringing his teleporter closer to completion. But the moment the Spartans discovered his base, everything changed.
When it became clear that Mick had no intention of helping them voluntarily, they forced him to. They seized his machines, his resources, and everything else of value, then carried it all back to their cavern. The lower level beneath it became the foundation of what they would later call the tech lab. They installed the unfinished teleporter there as well, forcing Mick to continue his work under their supervision.
Thanks to his machines, the Spartans could now manufacture lots of things that could help them survive in Dead City, like weapons, ammunition, and various kinds of survival equipment. Other than the teleporter, the Spartans made Mad Mick work on many other things as well. They exploited his skills however they wanted without giving him anything in return. Naturally, they claimed they were protecting him from the dangers of the outside world, but everyone knew that was bullshit. After all, before they found him, he had been doing alright on his own. If they had never crossed paths, he might already have escaped the city and returned to his main base. But after learning about his extraordinary skills, the Commander made sure to exploit them to the fullest, forcing him to invent various things instead of letting him focus entirely on finishing the teleporter.
“Let me get this straight,” Jake said. “Mad Mick was stranded in the subway. He had a main base somewhere, and he was building a teleporter to get back there. But before he could finish it, your people found him and kept him prisoner. Is that right?”
“Yep,” the Commander said. “I know how it sounds. Doesn’t exactly make me look good, does it? But I did what I had to do. I had a lot of people depending on me, and Mad Mick didn’t want to help us willingly.”
“I’m guessing you don’t know where his main base is?” Jake asked.
“Nope. Just that it’s somewhere outside the city. That’s why he couldn’t simply travel there on foot. He needed the teleporter.”
After that, he continued his story from the point where Mad Mick toiled in the tech lab, working for the Spartans and creating various inventions. He said that some of Mad Mick’s inventions didn’t turn out successfully or didn’t have much practical use, while others were highly successful. Among the latter were the energy-based weapons the Spartans were currently using, the same weapons whose blueprints the Commander had promised to share with Catalina’s people in exchange for Jake helping purge Dead City of the Ravage Contamination.
Among the inventions that weren’t very successful were weaponized ravagespawn.
When the Commander said that, Catalina’s eyebrows shot upward. “Wait a second. What exactly are you talking about?” she asked, even though she had clearly already begun to realize what he meant.
Jake stared at the Commander. “So you’re the ones who created those mutants fused with weapons?”
“Yes,” the Commander said. “We captured some ravagers and brought them to the tech lab, where Mad Mick worked out a way to fuse them with different kinds of weaponry and make them able to use it.”
“Wait, wait, wait,” Catalina said. “Before coming to your city, I sent two helicopters here with my people. The second one was shot down, and the first probably was too. The helicopter Jake and I came in was also brought down by a mutant carrying something like a rocket launcher. Are you telling me the creatures that shot down three of my helicopters were made by you?”
“‘Fraid so,” the Commander said, though his face showed no regret.
Jake remembered that one of Catalina’s main reasons for coming to Dead City had been to learn who was responsible for her people’s deaths. Now she had her answer. She stared at the Commander in silence for a long moment before speaking.
“So you were the one who ordered my people, and me, to be shot down?”
“What? No, no, no. You’ve got it wrong.”
“Do I?”
“Yes. We did create those armed mutants, but we don’t control them. We can’t. So we aren’t responsible for what they do.”
Catalina frowned. “Not sure if I’m following.”
“See, we only half succeeded,” the Commander said. “The original goal was to create mutants that would obey orders. Mad Mick did manage to figure out how to fuse ravagespawn with various kinds of weaponry, and he invented special tech that allowed them to use those weapons. Most of them were energy-based, so they ran on the mana inside the mutants’ bodies. And because they were still ravagespawn, other ravagers continued to treat them as their own despite the modifications.”
He continued, his tone turning colder.
“My goal was to create either obedient mutants that followed every order or to gain the ability to control them manually. Since regular ravagespawn allowed them to move freely wherever they wanted, having an army of armed ravagespawn would have allowed me to explore the city without risking the lives of my people. I could also have been able to test the various weapons installed on my mutants against the Ravage to see which guns were effective and which ones weren’t. So after successfully finding a way to fuse ravagespawn with weaponry, Mick moved on to trying to find a way to control the weaponized mutants. Unfortunately, he was never able to accomplish it.”
“Why not? Was the task too difficult even for him?”
The Commander’s expression twisted into a mixture of frustration and barely contained rage.
“No, nothing like that,” he said with quiet anger in his voice. “Everything was working out nicely, if I do say so myself. But then Mad Mick and Owen just had to join forces and rebel against me. And that’s when everything went to shit.”