by Peter Nealen
When they reached the bottom and came up against what felt like crumbling, vitrified soil, Gaumarus thought he understood why, and it gave him a chill of very normal dread.
They were inside one of the Huntership’s thrust bells.
The indig who had preceded them, though, had not been idle. There was already a hole in the crumbling wall of scorched dirt, and the indig had disappeared into it, more dirt and rocks flying out behind him.
I knew they were burrowers, but this is insane. In the last few moments, the indig had seemingly dug a hole nearly four meters from the crumbling slope that the Huntership had dug in the planet’s crust. Without comment, Blue Moon Above the Salt Cliff followed him in, and the amount of detritus flying out of the growing tunnel seemed to redouble.
The others joined them a moment later. One pulled several devices out of a pack and started them with harsh coughs that echoed in the cavern.
Above and behind them, Xanar Dak’s last stand continued to sound. It was only a matter of moments before he would have to detonate the bomb, or risk it never going off at all.
Kan Tur reached the bottom, and he and Gaumarus dove into the tunnel after the indig, hauling handfuls of soil behind them as they went. They weren’t nearly the kind of diggers that the indig were, but they would help or die trying.
Whatever those powered tools the indig had brought were, they were impressive. The tunnel was already expanding ahead of them. It was just big enough for the bigger humans to crawl on their hands and knees; the indig could move somewhat more quickly. One of them had already paused, laying charges. He motioned for the humans to go past him, and they barely managed to squeeze by. Gaumarus looked back to make sure that Verheyen and Chauwens were still there.
Of all those who had left the trenchline to assault the Huntership, they were the only ones left.
He kept crawling, his hands, elbows, and knees protesting every jarring step, scuttling through the ground to try to get away, expecting nuclear fire to rush through the tunnel and turn them all into a thin layer of carbon against the vitrified dirt at any moment. The tunnel doglegged suddenly, and then a shockwave hammered at him from behind. Part of the tunnel collapsed on top of him, and he fell on his face, sure they were all dead.
Then a blow like the descending fist of some mythological sky god hammered at him, and the tunnel collapsed the rest of the way. He was conscious only of the weight of the dirt pouring down on him for a second, before he lost consciousness.
22
There was a light shining on his face. He wondered if those stories about seeing a bright light at the moment of death were true. But he was in too much pain to be dead. At least, he hoped that was what it meant.
He squinted into the light, slowly making out shapes and sounds. No, he definitely wasn’t dead. He was underground, still partially buried. Much of the collapsed tunnel had been dug back out again though, and he could move.
Clawed hands helped him up, and four black, alien eyes studied him. Blue Moon Above the Salt Cliff signed, [Friend of Hunters, are you hurt?]
He took a quick inventory. His head ached abominably, and his entire body felt like one enormous bruise. When he sucked in air, his breath caught as a stabbing pain went through his side. He probably had at least one broken rib. But he was alive.
[I’m all right,] he signed back. He looked around him. He was still in the tunnel, but it was being widened. [What happened?]
[The one with the gods’ hammer on his back succeeded,] Blue Moon Above the Salt Cliff signed. [I think. The tunnel collapsed under the shock. We are digging out now.]
Gaumarus nodded. Aside from the aches and pains of his battered body, he felt tired, more exhausted than he ever had felt before. He wanted nothing more than to lie back down and go to sleep, even if he never woke up.
But he couldn’t. He looked around. Chauwens wasn’t moving, and Verheyen, his fatigues and weapon caked with dirt, was shaking his head. He winced, suddenly discovering that that was a bad idea.
Gaumarus started to crawl to Chauwens, but Kan Tur got there first. The pudgy man rolled over and groaned. His face shield was cracked, and there was blood on it, but when he pried it out of the way, Gaumarus could see that all the blood was coming from his smashed nose.
Kan Tur was still alive, sitting up and staring back at the piled rubble and detritus where the tunnel behind them was still collapsed. Two of the indig had stopped digging once they were sure he was the last one, and were starting to move past the humans again.
The indig plans for an offensive seemed forgotten, along with all the enmity between mountain tribesman and human. They were all simply enemies of the M’tait, down there in that tunnel. People who had survived what no one had ever survived before; they had been inside a Huntership and lived to tell about it.
At least, they had so far. What they would find once they got out was another matter.
There was little sound in the stuffy atmosphere of the tunnel. Unless he’d been deafened by the blast, Gaumarus didn’t think that the indig were using the digger they’d brought in. Maybe it had been knocked out by the shock.
Crawling forward, his powergun somehow still strapped to his body, Gaumarus joined the two mountain tribesmen at the top of the tunnel. They had small folding shovels in their hands, and his own hand-digging was rather pathetic, compared to how quickly they could power through the soil. But he would help. He had to. Otherwise, he would be sitting there in the dark, thinking about everyone who hadn’t made it that far.
He didn’t know how many hours they had been digging when the first mountain tribesman broke through. His shovel punched through the surface and he eased it back down carefully, only opening just large enough a hole that he could put his squarish head through up to his first pair of eyes. Then he dropped back down, whispering to Blue Moon Above the Salt Cliff.
Slowly and carefully, the indig began to remove more of the dirt. Gaumarus felt a tap on his calf, and looked back to see Kan Tur holding a gauntleted hand out to him. There was a small packet in his palm.
“Anti-radiation drugs,” the Knight explained. “You might want to take them before we go above. Just in case.”
Gaumarus accepted the packet, tore it open, and forced the capsules down his parched throat. He hadn’t even considered it, but with a fusion bomb having just presumably detonated at ground level or below, the fallout above the surface could well be fierce. Even the anti-rad drugs might not be enough.
After moving through the dark for so long, he might have expected blinding sunlight to come flooding into the tunnel as the surface was breached. But a wan, bloody glow was all that appeared, dimmer even than the weapon lights and hand lamps that were illuminating their little pocket dug out of the dirt.
“Background radiation is considerably elevated,” Kan Tur said, apparently checking a gauge built into his armor. He reached out and grabbed Blue Moon Above the Salt Cliff’s arm. When the indig warrior looked back, he told Gaumarus, “The abos will need something to filter the dust from their lungs. The fallout will be lethal, this close to the blast site. Ingesting alpha and beta emitters is a bad way to die.”
Gaumarus translated, telling Blue Moon Above the Salt Cliff that they needed to find a way to cover their mouths and noses—only then realizing that he had no idea if the indig even had noses; it was impossible to tell within their bristling hairs.
Blue Moon Above the Salt Cliff signed his understanding, and chittered and hissed to his fellows. In moments, the indig all had various forms of mask wrapped around their faces, mostly rags torn from the inside linings of their coats. The Provenians fitted their respirator masks to their face shields, though Gaumarus was worried about Chauwens. Would the dust manage to get through the cracks in his face shield? But there was nothing more they could do.
The indig were already up out of the hole. Gaumarus followed, crawling on hands and knees, his powergun still strapped to his back. He wanted it in his hands, but he needed both of them to get u
p out of the pit.
He was expecting to come up somewhere in the middle of the M’tait landing zone, still covered with swarms of the creatures and their monstrous biomechanoids. So, it took him a moment to grasp what he was really looking at, as he clambered up onto the scorched, barren soil and took a knee, swinging his powergun around to the ready as fast as he could.
At first, all he could see was the still-rising mushroom cloud above the blasted remnants of the Huntership. He felt sick looking at it, knowing just how close they really were. Only being as deep underground as they had been had saved them. That, and the fact that the Huntership’s hull had focused almost all of the blast upward.
Splintered shards of the M’tait starship’s hull still jutted black against the sky, though not one rose much more than a hundred meters above the plain. More fragments lay on the ground, still smoking, rippling with heat mirage. The thought of how radioactive they might still be made his guts twist. They were far too close.
But the simple fact that any of that ship had survived the blast at all was awe-inspiring. Any other starship should have been blasted to atoms by a fusion bomb going off inside its hull.
He tore his sickly fascinated gaze away from the wreckage. The ground was blisteringly hot under his boots and his knee, and he felt himself getting parched, even through his ventilator. Millions of joules had been poured into the ground and the atmosphere in an instant.
The plain had been scoured of life for as far as he could see. None of the yellow-gray grass that had covered the Monoyan Plain was left. Only ashes and dust.
There were no M’tait in view, either. He realized that any that might have still been out there in the blast would have been vaporized, turned into little more than shadows on the ground. There was nothing within view but desolation.
And that was when he realized that he couldn’t see the jagged spires of the other Hunterships, either. He looked up.
Through the pall of radioactive dust, he could see hundreds of glowing points of red light. They looked like falling stars, except that they were rising, not falling.
The M’tait were leaving.
“Why now?” Chauwens asked, peering up at the sky. “After all this…all it took was one fusion bomb?”
“I don’t think they left because of the fusion bomb,” Kan Tur said, standing straight and looking around at the blasted, ruined landscape. “I think they left because they were finished with whatever they came here to do. They had all the loot and all the livestock they wanted.”
“Livestock?” Verheyen asked. “What about all the people they took?”
Kan Tur looked at him levelly. “What do you think the M’tait see us as?” he asked. “No one knows for sure, because no one has ever been able to communicate with them, but they herd people right along with animals on their raids. That’s been recorded for centuries. To them, we are just different animals.” He looked at Gaumarus. “We shouldn’t stay here. The radiation isn’t as bad as I thought it might be, but it isn’t healthy.”
Gaumarus looked back up toward the knob where the indig fortifications had been dug. Then he blanched.
The knob was gone. In its place was a crater, choked with rubble. Smoke and heat haze still rose from it.
“That can’t have been from the fusion bomb,” Verheyen breathed, his voice muted and distorted by his ventilator.
“No,” Kan Tur replied. “I believe that the M’tait got in a few parting shots as they lifted. “We will find no shelter that way.”
Gaumarus swallowed. Blue Moon Above the Salt Cliff and the other indig were quiet and still. They might almost have been statues squatting on the barren plain. Maybe they were in shock from the losses in the fortifications. Or maybe they weren’t. He couldn’t trust anything he thought he knew about them anymore.
“Unless I’m mistaken,” he said, “we’re only about sixteen or seventeen kilometers from the main Pell Family farm.” He pointed. “It should be right over that ridge, there.”
Kan Tur nodded, then looked at Verheyen and Chauwens. “Can you march that far?” he asked.
Verheyen nodded. “If it gets us away from here, you had best believe I can march that far.”
Chauwens didn’t look that certain, though he nodded. In fact, he was looking a little sick and shaky.
But they had no choice. They were already going to pay a steep price for staying in that hot zone as long as they had.
Hefting his powergun, Gaumarus got to his feet and started off, little puffs of fine gray dust coming up from his boots with every step. “Follow me.”
It was a long hike. Chauwens especially wasn’t in the greatest of shape, and Gaumarus kept a close eye on him. He was worried about that cracked face shield. He had no idea what kind of tech went into the Knights’ anti-rad drugs, but it didn’t seem all that likely that they could directly counteract the effects of inhaling nuclear fallout, only a couple of hours after a blast. But while Chauwens was dragging his feet and occasionally stumbling, he had yet to start vomiting or otherwise showing signs of radiation poisoning.
At least, he wasn’t showing any signs that Gaumarus knew how to recognize.
The land started to slope upward. The ridge wasn’t named on any official maps of the Plain, but it had always been known simply as Pell Ridge. It had formed the backbone, as it were, of Pell lands, and had sheltered the main farmstead from the worst of the fierce thunderstorms that swept across the Plain in the early summer. It had also provided firing positions and terrain advantage in the wars with the indig during the early days.
Gaumarus had never doubted that Waldenius had continued to improve the defenses around the farm while he had been the Family patriarch. That Dagarius had not was another source of contention between father and son.
As they trudged up the slope, the grass brittle and scorched from the heat coming off the blast and the subsequent liftoff of the M’tait fleet, few of the spatulate pseudo-leaves on the kevit and enflit trees still clinging on the side facing the blast, Gaumarus wondered if there would even be any point in maintaining the farm at all, after this. He would probably have to take over the Family operations once the PDF, what was left of it, was demobilized.
He didn’t want to think about whether or not the farm was even still there. But as they topped a finger and looked down into a draw that had been used as a watering point for Pell livestock, he couldn’t avoid the question any longer.
The watering point was still there, still mostly intact. Several blackened skeletons, clearly burned clean by the M’tait beam weapons, just like he’d seen done to the wounded man on the battlefield, what felt like a lifetime ago, were scattered around it. Most of the bones belonged to nuyaks and some of the transplanted horses that had thrived on Provenia.
But two skeletons were clearly human. And from the twisted postures they lay in, they had been alive and conscious as the M’tait had flensed the flesh from their bones.
His blood ran cold, and he looked up toward the ridgeline. What would he find there?
Kan Tur loomed alongside him. The Knight seemed to be able to sense his distress. “I am sure that they made it to the refugee camp, Gaumarus,” he said quietly. “There was enough warning. These were probably drifters.”
But Gaumarus shook his head, as he started to forge his way up the slope once more. “You don’t know my grandfather, Kan Tur,” he said over his shoulder. “This was his place, his home, and he was a stubborn, terrible old man. He would never have left it willingly.” He suppressed a shudder at the thought of trying to convince Waldenius Pell to join the refugees. “If anything, the threat of the M’tait would have only strengthened his resolve to stay.”
He topped the next rise, and saw one of the old pillboxes that had been set in just below the ridgeline as a lookout post during the indig wars. It had been cracked open like a shellfish. Strangely, the ground around it seemed undisturbed, the vegetation still alive. But after everything he had seen over the last days, Gaumarus was unsurprised
by whatever strangeness he saw wreaked by M’tait tech. They seemed to have a way to defy the normal and expected when they wanted to.
He was too tired to run, even though every fiber of his being screamed at him to get up there, to see what had happened. He kept trudging up the hill, his eyes fixed on the wreckage of the pillbox.
He was gasping when he finally reached it, nearly a hundred meters ahead of the rest. His ventilator felt stifling, his face shield fogging. It felt like he was sucking breath through a straw. He had to stop and rest his hands on his knees, gulping air that tasted of synthetic, sweat, and smoke. He wanted to tear the ventilator away from his face, but didn’t dare, not with that huge pall of smoke and dust behind him, no longer mushroom-shaped but now drifting off to the south as the high-altitude winds caught it.
He finally straightened and looked inside the pillbox.
It was empty. No skeletons or corpses met his gaze. In fact, it looked like it had been abandoned for some time; his father must have had the munitions and supplies moved out at some point. Doubtless he had done it quietly, so as not to alert Waldenius. Gaumarus was sure he would have heard about that fight.
He began to breathe a little easier. If there were no defenders in the pillbox, then maybe those charred bones back in the draw had just been drifters, as Kan Tur had suggested. Nuyak thieves, maybe, trying to take advantage of the terror and confusion to make off with some Pell livestock. They had paid a worse price for their larceny than anything Waldenius himself could have dreamed up.
Staggering a little with weariness and relief, he started toward the top of the ridge again. Blue Moon Above the Salt Cliff had caught up with him, and the other humans weren’t far behind by then. It was only then that he noticed that all but one other of the indig had faded away. He looked around, nervous at their disappearance, wondering if things might be going back to the way they had been before, now that the M’tait were gone.
