by Bobby Adair
The base isn’t hard to find. Craters, small and large, dot the mountains all around the base’s entry and exit points. Where the rock gave way and the base was breached, the atmosphere exploding out from the inside left cone-shaped fields of broken equipment, shattered rock, and the frozen bodies of the dead spreading tens of kilometers over the surface.
Penny follows one of the cones to its tip, the hangar where Spitz renovated the Rusty Turd. With no power maintaining the base, the curtain wall that had separated the interior atmosphere from exterior is down. Where there had been a neat, rectangular hole cut right into the face of the mountain, only a ragged gouge is left. Nevertheless, we fly toward it, moving slower and slower the nearer we get.
Before entering, Penny looks to me for confirmation.
I nod. We have to go inside.
Penny brings us in, carefully hovering over the floor until she finds a place large enough and flat enough to set the Rusty Turd down.
It takes only moments for us to exit—Brice, Lenox, Peterson, Silva, Phil, Nicky, and me. We stand silently in the dark chill and watch Penny lift the ship off the ground, sliding out of the bay, and up toward the safety of open space. She’ll wait in a geosynchronous orbit over Iapetus, powering down the ship and lingering amidst the biggest field of orbiting rocks and broken ships she can find.
I take a look around at the misshapen hangar space. I don’t see a single ship. The massive volume of pressurized air escaping the base blasted the place clean.
Brice points toward the back wall of the hangar. A gaping, black maw opens where the airlock door used to be. “That way?”
I turn to Phil. “You need to guide us.”
“That was the way in,” he says. “It still is.”
“Are the hallways inside intact?”
“Some are,” he says. “As far as we can sense. Many are blocked or partially collapsed.”
“Survivors?” I ask.
“Nothing we can see yet.”
“Let’s go,” I order. “Stay on your toes, people.” That last instruction was probably unnecessary. Iapetus feels like a ghost town with real ghosts lurking in the shadows. We’re all nervous.
Chapter 18
Four hours in and it feels like we’re trapped in a maze. The dark hallways we tromp through come in three classes: pristine, partially collapsed, and impassable. Outside of that, it’s hard to tell one from the other. Every sign has been removed. Every distinguishing feature has been blasted to rubble. Doors are mostly gone. Some of the relatively thin walls that had separated individual rooms have been demolished with the remnants stacked into bunkers. At every turn—every bottleneck—the ceiling, and floor are heavily scarred from the firefight or ambush that took place there. The ground where every fight took place is littered with deformed railgun slugs, rock chips, empty H cartridges and cal packs, and all too frequently, shards of faceplate, cracked pieces of helmets, and power packs. Everything a man or Trog might carry that could be blasted to bits by high-velocity railgun slugs is crunching under our boots.
We come across corpses as we ventured deeper. First a few, then dozens, then hundreds. We find one place where the bodies of the solders were stacked into ramparts that survivors were ultimately unable to defend. The floor behind the bloody wall is carpeted with corpses. How effective the Iapetus soldiers were at killing Trogs, we can only guess. The Trogs took all their dead with them after their victory.
“Haven’t we been down this hall already?” asks Silva, as we exit a stairwell and choose left upon entering the corridor. She points to the right. “That pile of rocks blocking the way looks familiar.”
“You’re becoming an expert in rock pile recognition?” laughs Brice.
“No,” she answers. “But soon.”
“We have to go down some halls more than once,” says Phil. “They’re the only ones open between different parts of the complex.”
Brice turns to me and winks. “You can admit you’re lost, Phil. None of the rest of us knows where we are.”
"I know where I am." Phil is irritated. He's been catching the gripes of the squad for the better part of an hour, and he's fed up. "I know where we are. Exactly. If you want to go back to the hangar and wait in the cold, I can take you there in ten minutes."
“It’s pretty cold in here, too,” Brice deflects, though like all of us he wouldn’t have a clue about the external temperature without his d-pad telling him. Our second-hand suits keep the internal temp in a comfortable range.
Phil stomps on ahead.
“Lay off Phil,” I say. “It’s my fault we’re searching.”
“I know where things are." Phil turns his eyes toward the ceiling, and he scans as though he's watching an invisible roach crawl across. "Working together, Nicky and I can see three floors up and three floors down. A hundred or two hundred feet in every direction.”
I’m lucky if I can sense thirty feet of grav variations through the rock.
“I have a full picture in my mind of everything we’ve surveyed so far,” finishes Phil.
“What are we looking for?” asks Lenox. “Records again? We know what happened here. Given a few hours, Tarlow can probably tell us when it happened. We don’t need to top off our supplies. We’re nearly full.”
“This battle took a while to play out,” says Brice. “I’ll bet it went on for two or three months down here.” He looks up and down the scarred corridor. “Reminds me of the moon when the Trogs came.”
“Let’s take a break here,” I tell them. “Find a place to sit. Stay alert, though.”
“No need to stay alert,” says Phil. “There’s nothing alive down here but—”
Everyone looks up.
“Phil?” I ask. “What?”
He looks down the corridor. He cocks his head. Nicky is staring in the same direction.
Lenox shines a light down the long hallway.
“Something’s down there,” says Phil in a quiet voice.
“Something?” I ask, walking up next to him to look into the endless black. “What?”
“Too far to tell,” he says. “Maybe a half-mile that way.”
Around us, the squad arrays against the walls, weapons pointed down into the darkness or toward the stairs. They’re ready to fight.
“People?” I ask. “Trogs?”
Phil shakes his head. “Something is moving down there. Way down there. That’s all I can tell you.”
An authoritative voice crackles across my comm. “Put your weapons on the ground and identify yourselves.”
Chapter 19
“We have four coming up the stairs, all human,” says Phil. “Three flights down. They’re sneaking. They want to ambush us. Another squad of six is up two floors.”
Brice casts a hard glance at Phil. “They surrounded us?”
“With all the rubble,” Phil excuses, “it’s hard to make out things. The grav fields are chaotic.”
“Phil,” I tell him. “I need to know who these guys are.” Over the comm, I say to the voice, “Identify yourself.”
“Negative,” says the man. “Lower your weapons.”
"Hardly," I tell him. "Tell your four coming up the stairs to hold fast, or we'll drop a few grenades on them and step over their bodies when we blow your amateur envelopment tactic." I hear a partial word over the comm, and I read surprise and frustration into it. I give Phil a nod. Now they have to wonder what our capabilities are.
I turn to Brice. “We need to get out of this trap.” Back to Phil. “Find us a path out of here and keep an eye on those guys up top.”
Brice passes out orders. People start to move.
Phil points up the hall. “They’re starting to work their way toward us.”
I stare down the long, black corridor for a second and sense the mass of bodies, running from cover to cover.
Phil turns to Silva, who’s starting to climb through the rubble blocking the hall behind us. “Up in that co
rner,” he says. “Near the top. We may be able to crawl through if those rocks are loose enough to push aside.”
“Gotcha,” she says, and scrambles up.
Down the hall, Brice disappears through a doorway, and immediately comms in. "This place is large and defensible. Doesn't appear to be a side door, though."
“It can be our Alamo,” I tell him, “if we can’t find something else.”
“We need some time,” Brice tells me.
“I can buy it,” I answer, and switch to the comm channel the unidentified officer contacted me on. “This is Major Kane. Are you MSS, SDF, UN, or Free Army? You don’t want to go KIA on a case of mistaken identity, do you?”
“KIA?” he laughs. “You’re cocky. We have you outnumbered, two to one.”
“Really?” I prod, noticing he didn’t specify our number like I did with his. I suspect he doesn’t know. “You have six in the stairwell two floors up in addition to the four downstairs. I don’t know how many you have up the hall, but if you think it’s enough, why are we talking and not shooting?”
“You shouldn’t taunt him,” says Phil.
“You do your job,” I say. “I’ll do mine.
Phil says, “I think there’s a narrow shaft in a room about sixty meters down on the left. It runs up and down between the floors.”
“Got it,” answers Brice, and he rushes out of the room he’s in with Peterson in tow.
“We can’t get out this way,” says Silva from atop the rubble pile, “unless we blast it.”
“Will a grenade do it?” I ask.
“C4 will do the trick.”
“Set a charge,” I tell her. “Brice, forget that direction. We’ll blast our way out back here.”
“I heard.” He’s already running back toward us.
“Identify who you are,” asks the voice over the comm. “Are you MSS, SDF, UN, or Free Army?”
“That’s the problem, isn’t it?” I conclude for both of us. “Why don’t you trot on down here and you and me can talk about it over a beer before we get a bunch of our people shot for nothing.”
“You’d like, that wouldn’t you?” he asks, suspiciously.
“Yes,” I answer, ignoring the sarcasm, I would like that. “What’s your name?”
“My name is Lieutenant. Call me that.”
Silva says, “I have the charge set.”
Brice orders everyone into the stairwell.
“You can’t get out that way,” says the lieutenant.
“Phil,” I ask, “how are they tracking us?”
“Night vision?” He guesses. “Telescopic site from down the hall? I don’t know.”
My squad is in the stairwell in seconds, all on the landing inside the door, not on the stairs where they’ll have a direct line of sight to the troops above or below. Once we take that step, the bullets will start to fly.
“Lieutenant?” I call.
“What?”
“Sir, might be more appropriate,” I taunt. “I am a major.”
“You’re an unidentified target,” he says.
"I have a charge set on the rubble in the hall. I'm going to blow it, and we're heading out that way."
“You shouldn’t have told him that,” says Brice. “You gave away our surprise and put the squad in danger.”
“I’m still hoping to end this without a fight,” I tell him.
“We can fire down the length of the hall,” says the lieutenant.
Brice nods, to confirm that danger.
“So can we,” I argue.
To Brice, I say, “As soon as Silva blows the C4, drop grenades down the stairwell and take out the four below us. If we’re lucky, they’ll be charging up to hit us in the flank.”
“Cakewalk,” says Brice with a grim smile.
“Okay,” says the lieutenant. “I’ll come and talk to you face-to-face. Don’t blow up anything. Once you do, I can’t guarantee—”
“Guarantee?” I ask, “What? That you won’t attack?”
“That’s right.”
“Fine,” I tell him. “Bring a photo ID.”
“Are you joking?”
“A little bit.”
“We should blow it and go,” says Brice. “They may be buying time to put a force behind the barrier or to reinforce what they have in the stairwell.”
“He’s right,” says Lenox.
I peek out into the hall, delaying my decision for just a moment.
Chapter 20
Against the advice of my sergeants, Phil, and even Silva, I step back into the hall, turning to Brice as I go. “At the first sign of trouble, you know what to do.”
He knows, but he shakes his head anyway, because he wants one more time to tell me I’ve made a bad choice.
I amp up my defensive grav and start up the hall at a brisk pace, keeping an eye out as I proceed for places to dive for cover, rooms that look like good places in which to defend myself.
It takes several minutes before I can clearly make out the lieutenant coming toward me out of the darkness. He has no light shining to guide his way, I don’t either. I'm making my way on my grav sense. I guess he's got to be using an infrared HUD display built into his helmet, as I can't make out any extra gadgets in front of his eyes. That makes me feel optimistic, a little. The suits from earth aren’t manufactured with that kind of equipment. The UN is still developing new tech, though.
He slows down as we come in close. At five paces, I stop. He does, too.
“I’m going to turn on my light,” he says. “It’s not for targeting.” His shoulder light blinks on.
I turn mine on, too, and squint, to give my eyes a moment to adjust.
Through his faceplate, he looks like a young man, mid-twenties, dark hair, normal, average. Not a middle-aged man. Not a kid. Probably not SDF, demographically speaking. “Major Dylan Kane,” I say. “And your name?”
“Marsh,” he says. “Lieutenant Marsh. Will you step closer, please?”
“Why?”
“So I can see you more clearly.”
It’s a lie. I reach out with my grav sense, and visualize my escape—I can unload my rifle on full auto while I max grav back toward the stairwell. It might take all of five seconds to get there. I don’t do it. Not yet.
“I need to get a clearer picture of your face for the video feed,” he says. “My CO wants to see what you look like.”
“It doesn’t matter what I look like,” I tell him.
“She wants to see who you are.”
“She?” I ask.
“Colonel Blair.”
I groan. “Good God, she’s not dead yet?”
I catch a bit of a smirk on Marsh’s face, and guess right away that Blair hasn’t changed. “You know her, then?”
“Of course, I do,” I answer. “Did she turn MSS, or is she still an SDF problem?”
“She’s—” Marsh stops himself. “Step closer, please. So they can see your face over the video feed.”
I do as told, still not sure whether I’m stepping into or out of danger. “Can you loop me into the comm so I can talk with Blair, too?”
Lieutenant Marsh fingers his d-pad, and a comm opens up, with Blair scolding him in mid-sentence.
“Blair,” I say, “is that you, darling?” I laugh, because to me, it’s funny.
“You haven’t changed,” she snarls.
“Please tell me Bird is still in charge.”
“It’s none of your—”
"Are you still stuck on the traitor shit?" I ask her. "Really, after all we've been through?"
The line goes to static, giving me another moment of trepidation over the mistake I might be making. A familiar, old voice comes on the line. “Kane, this is Bird, I’m glad you made it back.”
“Thank you, Sir.”
“You can see we’ve had a hard time of it since you left.”
“We saw the Free Army HQ,” I say. “We stopped there da
y before yesterday.”
“So you’ve only been in system for a few days?”
“Thirty or forty hours so far.”
“Did your mission go well?”
“We destroyed the base,” I tell him, “and caught a fleet with their pants around their ankles.”
“You attacked a fleet?” scoffs Blair, back on the comm. “By yourself. You alone. How many ships?”
“Sixty? Sixty-five. Plus some hydrogen tankers.”
“Marsh,” says Bird. “Stand down. Lead the Major’s people down to the command bunker. Kane, we’ll talk when you get here. We’d pretty much given up hope on you. I’m so glad you made it.”
Chapter 21
Wary, with Blair back in the equation, I send everyone but Brice back to the surface for pickup. Penny will take them aloft and hide in the ring of debris forming around Iapetus in the aftermath of the battle.
Marsh and a squad of his troops are leading us deep into the bowels of the rocky moon. At every turn, we descend four or five flights of stairs. No hallway we enter is more than a hundred meters long. At the end of each stands a fortification, cut from the rock with gun slits set for firing at invaders coming down the corridor. Every bunker has a protected exit to the stairs leading down to the next level.
The walls were cut hurriedly, roughly from the living rock. The subterranean refinement of the formerly well-lit city above is absent down here. This is a fort, though none of the walls bears blast scars or gouges from high-velocity projectiles. None of this was fought over when the Trogs invaded.
Periodically, we pass through heavily defended airlocks, each marked with a depth. Half-kilometer, one kilometer, two. The last airlock we pass through is at the three-kilometer mark, and Marsh mentions that we’re nearly twelve klicks from the UN base as the lock is cycled to let us through. Inside, we see busy people headed here or there—soldiers, I guess, since they’re all armed, wearing orange suits, all with helmets dangling from their belts. They’re ready to fight.
Marsh and his squad take off their helmets to breathe the dank air. Brice and I do the same.
