We Dare

by Chris Kennedy

“Get in there,” barked Terry. “I’ll think of something.”

  “The hell with that,” said Valentine, shouldering his assault rifle. “Get some of those rocks down here, make me a barricade.”

  Terry complied instantly, with the instincts of a soldier. He was on his second stone by the time the stupidity of it all set in.

  “They’ve all got forties on board,” he offered.

  “And what have we got, pricing guns?”

  Terry cursed under his breath, but tore into the boulders, hauling them into place. At the outer opening of the cave mouth, Turner had taken down his face mask, hauled in a deep breath, and exhaled a cloud of wide-spectrum smoke that filled the alcove. Some sly English witticism sparkled in his eye, but the last time he tried to speak while dropping the smokescreen, he’d nearly choked to death.

  “Contact!” shouted Disco, and the fight was on.

  Terry wondered as he shouldered the Baby Vulcan, just where Disco went for her quiet when the fighting began. Everybody he’d ever run with had a Quiet Place, when they’d fought enough. He was surprised to find that now his wasn’t his breathing, and it wasn’t the way he centered himself by pushing his tongue to the roof of his mouth. It was the conveyor belt, the monotonous twisting and turning platform where he’d worked for the last six years, the simplicity of motion and the meditative trance of engaging and disengaging, flexing and relaxing, as the enhanced biomechanical supports that woke him in the night aching and reeking of metal carried him through day after day. It was a trance unto itself, a ballet of monotony, and as the drones came in, he put a quarter-pound bullet in one, then the next, with the methodical regularity of a factory worker lifting crates. Squeeze, center, place. Squeeze as he lifted the flat. Center, as he moved it to the conveyor. Place, as he released.

  Place, as he redirected to the next drone. Center, as he locked it in his sights. Squeeze, as he put it down. He’d feel the kick of the Vulcan that night, if he lived to nightfall. It thumped hard against his skin when it bucked, and the exhaust seared his face and fingers. There was no mechanical skeleton, no hydraulic assist to get around that. It wouldn’t be terrific. But then a shell burst too close to him, rocking his ears and slicing his cheek with a spray of limestone, and there was no time to think about the future. Just place, center, squeeze.

  Rocked by only the occasional grenade, they spent the next few minutes pinned by a hail of bullets, firing back when they could. With armor-piercing rounds and no less precision, Disco brought down her fair share, now that stealth was no longer an option. Every grenade that landed kicked more debris into the air; every whizzing bullet curled Turner’s smokescreen in interesting ways—and the drones seemed to be programmed for solitary recon and defense work, not for squadron combat. Twenty grenades at once, in a coordinated pattern, might have buried them and ended their expedition right there. But with only six grenades on board, the drones didn’t launch unless they locked—and the more of the mountain they kicked up, the harder it was for them to get a solid lock. Bullets, though, they sprayed with abandon, and everybody took a few center-mass before it was over. A few of the scales from Disco’s dragonskin had burst, showering her chest and her arms with the iridescent ceramic gel that filled the little cells. Terry’s shoulders were dented and his massive arms deeply scratched where he’d taken shower after shower of rock and shrapnel. He wondered if Valentine still had a maintenance guy. His thoughts drifted back to that pardon, ominously waved—and, he hoped, not left behind in the factory. If he could get back Stateside, maybe he could have a maintenance guy too.

  Disco knew what they’d brought for ammo—it was, as she’d said, a thousand-bullet situation, and she kept firing in short bursts with precise abandon until it was clear nothing was shooting back. She signalled the all clear and Valentine responded in kind. Turner grinned out of the side of his mouth, and said something witty, though Terry’s ears were still ringing hard, and he didn’t catch it.

  Valentine moved them close enough that he could shout to them. “That ain’t a half of what they got in the air,” he said. “There’s plenty more to come if we don’t get this thing and get out of here. I think we’re hot from here until I tell you otherwise. Might as well use the power tools, now.”

  The pack broke down quickly, and Terry remembered just how much he had hauled up with him. Jackhammers for the little people, a compressor to power them, and a generator to power the compressor, and diesel to power the generator. Again it was the logistics of the feat that separated the pros from the amateurs: twenty minutes of setup could’ve been the end of them.

  He remembered to set up his comms with them, but it was a moot point once they started jackhammering. Between them it was a five or ten-minute job, and even Valentine had to admit the hiding place was a good one. The mountain range was lethally radioactive, patrolled by heavy drones, and had probably been bombed by Karpov’s private jets just to seal in the goods. This was no place for grave-robbers, no team that could have moved the requisite equipment to such an impossible location the old-fashioned way. And yet someone had cut into this cave already. Muscles and servos surging, Terry rolled down the boulders for them. He grabbed and tossed the rocks as the team broke them up. And all the while, he nursed the feeling in the pit of his stomach that someone had already come—that the whole trip would be for nothing.

  “Does it bother you,” he asked the others as they shut down the hammers, “that somebody might’ve beat us to the punch?”

  “Course it does,” said Valentine. “But not as much as you’d think. Karpov stopped being a warlord years ago. He’s an emperor, now. He wants a shadow empire across Central Asia, and every year he’s closer to having one. Ten years ago, he thought whatever he buried up here was the way to get it.”

  “Well, genocide seems to have served him in a pinch,” Turner observed.

  “Even so,” said Valentine, “he’s a big fan of whatever he’s hid down this particular hole. Do I want it? Sure I do. I might have a buyer. I know for sure you do, Neville. Do I want to retire on a beach in Waikiki? Sure I do. But do I want it more than Karpov does? Maybe not, because I’m not insane. I do know I want him not to have it. So if some local outfit has come in here and low-tech’d it out of here—if a couple of grave robbers and Sherpas somehow came up here and disappeared it all—I can live with that.”

  “I want my pardon,” said Terry. “Even if there’s nothing at all down this hole.” Turner put a comforting hand on Terry’s enormous shoulder. It was cold and clammy, but Terry couldn’t feel it.

  “We’ll get it done,” he said. “I have contacts, too, who appreciate that the Service is still sending us, where and when they can. We are respectable gentlemen, now.”

  Disco spat into the dirt. “Keep digging.”

  The monotonous clack and crunch of the rocks began to echo hollowly. Beyond the wall of rock, dusty rays of light began to stream onto the smooth cavern floor. With a few heavy lifts, Terry opened the hole wide enough to squeeze his shoulders through. Without the generator, without the heaviest parts of the excavation kit, he could move a lot more freely. Against Valentine’s protests and Turner’s calls for stealth, he was the first one in.

  “About time,” he muttered. The rocks around the cave mouth crunched and crumbled as the others made their way in. As if shaken, as if roused from slumber by their harsh entry, the whole mountain groaned and trembled beneath them like an ancient man settling into an ancient throne.

  “What the hell was that?” Disco asked. Valentine was silent, his sensors working overtime. “We’ve got company,” he said, and then the flash-bang went off.

  * * *

  For the first time since his surgery, Terry couldn’t move his arms. He woke up in a panic, his heart racing, drenched in sweat. It was dark beyond dark down here, a dark so thick you could taste it. He was strung up strappado-style, with his massive arms wrenched behind him, and only the massive steel plate across his shoulders kept both them and his ribs from tearing t
o the point of torture. It was ingenious. The bionics didn’t seem to be responding. He might try to pull free on his own, to twist the plastic straps or jerk his way free under his own strength. But he was balanced precariously with fifty pounds of steel and carbon already fused to his frame, tapped directly into his spine. One wrong move, one botched attempt to pull free, and the delicate balance might slip. The extra weight of his hulking metal body would tear him apart.

  A burning light struck his face as a figure walked through the dusty cave. Her figure was a woman’s figure, small and fit; but her face was hidden by a gas mask, and by the glare from her miner’s headlamp.

  She studied his face, he thought—then turned to Valentine, who was tied and gagged—more than gagged—on the floor of the cavern. He had a gas mask, too; but Terry saw from the way it fogged that it was blocked for air. His internals were working full-time just to keep him alive. A man with basic innards would have suffocated by now. He couldn’t remember what happened to those like Valentine, and that troubled him immensely.

  The light multiplied as others came into the deep cave. Six, seven men, all wearing the same headlamps. All of them armed, all of them heavies. He tried to place the company, but he was too long out of the game, and too rattled by what had happened. The little woman looked so out of place among them—unless—

  “Terry Cullen,” she said. “As I live and breathe.” She killed her headlamp and doffed her gas mask. Lit only by the lights of her men, she smiled in the darkness as the reflected constellation of a half-dozen xenon lamps glittered in her almond eyes.

  “Hello, Ghost,” he said.

  At the sound of her name, Jimmy Valentine looked up from his place on the cavern floor with nothing but betrayal and heartbreak in his eyes. He was still putting it all together in his mind, but he didn’t need to. He’d been in the business long enough to know how these confusions resolved.

  “You boys have a lot of nerve coming back to Samarkand,” she said. “I thought you’d retired.”

  “Heard you’d retired,” Terry shot back. “Permanently.”

  Ghost shrugged. “A condition of my new employment.”

  “You’re here for Crate 14?”

  “The other condition of my employment,” she said, smiling.

  Terry cast his eyes around the room as best he could. “Who are these guys?” he asked. “You find yourself a new team?”

  Her laugh was still musical. “I’ve been spoiled for good teams,” she said. “No. They’re Chinese nationals. They work cheap and don’t ask questions. They speak a lot of Mandarin, and no Arabic.”

  “Didn’t think it was your way to trust mercs outside the Service,” said Terry.

  Ghost weighed the observation with a lackadaisical half-smile. “I suppose if I’d trusted them,” she said, “I would’ve told them about the radiation.”

  Something about her coldness frightened him. It made no sense. He’d seen Disco put down a half-dozen men less than a week ago. He was fine with it. But there was always something off about Ghost. Terry took a deep breath, centered himself, and pushed his tongue against the roof of his mouth. He jerked his head toward Valentine.

  “How come he’s gagged, and I ain’t?”

  “Because there’s nothing you can say to me that I’m afraid of.”

  “Go to hell,” he said, and she smiled.

  “Case in point.”

  As the men milled about, coming and going from the deep cavern, one of their headlamps flashed across an old wooden crate. Terry tried not to look, but he’d always been a terrible liar.

  “You want to see it?” Ghost asked him. “It’s smaller than we thought. All that fuss over such a little box.” She flicked her headlamp on in her hands, shone it over like a flashlight. Crate 14 was about a foot in every direction, small enough that Terry could have shouldered it in high school, before his surgery, even before he bulked up for the Reserves.

  “There ain’t no gold in that box,” he said, despondent.

  Ghost raised her eyebrows. “Is that what he told you?” she asked. “Jimmy, did you tell poor Terry this was all for a little box of gold?”

  Valentine’s eyes were black pits of anger.

  Ghost walked over to Terry, ran her hand over his head, and stroked his little dark curls affectionately.

  “You see?” she said. “This is why he’s gagged and you’re not.”

  Terry spit in her face. “Don’t do me no favors,” he sneered, with as much venom as he could muster. She backed away, genuinely surprised, and wiped her face with the sleeve of her fatigues.

  “Ew,” she said. “Uncalled for.”

  “What’s uncalled for,” he said, “is you rolling on us for Iskander Karpov.”

  Her smile faded. “I don’t work for Karpov,” she said.

  A mask of confusion passed over Terry’s face. “Then how come I’m strung up like a fish?”

  One of the soldiers came in, whispered something to her in Chinese. She nodded and motioned for the others to come in.

  “You’re here for the things my new employers want very badly. There’s other interested parties.”

  “Look, Valentine doesn’t even care,” said Terry. “He just wants to get it away from Karpov, whatever it is. You want it? Take it. You work for somebody else, just take your prize and go. But leave us out of it.”

  She scoffed. “You think that’s how this ends? You think I can just let the three of you walk out of here?”

  Terry smiled at that, transparently pleased. Ghost’s eyes widened and she motioned to one of her mercenaries, who called for the others. They came in, hauling Turner with them, and threw him onto the dusty earth. She gave them an order and made the hand motion for a perimeter search.

  “Something up?” Terry asked.

  “You didn’t come alone,” said Ghost. “You’ve got somebody on the outside to give you an hour and see if you don’t come out. Well, we’re leaving. Now.”

  “I’ll pack my things,” said Terry.

  “You think you’re coming with us?”

  Terry shifted uncomfortably in his hogtied position, trying to ease the pressure on his joints.

  “I ain’t that lucky,” said Terry. “I think you’re going to take off with that crate as quickly as you can. You’re going to get the hell out with most of your crew, and you’re going to leave us behind. Maybe you’ll leave behind a couple of the guys you like the least, with orders to dispose of us as soon as you’re somewhere safe.”

  She smiled at him, cocked her head as if she were considering it.

  “You’re not that lucky either,” she said. In a smooth motion, she pulled her pistol and popped two rounds into Turner’s head.

  There was no question of saving him—no question of anything. She was close enough for a contact shot, but wise enough not to give him the opportunity to slip it. The people they’d run with over the years—especially Terry and the other Mules—had had such a pissing contest when it came to large-caliber weapons that her little 9mm didn’t seem like much. But Terry’d been hit by a 9mm before, more than once. You only called it “small caliber,” Turner had told him once, until you took one. What was left of Turner went down in an instant, showering Valentine’s horrified face with blood. Ghost pivoted and let the little gun’s recoil guide it up toward Terry’s face, and Terry’s shout of alarm came from a place he didn’t know and meant something he couldn’t really understand.

  Ghost’s team were cheap hires, and they didn’t really know her. Maybe they expected her to leave them unattended, to delegate their execution to some bargain-basement soldier-of-fortune and be on her way. Maybe they took her for a little woman with a firm strategic will but weak stomach. Or maybe they were just asleep at the post—but they never saw the execution coming either; they flinched and recoiled as the shots rang out, then relaxed as they began to make sense of the situation. That was the moment she turned to put a bullet in Terry’s head—the only moment Disco could have chosen to do her thing.r />
  The roof of the cave was uneven, thick with stalactites, mottled with thick shadows and no shortage of anchor points. As she came down, Terry had the unpleasant experience of staring straight down the barrel of Ghost’s gun as the muzzle flashed. But Disco came down already spinning, and the cloak had trouble with spinning; it never really gave the perfect illusion of invisibility, just a queer shimmering mass of light as the muzzle flash lit up a hundred flashes of her dragonskin at once. She was already spinning when the hollow point tagged her in the shoulder, exploding in a shower of multi-colored light, and the force of it kicked her around the cable even faster, accelerating her rotation as her onboard targeting locked, locked, locked.

  Resisting the urge to move as Disco wiped the room was the hardest part. Every nerve in Terry’s body was screaming to hit the deck, but with the weight of his exoskeleton precariously balanced, it would have been a fatal mistake. He closed his eyes, imagined himself loading flats of beer, and trusted in his team.

  A few of them got shots off in the darkness, but they didn’t do too much good. The flash of gunfire and sparking ricochets was enough to return fire by, and Disco emptied her magazines into the room. The mountain shook and echoed ferociously with the sound of gunfire, and the overpowering stink of powder and death filled the cavern. When they were out, Disco’s guns seemed to appear in mid-air as she let them fall and kicked back up the rope in a shimmering flash of nothingness and disappeared.

  Valentine had been waiting for his moment too. He had a dozen onboard ways, of course, of slipping out of his restraints—just none that were stealthy enough to deploy while he was being watched without risking everything. His wrists were bleeding a sticky concoction of blood and nanofluid where the blades had come through, but he wasted no time in yanking a rifle from one of the mercs and kicking Ghost’s pistol away into the shadows. Like every other hostile, she’d taken two to the chest, but Disco’s armor piercing rounds had only gone clean through the vests of the others. She was gasping for breath, probably nursing a busted rib, when Valentine put his boot on her wrist and the muzzle of his new gun against her throat. With his free hand, he reached up to tear the gag off. His hand came away bloody—worse than bloody. With disgust, he threw the tangle of nerves and bloody wires to the ground.