We Dare

by Chris Kennedy

  Gibb’s elbow dug square between her ribs, and Devra’s eyes snapped open. Turk and Shike, across from them, both had their heads back, their own eyes closed, and she shifted her head to glare a silent question at Gibb.

  Gibb tipped her head back, as though Devra could see through the metal sheeting between them and the air ripping by outside. Glaring harder, Devra considered switching voice back on their channel—burning out all of their eardrums seemed super unlikely—then realized Gibb was calling attention to her helmet.

  Notably, what wasn’t coming through it.

  Dix invariably kept up a patter of his favorite topics when he flew them, delighted with his captive audience and knowing they’d never be able to remember all the sharp comments they might have in response by the time they could talk to him again.

  Last month he’d flown them through a small firefight and gave a credible summary of his favorite series at the same time, managing to both make Turk nearly wet himself and spoiling the ending of the show for Shike.

  It was his proudest moment.

  Now, he was silent.

  They could see into the forward compartment, so he hadn’t been shot or accidentally ejected, and the faint falling was unchanged from his usual lift orientation. Devra raised a hand to the harness restraining her against the wall in silent question, but Gibb shoved her hand back down with a quick headshake.

  Devra turned her palms up to ask ‘then what?’ already knowing Gibb was going to shrug in response.

  The aisle between them and Shike and Turk was too far for her to kick them, so she dialed her channel way down and switched over to voice.

  “Dix, you go fugue on us?” She pitched her voice low, just in case he had disengaged on them. He functioned with two mods, but that didn’t mean he’d always be able to process them. Sometimes a modded soldier…broke, never to return to themselves again. Rare enough that she’d never seen it up close, but possible enough that their helmets tracked their brain activity.

  Command didn’t need to know as immediately if they fugued off-mission.

  “Dix?”

  “Dev?” His voice was hushed, and it wasn’t just her volume settings.

  “What’s going on up there, Dix?”

  “How many colonists are on this planet?”

  “Official briefing has it in the tens of thousands, but the shitty ones didn’t come in official Galactic Ships, so it’s an estimate. Why?”

  “There are…a lot of heat signatures we’re passing over. I can’t see anything in visual, and I don’t think it’s…lava or hot water or anything, there isn’t any volcanic activity here and—”

  “Dix.” It wasn’t the moment to ask why he was flipping out of visual to catch thermal signatures. He was a good enough pilot that he likely did it for added security at regular intervals, so she kept her tone level.

  “Yeah?”

  “Anyone targeting us? Moving toward us?”

  The silence dragged on long enough that Gibb elbowed her again, and Devra elbowed her back harder than strictly necessary.

  “No.”

  “Keep flying. We’ll talk about it on the ground.” She switched back to listening mode and shook her head when she noticed Shike and Turk staring at her.

  “Dev?”

  “Yeah?” She sighed before she switched back to voice, keep her tone calm for his benefit.

  “Did you know someone who went fugue?”

  “No, Dix, I—”

  “I do. Thanks for checking on me.”

  The rest of their flight was disconcertingly silent. Devra caught herself wishing for some harebrained story about a magic fox and a stolen ship, or whatever had been going on in the kid’s shows when Dix was growing up.

  Confirmation codes exchanged with the Diggers broke through the steady roar of the engines, and within minutes, they’d landed neatly in a cove formed by a series of jagged rock towers. It was the most interesting landscape she’d seen in months on this dry stretch of planet, but they all knew better than to be distracted by something new. Turk dropped out of the lift first, signaling for Gibb and Dix to follow. Devra sent the command to Lolly to restart, then hopped off one side of the ramp while Shike took the other.

  “They’re in the center tower,” Turk sent over their channel, voice too low to carry for anyone without ear mods. “Page is on point.”

  Devra turned slightly to observe the small opening at the base of the middle tower. Command was always sending the Diggers out to map cave systems, though it seemed like they came back with mineral reports far more often than enemy action intel.

  Dix took the middling distance in a leap, engaging his rebuilt joints and tendons in what, for him, was basically a good stretch rather than any real effort.

  “His face,” Gibbon snorted, scanning the area. “Nobody told Page we had a runner now?”

  “Who would tell Page anything?”

  A chorus of suggestions for telling Page what to do with his anatomy answered Turk’s rhetorical question, and Devra and Shike followed at a more moderate pace.

  “Two lefts and a right,” Page said by way of greeting, his eyes sliding away from the three of them even though he kept his face politely pointed in their direction.

  “What’s it look like?” Devra stared directly at him; intel was intel, even if it came from a squirm like Page.

  “McCall said suspicious. Looked like a rock to me, but he swore he saw wires.”

  “If it has wires or a burning smell—we called you.” McCall joined the conversation through the channel. “No smell, Specialist, but it’s not attached to the wall like it formed there. Could be a weird Huvo thing, but we’ve been in and out of these caves for months, and the cols were going to figure our movements out eventually.”

  Devra kept her gaze focused on Page as she listened, and sure enough, the man started to shift in his tell-tale manner. Fucking squirms, still uncomfortable with the mods as though they hadn’t saved his ass more times than he deserved. She should leave some poppers in his barracks, get some fun out of it and earn some measure of this distrust.

  “Is it a tunnel, a chamber? Open or constrained?”

  “Right on the inside as the corridor opens into a cavern. Iggs and Curry had already broken the plane when I noticed it, so if it’s something, there’s not a trip wire in the archway.”

  “No, if it’s something it might be there to close the opening behind you. Everyone out?”

  “We’re a branch back. See you on the way in.”

  “Dix, you’re with me, you’re my cover for the other side of the cavern. Shike, stay with the Diggers when we meet up with them.”

  “A pleasure as always, Page,” Shike said, causing the other man to look back at him briefly.

  Dix blinked between them, and while it was clear he didn’t understand all the interplay, he knew better than to ask. Coming to Huvo fresh out of the training halls and spending most of his time on Huvo training with them, he hadn’t interacted much with the other kinds of units Command built. Usually better that way; separation while newbies got accustomed to their mods and their place in the Galactic Command structure.

  The caves were the same yellow-orange as most of what she’d seen of Huvo; less dust, more solid, with bands of lighter yellow and darker orange, showing some sort of geological evolution to the unrelenting sameness of the planet over the billions of years since it formed.

  Lolly chirped acknowledgement as it locked onto her path to follow, and she switched her eyes through their settings to scan as they walked. In the early days, she’d sent the robot ahead, but she’d lost two that way, and Lolly, her favorite, was running low on spare parts.

  The humans didn’t have spare parts, beyond the magic Shike could do, so she kept her head on a swivel. Nothing jumped out of the various spectrums she scanned, and Dix didn’t jump, stutter, or mention anything.

  “This part of Huvo is the Oven,” Shike pronounced, tugging his jacket down even as he lifted his head. “Hot and sm
ells like old food.”

  Devra often forgot about her sense of smell, as much of her processing went to other systems, so she paused to take a deeper breath. A hint of ancient meat, maybe, or stale hot air that didn’t move much, baked into place as the dust had baked into rock.

  “You a nose now?” Dix sniffed too, looking unconvinced.

  “Every part of this planet looks like every part of this planet. Maybe it’s hiding something interesting somewhere, but in the meantime, I like to name the pieces so I can keep them straight.”

  “It’s hot all over this quadrant though. Why’s this get to be the oven?”

  “Dix, let me tell you something.” Shike lifted a hand as though about to deliver a lecture, but Devra stopped him with a raised hand of her own.

  “McCall, did you do any sampling in this tunnel? Cores or scrapes? Bring any heavy equipment through?”

  “Negative, Specialist.”

  “Metal flakes.” Devra gestured with a finger, but got no closer to the walls. “There are little sparks of them, and Lolly’s picking up more on her way through. Someone dragged something through here.”

  “Like they made the tunnels?” Dix asked, halting entirely and staring around, trying to see what she saw. Infrared was his strength, and he registered it better than she did. But she had more than a decade of practice noting how light broke different elements, and could hold focus through the ranges better than any eyes she’d ever met.

  “No, it’d be everywhere if that were the case. Tunnel is old dirt, same as everything else here. But something else has been down this way, and if it’s not the Diggers, it’s got to be colonists.”

  “But which group?” Shike asked, knowing none of them could answer. The colonists who’d ‘earned’ their charter mostly tried to stay out of the way of the claim-jumpers and Command soldiers best they could, though there was no telling who was who anymore when it came down to it.

  “We’re a turn away, McCall. Noise you hear should be us.”

  “Confirmed.”

  Dix took the right turn first, checking around the corner. His runner reflexes gave him the best chance to get out of the way if it were all an elaborate ruse or one of the Diggers got jumpy with their trigger.

  “We finally get to meet the new kid.” McCall’s voice lessened the tension in Dix’s shoulders. “Can’t imagine why you keep him cooped up in mod city.”

  “Page,” Shike answered, following Dix without easing his own shoulders in the least. “And all his friends.”

  “Fair enough.” McCall shrugged and gave a vague salute as Devra moved into the corridor with the rest of them. “You put my guts back in where they belong, and I’m gonna be nice to you, is all I’m saying.”

  “I’d rather not see anyone’s intestines today.” Devra considered smiling, but pulled the face mask down from her helmet instead.

  “You do you, Specialist, and none of us have to worry about any of that.”

  “She don’t do her, and none of us have to worry about any of that. Won’t be any intestines left to speak of.” The figure past McCall, facing outward into the cavern, moved closer against the wall to leave clearance for Devra and Lolly.

  “Clear back to the first branch. I’ll let you know if you need to be out of the tunnels entirely once I get eyes on it.”

  “You need cover, just in case?” A second head poked into the archway from inside the cavern.

  “I brought my cover. Appreciate the offer.” Even as Devra spoke, Dix crouched slightly and then exploded into motion, darting down the rest of the tunnel and into the cavern.

  “Shit! I didn’t know we had a runner these days.” The closest figure flipped up their mask as they turned around, revealing a vaguely familiar face. Iggs then, not Curry, whom she hadn’t met. Iggs used to be called something else, but she couldn’t place it. Animal-related?

  “New kid is new,” Dev said, pushing the thought away and gesturing for them to fall back. Lolly tracked in on her treads, and Shike slapped one of her smaller appendages on his way by.

  “Go get it, ladies.” At the noise of protest from the cavern, he added, “You just stand there and look pretty, Dix. Let the ladies do all the work.”

  The world narrowed around her as Devra moved into the cavern. She bit down on her cheek and cycled her hearing through the ranges, listening for the taut string of a waiting receiver.

  Nothing.

  Nothing.

  Nothing.

  Noth—

  Something. A burr in the silence, not quite noise or signal, but an almost hum that itched along her back teeth. She hummed back absently, blocking it, and sent Lolly ahead to the area McCall had marked.

  The robot made no noise and barely disturbed the air as she worked through her analysis programs. Devra splintered her eyes and followed along the spectrum, matching her pace to Lolly’s until the robot went beyond her reach.

  The device had been mounted to the rough edge of the wall to look like a normal rocky protrusion. Lolly’s smallest camera could barely get the angle, which meant her first option was out.

  No way to move it somewhere else, including into Lolly’s containment chamber. That left “defuse it here” or “blow it up,” and if the colonials had set it to blow in this particular place, she could safely assume it would bring down a hell of a lot of rock on top of them. Command wanted the cave system that stretched ahead of them, so if she could defuse it, that was the best option.

  Looked like standard ammonium nitrate, a little fuel mixed in. Nothing biological that either she or Lolly could pick up, nothing too dirty. Definitely enough to collapse the cavern. Remote trigger, which meant either there were eyes on them, or a signal would get sent at whatever time the bombers could assume enough Diggers would be through the cavern and trappable.

  That depended on what their motive was—if it were simply blocking the path, it would have blown the second Iggs or Curry stepped in. Taking out a small force of Diggers would have been doable at any moment after they started waiting on her. The Diggers really should have known better than to wait so close to the device, but at least they’d learned her first lesson well enough to call for her.

  Motives weren’t her issue, so she redirected her thoughts again, throat vibrating in a silent offset to the wait signal from the device in front of her.

  She dropped her eyes into micro and studied the fine blurrings of the fake rock’s surface. At this level of detail it was clear the construct didn’t line up quite the same as Huvo’s rock, though the silica patterns indicated it was at least partly made of native materials. Lolly moved obligingly back so Devra could step up for a close scan. She found the stress fault near the center of the bottom bulge, but completed two passes to ensure there was no better entry point.

  Taking a deep breath, she focused on her fingers, widening the inputs of the feedback loop and concentrating the bulk of her attention on the tens of thousands of sensory neurons loaded into her fingertips. She lifted her hands to the device smoothly, feeling the air drag against her skin, the inescapable grains of fine dust sparking needle-sharp bursts of bright pain. Another deep breath, and she made contact with the surface of the bomb, filtering out the unbearable grittiness of its surface to dig further into the makings of it.

  Any pressure plate sensitive enough to be triggered by her barely-there touch would have exploded at vocal vibrations, so she crouched and craned her head back to let eyes and fingers work together, evaluating the layers of material and determining to the micrometer how Lolly should cut. Engaging the command, she stood and stretched her neck side to side, aware from only the stiffness how long that had taken.

  Lolly extended one of her smaller arms, calibrated the laser, and sliced along the exact path Devra had marked, removing the newly loosed panel with a less finely pointed appendage.

  Good girl. Dev crouched again, put her back to the purely stone wall, and gave herself a moment to wish they’d redone her quadriceps when they were mucking about with her sy
stem.

  The wires were unsurprisingly all the same colors, but one vibrated with more energy than the rest. One at the end felt oddly slippery to her fingers, so she cycled her eyes again. Sometimes that meant primary and secondary trigger, sometimes it told her what order to cut. Getting that one wrong was a good way to lose her face, so she studied longer than usual, shifting each of the bundled cords slightly to peer further into the cuts of the device.

  After that, it was snip, pause, didn’t blow up, snip. The burr in her ears dropped away, and all sense of a waiting connection went with it. She swallowed, felt the roughness of her throat, and stopped humming.

  “Time?” she asked, coughing as the dryness tried to choke off her words. She sent Lolly to finish scanning the cavern. There weren’t any other remote triggers she could hear, but if the colonists were that good at blending materials, any part of the floor could be a mine, and part of the walls could have a tripwire. No need to get careless, even if Page was part of the crew.

  “Forty-five minutes, Dev. Thanks for not blowing up.”

  “We’re not done yet.” Devra accepted the water Dix crossed over to hand her and flipped up her mask. There were no pockets in her suit, and no reason to carry anything that could become a projectile if things went sideways.

  “If you’re going to be there awhile, want me to take out the lookouts?” Gibb’s voice was so casual, Dev almost laughed. With the one bomb defused and no other devices found yet, her de facto command was released, so she waited for Shike or McCall to answer.

  “What do you have eyes on, Specialist?” McCall, unruffled.

  “Looks like two, five kilometers out the flat way. No cover out there, but they’re doing pretty good with camo. Took me a while to catch them—I think one got a cramp.” For Gibb, taking a while meant she’d likely had eyes on them for most of the time Devra had worked on the bomb, and she and Turk had determined between the two of them to wait it out.