“Our orders were recon only.” McCall didn’t sound regretful, but he was the most professional of the Diggers, so Devra couldn’t read too much into it.
She looked up at Dix, remembering his comment about the mass of heat signatures on their way in. If it was just Page, she might have been tempted to follow their orders to the letter and duck out, but McCall and Iggs weren’t so bad. Command could still go fuck themselves, but she wouldn’t lower herself to their level. She nodded at Dix, and he took a breath and broke into the conversation.
“McCall, be advised that about fifty kilometers out I caught a metric fuckton of heat signatures on infrared.”
“You identify the source?”
“Underground city? Building something with a lot of moving parts? Unclear. Orders were to proceed to you.”
“Understood, Specialist.”
Chatter stalled, and Devra studied the openings on the far side of the cavern.
“Orders were to map. Can you all stick around while we knock it out?”
“Our orders were to secure your location, so we stay while you’re here.” Shike said it with confidence, but she knew he was full of shit. They were all curious. Beyond getting shot at, this was the most interesting thing that had happened in months.
“Leave the lookouts unless they move. We don’t need a hundred mole-men coming at us ‘cause we kicked their nest.” McCall grunted, and faint noises indicated they were coming back her way.
“Will let you know if anything changes,” Gibb replied by way of agreement.
“Cavern’s clear as far as Lolly and I can tell.” Devra stood, stretching out her legs. “Let us know if you need us in the tunnels.”
“You don’t want to go in?” Page, of course, wanted everything the mods could offer without needing to treat them as the superior soldiers they were.
“Orders,” Devra replied with such sweetness she figured even Page had to hear the ‘fuck you’ she meant it as. With her number of successful mods, she was worth more than nearly every other soldier on Huvo combined. Maybe not worth enough for a ride home, but as long as she was stuck here, she might as well have some fun with the Pages of the universe.
* * *
Part 3
The number of colonists was staggering. There had to have been more ships than Galactic Command knew about.
Or.
She stopped, putting a hand on the smoothed wall of the cave to sense the vibrations of possible pursuit, and considered.
The subterranean cities she’d seen had taken more layers of this hole-ridden planet than twenty years accounted for. Even fifty.
How long ago had Command jumped their claim?
How many people lived here, fighting back against the couple hundred Command fielded against them? Hundreds of thousands? Millions?
She didn’t care. Everything fell down if you blew the right anchor.
She’d replenished her supply, and she was narrowing in on the anchor.
Take the cities down.
Take Command down.
Let this planet return to the dust it was always meant to be.
Two Months Ago
“These orders don’t make any shitting sense.” Gibb shook her head hard, as though that would reorder the words on the screen.
“Diggers have been going missing, and I don’t know if you noticed, but we’re not getting newbies anymore.” Shike shrugged, focused on his gear.
“We’re not fucking Diggers.” Gibb crossed her arms, pointedly ignoring the boots Turk threw to land near her. “What’s the point of us going in the caves?”
“Off the top of my head, Gibbo?” Shike stared down at his assembled tools, movements jerky. “Orders. Gaping canyons only Dix can jump. Huge pockets in the ground that only you can cover. Landslides only Turk can unpack. Clusters of bombs for Dev to blow up or knock out. Spilled Digger-blood that only I can save. Or.” He took a breath, forcing space between the words that had begun to run together. “It’s just orders.”
“Fuck orders.” Gibb stopped, eyes widening as her own words landed, as they all turned to look at her. Then she set her shoulders and nodded once, the motion sharp. “Fuck orders. Command still hasn’t answered any of us on why Dev is still here, or when the next troop drop off is. Even a damned computer can take the time to tell us why there are an uncountable amount of moving heat signatures on a planet that has a couple thousand colonists and us. What the fuck is going on in the caves? Why is Command so obsessed with them?”
“Maybe because there’s an uncountable number of moving heat signatures in some of them?” Dix offered, nudging her boots closer to her and hopping back when she turned on him. “Even Command doesn’t know everything. If the rest of the Galactic system isn’t communicating, or there are blind spots in what the drones and satellites can put together…”
“Quantum computers stop communicating all the time,” she huffed, but picked up a leg and slammed her foot into one of the boots. “Fucking Command.”
Bile rose in the back of Devra’s throat, and she swallowed it, spreading her fingers and breathing until everything settled. How many more of these runs before Command acknowledged she was well over tour?
There was no world in which she’d let her team go out without her, but if they refused…
Of course they wouldn’t refuse. Gibbon’s temper aside, they were all too thoroughly trained for that.
Still, no one felt much like talking as they suited up, nor for the long flight to their destination. She passed the time recounting the inventory, using Lolly to poke into a box when she couldn’t recall the exact number. There was no explicit bomb threat, but they’d been told to bring the demolition suite, so it was likely she’d get to blow a few debris piles, or maybe a whole new passage. That usually cheered her, even as the days dragged on with no word on her ride home.
“It’s just desert and dust,” Gibbon noted, wrinkling her nose as she scanned their landing site. “The fuck is the cave? Dix, you land on it?”
“Trap doors.” Page’s voice over the channel was almost welcome, after the ten minutes they’d spent looking.
“They’re getting good,” McCall added. “We’d gone too far under, missed your landing. You’re a little early. Don’t shoot, motion to the north of the LZ will be us.”
“Damn well better be,” Gibbon muttered, sighting over her rifle.
Dust billowed, and a section of the ground big enough to be a landing pad rose into the air soundlessly.
“Trap doors!” Shike laughed like a delighted child, and Devra felt her lips quirk in answer. McCall waved his hands over his head and steadily more of his body appeared over the lip of the opening.
“This pre-colony?” Shike asked, crouching at the side and staring at the mechanisms.
“How could it be pre-colony,” Dix asked, staring, “when nothing lived here before us?”
“How can this only be a couple decades old?” Shike replied, pointing at the wear in some of the connections.
“Because Huvo dust is gross.” Gibbon kept her eyes on, backing up toward them and surveying the area.
“Come on down, our orders were to wait on your team. All of you this time?”
“For some fucking reason,” Gibbon replied, spitting to the side. “You sending anyone up for lookout while we’re down with you?”
“Trap door locks from the inside with our program. Lock down the lift, Specialist, and let’s do this.” McCall dropped back into the opening as Gibbon hissed out her breath.
“Turk, carry Lolly, will you? These stairs are narrow, and I don’t want her treads to stutter.” Devra arched her back to loosen it and hoisted the pack holding her suit. Orders hadn’t indicated bombs, but preparation never hurt.
“You want me to carry Lolly and all our gear?”
“You say that like two trips on a set of random stairs deep underground isn’t the best thing to happen to you all day,” Shike interjected, his delight in this new trick of Huvo’s evident enough th
at even Devra laughed, answered by Turk’s deeper one.
“Yeah, yeah. Gibb, you on watch while I do all the heavy lifting?”
“You know I like to watch you work.” Even Gibbon’s voice lightened.
It took Turk three trips, and by the end he whistled cheerfully. His pull-up sets had been interrupted, so Devra figured carrying a half ton of material nearly a hundred meters underground balanced him out. Gibbon came down last, having watched McCall set the lock. Until the last step she’d kept her eyes fixed on the door above them.
“I’d rather you were still up there too,” Devra murmured, and Gibb knocked into her shoulder with a hint of a smile.
“We’ve been down here a few weeks and have mapped a fair amount, but we got dead ends in all directions. One tunnel’s blocked, one cavern’s got an uncrossable chasm, and one gets narrower over a kilometer until it closes, but sounds like there’s an opening on the other side.
Shike’s grin could have lit the caves. He didn’t bother to say ‘I told you so,’ but he radiated it regardless.
This tunnel was a darker orange than the last one they’d found McCall in, smoother and well studded with light sticks. The rest of his team was camped out in the largest cavern they’d seen, at least ten kilometers from end to end.
A large crack split the natural room, almost perfectly centered from each arching wall. As they got closer, Devra stopped, distracted. The opening was studded with enough ridges and natural projections that it made a navigable path. Dark oranges and faded yellows studded the rock in almost-recognizable patterns.
“Have you mapped below?” Gibbon frowned at the crack. Three bodies wide, from their side to the other though each of the branching pathways would keep them single-file.
“A little. It gets deep fast. We reported this just after we’d sent back the rest of the dead-ends and got the order back to wait for you.”
“Our orders were to map the system. Command didn’t mention you’d been here.” Shike glanced around, taking in the team of fifteen camped around the cavern. They were centered on the crack, and rightly so if there were no other ways in or out. “So I think it means down.”
“Want to check the three blocked areas first? Down is a commitment.” Devra leaned over, admiring the swirl of darkest orange that followed one of the potential paths. None of them were quite wide enough for Lolly, either, which made her want to stay up a little longer. Thoroughness.
“Our orders were just to wait for you, so I say we do both. I’ll send a detachment down, with whoever you task to them. Specialist assignments are yours, so you tell me where each goes, and we’ll see what we learn.”
“We stashed food down all the branchings, just in case someone loses their head or there’s a rock fall.” One of the other soldiers, relaxing in half-dress indicating she was off duty, approached and nodded to them.
“Iggs,” Devra said, placing the face and pleased with her recall. The non-specialists rarely made an impression unless they were far on the ends of the McCall-Page spectrum, but this one had been noncommittally pleasant enough times that her identity had stuck.
“Specialist.” Iggs saluted, then turned to McCall. “You want to name assignments before meal call, or—”
Devra would never find out the ‘or.’ An explosion echoed from the depths of the opening in the center of the room, and in the moment they all froze, a second one answered it, shaking the entire cavern and knocking both McCall and Iggs off their feet.
Devra and Turk grabbed each other’s arms and ducked, turning slightly away from each other to keep eyes on as much of the open space as possible.
With little additional warning, the ground around Lolly crumbled, sagged, and then gaped open, the robot plummeting out of sight.
“The fu—” Gibbon didn’t finish her exclamation, a third explosion shaking dust and small debris from the ceiling above as four of McCall’s soldiers lost the ground under their feet, disappearing after Lolly.
“Get to the door,” Shike bellowed, command voice reaching them over the sounds of rocks collapsing and someone screaming.
Devra cycled through her hearing, but either all the remotes had blown, or they were too far down for even her to hear. How far could the signal go in this rock? She’d done the math and assumed all of Huvo would remain consistent to everything she’d seen so far, but this dark orange was composed—
Turk heaved her back toward the door and she snapped ears and eyes back to standard, focusing on the moment at hand, catching her balance to land with her feet under her. Page ran her way, gun out, as though he could shoot the ground and do any good.
She opened her mouth to snap at him, and his head cracked open.
It took her a full three seconds to realize she hadn’t done anything to him, and then realized the shot had come from somewhere above and to her left.
All of the debris falling hadn’t been the explosions, pieces of the wall above them had been removed, and were now filled with very human shapes.
They’d been herded into this cavern. Had left no one upside to cover them. What the hell had Command been thinking?
What the hell had they been thinking, to obey?
A blur of motion, Dix vaulted from the cavern floor to halfway up the wall, landing in one of the newly opened spaces. Screaming answered him, and belatedly Devra went for her gun, running forward to use Page’s body for what little cover it could provide.
She pushed her vision up, focusing in on individual figures in the shadowed holes above.
Gunfire, from above and around her, varied in intensity.
Dampening her hearing, she imagined Gibbon’s cool precision and did her best to take out one target after another. Despite her eyesight, she didn’t have Gibb’s adaptation, and she had three kill shots, eight hopefully serious wounds, and too many misses before she had to reload.
Quick glance around her to get her bearings.
Shike was pulling bodies and boxes toward the wall, aiming to create cover for the wounded. Gibbon darted and fired with exactly the attitude Devra expected, and Turk was hurling rocks into the openings fast and hard enough to slow some of the shooting from above. A body flew out of one of the openings in the rock face, telling her Dixon was still active.
Shooting wasn’t her best offensive weapon, but most of what she had would take out allies as thoroughly as their enemy, and—
“Turk!” Shike shouted, having ripped the lid off a crate of grenades. He heaved a bandolier across the cavern, and Turk snatched it up, pulling pins and pitching them upward. Devra cycled through her vision, looking up, and the air above her sparked in warning.
“Turk, no—”
They’d flooded the cavern with gas. Devra ran full tilt toward the crack in the ground, useless, screaming for everyone to get down, the sound tearing her throat, too late—
Everything went white.
Had her eyes burned out? She didn’t remember losing consciousness, but now there was only silence and darkness around her, the air still and cool. No gunfire. No answer on her channels.
Blood, sticky on her face.
Maybe it was Page’s?
“Shike. Shike?” The slight shift in pressure that told her she still had ear drums, that she still cycled through the ranges.
The darkness grayed as she pushed her vision, then splintered. They were dead.
Command had killed them.
Command and colonists who fought endlessly, longer than Command had told them, longer than sane.
Her ears and eyes gave her nothing.
The endless fighting, over the dust of Huvo, for what?
She’d bring them an end.
* * *
Part 4
Now
She slammed into the ground, her hearing snapping back to aural as her head bounced off the rock below her.
“Grab her arms!” A voice from further back, not from whoever had her pinned—how many were there? Her eyes cycled through their settings, focus hard to find ov
er the ringing in her ears.
“Get the trigger, there’s a remote in her hands!”
A chorus of cursing, hard to separate as her head crashed against the cave floor again. She went limp as they ripped the small device away. Despite that, the force of the grab broke three of her fingers. She tried to dial back the feedback, but everything spun too fast for her control, and she screamed.
The weight on her released immediately, the other body rolling away, and the cursing became sounds of wordless pain.
One shuddering breath, two. A third and she wavered up to her knees, tucking her broken hand close against her chest.
Seven of them. Not Command’s. Colonists then, struggling to get their own balance, blood streaming from ears or eyes. She couldn’t get them all, but this? This was the largest pre-Command, subterranean city she’d found, and Command had built right on top of it.
It would be enough. She could take out Command and as many colonists as could fit in one abnormal city.
She breathed again, got one foot under her, then the next. Made it upright.
The largest of them stopped writhing, eyes locking onto her movement. He pushed against the ground, starting to stand. She smiled, looked at him, and down at the remote in his hand.
“That isn’t the trigger.”
He was too slow. He was always going to be too slow.
The noise in her throat was one no human could have made, and few human ears could hear. She matched the pitch of the humming frequency of the bomb, her bomb. It had taken her a full month, stalking the underground, setting her charges. She felt the click of them coming together, her vibration and the bomb’s waiting signal. It landed with a solid weight in her mind.
Fingers, eyes, ears, voice. Fours were always crazy. She didn’t need to block the bomb’s signal anymore, just meet it. Call it home.
She kept her eyes open to the end.
It was beautiful.
* * * * *
We Dare Page 44
