Deathtrap

by Craig Alanson

  “Cadet,” Shauna interrupted. “In these suits, our vision is just as good as yours, and the suits can react to pull us away from danger faster than you can even think. You stay behind us, and make sure nothing happens to that scanner.”

  “Yes, Sergeant Jarrett,” Nert pouted, stung by being dismissed so quickly.

  Shauna knew the teenager was hurt. It was not so long ago that she had been his age, she knew what it was like to want approval from people she admired. “Nert,” she added in a softer tone, “you are a cadet, we’re adults. We are responsible for you, understand?”

  “Yes,” he was still pouting.

  “Hey, jackass,” Jesse had no patience for hurt feelings complicating an already hazardous mission. “Shauna’s right about that, but your age is not the real problem. You are Ruhar. If one of us humans get killed down here, everybody will say that’s a shame. If you get killed while you’re with us, the whole Alien Legion concept might be dead, and all the shit we’ve been through out in this God-forsaken asteroid field is for nothing. You got that?”

  Nert kicked himself for acting like the teenager he was, instead of like the soldier he wanted to be. “Yes, Sergeant.” All the self-indulgent poutiness had left his tone of voice. “I capiche,” he was proud of using the human slang. “I want the Alien Legion to succeed. You can count on me.”

  “All right, then,” Jesse straightened, careful not to throw himself off the floor in the planetoid’s low gravity. “Colonel Perkins, we’re at the first door,” he shone his wrist light at the obstacle in front of them. They were already sixty meters down their assigned tunnel, and had not encountered any danger. The door was the first potential hazard. “Permission to proceed?”

  “Permission granted. We’re just getting into our tunnel. Remember to set up redundant communications relays as you go.”

  “Yes, Ma’am.” Jesse did not need to be reminded to leave relays behind them. Even if he forgot, his suit would warn him that the signal strength to the outside was getting spotty. Perkins had said that because she was worried and nervous. The Ruhar primary rescuers were having a lot of difficulty getting to the trapped team. At first, the Ruhar acted like requesting the humans to help was just humoring primitive aliens. Now they were putting pressure on the Mavericks to find an alternate path to the target site.

  “Colter?”

  “Yes?”

  “You three be careful down there.”

  “You too. Thank you for caring, Colonel.”

  “Oh, hell. I don’t care about your sorry ass, Sergeant,” she tried to laugh but her voice was too hoarse. “I just want to avoid the mountain of paperwork I’ll get stuck with if you do something stupid.”

  “Let me write that down. Don’t... do… anything… stupid,” he said slowly. “Got it.”

  That time, her laugh was genuine. “It’s a privilege for me to lead this team, Colter. Let’s keep it that way.”

  The first door responded to a command to slide open, after power was supplied to the mechanism. No air rushed out, behind the door was an almost pure vacuum. That was not unexpected, so Shauna and Nert set up a jack to keep the door jammed open while Jesse worked on supplying power to the inner door. When the inner door cracked open, there was a puff of air, with the exact mixture of gasses the Kristang used in their ships and artificial habitats.

  “So far, so good,” Shauna whispered, shining her wrist light down the darkened tunnel. There were lights on top of her helmet, and the enhanced synthetic vision provided by her visor did not truly need additional illumination. The wrist lights gave her a sense of control and allowed her to feel less uneasy about going into a tunnel deep into an alien base, under the surface of an asteroid where one team had already triggered a booby trap.

  “Yeah,” Jesse whispered back. “Nert, you got both of the relays in position?”

  “Affirmative. Signal strength is nominal,” he was proud to use formal military terms. “Why are we whispering?”

  Shauna swept the tunnel with the light on one wrist, and pointed with the other hand. “Because monsters live in tunnels like this.”

  “Oh,” his voice went up an octave. “I understand. Sergeant Jarrett, I do not think there are any monsters in-”

  “Bots,” Shauna cut him off. “Killer robots can be monsters too.”

  “Yes. There could be bots assigned to defend this facility,” Nert shuddered in his suit. Before they went past the first door, the mission was purely a great adventure to him. The thought of getting killed by mindless, emotionless robots terrified him. Being in combat against the Kristang was something he could understand. Both he and the enemy would experience exhilaration, terror and either triumph or agony. The survivor might even feel regret, possibly sympathy for the vanquished. A robot would feel nothing, his death would mean nothing to the emotionless machine. That scared Nert far more than the idea that his life might end. He tugged the strap to the rifle slung on his back, feeling a surge of determination. The rifle might not save him or his companions, but he could strike back, and that meant something.

  He could see Shauna and Jesse checking the straps to their own rifles.

  “Ok,” Jesse stepped through the doorway. “Let’s get this party started.”

  They worked their way down, winding back and forth. The diagram provided by the Kristang became more and more useless, until after they passed through the eighth pressure door, it totally diverged from reality. “There is supposed to be a three-way junction here,” Shauna consulted the map displayed in her visor, overlaid on the actual tunnel in front of her. Instead, they saw a broad chamber hewed out of the gray rock, with only one door at the far end.

  “I don’t like this,” Jesse gritted his teeth. “That door is leading to the right. Away from where we need to go. We’re getting farther from the target.” To their great frustration, every time the diagram was wrong, it led them away from where they wanted to go. What made the situation worse was the other team was reporting substantial progress toward the target. Jesse had been given a choice of tunnel entrances, and just like every time he picked a line at the grocery store, he had guessed wrong. Shauna assuring him it wasn’t his fault, only made him feel worse.

  Because it was totally his fault.

  “We keep going,” Shauna sounded defeated. “We don’t have a choice.”

  “Yeah we do,” Jesse risked contradicting her. Shauna shot him a look that was less effective than she intended, because her face was partly obscured by the skinsuit helmet, and because Jesse was dead set on not letting Dave Czajka beat him to the target. “We can go back up the tunnel, look for another route, one that leads where we want to go. This,” he pointed to the door on the other end of the chamber, “goes the wrong way.”

  “We are supposed to follow the tunnel,” Nert objected.

  “We are supposed to use our brains,” Jesse smacked a fist into the dull rock of the tunnel. “Our mission down here is to find a way to rescue the people who are trapped.”

  “Fine,” Shauna said softly, in a way that meant Jesse’s idea actually was fine with her. As long as Jesse had some sort of a plan. “You have an idea where to go? We got here by following the tunnel, I didn’t see another way, or we would have taken it.”

  “That chamber we passed, where something had blown up and collapsed the wall, remember that? I want to go back there. The diagram shows there should be a door at the far end.”

  Nert opened his mouth to speak, he froze when Shauna held up a finger right in front of his face. Wisely, he closed his mouth without comment, until they arrived back where Jesse wanted to search. “Wait! Sergeant Colter, we should use the scanner,” he knelt down to take the device off his back.

  “Whatever blew up in there, already exploded,” Jesse stuck his head just inside the doorway.

  “Remember Nigeria?” Shauna tugged gently on his backpack. “The hadjis planted secondary IEDs. We don’t want to get caught by-”

  “I am sorry, Sergeant Jarrett,” Nert tappe
d one side of his helmet. “I did not understand the translation. What is a ‘hadji’, and a secondary IED? I do know an IED is a homemade bomb, is that not correct?””

  Jesse pulled himself back into the tunnel, irritated at the cadet. “Nert, this is not the time to-”

  Shauna took full advantage of the interruption, it gave time for Jesse to reconsider what he was doing. “Nert, ‘hadji’ is just a slang word we used for the enemy on Earth, it doesn’t mean anything. It’s, um, not a nice thing to say.”

  “Oh, boo fucking hoo if those savages didn’t like what we called them,” Jesse snarled. “We weren’t the ones kidnapping girls and blowing up their schools.”

  “Jesse,” Shauna patted his arm through their suits. “That was another time, another war, another planet. Let’s focus on now. Nert, in Nigeria, the enemy would plant bombs that would explode when a patrol went by. Then, they would wait, and blow up a second bomb when people came to help the soldiers injured by the first bomb.”

  “Like I said, fucking savages,” Jesse insisted. He pulled his arm away from Shauna’s grip and glared into the chamber. Something had exploded in there. The ceiling, walls and floor had a fine coating of reddish soot, and all the surfaces were pockmarked with shrapnel. On the floor were several of the nasty jagged ‘stingers’ the Kristang packed into their version of a Claymore antipersonnel mine. The name ‘stinger’ did not convey how deadly the devices could be, for they were designed to dig into and shred armored suits. Both Kristang hardshell and Ruhar flexible armored suits had a layer of nanoscale liquid goo, that could fill in holes to prevent the internal air from leaking out. An armored suit that close to a detonating bomb could be shredded beyond the ability of its nano goo to repair, causing the wearer to suffocate or lose the use of one or more limbs. All of the Mavericks had gone through a ritual of seeing what a Kristang Claymore could do to a Ruhar skinsuit, and none of them would forget that lesson.

  The Ruhar trainers had also warned that the Kristang were sometimes known to coat their stingers in deadly broad-spectrum neurotoxins. The toxins were usually intended to kill Ruhar, or Kristang from rival clans, but some of those chemicals might also disrupt the human nervous system.

  Jesse took another step back. “Shauna, Sergeant Jarrett,” he added to let her know he was totally focused on the mission. “You’re right. There could be another boobytrap in there. To me, it looks like this place blew up a while back, but we should be careful anyway.”

  Cautiously, Shauna stuck one hand into the dark chamber, sweeping the area with the sensitive, full-spectrum camera built into the wrist. All three of them could view the feed from that camera. “Why do you say the bomb wasn’t recent?” She asked.

  Nert guessed. “Is it because there is a layer of regular gray dust on top of the red soot from the bomb?”

  “Bingo, Nerty, you got it,” Jesse patted the cadet on the back. “Jarrett, you see that?”

  Shauna was annoyed with herself. “I see it now. Good eyes, Colter.”

  Jesse could have made a smart-ass remark. He was smart enough to move on. “You think the scanner will pick up an IED?” he addressed the question to Shauna, although Nert carried the scanner.

  Shauna knelt and unfolded the scanner device. “If it works as advertised,” she activated it with an eyeclick on her suit’s visor.

  The scanner was an egg the size of an American football, with four legs that folded up inside it when not in use. When activated by Shauna, the legs slid out, getting a firm grip on the tunnel floor in the planetoid’s microgravity. The nose opened like a flower to expose the antenna. Shauna waved the others away from the doorway. “Get back. The active sensors of this thing will detect most explosive devices, but sometimes the Kristang set their bombs to explode when they’re painted by an active sensor sweep.”

  Nert tried to show how much he knew about the enemy’s tactics. “If the bomb has been detected, the Kristang want to explode it, rather than wasting it? I do not like the Kristang, but I can understand why they would do that.”

  “Yeah,” Jesse shook his head. “Do you see how that makes the lizards feel good, like giving us the middle finger, but it is dumb tactics?”

  “Um,” Nert froze, his eyes open wide. “Because, um, because-”

  Shauna took pity on the cadet while she sent the scanner walking through the doorway. “Nert, sometimes it is better to delay the enemy instead of just blowing stuff up. If the scanner sets off a bomb, that bomb is no longer a threat. But if we detect an active bomb and it doesn’t explode, then we have to disarm it, or detonate it ourselves. That slows us way down.”

  “It does more than slow us down,” Jesse added. “It halts our advance. We can’t move forward until we deal with the bomb. While we’re static, we’re vulnerable. In combat, mobility is life. Did they teach you that at the academy yet?”

  Inside his helmet, Nert bit his lip. “No. Mostly we have been learning theory. That is why I wanted to be here, with you Mavericks. I learn so much more by doing things than by sitting in a classroom!”

  “Is it ready, Shauna?” Jesse asked.

  In reply, she gave a thumb’s up. “Scanning now.” Two minutes later, she had the results. “It’s clear. Hmm, that’s odd. Shit.”

  “What?” Jesse leaned over her shoulder to see the scanner’s data on the tablet she held.

  “Give me a minute,” she flicked a hand back to get him off her back. “You can see the same data in your visor.”

  “Yeah, I know, but,” he got the message and stepped to the side, with Nert then crowding her from the other side. “We want to hear what you think about it.”

  “I think,” she pointed to the rock debris sloped against the far wall. “This is all bullshit.”

  “Darlin’?” Jesse didn’t know what to make of her comment.

  “The stingers on the floor,” she nudged one with a boot. “Are supposed to make us think somebody triggered an antipersonnel device, like a Claymore. No way,” she shook her head and her helmet bobbed side to side. “Whatever blew up here was big, powerful enough to collapse part of the ceiling.”

  “Ok, sure,” Jesse wanted to disagree without sounding disagreeable. “But, if it was an IED, they could have-”

  “This wasn’t an IED. The Kristang aren’t some ignorant tribe living in the bush, scraping together whatever materials they can to make bombs. This,” she jabbed a finger at the chamber’s ceiling, “was a shape charge. In the low gravity of this rock, a crude IED would have scattered the debris all over. Somebody set this charge deliberately, to pile up rocks in front of that door. Then they came back and tossed stingers on the floor, to make it look like some unlucky lizard set off a boobytrap.”

  Jesse was not entirely convinced. “How can you be sure?”

  “Look at the scan data. How many stingers can you count?”

  “Miss Shauna is correct,” Nert jabbered excitedly. “There are only seven stingers, all on the floor right at the entrance. There are not any under the pile of debris. The smallest antipersonnel explosive used by the Kristang packs forty-two stingers,” he announced with pride. That was something useful he learned at the academy.

  “Well, all right then,” Jesse patted Shauna on the back. “Outstanding work there, Jarrett. We can move this rock out of the way? There isn’t another bomb behind the door?”

  “If there is, it is concealed by a very sophisticated stealth field. We can send the scanner through the door ahead of us,” she recalled the device and it crawled back out of the way.

  “How about you keep watching that scanner,” Jesse suggested, “while Nert and I dig that pile of rock out of the way?”

  In the light gravity, their power-assisted skinsuits got the rock moved away from the door quickly. The door was jammed and needed to be cut away with torches, Jesse and Nert each took one side and soon were able to lift the door out of the way. Under Shauna’s direction, the little scanner scooted through the opening ahead of them without incident.

  “
Let’s go,” Jesse declared eagerly.

  “We should call this in,” Shauna cautioned.

  “Already did. The Colonel gave us the go-ahead.” He forwarded the message to her and Nert. “What she didn’t say, and Dave did, is they are making progress. They think they’re within two hundred meters of the place where that Ruhar team is trapped. The Ruhar rescue team has bailed on the route they were taking, and are joining the Colonel.”

  Shauna and Nert shared a look, peering into each other’s helmets. Shauna bit her lip. “If we rush this just so you can beat Dave to the target-”

  “It’s not about beating the other team,” Jesse insisted. “It’s about not doing any less than we can, just because maybe they found a way to get there. No shortcuts, I promise.”

  “Fine,” she handed the folded-up scanner to Jesse. “I will take point.”

  Jesse knew he couldn’t argue.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Shauna led the way, but they walked no more than a hundred meters before reaching the end of the tunnel. Beyond the set of blast doors that acted as an airlock, the tunnel became a hallway, with the gray rock smoothed out on both walls, and a concrete-like substance lined the floor. The ceiling was lower and there were lights set regularly into the rock there, although the lights had no power.

  Another fifty meters showed them why that part of the base lacked power.

  “Now that was a claymore,” Jesse swept this hand across the scorched area. Stingers littered the floor and their jagged edges had more embedded in the walls and ceiling. More telling was the broken body of a Kristang in what was once a formidable armored suit. “This guy caught it right in the face,” he noted. Only the back of the helmet remained, the front had disintegrated.

  “Ooh,” Nert craned his neck upward. “The bomb was concealed in the light fixture.”