by Aer-ki Jyr
David trudged out into the snow, feeling a chill sink into his armor, but one that he quickly dissipated with a touch of Rensiek heat produced throughout his body as he activated a waypoint for the coordinates that his team had been given for the tunnel endpoint he’d assigned himself to. The aquatics scanning track had led one of the tunnel spurs directly to this island and had calculated its upward trajectory to reach the surface somewhere near where they had landed, though the water craft obviously couldn’t track the tunnel once it crossed over onto land.
The island was a large one, so the best they could do was narrow down the area, which they’d pinpointed to within a 500 meter radius…which David thought was pretty damn good, though satellite reconnaissance showed no structures or topography in the area, just a flat, snow covered mass of land surrounded by ice-locked ocean.
The other members of Green Team weren’t with him. Jet and Nathan had gone with the aquatics team, while the other 7 members were each heading up their own tunnel team, given that aquatics had found a total of 8 tunnels spurs. David wanted to hit them all simultaneously as the drilling team began to chew its way down towards the base. That way The Word wouldn’t have any escape routes, plus he didn’t know what kind of tunnel defenses they might have.
He’d brought along some reconnaissance drones to probe for any booby traps, but first things first…which meant finding the damn tunnel entrance underneath all this snow and ice.
The waypoint marked a position some 700 meters to the north, so David started walking across the middle of the dropship formation and cutting underneath one of their long wings, getting a momentary shield against the thick falling snow that was obscuring his view of the others, though his HUD was able to keep track of their transponder signals just fine and give him position placements for them all.
Those closest to him were visible in their silver acolyte armor, with him being the only ranger amongst the group and no adepts. He’d pulled as many high level Archons as he could get from both Earth and the rest of the star system, giving him a potent, yet sizeable force to assault whatever defenses The Word may or may not have at their base. They were going into this blind, for the Master they’d taken had only heard about the facility while never having been there, nor having a hand in its construction. Those secrets, it seemed, belong to the Primarch alone.
“Everyone form on me,” he ordered over the comm. “Lateral line with spacing. We walk north towards the waypoint, report anything on or under the snow.”
The ID tags on his battlemap began to move his direction, so David slowly began walking out from under the Dragon’s wing and away from the dropships, which he’d brought along some Regulars to stand guard over. He commed them for a quick check, then turned on his Pefbar and focused it down into the snow and ground beneath, looking for any signs of the tunnel exit as he walked forward.
David got a brief headache as he suddenly was able to see every single falling snowflake in crystal clarity…but then his mind adjusted to the overload of data and he was able to ignore it as he focused on the ground, seeing his team’s signals beginning to stretch out on both his left and right into a shallow ‘V’ that gradually straightened into a flat line as they all trudged their way forward through the thick snow.
Below the recent snow was a thicker, denser pack that supported their weight…and below that was a sheet of ice covering the dirt. In some places David could see deep enough to encounter the bedrock, but if there was a tunnel exit nearby he shouldn’t have to look that deep, for The Word would need access through the dirt, so whatever they’d built here had to be shallow.
And whatever they’d built here either had to have its own vehicles or arrange for a pickup, because there were no roads nor any signs of civilization this far north, which made David wary about what they were about to butt heads with.
“Got something,” Harry-8334 reported.
David glanced at his position on the battlemap, for he couldn’t see more than two men down either side with the blowing snow obscuring his vision and now covering most of his own green armor.
“What do you see?”
“Subsurface structure buried in the snow. Nothing up top though.”
“Everyone, rendezvous at Harry’s position and give me a perimeter scan,” he said, heading his way. “And watch out for concealed turrets.”
David accelerated up into as much of a run as he could manage with his feet sinking into the snow up to his knees, and got over to Harry just after his own Pefbar penetrated down to the squarish vertical rectangle that the acolyte had discovered.
“What do you make of it?” Harry asked, knowing the ranger’s psionic skills were well beyond his own.
“I can see the tunnel beneath it. It dead ends here,” he said, trying to get as much information out of his senses as he could. “Nobody’s down there that I can detect.”
David set up three new waypoints heading north from his position along the length of the fairly deep tunnel that he just saw eeking off in that direction.
“I need psionic sweeps at and around these points. Mechanisms and minds.”
“On it,” one of the acolytes responded, with several more joining him as their dots on the battlemap repositioned.
“It looks like a lift shaft,” Harry commented. “But it looks incomplete, like they dug and built it here all the way out from their base and never finished it. It’s still got several meters of dirt overtop.”
“Nearly right,” David confirmed, dropping to a knee as he continued to mentally scan the area below. “There’s a flat top to it, but inside there’s a rotor assembly.”
“I…there, ok, I can just make that out. But what’s a giant fan going to do if it’s not connected to the air?”
“Not a fan, an auger,” David said, dropping all the way to his chest in the snow to get his head a bit closer. “It’s meant to drill the last bit up to the surface.”
“Emergency exit?”
“Possibly…which would explain why there’s no guards,” he said, switching to teamcomm. “Anyone find anything?”
He got back a host of negatives, confirming his suspicion that this wasn’t a tunnel shaft that was being used by The Word.
“So we need to dig down to it?” Harry asked.
“Maybe,” David said, focusing his Pefbar into as narrow a cone as he could to reach down to the base of the vertical rectangle where the tunnel met with it.
Suddenly there was a rumble from underneath and David jumped to his feet. “Maybe not. Everyone fall back,” he said, planting a special waypoint on the battlemap for them to scatter away from.
Beneath them David and some of the others whose Pefbar was advanced enough saw the rotor blades begin to spin within their casing, then once they got up to speed they elevated and broke through the thin metal, digging into the dirt and rising up towards the surface.
As David ran through the snow he looked back visually, seeing a mound of snow push up from below, then a stream of dirt burst out, blanketing the white landscape with something their eyes could actually lock onto. A few seconds later the dirt flew off the rotating auger as it came into view, with the square shaft rising up to the surface underneath it, forming a metallic hut that the falling snow started to blanket.
The rotors spun to a stop and David walked back over to it, hiking up and over a meter thick mount of snow/dirt around the new pavilion and stepped inside the two opposite walls, getting some cover from the snow as he spotted a control panel.
“It’s a lift,” he said over the comm. “Five with me, then come down in shifts.”
David switched his comm over to a frequency that would reach the dropship pilots, then ordered them to reposition their circle around the lift shaft as Harry and four other Archons stepped inside shoulder to shoulder with him, leaving just enough room for them to maneuver if/when combat broke out, otherwise they could have squeezed in more than twice that number.
David pressed the ‘down’ button and the floor began
to lower them into the metallic hole. Once their heads passed below the rim and descended another two meters, an iris closed above them, shutting out the cold and the dim light, leaving them in total darkness.
Fortunately that wasn’t a problem, given that their Pefbar allowed them to see quite well, not to mention that their armor also had lights if needed, though none of the Archons turned them on, not wanting to make better targets for themselves when the lift reached the bottom.
There was no door on it, so a crack formed at their feet first, then it expanded up into a full square opening that led them into a very wide and deep tunnel at the base of what looked like a loading dock and a pair of ramps…with absolutely no one in sight.
Harry noticed the single control panel on the wall beside the lift shaft, noting it only had one button.
“You pressed that from up there?”
“Barely,” he admitted. “Saves a lot of digging.”
“No lights,” Mike-10395 observed, looking at the ceiling and walls that were clearly synthetic rather than having been cut out of rough stone…then again, with an Ocean nearby one didn’t want to have to worry about potential leakage. Still, this tunnel entrance was the nearest to the base coordinates at some 420 miles away, meaning someone had gone to a lot of work to carve out and line the tunnel…yet they hadn’t bothered to add lights?
“Maybe they haven’t finished yet, or maybe they don’t need them,” David said, pressing the ‘up’ button on the lift and hopping off it as it returned back to the surface so the next group could make their way down. “That’s a lot of tunnel to light if you’re hardly ever going to use it.”
“We would,” Mike noted.
David frowned as the lift disappeared above the entrance. “Point.”
“You think the other tunnels are like this?” Harry wondered.
“No, I think we got the spare,” David said as he got on the teamcomm. “Looks like we’re going to need the mongooses after all. Get them unpacked once the dropships move. Should be able to fit four.”
“Wide tunnel,” Harry remarked after he’d finished. “Too big for this little exit.”
“I was thinking the same thing,” another acolyte remarked. “Unless all the tunnels are the same size.”
“A lot of extra digging,” Harry replied, with the Archons looking out down the tunnel as far as their Pefbar would allow. They could see the floor, walls, and pointed ceiling forming a house-like pentagon, but there was nothing visible as the tunnel disappeared beyond their view a few dozens of meters ahead, depending on the individual Archon.
David went ahead and flicked his suit’s lights on, but they didn’t penetrate much further. The other five did likewise, brightening the immediate area with small floodlights, but the massive tunnel, easily wide enough to hold a four-lane highway, swallowed them up, not letting them see very far ahead, but according to the reconnaissance scans the tunnel descended at a shallow angle until it reached a depth of several kilometers below the seafloor, then it flattened out and wiggled its way out towards the center of the Arctic, intersecting with another spur line before connecting to the main base.
There were no other stops, so far as the limited scan could see, but a small outcropping or checkpoint wasn’t out of the question…though David got the feeling they weren’t going to find anything but empty tunnel until they got out to their destination.
It took longer than he expected for the first group of mongooses to come down. They’d packed them into the dropships in case there wasn’t any local Word transportation for them to pirate, given the hundreds of miles that they weren’t going to travel on foot. Each of the mongooses had been equipped with a backup fuel canister underneath the seat sufficient to get them out and back at least once on the furthest length of tunnel…with David’s being the shortest of them all, meaning they shouldn’t have any problems, and could probably make it on a single load, but given the lengths involved they didn’t want to take chances, which is why they brought a mongoose for each person, giving them the option to double up if one or more became damaged.
This was The Word after all, and even though he didn’t feel like there was any danger here, they weren’t above using booby traps, so they’d also brought a long a few multi-seaters that could carry extra gear, including some drones. Only if they got very lucky would they get to the base and find the doors open, and with this entrance not having any defenses whatsoever David pretty much ruled out that possibility.
Whatever was waiting for them they’d tackle while the drilling team created their own back door…he just hoped the base didn’t have a self-destruct nuke tucked away, and they’d brought ultra-sensitive detectors to try and smoke out that possible threat, but if it was well-shielded they’d never know until it was too late.
Which was why the drones got to go first, both in the tunnels and the drilling shaft.
Once all 32 Archons and their rides were down the shaft…with the mongooses having to be pushed more than driven through the thick snow…David mounted up his low to the ground four wheeler with a small gear satchel attached to the back in place of a second rider and trolled his way up to the front of the group, with the onboard lights punching much further down the tunnel than their armor’s had…yet still they were ate up by the distances involved.
“Travel by twos,” David ordered, pulling out ahead but at a speed the others could easily match as they formed up. “3 second spacing. If we come up on something I don’t want us pancaking. If anyone has trouble say so immediately. It’s a long walk back if you fall off the group, and the tunnel is smooth enough we’re going to be moving fast. Let’s go.”
David, now with Harry flanking him on the left and both of them with meters of space between them and the walls, accelerated smoothly, dragging the others behind him in a long convoy of nearly silent vehicles, but with the lack of any other sounds they made for a buzzing swarm of bees as they zipped off down the annoyingly straight tunnel, with David feeling the slight downhill as he passed 100km per hour. He continued to accelerate further, eyes focused ahead in case any obstruction might occur, but none would come.
Over the next several hours the mongooses would fly down empty tunnel enroute to the branch point…which was likewise undefended. It was merely a splitting of the tunnel, with no sign of anyone in either direction. The spur turn was the largest they had to navigate, but while the rest of the tunnel appeared straight there were very shallow adjustments as it almost imperceptibly zigzagged its way across the Arctic bedrock, allowing the mongooses to maintain their high rate of speed.
The closer they got to their target the more angst David felt. He knew the drilling team was even now coring its way down to the base, and he wondered how close they had to get to breaching before The Word would become aware of their activity. If it’d been Star Force, they would have put some small sensors on the Ocean floor above, or maybe that was just paranoid thinking. After all, The Word had built this base by digging under the Arctic because they couldn’t venture out into the ocean without Star Force’s aquatics fleet noticing.
So no, they probably didn’t know they were being drilled down to, but thanks to David’s group’s easy insertion, it was questionable as to who would get to the target first, and what they would find when they got there.
David didn’t like going in blind, but given the size of these tunnels, the obvious difficulty in crafting them, and the fact that only the Masters knew of their existence told him that this was finally the rat hole Star Force had been looking for the past 45 years, and he was eager to get inside and ruin their day.
3
After more than 5 hours of travelling through the dark, annoyingly straight tunnel the view ahead finally changed. What had been a black pit directly ahead of them solidified in the faintest glare of their headlights and David immediately eased off the accelerator.
“Hold up,” he ordered, gradually slowing down his mongoose to a stop as the rest of them caught up and idled behind him, still
keeping decent formation spacings. David activated the zoom on his helmet and got a decent look at what appeared to be a massive door or wall ahead, blocking the tunnel off, though they were still far enough away that the dim lighting wasn’t very distinct, and they were so far away he didn’t have a hope of reaching out with his psionics for any additional information.
“Break out a drone,” he ordered, flicking on his Pefbar and adding it to the view of dozens of mongoose lights just before there was a small flash ahead, followed by a super-loud ping/screech as something flew past them over their heads…then the boom of a cannon caught up to them as it reverberated down the tunnel.
“Get against the walls!” he said over the comm as he drove his mongoose up against the right side just as another ping/screech sounded, this time closer to them and he could see just a tiny blur of a projectile coming up from a low angle as it deflected off the floor of the tunnel and passed through the Archon formation…hitting one of the multi-seaters.
The four wheeler got hit in the back quarter, shredding and spinning it about at the same time while throwing the single rider and cargo off violently into the side wall, with the momentum transferring and pushing the broken vehicle back down the tunnel the way they’d come.
“Eyes on with snipes, rockets ready,” David said, having neither on his mongoose, but he knew others did. “What have we got?”
Another projectile whizzed by them, this time not hitting the floor until it was passed them all, and David could see it gouge out a shallow trench in the floor where it hit.
“Cannon attached to the ceiling,” one of the acolytes reported. “Marking now.”
“Take it down,” David said unnecessarily, for a split second later a rocket whizzed back the other way, followed by two more at intervals, streaking down the long tunnel towards the laser dot the sniper had on the inverted tank turret. Another projectile shot through the Archons before the first of the rockets hit, followed quickly by the others.
