by Rick Partlow
Everything was chaos and clamor and light and heat, and my legs were burning and sweat was pouring off of me despite the cold against my bare face. Buildings flashed by me on either side, warehouses and workshops and store-fronts and row-houses, most of them damaged, many destroyed, and I only took note of them in surveying glances so cursory they were almost futile. If the enemy, or even an enemy was lying in wait for me in one of the buildings, then I was dead twice over, because pausing to deal with them would give the damn drop pod time to catch up to me.
Every time the thing dropped out of my sightlines, I searched desperately, looking for somewhere I could hide not just from visual sensors but thermal ones. If I’d been wearing a helmet, I would have had some protection from thermal detection, but for the moment I was a literal hothead, not just a figurative one the way my mother had always said. And there was nowhere obvious to conceal myself. Maybe the buildings yawning broken and open around me had basements and maybe they didn’t, but I didn’t have time to search through them and kick open locked doors.
And I was getting tired. I gave myself a dose of stimulants from my pharmacy organ and felt the fatigue falling away beneath a haze of energy; but it had the dirty, greasy patina of the artificial, and it wouldn’t last long. When I came down, the weariness would be back twice as bad as before.
I flinched away from an explosion that tore the corner off of the wooden patio of a building only twenty meters away, and saw the drop pod hanging in the air at the other end of the street I was crossing. I didn’t have the breath to curse or the time to return fire so I just drew on reserves that came from a miniature pharmaceutical plant beside my stomach and robbed a biochemical Peter to pay a biological Paul. I felt the burst of speed carrying me across the street like it was someone else pushing me from behind, and then I was in the alleyway between a fabricator shop and something that might have been a theater before the roof had collapsed.
At the other end of that alley was a fire team of Predecessor Cultists. The pod’s pilot had to have been calling them in, and I kicked myself in the ass for assuming that they wouldn’t have EM communications just because they were jamming ours. There wasn’t time to bring my rifle to my shoulder, but my contact lens was connected to its sight, so I was able to put the targeting reticle in the general area of the center of mass of the closest of them, about thirty meters away. I braced the stock against my side, clamped down on the vertical foregrip and sprayed out half a magazine on full-auto.
The Gauss rifle’s rate of fire wasn’t anything to write home about, not like the electromagnetic needle-guns the Tahni had used in the war, but it made up for that by its recoil making it damn near uncontrollable on full auto. I don’t know why the hell the designers had included the option, because the Marine Drill Instructors had made clear in very obscene terms during Boot Camp that we were never to use it.
The kick and the muzzle rise almost tore the rifle out of my hands, and I’m fairly sure the last three rounds went somewhere into the woods a couple kilometers past the city, but the burst had the desired effect: the Cultists hit the dirt. Two of them hit it permanently, with massive wounds through their chests, and I thought I might have hit one or two more but I didn’t stick around to find out.
I had a microsecond’s mental debate about whether they’d be expecting me to run back the way I’d come and I decided it was what made the most sense and that the pod would likely be sitting back there waiting for me. Instead of doing that, I ran right into the teeth of the fire team, dancing between them where they’d tried to take up prone firing positions. Two of them tried to get up as I passed, attempting to swing their carbines around, but I smashed the butt of my rifle into the neck of one of them, then caught the other just under the helmet with a kick from the armored toe of my combat boot.
Both of them sprawled backwards and then I was through them and sprinting out the other side of the alley, swapping out magazines for my rifle with motions practiced enough to become instinctive. The others were firing at me now, if rather panicked and inaccurately, so I cut right and headed down the next street over to get out of their line of sight. I didn’t see anyone on my team, even though I knew I was getting close to Koji’s place by now.
Where the hell were they?
Then I cut through to the next street over and skidded to a halt, eyes going wide. I didn’t recognize it at first, because there wasn’t much left to recognize. It had taken at least three or four proton blasts to do it, I figured, but it didn’t look like they were stingy about those. Smoke billowed off the wreckage, and it was scattered so far and so small that there must have been secondary explosions from the ammo Koji had stored there.
“And that’s the end of plan B,” I muttered.
I wondered if the cagey little bastard had made it out, then decided that of course he had. He was a cockroach, like the Sung Brothers…like Mother. They never got what they deserved and they always survived.
A whining hum broke me out of my reverie and I snapped around and saw the drop pod coming over the rooftops about a kilometer behind me. The damn thing was like a tick on a dog, except in this case the tick was bigger than the damn dog.
Shit. I didn’t even know which way to run anymore.
“This way!”
I blinked, half sure I’d imagined the voice. I looked around and saw a hint of movement in the doorway of a small building, maybe a workshop, with half the roof collapsed. Then my contact lens adjusted to the dimmer light inside and I saw it was a kid…the kid. It was the boy from the first night, the one we’d saved from the mercenaries. He was waving at me from shelter, too cautious or too afraid to leave it.
There wasn’t really any other choice. I ducked through the partially blocked doorway and into the shadows, hoping I wasn’t leaving the frying pan for a quick trip into the fire.
***
The sheet metal stairway was dark and narrow and so long that I was beginning to wonder how far down this basement was. I didn’t ask the kid; he hadn’t offered another word after the yell that had led me in here. I thought perhaps he was afraid the Cult would have detected it, and maybe he wasn’t wrong. When we came out at the bottom, it wasn’t a basement after all; it was a tunnel, dug into the rock coarsely enough that I thought it had to have been done by primitive machinery and not an excavation laser.
Chemical strip lights lined the walls, along with what seemed like a constant, moist slime that radiated a damp chill even through my armor. As we stepped away from the concrete slab of the stairway landing, I could hear, if not feel, my boots splashing in shallow puddles of water.
“Where are we heading?” I asked the kid, risking the words now that we were at least twenty meters underground.
“We’re almost there,” he promised me, not wanting to slow down.
It was only another thirty or forty meters before we came to the chamber. It was up a short set of steps carved into the rock, and out of the water, and it was brighter lit than the tunnel. Inside it were a line of plastic cots, a few folding tables and chairs, some generic storage totes…and Bobbi, Calderon, Marquette and everyone else. Except Vilberg. He wasn’t in the room, and I wondered if he’d made it out of the initial drop pod attack.
“Good to see you, Munroe,” Bobbi said. She had her helmet off and I could see the worry in the set of her mouth. “Thanks, kid.” She nodded to the boy, but he didn’t respond.
“Anyone know what happened to Vilberg?” I asked her.
“Last I saw him, he was with you,” she replied, raising her hands palm-out. She didn’t seem too broken up about it, but then Bobbi wasn’t quick to make new friends.
Shit. I didn’t feel right leaving him behind, but where the hell would I look for him? I’d covered at least ten square kilometers getting here.
“What is this place?” I asked the boy.
He didn’t look at me when he answered, an expression on his face like a perpetually abused animal.
“It’s a bratva hide-out,” he t
old me, his voice barely above a whisper. “My mom told me about it. She used to work for them before she had us.”
“Us,” he’d said. I didn’t want to ask who “us” was, not after he’d told me before that he was alone now.
“Why weren’t you hiding out here the whole time?” I wondered.
“It took me a while to find it,” he admitted. His eyes flickered my way, grey and slitted, then looked away again just as quickly. “When I did, the door was locked.” He shrugged. “The next time I came by, there wasn’t a door anymore.”
I looked back the way we’d come. “Is there another way out?”
He nodded, motioning farther down the tunnel from the chamber. “It starts going up again in a bit. Comes out a couple streets over in a bar.” He shrugged in his oversized, ripped jacket. “What’s left of a bar.”
“This is a good place to wait it out,” Calderon declared from where he sat on one of the cots. “We only have a few hours until your ship gets back, right?”
I nodded, moving deeper into the chamber and setting my Gauss rifle down on one of the tables. Marquette was lying on the next cot over from Calderon, not asleep but collapsed in exhaustion.
“Are you sure this is safe?” I asked the kid. “I mean, for you. You aren’t going to wind up in trouble with the bratva because you brought us here, are you?”
“He has my permission.”
I had nearly ten years of instincts and habits ingrained into me and my pistol was in my hand and pointed at the entrance to the chamber before my brain had recognized the vaguely machine-like tone of the voice. I still almost put a round through Anatoly’s face before I realized it was him. The cyborg had seen better days. His clothes were charred and torn, and he had dried blood crusted on the left side of his face from a pressure cut.
“Hello, Mr. Munroe,” he said, stepping up into the chamber. He barely fit through the door.
The others didn’t seem surprised, so I assumed they’d known he was here.
“Anatoly.” I nodded to him, lowering my handgun but not re-holstering it. “Things don’t look so good out there.”
“You have a gift for understatement, Munroe.” He put his back to one of the carved stone walls and locked his legs in place, the cyborg equivalent of sitting down and making himself comfortable. “In the last six hours, the Predecessor Cult has killed at least half my people and, as your Marines might put it, destroyed the unit cohesion of the rest.”
He paused, and I had the feeling that, if he’d still had biological eyes, they would have been closed.
“They overran my offices two hours ago,” he went on softly in that incongruously melodic voice of his. “Killed everyone there and took the artifact. I thought that’s what they wanted, but they haven’t stopped.”
“They want him,” I nodded over at where Marquette was slowly sitting up in the cot. “He knows where the rest of it is.”
Anatoly grunted dispassionately. “A few hours ago, I would have tried to kill you all and give him to them to end all this. Now…” He moved his head in what might have been a shrug. “Now, there is nothing left to save, is there? We’ve lost.”
“Everyone lost,” I corrected him. “You, the bratva, the Sung Brothers, us.” I motioned at the kid. “Them. Especially them.”
The boy looked over at me, his face still with that numb, cold expression, like he’d never feel anything again. But he’d cared enough to save us…
“I’m Randall Munroe,” I said, trying to get him to meet my eyes. “What’s your name?”
“Amos.” He looked up. “Amos Dobrev.”
“Thanks for helping us, Amos.”
“He told me to,” the kid said without a hint of shame, pointing at Anatoly.
The cyborg smiled. “I was keeping an eye on the street.” He waved upward. “There are hardwired cameras up there.”
“What do you want?” I asked him bluntly. I didn’t feel the least bit bad about it; he wasn’t going to shelter us out of the goodness of his heart. Whatever else this guy was, he was also an enforcer for a criminal gang.
“A way out.” His answer was just as blunt and plain-spoken, the grin leaving his face. “This place is done, even if and after the Cultists leave. I want a ride somewhere more hospitable. I hear Canaan is a nice place for my people these days.”
“You help us get to the ship,” I agreed, “and you’ve got a deal.”
“Until then,” Anatoly said, “there’s food in the lockers.” He motioned at the polymer storage tubs.
“Protein bars anyway,” Sanders clarified, tossing me a couple of them.
I caught them one-handed and began unwrapping one, then sat down on the cot next to Marquette and offered him the other. He looked better now that he’d been able to rest, and he tore into the ration bar like he hadn’t eaten in days. I eyed him sidelong, chewing my own meal sedately while he sprayed crumbs over his bushy beard.
“What was it like?”
He glanced over sharply at my question, eyes hooded and cautious.
“The place where you found the stuff,” I amended, though I was sure he knew what I meant. “What was it like?”
“It’s all underground,” he said around a mouthful of stale chunks of protein infused with vitamins and minerals. “There’s nothing on the surface, nothing to show what’s down there. It’s not even really habitable anymore, even though it’s got that terraforming fungus. I think it’s really old.”
He paused, swallowing the last of the bar.
“Inside…it’s like there are things you can’t even see.” I squinted at him, uncomprehending and he sighed. “I mean, you see the things, but they’re so strange, so not like anything you’ve ever experienced, that you don’t really see them.”
“So, you couldn’t tell what anything was?” I was almost disappointed. Part of me dreaded what he’d found, knowing how people like my mother and uncle would use it, but another part… Well, these were the Predecessors we were talking about. Legends, myths, bedtime stories people had told their children for over a hundred years.
“Not all of it,” he admitted. “But there were ships. I could tell what those were. Like glowing green tubes, floating over their landing pads. Floating there for hundreds of thousands of years.”
I tried to imagine it, feeling the same sort of tingling go up my spine that I’d experienced when Gramps used to tell me about the Ancients and their secrets. Then I imagined that kind of technology in the hands of the Cult or the cabals and felt a different sort of chill.
“Did you tell them anything?” I needed to know. “Did they get anything out of you?”
“Not what they wanted.”
His beard split in a white grin that wasn’t at all pleasant looking, and I got the sense for the first time that Captain Marquette wasn’t a very nice person. I guess I should have known that; nice people don’t try to sell advanced alien technology to the Pirate World cabals.
“I had counter-conditioning when I was in the military,” he told me, leaning over conspiratorially, “so the drugs the Sung Brothers had lying around didn’t do much. They hadn’t gotten past that stage yet when your girl there,” he nodded at Bobbi, “broke me out.”
I breathed out a sigh of relief. Thank God for small favors. I started to stand from the cot, but he stopped me with a hand on my arm.
“Don’t you want to know where it is?” His tone was almost playful and he punctuated it with almost manic laugh. “It seems like everyone wants to know that.”
“No,” I said flatly, getting up and stepping away from him. “And I don’t want anyone else to know, either.”
Chapter Fourteen
“Munroe.”
I came awake at the light touch on my arm, before I even heard Bobbi’s voice, and looked around, blinking uncertainly. I was lying in one of the cots in the hide-out, up against the wall, and I didn’t remember going to sleep.
“How long was I out?” I mumbled, rubbing a hand over my face.
�
�Five hours,” she said, and I sat up straight, eyes flying open.
“Shit.” I swung my legs off the side of the cot, feeling instinctively for my holstered handgun. “You shoulda’ woke me up earlier.”
“You needed the rest,” she told me. I looked at her and saw the dark circles under her eyes.
“And you didn’t?”
“I was going to take the next shift.” She shrugged. “But something’s up. Anatoly wants to talk to you.”
Anatoly, as it turned out, was in another room just down from the main chamber, a much smaller one that was secured behind a very solid-looking metal door. It was ajar and when I pushed it open, I could see the glow of a dozen obsolete, two-dimensional flat-screen monitors mounted on racks set into the stone wall and fed with cables that led upward out of insulated pipes that ran through holes drilled into the ceiling.
I could see the city streets on the screens, and I guessed they were hooked to the wired exterior cameras Anatoly had mentioned. It was sometime past noon outside, and the glare on the lenses made it hard to see details, but I could make out armored Cultists wandering around out there, up to something. Maybe looking for us.
“I’m glad you’re awake,” the big cyborg said, not turning to look at me. “We have a situation outside.”
I glanced at him, then moved closer to the screens. Everything came into focus as the primary went behind a thick, gray cloud. The Cultists weren’t just looking for us, they were pulling civilians out of their homes, and their shops, and their basements. They’d corralled them in the streets up and down the central section of town, the area where I’d been chased around by the drop pod. It was still out there, too, buzzing around just over the rooftops, and I thought I saw the shadow of an assault shuttle pass over up in the clouds.
“What the hell are they doing?” I wondered, shaking my head.
By way of response, he touched a control on the wall and activated the speakers.
“…immediately!” A voice boomed out across the streets as if it came from everywhere. “You have until 1500 hours local time to respond!”
