by Jack Colrain
The soldiers reached the base of the building as the fighter opened fire again. The apartment building didn’t put it off, however, and its explosive plasma bolts slashed down through the tower’s angled walls and through the floors to rip into the lobby between the building’s legs. The blasts tore two more soldiers to shreds and hurled chunks of floor around. Everyone threw themselves into the lee of the tower’s legs in the hope of gaining a measure of safety, and then the fighter was arcing away to turn for another run.
“We must have really pissed them off now,” Daniel said. “Did their fucking president live in that building or something?”
“It certainly seems an odd change in their behavior,” Wilson agreed. “You might well be proved right about them,” he added sadly.
“We need to get out of here before anything gets proved,” Daniel said. “Look at this.” One of the tower’s legs had lost some wall, and Daniel was surprised to see that the spiral from a Gresian staircase went down from ground level as well as up. He looked at Wilson. “Tunnels?”
“Almost certainly,” Wilson agreed. The sound of the fighter was getting louder again, and it had been joined by a second fighter engine, too.
“Downstairs, everyone,” Daniel ordered, shoving Wilson in first. The lobby was already lit up with an actinic glare as the remaining Hardcases, plus Torres, dropped down into the stairwell tube. “If we’re lucky,” Wilson was saying, “we might be able to access their whole tunnel system from here.”
“Would that take us into the Shaldine facility?” Daniel asked.
“I doubt it, but we might be able to use a nanoblock to tunnel through and access it without returning to the surface.”
Daniel nodded. “Doug, that makes good sense. Cole, is that doable?”
“Yes, sir.”
Daniel was feeling a little better already, and satisfied that they hadn’t blown their chance of completing their mission. The stair frame led downwards to an underground complex, which Daniel supposed was the building’s basement. It was pitch dark and had wide corridors, so Daniel ordered “Moonbeams.” The Hardcases turned on their flashlights, playing them over the walls.
At first, Daniel couldn’t help being confused, wondering what sort of standards of art the Gresians had, but then he heard Wilson say “Oh my god” in a sepulchral voice. More surprisingly, Palmer and Bailer both exhaled “oh, fuck no” at the same time.
The walls were covered with artwork. Nothing that would hang in the Louvre or the Smithsonian, but the kind that would be familiar to many domestic refrigerators. They boasted stick figures, and colorful animals, and simplistic houses and sunrises…. Children’s paintings.
Every room they looked into was filled with strange desks, books, and writing implements. And then something moved in a corner, and Daniel raised his shotgun, the other Hardcases raising their weapons, too. Palmer reached across and pulled down a pile of desks with a sharp, deafening clatter. The creatures behind them whimpered and growled, and Daniel was so stunned that, if one had tapped him with a finger, he thought he’d have fallen down. They were Gresians, with their thick, flat skulls, clawed hands, and fanged, golden-eyed faces and feline ears.
And only two of them, the ones in front, were taller than Daniel’s waist.
“This is a school....” He could feel the tattoo on his should starting to burn. The date of his sister’s death, shot in her classroom. And these Gresians were kids and teachers huddled in their own classrooms. The children—kittens? cubs? no, they were simply children—were clearly and understandably terrified. The sounds they were making sounded more like crying than anything else, and some had soiled themselves, but that wasn’t what made Daniel feel nauseated and dizzy.
They must have been huddled inside their classrooms for some time, Daniel realized, and he put out a hand against the wall to steady himself. His guts felt as loose as his brains. They were huddled in a classroom before a man with a gun, and he was the man standing in their classroom. With a gun.
“Daniel,” Hope whispered. “The other tower...”
Daniel didn’t want to think about the apartment building he’d ordered demolished as a distraction, but he couldn’t get it out of his head. It had looked just like the one above them now. If that building had been a school, or at least a neighborhood for families with young children…. No wonder the Gresians had gone crazy after he’d brought it down. They’d been protecting their children from a man who would massacre them in their classrooms. They still were.
Someone grabbed hold of him so he didn’t fall and pulled him aside as tears burned at his eyes. “Don’t hurt them,” he gasped.
“Nobody’s hurting them,” Bailey said in an odd, distant tone.
“Find… find an exit. No firing until we’re clear of this building.” He forced himself to stand straighter, wishing he could say something to the children and their two teachers. He knew he couldn’t, and knew better than to terrorize them further by trying.
“And the Gresians outside?” Wilson asked.
“They’re protecting their children. When we’re clear, they’ll be looking after them, not following us.”
There was a tunnel about five hundred meters closer to the park. When they emerged, the sound of the Gresian fighters was more distant, but circling above, waiting for a drone to spot them. They kept low, moving slow and stealthily from building to building without entering any of them.
Occasionally, a Gresian would spot them and shoot at them, but once they broke line of sight, the Gresians didn’t pursue. They didn’t direct the fighters onto them either—probably because they were more interested in driving the invaders away from their family homes, Daniel now realized, than in chasing them who knew where.
Finally, wreathed in the shadows of the semi-dark night, they were creeping their way over the hill which had a park as its skin. Low walls ran here and there, and shelters against the weather dotted the land.
It had once been a stepped pyramid vaster than anything seen on Earth, and far larger than the one Daniel and the Hardcases had seen on Lyonesse. Part of it had collapsed inwards, leaving it hollow like an ancient shell of a volcano, but the gaps between levels, filled with pillars, spoke of the same guiding hand in its design.
The central area was fenced off with ankle-high wooden borders, and it was clear that it was a site of public interest, but there were no students or tourists around at this hour.
The whole place reminded Daniel of archaeological sites in Rome or Greece. Wilson whispered to Daniel, “Even if it’s their equivalent of Disneyland or the Tower of London, there’s going to be security here.”
“The Gresian security—”
“The Shaldine security systems,” Wilson corrected him.
“The pyramid on Lyonesse didn’t have anything…”
“That we know of,” Wilson said.
“And the asteroid in orbit—”
“Was shut down, drifting in space,” Wilson finished for him. “This is on a planet full of vengeful soldiers who think they’re ex-slaves. The Shaldine will have taken more precautions; they have to have been aware that the Gresians could cause more trouble with Shaldine technology, even long after they were gone.”
They descended into the crater-like depression, and Doug Wilson led them away from the main part of the ruin to what looked like a well. Guided by Wilson, they climbed down into it, finding it to be filled with stinking water at the bottom. “This should do,” Wilson said to Cole. “If the nanocube can create a tunnel running ten meters due west, it should intersect with the Shaldine main elevator shaft.”
Daniel nodded to Cole. “Do it.”
Cole set up the nanocube, and it began to deconstruct the stone lining of the well. Above them, a drone floated over. Jefferson looked up and spotted it, alerting the others.
“Shit,” Daniel muttered. “We’re going to have company, after all.”
In five minutes, there was a tunnel wide enough for the Hardcases to crawl through. True
to Wilson’s promise, the other end emerged into the top of an ancient elevator shaft that stretched down a hundred meters or so. A maintenance ladder had been inset into one wall, which the team used to climb downwards.
The lab that they eventually emerged into was, amazingly, still illuminated by some kind of phosphorescent veins in the rock. It looked full of modern art statuary, on plinths, surrounded by pipes and conduits and railings. Daniel touched one of the carvings—a smooth, stone mass of twig-like shapes. Nothing happened, but Daniel could only think of one reason for them to be there.
Wilson caught his expression and smiled. “Well deduced, West. Those are the Shaldine computer banks. He prowled among them, examining each before settling on one that looked like an astrolabe. “This is the security system’s master control,” he told Daniel. “I will have to deactivate that.” He touched the sculpture then, and stiffened slightly.
From above, Daniel could hear the distant sound of Gresian shuttles incoming.
Daniel turned to Cole. “You and Beswick get back to top of the well and build a defensive perimeter around it. Set up your flak railgun as an autoturret, and place concentric rings of claymores and nanocharges, then get back down here.”
“Should I mine the elevator shaft?” Cole asked.
“No. If we succeed, it’s our only way out.”
Daniel sighed. His people, all ten who were left, were sharing out ammunition. Cole had set up a nanocube in the bottom of the well to construct ammo from the local stone, but that would take time. He had also set up stronger walls surrounding the well up on the surface.
“It’s just us and what we can carry,” Daniel said. “No back-up, no support, and only one chance, but I know that if anyone can fulfil this mission, it’s us. I don’t know if our best is enough, but I know that our best is what we—you—do. That’s why it’s been such a privilege to serve with all of you, and I could not be more satisfied with, or more proud, of this team.”
He turned to Hope. “I doubt anybody here doesn’t know it, so to hell with the regulations: I love you. I will always love you.” He closed his eyes and rested his forehead on hers. Above, a hundred meters over their heads, the flak railgun began to fire.
The crack of plasma fire and the boom of fifty-caliber weapons echoed tinnily down the elevator shaft. A Gresian shuttle was hit by railgun HESH rounds and exploded, the remains trailing smoke as the vessel slammed into the far side of the hill.
Hordes of Gresians were swarming up from their landing zones around the hill ruins, but that meant that Daniel and his squad had the high ground, and there’d been a relatively natural breastwork of earth and stone even before the addition of Cole’s black, nano-built walls.
Daniel hurled a grenade over the edge of the ruins’ depression and then lay flat to pick off the advancing Gresians with three-round bursts from his railgun. Several Gresians ran straight into a nanocharge mine, triggering clouds of nanites that seeped through the gaps in their armor and dissolved them. Daniel’s railgun ran dry and he backed off behind a part of the nanowall to reload as plasma bolts flashed overhead.
A fighter dropped out of the sky and into a strafing run, blowing holes in the ancient Shaldine walls, then veered off sharply to avoid being hit by the modified flak railgun which Cole had mounted on a tripod and rigged up to be triggered by aerial movement. Flashes and pops of smoke interrupted the strafing run and the fighter wheeled in the sky.
“Black on ammo!” Palmer yelled, and Cole threw him a freshly made magazine for his railgun.
“Regroup on me!” Daniel broadcast. “Let’s pull back.” With that, he hurled a last grenade and fell back to the nanowall, moving in a crouch. Gresians began to crest the edge of the ruins’ depression, silhouetting themselves nicely against the pre-dawn sky. Daniel and the others weren’t going to pass up such an easy shooting gallery, and spent a minute or so just picking off the charging creatures. Then the fighter returned for another strafing run, and the humans ducked behind their nanowalls. That kept them safe from the airborne plasma cannons, but meant the Gresians on foot could drop safely into the depression while only the flak railgun was firing from the humans’ side.
Suddenly, armored Gresian troops were inside the nanowalls and the Hardcases were dodging claws while tossing their railguns into the well and drawing shotguns. There was a reason, Daniel thought, why they used to call shotguns trench brooms. In the close spaces between the nanowalls, even regular shot was pretty effective against the Gresians.
The Gresians had the advantage with their claws, however, and pressed it. “Fall back!” Daniel yelled, blasting away at the swarming aliens until the rest of his team got down below. He backed up to the edge and swung himself over, dropping thirty feet into three feet of water. Without the Exo-suit, he would have shattered both legs, at best.
He followed his team through the tunnel to the elevator shaft, but not before leaving a present for the Gresians in the water. As he descended the ladder, he heard the first Gresian drop into the water, and, a second later, the whoosh of the incendiary claymore going off. The Gresian howled terribly, and Daniel knew that its friends would be delayed in coming down after him thanks to the flammable oil he had spread on the water, which would keep the interior of the well burning for quite a while.
He knew they’d figure out a solution eventually, though.
It didn’t take them long.
There were several concussive, echoing blasts, and then another huge explosion that shook fragments from the ceiling. “Think they’re though?” Hope asked.
“Yeah.”
“Definitely,” Cole said. “Overpressure bomb to suck the air away from the well and smother the fire, then blasting charges to widen the tunnel we made.”
The Hardcases were enfiladed behind more nanowalls in the lobby and the base of the elevator shaft. There were clangs and snarls from somewhere above, and they’d begun getting lower. Then the long-disused elevator doors blew open and Gresian troops stormed out into a hail of railgun bolts. Four died, then eight, twelve… after a moment more, something thudded down the shaft and exploded, ripping the breath from Daniel’s lungs. Then more Gresians came.
“Use the Molotovs!” Daniel ordered, and he hurled some into the elevator end of the lobby. Some Molotovs made into the elevators, turning them into furnaces for cremating Gresians soldiers, but then an explosion blasted a hole out of the wall just above the elevators, and Gresians began leaping through that to avoid the flames.
Daniel’s team opened fire with their shotguns and Desert Eagles, and held the Gresians back at first, but Daniel was acutely aware of their ammo situation. “Black on ammo!” Pipsqueak called.
“Get back to the lab—we’ll cover you.”
“Black!” Svoboda called.
“Lab!” Daniel replied. It was becoming clear to him that they were all needing to fall back to the lab, where some more ammo had been stashed. He gave the order, and the Hardcases began moving backwards.
As they had done on the Shaldine asteroid orbiting Lyonesse, they paused at choke points where the corridor jinked first one way and then the other. The choke points also held some stashed ammo; a few railgun bolts, but mostly deer slugs. Daniel had made sure to have a flamethrower or two ready, as well. By the time Pipsqueak and Svoboda had reached the lab, Erik Palmer and Doug Beswick had picked up the flamethrowers.
Now the Gresians were walking into corridors filled with jets of burning liquid, and they screeched and howled as they shriveled and died.
After about fifteen minutes which had felt like a couple of days, Daniel heard Doug Wilson’s voice come over the radio. “Lieutenant West, I have successfully deactivated the security system throughout the facility.”
Daniel caught his breath, which tasted of the stink of burned Gresian flesh. “Roger that.” He turned to Palmer, who’d managed to get a nanoblock to construct a series of sealed walls along the corridor, creating a successive row of choke points in a straight line. “Take charge he
re. The flamethrowers seem to be working best. Stick with them.”
“Yes, sir.”
“You can call me Dan, you know.”
“Yes, sir.”
Too tired to chuckle, Daniel ran through the security section of the lab and down a flight of stairs to a newly-accessible room. Wilson and Lizzie were already there. “Welcome to the Shaldine Gateways control room,” Wilson said proudly. It looked like the villain’s lair from an old Bond movie, or the interior of a huge power station, which was basically what it was. A series of giant, cylindrical machines were arrayed around a large diamond-shaped frame, in which Doug Wilson sat on a chair slightly too small for human size, each hand on top of a short, glittering granite pillar. “This facility is the true epicenter of what was the most important development in the Shaldine civilization.”
“The gateways,” Daniel said.
Wilson nodded. “It’s also the location of the Shaldine’s first prototype gate. It’s fully functional.”
“Where is it?”
“All around me.” Wilson said simply. “This is what Operation Stravinsky was for: putting me right here, in contact with the operating system that runs this prototype. Now, I really want to have that conversation that we started on the Sydney.”
Daniel looked at the wall, avoiding eye contact. “We had that conversation.”
“But let’s have it again. If you really want to commit genocide, and kill every Gresian in existence, say so now. All I have to do is execute a program, and I can do that with a single thought. Or, we can destroy the gate system. That will create a cascading series of failures across the entire system, and break the gate system permanently.”
“How permanently?”
“To restore it, the Gresians would have to learn a lot more about the gates, and they’d have to visit the location of each gate to rebuild the gates from scratch. They won’t be able to perform some remote magic and open a gateway to Earth. Ever.”
“How can that happen?”
“Well, in the first instance, I’ll need to write an entirely new program to manually override the gate’s safety protocols.”
