SNAFU: Future Warfare

by Geoff Brown

  Revealing a floating golem assembly. Its energy fields ripped out metal and bone from the corpses, assembling a twisted facsimile of a skeletal giant.

  Behind them, the other golem advanced.

  “Run!” Santiago again ordered.

  Santiago pulled down his map, solving the maze that lay before him. He raced down a corridor, turned right, blew through another thrall, another right turn, and the exit was before them.

  Running up the stairs two and three at a time, Santiago didn’t dare look back, tracking the golems by their heavy crashing footfalls. They were getting louder. Closer.

  At the top of the stairs, he brought up his wrist-mounted nanospray. He doused the steps in front of him, keying the nano for command detonation. Meyers slipped on the liquid. Santiago caught her and hauled her past him. Ismail was right behind, huffing and puffing.

  Rook was the last. Half a storey to go. But the golems were gaining on him,

  “Come on!” Santiago yelled.

  Rook scrambled. Thirty steps to safety. Twenty-five. The golems ate up the stairs behind them, lengthening their legs and arms, widening their gait. Rook glanced over his shoulder, and cursed.

  “Look at me, damn you!” Santiago shouted. “Fucking run!”

  Rook ran.

  Fifteen steps.

  The golems nipped at his heels.

  Ten steps.

  Rook jumped, clearing several steps at once.

  Five steps.

  A golem reared up and extruded a pair of metal-encrusted bone scythes above him. The curved blades hooked into his torso, piercing his armour and reeling him in.

  “Shit!” Rook yelled.

  Santiago fired. The rounds halted in mid-air, then whipped around and meshed itself with the golem.

  “Go!” Rook screamed. “Fucking go!”

  Cursing, Santiago jumped clear and detonated the nano. The blast consumed Rook and collapsed the stairwell. The golems fell into the darkness below. Santiago staggered away. The survivors grabbed him, pulling him away from the rising dust cloud.

  “Rook?” Ismail asked.

  “Didn’t make it.”

  Meyers shook her head. “Damn. Did you deny him?”

  “Yeah.”

  Meyers patted his shoulder. “You did good. At least they can’t turn him against us.”

  “No time to rest guys,” Santiago said. “The SDM is still active.”

  They ran back the way they came. Out the door, back through the tunnel, out into the concourse—

  The ground rumbled.

  “Initiation!” Ismail called.

  The earth trembled. Crumbled. Hardened concrete broke and fell. The Rangers sprinted. Dust fell from the ceiling. An extended roar reverberated behind them. Santiago didn’t dare stop. A Hiver must have triggered the SDM’s anti-tampering mechanism. The two-kiloton fusion weapon was a ‘clean’ bomb, but it still released prodigious amounts of neutrons, which would punch through all but the thickest shielding material. Run, or die.

  They ran.

  * * *

  They sprinted down the length of the concourse before Santiago called for a halt. They leaned against walls and benches, panting and gasping. Santiago’s eyes were blurry. His gorge rose, and he swallowed it down. He was fine, he had to be fine, it was just fatigue, but his dosimeter was crackling through his earpieces. He unhooked the device from his suit and examined the screen.

  Six grays.

  “Fuck me.”

  “You’re not my type, boss,” Ismail said.

  “Check your dosimeters. Now.”

  “Fuck... “ Ismail muttered.

  “What’d you get?” Santiago asked.

  “Six grays.”

  “Meyers?”

  She stepped aside and emptied her guts onto the floor. Santiago’s will broke. He took a deep breath, ripped off his mask, stepped back and turned away as his stomach rebelled. A stream of yellow-green exploded from his mouth. As he blew his nose, expelling more waste, he heard Ismail retch.

  “Meyers,” Santiago gasped, massaging his belly. “Dosage?”

  “Six grays,” she whispered.

  “Antirads. Now.”

  Santiago fished a small orange case his thigh pocket. Inside was an autoinjector and four spare cartridges. He pressed the needle into his neck and hit the plunger. Cool liquid invaded his blood. Sighing, he discarded the used cartridge and replaced it with a fresh one.

  The medicine circulated rapidly through him. The nausea faded. His eyes focused. He spat out the last drops of bile, kept the case, donned his mask and took a deep breath.

  “Good news, bad news,” Santiago said. “Bad news is, six grays is a lethal dose. Good news is, a medbox can still reverse the damage. Antirads will buy us time to get to one.”

  “And where’s the nearest?” Ismail said.

  A soft buzzing filled the air.

  “Wasps,” Meyers hissed. “We have to go.”

  Ismail sprayed the puddles with nanospray. “Burning. Stand clear.”

  They couldn’t leave any trace behind. Who knew what Hivers could do with DNA.

  They ducked into a corner. “Burn,” Santiago said.

  A flash of light. The wasps buzzed, swooping in on the fire. Soft thud-thud-thuds rose above the beating of a thousand wings. Dark shapes slinked across the ground. Hunters.

  Using touch and squeezes, Santiago signalled the duo to follow him. He lowered his monocular, switching to passive infrared. He could just about see beyond arm’s length, but he didn’t dare switch on his infrared lamp. Not with the hunters so close behind.

  Dropping to a crouch, he extended his left arm ahead of him and moved slowly on the balls of his feet. With each step, he lifted his foot just enough to clear the floor, toeing aside bits of glass and debris in his path. Meyers felt around his back, and latched on to his suit’s rear grab handle. She was so close he could feel her body heat. Sense the sickness in stasis within her.

  Glass crunched behind him.

  Santiago paused, listening.

  Ismail? Meyers? Who knew? Who cared? He skulked into the dark, away from the fire.

  Now there was no light, period. Nothing but complete black. Swallowing, he paid extra attention to the rest of his senses. A faint, sweet smell of decay hung in the air. Through his soft-soled boots, he felt the cracked, broken earth. He swept for obstacles with his left hand and guided himself around them.

  The buzzing grew louder. Closer. Santiago swallowed. They wouldn’t escape them. They had to—

  Meyers twisted around. A stone bounced off a distant wall, breaking glass.

  The wasps flew away, investigating the new sound. A hunter screamed, and its fellows yodelled. Santiago picked up the pace. He remembered to breathe. To breathe was to think, and it was the thinking man who lived. He turned down random corners, putting as much space as he could from the fire, guiding his feet with his pre-War memories of the concourse.

  Tak-tak-tak

  Santiago halted. Activated his infrared lamp.

  On the ceiling, a hunter awaited, its tail poised to strike.

  Santiago snapped up his carbine.

  The hunter screeched, dropping. It flipped around in mid-air, landing on its feet, bringing up its lasers. Santiago fired.

  On impact, the ceramet rounds flashed into brilliant plasma. Santiago flinched. His right eye was temporarily blinded. The monocular blanked out, and when he could see again, the hunter lay in pieces before him.

  More hunters howled. One, two, three of them.

  Which meant there were at least ten more. Howling was not a means of communication. It was echolocation and psychological warfare. They already knew where the Rangers were.

  “Go active,” Santiago ordered. “Ismail, proxy mine.”

  Santiago activated his infrared lamp, sweeping for targets. Then the monocular winked out as the hunter self-destructed.

  An infrared spotlight appeared behind him. Then another.

  “Mine set,” Ismail said.<
br />
  “Let’s go.”

  They charged down the corridor. Turned right. Santiago took three steps before he heard the buzzing. A swarm of wasps descended from the ceiling, stingers exposed.

  “Move!” Meyers yelled, pushing past him. She raised her nanosprays and squirted. The aerosol blossomed into white fire. Burning wasps dropped from the sky.

  “Back! Back!” Santiago ordered.

  He turned and ran, aiming for a hallway to his right. Behind him, the proximity mine exploded.

  The hall graded down, leading to a pair of escalators flanking a staircase. Clunks sounded above them. A ventilation grate fell from the ceiling. A golem cube dropped.

  “Fuck you!” Santiago extended his wrist and hosed it with nano. Closing in, he kicked the assembler against the wall and ordered the nano to ignite.

  The cube melted.

  Santiago blinked. He hadn’t expected that. Damn things could be killed. He ran—

  Meyers grabbed his shoulder, reversing his momentum.

  “What the hell?”

  “Look down! Tripwires!”

  Thin lines glittered in the infrared lamp, sealing off the escalators and the stairs.

  Behind them, a second mine exploded. Hunters howled.

  “Follow me!” Santiago called, jumping over the tripwire that guarded the stairs. He landed awkwardly, slipped on a step, and landed on his ass. Painfully.

  Ismail laughed.

  “Real funny,” Santiago groused, getting up.

  Santiago ran down the stairs, leaping down the last five steps. He turned to cover the team, and saw hunters pouncing on the ceiling.

  “Contact front!”

  Santiago dumped his mag into them, squeezing the trigger as fast as he could. Ismail and Meyers added their fire to his. A pencil-thin beam snapped out past his head, missing him by an inch. Plasma flash-blinded his right eye.

  “Grenade out!” Meyers yelled. Pulling a plastic pipe bomb from her vest, she pulled the pin and tossed it at the head of the stairs.

  Santiago ducked away. The bomb exploded; a burning gob landed by his foot.

  Navigating with his good left eye, he raced to the platform. To his right, the maglev track was blocked by a stationary train.

  To his left, the tunnel had caved in.

  The hunters bellowed.

  Swearing, Santiago called up the map, searching for...

  There.

  Jumping down onto the track, he turned right, squeezed himself between the train and the wall then crab-walked down the tunnel.

  A soft buzzing filled the air.

  “Go passive!” he whispered, dousing the infrared light.

  The world went dark again. Navigating solely by touch, he inched his way along the wall.

  The train rocked. Clunk-clunk-clunk.

  His fingers touched a corner. He eased himself into the space, finding a tiny nook. The back wall was smooth and unmarked. A junction box lay at head height.

  The buzzing grew louder.

  Santiago ran his palm along the right side of the box. A hidden panel slid open. Inside was a tiny dataport. Santiago ran his suitjack into the port.

  Click.

  Santiago pressed against the far wall, and it swung on silent bearings. He motioned the team through, and slid the door shut. It locked behind him.

  The space beyond was dark and tight. Feeling along the left wall, he found a button. Overhead lights snapped on revealing an airlock door.

  “Is it safe to ask where the hell are we?” Ismail asked.

  “Metro-2,” Santiago replied.

  * * *

  “Metro-2, here?” Ismail whistled. “How far does it go?”

  “Everywhere,” Meyers replied, reloading his carbine. “Wherever the Metro goes, there’s a connection to Metro-2. It’s the only reason the Resistance has held out for so long.”

  Metro-2 was the city’s final redoubt against total war. But only as long as the Hive wasn’t aware of it.

  “The Hive isn’t stupid,” Meyers said. “They know we couldn’t have disappeared into thin air. They’ll start looking for the Metro-2 connector.”

  “And drop a rock on us,” Ismail continued.

  “They stopped doing that a while back,” Santiago said. “Now they prefer uploading Resistors into the Hive mind. Dead or alive.”

  “And so we prefer denying compromised connectors to the enemy now,” Meyers added. “With SDMs.”

  Ismail sighed. “This war. Either they kill us or we kill ourselves.”

  “Or we kill them. Let’s go.”

  The airlock cycled open. Beyond was a white-lit decontamination chamber. Santiago activated his suit’s IFF system, letting the embedded sensors know they were friendly. When the door closed, the nozzles on the ceiling hissed.

  “No more decon solution?” Meyers asked.

  Santiago clucked his tongue. “Looks like it. Only thing coming out is pressurised air.” He pulled a Geiger counter from his pouch. “Guys, check your suits. We need to know if we’re still hot.”

  The Geiger counter crackled. The neutron flux had blasted the suits, exciting and displacing molecules. The now-radioactive material was emitting the full range of radioactive particles: alpha particles, beta and gamma rays, fission by-products. Santiago wondered if the neutrons had embrittled their gear too. They couldn’t afford to find out the hard way.

  The Geiger counter said he was emitting 2.5 Sieverts of radiation, slowly dropping. Meyers and Ismail reported similar results. But the team was still absorbing radiation. The antirads could only protect them for so long, hours maybe. Already Santiago felt his fingers turning cold, his skin itching under the suit.

  It was psychological, he told himself. That or the antirads.

  He almost believed it.

  “Dump your water,” Santiago ordered.

  “What?” Meyers said. “Why... oh. Damn. Damn!”

  “You drank some?” Ismail said.

  “Yeah. I was... oh shit.”

  Santiago shrugged. “Probably not hot enough to kill you. Well, not any faster anyway.”

  All the same, he emptied the contents of his irradiated canteens and water bladder into the chamber’s drains. A soft chime whispered in his earpieces. The stolen data had been transmitted.

  The airlock cycled open. The Rangers emerged into a brightly-lit tunnel. Santiago opened a nearby door. The room beyond held supplies. Ammunition boxes, weapon racks, medicine closets. A lonely fabricator in the corner. But no medbox.

  Most of the crates were empty. Logistics cells roamed Metro-2, restocking equipment stores like this one, but as the war dragged on the resupply schedule had grown increasingly erratic. Part of Santiago rejoiced at the arsenal before him. Another raged at the bastards before him who had taken so much. A third insisted they take everything they could carry, while the last warned there was still a war on and other teams would need the supplies too. Santiago acknowledged each then coldly shoved them all away. The mission would dictate equipment, and their first mission was staying alive.

  First priority was water. There was a water dispenser in a corner…which lacked a water tank. Entering the adjacent washroom, he turned the taps. Nothing. Santiago gathered a mouthful of saliva and swallowed it down. He’d been through worse.

  After water came gear. As they topped off ammo and nano, they replaced their M592s with the racked ones. Those had never been zeroed, but M592s could launch projectiles at such ludicrous speeds zeroing wasn’t strictly necessary. They threw their old equipment into the fabricator’s mass digester, where it would be broken down into feedstock.

  They peeled themselves out of their suits and wiped the suits’ computers, condemning the materiel to the digester. Maroon splotches crept across Santiago’s skin. They itched, but he refrained from scratching. When he peeled off his mask it took a mass of hair with it. Ismail and Meyers fared no better. Standard decon procedure was to wash off contaminated materials from their bodies. They made do by spraying themselves
down in the washroom with nano, configured for cleaning instead of killing.

  The fabricator churned out replacement suits, and after suiting up the team reconfigured the fresh suit computers and electronics. When Santiago powered up his q-com, he had a voice message waiting for him.

  “This is Central,” a cool female voice said. “Proceed to Academy Outpost and link up with friendly forces. Prepare for high intensity operations. This is an Alpha Priority mission.”

  Santiago passed on the message. Ismail frowned. “Academy’s on the other side of the city.”

  “They’re bound to have a medbox there,” Meyers replied. “Water too.”

  “How do we get there? If we’re walking... “

  Ismail’s voice trailed off. Sure, they were Rangers, the best of the best and all that, but acute radiation syndrome cared little about that. Santiago could feel the invisible death gnawing through his veins, killing him by inches.

  “The Underground Railroad,” Santiago said. “With Alpha Priority we can call the train.”

  “It’s still functional?” Meyers asked.

  “It better be.”

  * * *

  Metro-2 was an intricate network of service tunnels and corridors, denser than the civilian Metro. Digital maps were deemed non-secure and never stored on suits. There was a time when maps were posted at every junction, but Central had them torn down after they realised the Hivers were aware of Metro-2. Direction arrows were painted over, signs removed, even the alpha-numeric lettering that designated different sections were whited out. All that remained were sterile walls of white concrete, greying by degrees. Santiago had to navigate by memory alone. And, he knew, one of the side effects of radiation poisoning was decreased cognitive function.

  No. He could not give in to despair. He had to keep going.

  White lights gave away to lamps filled with bioluminescent bacteria, throwing a soft green glow into the darkness. They were filled with water, and for a moment Santiago entertained the thought of taking a sip from them. But that was the height of stupidity. Still, his tongue grew sticky fur and his skin tried in vain to reabsorb the sweat in his suit.

  A soft metal crash reverberated behind them.