by Rick Partlow
The bay yawned empty, the assault shuttles having left the two docking collars free and all the machinery meant to secure them naked and open. Victor had headed straight for the service lock between the docking collars and was pressing a cracking module over the security plate while Sanders covered him. I twisted my control the opposite direction and felt my shoulder straps bite as the braking jets fired; then I was gently coming up against the side of the lock beside Sanders, fastening the magnets of my right boot to the bulkhead.
“Victor?” I asked, unlimbering my Gauss rifle. Through the transplas of the lock window I saw only empty passageway, but that could change in a heartbeat.
“Just a second,” he mumbled, making one last adjustment to the module’s settings.
Then the outer door slid smoothly aside and the three of us piled in. I saw the others still waiting in the docking bay, guns pointed outward. Trying to squeeze all of us into the airlock at the same time and putting our whole squad into one kill box would have been tactically unsound…not to mention crowded.
Victor shut the outer door and started the lock cycling. That was going to set off an alarm somewhere, and it was anyone’s guess if they would get there before the inner door opened. I tried not to think about it, just waited with one boot magnet fastened to the deck and watched the status bar across the top of the inner lock travel slowly from the red towards the green.
“Get ready,” I told Victor and Sanders. “Concussion and smoke.”
The two men pulled a pair of grenades from their tactical vests, switched off the safeties, and waited. They didn’t have to wait long; the status bar hit full green only seconds later and the inner lock slid aside. It wasn’t even halfway open before Victor and Sanders had tossed their grenades through, one of each in opposite directions. Our helmets blocked out the ear-spitting thunderclaps and the blinding flashes from the concussion grenades, but the smoke was electrostatically charged to disrupt electronic and thermal sensors as well as visual ones and it would blind us as well as the enemy.
But as Gramps used to say, it rains on the just and the unjust, and we’d just have to deal with it. I squeezed a short burst out of my EMU and rocketed out across the cargo bay, getting just a glimpse of a clear route through the strapped-down crates that were scattered through it like obstacles. There was only one hatchway into the compartment and I needed to secure it before the enemy did. I took the impact on the far bulkhead feet first, leaning around the edge of the hatch…and then jerking back just a fraction of a second ahead of a burst of laser fire that nearly took my head off.
“Contact!” I snapped out of long-ingrained habit, but Victor and Sanders were already spreading to either side of the door and taking cover behind cargo crates, seeking concealment in the smoke.
The laser pulses flashed in red traces through the dark, roiling clouds, spalling off the far bulkhead, and I knew I had to shut it down before the others cycled through the lock and walked right into a firefight. I magnetized my right boot sole and attached it to the overhead, then straightened just enough to aim my Gauss rifle down the passageway and cut loose with a half-dozen rounds. The recoil tried to push me back, but I tightened my leg and stomach muscles and leaned into it, using my one foot as an anchor and trying to hit thermal signatures that were being obscured by my own smoke.
There was a scream of pain that echoed eerily through the passageway, and the laser fire stopped. Suddenly, someone was next to me at the hatch, firing three or four shots of his own; at first, I thought it was Sanders, but then I realized from a glance at the IFF readout in my helmet that it was Vilberg. Bobbi’s team had made it through the lock.
“Vilberg, Anatoly, go after them!” She ordered. “Don’t give them time to regroup!”
The two of them flew through the hatchway on jets of steam from their EMU’s and Bobbi was only a half-second behind, jetting past me without a glance backwards.
“Sanders, find me a life-pod, fast,” I ordered before switching over to Bobbi’s private frequency. “We’ve got to drop,” I transmitted to her. “I told Kane to check on your team after he’s done hunting down that shuttle.”
“Good luck,” was all she said. I figured she was busy.
“Boss, over here!” I heard Sanders call. I was about to tell him I couldn’t see where “here” was through the smoke, but he must have thought of that and added, “To your right, if you’re facing the docking bay.”
I made my way through the cargo bay carefully, following the curve of the bulkhead around until I nearly ran into Sanders, who was busy cranking the manual release wheel of a life-pod. There were three of them lined up abreast, mounted in the hull just starboard of the docking bay, but we’d only need the one.
I let my rifle retract to my chest on its sling and locked my boots to the floor to help Sanders with the hatch.
“Victor,” I grunted, putting my back into it and feeling the lock release with a solid clunk. “Get over here and get inside the pod.”
“I hate these damn things,” the big man complained, tossing aside his EMU before helping us yank the massive hatch aside and then pulling himself into its cramped confines. “Gives me claustrophobia.”
I didn’t blame him; I felt a tingle of unreasoning apprehension run through my gut as I watched him and Sanders squeeze through the entrance hatch while I unstrapped from my propulsion unit. I tossed the EMU across the cargo bay, then cut loose the magnets in my boots and wormed through the narrow passage, gritting my teeth against the gentle whisper of panic. There were four acceleration couches in the tiny pod, and none of them were built for a man in combat armor, but I did my best to squeeze into the one next to Sanders, then pulled the straps across my chest and locked them down.
The control panel was in the center of the pod, and it seemed fairly simple and universal. I yanked a lever and the hatch swung shut, locking in place with a metallic finality. The navigation system was basically point-and-shoot, and I guided the targeting circle to the landing spot where we’d seen the other shuttle, then locked it down with a squeeze on the joystick control. I took a deep, shuddering breath and flipped up the safety cover for the ignition switch, revealing the ominous red button beneath.
“Hold onto your stomachs, gentlemen,” I said with more bravado than I felt. “Here we go.”
I mashed the button down and we dropped out of the sky.
Chapter Nineteen
Dawn was breaking and the light of the primary glared at us harshly through the thin atmosphere as we tumbled unsteadily out of the remains of the life-pod. I tried to maintain a watch for threats, but it was all I could do to keep from puking or, alternatively, rolling up into a ball on the rocky ground and taking a long nap. I looked askance at the flapping white nylon of the braking parachute, fluttering slightly in the wind as it flattened itself onto the rough ground. I wasn’t sure why it was there, because it hadn’t done a great job of cushioning our fall. Thank God the gravity here was just a bit over half Earth-normal.
“Oh, good Lord,” Sanders moaned, limping out of a haze of smoke from the explosive bolts which had separated the halves of the pod. “I’m going to be shitting blood for a week.”
“Stop whining,” Victor admonished him, lumbering up behind us, seemingly unaffected by the hard landing. “You sound like a little baby.”
I squeezed my eyes shut for a moment, then opened them and found my vision clearing. We were near the edge---way too near, given how little control we’d had coming in---of a sandstone plateau, bare except for the persistent green film of algae that seemed to cover almost every surface. A hundred meters away, closer to the center, the matte grey delta of an assault shuttle squatted on its landing treads, staring at us like a bison bull debating a charge. Normally, if we’d had a full squad down here, I would have sent a team to check on it; but there was just the three of us, and the shuttle was cold on thermal and its belly ramp was sealed up tight. Anyway, if there’d been anyone left to guard it, they would have come and checked
on the life-pod by now.
“Come on,” I urged the others, setting off to the north side of the plateau. We’d spotted the trail on the way down and it looked like the only path the Cultists could have taken off the flat stretch of sandstone.
It wasn’t much: just a slightly worn, slightly flatter strip of rust-colored rock and sand, mostly free of the terraforming algae, but I wondered what had made it. Had the Predecessors carved it with lasers millennia ago, a broad avenue leading from this landing site to their base? Was this barely-visible mountain track all that was left of that?
The trail led upwards, gently at first into the rolling hills past the plateau, but then more sharply as the mountains loomed ahead. They were worn and rounded by rains that no longer fell on this nearly dead world, weathered from a time when it had weather, but all that did was make the path more slippery. I tried to be vigilant, tried to remember to keep watching our rear approach, but as the kilometers dragged on and one stretch of lichen-covered rock began to look much like another, I fell into a one-foot-in-front-of-the-other trance and counted on my helmet sensors to warn me of any danger.
And finally, they did. The blinking red icon in my Heads-Up-Display jarred me from my fugue and I dropped to a knee, raising my right fist to halt Sanders and Victor, who were spaced out ten meters apart on the trail behind me. There were a few large rocks by the side of the trail and I ducked behind one, taking a moment to concentrate on the sensor readings.
A touch on the control pad fitted to the armor on my forearm showed me a more detailed display; the warning had come from what the audio sensors had determined was a scrape of a combat boot on sandstone, and an echo pattern that showed at least one Tango thirty meters ahead, where the trail angled downward and narrowed into a draw.
I turned and waved the others forward, not wanting to trust that the enemy wouldn’t be able to detect our transmissions this close. I signaled that I was going to head down into the draw and I wanted Sanders to go off-trail and climb up the other side in order to get behind them, while Victor waited here until I broke radio silence.
I could see the frown in Victor’s eyes through his faceplate and I knew he was disappointed that he was being left back. It wasn’t that I didn’t trust him or didn’t feel I could rely on him; but this was going to require silence and stealth, and Victor and Kurt were both blunt instruments. I signaled to Sanders that I was going to give him ten minutes before I started down the draw; he responded with a grin and a thumbs-up, and scrabbled up the slick rock beside the trail with barely a sound.
I watched him climb slowly and carefully over the bare sandstone, half wanting him to speed up and get it over with, and half glad he was being cautious. Finally, he dropped behind a ledge and disappeared from view. I tried to follow his progress as best I could with my helmet’s audio sensors, but he was a lot stealthier than whoever was in that draw, and I lost track of him quickly. I’d set a timer in my HUD counting down from Sanders’ departure, and when it reached about a minute, I tapped Victor on the shoulder and told him to watch our backs, then I went down on my belly and began high-crawling along the trail.
The path climbed upward for another few meters, then curved to my left before it headed down into the draw. I stopped there at that curve and edged slowly around, my Gauss rifle cradled in my arms. The trail followed the draw downward and abruptly terminated in a cliff face. I blinked, wondering if I was missing something, and it only took a second to see that what I was missing was a cave.
The entrance wasn’t very large, maybe a couple meters tall and half that wide, jagged and crooked like a dark slash across the rock face. My pulse quickened as I realized that this was what Marquette had described in his message to me…then quickened again when I saw the guards. There were three of them, dressed in the scavenged battle armor they’d stolen from the Sung Brothers, as spread out as the narrow end of the draw would allow, their pulse carbines aimed outward.
They looked intimidating behind their mirrored visors, but I wasn’t impressed with their tactics or their initiative; if they’d been Recon vets, they’d have had a lookout posted up in the…
The unmistakable sound of a discharging Gauss rifle made my head snap upward towards the rock ledge overhanging the cliff, just in time to see the fourth guard falling backwards from his hiding place, a gaping hole blown through the back of his helmet.
Okay, maybe they have some Recon guys after all, I admitted, but so do we.
The three Cultists in front all looked instinctively upward and outward, thinking someone had sniped their buddy from somewhere far away, but I could see Sanders sliding down towards the ledge from the outcropping where he’d been concealed just above them. I took advantage of their momentary panic and put my targeting reticle on the chest of the closest of them, who I guessed was a woman by her height, then pressed the trigger pad.
I was moving my point of aim before she fell, letting the twisting kick of the electromagnetic launcher pull it to the right towards one of the other two guards, but they were finally doing the smart thing and falling back through the cave entrance, spraying wild bursts of laser fire to cover their retreat.
“Victor!” I yelled into my helmet mic. “Sanders! Follow me!”
I dug the spiked soles of my boots into the sand and sprinted after the Cultists, straight into the cave entrance, firing off a full mag from the hip as I went. The one thing we couldn’t afford was for them to bottleneck us at that chokepoint, and the only way I could think to prevent it was to keep them running, even if it meant alerting the others that we were here.
I saw sandstone spraying off the walls as my shots tracked them and then…nothing. I didn’t understand until I followed them through the twisted, sandstone entrance and found that the cave expanded outward into a darkened amphitheater that my infrared filters couldn’t penetrate, and that the rock inside was a different, harder mineral than the sandstone outside. It was smooth, too, unnaturally smooth and I nearly slipped as I ran. I couldn’t see the guards I was chasing, but I knew they couldn’t be more than twenty meters ahead of me.
I decided to take a risk and switched on my Gauss rifle’s integral weapons light, an infrared flashlight built into the fore-stock. It would reveal my position, but it wasn’t as if they didn’t already know where I was, and it was better than running blind into an ambush. The cavern around me lit up green in my helmet’s infrared filters, but the light still didn’t penetrate to the edge of the cavernous chamber, and I still didn’t see the guards.
I didn’t see the two-meter-wide circle of blackness right in the middle of the floor, either, until I’d already fallen into it.
“Shit!” I blurted, dropping my rifle as I tried to scrabble at the edges of the hole.
They were glass-smooth and coated with slippery lichen, and I was falling into nothing, my stomach twisting and my sense of what was up and down disappearing in a wave of nausea, and I fought to keep from throwing up inside my helmet. I cried out again, sensing that this fall was too far to survive, that I would be broken on the rocks below and die here on this fetid shithole, far away from the only people I loved.
***
But I didn’t.
I didn’t die, and, after a few seconds, I finally understood that I wasn’t falling.
I was floating. Floating slowly downward, deep into whatever this thing was that clearly wasn’t a cave. I tried to press out against the walls of the tube, or whatever it was, but they pressed back with a spongy force that wasn’t physical.
Artificial gravity, I thought in wonder. It was something that human scientists had been trying to develop for decades, ever since it had been discovered that you could generate it in Transition Space as a function of the Teller-Fox drive. But so far, the altered physics of T-space were the only conditions that could produce it.
For us, I corrected myself. Because clearly the Predecessors had solved that mystery.
By the time the transport tube deposited me wherever it was that I’d gon
e, my breathing had calmed down and I had the presence of mind to pull my rifle away from my chest harness, where the sling had retracted it when I’d let go of it, and point it out ahead of me. It was still totally black, so devoid of light that not even infrared could show me any details, and on thermal I only caught a diffuse blue haze.
I stepped off to the right of where I’d touched down, then keyed my weapons light again. And froze in utter and complete wonder. I’d been deposited deep inside the hollow mountain, inside some sort of vast, fathomless underground installation left here eons ago. Stretched out as far as my light beam could reach was an endless landscape of mechanisms that seemed more sculpture than machinery---liquid, flowing curves and vague, hazy edges that almost made me wonder if the things were really there.
Tall spires hovered precariously above me, while vaguely rotund mushroom shapes squatted in dark menace. Flickering shadows played teasingly at the edges of the cone of light, and I had the absurd thought that something more horrifying than I could imagine was about to burst from those tricks of the light and devour me. The sight literally took my breath away; I realized abruptly that I’d been holding my breath and gasped in air, trying to free my mind from the mesmerizing clutches of the alien architecture. I’d been on the Tahni home-world, but there was something about his place that made even Tahn-Skyyiah seem home-like, that made the Tahni seem like our brothers.
“Victor,” I transmitted on the suit radio. “Sanders. Do you copy?”
Nothing. I tried again and still received no answer, and I wasn’t reading their IFF transponders either. It wasn’t a huge surprise; God knew how far below-ground I was, and they were presumably still topside, looking for me. And I was…here. Wherever that was.
