by Love, Aimee
Off in the distance I heard a series of deafening booms as all of the tunnels leading down were unsealed and my homemade bombs were detonated.
Titus didn’t have enough people to cover every entrance with anything but a token resistance, but that hardly mattered since he had to know where we were heading. Besides, it wasn’t Titus’ people I was worried about.
“What do you have?” I asked the twins, laying down between them and peering over the edge.
“Two or three hiding in the tunnel,” one of them told me. “Plus one already sent to sleep with the fishes.”
I shot Quince a glance and he grinned. Clearly he’d been putting my wand to good use.
“Okay,” I said getting to my feet. “Keep them pinned.”
I looked around at the others.
“What’s rule number one?” I asked.
“Nobody gets in front of you,” everyone but Quince chorused. I gave them a nod and started on the long climb down.
The twins did an excellent job of covering us, but news of six well armed people coming down the ladder must have spread, because there were certainly more than two or three by the time I got close the the ledge. They weren’t being stupid and sticking their heads out either. They had some sort of metal plate that two of them held out as a shield over the others and as soon as they could get an angle on us, they began chucking rocks.
Rocks might not sound very impressive, but a lucky hit on any of us could make us fall to our deaths and possibly take a few of our friends with us.
I shifted so that my body was blocking my hands, but when a glancing blow caught me on the side of the head I decided I’d had enough.
I reached up and tapped Quince’s ankle in our pre-arranged sign to halt, then slid my lower legs in between the rungs and the wall and hooked my ankles back through. I released my hands and let myself fall back, hanging by my knees, then grabbed the pistol from my belt and waited.
Soon enough, the metal shield appeared and I saw a head poke out underneath it. His eyes went wide when he saw me and I smiled and waved before shooting him in the face. He crumpled forward and someone reached out to grab him and keep him from going over the edge. It was kind of touching actually, but I still shot him to.
I switched my pistol for a grenade, thumbed the safety off and leaned out as far as I could to throw it. It bounced off the far wall of the arch and into the tunnel. The resulting explosion sent one man, still clutching the metal shield, tumbling over the edge and down into the ocean, and I was willing to bet it gave all the rest second thoughts about sticking their heads out. I hated to waste a grenade, but I hated getting hit in the head with rocks more.
I swung back up, tapped Quince’s ankle telling him it was clear to get moving, and continued down to the ledge unmolested. Once there, I pulled my riffle and covered the arch until all seven of us were down, then inched over to it and tossed in a second grenade for good measure.
When the dust settled, I dialed up my heat vision and poked my head around the corner.
“We’re clear to the first turn,” I told them, giving Edmund and Seyton a nod. Their task was to hold the ledge. Neither of them had a gun, but they had enough Molotovs between them to light up the entire cliff face if the spiders decided to get tricky and try to come at us from behind. Combined with the rifle cover provided by the twins, I hoped it would be enough.
I led my remaining four men into the arch and paused long enough for everyone to shuck their outerwear. They pulled down their goggles without being told and I dialed up the starlight mode on my implant. Quince gave me a thumbs up when they were all done and then reached over and gave my shoulder a squeeze, as if I was the untrained youth and he was the combat veteran.
I gave them all what I hoped was a reassuring smile, shouldered my rifle, and led the way into the darkness.
Chapter Thirteen
Revenge
“Report in,” I ordered Abram, who was taking up the rear. Everyone else’s coms were turned off to cut down on confusion topside. I wasn’t too keen on not having a com myself, but the technology evolved too fast to make it a good candidate for implantation and it would have been wasteful for me to hog a pair of the precious night vision goggles that the coms were built in to when I didn’t actually need them.
I heard him give our position and waited while he learned what was going on elsewhere.
“Heavy fighting at the weather station,” he told me. “They’ve broken through.”
“Human or spider?” I asked.
“Sounds like both.”
“Lets see if we can draw some off,” I said with a grin, holding out my hand to Conrad.
He reached into his backpack and passed me one of the Molotovs with a yellow seal. I’d played with the proof and settled on three varieties. The yellows burned hot and fast, the greens burned long and slow, and the reds were twice the size of either of the others and packed enough punch to take out an armored transport.
I slid up to the corner with my back against the wall. There was still enough light this close to the entrance that I knew I’d make a tempting silhouette if I poked my head around and looked so I just tossed it around the corner then put my rifle on wide beam and shot blindly.
There was a whoomph as the liquor ignited followed by some panicked screams. I put my head around and took a glance. The local brew didn’t burn for long, but it certainly made a nice distraction. I could make out the forms of men on the other side of the flaming pool but the light it was putting off made my implant worse than useless.
“I’m going through,” I told them, looking hard at Quince. “You stay on this side until the flames are out, got it?” My onesie was fireproof, but I knew from an accident during our days on the practice range that their clothes went up like torches.
I waited for the nods of agreement, set my rifle back to pulse, and popped around the corner. I fired past the little conflagration I’d created, but if I hit anything, it was pure luck. When the flames were low enough that my hair wouldn’t get singed, I dashed through.
There were only three men on the other side and two of them were busy trying to beat out their flaming clothing. The third saw me come through and raised a weapon to fire, but I was faster. He went down gurgling as blood spouted from his neck. I finished the other two off, though it felt rather unsporting since they hadn’t even registered my presence yet, and then knelt down to examine the weapon that the first man had leveled at me.
It was a sort of air powered harpoon gun, and I assumed it was what they used to hunt the pollies, but it would have been nice if someone had warned me about them.
The tunnel ran straight for a long way here and I could see that it was empty. The men who lived below had their hands full, I knew, but still I would have thought we warranted a little more attention than we were getting.
“Clear,” I yelled back and advanced to the first vent checking for any activity from the tunnel’s other inhabitants. There was no sign of them, but I knew that was about to change.
When the others joined me, I advanced slowly, counting off the vents on the wall. When I hit the third I stopped and patted it.
“Iago,” I said.
Conrad pulled six bottles from his backpack, three red and three green, and set them gently in a pile on the floor in front of it.
“Two per tube,” I reminded Iago. “The green one open and the red one closed.”
He nodded and we left him there, going deeper. Three more tubes and another pile, this one for Abram. It was my own plan, but I still hated it. Leaving them all strung out, with me on the far end, too far away to help if anything went wrong, felt like shit but the alternative of lighting the tubes one at a time and having them come at us all along the corridor instead of funneled down its length was unacceptable.
“You take these,” I to
ld Conrad when I’d counted out three more tubes. “Quince, take the pack.”
Now was when things got tricky. The next set should be Quince’s, but there was a bend in the corridor here that would cut off our line of sight and I knew there was no way he was going to agree to leave me.
Instead, I set them as I passed, rolling one red bottle down then pulling the stopper from a green and sending it after. In our tests, the line of spilled liquor from the green bottle acted as a wick and set the first bottle off. Of course, there was a lot of margin for error. If one of the red bottles, with their extra weight, made it further than its accompanying green, we could have open tubes at our back, allowing them to cut us off.
I’d set the forth tube when I heard voices and turned just in time to catch a harpoon in the chest. It glanced off the armor plate in my onesie, but Quince had dropped the pack and raced off down the corridor before I recovered from the shock.
He held his stun baton like a baseball bat and hit the first man without even bothering to turn it on. The man crumpled, but the two behind him both brought their harpoon guns up to fire. I cursed. I couldn’t risk a stray shot lighting up the tubes prematurely. Thumbing my rifle over to sonics I sent a quick burst down the hall.
Quince and his remaining two attackers all doubled over when the combination of high and low frequency sound hit them. It wasn’t lethal, but they would all suffer from a few minutes of extreme nausea and badly distorted vision.
I raced forward, drawing my knife, and took the three men out easily.
“It’s all right Quince,” I told him, taking his arm and moving him over so he was leaning on a wall. “You’ll be fine in a minute, but the next time you pull a stunt like that I’m going to let them kill you.”
He knew it was a lie as well as I did, and gave me a weak grin. That was when all hell broke loose.
I’d wondered more than once how the spiders saw. Everyone I’d asked seemed to agree that they were primarily nocturnal, which was why we were attacking in the middle of the day, but nobody knew what they used to hunt. They had no obvious sensory organs and I’d been able to sneak up on the three I’d encountered so far rather easily. Now I knew the answer. Sound.
The tubes further down the hall, where my blast had been aimed, erupted with spiders. There were over a dozen of them and Quince was still dazed. Shit.
I hit the toggle on the side of his goggles, turning on its com and yelled into his face.
“Blow the tubes and pull back, now!”
I had no way of knowing if the others heard me, but the spiders certainly did. They all turned their attention my way and two at the front zipped toward me.
I’d never seen one move at anything more than a slow amble and I have to say, their speed was impressive. They were like crazed demonic tumbleweeds, rolling down on me with their barbed legs bent and angled out.
I slung my rifle over my shoulder, grabbed Quince’s arm and ran. I knew it was hopeless, I could hear them close behind me, their legs making a manic clacking noise as they spun along, but I also knew I had to get past the last tube I’d set or risk being completely overrun. Quince was reeling, barely able to keep his feet and I knew we wouldn’t make it much further like this.
“Go!” I told him. “Get past the bend!”
He clutched at my arm but I pulled free and shoved him ahead as hard as I could.
“Go!” I yelled again, drawing my pistol and diving to the side.
I rolled, coming up in a crouch and catching our pursuers by surprise. I got off three quick shots as the first rolled past me, but unlike the one I’d seen excreting goo in the tube, this ones scales were hard and polished. The bolts of light scattered when they hit it, loosing their coherency and doing nothing more than creating a rather dazzling burst of sparkles.
I got its attention though. It skidded to a halt, idled in place for a moment, and then came at me as its fellow shot past, still after Quince. I dropped my pistol and pulled a grenade from my belt, throwing it back the way we’d come and tucking myself into a ball.
There was a loud bang and then a deafening roar as the exploding grenade set off the bag of Molotovs Quince had left abandoned at the last tube. The resulting shock wave knocked me flat and ripped the breath from my lungs, then the tubes started to go and things got really interesting.
I had no way of knowing what was going on further down the corridor. It was possible that my men either hadn’t heard me or had simply ignored my order, not wanting to trap Quince and I behind them, but whether it was a chain reaction started by my grenade or they heard the explosion and realized it was now or never, every tube seemed to go off at once. I didn’t dare open my eyes to look, but I could hear the blasts going off far into the distance and then I heard something else. A sort of keening wail that never could have come from a human mouth.
I pulled myself to my feet, gasping as the hot air seared my lungs and the smoke bit at my eyes. The spider that had been about to attack me was alive, but badly shaken. It had curled up in to a ball, just like me, and I gave it a hard kick, sending it back toward the heart of the conflagration.
I pulled the filter from my belt and clamped it between my teeth. The air was still painfully hot, but it was breathable. I couldn’t see Quince or much of anything else and I switched off my implant as I staggered in the direction I’d sent him.
I rounded the bend and saw him, laying in a heap with something large looming over him. I pulled my rifle up and sighted, then dropped it.
Conrad waved to me and pulled his breathing filter out.
“Hey,” he yelled.
I motioned him to put the thing back in, since I doubted I was in much shape to drag two of them out of here. I couldn’t really complain that he hadn’t followed my orders and pulled back, since I wasn’t very good at doing as I was told myself, but I smiled when I saw the dead spider at his feet. At least a few of my lessons seemed to have sunk in.
Between the two of us, we managed to get Quince’s filter in his mouth and drag him to his feet. He’d taken some damage both from the blast and the spider, but his pulse was strong and steady. Conrad slung him over his shoulder and I pointed them toward the way out and gave him a shove.
I backed along behind them with my rifle up, letting them get a good lead before holding down the trigger and sending out another blast of sonics. We might be falling back, but I wasn’t ready to pack it in until I was out of grenades and tricks.
I don’t know whether the sound my rifle emitted hurt them or was the equivalent of ringing the dinner bell, but it certainly brought them running.
Five of them came spinning toward me through the dying flames and I quickly toggled the rifle to hydrokinetic shock. It was a crappy setting and I hated to rely on it, not because it didn’t pack a nice punch, but because the rifle only held so much water and running out of ammo in the middle of a fight always pissed me off. Still, with lasers bouncing off and sonics calling them closer, I was short on options.
I squeezed off a shot, hitting the closest spider with a tiny ball of the supercharged liquid and sending it into a furious spasm that I found extremely heartening. Half of its legs fell off instantly and the other half twitched or flailed, depending on their type.
I hit two more and got similar results then started as something bumped my arm. Abram, taking up position beside me. Hadn’t any of them been listening when I taught them about chain of command?
I wanted to tell him that his pistol, with only a high and low laser setting, was useless, but he seemed to have figured that out himself. Instead of aiming for the scaled bodies, he fired at the individual legs, picking them off one by one. With thirty a piece, it wasn’t a very workable strategy in the long run, but it did the trick on the two that were left and let me conserve my water supply.
As soon as they were all down, he pulled out his br
eathing filter and I followed suit. Though every tube we’d passed was still aflame, most of the smoke had cleared.
“They’re overrun topside,” he said, his voice on the edge of panic. “They were screaming for us to come and help but now there’s only static.”
My heart sank. After creating as much havoc as we could here, we’d planned to ride the small sled down and hit the deeper tunnels. If things were bad enough that the dining hall had fallen, then we had to scrap the entire plan and do what we could to salvage things.
“What’s our situation?” I asked, thinking furiously.
“We lost Seyton and there’s no sign of the twins,” he told me, his voice breaking. “Iago and Edmund were still trying to hold the ledge when I left them.”
Over half of the team down.
“Come on,” I told him, turning and running to catch up with Conrad.
“Put him down,” I ordered when we caught up, unstrapping my med-kit.
I motioned for them to guard us and pulled out a stim patch slapping it onto Quince’s neck and saying a silent apology to him. I knew it would bring him around in seconds, but I didn’t envy him the hangover he would have for the week it would take for the drugs to clear his system.
His eyes fluttered open and he looked around, confused.
He’d lost his stun baton, so I pressed my pistol into his hand.
“Aim for the legs,” I told him, then stood up.
“Wait until he can walk, then follow me,” I told Conrad as I ran past him toward the ledge.
I rounded the last bend and stopped dead. There were spiders everywhere. Iago had his back to the wall and was swinging his rifle at them like a club and Edmund was nowhere to be seen. A smart commander would have turned and gone back, taken Quince and the others deeper and hoped to fight through to the stairwell there, but I wasn’t terribly smart and there was no way I was abandoning Iago. Instead, I pulled my knife and cut free one of the empty clips that had held the grenades to my belt. I coiled it around my rifle trigger and set it to full auto and sonic, then I squeezed it tight.
