It wasn’t the most elaborate plan ever conceived. There was no choice – the corridor branched off midway along, leading towards one of the main stairwells. He had no idea if the Vraxar were heading that way but it seemed a logical enough destination for them.
“On my command…now!”
McKinney was determined to be a man who led by example. He walked three quick sideways steps until he was against the far wall and looking along the corridor. He crouched, keeping his gauss rifle at eye level and looked along the barrel. There were six Vraxar and they had humans with them. In the confines of the corridor it was hard to select a target at speed whilst also being absolutely certain it wasn’t a friendly one.
McKinney squeezed the activation switch. The gauss rifles were the finest, most expertly-crafted examples of metalworking this side of a fleet warship. They were perfectly calibrated in the factory and if you aimed straight with one, you could rely on hitting whatever you pointed them at. Every ranker in the Space Corps was extensively drilled in their use, until most soldiers could put a slug through a tin can a thousand metres away.
The Vraxar fell, mowed down by several expertly-placed volleys of gauss projectiles. McKinney didn’t wait – when the last alien toppled he was up and running towards them. The short time it took him to cover the distance was enough to tell him what he needed to know. There were three humans amongst the Vraxar. They wore spacesuits and looked badly used.
Two of the three were men, both of whom looked dazed. They stared at McKinney as if hardly believing he existed. The woman was struggling to pull herself from beneath the body of a Vraxar soldier. McKinney reached out a hand and hauled her free.
“We need to get out of here,” he said.
Lieutenant Caz Pointer groaned and pressed a hand to the back of her neck. “No shit?” she said.
“However, there’s some unfinished business to deal with first, ma’am.”
McKinney pointed along the corridor. There was an open doorway there, with a sign on the wall above. He read the words on the sign: Secondary Data Repository Access Area – Restricted Personnel Only.
Chapter Twenty-Four
The corridors of the bunker, which had seemed far too long when Maria Cruz only had a broken ankle to contend with, now appeared to stretch on forever. The emergency lighting was slowly fading and distant noises echoed strangely, making it hard to pinpoint exactly where they came from. Technical Officer Gibbs was becoming increasingly jumpy and on one occasion she nearly dumped Cruz to the ground by spinning to check an empty room they passed.
“I’m not trained for this,” Gibbs said in a hoarse whisper. “I studied life support systems, not warfare.”
It’s all part of the same thing when you work on fleet warships, thought Cruz. “How much further is it?”
“One set of steps, a corridor and then another set of steps. After that, a short walk and then we reach the offices. By that stage we may want to keep fingers and toes crossed that someone left a tablet on their desk for us to pick up. After that, we should continue to keep everything crossed and hope the comms tablet will allow you to interface with the ES Lucid.”
“I like hopes and maybes,” said Cruz.
They reached the steps and paused to listen. There were sounds, but it was impossible to be sure where they came from. The bunker was huge and Cruz was relying on it being too large for even an entire division of Vraxar to keep adequately locked down. Not that she thought there were thousands of the aliens here – a couple of hundred seemed a more likely number and that was way too few to patrol everywhere.
“Come on,” said Gibbs. “Hold onto the rail.”
The steps were concrete and solid, carved through solid rock, though you wouldn’t know it simply by looking. It wasn’t easy to descend without producing a quantity of noise and Cruz found it hard to keep her damaged leg from scraping on the edge of each step as she hopped down.
They went down one flight of twenty steps, reached a landing and then started on the next set of steps. At the bottom, a square doorway led into the next passage. Cruz didn’t know what made her stop. She gripped the railing tightly and pulled Gibbs to a halt.
“What…?”
“Shhh.”
There was something at the bottom, Cruz was sure of it. The two of them waited on the stairs, trying to make as little noise as possible while listening for whatever might be in the room below. Gibbs was beginning to look wild-eyed with fear.
“I can’t…” she began.
“You can,” Cruz interrupted, barely mouthing the words.
Other memories from her training returned. Sometimes the waiting played more on a combatant’s fears than the action itself. Once you were committed, there was no choice other than to give it your best shot.
Cruz hopped down another step. Gibbs tried to resist and Cruz pulled hard until the technician followed. She hopped again, bringing the reluctant Gibbs after.
“Stop. Please.”
“No. We’re going down there.”
There was another landing at the bottom of the steps. There was a metre or so between the last step and then there was the doorway on the left. They huddled in this space, Cruz leaning against the wall while Gibbs did her best to look into the room beyond. She stepped back, her face pale and with a sheen of sweat across her forehead and cheeks.
“I think there are three of them,” she mouthed.
“Where?”
A wave of the hand. “Over that way. Maybe fifteen metres from here and looking out of the window.”
“We are going to shoot them.”
A single nod.
“I will lie down and shoot from the floor. You will lean out and shoot.”
“Which one do I aim for?”
“The closest one. Keep firing until I say otherwise.”
Another nod.
With a grimace, Cruz lowered herself to the floor and shuffled along. There wasn’t lots of space to pull this off and she was sure the training officers would be able to suggest a dozen better ways. The grenades she still carried dug into her chest, mocking her inability to use them without alerting every Vraxar within five hundred metres.
She poked her head around at floor level. This was another one of the viewing rooms – she could see the window, though the extents of the room itself were hidden by the sides of the doorway. The assessment that the aliens were looking out of the window was inaccurate – in fact, they had their backs to the window and were standing stock still, three pairs of eyes staring in three different directions. I should have realised they wouldn’t be interested in anything as mundane as looking at a warship.
Realising she’d be dead already if they’d spotted her, Cruz studied the Vraxar for a long moment. There was something absolutely vile about them – it wasn’t an emotional response to see them as an abomination and an affront to nature. Whatever they wanted from the Confederation, it would be worse than anything the military’s projections teams could ever imagine.
There was a row of chairs between the doorway and the window, but not enough to stop her getting a chest or headshot. Cruz made a mental decision on her targets and dragged her pistol from her belt. A foot nudged her in the hip.
“Well?” asked Gibbs.
There was no easy way to coordinate. “You start shooting and then I’ll go.”
“I can’t hear you.”
Gibbs stooped lower and Cruz repeated the words.
Having been primed, Gibbs was suddenly eager to get on with it. She gave no further warning, took one sideways step and started firing wildly.
Taken by surprise, Cruz rolled into position, holding her own pistol a few inches above the floor. In the viewing room the Vraxar hadn’t moved from their original positions, nor attempted to take cover behind the chairs. The closest was mid-stumble, while the other two fired their wide-bore cannons.
Cruz responded with her gauss pistol. It had minimal recoil, but from her position on the floor it was enough to make it harder to a
im straight. The Vraxar slugs pinged and ricocheted away from the doorframe. One of them toppled. She changed target and shot at her second target. Bullets punched through the back of one chair, tearing razor-sharp chunks of the metal free.
“Oh,” said Gibbs.
After another exchange of fire, the third Vraxar went down in a shower of clear fluid. Cruz caught it with a shot to the head on the way and felt a surge of satisfaction at the finality of it. The shooting stopped.
A weight came down onto Cruz’s back and then slipped off to one side. She twisted around and saw Kari Gibbs, lifeless and covered in blood, the gauss pistol still clutched in her hand as though it was the single possession she wished to carry with her into death.
“Shit.” Cruz struggled into a sitting position.
There was a lot of blood – it covered the floor, reflecting her face in accusation. She gave Gibbs a shake. The technician was dead, gone in the same way as Larry and thousands of others on the Tillos base. Cruz felt anger rise anew and she snarled, not only at the Vraxar, but at the damage to her own body which slowed her down. She took strength from the anger and before she knew it, she was on her feet, her injured leg raised from the ground.
There was no movement from the room and she hopped through the doorway, pistol still in hand. The first Vraxar was slumped across three of the straight-edged metal chairs. She put a couple of slugs into it and hopped closer. The second was also dead. Again, she fired into its prone form.
The third was not dead, though she didn’t know why she was so sure since its chest didn’t move. It lay on its side, eyes open and unblinking. She came closer and saw the bullet holes in a diagonal line across its chest. Blood oozed from one, clear fluid from another and from the third there was nothing, as though the final bullet had punched into a part of the alien with no organs or blood vessels. Or whatever the hell it has inside.
It didn’t react when she lifted the gauss pistol and took aim. She fired twice into its face and lowered the pistol. This time, it was definitely dead.
“You smell terrible,” she told it in one final show of hatred.
She crossed to the nearest viewing window and propped herself at one side. This level was so low she could see the underside of the ES Lucid. The emergency lighting wasn’t good enough to illuminate everything, though it was sufficient for her to see groups of hulking shapes standing amongst the landing legs.
She had no idea what they were using to interface with the warship’s main AI cores – there was no sign of a physical connection. Everything she’d experienced so far suggested this was the kind of warfare the Vraxar were good at. There was no doubt they’d have the technology – it was simply a matter of how long it would take them to shut down the cores. Maybe they can take over the ship, came the unbidden thought. Squirt in their own code or something.
There was no time to stare. The engagement with the three Vraxar soldiers hadn’t lasted long, nor had it produced a lot of noise. There had been some noise and she was fairly certain any organised group of soldiers, anywhere in the universe, would have some way of finding out when a few of their number had been killed.
She pulled at her belt and stuck the pistol behind it. Ideally, she wanted it in her hand – the problem was, she needed both hands free to help her move. Kari Gibbs had provided adequate directions to the comms offices and Cruz did her best to make haste. With one hand against the side wall, she hopped along the passage towards what she hoped would be the final set of stairs.
It was tiring and put a lot of strain on her good leg. In addition, each hop produced waves of pain from her broken ankle. If there was any positive to take from it, the pain of her ankle stopped her thinking about her cheekbone and eye socket, both of which were probably broken.
The worst part was the knowledge that the painkiller Sergeant McKinney gave her had definitely not worn completely off and was in the process of doing so as the minutes went by. Cruz had no idea how bad the pain would end up and she didn’t want to think about it.
To her dismay, the steps weren’t quite so close as Gibbs had described and it took Cruz a number of minutes to reach them. This was meant to be the final stairwell and then it would hopefully be a short distance further to the comms area.
The Space Corps put safety above everything and there was a standard high-grip railing on both sides of the stairwell, combined with signage to let personnel know which side they should walk on. Trained to perfection, Cruz made three excruciatingly painful additional hops to reach the prescribed side of the stairwell and struggled downwards.
She paused at the first landing and listened carefully. The loudest sound was her own blood rushing through her ears, which didn’t prevent her from also hearing the ephemerally distant sounds of enemy activity. She drew the pistol again, its cool handle comforting and smooth.
It didn’t take long to reach the end of the second flight of steps. There was another landing, identical to the one on which Kari Gibbs died and Cruz hopped to the doorway. Another passage lay beyond. It curved noticeably to both left and right – this was the narrowest end of the bunker and she was at the nose end of the ES Lucid.
To the left, a considerable number of hops away, she could just make out three doorways in the metal wall of the passage. Her heart beat a little quicker and she emerged into the passage, conscious she was an easy target if anything happened to come from either direction. At the moment, the coast was clear.
“I can do this,” she muttered.
With one steadying hand pressed to the wall, she pushed her damaged body towards the first doorway a hundred metres or so ahead. It didn’t take long to comprehend exactly how drained she was – she required food, water, sleep and medical attention. It was a wonder she’d made it this far, she thought, fully aware it would all be in vain if she was spotted and killed at the last second.
With sixty metres to go she heard the sounds of heavy footfall, coming from somewhere behind and carried to her ears by a funnel effect from the passage. She chanced a look over her shoulder and nearly fell. The glimpse was enough to tell her there was nothing in sight. The footsteps continued and to her perception they became neither louder nor quieter, as if the Vraxar patrol was marching on the spot. It didn’t seem likely they would be doing so and she drove herself to one final effort.
At forty metres, she looked again.
“Crap.”
Shadows, elongated and warped by the overlapping emergency lighting, loomed over the floor and walls, just out of sight around the curvature of the passage.
She turned her head forward. Thirty-five metres to go.
The sound of the footsteps remained at a constant volume, while the shadows of the Vraxar grew ever larger. She tried desperately to figure out if she’d reach the closest office in time before the enemy saw or heard her attempted escape.
Even if Cruz wasn’t pessimistic by nature, she was rapidly learning. Her brain added everything up and informed her she was travelling too slowly to make it to the office. There was no fuel left in the tank to give herself that one final burst – her body’s reserves were spent. Her anger, however, was not.
“I’m damn well not going to fail.”
Maria Cruz ran for it. She put weight on her damaged ankle – only just enough to use it as a pivot for her good leg. The pain was like nothing she’d ever felt, nor imagined was possible. Her resolve was stronger and she used the leg again. She wanted to scream and clenched her teeth so hard they screeched against each other.
After three steps, she found a rhythm of sorts, which allowed her to put just enough weight down at just the right angle to keep the pain below the threshold above which she wouldn’t be able to continue. She ignored the sounds of the footsteps and didn’t attempt to look for the chasing shadows.
It was the longest twenty-five metres she’d ever run and when she made it to the office, Maria Cruz hurled herself inside, away from the sight of the Vraxar. The pain didn’t go away. In fact, it hardly lessened and pulsed
away from the snapped bone and filled her senses with an unbearable white noise of agony.
She scrambled across the floor. There was a desk, a chair and a shelf unit holding a couple of textbooks. Behind the desk she huddled, curled up in misery. It’s my birthday, she thought, unsure who she was accusing and of what. Except it wasn’t her birthday any longer and the aliens walking along the corridor outside didn’t care.
They walked by the office without so much as a break in stride. Cruz waited a moment longer to see if the pain would subside. It did, if only slightly. She raised her eyes over the edge of the desk.
“No tablet.”
There were drawers in the desk. They weren’t locked – nobody in the Space Corps stole anything. In the case of this particular desk, any hypothetical thief would have been as disappointed as Maria Cruz at the lack of diagnostic hardware within.
There was no reason to stick around. The Vraxar patrol was gone and the adjacent office was no more than twenty big hops away. She reached it without incident. Her first reaction was one of disappointment – the desk was clear.
She rattled at the top drawer in the desk and pulled it open with a scrape. There was an unopened bottle of water, a bar of chocolate and some over-the-counter painkillers. She washed down a handful of the tablets with deep gulps from the bottle. It was empty before she knew it. For some reason, she didn’t feel enormously hungry and shoved the chocolate into one of her pockets along with the rest of the painkillers.
Cruz checked the second drawer and closed her eyes when she saw the diagnostic tablet, its screen facing upwards. The previous user had locked it against unauthorised use. She snatched it from the drawer and sank onto the floor out of sight, in order to take a look.
With a press of her thumb, she provided her biological data to the tablet. In less than a second, the lock on the tablet opened and showed her the top-level data relating to the ES Lucid’s comms systems. Not daring to hope, she attempted to open up a sub-menu. For a split second, her pain was forgotten and Maria Cruz could have cried in relief.
Negation Force (Obsidiar Fleet Book 1) Page 21
