Bunker Core (Core Control Book 1)

by Andrew Seiple

  There were a number of things I could have done to prevent this. I didn’t do any of them. Instead I watched, and I studied the ones who came out of the pit. The one who’d tried battering the walls was the most intact of them, and he limped. A twisted ankle there, at the very least. The girl’s hand was ruined, and she took the most help, moving slowly. Blood loss, I reckoned. Another two seemed to have broken bones, ribs in one case and a leg in the other. And the dead guy, of course, remained dead.

  I’d decimated them. Five from fifty, ten percent of their force rendered incapable of combat. A good start.

  Argus didn’t see it that way. “We should be pushing the advantage! Why aren’t you triggering the other traps?”

  “Patience,” I told him, back in the control room. “I want to know who I’m up against.”

  “You’re up against them!”

  “No,” I said, refocusing the nanocams. “I’m up against him.” I said, staring at the boss guy, well back from the mouth of the entryway, barking directions to the next wave. “I’ve got my drones, and he’s got his. Your move, Chuckles…”

  EIGHT

  They’d come in cocky, sure of their numbers, ready to knock down a malfunctioning door and tear a glowy ball to bits. Now they’d been bloodied, and it sobered them right up. I had traps, and they had casualties. Using the light of their fire I watched the boss guy harangue his troops, and studied his tone and body language.

  It was wrong.

  I had been a soldier, I knew, but it wasn’t the sum of me. I had been more than that. I had led troops and done that more than once. I knew how to draw them out, inspire them, turn them from soldiers into an army.

  This guy didn’t.

  The proper thing to do would have been to leave the wounded alone to get treated and recover, and question the torchbearers on what they saw.

  Instead, he was trying to get answers from the wounded as they were being treated and getting frustrated when they were letting their crashing adrenaline and pain answer him. I saw him backhand the guy with the sprained ankle, finally, and turn to the torchbearers. Sprained ankle took it stoically, but from his body language, he’d remember that hit. And not in a good way.

  No-longer-smart guy gave orders, and groups moved out to the forest, came back dragging logs. It took some work, the least of them was twelve feet. I saw their goal immediately, and felt satisfaction. I’d predicted this; planned for it.

  Still, I had a few minutes before they were ready, I thought. I let the nanobuilders munch away on the dead guy in the pit, raising the lights above it to survey his corpse as my minions ate.

  “Why are you turning the lights up?” Argus whispered. “They’ll notice.”

  “Let ’em. I’m looking for something important.”

  “What?”

  “A hint to their strategy. I haven’t seen any packs on these guys, which means that the pouches…” I ordered the swarm and found what I was looking for, as leather dissolved. Strips of jerky, a few biscuits, and some dried vegetables. Another pouch turned out to be a canteen, and it burst when the bots ate through it, leaking water into my clean, system-approved spiky deathtrap. With a sigh, I watched as the nanobuilders stopped what they were doing to paint “Caution: Wet floor!” on the side of the pit.

  The device I was inhabiting really wasn’t built for the purposes we’d turned it to.

  “Is everything alright? You sighed. Is that bad? It’s bad, isn’t it?” Argus hopped and bopped, eyes looking worried.

  “Cool your jets. I was sighing about something else. That food the guy’s got is actually good news. They don’t plan on staying. That’s a day’s worth of food at most.” I squinted my cameras. “Well, it’s good news in the short term. Such a small amount of food means that these guys don’t live too far off, as the crow flies. We’ll have to deal with these people again, after this is done.” I killed the lights again and let the swarms eat in peace.

  Some of the raiders had bows slung across their backs. They could go hunting, I supposed. Well, they would or they wouldn’t.

  I refocused my attention to the next wave heading into my corridor, stepping cautiously down the grade to the turn in the tunnel. They’d split up the torches this time, one in front and one in back. The rest were carrying logs. Took some maneuvering to get them around the corner, and I let them do it unmolested.

  I let them get up to the pit and throw a torch across. I even let them slide the logs over, one by one. They made a bridge that covered about half the pit.

  Though I did order the nanobuilder swarm to go up and start chewing on the underside of the logs. It would take a few minutes for them to do what I wanted there, but I wasn’t worried.

  Sort-of-smart guy shouted from outside, the construction crew shouted back, then pulled out, all save two of ’em who knelt and held the logs steady. The departing crew were replaced by beefy troops with hammers and pry tools.

  These goons didn’t hesitate. They moved up to the logs and with a shout, ran across.

  They tried to, anyway.

  Because as soon as they moved, I triggered the drop ceiling above the pit.

  It was pretty damned simple, when it came down to it. A paper-thin layer of concrete concealed what were essentially cinder blocks, hanging from cables in a reinforced frame. The frame pulled apart, the cinderblocks crashed down, and screaming raiders fell off the bridge, into the pit. One of the logs got bounced loose, clocked one of the two steadying the bridge straight in the jaw, knocking his head up and back in ways that human heads shouldn’t go. He flew back and crumpled in a heap, unmoving.

  I raised the lights to see how I’d done.

  Mostly good. Three of them had ended up in the pit, only one had made it across to the other side. She turned, staring wide-eyed at the cross corridors and the steel door ahead of her. She hesitated and took a step back toward the bridge but stopped when the survivors shouted at her.

  The ones in the pit yelled, slipping in the goo of the half-eaten corpse, dealing with gashes from the spikes. All save for one who lay still, under three of the blocks.

  I killed the lights. Torchlight was rough, but it let me see… probably better than they did, for that matter.

  The ceiling had done its job. The downside was that now my pit had blocks in it. I couldn’t spare the swarm to deconstruct them, that would take too much time. Besides, it was doing a good job where it was.

  “We’re going to play for time,” I told Argus. “With that goal in mind, a bad injury is better than a kill. We’ll aim to outlast their food stores, which shouldn’t be hard. Chuckles upstairs might not be brightest, but I’m pretty sure he knows better than to try and move the injured on an empty belly. If we can turn it into an endurance match, we win. That’ll give us time to prepare for their second attempt.”

  “Can we outlast them?”

  I considered the dim figure who’d made it across the bridge, watched her inspect the door and explore the cross tunnels, torch held high. “Maybe.” That rush had been faster than I thought. I hadn’t counted on them having someone across so early in the battle. Still, I didn’t see what one person could do. Not without a blowtorch, or maybe some C4, anyway.

  It took them a good fifteen minutes and change to get their people out of the pit this time. One was unconscious and had to be hauled up, which was tricky without rope. Two of the ones in the pit had broken bones, I could tell. Both legs in one poor guy’s case, one arm and maybe a collarbone, judging by how the girl down there was moving. I winced at that last one. Without a good hospital, that injury would be trouble for her for months.

  Had I been a doctor, as well? I seemed to know a lot about injuries and their treatment. Yes, I thought, I had been a medical practitioner of some sort, for a time, at least. We all had been.

  That last thought tantalized me, and I chased it… nowhere. I had snippets of reference, but they were memories of dreams. The more I ran them down, the more they evaded me. Frustrating. Irritating.

/>   I owed Juno pain and trouble for wiping my memory and putting me at such a disadvantage. No matter how much I mulled it over, I could not conceive of ever consenting to be put into such a state. Which meant that it had been done against my will.

  A crack and a scream caught my attention. Some poor bastard had decided to try crossing the bridge and found the logs a lot less sturdy than they’d been half an hour ago. He fell and blood sprayed… that was definitely arterial. He died as they tried to extract him, too.

  Was that ten? Yep, that made an even ten that wouldn’t bother me. And one who had gotten past the traps in the hallway. Not bad work, but maybe not good enough. Thirty-odd raiders left to go.

  I watched the fallout outside. Sort-of-smart guy had brains, but he didn’t have charisma, and he simply stood there scowling as the injuries mounted. The mood grew tense. The sobbing and broken were laid by the fire, while a couple of their more medically-skilled number tried to splint, bandage, or restrain them as the case may be. I could see several of the rest of the troops doing the cruel mathematics and realizing that the more people who fell, the likelier the chance that their number might come up.

  After a time, he came to a decision and waved another group forward… and this time it took some persuading. He had to put a hand on his junky mace before they grudgingly obeyed, and that gave me ideas.

  As soon as the first of them set foot back in my corridor I cranked up my speaker volume and screamed “YOU’RE GOING TO DIE HERE!”

  Goddamn, it was fun watching them jump back and run.

  Cue more haranguing, and this time the boss guy had to draw his mace out from its belt loop. I didn’t focus on him though, but the other faces around the fire. There were way more sweaty foreheads and nervous, shifting eyes then there’d been before I yelled, and I would have grinned if I’d had teeth.

  Grudgingly, they turned, angry and afraid and angry over being afraid, drawing their own weapons and advancing into the corridor.

  And when they got to the corner, I triggered the second drop ceiling.

  More screaming, more yelling from outside, and when the dust cleared I saw I’d gotten three of the ten. One stared at his fallen friends and bolted, just bolted out of the corridor. The other six froze and stared around, then wearily started digging their buddies out of the rubble. I couldn’t say whether they were alive or dead, and it didn’t matter. They wouldn’t be back in here tonight.

  I couldn’t see the fate of the runner, but I heard smart guy bellow, and then I saw one of the picket guys pull his bow and take a shot. Maybe more followed. But I literally had tunnel vision, so maybe the runner escaped.

  Warning: Core Chamber Door 1 is under attack!

  I hastily switched cams to see the lone lady who’d made it across the pit whacking at the door with her crowbar and getting precisely nowhere. She looked frenzied, and I didn’t blame her. I’d just killed some of her buddies a few dozen feet away. Then she managed to find her head and started trying to pry at the seams of the door and the frame, and I would have held my breath if I had lungs. This was the moment of truth.

  After a few minutes I felt relief. Thanks to Sturdy Construction, she was making little headway. Just scratches. If she’d had a few more people and a few hours, it might be a different story. But as it was, this was fine.

  I switched back to the main cameras in time to see the boss guy himself heading down into the entryway, torch in hand. Damn it! I’d used every trap I had in the corridor. I couldn’t do much more than watch and fume, as he came to the pit, studied it, and called out to the woman across the way. She stopped trying to crack the door and listened.

  Then he went out and came back in with something like a mattock. He threw it across the pit, and she dropped her crowbar and lifted the heavy pick. Was she going to try that on the door? It might do a better job, but I had my doubts.

  To my surprise, she moved into one of the cross tunnels not far from the door, and started hacking at the wall. And I realized, to my horror, that she was going through the loose dirt and rock, digging it away with ease.

  Digging straight toward my core chamber.

  The door was sturdy. The frame was sturdy. The walls? How sturdy were they?

  I was going to find out, and there wasn’t a damn thing I could do about it.

  NINE

  The raider dug, and I watched her go through the nanocams. Once she was sure that the ceiling wasn’t going to fall on her, or the ground wasn’t going to drop out, she picked up the pace. Dirt flew at a pretty good clip.

  “Give me ideas, Argus,” I said, glancing back to the pit. Smart guy was kneeling, examining the logs by torchlight. I was tempted to slam the pit hatch shut, but resisted the urge. At best I’d take his hand, but more likely, the hatch would jam on the logs that were sticking out.

  “Um… the problem is that she’s in unclaimed area. The builder nanoswarms can’t take orders once they’re outside the claimed areas.”

  “Then how did you have them dig the tunnels in the first place?”

  “I told them to dig straight out in a defined pattern for ten feet. They returned after they could no longer fulfill those orders.”

  I glanced back to the woman, already a foot into the wall if I was any judge. The soil was loosely packed at best. Gravity was working with her. She had ten feet to go, and that would take hours, probably…

  …assuming that Chuckles didn’t manage to get a few more across. I couldn’t assume that. My traps were sprung, all but the turrets.

  It was tempting, to open the doors and see about nailing Chuckles to the wall, but I’d put the turrets in the wrong position for that. At best they could hit something next to the door, or a bit away. Anything else and I’d have to rely on ricochets, and though I had a feeling I was a badass with that sort of thing normally, I didn’t have a body at the minute.

  Hell, I couldn’t even jump into a drone, to see if that helped matters. My bandwidth was full. No way around that, not any time soon.

  The guy left the tunnel before I could dwell on the matter any further. “So, about those ideas?” I asked Argus. “Nevermind. Let me bounce a few of mine off you.”

  “Yes, please. I’m not very creative. Not my function.”

  “We could order the builders to devour her mattock.”

  “They have trouble deconstructing anything that’s in motion, and they’re already slow enough when they operate outside of your claimed area. They could do it but it would take… forty minutes, give or take.”

  I shelved that option for now. “We could eat out the dirt above her, try to drop rubble and rocks on her head.”

  “Again, they’re pretty slow outside of your control area. But that might work, assuming there’s anything heavy right above where she is. She’ll probably notice the dirt trickling down before that, though. Given the soil to rock ratio of what we’ve gone through… it would conceivably take about twenty to thirty minutes to reach anything capable of injuring or incapacitating the intruder.”

  Not ideal but worth a shot, I judged. I was about to do it, when another group of guys came down into the tunnel, bearing torches and more logs. “Fuck me running.”

  “What?”

  “Just cursing. Never mind.” This was a tidy trap. I could maybe drop the ceiling on the digger, but couldn’t guarantee a KO. But it would take time, and while I did that, they’d be getting more people across. Whereas if I gnawed away the logs with the builders then they’d still get people across, most likely, but the lady would be digging unmolested.

  My mind ached and twisting, fractured code swam in my vision for a second. My thoughts stuttered, feeling something like a seizure, then the pressure eased.

  Warning! Corruption levels are beyond standard operating recommendations! Recommend sector purge. Rerouting…

  I would have taken a long breath if I could. Corruption was not my friend, and it needed to go. But that was a worry for another time. Right now I needed ideas and fast.

 
“Walls,” I said, looking at the area where she’d eventually break through if she kept going. “Can I put walls in rooms?”

  “I don’t see why not.”

  “Can I wall myself off? Hunker down and keep repairing them when people try to dig through?”

  “No, sorry. It’s hardcoded into the cores. For maintenance and safety purposes, there must always be a human-accessible path to the core.”

  Whoever had made these regulations didn’t want an uprising, I figured. I respected the logic, while I cursed the thoroughness. “What about building a wall where she’s digging, then putting another one behind it?”

  “That… might work, except it would have to be a heavy wall. I don’t know if we have enough feedstock.”

  I shrugged mentally and sent the builderswarm over to eat the logs that the new arrivals were sliding across the pit. It would slow them down at least. But four more jogged across, carrying tools that seemed suited for digging.

  “How about gas?” I said. “Using the nanos to eat the oxygen out of the air?”

  “No good. I’ve seen this in other core runs. The safety countermeasures won’t let an entire complex be rendered poisonous or suffocating. The best you can do is go room by room.”

  After glancing around for a bit, the new miners relaxed as nothing attacked them and headed over to their buddy in the tunnel.

  They shouldn’t have relaxed. As they passed the control chamber door I willed it open, and ordered the drones to do their thing. Blinking against the light, the poor bastards didn’t realize they were under attack until one of their own guys was down. They scampered back as he crumpled, another girl screaming as a bolt caught her in the hip. She toppled out of the firing arc of the bow turrets. I slammed the door shut before they could go getting any funny ideas.

  Replaying the video from the turrets, I nodded in satisfaction. They’d fired semi-automatically but emptied their six-round drop fed magazines in a little over a bolt a second. Their accuracy was… well, it was. Only a quarter of the shots had hit. Part of that was the angle, I hoped. They weren’t made to fire at things outside the room, weren’t in a good enough position for that. I’d have to fix that later.