Bunker Core (Core Control Book 1)

by Andrew Seiple

  Donna nodded her agreement to the idea, and the two of them slipped out of the ruin, through the doorless doorway. The mosquitoes kept away for once, thankfully, driven off by the fumes. Juscade had chosen this place to “cook” within because of the combination of its excellent ventilation and the good wall of trees between it and the Heronmen’s home. The small fires and fumes were unlikely to be detected. That was his assessment, anyway. For her part, Donna eyed the tall towers of their floating castle and wondered.

  The moon hung over head, full and bright, distorted by the clouds wisping and gathering around it. It would be rain soon, she knew, even without her sense of smell. The shifting pressure made her head ache, more so than normal.

  It wasn’t far from the lab back to the perimeter of Our Cadia, but they moved with caution, eyes scanning the night and the shapes of the homes around them. She hadn’t seen the Nighteyes again since it had almost killed her weeks ago, but its memory still haunted her. It was beautiful, and it was deadly, and two people might not be beyond its ambition if hunger drove it.

  And someone had to keep watch. When she turned back after surveying a potential ambush point, she caught Juscade looking back at the lab, his face solemn. “There’s no way they haven’t noticed us,” he said, greatcoat creaking as he folded his arms.

  “Who?” She tugged on his sleeve, and he followed as he spoke.

  “Tyr and his boys.”

  “The Screamers have not been near here for months.”

  “Yes, and doesn’t that make you wonder?” He shot her a look, then picked his way through the trees, hands outstretched, shuffling without any particular hurry.

  “Wonder?” Donna asked, feeling the tickling trace around her throat again. She cleared it several times, trying to get ahead of it, then coughed and spat.

  “They’d come by every few weeks, sweeping in their patrols, back when they started. Then they moved down to once every couple of months. Now they’re not coming at all. Why? What changed?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Nothing… as far as we know. Nothing we control. Nothing we chose. We did our best to hide in every way possible, but there’s no way we haven’t slipped up at some point. Which means one of two things.” They broke through into the perimeter around Our Cadia then, pushing the heavy branches aside, finding the gate hidden in the covered fence. “Either they don’t care about us, or they’re gearing up to kill us all, and they’re trying to avoid spooking us in the meantime.”

  “That’s a risk we can’t take,” a voice said from beside them, and they both jumped.

  It was Rauph, face blackened with dirt and paint, muscular form hidden in the shadows.

  Donna blinked, and got her heartbeat under control. She was getting slow, getting stupid. She had not seen the elder hunter. Losing her night eyes, her mother would have said.

  “Rauph,” Juscade said, pretending he hadn’t jumped just as high as she did. “Any chance of food?”

  “We saved some for you.”

  “Gonna need it to go,” Juscade said. “Can’t leave the still unminded for long. Bring it to us, will you?”

  Rauph nodded without another word and slipped through the perimeter.

  The hidden gate clinked and rattled, and Donna turned to head back to the workshop.

  But Juscade lingered behind, staring after his old friend. “I’m sending him to die. I’m sending all of us to die.”

  “Prophet?”

  “I’m sending us to die because we can’t take the risk the Heronmen won’t come for us. The glowfields in the north are shifting, and the passage will be sealed soon.”

  Donna inhaled sharply, then coughed. She leaned against a tree, collecting her thoughts. The path through the glowfields was one of the few safe hunting grounds that her people had. Even if half the game and plants had to be discarded, due to shine and radd taint, it still provided the staples that let them survive. Without the northern hunting grounds, winter would bring death.

  “That’s what they’re waiting for,” Juscade continued. “The Heronmen. Once it closes, we have to scavenge the city or die. And scavenging the city is death. They’ll see to that. They haven’t come yet because they’re waiting until we have no place to run.” His voice wavered. His smooth, deep tone broke.

  “Are you sure?” Donna found herself asking. It was a question she wouldn’t have dreamed of asking a week ago, a question that the other Cadians would have deemed the rudest of stupidities. Of COURSE he was sure. He was the PROPHET.

  But she had come to know Juscade the man, and so she dared to ask it.

  “No,” he admitted, turning back and beginning the trudge out of the woods. “But the alternative’s almost worse. That we don’t matter. That Tyr’s looked at us and shrugged. That nothing we can do matters to that son-of-a-bitch.” He bared his teeth, white in the darkness, white against his skin. “That kind of arrogance gets my goat. I can’t let that stand. I can’t let him win.”

  “You would have us fight a god?” She whispered, eyes wide. This was new. This was nothing she had ever heard of, ever conceived before. The Jaspa had fought a god and won, but at a cost that still crippled them. How could the Cadians even—

  Realization struck. “You would fight a god with another god. This is why you want Wynne’s favor.”

  Juscade laughed, as he moved back down the street, voice echoing fearlessly though Donna flinched at the noise. “No. There are no gods here. Just machines and men.” He pulled the radio from his coat as he walked back into the workshop and replaced the salvaged object back on the shelf. “And Wynne is a man. I spoke to him. I got his measure. That’s no machine in there. Just a man, pushed into a corner and fighting for his life. Like us.”

  “No men have such powers.”

  “We did once,” Juscade said, turning to look at her. And her protests stilled in her throat, even the tickle abating as the old fire glimmered in his eyes, magnified by the lenses over them. He looked every inch the man that her parents had followed out of slavery. He was the Prophet again, and she turned her head in shame rather than meet his gaze for a second longer.

  “We did once,” the Prophet whispered. “And we can again. If we can escape the traps, and those hunting us. If we can find a place to grow, free and unhindered. If we can just… catch our breath, for a moment. Just breathe.” His fingertips brushed her throat, and for a second she thought herself healed by his touch, some miracle called down to soothe her charred throat.

  Then the tickle returned. No, there were no miracles, not anymore.

  But there were gods, no matter what the Prophet said.

  And as if on cue, the radio crackled, braking the moment. The old tongue rattled from it, in Wynne’s easy, drawling voice. Juscade listened, then closed his eyes. “And so it begins.”

  “Shall I gather the others?” Donna offered.

  “No. Let me respond. Keep silent… except when I wave at you, I need you to cough, alright? The nastiest sounding cough you can manage.”

  Donna nodded, not sure why she would be doing that. Still, she could manage something pretty nasty sounding, she thought.

  After all, she’d had a lot of practice, recently…

  SEVENTEEN

  “Why did you redesign it? And for that?” Argus asked.

  “You’ll see.” I watched as my builderswarm finished modifying the reconnaissance drone. “It comes down to asymmetric warfare.”

  “I don’t think I’ve been programmed with that concept.”

  “There’s a couple of ways to take that phrase, but the basic fact of the matter is that I’m trying to drive them off and make it too painful to keep fighting, and they’re trying to break a fortified position. They want to get this done as fast as possible. I have to play defense and whittle them down to the point where they can’t continue.”

  The swarm eased back from the drone, and I hopped back into it, firing up the engine. Quieter now, just by a bit. But also heavier, thanks to the nozzle near the bat
like drone’s “head”.

  “I’m not sure how that’s going to help whittle anyone down. Maybe if you covered their faces while they were sleeping, made them suffocate. But that seems like a lot of trouble, really.”

  “Cute, but nowhere close to my plan. Right now we’ve got an advantage. They think they’ve scouted out our capabilities. Enough survivors got back that they’ve got a notion that we’re a simple hole in a mountain. They don’t know we have assets outside of the bunker.”

  “Two drones isn’t much of a trump card.”

  Trump cards… I shook my head, as the phrase distracted me for a moment. I chalked it down to the corruption, which had been giving me grinding headaches off and on for the last few hours. “Two drones, the Arcadians, and a few other assets who don’t know it yet.”

  “What? How? Have you been talking to people behind my back? Impossible, you don’t even have a full Grid interface constructed yet!”

  Full Grid interface? I’d ask him about it later. “Talking to people? No. An army travels on its stomach. We’re going to make sure that stomach doesn’t get any new meat. Not without a lot of trouble and fear, anyway.”

  “So how is a paint sprayer going to help you with that?”

  “Watch and learn.”

  I’d taken a risk, pulling the drone back in and leaving their camp unobserved. But I thought it was a good risk. Like I told Argus, they were expecting to break a siege. Even if their commander was good, they wouldn’t be expecting external drones.

  That would change if they got a good look at me, or if I overplayed my hand. I had a number of tricks to pull, but I had to start low and escalate or risk lowering the effectiveness of some of my later plans.

  If there were later plans. Three hundred warriors was three hundred warriors, and there was no way around that. This was a situation where I could do everything right and still fail. “Quantity has a quality of its own,” I muttered.

  “Excuse me?”

  “Nothing, Argus. Hang on, we’re almost there. I’ll patch you in to the visual feed.”

  “Oh… good.” He sounded faint. Probably his agoraphobia kicking in.

  Well, tough. I didn’t want to waste words when a visual lesson would do. Besides, I had to admit I got a bit of childlike glee when I managed to surprise him on something.

  There weren’t too many joys in this half-life I’d ended up in. I’d take what I could get, at least until better times came along.

  “So,” I began heading down the hills, cresting the tops of the trees with inches to spare. “Remember how we spent the week chasing game away from the area?”

  “Is that what you call it? I thought you were just trying to wreck the drone in the most creative way possible.”

  A bit unkind but not without accuracy. My strategy of using the drone to spook and pursue animals had resulted in a few tumbles and one total loss. Fortunately I’d been able to get the construction drone to it and wheel it back to base for repairs, at the cost of most of a day.

  “Shush. It worked, and that’s what matters.”

  Argus wasn’t convinced. “Except it didn’t. I mean, not for a lot of them. The deer are gone, but the wild dogs came back. And that thing is still out there…”

  “Oh, I’ve got plans for him. You’ll see.”

  “Well, hopefully it goes better this time around.”

  “If the worst happens I’ll have to build a new drone.” I shrugged, shoulderless.

  Three hundred men (and probably a few women, too.) Three hundred men and women would eat. It’s what people do. They’d bring some food with them, but they’d also plan to hunt and forage. Too many plants out there to try and nail down all of them, but I could and had done something about the meat available. And now I’d do more.

  It took twenty minutes to track down the wild dog pack, and another five to catch up to them when they started running. Even with the noise baffles, their ears were too sharp for me to fool. No matter, the drone was fast, and I only needed to hit a few of them.

  I managed to pull up to something that might have had a golden retriever in its ancestry at some point, waited until it twisted sideways in an attempt to zig-zag, and pasted it with the paint sprayer. It yelped, then started running in circles and shaking, trying get the unpleasant ooze off. But I didn’t stick around to watch, I had more dogs to tag.

  I’m pretty sure the Jaspa camp heard the barking and commotion, even if they were a little distant. But that was fine, the paint would be dry by the time they got anyone out here.

  After the fourth pup got painted I hovered away and landed the drone on a high branch, watching the pack pull back together. Dogs being dogs, they tried to help their tagged comrades groom.

  Which spread the shimmering, shifting paint all over their muzzles and fur, lighting up the inside of their mouths in a fascinating and fairly horrific manner.

  It had taken a couple days of experimentation to whip up paint that sort-of-matched the shine in my Tazzel Worm buddy’s scales. This stuff was temporary. It’d peel off in a few days, but that was fine. If the conflict lasted longer than that I’d probably lose, and it was a moot point anyway.

  Though I had taken care to make sure the stuff was nontoxic. I liked dogs well enough, no sense in poisoning the poor bastards.

  “You’re painting dogs.”

  “Making it look like they’re shine-infested, yes.”

  “Okay… why?”

  “So the Jaspa don’t eat them.” I kept my voice neutral. Argus wasn’t always the fastest mind around. Which worked in my favor in the long-term, so I didn’t mind the fact. “They’ll avoid eating the dogs, try to avoid them altogether, and probably keep away from their territory. That’ll cut off a whole foraging area, for our enemies.”

  “Oh. Is that what you’re going to do with… him?”

  “Not exactly. I’ve got different plans for that one.”

  I left the dogs behind and flew slowly through the trees, away from the barking and growling. If the Jaspa did have scouts, they’d be looking this way. So I didn’t put the drone above the canopy until I was a good distance away, and the sun was at an angle that favored me.

  It took longer to find my next target.

  Where the woods grew tangled, in the shadow of the hills, I found a thicket that twitched and moved. Knowing what it held, I buzzed it from a respectable height, hovering and revving the drone’s engine until my quarry poked its snout out to investigate.

  Argus squeaked in the back of my head.

  My quarry grunted.

  In a world that had been torn apart by weapons of mass destruction, infested with rogue nanite strains, and where mutants roamed as apex predators, it had actually made me smile to find this thing.

  Six hundred pounds of fat and muscle and bone, a scarred hide thick enough to turn knives, and a pair of flat, black killer’s eyes stared at me over a porcine snout. This wild boar was the undisputed king of his little patch of territory. He didn’t need any damn mutations to be a badass. Those tusks did just fine, as his survival to such an apparent weight and age testified.

  We stood staring at each other for a long moment, he and I. Then I abruptly dropped the drone to eye-level with him, spritzed him in the face with the paint sprayer, and flew for all I was worth.

  I heard an ear splitting shriek of piggy rage behind me and didn’t look back. The first time I had found him I had navigated to a point where the trees were too thick to escape upward, and I’d crashed the drone with my sub-par piloting skills during the hurried escape. The bastard had pursued me with a hatred that hadn’t faded even after a couple of miles, and it was only thanks to his poor eyesight that he hadn’t found the crash site and mangled the wreckage into something unsalvageable.

  “He’s my opening volley,” I told Argus.

  “What?”

  “Dogs, dogs I might have felt bad about using this way. This guy? He’s ammunition.”

  Argus didn’t understand at first.

&nbs
p; But ten minutes later, as he realized where I was leading the boar, he gasped in understanding. Then he giggled.

  Not completely innocent after all, then.

  Shouts from the Jaspa pickets ahead, and I turned the drone, dove behind a tree, and killed the motor. The boar was far enough back that I was out of his sight. Boars had lousy sight to begin with.

  But they had good ears.

  And oh, were those sentries noisy.

  The boar thundered past me, not even sparing my drone a glance, and burst out of the thick trees—

  —right into the picket line of sentries around the Jaspa camp.

  Squealing and screaming ensued. I waited until they were both pretty well stuck in, fired up the drone, and headed back to my safe vantage point, miles away.

  My feeling of smug satisfaction lasted until a gunshot rang out through the woods. Then thirteen seconds later, came another.

  They have guns.

  The next gunshot came a minute later, followed by a twenty-second delay between it and the fourth. I relaxed a bit. They only have a few guns. Or one that’s really slow to load.

  “This is bad,” Argus said.

  “Not as bad as it could be. If I’m right then it’s not a game changer, more of a nasty surprise. And we just got them to reveal it early.” I found my perch and turned to examine the camp.

  I’d hit them in the middle of the day, right during their sleep cycle. A thin line of sentries were no barrier to an angry pig, and he had gone right through them. A couple of tents were down, and there were a few bodies being dragged off, either to graves or a doctor, I couldn’t tell which best suited from this distance. My piggy friend lay in the middle of camp, unmoving.

  Standing near him was a solitary figure. Man or woman, I couldn’t tell from this distance and resolution. They had a longarm over one shoulder, with gunsmoke trickling out of the barrel.

  Their other hand was sheathed in a gauntlet, and I watched fingers clench and unclench as they stared down at the pig, before turning and stalking back toward one of the bigger tents, waving their metal hand as they obviously gave orders.