He wasn’t alone, at the top of the shaft. The warlord was there with him, cuts covering her face, everything below the eyes a bloody mask. She was shouting, but the TNT had blown the audio sensors I had in that room. More Jaspa stood ready, most wounded and filthy, readying long stabbing spears, shields, and here and there, battered and well-worn guns.
I shifted my view back to the elevator shaft and the twisted metal and shards of rock coating the bottom…
…and the roiling light, something like an oil slick illuminated from within, that prodded and pushed and pulled itself out, streamers of sticky blood wiggling as they left the creature, to fall limp and lifeless and tar-black as the oozing substance dropped away. Something in between a mantis and a squid, I thought, with more appendages flickering and growing from its wounds, more limbs than it could ever need. Then, resolute, it started to climb again.
Then it stopped.
And it looked at me. Straight at my viewpoint, as new warning popped up. PROCESS $452@$!)-ERROR wants to synchronize. Y/N?
“No,” I whispered, and the thing screamed without a mouth, shaking more fragments of rubble down on itself.
I moved my perspective up, looked at the twisted remnants of the elevator car, looked to where the Jaspa had spiked it to the wall. Had. The spikes were gone now, twisted shrapnel from the blast.
Good.
The beast screamed again. I dropped the elevator on it.
Shouts from above. I realized that the audio sensors were back online. The beast’s scream should have tipped me off, but I’d been distracted.
Distracted. No, I couldn’t be. I had things to do and little enough time. I glanced into my status, found the open circuit I needed. It had arrived while my consciousness was stuck in the labyrinth.
I put it into Infrastructure.
Infrastructure Subroutine is now 2
You have unlocked a Construction Improvement!
Three options are available at this juncture;
Flame-Resistant: Your structures are reinforced against fire and heat.
Slick: A macroteflon layer coats all manufactured surfaces unless you instruct otherwise at the time of construction.
Modular: All devices and fixtures can be reconfigured on the fly for ease of assembly and repurposing.
Three choices and I had time for precisely none of them. Choosing one would shut me down for a time, and that would get me killed right now. I willed them away and moved my nanobuilder swarm into the elevator room.
I had to work fast. The schema I wanted flowed into my mind, and now that I had demolition and infrastructure to three and two respectively, I had enough to construct it.
Lightweight frangible stone reinforcement.
My nanobots whipped along the ceiling, converting the material as they went. The schema hadn’t factored in gravity, though, and dust fell as they worked… lightly at first, then a regular rain of the stuff.
I growled in frustration as one of the Jaspa looked up and saw the patterns on the ceiling. I dimmed the lights, but it was too late. He shouted, and their nerve broke, at the worst possible time. They pushed and shoved each other, crowd turned to mob as they fought to escape what they thought was a crumbling ceiling.
The fools need not have bothered. The safety protocols wouldn’t let me collapse a room onto anything even remotely human. I couldn’t even rig it to collapse. Though I was riddling the ceiling and the rock above it with frangible armor, which was built to crumble and spare the layer below, though I was weakening the overall structure of the ceiling above, I couldn’t thin it to the point where it would crumble under its own weight and cave in. I could get it NEAR that point but not over.
Which was my plan. But to do that, I needed time. I needed cannon fodder to throw at that thing coming up the elevator shaft. I needed distractions.
And the folks I’d planned to use for that purpose were exiting, stage left.
I choked back words that would do no good and watched them go, watched the warlord shout and threaten from the rear, watched her clench her non-gauntleted fist in impotent rage…
…and then I saw it, as she gave up and grabbed a few discarded guns, glancing at the door, preparing to flee.
“You screwed up,” I told her. At her side, holding the guns she jammed into his arms with distaste, the Ploughman glanced upward. Fear in his eyes, more fear as he glanced between my unseen speakers and the open door into the elevator shaft.
“I have no time for you!” she snapped, jamming a pistol into the waist of her trousers.
“You have no time at all. You’re infected.”
The Commander stopped, frozen, then spat. “Waste your lies on that,” she gestured to the elevator. “Come, Hiram,” she barked, as she took a step toward the tunnel out.
But the Ploughman didn’t move. He stared at her in horror.
I sighed. “There’s a patch of shine the size of your palm between your spine and shoulder. Right where your leathers are torn.”
She took another step, stopped. Looked at the Ploughman. And his gaze convinced her where my words couldn’t.
In the shaft, metal ground and tore. The beast was freeing itself from the wreckage.
“Your life is over, one way or another. Unless I help you fix that. But first you have to fix what you did. You have to slow that beast down for a few minutes.”
“How?” She whispered, and I had to strain my sensors to hear her over the racket our nemesis was making.
I weighed my options. “Hold your ground here. Once I’m done, I’ll open one of the doors.” I opened them both with a thought, snapping them shut just as quickly. “I need a minute and a half. Give me that.”
“I have two sticks of TNT left,” said the Ploughman.
“Guns did little enough to it in the levels below,” The Commander muttered.
“If it gets out and gets to me before I’m done, it’ll infect me, grow more powerful, and your people will be fighting things like it for the rest of their very short lives,” I lied. I didn’t know what the hell would happen if it got to me, but it wasn’t an impossible scenario.
And right now, tired and weakened as she was, she bought the lie without hesitation.
“Do it,” she nodded to the Ploughman. “Both at once.”
He looked toward the doorway out, then breathed a heavy sigh. And that’s about all I had time to see, because I left them to it and jumped into the nanobuilder swarm.
I had too much to do and not enough time. Never enough time. Story of my life, if I cared to wade into self-pity.
I didn’t.
I pushed the nanoswarm to their limits, burning hot, not caring. This was the moment I’d been working toward for two days, and the stakes couldn’t be higher.
And nine feet up, as I converted the last bit of raw stone and earth into ‘armor’, messages flared up at me.
Warning! Further construction impossible
Reason: Endangerment of personnel assets
I leaped out of the swarm—
—and into chaos.
It had gained the doorway but at a cost. The beast’s oil-slick splattered the floor, the walls… and the Warlord.
The guns hadn’t worked, after all. They lay scattered around the chamber, discarded, gunsmoke drifting from barrels. No, she’d tried, but now she was up in front of the elevator door, going toe to toe with the damned thing. The many-times-over-repaired fire ax in her hands flashed, as she cut into groping tendrils, smashed claws away, and jerked painfully away from its return strikes.
She was good.
But not perfect. Red, red blood flowed from gouges in her side, out of flapping tears in her leather vest, red mingling with rainbow shine and falling to the floor like ketchup mixed with glitter.
With cold clarity, I knew what I had to do. I found the Ploughman and opened the door nearest to the corner he’d ended up in.
He shot me a fearful glance. I ordered the nanobots through while he hesitated. “Now!” I barked, whe
n he didn’t move.
The Ploughman bolted, and the Warlord shot him a glance, crusted, bloody face twisting as he went. She backed away from the beast a step, another, then ran to follow.
I shut the door in her face.
The Ploughman stopped, started to look back. I opened the door in front of him, and he snapped his head back around and kept running.
A single patch of shine? I could have maybe done something about. It was possible she would have lasted days, even weeks depending on what it did.
But with the coating she had on her and the open wounds? I wasn’t an expert, but given how she’d handled her infected troops, I knew she was too much of a risk. Too contagious. If she got near me or anything living, then she’d doom it regardless of her intentions on the matter.
So I betrayed her and ignored her screams as she pounded on the door, took the axe to it as the monstrosity struggled to move its bulk out of the now-free elevator door.
I withdrew my presence from the room, withdrew ownership from it and the rest of the connecting rooms, felt my bandwidth recede as the broadcast nodes deactivated.
Not that it mattered. I gave the nanoswarm its marching orders and jumped into the construction drone. I’d have one shot at this.
I hovered alone under a field of stars, up on the mountain slope above the ruin of my complex.
And with careful, careful twitches of its manipulators, I pulled away the blocks that I’d so carefully placed yesterday, the blocks that I’d put in place to hold the scree and boulders and logs that I’d worked free from their moorings.
It started small, at first. A tickle of pebbles, followed by larger rocks, followed by the smallest of the boulders and a bouncing log…
…and then physics did its thing, and the rest followed, surging downward and taking out more boulders, sweeping them into the avalanche as it thundered down toward the ground above the western half of my ruin.
Then I started trundling the construction drone down the slope, picking my way carefully as I could. Wheels weren’t optimal here, but they were what I had.
Tons of falling rock struck the earth above my original control room, above the room whose ceiling I’d just converted into material that I’d just converted into very breakable armor.
Dust billowed up, and when it was clear, I would have sighed in relief if I’d had lungs. The ruin was gone, the ground was warped and sunken, and the fact that I was still thinking meant that my little landslide had missed my core chamber.
And even better, there were lights coming up the road.
Not torches, not a rough, burning line but three electric lanterns. Just as I’d specified, during our last radio conversation. The Arcadians were coming to pick up the pieces.
I gave the construction drone its orders, swooped the aerial drone around for one last look to make sure we were clear, and returned my perspective to the bunker.
And more importantly, to the Ploughman who sat curled with his back to the door, face buried in his hands. He shook, and I knew it was adrenaline wearing off.
I’d have loved to have given him the time to recover. It would have been the decent thing to do. But I never had enough time. So instead I switched on my audio. “I’m sorry for your loss.”
“It was not my choice to join her on this. She was my slaver, not my friend.”
“I know.” But there had been tears in his eyes when he looked up.
He was silent a moment, then asked “What will you do now?”
“Leave. Will you come with me?”
“You would make me your slave, then?”
“No. If you say you want to go I’ll let you go. Even have my friends give you a few supplies. But where will you go?”
“Back to my—” he stopped. In the dim light I saw realization start to sink in.
“If you go back to your family, the Jaspa will find out. They will blame her death on you. But if you vanish here, you’re just one more assumed dead.”
“How can I trust you?” he asked.
“You can’t.” He had been decent enough. “But I aim to solve the Jaspa problem now. That will probably do your family and neighbors good, in the end.”
“I won’t help you fight them. I can’t.”
“Will you make me TNT? And teach others how?”
His eyes hardened. I kept going. “And not just that. I’m going to have a lot of people to look after. They need to know how to farm, how to make tools, how to… ah hell, they need to know how to live. Not just survive, but live.”
“Why do you care?”
I sighed. “I don’t pretend to be a good man. But this world is lined with the skulls of those guys. I’m about as decent as I can get away with, and that’ll have to do. I’m going to help the people I like and maybe take out some bigger evils than me before I’m done. Up to you whether or not that’s a good enough answer.”
He bowed his head and seemed to be thinking it over. While he did, I set the nanoswarm working above me, and the construction drone to digging down.
“Yes,” he decided at the end of it. “But I will leave you if you ask too much.”
“Fair enough.” I diverted the nanoswarm down and ate a hole through the false ceiling between us. “Sit tight for a minute. I’ll get my friends to lower a rope when they’re ready.”
Once the vertical shaft was complete between the surface and my chamber, they dropped cables, not ropes. And a familiar figure scrambled down first. A girl, just as grungy as before, lean and wiry.
I fired up my translation program. “You’re looking well.”
“Great one!” She bowed to me.
I snorted. “Get up. You’re staining the floor.”
“Glad you survived,” Cade called from above. “What now?”
“Got a friend below. Get some ropes down here, he’s coming with us. Then you’re going to lower that construction drone into the hole, and I’ll shut down for transport.”
“Transport? You’ve won!”
“No. I’ve faked my death and bought some time, that’s all. We’re relocating. You’ll need to help the drone set me up again, a few miles away. I’ve got a good spot. The Jaspa think that shine-contaminated dogs are roaming the area.”
“You sure about this?” Cade asked. “We didn’t discuss this.”
“Couldn’t. Too many ears. Radio’s impossible to secure with what I had to work with.” Argus might have found a way.
Argus. Poor bastard. I hadn’t had time to mourn him, and I couldn’t spare it now. I’d only known him a short time, but he had helped me, even if he was a spy.
Hell, I’d figured he was a spy from the get go. That had made him easier to understand and work with, honestly. Easier to forgive.
I gave Cade the coordinates, saw the Ploughman… Hiram, she’d called him, lifted from the sub-level. Then I guided the drone down and started the procedures needed to shut down and get packaged away.
The board had been stacked against me from the beginning. But I wasn’t about to give up. It was time to withdraw to better terrain, time to change the game entirely. I was off the Grid, literally, so that shut out any more attacks by fake-Leony from that vector. The plume of dust would have been noticed from the Starport, and the morning would show a crushed complex. That would lead Tyr to believe I was dead. The Jaspa might buy it, too.
About the only dangling thread were the mutants below. More might come for me, given time. They’d been stirred up now, and I wasn’t even certain the cave-in had killed the mantis squid. I had the feeling I was putting a problem off, rather than resolving it, there.
But that was a worry for another day. I stared up as my vision faded, the sensors going dark one by one.
Above me, bats wheeled and chittered in rage, their home destroyed… but they’d find another.
And beyond them, the cold, distant stars.
Perhaps I’d see them, before this was done.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
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Bunker Core (Core Control Book 1) Page 25
