by Rick Partlow
"Ten," Deke droned. I tried to think of a prayer, any prayer, as fast as I could. "Nine..." Our Father, "...eight..." who art in Heaven, "...seven..." hallowed be thy name. "...six..." Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in Heaven. "...five..." Give us this day our daily bread, and forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us. "...four..." Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil. "...three..." For thine is the power and the glory, "...two..." forever and ever. "...one..." Amen.
The world outside exploded in rainbow colors, my consciousness pulled in a million different directions at once, and we were swallowed up in darkness. But the god of hyperdimensional physics looked upon the darkness and said, "let there be light," and there was one hell of a lot of light!
Polychromatic spots danced through a dazzling image of a huge, red-green planet separated from its amber moon by a monolithic starship that dwarfed them both on our screens. Our warp corona hadn't even faded before the Corporate spacecraft filled half the viewscreen, our prejump velocity sending us across the kilometers from our exit point to the ship's orbit in only seconds. I felt a giant hand pushing me forward against my restraints as Kara hit the braking thrusters, the flares of their twin, fusion-heated hydrogen flames shooting out from below and to either side of the Dutchman's nose.
Then there was no more time to think, only time to act. The CSF ship was a lighter, similar to the one that we'd destroyed at Thunderhead---a converted commercial freighter---but it was heavily armed with weapons pods bristling awkwardly from hardpoints designed to carry cargo handling equipment. Even as I saw the dazzling spear of ions lancing out to strike at the bulbous protuberance along the freighter's spine that I knew to hold its bridge, I was swinging the Gatling turret around.
The laser pulses were invisible in the vacuum of high orbit, but the computer was gracious enough to simulate them for me quite convincingly with a line of red dashes that connected us to the portside weapon's pod for nearly three full seconds. Jets of flame streamed from the pods innards, and I fired another long burst, targeting the same spot. This time I must have hit the propellant for one of the missiles, because the whole pod burst apart in a blast of light that rocked the ship.
Then we were moving past the picket ship, and I switched to the rear view to see the big freighter trailing yellow fire from its bridge and weapon's pod. Deke, I saw, had scored a direct hit on the bridge, and, if the oxygen flame pouring from the command center was any indication, I doubted there was anyone left alive in that section.
"I'm coming around for a pass at the drives," Deke told us, his voice tight. "Keep your eyes open for assault shuttles."
We were pressed into our acceleration couches as he swung the Dutchman end for end, opening up the fusion drives at what felt like five gravities. The little ship shot back toward the injured CSF lighter, this time coming in from the big craft's rear, towards its dark fusion drives. We probably couldn't penetrate deep enough to take out their reactor, or even damage their warp units, but if we took out their fusion drives, they wouldn't be able to reach minimum distance to use their impellers.
Deke slowed us with a blast from the braking rockets, then knocked our nose down a few degrees with the maneuvering thrusters before he targeted the engine ports and fired the proton cannon. Scintillating lightning bolts streaked into the maw of the drives, producing glittering showers of sparks and a cloud of incandescent gas that poured out of the ports and slowly dissipated. I opened up with the Gatling as he waited for the capacitors to recharge, playing the burst over the magnetic coils that lined the inside of the starboard drive port. The superconducting electromagnets that had survived the proton blast fragmented and burst under the hail of pressure pulses, and Deke took out the portside coils with another shot from the particle accelerator.
"Check the docking bay," I warned Deke, trying to get a look at it through the side viewers. We hadn't seen any shuttles yet, which meant they were either onplanet or in the bay.
"Roger." He brought the former missile cutter beneath the lighter, down to the small, open bay nestled against the belly of the big ship.
A delta-winged assault shuttle was already attempting to launch, its maneuvering thrusters flaring as it floated too slowly out of the open doors. It was only halfway out when a stream of protons intercepted it, coring it like an apple. The shuttle flared plasma and disintegrated, the explosion taking most of the hangar bay with it, a secondary blast tearing through the outer hull with spears of glowing plasma.
"She's finished," Deke decided, pulling the Dutchman away from the CSF ship. "We're heading down."
Deke nosed the cutter into the atmosphere, heading for the site of the cave entrance. When Kara had landed on the world, she'd been forced to find a level plain at the foot of the mountain, and walk up, but we assumed the Corporate engineers would have carved out a landing pad by now.
The cautious part of my mind that had kept me alive during six years of a dirty war whispered that I should be worried about ground-based antiaircraft batteries, but I dismissed the thought after a moment's consideration. They weren't expecting attack. If they had been, we'd have never made it this far.
So we blasted into the mountains at full throttle, both gravity and the startlingly loud roar of the drives returning with the atmospheric entry. We skimmed the peaks at less than two klicks up---if the picket hadn't been able to warn the dig site, we didn't want to alert their sensors too early. This was almost going too well. I chuckled to myself, remembering a line I'd read in some old book---I'm paranoid, but am I paranoid enough?
The dig site came into view within a few minutes, though it looked much different now than what Kara had described. The draw she and her partner had walked up had been leveled, probably by explosives, to make room for a large landing pad, now occupied by a pair of assault shuttles and a larger cargo lifter. The cave entrance had also been enlarged, presumably to carry excavated Predecessor relics out to the lifter, and a trio of armored mercenary guards were clustered outside of it, looking upward at us, pointing frantically.
While Deke brought the Dutchman around in a lazy arc, I spun the Gatling turret and laid down a barrage of fire that cut down the guards, then tracked over to the shuttles. I chopped a long burst across the wings of one of the assault craft, blowing glowing fragments of graphite insulation off of the surface of it, and then Deke had the proton accelerator lined up. A single blast consumed the cockpit of the shuttle I had targeted, and he had time to put another shot through the portside wing of the other craft, shattering the delta shape and toppling the shuttle on its starboard side, burning.
"Hang on!" Deke warned us, hitting the braking thrusters to halt our arc, then feeding hot plasma to the landing jets.
We came down fast and landed hard, but Kara and I were halfway out of our acceleration couches before we touched on the cutter's five landing treads. Deke was right behind us as we rushed into the equipment bay, throwing open the concealed locker that held the various personal weapons he had accumulated. While he and Kara grabbed pulse carbines, I retrieved the light Gatling from its hiding place, hefting its weight. I only had the thousand rounds I'd salvaged from the groundcar, but I hoped that would be more than enough.
The belly ramp lowered with a moan of hydraulics and we jogged down it with Kara in the lead. Despite the fact that the world was half again Earth's size, the gravity was actually a tad lighter than Standard due to the lighter materials in the planet's core, and I felt the extra spring in my step. Deke and I ran a quick check of the cargo module while Kara stood watch, but the lifter was deserted, and we made our way into the cave entrance.
Not only had they carved out the opening, but a wide ramp, lit by rows of chemical striplamps, had been tunneled through the floor of the cave, down into the main chamber where Kara had found the corpses. We headed down it at a slow jog, me in the lead with the Gatling, the others behind me in a loose wedge. We were nearly twenty meters down it before the oppositio
n showed its face---a CSF merc fireteam came running around the corner onto the rock ramp, probably sent to check out the explosion of the shuttles. They almost ran into us before they realized what was happening.
Mirrored visors covered their faces, so I couldn't see the surprised looks I was sure were present beneath, but their pulse carbines coming up spoke volumes. I took three of them out with a short burst from the Gatling, the servomotor whine of the spinning barrels nearly drowning out the snap-crack of the laser pulses as a sheaf of crimson sliced through their armor. The other two dropped almost as quickly to Deke and Kara's carbines, and she ran forward to take up an overwatch position at the end of the ramp. Coming up against the lighter, raw rock on the right-hand side of the wall where the ramp had been carved out of the original entrance, she stuck her head around the corner to check for more Corporate mercs.
She waved us forward, and I fell into a crouch at the edge of a huge chamber beneath a hollowed-out mountain. It went on as far as I could see, literally for kilometers, with the alien shapes of the Predecessor machines arranged like some kind of eerie playground.
"They've taken out a lot," she informed us. "It looks like everything small enough to be moved is gone."
Whatever had been done, what remained still retained the unreal, almost illusory quality of which Kara had spoken. It was as if their machinery---if it was machinery---had been designed by an abstract sculptor as one constant piece of art, kilometers across. Here and there, I could see interruptions in the natural progression of it all, where items had been removed; and, far in the distance, I saw the activities of the Corporate Research Division team.
Their skeletal equipment scaffolds climbed the backs of the larger pieces of Predecessor machinery, surrounding it with sensor gear and low-glare floodlamps that bathed the entire chamber in their soft glow. From this distance, I couldn't make out any human shapes. Apparently, either no one else had heard our activities---which I could believe with the odd acoustics in the cavern---or the remainder of the guards were lying in wait for us somewhere in the twisted maze of mechanisms.
"We'll have to split up," Deke decided, face expressionless. "Otherwise, someone's going to get past us."
"Okay," I agreed. "How do you want to play it?"
He motioned with the barrel of his pulse carbine. "You go right, around the perimeter. I'll go left, and Captain McIntire, you go right up the middle. We meet up at the opposite end, then turn around and go back the same ways if we haven't found anything."
"Keep in contact---let us all know if you find anything. And remember, we want to take at least one of the technicians alive, but if we can't find them, try to bag one of the guards." I looked them both in the eye. "Good luck."
With that, we went our separate ways. I took off toward the right side of the chamber's perimeter, scanning on infrared, thermal and sonar. If the bulk of the guards weren't aware of our presence, they'd likely either be on break somewhere or clustered at posts around the more important excavations, and those should show up on thermal and sonar. If they did know we were there, and were trying to ambush us, they'd still be expecting us to come to the digs. Either way, that's where the action would be.
I hoped Deke would be okay. He'd seemed uncharacteristically keyed up and tense once we'd hit the ground. There hadn't been time to talk to him about it, but it was unlike him. So was wanting to avoid this fight. Had that much changed since the war? Were we all that different? It had seemed just like old times, getting drunk and playing poker on board ship, but the feeling hadn't lasted too long. I'd come to him because there was no one else I could trust, but could I really trust him anymore? I shook my head to clear the lingering questions---I'd just have to concentrate on the task at hand and let this one play itself out.
Just inside the right side of the entrance was a parking area for the excavation's hoppers and crawlers---the area, I guessed, where the guards who'd attacked us had been posted. I moved through it carefully, meandering between the machines to make sure no more of the men were hiding among them. I tried to keep from letting my eyes wander around the huge chamber, but I couldn't help but be amazed at the power it must have taken to carve this place out.
I let myself have a glance at the roof, saw that a vast section of it, stretching from just in front of the ramp to nearly two hundred meters in front of me, was artificial; it seemed as if it could be opened to allow ships to descend. Moving on past the parking area, my suspicions were confirmed: running the breadth of the kilometers-wide chamber were a line of four large, circular embankments that could only have been landing pads. Each of them had to have been at least five hundred meters in diameter and nearly ten meters high, and they seemed to have been carved out of the rock.
I shuddered involuntarily. I was glad the pads were empty. I didn't want to think what the Corporates could do with access to Predecessor starships---unless they had access to the Predecessors themselves. They'd sure as hell convinced Fourcade they did. Yet, somehow, I couldn't bring myself to believe that. Maybe I just didn't want to. Or maybe I had a hard time accepting the idea that a race of beings that had been flying starships before humans discovered fire could be conned by the Corporate Council into cooperating with some scheme to grab more power. It was much likelier that they'd deceived the Predecessor Cultists...and much more comforting a thought.
Past the landing pads were a series of a half-dozen oddly-curved columns that stretched a good hundred meters from floor to ceiling. I had no idea what they had been used for, but from the scaffolding surrounding them, the Corporates must have thought they were important. I approached the rightmost of the structures carefully, but I didn't immediately notice any activity around them. I wondered if we'd been lucky enough to catch the research crew on a sleep cycle. It was late afternoon outside, but down here, under tons of rock, that wouldn't mean much.
Clinging to the shadows beneath the scaffold, I began to move on, but hesitated at the nearly-inaudible scrape of shoes on rock floor. My headcomp dissected the sound, deciding that it was one person approaching from ahead of me and to the right. I gently set the Gatling laser on the ground beside the scaffold and pulled the sonic stunner Deke had provided from its shoulder holster. I was taking a chance. If it was a guard, he'd be wearing a shielded helmet, and I'd have to switch to hand-to-hand pretty damn quick.
I pressed myself as far back into the darkness beneath the Predecessor column as I could, wishing for my wartime combat suit and its chameleon camouflage, and waited for the walker to come into view. He was an ordinary-looking human male, and from his white coveralls and the computer handset he was carrying, I took him for a technician. Not as good for our purposes as one of the researchers, but maybe he could tell me where to find one.
I set the stunner for its lightest setting, aiming carefully as the slim, dark-haired tech stepped toward a scanning device built into the scaffolding around the column. Squeezing the trigger, I felt rather than heard the feedback from the intense subsonic vibrations directed out the bell-shaped muzzle, and saw the technician jerk and slump forward to the ground without a word. Stuffing the stunner into its holster, I scanned the immediate area to make sure no one had seen us, then grabbed the unconscious technical worker by his collar and dragged him back into the shadows.
Deke, Kara, I transmitted to them, hold up where you are. I'm interrogating one of their technicians. I'll let you know when it's safe to proceed.
Read you, Kara replied over her mastoid comlink. I waited for an acknowledgment from Deke, but received none and decided I couldn't risk holding off any longer.
I hauled the technician into a sitting position against one side of the column and slapped him across the face to try to bring him awake while I drew my Gauss pistol from its holster at my hip with my other hand. His eyes fluttered open, and he moaned softly, hands going to his temples. Even a light sonic gives you a hell of a headache. I shook his shoulder, and his eyes suddenly opened wide, focusing directly down the large bore of my slugsh
ooter. He drew in a breath to cry out, but I put a hand across his mouth, shaking my head.
"If you try to call for help," I whispered to him softy, "they'll be cleaning your brains off the side of this column for a week. If you have a neurolink or a mastoid comlink, don't think about using it. Anyone shows up, you'll be the first to die. Nod if you understand."
He wagged his head jerkily, eyes still fixed on the business end of my pistol. I slowly took my hand off of his mouth.
"All right," I went on, "I've got some questions, and you damn well better have some answers I like. The first question you don't answer," I warned, extending my talons and waving the blades in front of his suddenly pale face, "I'm going to start cutting things off. Understand?"
He nodded, beads of sweat trickling slowly down his forehead.
"What's your job here?" I asked him.
"T-technician," he said a bit too loud.
"Softly," I hissed, pressing the edge of a talon against his throat. "What's your name, technician?"
"Prohl," he rasped. "Gaston Prohl."
"Well, Gaston Prohl, my good friend, I need you to tell me who's in charge of this little project."
"Director Costanza," he answered immediately, seemingly eager to direct my attention to some other target. "He's back in the stasis chamber," Prohl volunteered, gesturing at the area into which Deke had headed. "That's where he sleeps."
"Is that where they found the bodies of the Predecessors?" I asked.
His eyes went wide, full of obvious shock that I knew about the corpses, but he nodded.
