by Peter Telep
Wang released a dumbfounded laugh. "It's an elevator. Motion or weight activated."
Blinking away the spots, Shane saw that he was right. And it was a very big elevator, able to accommodate thirty or forty Chigs, she guessed. What was even more surprising was that the control panel located inside the lift was human-made. Shane stepped into the elevator for a closer look.
"That's English," Damphousse said, observing the panel. Bridgeway, mining level, and subsurface access were written under three large buttons.
"Cannibalized parts," Wang speculated.
"Or someone else built it," Shane said. "Maybe this was an Aerotech facility that the Chigs captured."
"Wouldn't they have told us that in the report?" Damphousse asked.
"Not necessarily," Wang said grimly. "This aqueduct's history is probably in the same missing paragraph that describes the POW camp."
"I hope this was an Aerotech facility," Damphousse said. "I'll be even happier to blow it up."
Shane pressed the button marked mining level, and the doors slid closed. The elevator rose smoothly and quickly, much to the chagrin of her stomach.
"Can we stop on fourteen? I wanna look around in sporting goods," Wang said with mock seriousness.
"When are you gonna stop your nerves from talking for you?" Shane said softly. "You might be dead in a couple mikes, and your last words will be a lame joke."
"I just don't care anymore, Shane," Wang answered. "I'm going in there, and I'm going to kill everything in my way. And if a Chiggie kills me, just do me a favor. Teach it about payback."
She smiled weakly. "My favorite lesson."
And it was then that she detected the muffled but definite sounds of gunfire and multiple grenade explosions. She eyed the elevator's ceiling.
Though he probably didn't know the expression, Hawkes was going to town on the Chigs and silicates outside. He was a one-man exterminator, and she knew he thought of himself as God of the mountain up there. And that was all right. She would let his ego run wild for now. Reckless courage was another one of his specialties.
The elevator came to a halt, and she and Mister 404 hugged the wall on one side of the exit while Damphousse and Wang stood poised opposite them.
The doors slid apart, and Shane, gripping her pistol tightly, hazarded a peek around the comer.
Without time to brace herself, it all hit her at once.
The spooge-covered bodies of Chigs and the twitching, sparking bodies of silicates lay all over the metallic floor, cast in a dim glow by unseen overhead lights. There had to be fifty or sixty corpses spread across the two or three hundred yards of conduit visible ahead. The noises she had heard hadn't come from Hawkes. They'd come from within the duct. And the smells and mist of combat still lingered in the air.
Even though the body count was high, the corpses still appeared lost amid the immense aqueduct, its curved ceiling dotted with lights and towering some fifty meters above. Teddy had obviously been wrong about the interior of the duct being cramped. You could hold a rock concert in here, she thought.
A latticework of support hangers was affixed to the ceiling and ran lengthwise to support another conduit about ten meters in diameter. This tube within the tube hung about thirty meters off the floor and was designed of a slightly opaque material that revealed the rushing liquid within it. The rushing water within it, Shane corrected herself. Beads of condensation covered the smaller conduit and dripped into a recycling pan that ran the entire length of the tube.
And in what was a bizarre arrangement reminiscent of some ancient TV game show, cell blocks had been constructed on either side of the conduit and stretched into the hazy distance. They did not follow the curve of the wall but were set away from it to form a vertical line. Each cell was simply a box, perhaps twenty feet by twenty by six. The front and rear walls consisted of the wavering energy fields Shane had been imprisoned behind during her wonderful stay at the Kazbek Penal Colony.
As she noticed a sign of movement from within one of tire cells, Chig laser fire echoed in the distance.
"What the hell happened?" Wang asked.
"There's still a chance that many of the Chigs escaped," Mister 404 began quickly. "So there's not much time. But now that we're here, Captain Vansen, I'll tell you the truth."
"How did you get ahold of the T-140?" Shane asked, having already pieced the whole thing together.
"Coop helped him," Damphousse said.
Shane regard her with a scowl. "And how do you know that?"
"'Cause I caught him. And let him go. And I'm glad I did." She turned to the silicate. "Thanks, Teddy."
"You could do time for that, Lieutenant," Shane said through gritted teeth, then returned her attention to 404. "I thought you were just gonna lure them out of the aqueduct."
"I devised a more effective plan. I introduced a local upgrade to their virus. Take a chance. Kill Chigs. And yourselves."
"Wait a minute," Damphousse said. "Software engineers have been trying to alter the A.I. virus for years with no success. How did you manage to pull it off in just a few hours?"
"You've heard of doctors who inject themselves with viruses in order to learn if their vaccines will work? Well, I gave myself the virus. And I developed a subroutine that keeps it in check. Then I realized that the subroutine could be changed, and that it would, in turn change the virus."
"What's the bottom line?" Shane asked, fighting off the desire to put a bullet in 404's head to shut him up. "Do you have the virus now?"
He nodded.
Shane raised her pistol and aimed it at his temple. "Don't do it, Shane," Damphousse said. "Yeah, he's got the virus, but it's a different virus, one that tells him to kill Chigs and silicates. And even himself."
"How do we know that? How do we know anything he's telling us is the truth?" she asked.
Wang huffed. "I'll be the last one to defend him. But look around."
"You won't have to worry about me, Lieutenant," 404 said reassuringly. "I'm about to prove how loyal I am to the United States Marine Corps."
Shane snorted. "How?"
"We have a pair of generators to destroy and prisoners to free," he reminded her. "After that, I'll tell you."
twenty-six
Cooper flinched as another salvo of laser fire blasted a gaping hole in the rock wall not more than a meter above his shoulder. It would be obvious to even a pre-schooler that if he hung around much longer, the Chiggies would find their mark. He already felt old wounds tingle with remembered soreness.
Fighting off the shakes and brushing the falling snow out of his eyes, he clipped his rifle back onto his rucksack, then withdrew the folding grappling hook from the pack's side pocket. He set the three hooks into place, slid down the locking ring, then clipped a secondary rope to the grapple's base. "Don't miss, you stupid tank," he told himself as he wound up and released the hook.
But before it struck anything, a particularly large orb of laser fire impacted the mountain somewhere below Cooper, and he actually felt the rock wall vibrate as a part of it was blasted away. "Where'd you guys learn to shoot? The VR-cade?" Cooper shouted down to the trio of Chigs who were leaping over their dead comrades and scurrying toward the center of the duct.
The grappling hook thudded onto the bridgeway. Cooper wasted no time drawing in the slack until the hooks found good purchase on one of the railing's vertical supports. He slid the rope through the carabiner clips attached to his anchors, pulled it taut, and tied it off there.
Now he was ready to attach another anchor to the rope, one he would use to slide down it. But then he saw that the Chigs on the bridgeway had turned their fire on his grapple. Frantically, he unclipped himself from the mountain, clipped the slide anchor onto the rope, and, gripping the anchor's nylon loop with one hand and reaching into his hip pocket with the other, he pushed off.
Though the angle hadn't looked too threatening at thirty-five or forty degrees, Cooper hadn't realized just how fast he would descend. He was a
lready halfway to the bridgeway by the time he got his last smart grenade out of his pocket. He gave the bomb a sidearm flick, and it streaked away.
As he neared the bottom, he came to the terrible realization that throwing the smart grenade had been a huge mistake.
The trio of Chigs continued to advance toward his grappling hook, now firing at it and him.
And Cooper continued down the rope. At nearly the exact moment that he impacted with the side of the railing and slapped a hand on it, two things happened:
One of the Chigs managed to strike his grapple and blow it in a shower of sparks off the railing. A millisecond later, the smart grenade detonated in the aliens' faces, blasting them into acrid chunks of spooge-covered armor amid a shower of green slime that rained on Cooper.
But the aliens had only been two or three meters away, and three of the railing's support struts beside them had also been blown off then mountings. The rail suddenly groaned and squeaked and peeled away from the bridge, taking Cooper with it.
Thrown violently left then right, he finally settled to a halt, dangling by one hand some two hundred feet above a frozen lake that Damphousse and Wang had said was mined with buzz beams. A sudden gust of wind, a brother of the one that had knocked Vanessa and himself down, struck like thruster wash. He got a second hand on the rattling, snow-slick rail even as the wind lifted him almost perpendicular to it.
And then the gust vanished, sending him swinging down with enough force to make the rail peel back another meter or so. Fighting for breath, he threw his head back and studied the bars above him. He would have to grip one of the railing's horizontal poles (which now hung vertically) and slide a meter up it to one of the rail's support struts.
He was about to make his move when he heard a grinding, metallic sound coming from the east. A look over there confirmed what he and Teddy had feared.
An open hatch had appeared at the far corner of the airfield. It was identical to the one on the west side and had been naturally or deliberately camouflaged by snow. Chigs poured out of it like ants fleeing a burning hill.
It probably would have been smart to have told Shane about the possibility of another hatch, but for once Cooper had wanted to do things his way and had repeatedly told himself that you can't keep a good rebel down. And it wasn't as if he had withheld vital information from her, was it? He had said that if the Chigs had another hatch, he would be ready for them. Those words tasted very bitter at the moment.
The first five or six aliens to emerge from the new hatch pounded off toward the fighters parked on the north end. Another group of six charged away together, then divided to assume supplementary positions around the tankers.
"West? You copy?" he cried into his link. "You got Chigs on the airfield."
Not bothering to wait for a reply, Cooper began a muscle-burning ascent of the railing, fearing that the protesting whine of steel against his weight would draw attention from below.
That fear did not go unfounded. A flurry of conventional fire abruptly nicked and pinged off the railing above him, and he paused. The rounds came from a pair of Chigs who stood near one of the tankers, and Cooper grimaced as he saw a third spoogemiester join them, this one armed with a long laser rifle. He thought of the pistol holstered at his hip, and that's as far as that notion went.
With a howl and nowhere else to go, he fought his way up the rail, moving into the path of the aliens' fire. The railing glittered and trembled with deflected rounds, but it was a pathetic shield for him. Just as one of his shoes found a crossbar and he smiled that now he could rise quickly to cover, a round punched him in the right shoulder. He screamed as one of his hands came off the rail, and he twisted sideways.
Then a superheated hammer of tremendous force struck his rucksack and drove him up into the railing. He lost his grip entirely, but the crossbar became jammed under his arm. A horrible stench drifted from over his shoulder, and he looked back to see that most of his pack had been melted away. What was left he could not identify, and small flames still burned here and there. Wincing and groaning, he unbuckled the pack's waist strap, slid off the shoulder straps, and let the smoking remains fall away.
A mere six feet of rail stood between Cooper and the bridgeway, but even the slightest movement made him clench his teeth and shiver against the pain.
More gunfire resounded from below, and Cooper blinked hard as he expected the accompanying spatter of rounds off metal. But they didn't come.
Down on the tarmac, the three Chigs who had been firing at him were now exchanging salvos with an unseen target below one of the tankers. The Chig brandishing the laser rifle swallowed a round and staggered backward, spouting gas. Then the other two aliens dropped in turn, leveled with an efficiency that belonged solely to members of the United States Marine Corps.
As Cooper expected, Nathan and Kyoko emerged from beneath the tanker, sweeping this way and that with their rifles.
"West?"
"I'm here, Coop. Got your message, but we were a little busy to reply. Where are you?"
Cooper fought off a sudden surge of flame within his arm and shoulder. Through his ragged breathing, he managed, "Look up."
Nathan complied, then said, "God, you all right?" Opening his mouth to answer, Cooper thought better of speaking as more gunfire echoed below. He watched Kyoko and Nathan dart back to the cover of the tanker.
Attempting to keep his arm down, Cooper placed his shoe back onto a crossbar, pushed up, and reestablished a hand grip on the rail. As tears welled and his shoulder throbbed, he one-handed his way up the remaining section of rail, hooking his chin on a crossbar when he had to release his grip. He hauled himself onto the bridgeway and collapsed, struggling for breath.
Turning onto his side, he tried to focus on movement in the distance. But it wasn't the falling snow that interfered with the image. In fact, even the snow appeared blurry.
"Cooper? You all right?" Kyoko asked, her words punctuated randomly by weapons' fire.
"No, I, uh, I lost my pack. No medi-kit. Feels like I'm swimming."
"Stand by. We'll come up and get you."
"Negative. I'm all right," he lied. "I'll get down there."
"Sure?"
"Yeah. We gotta set those charges. But I gotta tell you something. I helped Teddy get the radio so that he could help me take out the silicates. But they never came out here. I think the bastard double-crossed me."
"Don't think so, Coop," Nathan said. "The wireheads down here killed each other. And I can only imagine what's going on inside."
Cooper managed a weak grin that suddenly faded as a triple crack of conventional fire tore up the silence behind him. Then came the growing, pounding rhythm of approaching Chigs. Blinking away the dizziness, he wrenched his pistol from his hip holster, clicked off the safety, and tensed as he prepared to roll and fire.
twenty-seven
Shane and Mister 404 had rushed down a humid shaft whose walls and ceiling were buried behind rows of sweating pipes. The shaft had opened up into a vast, circular chamber which housed the aqueduct's primary and secondary generators. Shane had had a hard time identifying the generators themselves amid the conglomeration of what 404 had identified as filtering and cooling equipment. He had led her up onto a catwalk to the twenty-meter-high units on the opposite side of the chamber, then he had instructed her where to plant the charges.
After keying on her last explosive, Shane called to him. "I'm set over here."
The silicate shifted from behind a thick, U-shaped pipe that ran into the secondary generator. He withdrew his remote detonator from his pack and tossed it to her.
She caught the device, then threw it aside. "I'll use my own," she said, pulling another detonator from her pocket. "Yours doesn't work." When he had gone up to drag Hawkes out of the avalanche, she had removed one of his detonator's transistors.
"I see," he said, sounding wounded over yet another reminder that Shane had never fully trusted him.
Shuffling past 404, she
powered up the detonator, then broke into a sprint once she reached the exit shaft As she headed for the main section of the aqueduct, she heard 404 catch up to her. They cleared the tunnel and pressed their backs against a wall adjacent to it. Setting her teeth, Shane triggered the charges.
An untrained ear would have heard a single, thundering explosion come from the generator chamber. But Shane had heard the sound of C-670s so many times that she could tell you if multiple charges were going off in unison or if a single C-920, the equivalent of ten C-670s, had been used. The differences were barely audible, but there.
The blast wave, however, was the same, and it came in a fury out of the shaft, dragging smoke and an odor similar to burning rubber with it. The wave poured into the main conduit and mushroomed up toward the ceiling, where the overhead lights abruptly winked out along with the energy field status lights on the cell block.
A collective cheer came from the prisoners, but it wasn't as loud as Shane had thought it would be. Five hundred plus souls should have been able to produce quite a roar. She clicked on her helmet's light and strode toward the cell block.
"Shane, we got Coop," Wang reported in her comlink. "But he took one in the shoulder, and he's losing a lot of blood."
Shane winced in sympathetic pain. "Can you and 'Phousse get him to a tanker?"
"I don't know. Still a lot of Chigs down there. And we're still taking some fire up here."
"We'll get him down there," Damphousse said. ''Whatever it takes."
"West?" Shane called.
"I'm here, Shane. And the tankers are standing by. Kyoko's already finished both pre-flights."
"Great. Power's down in here. We'll be coming out in a mike."
"Hey, Shane? Bad news is, a lot of Chiggie pilots it back to their fighters. Three have already lifted off."
Shane swore under her breath. "I wanted those ships taken out."
"Chigs got to them first," he said grimly.
"Pray they're just retreating."
"They're not."
"Just watch for us." She returned her attention to the cell block, where the ragged-looking personnel representing every branch of the Earth Forces were heading toward exit ladders located behind the block. "This way!" she shouted, pointing toward the elevator doors.
