by T Q Chant
Have a look. If it looks easy, go in. If it doesn't – back off; they're on their own.
She quirked a bitter smile – she knew she sort of owed the colonists, but when it came down to a choice between surviving and paying back a debt, the rules came down on the side of self-preservation.
It was looking more and more likely that she had to cut and run, though. The corridor lights were all on, and she could hear the murmur of voices from the wards that she flitted past, ducking low under the small windows inset into each door.
She started to hit real problems when she wasn't far from her target. A blood-curdling, agonised scream froze her on the spot, the sweat coating her skin turning to ice. A moment later two porters crashed through the door she had just been approaching, wheeling an antiquated gurney between them; the scream had subsided to a low gurgle that emanated from the bundle on the trolley. She squashed herself against the corridor wall, but thankfully they turned the other way.
She stayed there until she was able to start breathing again, and then crept slowly forwards, every sense alert. She crouched to go past the door, then decided to risk a peek through its window.
The ward was full. As far as she could tell, all of the patients were men; some were entirely bundled up in bandages. She saw limbs wrapped in crude plaster or missing entirely; casualties with their eyes covered with bloody dressings or abdominal wounds that were leaking blood and other fluids. The facilities seemed crude, and from the way many of the injured moaned or writhed on the cots, pain relief was lacking. Two obviously senior Saved was moving amongst them, praying by their bedsides.
The prayers, the handholding, the mumbled words of comfort – none of it was helping. Have they considered morph-five? She ducked back just as one of the Saved glanced up, scurried away before anyone felt the urge to investigate. She realised she was stepping in sticky cooling fluid, a smeared trail left by the porters and their grisly burden, and fought down the urge to vomit.
This place is at war. Those are combat casualties. She had a vague notion how she knew that, some sort of instructional holovid. Would have slept through it, as well, but one of the nurses was hot. Shit idea, showing supply clerks what to do in a warzone.
She shook the recollection off – she'd have time to piece herself back together later, she hoped. Right now she had to stay focused on the prize.
She heard Jonathan before she saw him; the coldly clipped tones carried over the background noise of the hospital. "You are sure, my son?"
She realised that they were having this conversation directly outside the maternity ward she was trying for. She paused, high on the balls of her feet, ready to run but wanting to hear what the two of them had to say.
She didn't catch Okafor's next words. Where his father was expressive in his own way, Okafor's voice was a dull flat drone. She heard a slap – hand on cheek – and the boy's volume at least increased, even if he showed no more passion. "Very sure, my father. She has rejected the Brightness again."
Sam's heart flatlined and the bottom dropped out of her stomach. Bitch didn't hesitate in betraying me. She didn't have any doubts who they were talking about; there was only one person who could have tipped them off.
"This is the fifth time," Jonathan ground out. "Seeker Bethany assured us this time that it would work – she staked her life on it when she volunteered to be the mentor."
Sam knew she should turn and run, but she felt frozen to the spot. Her breath stopped in her throat – she felt as though something was reaching up from her guts to choke her.
"She could go back to the Bright Place. The Near-Raptured seem determined for this experiment to work."
"No, there is something about her mind – Bethany calibrates it differently each time, but each time she shakes it off; she is gaming it somehow. No, I think it is time that a new subject is found."
"And what of Cane?"
"I know she was chosen for you, my son, but she must serve in another way."
"The angels, then."
"Indeed. We must be careful – our demonstration of justice shook the Saved more than I expected. They have become weak and decadent, the Raptured were right to bring us here to strengthen their resolve. However, if we are seen to defy the Near-Raptured now, even though we are righteous, it could harm the great working."
"An accident, then, during the working day? There is a derelict where we have been assigned."
"See to it, tomorrow." That was a third voice, one she recognised and hated even more than the other two. "She is not to die – just ensure she is only fit to be a vessel."
Yeah. In your dreams, Cho.
"Jonathan, the Near-Raptured would see us now. This attack has shaken them."
Shit – they'll be coming this way. Sam backed up quickly, suddenly acutely conscious of the faint red outlines of her bare feet on the floor. Casting about, she slipped through the door to a ward that appeared darkened and deserted. She pressed herself to the wall next to the swing doors; she could really live without her heart hammering noisily in the silence. A passing flicker of shadows told her the three conspirators had gone past. She was just starting to relax enough to breathe out when she felt the cold, sharp edge of a blade against her throat at the same time as a gloved hand went over her mouth.
**********
It was a huge beast, more hulking than the shamblers and quite obviously designed for combat. A blunt head with tiny eyes turned this way and that, fast nostrils flared as it sought further prey. It shook its right appendage, the barbed tentacle, to shed a last rope of Yvgena's intestines, and turned to glare at Williams, the great scythed claw in place of its left arm snapping.
Williams pulled the trigger a second before Cahaya and Kora, drilling a stream of hyper-velocity steel pellets into the target’s chest. The fire would have turned a normal, unarmoured human into a bloody paste against the wall – instead they hammered into some form of chitinous plate that covered the thing's chest, tearing great chunks out of it. It staggered back as Kora and Cahaya hit it as well, the rounds smacking into its head and upper body but not penetrating its grown-in armour shell. It set itself to charge, and Wlliams gave herself a half-heartbeat to aim before she put a single pellet into each of its eyes. Its head deformed and then burst as the rounds went in, blood and brains spraying. It still managed to start moving, but crashed to the ground half a metre from her.
"There's that smell again," she muttered, almost gagging on the reek coming off the body. She stepped round it and scoped the tangled mess of bodies and bits further down the ramp. Detecting movement, she put a few bursts downrange, the pellets exploding limbs and opening torsos as they hit.
Yvgena was quite obviously dead – the first penetration would have gone through her heart, the rest of it had been window dressing. Careful not to step in the pooling blood and viscera, she got close enough to grab the physical tags from around her neck (the e-tags having already uploaded to Williams' systems at the moment of catastrophic system failure), recover her pumpgun and machine pistol, and then close her sightlessly staring eyes.
"Let's keep moving," she snapped to Cahaya and Kora – all that was left of her team, she realised. She chivvied them ahead of her, at least until they couldn't see or smell the charnel house behind them. Kora was handling it, but she was proper specops. Cahaya looked like he was ready to retire to a desk job.
After they were clear she slowed the pace, took point with Kora keeping a close eye out behind. For a while she couldn't help the feeling that the spiral ramp somehow went on forever; she was also suspicious of the complete lack of hostile contact even when they finally reached the top.
+Definitely man-made here+ Cahaya told them. They were crouched at the top of the ramp, Kora watching one way along the deserted corridor and Williams the other while Cahaya did his intel schtick. +We're above mean surface level here as well – probably dug into a mountainside rather than a building though+
+What about threats?+
+I'm getting
some signs of life in the area but nothing immediate. No hostiles+
+Amateurs+ If she had to guess, the hostiles would have assumed they'd have the team trapped in the caverns and wouldn't have backstopped any further. It wouldn’t take them forever to work out that the enemy had broken through their cordon and was loose in the wider installation – whatever that was. +Caha, find us a place to lie low+
+No heatsigs through those doors. Nothing powered+
+Go+
The door was unlocked, the space beyond dark and unoccupied just as Cahaya had promised. They were ghosts in a dark hospital ward as they slipped through, stacking up on the other side of the door, all of them listening for the sounds of pursuit.
Williams was about to relax when the door opened just far enough for a slight figure to slip through and press herself up against the wall, barely an arm's reach away from her.
The woman was breathing hard and fast, obviously scared. Williams slipped her dagger from its sheath and reached out with her other hand, ready to clamp it over the target's mouth.
Something about the situation, about the obvious fear that tautened the slight figure, made her pause before she drove forward and struck. It gave Cahaya a chance to report.
+It’s her+
**********
"Sam Cane?" The voice was rough, with a strong Austral accent. The knife point disappeared from the back of her neck but the hand stayed over her mouth. She nodded emphatically, the only communication she could manage.
The hand went as well, but rested on her breastbone, maybe a little harder than gently. "We've been looking for you."
The words sounded, strange, almost like a foreign language. She blinked, shook her head. They even messed with my language.
She started to say something, realised they probably wouldn't have a clue what she was talking about. Instead she stared hard at the dark shape that loomed over her, trying not to let her fear show.
After a moment, the Australian put her blade away and pushed up the bug-like tinted visor of her helmet. The soft glow of internal displayers illuminated a hard black face with dark eyes and thin lips. Battlefield ally a memory said, the slang for a specops soldier.
"Williams, Commonwealth Armed Forces." She didn't specify a unit, another telltale. "We got your message and came looking for you."
It was just enough to recalibrate her language. "Cane. Ex-Army, as it happens. Where's the rest of your unit?"
"This is it, and we don't have long. Let's get you out of here."
Sam scowled at them, the sense of relief that had flooded her being pushed back by cold realisation. “They sent three people? Not, I don't know, a rapid reaction force?”
The hand went back onto her mouth with sudden savagery. “They sent more than three,” Williams ground out. “And if you don't keep your fucking voice down I will cut your throat and leave you to bleed out. Do you understand me?”
Sam nodded sharply. “Do you have a plan?” she whispered.
The thin lips twitched into a humourless smile. “We're sort of making it up as we go along – right now we need to get clear of this installation and work out getting offplanet.”
Sam almost burst out again, fought down the urge to shout at them. “Installation?” she whispered as she mastered herself. “You do know that this is a city? A whole fucking underground city of religious fanatics?”
“You're going to need to brief us once we've double-eed.”
Sam didn't quite know what to make of this, nor of the weird expression on the other two soldiers' faces as they opened their helmets. Particularly the small, wiry man who stared at her intently. “I can get you out of here. Depends how you feel about kidnapping priests. Well, sort-of priests.”
This time, Williams' smile was genuine. “If they're involved with running things here, not bad at all.”
Sam knew she should be shitting bricks; that she was in serious danger. But then, when in the last few months had she not been up the creek? At least now she was on the move, committed to an escape. And, better than that, she was on a con again. It wasn't much of a scam, if she was honest, but it was something.
The wait in the darkened hospital ward had been nerve-wracking. Sam didn't have any way to tell the time, and it had felt like hours had gone past; hours in which her absence from her room could have been discovered. The three special ops soldiers hadn’t seemed overly concerned; waiting for a target was probably part of the dayjob. Williams and the Nihongo woman had talked by subvoc, mouthing the words to each other, while the little man just smiled encouragingly at her.
In truth, it had probably only been a few minutes before the two Saved emerged from the ward where they had been ministering to the wounded. They had appeared with satisfied expressions, no doubt content with the numbers of souls they had bolstered in the stinking charnel house of the primitive hospital. Williams and the other woman – the rest of the team hadn't been introduced yet – had seized them, immediately overpowering them, and dragged them into the ward.
“I'm too big for these robes,” Williams said, standing over the two Near-Raptured after they'd stripped, bound and gagged them.
“That's fine. We'll put them on your mates and you can be the prisoner. Pretty straightforward – I'll do the talking.”
She was only half-paying attention, staring in horrified fascination at the prisoners on one of the beds – without their swathing clothes, the damage of coming close to achieving rapture was clear. Tumorous lumps pocked their grey, pasty skin and sores wept particularly foul-smelling, odd-coloured pus into filthy bandages.
“They smell just like the things we've been fighting,” Cahaya commented, fascination in his voice as he made sure he captured close-ups. The captives stared at them, eyes bugging out of their faces. One of them was making a low keening noise.
“Aren't your Bright Ones going to save you now?” Sam muttered. “What're we going to do with these guys?”
Williams didn't answer, not immediately. She was standing behind their two prisoners with her back to them. Without warning, she turned and put a flechette through the back of the first one's head. His compatriot had just enough time to register the hot, wet spatter of blood on the side of his face before Williams ended him too.
“Can't risk leaving anyone behind to raise the alarm,” she said coolly. Sam dragged her eyes up from the jagged mess of the Near-Raptured's heads. Williams was stripping off her weapons.
“You two, get into the robes. I don't care if they stink. Helmets off and hoods up.”
“Obviously.”
“You sure you're ex-army, Cane?”
“Never really fit in, sarge.”
“It shows.” Williams turned to survey her squadmates, who looked faintly ridiculous in the robes until they put their hoods up. Their weapons and helmets had folded down and stowed flush against their armour.
“They'll do. I'd best tie your hands, Williams.” The soldier flinched away from her as she offered up a section of belt she'd cut off.
“It's gotta look real.”
“Just not too tight.” There was a pause as Williams' dark eyes bored into her. “Are you sure you can handle this?”
“You'll have read my file, and know what I used to do. This is kiddy playtime for me.” She hoped she was injecting confidence into her voice, even though she wasn't feeling it. Simple 'taking a prisoner to the cell block' con, but she hadn't run a proper graft since the Saved had fucked with her head.
She shook off the doubt. “It's not like we have any other options – let's just fucking do this.” She glared at the two fake Near-Raptured. “Just keep your mouths shut and project an aura of mystery.”
**********
Williams didn't like it one bit. She didn't like being oscar mike in a hostile environment without a weapon, with her hands tied (albeit loosely), or that she was out of comms without her helmet. She didn't like the fact that this stranger was leading them through an enemy installation (or city, or whatever). She was still k
icking herself for splitting her team, and not knowing what had happened to Dirchs and Miller.
At least they were operating more on their own terms again, rather than running from hot pursuit. They were taking steps to escape and evade. That was one thing to like about the situation.
That, and the fact that the enemy still didn't seem keen on trying to track them down. “There should be more patrols,” she whispered out of the corner of her mouth. Cane was walking beside her, her face set. Williams wasn't sure what to make of her at all, held prisoner here for months but now seemingly allowed to wander free. Maybe they felt the installation was enough of a prison – Williams had seen the world beyond this ratrun of tunnels, and she didn't fancy trying to tackle it alone and without gear and supplies.
“I don't think they were really ready for this – like I said, this isn't a base, it's a city. And don't whisper, that draws more attention. Keep your eyes down and mutter sullenly.”
“Whatever.”
There was maybe a flicker of a smile on Cane's drawn face, but she wiped her features smooth as four armed hostiles came round the corner. They were carrying a mishmash of antique weapons, the sort of thing she hadn't seen outside past warfare displays, and up close they definitely had more of a militia look about them. It gave her hope for the other two, if this was the best the other side had to offer.
She didn't need to see Kora and Cahaya to know that they'd shifted onto a combat footing; she wanted to tell them to stand down, that rocking and rolling down would compromise the fuck out of the op.
Cane didn't hesitate, stepping forward in front of the three soldiers. She had her hands linked behind her back, clenched tightly together to suppress tremors, but her voice was calm and hard.
Williams realised with a start that she was speaking the local language. After a few moments of listening to it, she realised it was to some extent comprehensible; that as she suspected it was some bastardised or primitive form of Anglic. She was able to make out some of it, standard ‘do you know who you’re talking to, how dare you impede us’ stuff she’d seen in any number of thriller holos at the base kine.
