Cold Welcome

by Elizabeth Moon

  “Tag One” came from the other com desk.

  The shuttle tipped forward. Through her helmet display, Pitt saw a white bay streaked with dark water, watched the ground rise, red rock splatched with white. Level-out, and then the runway in front, the squawk of tires, the brief slither then hard deceleration.

  “We’re down,” she said to the Rector. Ahead, the first shuttle took out both the small barracks on the surface, then its surface shimmered as it powered up the forward shield arc. Its rear ramp was down, troops in bulky winter gear moving down to cover the emergence of their heavier weaponry and vehicles. The first three drones, the small ones, went up fast into a pale-blue sky.

  “Jumpers active,” the com officer said to the crew. “Somebody better do something soon or this is one expensive training exercise—”

  “For which we’re being paid, Pete.”

  Flurries of code went past Pitt’s eyes in the display. Drones were not her responsibility; someone else would get those readouts.

  “Jumper one down,” came another voice. “Guess they want to play laser tag. And we tagged ’em. Pop up Spanker.”

  A slightly larger drone lifted from behind the first shuttle. When it was a meter above the surface it went chameleon, and though it would be visible to some detectors, human eyes wouldn’t see anything but a vague blur as it moved along.

  “Tag Two, take up position.” Pitt felt the shuttle quiver, and then the view changed as it zigzagged its way backward to the specified support point. Her view now was of the rise to the north of the runway. She heard the back ramp release, and knew the troops and equipment there would be unloading. An explosion bloomed from behind the nearest rise.

  “Spanker One took out the battery,” someone said.

  Pitt passed that information on to the Rector.

  “What about the transports?” the Rector asked.

  “Nobody’s fired on us from them,” Pitt said. “If they do—we’ll have to blow them.”

  “Of course,” the Rector said. “Do it now, if you want.”

  She did not sound like an old woman, Pitt thought. She did sound like a relative of Ky Vatta’s.

  A standard hour later, they were ready to consider the door into the underground facility. How heavily was it defended? And what would they destroy that might be valuable later? A burst of small arms roused no response. The door itself sported a new lock but showed signs of having been damaged before by someone with a crowbar and axe. With the equipment they had, it was easy to drill out the lock and open the door.

  Inside, they faced a small entry space and a ramp leading downward. Though daylight pouring in the door revealed light fixtures on the overhead, they were dark, and nothing recognizable as a switch was on any surface. Pitt, mindful that underground might not allow ready communication with the outside, told one of the communications teams to lay a cable. Two puppybots set off down the ramp, com-whisker tails wagging. They didn’t look much like real dogs, having various sensor gadgets stuck all over them, but the name was traditional; they even had individual names, real dog names: Fly and Peg.

  Pitt stayed behind the first two teams, who themselves followed the puppybots, their dark-vision goggles on. Nothing, all the way down. When they reached a level that matched what Ky had told the Rector, the bulkheads and overhead were pocked with small-arms fire. Since there were no bodies, evidently the Torch had come in shooting but found no resistance. All the doors had their locks shot out. Pitt didn’t bother to inventory any of the rooms; she noticed in passing that the Torch had left the mess hall filthy, dirty pots piled on counters and dirty dishes left on the tables. Had their commander rushed them through a meal? Down the corridor to the left, there was an obvious communications center and an equally obvious powerplant control center. Beyond, a wall had been blown open, revealing other corridors and more ramps. So far the puppybots had found no trace of personnel except the mess they’d made.

  The next section of blown-open wall led into a huge space, rather like a shuttle bay or aircraft hangar. It was empty, but footmarks showed on the gray floor, and at one end another wall had been blown open, revealing an empty passage leading off into the dark. Pitt paused there, testing her ability to communicate topside. That still worked.

  “Set up a communications board here. We’ll test at intervals as we go—” That was the major. Then he held up his hand. “Wait—new data—relayed from that ISC fellow. Our friends report they’re still ahead of pursuit but they can hear it.”

  CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

  MIKSLAND, UNDERGROUND

  DAY 222

  The next day began just like the one before. Ky woke the others. They ate a quick breakfast, mounted up, and rode along at fifteen kilometers per hour for another four hours, before coming to what looked like just another open space. But the passage ahead stopped at a blank wall that did not move when a vehicle was aimed at it; the vehicle stopped instead. A search for dimples on the wall found nothing.

  “Maybe there’s an elevator,” Betange said. “We should check all the walls.”

  “And the floor,” Ky said. “Remember that first one.”

  “Which we couldn’t get back down,” Droshinski pointed out. “Maybe this is the end.”

  “A dead end, it looks like,” Yamini said.

  “We’ll stop here for the day,” Ky said. “We’ll look in every chamber, feel every wall and the floor. If the enemy hasn’t found a way into the old part of the facility, then we’re safe enough, and even if they have, they have to figure out how to get through the various shut doors.”

  “Unless they just blow holes in everything,” Cosper said.

  She wished he hadn’t said that. From the expressions on others’ faces, they wished the same thing. She had finally fallen asleep when an insistent warbling noise and flashing lights woke her; everyone was waking up as well. The formerly blue-white ceiling lights now flashed yellow.

  “What is it?”

  “Something—not good.”

  “The bad guys,” Ky said. “They did something that triggered a warning system. Maybe blew a hole in a wall. Load up. We’ll try again to get that door open; maybe it will work in an emergency.”

  When Ky pressed a command rod to the first vehicle in the line, the flashing lights and warbling siren stopped. “That’s a relief. Now maybe it will tell us what to do next.”

  “Sir—” Barash’s voice sounded shaky. “There’s something showing up on that door.”

  Dimly at first, then brightening, rows of symbols in red appeared on the door. They did not look like any writing Ky had ever seen; she had no idea what they meant. The symbols pulsed, demanding attention.

  “I don’t understand,” Ky said. She was sure now that whoever had made the place, it could not have been anyone from their culture. She walked up to the door; the symbols pulsed faster. How could she communicate with an automated system—it must be an automated system—that didn’t speak her language? Or could it have learned, in the time humans had occupied part of this facility? She repeated what she’d said slowly: “I do not understand what to do.”

  The symbols all disappeared. A single short vertical mark appeared, this time in blue. “One,” Ky said. Two lines. “Two.” A circle. “One circle.” A hexagon. “One hexagon.” One side glowed brighter, and then the glow moved around, pausing. Ky counted them out. “Six sides.” An arrow sign. “Arrow.” A line drawing of a vehicle. “Truck,” Ky said. She patted the nearest vehicle for emphasis—surely it was observing, whatever it was.

  Those symbols disappeared, replaced by red ones: a flashing red circle, then stick figures moving into the vehicle symbol. Outline of a rod touching a vehicle. A moving arrow, with a line of vehicles after it. That was clear enough.

  “Mount up,” Ky said, climbing into the lead vehicle. A screen rose from the front, showing red arrows on the floor leading away; when Ky put the vehicle in motion, it followed them, and the door in front of them opened. It was, she saw, at least three times
as thick as the others they had passed through, and it opened much more slowly.

  Beyond, the passage looked very different. Narrower, round in cross section, with a floor that appeared to be a series of grooved metal plates rather than a single smooth surface. Instead of the bright overhead lights, dimmer lights were spaced at intervals. The vehicles bumped up onto these plates; when all were on, Ky heard a series of metallic clunks and felt something below make a hard connection with the bottom of the vehicle. Ahead, on the screen, a line of red arrows stretched into the distance. Onto the screen came other instructions: stick figures sitting still, then one trying to step off and disintegrating. The pulsing red circle again. Stick figures’ arms out, then disappearing. Pulsing red circle. Clear as the signs in tram systems: SIT DOWN, DO NOT EXIT WHILE MOVING. KEEP ARMS INSIDE VEHICLE. DANGER.

  She yelled instructions back to the others, heard them passed on. The door behind them slid shut more slowly than the others. Then, with a solid jerk, they were moving, the grooved plates sliding faster and faster. Dim lights flashed past, finally forming a pale stream along both sides. She had no idea how fast they were going, or where, but they were moving much faster than they had in the trucks. Away from danger, she hoped.

  The moving plates made much more noise than their previous near-silent progress. A steady low roar reverberated from the tunnel walls. When it changed pitch, Ky looked quickly at the screen. Instead of tunnel walls she could just make out a black void stretching to either side. Then the walls closed in again, the familiar noise returned. Ky yawned. According to her implant, they’d been moving 2.4 standard hours.

  DAY 222

  At 5.2 hours, the moving track stopped. Sharp sounds of metal adjusting to a new normal echoed off the walls, as did voices when they spoke. Ahead a dark opening led into darkness.

  “That door didn’t close behind us,” Gossin said. She’d been in the last vehicle that time.

  “And this one didn’t open for us—it’s just open.”

  Ky turned on her helmet light and walked toward the opening. Another passage like the ones they’d driven through before and shadows that might be doors not too far ahead. The air smelled stale.

  “Lights,” she said. She didn’t expect lights to come on, and they did not. She tipped her head back. Her helmet light revealed the same kind of light fixtures. “Bring the vehicles forward,” she said to the others. “Slowly. We need to take a rest anyway, if this place has water.”

  The others had their headlamps on by then, a small constellation in the darkness, and one by one the vehicles moved into the space where Ky stood, avoiding her and parking to one side as usual. The rooms were in the same relative position as before, but no lights came on when they entered the mess and the washroom, and no water came from the faucets. Nothing worked in the kitchen—no burners heated.

  “Electricity’s out,” Corporal Lakhani said. He had found an outlet and inserted a tester. “Completely.”

  “If the emergency signal was from the bad guys breaching the facility…if they figured out we had to be somewhere below and started blowing walls…they might have damaged the whole system.”

  “Then why lights along the moving plate things?”

  “I don’t know. Different source? And if that, then why not here? I don’t know that, either.”

  “Are we safe from them?” Gossin asked. “Will that track move for them?”

  “Again—I don’t know. Get your packs; we’ll have to go on foot. As much food and water as you can carry, your weapons, ammunition.” As she talked, Ky found the duffel in which she’d stowed all the evidence left from the shuttle, and shoved its contents into various pockets. “Let’s get going.”

  She felt a sudden change in air pressure, then stillness again. “They are blowing the doors,” Betange said. A dull deep sound vibrated underfoot.

  “Keep going,” Ky said. But shortly after that, they found the entire tunnel blocked by a mass of dark rock, and nothing that responded to the control rods on the floor, overhead, or on the side walls.

  “We missed a turn,” Ky said. “Backtrack.” Straight into the enemy, but maybe the enemy had other problems. Surely Mackensee had landed by now; the hunters would have hunters on their tails. Would they realize it, turn and fight? Or try harder to overrun their prey?

  Kurin found a panel a hundred meters back; it opened into a side passage, too narrow for the vehicles. “And we wouldn’t have found this if we’d been riding,” Kurin said. They shut the panel behind them, hoping a turn of the wheel on the far side meant it was locked, and walked up a smooth ramp until it turned sharply, steepened, then turned again. Just beyond that turn they found another door, closed but not locked, thick as a spaceship pressure door. Gossin spun the wheel on its far side.

  “Two doors between us,” Ky said, looking around the group with her headlamp. Even Sergeant Cosper was tired. “We can risk one hour rest,” she said. “Set your implant alarms for noise, as well.” They all slumped down, falling asleep almost at once. Ky closed her eyes, heard nothing but their breathing, and woke when her implant woke her. The others were already stirring.

  Now she could hear a vague, disturbing sound through the door. Were the enemy troops already into the side passage? Or just banging on the walls? “Hurry!” Ky said. They moved as fast as they could up the ramp, arriving at another identical pressure door that operated the same way. Beyond was an even narrower passage of raw rock hacked into a semblance of a stairway. Ky hoped that meant it was near the surface.

  Ky led the way. The stair turned, turned again; uneven steps and the bright patches and black shadows cast by their helmet lights made it hard to see their footing clearly. Ky’s breath burned in her chest; her legs hurt. Soon they were all panting; Ky knew the others must feel as bad.

  “Five minutes,” she said. She leaned on the rough wall, catching her breath. Then started again. Up, up, turn and twist, duck beneath a rock that hung down. How close were their pursuers? Would they go to the end and then backtrack or just find the panel right away?

  “We’ll hear if they blow the panel,” someone said, just as a muffled whoomp reached them. Ky tried to speed up.

  Finally the stair ended on a cramped rock landing not big enough for all of them at once. They could see daylight beyond, at the end of a widening passage. They had traveled through another night. Ky squinted against the brightness. This passage smelled—stank, in fact—of something alive. Some animal. She closed her eyes for a long moment, then opened them, looking down and away from the entrance. It might be wolves, or that tall heavy-legged hairy thing with tusks and a nose like a fire hose—but that wouldn’t fit in here. She saw an uneven lumpy heap. Wolves? Giant wolves?

  “Quietly,” she said to Lakhani. “Hand me a stronger light. There’s something in here.”

  It looked like a pile of fur. Even with the light she couldn’t be sure of the shape, except that it was big, much bigger than any of them. She tried to move the light along the margins of the pile, looking for clues to its identity. Something moved—squeaked—wiggled—a small subdivision of the pile or rather two such, with bright eyes, black noses, very red mouths with very white sharp teeth.

  Not wolves; they had rounded ears, a round head like a cartoon animal. Paws with long claws. Some memory stirred in Ky’s mind; her implant finally offered a picture of a smaller but similar shape: the bear cubs she’d seen in the Port Major zoo. Black, with white chevrons on their chests. The adult bear in the zoo hadn’t been as tall as a human when it stood on its hind legs. This adult bear was huge. The cubs squeaked again and wriggled back into the fur pile. She could hear them suckling, slurping.

  So it was a mother bear, a huge mother bear, with her cubs. Ky backed up cautiously, trying not to make a sound. The bear’s nose quivered, its lips lifted over fangs as long as Ky’s hand, and then it yawned. Deep in folds of fur tiny eyes opened, then closed again. It lifted one massive paw and scratched at its chest; the claws were as long as her fingers, sto
ut enough to shred a human torso. She turned the light off and backed up again.

  “What is it?” the others asked, when she’d retreated to the narrow passage. “Can we go out now?”

  “There’s a huge bear,” Ky said very softly. “With cubs. The cubs are awake; the bear was asleep but is waking up, I think. If it wakes while we’re trying to get past it, we’re dead.”

  “We could stun it.”

  “If we knew we had enough charge. We might be able to kill it, with the rifles, but I’d rather use ammunition on our enemies.” The enemies who had certainly found the passage entrance and were following.

  “We have to do something—”

  “For now, we’ll wait. Maybe it’ll go back to sleep and we can sneak past.” Did bears snore? Some dogs snored. As they sat quietly waiting, she heard other, smaller sounds in the cave. Little high-pitched squeaks, the skittering of small paws. So the bear wasn’t alone in the cave…mice, that would be, or something similar. No sound from the bear. She crept forward, dared another look at the bear. Eyes closed, mouth closed. From here she could hear the cubs still suckling. She aimed the light around the cave floor, side-to-side, and surprised several smaller animals: they looked like mice, but with furry tails. One of them scurried across to the bear and burrowed into the fur under that massive paw. The bear didn’t move.

  So…if they made no more noise than some mice, maybe it wouldn’t notice them. She edged back to the others, and very quietly explained what they needed to do. Boots off. Sock feet only. Single file. If the bear moved, freeze: hold still.

  Ky set off in the lead, not hurrying. Underfoot, the rock’s cold penetrated her socks almost at once. She couldn’t hear the ones behind her, only the beat of her own pulse. As she came even with the bear, she could see it a little better in the dim light. It wasn’t black but brown; the hairs backlit by the cave entrance seemed frost-tipped. The bear stirred; Ky froze. She dared not turn her head to look. It grunted, sighed, and settled down once more. Another meter. Another. By the time she reached the mouth of the cave, her feet felt like blocks of ice, but the bear hadn’t roused. She stopped and glanced back.