Hank nodded.
‘We would have gone with her,’ Daniels told him. ‘We were all going to desert but Amanda knew it’d sink our careers, such as they are. She slipped away when we weren’t paying attention.’
Hank was nodding.
‘If it’s kin I guess I can understand.’
‘If I’d still been in the army it might have been difficult but frankly, fuck CELL . All they are to me is a rapidly shrinking monthly pay packet. In fact if you were in New York under Barclay I’m surprised you joined up with CELL .’
Hank shrugged.
‘Times is tough. I got kin as well.’
Daniels and Amanda nodded in agreement.
‘Let’s get these cameras up and running,’ Amanda said. She glanced down at the corpse. It would be sent up in the elevator like Walters had been, to be disposed of in the most cost-effective way possible. Until that happened it would be stored in one of the caves, one that wasn’t imbedded with Ceph tech, close to the main cavern. His next of kin would be notified via text over the Macronet, maybe. ‘Poor kid,’ Amanda echoed Daniels.
C site was a long thin cavern. The floor was crisscrossed with trenches, like all the other sites. One of the light rigs had been broken when the ground had shook and as result the end of the cavern opposite the exit was in darkness. The eight workers in here were staying close to the light and the exit that led to the tunnel, which in turn led to the main cavern.
Amanda didn’t know much about archaeology or recovering ancient alien tech that fused with rock, but the workers chipping away here didn’t look like they were doing a particularly good job. Several of them either were or had been crying. A number of them were still shaking badly and all of them kept looking into the darkness at the end of the cave.
The workers looked like poor locals who had been given minimal training and less pay. They slept down here on floor mats and in sleeping bags, huddled around the heaters in the main cavern. They looked at Amanda, Daniels and Hank like they were their prison guards.
We’re not the enemy, kids, Amanda thought as she and Daniels moved past, weapons at the ready, the flashlights attached to the barrels of the weapons stabbing into the thick, inky, seemingly total darkness. Hank covered them from further back.
‘Clear,’ Amanda said as they finished checking the cavern. The word felt like a lie. There were so many caves and so much darkness down here that whatever was killing people didn’t have to be very far away from them for it to be impossible to find.
Asher didn’t seem to understand that the dig workers were not going to be very productive just because he had told them to be and because it was their poorly paid job to be so. He didn’t understand why people couldn’t or wouldn’t just do what he told them to. He couldn’t understand that the fear, exacerbated by the dead bodies that they had all seen dumped just outside the main cavern, was going to impact on productivity. Asher couldn’t understand that in the long run he was more likely to achieve what he wanted by rolling up the operation, having the threat dealt with and then coming back. In other words, it didn’t matter how much of a martinet Asher was, they were always going to be more scared of the alien creature killing them silently than they were of him.
One of the workers had, in broken English, accused Amanda of using them as bait. If she’d had her way she would have evacuated everyone, and as de facto security chief it was her call under CELL operating guidelines, but the reality of the situation had prevented that. So she had to work with what she had. If she was honest, the worker hadn’t been wrong. Her best chance of finding the thing was when it was in the act of either killing people or trying to initiate the Ceph tech.
As she exited site C she glanced down at one of the workers. She was gaunt, haggard and probably not even out of her teens. The look the worker gave her back was resentful to the point of hatred.
It’s not me, she wanted to tell them, but she knew she was part of the problem now.
‘Boss?’ Daniels said, out in the tunnel leading back to the main cavern. Amanda didn’t like the frightened tone in the Brit’s voice. She looked around to see what was bothering him. The tunnel wall was glowing with shifting symbols made of neon light. It looked like the walls were alive with some sort of circuitry, clearly Ceph tech.
‘Another activation?’ Hank asked. He was covering one way up the tunnel. The tunnel lights, the ones put there by humans, started flickering. The three of them switched on their flashlights, though there was a lot of light coming from the alien-tech in the tunnel walls.
‘Mikey, where are your people, over?’ she said into the tac radio. Alan, Okobe and Safiya were getting some rest. Amanda was exhausted, she had managed to get some sleep on the flight from Lagos but she was nearing the end of sixteen hours on. Between a long shift and the nervous tension, she knew she was too fatigued to be thinking clearly. Amanda didn’t want to start on the amphetamines as she would never get to sleep when her shift ended and she didn’t want to go there again, at least not unless she had to.
‘Cross, what the hell is going on?!’ Asher demanded over the radio.
‘Doctor, get the fuck off this frequency! Mikey, report, over.’
‘We’re coming into… contact!’
Gunfire echoed through the tunnels. Two short bursts, then a longer less disciplined one. Then the gunfire stopped. Daniels was up and starting to move.
‘Wait!’ Amanda ordered. Daniels did as he was told. The beam on his flashlight was shaking badly as he covered the tunnel. Hank was covering behind them. Amanda let the Jackal drop on its sling as she grabbed the phone from her coat and switched it on. They had set the cameras to stream to the phone, but the cameras on B site were down. ‘B site. Now.’
The light illuminated the smoke from the cordite swirling in the air. There were spent shell casings on the ground and a lot of blood. The lights had been smashed as well. The beams from their flashlights and the glowing alien symbols in the rock were the only illumination. Amanda stared in horror. She wanted to be sick.
She had seen death before. She had seen a lot of it in New York, the horrors of the Manhattan Virus and the violence of the Ceph and in some cases her CELL colleagues. She had lost people before, but this assault had just seemed so easy for the Ceph bioform. Despite the weapons, the armour, the training and the experience, something had just snuffed out Mikey, Schmidt and Coyle like it was standing on bugs. Perhaps, to the Ceph, that was exactly what it was doing.
‘It’s gotta still be in here,’ Daniels said. The fat, middle-aged British ex-soldier was breathing hard, staring at Mikey. Daniels had always pretended not to like Mikey as the other Brit had been an ex-military police officer, like Amanda, and there was little love lost between enlisted men and MPs, but in truth the two had been close. The front of Mikey’s neck was a gaping red mess. The Ceph killer had nearly sawn his head off.
Amanda swallowed hard and tried to control the shaking, she just needed to cope long enough to give orders that wouldn’t get any more people killed. Her flashlight played across Schmidt’s body. He was laying half in and half out of one of the shallow trenches glowing with alien technology. His back had been broken. The angle that he was lying at looked horribly unnatural, to the point of obscene. Amanda could still make out the look of surprise on the German’s face.
‘H… help…’ The voice was weak. Amanda and Daniel’s flashlights played all across the floor of the cave. Only Hank remained calm, using his flashlight to search the back of the site. Daniels found him. It was Coyle. He was frothing up blood.