Dirt was piled up waist-high against the inside of the walls, as though someone had been trying to build themselves some kind of improvised radiation shield. Not that it would do much good, at least once the sun was above them. Which it would be, in just a few hours.
Otherwise the interior was empty, aside from some old farm tools, and stacks of ancient, rotting, straw-like plant stems.
He kicked the straw, but nothing moved beneath it. He grabbed a rusty pitch-fork from the tool pile, and shoved the prongs into the dirt piles in case another IED was hidden there. The spikes just sank into the dirt until they scraped against the wooden wall behind them.
Desoto crouched beside the wall, in the corner across from the horse. “Where’s the girl?”
“I have no idea.”
Logan pushed on the human-sized door on the street side of the barn. It creaked open onto the weed-strewn dirt of the street outside. Through the doorway, he could see the rear of the left-most building that the others had targeted as hostile.
Yellow light flashed to his left for a split second, then chunks of the roof planks of that building exploded upwards, tumbling through the sky. They clattered across the street, and smashed into the buildings on Logan’s side.
Logan glanced to the left.
The green squares of Charlie team were moving into the village from that end, and one of them crouched with a grenade launcher on his shoulder. Whoever it was stared at the building for a second, then slung the launcher and walked on.
The red HUD square that had hung over the wrecked building disappeared. Logan took a step out of the door, then crouched at the side of the street, as he pulled his own launcher from his back.
“Drone incoming,” Bairamov said.
A flashing red rectangle appeared on Logan’s HUD, around the building with the other shooter. Logan pressed himself back against the wall.
Then a crackly howl came from the sky.
The building erupted in a spray of wooden splinters for a few seconds as one of the drones opened fire with its Gatling gun. The thick planks on the side of the building split apart as the hypersonic rounds tore through the wooden frame. The top floor twisted and collapsed, pushing the walls apart until they fell to the ground in a pile of shattered wood.
Then there was silence once more, except for the sound of Logan’s breathing, and the air hissing into his helmet.
“Move up,” Volkov yelled. “Clean up the mess. There are probably more of the bastards hiding here somewhere. Bravo, do you have the girl?”
“No sign of her, sir.” Logan said.
“Then where the hell is she? She didn’t come out of the building, and she didn’t just vanish into thin air.”
“Don’t use the drones again,” Poulin said. “I need prisoners.”
“Bravo, try to get her alive, if it’s not too much trouble.”
Logan stepped back into the barn. The girl had to be there somewhere. The drones would have seen her leave, even if he hadn’t. He peered up into the roof again. Wooden planks ran across the rafters, and were piled high with straw. But nothing showed there in IR. There was just nowhere for the girl to hide.
He turned around on the spot, staring at the walls. Could she have removed some of the planks, and moved from one building to the next without being seen?
None looked loose, and she’d still have to cross the open dirt between the buildings, where the drones should have seen her. Besides, if she thought the Legion were following her, why would she even come here? Unless it was a trap.
There was something else. He glanced toward the horse. They boy’s body no longer hung over its back. Wherever she’d gone, the dead boy had gone with her. She wouldn’t have dragged him through the village, would she?
An explosion rattled the planks in the walls. Logan dove to the dirt. Another explosion followed a second later. Sounded like grenades, but whose?
“Man down,” a voice called. Then rifle rounds cracked in rapid bursts.
One of Charlie’s men turned flashing red. The buildings they were clearing had turned green on the HUD as they marked them safe, but one now switched back to red.
“I thought you cleared that damn building?” Volkov yelled.
More grenades exploded, followed by long bursts of rifle fire. No-one had flagged a hostile in the building, so who was firing at what?
“We did, sir.”
“Then where are they coming from?”
“Don’t know, sir. But I don’t reckon there’s anything alive in there now.”
The rear door creaked behind Logan as Bairamov clambered over it. “Where’s this damn girl?”
Logan crouched as he stomped across the building toward the horse. Wood creaked beneath him, and his foot sank a few centimetres into the ground.
He stepped back, and kicked at the ground with the metal claws. Dirt sprayed into the air, then the claws scraped on wood. He crouched, and dug his fingers into the dirt.
They wrapped themselves around a plank, and he pulled it free. More planks lay in the dirt beside it, and he heaved on them all until he’d cleared the ground beneath them.
“What have you found?” Bairamov said.
Logan crouched, and stared down at the floor of the barn where he’d ripped up the planks.
“Alice, IR illuminators.”
The suit’s external IR lights turned on. Lights bright enough to illuminate the area around him for the suit’s visor to see, but still invisible to anyone looking their way with the naked eye.
And a dark circle about a metre across lay there in the dirt where the planks had been, hiding it from view until he’d stepped on them.
A tunnel entrance.
Logan had crawled through smaller tunnels in the caves along the shore when he was a kid. But he’d been much smaller then, too.
And not wrapped in hundreds of kilos of metal and plastic.
This tunnel was wide enough for a human to drop into, but too narrow for a man in a suit.
It didn’t look like the kind of thing the colonists would have built when they first constructed the village. And a thin layer of dirt still clung to the top of the planks, as though someone had stuck it there to try to hide them.
The suit’s ground-penetrating radar was only designed to spot mines, not to look metres deep into the ground. But it showed a faint outline of something leading away from the hole, out of the building, and across the street.
“Sir, I’ve got a tunnel.”
It would make sense. If anyone was still living there, they’d be living underground to protect themselves from the radiation. There was nowhere else they could go.
And, if they built radiation-protected homes above ground, they’d be easy to see. But beneath a dead village… no-one would notice them there. Even if someone saw the insurgents as they came and went, they’d just see a few people enter the buildings and leave.
More gunfire outside.
“I’m hit,” a voice yelled.
A suit in Alpha team showed damage on the HUD. Another building they’d marked as cleared turned red.
“Sir,” Bairamov said, “we’ve found a tunnel in the building where the girl was. They must be using them to move around behind us.”
“Drop grenades down the tunnels,” Volkov said, “then fall back to the rally point. We’ll call in the drones and and destroy this place.”
“No,” Poulin yelled. “We need to capture this village.”
“Mademoiselle, if you’d like to go crawling through those tunnels, feel free. But I’m tired of you getting my men shot. The rest of us are leaving.”
“Disobey me again, and I’ll have you demoted and shipped back to France. Don’t think I can’t do so.”
Volkov was silent for a few seconds as gunfire and grenade explosions continued around the village.