Santiago remembered to breathe. Softly. The last of the hunters had passed. And if they passed over him…
“FUUUUUUUUUUUUUAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRRGHH!”
“Hold position!” Santiago q-commed. “Do not engage!”
The men held position.
Crunching, chewing sounds bounced off the walls.
Santiago waited.
Breathed.
Ten minutes later, he stepped away and looked around. The hunters were gone.
“All clear,” Santiago said. “Who was it?”
“Lenny,” Meyers replied.
“You saw what happened?”
“A hunter poked him. He moved.”
Santiago sighed. Goddammit. Before the Hivers came Lenislaw was a civilian. He had made his bones in the Resistance but he had no place among the Rangers. Lenislaw hadn’t been conditioned to iron discipline the way Santiago was. This was supposed to be an all-Ranger operation, but Central said there were too few Rangers left.
“Distribute his load. Five minutes.”
“Roger.”
Santiago knelt, bringing his M592 gravitic accelerator carbine to his shoulder, and kept watch. Five and a half minutes later, Meyers spoke.
“We’re done.”
“Form up. Move out.”
“And the remains?”
“Mark them on your map. We’ll come back for him later.”
It was a polite fiction and they knew it. If the Hivers wouldn’t take the corpse the rats would. But Santiago, Meyer, and the rest of the team were only human, and they needed that last inch of faith in their fellow humans.
The tunnel ended in a metal door recessed into the wall. They stacked up, weapons at the ready. Meyers inspected the frame for traps and alarms. Grabbing the doorknob, she turned. Pulled.
Beyond was once a bustling concourse. Now there was simply darkness. Santiago lowered his enhanced vision monocular over his left eye and the world filled with false colour. The shops were shuttered forever. Glowing mould and alien roots covered the ceiling and walls. Water dripped and gathered in dank corners. Santiago gently swept debris away with his boots, ears primed for errant noise.
At the end of the concourse was another door to another tunnel. It led to a staircase that spiralled down to darker depths. A gentle hum filled Santiago’s ears. He peeked over the railing, aiming his M592 down.
All clear.
Keeping to the outer edge of the stairs, they descended the creaking steps. Santiago kept his eyes open for lasers, motion detectors, ultrasonics, magnetics, even simple tripwires. There was no telling how the Hivers would secure this route.
At the bottom of the stairs, a door awaited. Its hinges had rusted, the frame welded shut. The third man on the team, Rook, aimed his forearm-mounted nanospray and squirted, generously slathering the frame. He stepped clear.
“Breaching,” he called.
Blinding light banished the dark. The metal melted, and the door fell. A gentler light flooded through the doorway. Santiago stepped through, the monocular automatically reverting to real-sight.
The corridor beyond was white. Clean. Sterile. Santiago pulled up his maps on the monocular and picked a waypoint. In his augmented vision, a thick green line grew at his feet and snaked down the passageway.
Navigating a labyrinth of white corridors, he followed the line to a pair of unmarked doors. Santiago and Rook took one door; Meyers and the last Resistor took the other.
Santiago held up three fingers. Dropped one. Another. The last.
Meyers nodded.
Santiago dropped his fist, shouldered his carbine, and opened the door.
A man wearing spotless blue overalls spun around. His hands were empty, his face slack, his eyes set. His pupils were unnaturally dilated, the sclera an empty white.
Santiago shot him in the face.
The thrall’s head caved in. Santiago fired again and again until it dropped. Turning his back to the nearest wall, he scanned the room. This was a target-rich environment, full of blue-uniformed thralls. Santiago aimed at the closest and cut loose. The M592 whined, the clack-clack of the moving bolt louder than the bullet in flight.
Caught in the crossfire, the thralls dropped, twitching. Santiago checked for more targets, saw Rook on the ground grappling with a thrall. The Hiver flipped Rook onto his back, mounting him. Rook’s dagger flashed in his hand, stitching into the target again and again and again, to no effect. The thrall brought a fist crashing down. Rook rolled, guiding the fist into the floor. The tile powdered. The Hiver reared up and Santiago drilled it twice in the face.
“Clear!” Santiago called.
“Clear!” Meyers agreed.
Rook coughed. “Shit. There went the element of surprise.”
Santiago nodded. Shattered circuits and snapped wires flowed out of the broken heads, carried by pseudo-blood and whatever was left of their organic brains. Like all Hivers, the thralls were networked to every other Hiver in the area. The rest of the swarm would come. Soon.
The corpses smoked and hissed. Santiago stepped back as their skin blackened and crisped, their limbs curled, tendons snapped. Then in a flash of blue light they disintegrated, leaving smoking puddles on the floor.
Meyers extracted a scanner from a pouch, running it over Rook. “You’ve been tagged,” she said.
Hivers sprayed targets with pheromones in close proximity, marking them for other Hivers. Some variants mixed in different chemicals, with less pleasant effects.
“Meyers, Rook, exterior security,” Santiago said. “Clean up as best as you can. Ismail, you’re up.”
Meyers and Rook left the room. Ismail set down and opened his heavy haversack.
Santiago surveyed the room. The walls were lined with computers, most of which he had no idea how to use. He did, however, recognize a dataport. He removed a memory stick from a utility pouch and plugged it in. The tip of the stick glowed red.
Windows lined the control room. Beyond, Santiago saw a sprawling assembly line. Assemblers digested raw materials and alchemized them into feedstock. The fabricator turned the feedstock into goods, rolling them out for collection and storage. Robots scurried around the assembly lines, performing a thousand different tasks. Before the War, this was the largest, most sophisticated underground fabricator on the planet, capable of producing almost anything the programmers could dream of. Santiago pressed his hands against the glass, allowing himself to believe that one day true humans would possess such a fabricator again, that in some not-too-distant future it could produce the goods they needed to reclaim the land and sky.
Ismail hauled the Special Demolition Munition from his bag and dashed Santiago’s hopes forever.
“SDM ready,” Ismail said. “Just give me the word.”
“Roger.”
Santiago watched the memstick. It contained a limited artificial intelligence, closer to a search engine than a true AI. The AI scoured the fabricator’s databanks, copying a treasure trove of Old World knowledge. Most of it would be useless. But the Hivers were running the fabricators now, producing the cybernetics and biomechatronics that defined them. If there was any hope of understanding the enemy’s strengths and weaknesses, it lay in the stick.
The memstick turned green.
Santiago pulled it. “We’re done. Ismail, set the timer for thirty minutes.”
It pained him to give the command. But the Hivers had to believe this was a demolition, not a data extraction.
CLUNK
“What was that?” Ismail asked, closing the SDM’s control panel.
“Came from above us.”
CLUNK-CLUNK.
Not a hunter. They weren’t that clumsy. But it was coming closer. Santiago plugged the stick into a suitport and powered up his q-com. Tuning it to a channel reserved for the mission, he began uploading the contents of the stick. Now they just needed to survive long enough for Central to receive its contents.