“Coming out,” Santiago called.
“Come out,” Meyers replied.
The team regrouped outside.
CLUNK
“That came from the ceiling,” Meyers said.
“We have to—”
Five feet away a ceiling vent opened. A large cube dropped down, slowing into a mid-air hover. Klaxons screeched. The cube pulsed multi-coloured lights in rapid patterns. As Santiago shut his eyes and turned away, the walls and floor around the cube cracked, buckled, and exploded.
Chunks of ferromagnetic material gathered around the cube, twisting and separating and re-forming into springs, cogs, legs, arms, claws. It rolled, crawled, walked towards them.
“Golem!” Meyers yelled.
Rook hosed the construct with full auto fire. The intense gravity fields around the golem assembler snatched the rounds out of the air and repurposed them as mass.
“Run!” Santiago shouted.
They fled, retracing their route. The golem graduated to long, loping bounds, each step a heavy thud. Santiago rounded a bend…
The corridor was filled with thralls. All were armed with improvised weapons: clubs, knives, engineering tools.
Santiago turned up his GAC to full power and fired. His first round blew a hole clean through the nearest thrall, and into two more behind. He worked the crowd with short bursts in full auto. The team took his cue, mincing up the thralls as they surged forward. The wall of flesh fell before them.
Revealing a floating golem assembly. Its energy fields ripped out metal and bone from the corpses, assembling a twisted facsimile of a skeletal giant.
Behind them, the other golem advanced.
“Run!” Santiago again ordered.
Santiago pulled down his map, solving the maze that lay before him. He raced down a corridor, turned right, blew through another thrall, another right turn, and the exit was before them.
Running up the stairs two and three at a time, Santiago didn’t dare look back, tracking the golems by their heavy crashing footfalls. They were getting louder. Closer.
At the top of the stairs, he brought up his wrist-mounted nanospray. He doused the steps in front of him, keying the nano for command detonation. Meyers slipped on the liquid. Santiago caught her and hauled her past him. Ismail was right behind, huffing and puffing.
Rook was the last. Half a storey to go. But the golems were gaining on him,
“Come on!” Santiago yelled.
Rook scrambled. Thirty steps to safety. Twenty-five. The golems ate up the stairs behind them, lengthening their legs and arms, widening their gait. Rook glanced over his shoulder, and cursed.
“Look at me, damn you!” Santiago shouted. “Fucking run!”
Rook ran.
Fifteen steps.
The golems nipped at his heels.
Ten steps.
Rook jumped, clearing several steps at once.
Five steps.
A golem reared up and extruded a pair of metal-encrusted bone scythes above him. The curved blades hooked into his torso, piercing his armour and reeling him in.
“Shit!” Rook yelled.
Santiago fired. The rounds halted in mid-air, then whipped around and meshed itself with the golem.
“Go!” Rook screamed. “Fucking go!”
Cursing, Santiago jumped clear and detonated the nano. The blast consumed Rook and collapsed the stairwell. The golems fell into the darkness below. Santiago staggered away. The survivors grabbed him, pulling him away from the rising dust cloud.
“Rook?” Ismail asked.
“Didn’t make it.”
Meyers shook her head. “Damn. Did you deny him?”
“Yeah.”
Meyers patted his shoulder. “You did good. At least they can’t turn him against us.”
“No time to rest guys,” Santiago said. “The SDM is still active.”
They ran back the way they came. Out the door, back through the tunnel, out into the concourse—
The ground rumbled.
“Initiation!” Ismail called.
The earth trembled. Crumbled. Hardened concrete broke and fell. The Rangers sprinted. Dust fell from the ceiling. An extended roar reverberated behind them. Santiago didn’t dare stop. A Hiver must have triggered the SDM’s anti-tampering mechanism. The two-kiloton fusion weapon was a ‘clean’ bomb, but it still released prodigious amounts of neutrons, which would punch through all but the thickest shielding material. Run, or die.
They ran.
They sprinted down the length of the concourse before Santiago called for a halt. They leaned against walls and benches, panting and gasping. Santiago’s eyes were blurry. His gorge rose, and he swallowed it down. He was fine, he had to be fine, it was just fatigue, but his dosimeter was crackling through his earpieces. He unhooked the device from his suit and examined the screen.
Six grays.
“Fuck me.”
“You’re not my type, boss,” Ismail said.
“Check your dosimeters. Now.”
“Fuck… “ Ismail muttered.
“What’d you get?” Santiago asked.
“Six grays.”
“Meyers?”
She stepped aside and emptied her guts onto the floor. Santiago’s will broke. He took a deep breath, ripped off his mask, stepped back and turned away as his stomach rebelled. A stream of yellow-green exploded from his mouth. As he blew his nose, expelling more waste, he heard Ismail retch.
“Meyers,” Santiago gasped, massaging his belly. “Dosage?”
“Six grays,” she whispered.
“Antirads. Now.”
Santiago fished a small orange case his thigh pocket. Inside was an autoinjector and four spare cartridges. He pressed the needle into his neck and hit the plunger. Cool liquid invaded his blood. Sighing, he discarded the used cartridge and replaced it with a fresh one.
The medicine circulated rapidly through him. The nausea faded. His eyes focused. He spat out the last drops of bile, kept the case, donned his mask and took a deep breath.
“Good news, bad news,” Santiago said. “Bad news is, six grays is a lethal dose. Good news is, a medbox can still reverse the damage. Antirads will buy us time to get to one.”
“And where’s the nearest?” Ismail said.
A soft buzzing filled the air.
“Wasps,” Meyers hissed. “We have to go.”
Ismail sprayed the puddles with nanospray. “Burning. Stand clear.”
They couldn’t leave any trace behind. Who knew what Hivers could do with DNA.
They ducked into a corner. “Burn,” Santiago said.
A flash of light. The wasps buzzed, swooping in on the fire. Soft thud-thud-thuds rose above the beating of a thousand wings. Dark shapes slinked across the ground. Hunters.
Using touch and squeezes, Santiago signalled the duo to follow him. He lowered his monocular, switching to passive infrared. He could just about see beyond arm’s length, but he didn’t dare switch on his infrared lamp. Not with the hunters so close behind.
Dropping to a crouch, he extended his left arm ahead of him and moved slowly on the balls of his feet. With each step, he lifted his foot just enough to clear the floor, toeing aside bits of glass and debris in his path. Meyers felt around his back, and latched on to his suit’s rear grab handle. She was so close he could feel her body heat. Sense the sickness in stasis within her.
Glass crunched behind him.
Santiago paused, listening.
Ismail? Meyers? Who knew? Who cared? He skulked into the dark, away from the fire.
Now there was no light, period. Nothing but complete black. Swallowing, he paid extra attention to the rest of his senses. A faint, sweet smell of decay hung in the air. Through his soft-soled boots, he felt the cracked, broken earth. He swept for obstacles with his left hand and guided himself around them.