The buzzing grew louder. Closer. Santiago swallowed. They wouldn’t escape them. They had to—
Meyers twisted around. A stone bounced off a distant wall, breaking glass.
The wasps flew away, investigating the new sound. A hunter screamed, and its fellows yodelled. Santiago picked up the pace. He remembered to breathe. To breathe was to think, and it was the thinking man who lived. He turned down random corners, putting as much space as he could from the fire, guiding his feet with his pre-War memories of the concourse.
Tak-tak-tak
Santiago halted. Activated his infrared lamp.
On the ceiling, a hunter awaited, its tail poised to strike.
Santiago snapped up his carbine.
The hunter screeched, dropping. It flipped around in mid-air, landing on its feet, bringing up its lasers. Santiago fired.
On impact, the ceramet rounds flashed into brilliant plasma. Santiago flinched. His right eye was temporarily blinded. The monocular blanked out, and when he could see again, the hunter lay in pieces before him.
More hunters howled. One, two, three of them.
Which meant there were at least ten more. Howling was not a means of communication. It was echolocation and psychological warfare. They already knew where the Rangers were.
“Go active,” Santiago ordered. “Ismail, proxy mine.”
Santiago activated his infrared lamp, sweeping for targets. Then the monocular winked out as the hunter self-destructed.
An infrared spotlight appeared behind him. Then another.
“Mine set,” Ismail said.
“Let’s go.”
They charged down the corridor. Turned right. Santiago took three steps before he heard the buzzing. A swarm of wasps descended from the ceiling, stingers exposed.
“Move!” Meyers yelled, pushing past him. She raised her nanosprays and squirted. The aerosol blossomed into white fire. Burning wasps dropped from the sky.
“Back! Back!” Santiago ordered.
He turned and ran, aiming for a hallway to his right. Behind him, the proximity mine exploded.
The hall graded down, leading to a pair of escalators flanking a staircase. Clunks sounded above them. A ventilation grate fell from the ceiling. A golem cube dropped.
“Fuck you!” Santiago extended his wrist and hosed it with nano. Closing in, he kicked the assembler against the wall and ordered the nano to ignite.
The cube melted.
Santiago blinked. He hadn’t expected that. Damn things could be killed. He ran—
Meyers grabbed his shoulder, reversing his momentum.
“What the hell?”
“Look down! Tripwires!”
Thin lines glittered in the infrared lamp, sealing off the escalators and the stairs.
Behind them, a second mine exploded. Hunters howled.
“Follow me!” Santiago called, jumping over the tripwire that guarded the stairs. He landed awkwardly, slipped on a step, and landed on his ass. Painfully.
Ismail laughed.
“Real funny,” Santiago groused, getting up.
Santiago ran down the stairs, leaping down the last five steps. He turned to cover the team, and saw hunters pouncing on the ceiling.
“Contact front!”
Santiago dumped his mag into them, squeezing the trigger as fast as he could. Ismail and Meyers added their fire to his. A pencil-thin beam snapped out past his head, missing him by an inch. Plasma flash-blinded his right eye.
“Grenade out!” Meyers yelled. Pulling a plastic pipe bomb from her vest, she pulled the pin and tossed it at the head of the stairs.
Santiago ducked away. The bomb exploded; a burning gob landed by his foot.
Navigating with his good left eye, he raced to the platform. To his right, the maglev track was blocked by a stationary train.
To his left, the tunnel had caved in.
The hunters bellowed.
Swearing, Santiago called up the map, searching for…
There.
Jumping down onto the track, he turned right, squeezed himself between the train and the wall then crab-walked down the tunnel.
A soft buzzing filled the air.
“Go passive!” he whispered, dousing the infrared light.
The world went dark again. Navigating solely by touch, he inched his way along the wall.
The train rocked. Clunk-clunk-clunk.
His fingers touched a corner. He eased himself into the space, finding a tiny nook. The back wall was smooth and unmarked. A junction box lay at head height.
The buzzing grew louder.
Santiago ran his palm along the right side of the box. A hidden panel slid open. Inside was a tiny dataport. Santiago ran his suitjack into the port.
Click.
Santiago pressed against the far wall, and it swung on silent bearings. He motioned the team through, and slid the door shut. It locked behind him.
The space beyond was dark and tight. Feeling along the left wall, he found a button. Overhead lights snapped on revealing an airlock door.
“Is it safe to ask where the hell are we?” Ismail asked.
“Metro-2,” Santiago replied.
“Metro-2, here?” Ismail whistled. “How far does it go?”
“Everywhere,” Meyers replied, reloading his carbine. “Wherever the Metro goes, there’s a connection to Metro-2. It’s the only reason the Resistance has held out for so long.”
Metro-2 was the city’s final redoubt against total war. But only as long as the Hive wasn’t aware of it.
“The Hive isn’t stupid,” Meyers said. “They know we couldn’t have disappeared into thin air. They’ll start looking for the Metro-2 connector.”
“And drop a rock on us,” Ismail continued.
“They stopped doing that a while back,” Santiago said. “Now they prefer uploading Resistors into the Hive mind. Dead or alive.”
“And so we prefer denying compromised connectors to the enemy now,” Meyers added. “With SDMs.”
Ismail sighed. “This war. Either they kill us or we kill ourselves.”
“Or we kill them. Let’s go.”
The airlock cycled open. Beyond was a white-lit decontamination chamber. Santiago activated his suit’s IFF system, letting the embedded sensors know they were friendly. When the door closed, the nozzles on the ceiling hissed.
“No more decon solution?” Meyers asked.
Santiago clucked his tongue. “Looks like it. Only thing coming out is pressurised air.” He pulled a Geiger counter from his pouch. “Guys, check your suits. We need to know if we’re still hot.”
The Geiger counter crackled. The neutron flux had blasted the suits, exciting and displacing molecules. The now-radioactive material was emitting the full range of radioactive particles: alpha particles, beta and gamma rays, fission by-products. Santiago wondered if the neutrons had embrittled their gear too. They couldn’t afford to find out the hard way.
The Geiger counter said he was emitting 2.5 Sieverts of radiation, slowly dropping. Meyers and Ismail reported similar results. But the team was still absorbing radiation. The antirads could only protect them for so long, hours maybe. Already Santiago felt his fingers turning cold, his skin itching under the suit.
It was psychological, he told himself. That or the antirads.
He almost believed it.
“Dump your water,” Santiago ordered.
“What?” Meyers said. “Why… oh. Damn. Damn!”
“You drank some?” Ismail said.
“Yeah. I was… oh shit.”
Santiago shrugged. “Probably not hot enough to kill you. Well, not any faster anyway.”
All the same, he emptied the contents of his irradiated canteens and water bladder into the chamber’s drains. A soft chime whispered in his earpieces. The stolen data had been transmitted.