“HELLO!”
The Rangers jumped. Santiago turned down the volume.
“…are five stops away,” the train engineer continued. “Where are you headed?”
“Academy Outpost,” Santiago replied.
“Ah! Excellent! So are we. We should be there in twenty minutes.”
“We have Hivers on our tail.”
“Hivers? Here? Shit.” The engineer sighed. “I’ll push ‘er as fast as she can go. But be ready for a hot extract.”
Santiago stepped away from the console. His head felt heavy and foggy, overburdened by the toxins that were surely swelling his brain. He knew he had to do something, but…
“Boss?” Ismail said. “I’ll go upstairs and lay some traps for our friends.”
Ah, right. That. “Go ahead.”
Ismail ran up the stairs. Santiago patted himself down, checking that his kit was where he’d left them. Meyers fiddled with her M592. Silence reigned in the dark.
Long, long minutes later, Ismail sprinted back down, closing the door behind him. As he welded it shut with nano, he said, “They’re coming.”
Santiago looked around. There was no cover on the platform. It was…
Meyers went down to the tracks, crouching behind the thick concrete of the platform floor. The men followed her.
“You know… this is… crazy,” Ismail said, gasping for air.
“Got a better idea?” she asked.
“No,” Santiago said.
Santiago kept his ears open, listening for the sound of hissing air. A mine detonated in the stairwell. Training his carbine at the door, he breathed slowly, deeply, regularly. Waited.
A lifetime passed in the dark.
White-hot light flared from the doorframe.
Santiago shouldered his weapon.
The door fell. A dark shape leaped through.
“Fire!” Santiago called, pulling the trigger.
The hunter blew apart. Two more pounced out from behind it. Santiago tracked the one on the right. It halted for a moment, bringing up its weapons. He fired, and both the hunter’s hands exploded. Santiago put the creature down with a double-tap, scanned for more targets, and saw the other hunter die.
And a cylinder bounced down the stairs and into the open.
Santiago looked away.
It burst in dazzling, ear-shattering flashes of white. Santiago’s monocular shut down. Flattening himself as far as he could, he extended his carbine above his platform and loosed a burst. Another. A third. Ismail and Meyers added their fire to his. When the flash-bang died Santiago looked up.
A pair of corpses greeted him. Shattered bodies with triangular heads, torsos covered in pseudo-chitin carapace, their hands gripping Hiver gravity guns. The bodies began to burn.
A hunter surged through the doorway. The Rangers pumped it with bullets. As it vaporised, it lobbed a grenade at them.
Landing in front of Ismail.
The Ranger swore and jumped up on the platform. Scooping up the grenade, he dashed to the door, brought the bomb to his ear, threw it—
It exploded. The munitions on the Ranger’s suit detonated too.
“Ismail!” Meyers yelled.
When the dust cleared, there was nothing left of him larger than a leg. The massive explosion broke up the stairs, bringing it down in a wreck of twisted metal and rubble that sealed off the doorway.
“Ismail,” Meyers whispered. “My God.”
Air whooshed through the tunnel. The duo clambered up on the platform.
Moments later, a sleek, shining maglev rushed into the station. The doors slid open.
“All aboard!” the engineer called through the intercom.
The train was packed with men and materiel. All the seats in the front carriages were occupied, and much of the floor space taken up by supply crates. Wending their way to the rear, the Rangers found a pair of empty seats. Meyers collapsed into one. Santiago discreetly whipped out his Geiger counter first.
They were cold. Thank God. Last thing he needed was to contaminate what could well be the last maglev on the planet.
The journey to Academy passed in a blur. At six hundred kilometres per hour, all Santiago could see of the outside world was an ill-defined gray stretch. Santiago opened his q-com and updated Central on his team’s status. The moment he received an acknowledgment, he closed his eyes and drifted into a twilight state somewhere between restfulness and true sleep.
Meyer nudged him. “We’re here.”
Santiago opened his eyes. That was fast. Too fast. Had he nodded off? He didn’t know. All he knew was that he felt even more tired than when he had boarded. Yawning, he followed the occupants out the train.
An array of guards scanned the passengers with handheld scanners, searching for Hiver pheromones and cybernetics. When Santiago cleared the checkpoint, a guard approached him.
“Please step aside, Sergeant Major.”
“Is there a problem?”
“No problem. But Central wants to speak to you and your team.”
“Lead on.”
The guard led the duo away from the crush of people and to the security office. Inside the office, a short man in a grubby suit awaited behind a desk. He wore no rank tabs on his chest epaulet, and needed none.
“Major Khabarov,” Santiago said. “Finally showed up in person?”
“Have to show my face once in a while, let people think I’m alive.” Khabarov gestured at the chairs in front of him. “Sit, please.”
They sat. “You have something for us?” Meyers asked.
“I’m truly sorry for the loss of your team. Their sacrifice was not in vain.”
Santiago thought of Lenislaw, dying alone in the dark. Rook, consumed by golem and fire. Ismail, blown apart. The long line of Rangers and Resistors he had led and lost.
“Thank you, sir,” Santiago said. “But you must’ve seen our report. We need to be in the hospital right now.”
“Absolutely. But I’ve been told you can still fight.”
“We don’t get in a medbox, we’re dead men walking.”
Meyers coughed.
Santiago grimaced. “Well. Dead Rangers. You get what I mean.”
Khabarov smiled wanly. “I spoke to the medical techs. They said the medbox will need two weeks to fix you. We don’t have two weeks.”
“Sending us into the fire again?” Meyers asked.
“Yes. This could be our only chance to win the war.”
“You said that about the last job, sir.”
“This is a continuation of that operation. The Academy AIs have pored through the data you transmitted. They found schematics for Hiver cybernetics. Hardware, firmware, and software infrastructure. Coupled with all the intelligence we’ve gathered in previous missions, we’re confident we can penetrate the Hive Mind.”
The Hivers distributed their computing capability across decentralized swarms, making them ultra-resilient and impervious to decapitation strikes. The Academy concentrated most of what was left of the planet’s major processors, becoming a gigantic hyper-computer several orders of magnitude more powerful than the Hiver equivalent. If it were allowed to.
“You’re saying we can hack into the Hiver command and control system?” Santiago asked.
“Not quite. The Hivers use quantum comms like we do. The only way to hack the Hive Mind is to access a dedicated communication and control node.”
“Which they don’t normally employ, since they prefer decentralised networks and autonomous swarms.”
“Yes. They only use C&C nodes to coordinate activities between different swarms during large-scale operations. Such as an upload-or-destroy mission.”
“That’s all well and good, but what do you need us for?”
“The Hivers are coming. We’re going to ambush them.”