“Did these tunnels come with the place,” Deke asked, “or did you dig them yourself?”
“The tunnels were here,” Marakit told him, something about her artificial voice even more robotic now. I wondered if that was from damage to the synthesizer or just stress. “I hid them. From nearly everyone.”
She’d certainly hidden them from me, because I couldn’t see a damned thing except where the tactical light on the side of my laser carbine illuminated, which wasn’t much. Only a meter across, the passage reminded me of the maintenance shafts in the Underground, where I’d used to sleep when the gangs were hunting for me in the housing blocs. The sides were smooth and polished, like the tunnels had been carved with an industrial laser, and unfortunately the floor was just as smooth, which made footing tricky. I didn’t have it as bad as Deke did, trying to haul around a lamed Marakit, but I suppose he had more to work with too. I still hadn’t figured out how though. If he carried bionics, they were the most lifelike I’d ever seen.
“How far do they go?” I wondered, which I thought was a less whiney way of asking are we there yet?
“They run the perimeter of the original installation,” Marakit told me, her voice echoing off the walls. “We’ve expanded homesteads into thermal pockets outside the perimeter in the last few months so it wouldn’t feel so crowded, but there’s no direct route into those homesteads.”
“Who do you trust, Marakit?” Deke asked her. “Who can you count on?”
She didn’t answer immediately, the only sound the scrape of her dragging leg on the stone.
“The Evolutionists,” she decided. “Once they hear Vagabond has been killed, they’ll rally to me. Raven would be the one to organize the others, once she hears about the attack.”
“Where would Raven be?” I wanted to know. “Assuming she’s not sitting around the house having baby food pumped into her stomach.”
“There’s an intersection a hundred meters ahead. Turn left and follow it two hundred meters to the end. It comes out near the armory. That’s the first target Raven will try to seize.”
I had a bunch of other questions, but none of them were as important as getting the hell out of these tunnels and finding someplace safe—and warm—to hole up, so I kept them to myself. At the intersection, Deke stopped abruptly, checking both ways up and down the passage before setting Marakit to rest against the wall and waving me forward. With the openings on all four sides, there was more space at the intersection, enough room for us to stand shoulder to shoulder without either of us needing a breath mint.
Pol-Kai would have thought of the armory too, he cautioned over his implant transmitter, which I figured meant he didn’t want Marakit to overhear. He probably already took it, and I don’t hold out much hope he would have left any Evolutionists running free.
That’s a depressingly likely scenario, I agreed. What about the Cultists?
They could go either way, but I don’t know we can rely on them even if they’re on Marakit’s side. They’re strong, but not that much stronger than the Tahni, and they’ll be unarmed.
What’s the plan then? I wanted to know.
Since we know all of Jack and shit at the moment, we still have to check out the armory. But we need to be ready to move if we get spotted, and Marakit won’t be moving fast unless I’m carrying her.
I was willing to concede that. The cyborg probably weighed twice what I did, given the bionics and the isotope reactor to power them. Even with the lower gravity here, it would still be awkward as hell for me to try to carry her.
I’ll scout it out, I volunteered. Wait for me back here at the intersection.
A moment ago the tunnel had felt cozy and protective, but now that I was out in front with no one to back me up, what had been a narrow passage turned into a huge, open space with me an inviting target. I shoved the laser carbine out ahead of me, swinging the light from side to side, making sure there were no side corridors where a potential ambusher could conceal themselves, but all the light revealed were cobwebs.
Spiders. Every human colony had spiders to go along with the flies and mosquitoes and rats. They’d colonized every world right alongside us. I’d just had the thought that at least I hadn’t seen any rats when one of the damned things scuttled along the tunnel, almost running across my boot. I let it pass, controlling myself with difficulty because I figured a high, piercing screech might give away our position. Maybe Deke could spear it on one of those talons and heat it up like a shish-kabob.
When I estimated I’d gone nearly two hundred meters, the glow from my weapon’s light fell on a darker square against the gray of the rock walls. I had to switch off the light and let my eyes adjust for a moment before a glint of yellow around the lines of the door showed me I’d reached the right place.
It occurred to me that I hadn’t asked Marakit if there was some special method of unlocking the door from this side, but I figured if there had been she would have told me, so I just played the light over the edges of the frame. A pressure plate, dull and blending with the rock, stared back at me, and I took a deep breath and switched off the light again before I pushed it in. The metallic click of the lock releasing was obscenely loud and I gritted my teeth, sure if anyone was on the other side they must surely have heard it.
At least the door swung inward rather than outward, allowing me to use it for cover as I slowly, cautiously leaned around the edge. The corridor on the other side was well-lit, in contrast with most of this freaking place, but what it showed me I didn’t particularly want to see. Dead bodies. Up and down the hallway, most of them clustered around a thickly armored door that now hung open, the edges charred and cracked from what might have been an explosive charge.
That would be the armory, and Deke had been dead right. Three of the bodies were Tahni, their necks broken, but there were at least twenty Evolutionists scattered around them, and Pol-Kai’s troops hadn’t been so sporting as to fight hand-to-hand. More lasers. I suppose they’d gotten a bulk purchase deal on the weapons from a black-market source, or maybe Pol-Kai had stumbled on a cache of Tahni weapons out there on Hudson Bay. Whatever guns the Tahni had before, they had more now.
I’d only taken two seconds to scan toward the armory, fully intending to check the other direction, my attention captured by the field of dead bodies for perhaps a half a beat too long.
“Human!”
The shout came from behind me, away from the armory, and my initial thought as I turned was that it was a warning, the beginning of a command to drop my gun. As it turned out, it was an identification of his target, because the Tahni fired before I’d gotten completely turned around.
If anything saved me, it was the fact that most of the Tahni in this place were too young to have fought in the war and had little to no combat experience. Since they were vegetarians, none of them had ever hunted, but I had back on Hausos, and I knew all about buck fever. He pulled his shot, the swathe of blinding white energy hitting the interior of the door instead of my head, blasting a chunk out of its top corner. I threw myself to the floor and away from the spray of molten metal, my left shoulder hitting hard just as the muzzle of my carbine found a target.
Two Tahni at ten meters, though only one had fired. Young, as I’d thought, unblooded before this from the lack of a cue wrapped around their necks, and the one in the rear stared at me with fear and alarm obvious on his face, content to leave the shooting up to his friend in front. That one had the look of a young warrior eager to prove himself, perhaps one who’d been left to guard the armory and badly wanted his first kill. I was supposed to be it.
If I’d had time to think, I might have felt bad about killing him.
But I’d had too much combat experience to let thinking get in the way, and the laser carbine fired as if it had been controlled by one of the AI in those autonomous drones. My war had been fought in a battlesuit, but I’d had enough combat outside of one since then that I could fire accurately at this range without using the sights. A short burst erased the fierce determination on the Tahni’s face and shocked his more timid friend into action, a wild spray of laser pulses that cratered the walls but came nowhere near me.
I couldn’t know if he was wearing armor under the loose, colorful tunic and couldn’t take the chance. A second headshot, and if Top had been around she would have yelled at me for showing off. The whining crackle of the laser had barely faded before I’d rolled to my feet and took a step toward the bodies, intent on stripping them of weapons and ammo. Shouted warnings in singsong Tahni stopped me, and I ran back to the tunnel door, closing it for all the good it would do. The door was trashed, and they’d know what had happened and where I’d gone.
“Go!” I yelled ahead of me. “Go! They’re right behind me!”
I could, I realized in hindsight, have broadcast the transmission on the implant ‘link, but I still wasn’t used to having that shit inside my head and yelling came naturally. By the time I reached the intersection, Deke already had Marakit up, her arm around his neck, but we still had a problem.
“The armory was taken,” I told them, panting with the effort of the spring as I slid to a halt. “Lots of dead Evolutionists, and I don’t know if your friend Raven was with them. We need a plan B, and we need it fast.”
Marakit hesitated, which I didn’t think was natural for her, then pointed back the way we’d come.
“That way. Take us back to the last junction and turn right.”
“Why?” Deke asked, though he didn’t hesitate to follow her directions, running at what would have been a good clip for an unencumbered sprinter, one I could barely keep up with. “Where are we going?”
“To what may possibly be the last friends I have here,” she told him. “And the last place Pol-Kai would expect.”
