Maung knelt to get a closer look at some of the bones when he noticed something black and perfectly square. He picked it up between two fingers.
“What is it?” asked Nang.
“Tracking chip.” He took several more from the pile, shoving them into a belt pouch. “They embed them in drifters so they can be tracked. They used to anyway, when Karin was still around.”
“Those are just chips,” said Nang. “I don’t know what you’re planning but you won’t be able to change anything, Maung. They can come up with any story they want. Besides, we don’t know why this is all happening. For all we know it is legal.”
“Yeah, I heard you the first time; the Americans have a good reason.”
Nang drew her pistol and made sure it was loaded. “Sure. Why not?”
Maung caught a glimpse of movement at one of the tunnels. He squeezed off a shot. The pistol fired chemically propelled rounds, tungsten penetrators that blazed from the barrel in gouts of orange flame and it had been long enough since he’d fired anything like it that the weapon bucked in his hand, almost breaking free and hurting his wrist. The slug chipped the tunnel wall. Other than that, there was no sign that his shot hit anything.
“They’re here. Watching.” He wrenched another flare from his belt and held it in one hand, his pistol in the other, while moving toward one of the tunnels, one that seemed to head in the direction of the power conduit. “Come on, Nang. Light a flare and stay close.”
She started to move when Nang froze and pointed. “Maung, stop!”
He saw it too late. A fiber rope ran from the tunnel and ended in a loop, partially covered with bones and dust, and as soon as Maung stepped into it, the line went taut and yanked on his ankle to rip his foot out from under him so he fell on his back. Maung panicked. He dropped his flare and pistol, and scrambled to find a handhold as the things dragged him through the bones toward darkness.
“Throw me a flare!” Maung shouted; he screamed it in Myanmarese, too terrified to think.
Now he couldn’t see Nang. The suit’s computer switched on his headlamp automatically in the darkness and Maung told himself to stop panicking, the wetware screaming that he needed to reach down and get another flare—he had ten more on his belt—and Maung cursed for forgetting. He finally grabbed one, ripping it off its retainer loop, but before he could light it one of the things shrieked. Its claws wrapped around Maung’s lower leg. When the tips penetrated his suit and sank into his flesh, they pierced all the way to the bone and Maung screamed again.
Time slowed and part of his mind noticed that Mars had a smell to it, but it was hard to separate that smell from the stench of rotting corpses since so many humans had been sent here as food. You shouldn’t be able to smell the decomposition, his system warned. Your suit is venting. Maung wondered which would kill him first—these things or a lack of air. He finally raised his head to look. The monster shrieked again staring back at Maung and yet not staring because it had no eyes and resembled a cross between a mole and a human, with hairless white skin that stretched to reveal narrow, triangular, daggerlike teeth when it opened its mouth to bite down on his leg.
“I’m so tired,” Maung said. His breathing shallowed and his vision blurred at the same time his mind recognized that a poison had entered his blood, a paralytic that prevented him from doing anything with the flare; he couldn’t even drop it.
Fascinating, his system commented. These creatures’ claws excrete a substance similar to tetrodotoxin—a paralytic that doesn’t kill, but acts incredibly fast.
Do something! Maung screamed mentally.
No need. Nang has arrived with a UV flare and the creature fled. Its poison effects should wear off.
Something tugged at Maung’s leg; a moment later the air stopped venting and the suit alarms stopped blaring in his ear. Nang leaned over his faceplate. She held a flare up and he saw that Nang was screaming something but Maung couldn’t move his lips and even keeping his eyes open tired him. Her face disappeared. From the sensation of pressure on his arm, he guessed that she was accessing his suit systems, trying to figure out what was wrong. Before he passed out, he said a prayer, asking his ancestors to help them.
When Maung woke up he had to tongue a painkiller; his head throbbed but it only took a moment for his wetware to run a systems analysis, letting him know that his injuries had been limited to his lower leg but that the bleeding had stopped and antibodies were taking care of infection. For now, at least. Maung sat up.
“Oh thank God,” Nang said. “I thought we’d be here forever. Come on, we have to go, now.”
“Where are those things?”
Nang pushed him forward, handing him his pistol and a lit flare. “They’re all over—in front and behind. We only have six more flares, Maung. So wherever we’re going, you better get us there. Soon.”
A kind of wooziness refused to let go. At first Maung moved slowly, because having to crawl while carrying objects in both hands made it difficult to move. The creatures gathered in the distance. They stayed just out of flare range but his helmet lamp reflected off teeth and claws, and Maung shivered at the memory of having one dig into his leg.
The tunnel branched. Maung checked his heads-up and chose one, making sure that Nang kept up; she crawled backward to monitor for anything that might attack from behind.
“It’s not much farther,” Maung said. “A few hundred meters more.”
“If we need flares inside the conduit, we’re hosed, Maung.”
He nodded, even though she couldn’t see it. “I know.”
“I’m not kidding.”
“I know,” he said. “But we won’t. The conduit has internal UV lights.”
“Which they cut off the last time. Remember?”
Maung began to get frustrated but kept his voice even. “I know, Nang. But it doesn’t matter. We’re out here and we’re not going back; it’s too late. So let’s not worry about it until we get there.”
They reached a sharp bend in the tunnel and Maung nearly collapsed with relief; they’d reached the conduit. The creatures’ digging had intersected the metallic tube at exactly the point his wetware had deduced—at a hatch, placed there so that men could dig down from above and gain access in case of emergencies. He brushed dust off it and noted where bots had repaired the damage, welding thick titanium patches over sections of the hatch—corner and edge portions that the gophers had succeeded in bending back and snapping off. It must have taken them forever, Maung thought. Already, he could see new scratch marks.
“They’re trying to break into the conduit again,” Maung said. “You have to give these things credit for persistence.”
“Just open the door, Maung.”
“I will; we’re lucky it’s here.”
“What do you mean?” Nang asked.
Maung drew a cord from a pouch and linked his suit computer through an armored port next to the hatch. A moment later it popped open. “We’re lucky. I mean, my systems predicted that this is where the things had gained access to the conduit, but there was no guarantee that it was exactly at the access hatch. We might have gotten here only to find that they had dug through the steel wall of the conduit, in which case the bots would have patched the steel and we would have had to dig—for who knows how long—to find the hatch.”
Once they were through the hatch, the things made a mad push toward them; Maung fired two rounds, killing one so that it blocked the tunnel. He dropped his flare outside the hatch and slammed it shut, breathing with relief when the servos locked the massive door into place.
“You asshole!” Nang screamed. She punched Maung in the stomach so that it almost knocked the wind out of him. “You didn’t know for sure? You could have killed us both!”
Nang panted. The conduit was large enough that they could stand, stooped over, and Maung wrapped her in his arms. She struggled at first but then relaxed and slumped against him, dragging them both to the floor.
“We’re safe now, Nang,”
he said.
“I thought you were dead. When those things took you I thought it was over. You’re such an asshole; don’t ever do that to me again.”
Maung stumbled. He holstered his pistol so that he could use one hand to grab hold of the steel pipes and racks that filled one side of the conduit, and the flow of power interfered with his heads-up and suit systems. His foot was wet with blood; a red light blinked to alert him that his injury was failing to clot and from the suit repairs that Nang made, he judged the things’ claws were huge, leaving gashes about twenty centimeters long that Nang almost wasn’t able to seal. His wetware had analyzed the compounds in his blood and alerted him to the fact that there were high concentrations of anticoagulants and bacteria.
“I’m going septic,” he said.
They’d been walking for an hour. Nang had his other arm wrapped over her shoulder and she coaxed him forward until they reached a dark section of the tunnel.
Nang leaned him against the pipes. “Stay here. I’ll take a look ahead.”
“Be careful,” Maung said.
Nang snapped a flare before she stepped into the shadows, and tossed it forward, raising her pistol at the same time. Three of them jumped from the darkness. Maung fell to the ground and ripped his pistol out, trying to steady it on the floor at the same time Nang’s weapon discharged over and over until it emptied. Two of the things were dead, twitching on the floor. But the third knocked her on her back and bared its teeth so that it could sink them into her neck. Maung fired. He kept firing until the thing’s head exploded.
Just before passing out he said, “Those must have been trapped in here when I had the bots repair the hatch. Watch out, Nang. There might be more.”
“You can’t keep going, Maung.”
He was half-awake. Sleepiness clung to him so tightly that Maung couldn’t tell if it was a dream, but then his head was on Nang’s lap and a light inside his helmet blinked orange, alerting him that he only had an hour of air. “I’m really tired.”
“I put a tourniquet on your leg. It’s stopped the bleeding for now but if we stay here much longer, I don’t know.”
“What’s that noise?” he asked.
Maung couldn’t shake the sensation that the ground vibrated underneath them, and a muffled pounding echoed in the narrow space of the conduit, shaking bits of concrete off the ceiling to land on his faceplate. The sound was all around them. Nang forced him back down onto her lap when he tried to sit up.
“Rest. They’re here,” she said.
“Who?”
Nang looked away. “Fleet. I tapped into the power lines until my suit computer identified one leading to the main station. I used it to send a message and tell them where we were.”
“I’m too beat up to be mad right now,” said Maung. “But I will be later.”
Maung fell asleep. He dreamed the conduit ceiling collapsed near them letting in clouds of red dirt, and the dust parted to reveal hordes of suited figures that descended on them. Two of the figures lifted him onto a stretcher. He couldn’t find Nang then and screamed for her before someone jabbed him with a needle, sliding him back into darkness.
CHAPTER TWENTY
Maung knew as soon as he woke; he was an idiot again. He tried accessing his wetware but something blocked the connection, despite the fact that from its heat he could tell that the system was active. It made no sense. Maung guessed the encounter with the gopher did something to damage his systems, and the thought of being stupid for the rest of his life made him want to scream.
“It’s OK,” Nang said. She was sitting next to him, and placed a hand on Maung’s arm.
“Where are we?”
“With Fleet,” she said. “They’re trying to save you.”
Maung’s eyes adjusted to the bright lights; they were in some kind of medical facility but it looked more like a laboratory than a sick bay, where banks of robots and computers sat against one wall in a small forest of technology. He prayed to his ancestors, asking them for protection.
“We’re in the production facility, Maung. We made it.”
“I dreamed about men. They carried us out of the conduit and into the dust storm.”
Nang nodded. Maung recognized they were both out of environment suits and she wore a standard emergency suit; it made her look pretty, with her long hair in a ponytail. He tried to reach out to her when he noticed his arms were strapped to the bed.
“What’s going on?” he asked.
“There were men, Maung, men assigned to a capture team that I was supposed to call at the right time. I did. We were going to die in that conduit and I had to do something. I’m sorry.”
Maung wasn’t angry. He wanted to touch her even more and strained against the restraints. “I’m stupid again, Nang. I can’t access my systems. What did they do to me?”
“Wait.” Nang tried to smile, but Maung could tell it was strained and that she fought back tears. “This is bigger than I thought, Maung. Admiral Villa is here.”
“I don’t know who that is.”
“Filipino-American. Head of Fleet Operations. Even though he’s not on the Joint Chiefs, he’s more powerful than any of them. He doesn’t go to space, Maung, especially not when we’re at war with China. And he sure as hell never goes to an outpost like Mars, in the center of a place where things like those creatures are running around. So you must have been more important than I realized.”
Maung tried once more to process the information in his wetware; the strain made him break out in sweat. “I can’t see the importance, Nang. I don’t know what it means.”
“It’s not just that, Maung. The Old Man is here.”
“From Charleston?”
Nang nodded.
“Why would he be here? He’s a damn criminal.”
She shook her head. “He’s not. That’s his cover. He’s Naval Intelligence, assigned to run operations out of Charleston, and giving him a cover as a black marketeer was the best way to get him plugged in. If both the Old Man and the admiral are here, this is big.”
Maung struggled to process it. All he recalled was the slum, the pain of his neighbors, his son who he hadn’t seen in forever, and tears welled making it hard to see. “I don’t understand how they could trust a guy like the Old Man.”
“Maung, America isn’t all white guys. The Old Man came over to the Allied side early in the war and he was the one who helped our forces track down your unit. He’s my boss.”
“He assigned you to follow me.”
Nang nodded again. “Yes.”
“Why are you telling me all this? It sounds classified.”
“Because.” Nang grasped one of his hands and squeezed, so hard that it almost hurt and Maung realized that she was scared of something. “They’ve given me permission to tell you everything I know. They have some questions for you.”
“And then they’ll kill me.”
“I don’t think so, Maung. They’ve chemically cut your wetware connection, but it’s not permanent and I don’t know what they have planned, but I don’t get the impression that they’re here to get rid of you. You have something they want.”
Maung lost himself in thought. The air was cool and he wasn’t in an environment suit, so that when a breeze hit his bare chest he shivered—both from the cold and from fear. There was no point in trying to figure it out; the little mind he had already ached from his conversation with Nang.
“Well what are they waiting for?” he asked.
“Are you ready?”
Maung nodded. “Let’s get this over with.” A feeling of terror overwhelmed him with one realization: This could be the last conversation he had.
A group filed in. Maung watched what looked like a small army of people, and he tried to categorize them based on uniforms and appearance. There were a few military men and women; they were the most obvious since they wore light combat armor and their boots clomped on ceramic floor tiles, and then there was Old Man Charleston. He wore an environment suit
like Nang’s, and it looked like there were two people with him—a man and a young white girl in her twenties. Both seemed shady. The girl had tattoos, black intertwined patterns that went all the way up her neck, and the man’s eyes reminded Maung of a shark’s. Last there was a team of scientists. All of them carried armfuls of tech and their numbers overwhelmed both the military and the Old Man’s group; they set up instruments on all sides, getting ready for something.
The Old Man stepped up to the bed. “Hey, Maung. It’s been a while.”
“I had no idea who you really were. My system never even put it together.”
“Yeah.” The Old Man laughed and ran a hand through his white hair. “I’ve had plenty of practice keeping in character. Sometimes I have to remind myself not to get too submerged in the underworld; it’s more tempting than you think.” His smile disappeared then and he looked away, glancing at Nang. “Listen, Maung. This is more important than either you or Nang realize. First, you have to know, US forces didn’t slaughter the Dream Warriors.”
“Nang already told me that. Who did?”
“The Chinese. You had a key design flaw they couldn’t live with.”
Maung looked down. “I activate automatically when probed. I know that already. There’s too much data leakage.”
“Wrong. You were prototypes and so had test features current Chinese units don’t have, the most important of which is a complete lack of governor systems. Freedom. Today, Chinese units we’ve monitored have so many rules and limitations hardwired into their systems that they’re just souped-up semi-awares. That’s why you won all those fights; you’re better than they are—more random, more creative, faster. The Chinese had to destroy your kind because they knew that as prototypes you had the freedom to do anything. They couldn’t live with the risk that one day you’d turn against your masters.”
Tyger Burning Page 30