He pulled his head out of the hole, lowered his legs into it, then crouched low enough to get his head and shoulders into the tunnel.
He clung tightly to the pistol as he went prone on the dirt floor, and began to crawl along the tunnel. His rifle was too big and heavy to take with him, and the recoil too powerful. If he ran into anything down there, it would have been a liability, even if he could carry it with his unassisted arms.
He crawled slowly, gasping for breath as he moved. He’d grown used to the oxygen in the suit, and his body complained now it had to deal with the thin air of the natural atmosphere again. Every few metres he stopped and peered further along the tunnel for any sign of movement. But no-one was heading his way.
There was a junction up ahead, where another tunnel crossed his. He crawled toward it, then kept his head low as he peered around the corner. Just more planks along the walls and ceiling, the faint smell of mould and rotting wood, and no sign of life. He breathed slowly to make as little noise as possible while he lay there, and listened for a few seconds.
The sound of gunfire came from the right. The left side was silent, as was the rest of the tunnel he was following, on the far side of the junction.
He twisted into the right-hand tunnel and crawled on. His body seemed to press harder and harder against the ground with every metre he crawled, as though it was trying to find a hole in the dirt to hide in.
When he first entered the tunnels, he could be sure no-one was behind him, and the only threat was ahead. Now they could be coming from two tunnels behind, and the one in front. And, if they were behind, he couldn’t even turn around to fight them.
Something scraped up ahead.
Logan stopped instantly, held his breath, and listened. The noise of the earlier grenade explosion still buzzed in his ears in the silence of the tunnel. Something moved in the dark, hazy shadows at the limit of the goggles’ range.
A second later, the screens in the goggles went white as a bright light glowed ahead.
He pulled the goggles up with his free hand.
A flashlight was swinging around the tunnel up ahead.
The light reflected back from the wooden walls near the flashlight, and faintly illuminated the side of a face and an arm that protruded through the floor. The arm held a rifle, which pointed toward the roof of the tunnel.
The flashlight beam wandered along the floor of the tunnel, then shone into Logan’s face.
“Who’s that?” the man yelled.
The pistol bucked in Logan’s hand as he fired twice.
He flinched as the gun boomed in the narrow tunnel, and left his ears ringing again. The flashlight fell to the dirt floor, and the man struggled with the rifle, trying to swing it around to point down the tunnel, toward Logan.
Logan fired twice more.
The man fell backwards, then vanished into the ground. The flashlight rolled across the floor, and came to a stop against the wall.
Logan crawled forward, pistol held ready to fire. The beam of the flashlight was shining across the tunnel now, and the light illuminated a dark opening in the floor. The man must have come up through there from a level below this one.
A metre from the hole, Logan grabbed a grenade from his belt, pulled the pin, and tossed it forward. It fell through the hole, and he pushed himself down hard onto the dirt.
The grenade explosion thumped below him, loud enough to hear over the ringing from the gunshots. The planks in the walls rattled. The roof shifted, and dirt dripped onto his back from the gaps between the planks.
Logan lifted his face and pulled the goggles back over his eyes, then crawled forward to the hole, and looked down. The remains of the insurgent lay at the bottom of a hole about three metres deep, his flesh torn apart into a bloody mess by the grenade explosion. Hand and footholds had been cut into the planks on the walls.
Logan’s breath wheezed, and his heart pounded. The sounds of the world began to return as his ears slowly recovered from the explosion. He lowered his head into the hole, and listened carefully. Someone was mumbling down there. He couldn’t hear the words, but he could hear someone talking. Probably more than one person.
He could crawl back along the tunnel, say he hadn't found anything. Maybe Volkov would believe him. Or maybe not. Because he probably wouldn’t believe Logan whatever he said.
No, he had to go down there and see who was hiding on the lower level.
He lay beside the hole for a few seconds, waiting for any sound that might indicate someone crawling along the tunnel below him to investigate the noise, and breathing deeply to try to fill his blood with oxygen.
Then he twisted around until he could slide his legs down into the shaft. He pressed the toes of his boots against the wall until he found a foothold, then descended one step at a time, stopping half-way to listen for anyone approaching. All he heard was the mumbling, louder now but still unintelligible.
He continued down, hanging by his arms as his feet passed the bottom of the shaft and dangled below him into the lower tunnel. The body squished beneath his boots as they touched down on the ground. He coughed at the smell of burned flesh, then crouched on top of the remains and pulled himself into the tunnel that led toward the voices.
A face appeared out of the darkness.
Logan swung his pistol ready to fire, then stopped. Someone lay in an alcove at the side of the tunnel, covered from neck to feet by something thick and dark. They weren’t moving, and he recognized the face as he slowly crawled closer.
The dead boy’s body, wrapped in a tarp. It didn’t smell so bad, down in the cold air of the tunnels, but Logan crawled past as fast as he could.
Maybe they figured it was safer to bury him somewhere in the tunnels than up on the surface, where someone might see the grave. Either way, the girl had definitely been down there, after all.
And one of the voices he heard up ahead whose mumbling echos reflected from the wooden walls sounded high-pitched, and female. The other two were deeper, more masculine.
As he crawled on, he tried not to think of how much dirt was above him, and how thin a layer of planks was supporting it. Or how hard it would be to turn around in the tunnel and crawl back out if there were too many insurgents down there for him to handle.
They shouldn’t be expecting anyone to be crawling through their tunnels. Any sane commander would have done what Volkov suggested, and just pulled out of the village to blast the place with heavy weapons. Logan didn’t plan to die just so Poulin could look good to her aristo friends. But every moment he spent down in the tunnels not clearing them out was another moment the insurgents could be using them to move around and shoot at his comrades up above.
He crawled faster.
After a moment, he reached another cross-tunnel. He looked both ways and listened, then crawled across it. The voices were still coming from ahead of him, and some of the words were intelligible now.
A light glowed dimly a few metres ahead of him in. Logan raised the goggles as he crawled toward it, and blinked as his eyes tried to adjust to the faint glow after the bright image in the goggles. The voices grew louder as he approached. He could hear the words clearly now.
“How could you do it? Kill your own people?” the girl said.
“We didn’t order it,” a male voice said.
“We need to get out of here,” a deeper male voice said. “Those shots were in the tunnels, not the village.”
“Who did it?” the girl said. “How many other villages have they slaughtered?”
“It’s the damn Montagnards,” the first man said. “And I have more important things to deal with right now.”
“What’s more important than mass murder? How will the people support us after that?”
Time to earn some brownie points with Poulin. Logan grabbed a grenade from his left side, pulled the pin, and tossed it into the room. Then lowered his head and closed his eyes.
The girl yelled as the flashbang went off. The flash was bright enough fo
r Logan to see the glow even through his closed eyelids, and the bang made his ears ring again. He took a deep breath, then pushed his head and arms out of the tunnel, into the room.
It was about three metres square and two metres high, with thick planks for walls. A lamp hung from the ceiling, shining its light around the room. The girl crouched low on the far side, behind the narrow table that filled the centre of the room below the lamp, and held her hands over her ears. Her lantern lay on the floor beside her.
One man held his hands over his eyes as he leaned back against the wall. The other glanced at Logan, then fumbled for the rifle that leaned against the wall beside him. Logan swung the pistol up, and put two rounds in the man's head and neck, above their body armour. The man collapsed to the ground.
“Drop your weapons and surrender,” Logan yelled, but even he could barely hear the words over the ringing in his ears from the flashbang in the confined space.
Something moved in the shadows of the tunnel mouth on the far side of the room. Logan didn’t hear the rifle firing from that tunnel, but he could hardly miss the dirt and wood splinters spurting into the air as the rounds hit the ground and walls near him. He ducked back into his tunnel.
More shots followed, tearing chunks from the wooden walls beside him. Then something small and round smacked into the dirt, and rolled across it to thunk against the wall.
A grenade.
Logan reached for it. Rifle and pistol rounds smacked into the wood nearby. He ducked back for a split second, then grabbed the grenade, and tossed it back. He barely heard the explosion over the ringing in his ears, but he could hardly miss the flash from the end of tunnel.
The room went black. Logan pulled the goggles down, and peered around the corner of the tunnel, into the room.
The table had collapsed at one end. The lamp lay smashed on the floor, and the lantern had been crushed beneath the fallen table.
Planks hung loose from the walls where the explosion had torn them free, and more dangled from the ceiling. A body lay beside the table, and the head and arms of another dangled out of the tunnel entrance on the far side of the room. The shooter's rifle lay on the floor beside them.
No sign of the girl.
Logan held the pistol out in front of him as he crawled out of the tunnel, and into the room. Then crouched behind the half-fallen table and rolled the nearest body over. The face of the man who had been standing beside the table stared up at him, the eyes and mouth now wide open in death.
A tablet lay beside him, in the ruins of the table. Logan grabbed it and stuffed it inside his body armour. At least there might be some intel on there to keep Poulin happy.
He stepped carefully over the twisted planks, staying close to the wall, and followed it toward the tunnel on the far side. A sudden crack filled the room as he stepped on one of the broken table legs, and snapped it in two. He crouched and waited, breathing slowly and deeply with the pistol aimed at the tunnel mouth. But no-one came his way.
He swung the pistol around the corner, and peered down the tunnel. The goggles showed only the body of the rifleman, and an empty tunnel beyond.
The girl was gone, or hiding out of range of the goggles.
Forward or back? He knew the route behind him, but who knew who might have moved into the tunnels back there while he was exploring this level?
The whole tunnel complex was too connected, it was too easy to find a route to let you flank anyone who came in. And it was probably designed that way. Going on ahead... at least they’d probably be ahead of him, not waiting to shoot him in the back.
He dragged the rifleman's body out of the tunnel entrance, and ignored the coppery smell of blood and the dark patch that had spread across the dirt beneath the dead man’s chest. He crouched, then crawled into the tunnel.
He crawled along it, stopping every metre to peer into the darkness for any sign of the girl. He could see long, twisting trails in the dirt as though someone had dragged themselves along there not long ago, but it could easily have been made by the now-dead rifleman crawling toward the room, not the girl crawling away.
He continued crawling, slowly.
The girl had an advantage, because she knew these tunnels, at least well enough to find her way in and out. But he could see where he was going in the darkness, and she probably couldn’t. She probably couldn’t see anything at all.
What would he do if he was crawling through there in pitch blackness, with no hint of light, and knowing someone was probably chasing him? Crawl as fast as he could, and hope to recognize the tunnels by feel? Hide in the first side tunnel and hope anyone following would go past?
Or just go crazy, feeling the walls closing in on him, and thinking every sound was a man with a gun ready to shoot him. Someone he’d never even see before he died?
Something interrupted the smooth wood of the ceiling just ahead. A dark, rectangular patch. And another in the floor.
He crawled closer, until the floor disappeared ahead of him. There was another shaft here, going back up to the higher level, and down even further. He looked up, and listened.
Now he could hear faint scraping in the shadows, like one of the rats that used to raid the garbage bins outside his parents’ old apartment. And maybe it was a rat.
But, if he was a girl trying to escape, going up would be his first choice. He looked down. This shaft descended a long way, too far for the goggles to illuminate. If he was a girl running away from someone in the darkness, he sure as heck wouldn’t choose to go down there.
Besides, up was up, and closer to getting out of these damn tunnels. He straddled the hole, holstered the pistol, and grabbed the hand-holds above him. His arms strained against his weight as he hauled himself up, until he was high enough to push the toes of his boots into the holes and climb with his legs. The scraping grew louder as he climbed higher, and the faint cracks of gunfire outside the tunnels joined the noise.
He stopped half-way up the shaft with a pounding heart and a light head, to gasp down some air. He paused again just below the top of the shaft, pulled the pistol from his holster, then pushed his head up and peered out. Only the dirt and planks of another tunnel running left to right showed in either direction. But the scraping seemed to be coming from his right.
He clambered out of the shaft, and lay on the dirt floor. Then pulled the last HE grenade from his belt.
If there was anyone or anything important down that shaft, he could give them something to remember him by.
He pulled the pin and tossed it down the shaft below him, then grabbed the pistol, pulled his legs up into the tunnel from the shaft, and crawled away as fast as he could.
He made it about three metres away before the ground shook beneath him, the tunnel walls bent in toward him, and everything went black.
CHAPTER 15
Logan woke in the darkest blackness he’d ever experienced. A heavy weight lay on his legs, and he spat the taste of dirt from his mouth. More dirt crunched between his teeth as he moved his jaw, and he spat again. Then fumbled with the goggles on his face. Turning them on or off made no difference. The world around him was just as black either way. The blast must have broken something inside them.
Or it better have. Because the alternative was that the big explosion had broken his eyes. And he didn't want to think about that.
But his heart thudded again as he did. What if he was blind? He stared into the darkness, and it slowly became a hazy grey as his eyes tried to adjust, and find anything they could identify. They still seemed to be working. Probably.
He left the goggles pushed up on his forehead. If he ever managed to get back to the surface, Volkov would be pissed if he’d lost Legion property.
But what if he couldn’t get back? His legs were numb. He could be trapped down there in the darkness until he died. The Legion would try to find him, if they’d managed to clear out all the insurgents up above. But they wouldn’t go digging through the dirt to get to him. He’d go mad from thirst after a
few days, if the constant darkness didn’t get him first.
He shivered at the thought. Or maybe it was the cold air.
No, he’d find a way out first. Either by escaping from the tunnel, or...
The pistol was no longer in his hand. He reached forward, and found no obstruction. No sign of the pistol, either. The tunnel was clear in that direction.
The air smelled almost like gunpowder, as though it was still full of dirt from the explosion, but was no less breathable than it had been before. He lay there and listened. The silence was so intense he could hear only the blood rushing through his own ears. But he could feel a faint breeze around his face. Air was still moving somewhere. As it should be, because there must be many entrances to the tunnels around the village.
He pulled his right knee forward. Heavy weight pressed down on his boot, and it barely moved. He tried again. The boot pulled against his foot, but began to move. Dirt hissed and stones rattled as he hauled his leg forward. He winced as his calf scraped against something hard and sharp. The edge of a smashed plank from the roof or walls, maybe.
Then he pulled out the other leg. The muscles ached from being buried for however long he’d been knocked out after the explosion, but nothing seemed broken. Pins and needles stabbed at his legs and feet as the blood flow returned now they’d been relieved of the weight of the dirt piled upon them.
The insurgents must have had some kind of ammo dump down there, and the grenade had set the whole thing off. Most of the blast must have gone up the shaft, and along the tunnels below him. Otherwise he’d be dead and buried.
As any remaining insurgents probably were, if they'd still been alive down below.
Whatever.
There was no way out behind him. He had to keep moving the way he’d been going. The insurgents clearly had tunnels into many of the buildings, and he just had to find one.
He crawled forward through the blackness, tapping his hands against the walls every few seconds to check for any side tunnels that might lead to a building.
If this was the other end of the tunnel he’d entered earlier, that one had seemed to follow the main street of the village. His fingers dug into the dirt as he crawled along it, and he reached out as far ahead of him as he could.
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