He stared at her incredulously. “You do realize I’m easily one-third synthetic, right?”
“So? I’m an Enhanced human. Show me what you’ve got.”
“Settle down,” Selene growled. “Leave the dick measuring to Lacese, please. Grant, grab an empty bag, or don’t, but we’re leaving in five minutes.”
Grant motioned grandly toward the supply room. “After you.”
Beneath Namino One
The tunnel leading out from the bunker was almost three meters high and a meter and a half wide—presumably because Taiyoks had initially dug it—so the space didn’t feel quite as claustrophobic as Marlee had expected. Everyone attached lights to their clothing, and Selene led the procession wielding a large flashlight.
Less than three minutes into the two-kilometer journey, Selene and Joaquim started bickering. Marlee listened to them go on for a while under her pre-existing theory about gaining further insights into Asterion society, but she was tempted to resign herself to the reality that they were just…people. People with two sets of very different ideas on how to move forward during this crisis and a severe case of repressed sexual tension.
She glanced at Grant, who had fallen in beside her. “Are they always like this?”
“I think they met for the first time during the attack. Joaquim has a strong prejudice against…he doesn’t care for Justice officers.”
Ava dropped back to join them with a quiet laugh. “Would you believe he got an up-gen a few months ago that was supposed to tone down his virulent hatred of all things Justice? Which…come to think of it, I guess this is toned down.”
Grant nodded in agreement. “It is.”
“An up-gen?” Marlee asked.
“He went to a clinic and had a portion of his personality programming tweaked to better suit who he wanted to be.”
“You can do that? How astounding!”
“I don’t know about astounding, but it’s a thing.”
“Have you ever had an up-gen?”
Grant exhaled harshly. “A few.”
The way he muttered it made her suspect she was missing some crucial nuance. “Did you not like who you were before?”
“It’s not about that, not exactly. Sometimes, we screw around with different traits for fun. But mostly, we try to improve ourselves. Don’t want to get stale and set in our ways.”
“Oh, I get it. Basically, the polar opposite of the path the Anadens have taken.”
“We ran from more than persecution.”
“It’s wonderful how you keep the spirit of your ancestors’ vision alive after all this time.”
Grant’s features puckered up as he turned away from her to study the earthen walls.
“What did I say? Are you not keeping the spirit of your ancestors’ vision alive? Did I misunderstand?”
“No, you understood fine. The SAI Rebellion is a sensitive topic is all. Can we talk about something else?”
“Sure.” She pondered on what he’d said—and the unspoken disquiet beneath it—while the tunnel curved around to the left. She knew enough Anadens to recognize that extreme long life could alter the way one viewed the passage of time, but the SAI Rebellion was a long time ago. Still, she should respect his request. “Aren’t you all afraid the Rasu are going to discover the tunnels and bunkers?”
He didn’t respond, and she waited for five whole seconds before pushing. “Grant? Listen, I’m sorry if I touched a nerve—”
He stopped and pointed up, where a square black box was embedded in the ceiling. “That module and a bunch more like it are broadcasting the EM signature of solid bedrock. If nothing else, it should make the underground area a low-priority target for the Rasu. Gods know they’ve got plenty of material to pillage aboveground first.”
“Clever. Good thinking on your part.”
“We try.”
Up ahead, Selene stopped and held up a hand. “Everyone on alert. We’re almost there. Let’s not spook any friendlies or attract any Rasu.”
Marlee readied her archine blade in one hand and her handgun—they’d called it a Glaser—in the other. She’d lost her plasma blade when the Rasu had sideswiped her, but she gathered it wouldn’t be of much use against the aliens anyway.
Selene, Joaquim and Ava appeared to bring serious skills to bear when it came to combat, and she found she was okay with hanging back until they cleared the way. She wasn’t afraid as such, was she? No, of course not. Merely properly respectful of an enemy who had nearly killed her with an offhand wave of one arm.
The tunnel abruptly branched to the left and the right; they took the left branch until it ended at what appeared to be solid rock. Selene motioned everyone flush against the walls. “Kill your lights and stay here.” She waved her hand in a controlled, circular motion, and a small panel in the rock revealed itself. She entered a code in the panel and raised her weapon. The rock swung away to create a door-sized opening.
Darkness greeted them. Selene and Joaquim disappeared inside, and silence held sway in the tunnel. Ava took up a position in front of the doorway, her awesome gun arm trained inside.
Thirty agonizing seconds later, Ava stepped aside to let Selene rejoin them. “It’s empty. Come on in.”
Selene set her flashlight on the floor, and the light cast eerie shadows across the deserted space. It closely resembled their bunker, if a bit smaller and oddly shaped on account of two large boulders jutting out of one wall.
“Dammit, why is no one in here? Did you Justice people bother to tell anyone about the bunkers?”
Selene scowled over her shoulder. “No, Lacese. We thought we’d keep them our little secret. Yes, we broadcast their locations repeatedly on the nex web as soon as the attack began.”
“Then where is everyone?”
Grant strode past Joaquim and vanished into a murky hallway, only to return quickly. “This is why. The entrance from the surface is caved in.” He picked up Selene’s flashlight and shone it down the hallway to reveal rubble piled up in a slope from the floor almost to the ceiling.
Selene rested a hand on one of the boulders, her expression unreadable in the shadows. “That answers that. Let’s gather up all the weapons and food stockpiles we can carry and head back.”
14
* * *
NAMINO
Camp Burrow
“I told you, I agree we need to do what we can to thwart the Rasu on the ground, but—”
“Insurgency. It’s called an insurgency.”
“Fine. No insurgency until I see for myself what it looks like up there.”
Joaquim groaned; godsdamn, the Justice Advisor was infuriating! But, he had to concede, also competent. So far. “Then let’s go see what it looks like up there.” He scanned the room full of people, most of them sitting in small groups or napping on pop-up cots. “Rogers, over here for a minute.”
The colonel came over to where he and Selene sat talking at one of the two small workstations. Despite being formerly in charge of managing DAF Command, Rogers appeared to be more of a bureaucrat than a warrior, and thus far he hadn’t tried to challenge either Selene or Joaquim for leadership. If anything, the man acted relieved that he wasn’t being expected to lead. “What do you need?”
“DAF Command has a well-stocked armory, doesn’t it?”
“Of course it does.”
“Do those armaments include drones?”
“They should. A couple, at least.”
“Excellent.” Joaquim turned to Selene. “We’ll go to DAF Command, acquire us some drones and release them from the roof. Give me ten minutes, and I’ll have a spike ready that will program them for a grid sweep and send all the data they intake to me.”
“If they’ve realized what it is, DAF Command will be crawling with Rasu.”
“You mentioned that already. We’re going to come up against Rasu sooner or later, and this is worth the risk.”
“Later would suit me fine.” She nodded, though. “Bring Ava. Colonel Rogers, yo
u’re with us as well. Arm yourselves to the hilt and set your kamero filter to block your thermal signature.” In a stroke of luck, the Taiyok origins of the kamero filter technology meant it didn’t rely on quantum mechanics to function.
Rogers frowned. “I don’t have a kamero filter installed.”
Definitely a desk jockey. Joaquim pointed toward the supply room down the hallway. “It’s a good thing they stocked a couple of external modules here in the bunker.” He glanced back at Selene. “Ten minutes.”
Joaquim was finishing up on the spike when the Human girl came up to him. “Let me come with you again.”
“Marlee, right? You obviously don’t lack for bravery. Or maybe you’re itching for suicide by Rasu. But you don’t look like a fighter, and I have no idea how you’ll react when faced with a real combat situation.”
“Whatever I look like to you, this won’t be my first combat situation. I can handle myself in a fight.”
“Perhaps. And something tells me we’ll get to find out soon enough one way or another. But not tonight, okay? Besides, a larger team will crowd the hallways and make the kind of clatter that will bring enemies running. We’ll need to move fast and quiet if we want to retrieve what we’re after and make it back alive.”
Her face scrunched up in a universal display of annoyance. “Okay. Next time, though.”
“We’ll see.”
She turned to go, then pivoted back to him. “Can I ask you something?”
He checked the program compilation status. “If you can do it in less than thirty seconds.”
“You mentioned suicide. Why doesn’t everyone here just commit suicide and wake up in a new body someplace safer?”
“Hmm.” He checked the spike’s progress again. “Anadens have a process whereby they reincarnate in new bodies when they die, don’t they?”
“Yes. Regenesis.”
“And you Humans have copied it by now, I assume?”
“More or less.”
“Then why aren’t you committing suicide?”
“Because I want to live.”
He shrugged broadly. “There’s your answer.”
She studied him suspiciously. The girl wielded an impressive stare, and he found himself weakening beneath its power. “Also, the psyche backups for most of the people here are stored on Namino, and I don’t think any regen clinics are open today. Maybe some of them also have a copy stored on the Vault, but cracking it open is our doomsday scenario. So for the time being, this is the only life they’ve got.”
“But not you, right? You’re not from Namino.”
“No, not me. Before you ask, I’m staying because I want to fight these monsters. It’s why I came here in the first place.” The light on the spike flashed green, and he made a shooing motion. “Now off with you.”
DAF Command
The DAF Command basement had been ransacked as thoroughly as if a junkie thief had come through hunting for hidden doses.
The concrete door they’d entered through was now a solid wall; the camouflage was well done.
Selene glared at the mess and muttered under her breath, “If they’ve come down here, it means there are probably Rasu upstairs.”
Adrenaline pulsed through Joaquim’s veins. “Good. I’m tired of dreading this fight.”
“No, not good. I’ve marked our route to the armory on the schematic.”
He studied the map for a minute. “Talk about taking the long way around.”
“It will maximize our chances of avoiding enemy contact.”
He bit back a snarky retort. Objectively, he recognized that a close-quarters encounter with Rasu was apt to be bad, bad news. Part of him still wanted it. “All right, we’ll do it your way. Kamero filters to maximum and conversation to a minimum.” The inability to ping one another thanks to the quantum block was going to make the latter declaration considerably more difficult than usual.
They moved to the lift, which seemed to be mostly intact, and stepped on it. A gear squeaked too loudly, but the lift began to rise.
His muscles tensed, and he adjusted his grip on his Glaser. If a Rasu stood guard at the top of the lift, they were screwed.
But the lift cleared the floor to ascend into a deathly silent lobby. At the other end, the building entrance had been reduced to a jagged, gaping hole. He shivered in spite of himself. The last time he’d been here, screams and shouts had ricocheted through billowing smoke beneath the roar of attacking Rasu. Now it was far too quiet.
He shook off the spell as Selene led them down the hallway to the right, into the heart of the building. The lights were out, and he increased his infrared and thermal filters to compensate. Thanks to their kamero filter protection, the others’ heat signatures didn’t even register.
Muted thuds echoed overhead, and everyone pulled up to stare at the ceiling in concern. “Rasu in the command center?”
Selene whispered beside him, “Sounds like.”
“They’re stealing our military data.”
“Sounds like. Take the next left.”
Ugh, he wanted to throttle the woman, he really did. The Rasu were pillaging the planet and stealing crucial intel about Dominion operations, and she remained as cool as a fucking cucumber. But he held his tongue. They could spar to their hearts’ content back at the bunker, but if he wanted this mission to succeed, he needed to stay focused.
“I can—” he tamped his voice down, focus “—read the schematic.”
They rounded the next corner, and Selene jerked to a halt. Thirty meters beyond them, at the end of the long hallway, a bipedal Rasu disappeared inside an open doorway on the left.
On the schematic, their intended path shifted as Selene devised an alternate route to the armory. She checked each member of the team to confirm they’d seen the modifications, then motioned for everyone to retreat. They backtracked down the hall and took the next right, then a left.
This route took them past DAF Command’s primary server room. When they reached it, Joaquim paused to peer inside. Deep in the high-ceilinged room, a shadow flitted across the icy blue glow of powered servers. Rasu.
He reached out to where he thought Selene was standing, grabbed her arm and pointed deliberately into the room. She shook her head in a firm, ‘no.’
Joaquim gritted his teeth…and obeyed. But in the back of his mind, he began to hatch a plan.
Three turns later, they reached the DAF Command armory. It looked untouched, but he supposed the Rasu had no need for Asterion weapons.
The door closed behind them, and they lowered the setting on their kamero filters so they could see one another more easily.
Rogers motioned deeper into the room. “The drones should be in the far right area.”
Joaquim let Selene and Rogers head into the stacks while Ava watched the door, and he started scanning the labels on the bins. Fifteen seconds later, he found what he was hunting for. He emptied an entire bin of power amplifiers onto the floor, then sat down and started opening them up.
Two minutes later, Selene and Rogers reemerged lugging four drones under their arms. Selene invaded his personal space, towering above him from but a few centimeters away. “Why are you on the floor?”
“It’s not important. Hand over the drones.”
Her lips puckered into a pout as she crouched beside him and placed her drones on the floor. He blinked, momentarily distracted, then busied himself getting the spike ready while she motioned for Rogers to deposit his drones as well.
Joaquim took each one in turn and jammed the programming spike into the input port. When a subtle ring of lights illuminated around the circumference of the port, he moved on to the next one.
Once they were ready, Selene hefted two of the drones back under her arms. “Now for the tricky part—getting to the roof while lugging these around.”
Joaquim began gathering up the power amplifier pieces and stuffing them in his bag. “You three head on up. I’m going to the building’s power control center.”<
br />
“No, you’re coming with us to the roof.”
“No, I’m going to the power control center. The Rasu have gotten some of the data stored here, but not all of it, or they would’ve already left and destroyed the building. I intend to make sure they don’t steal any more of it.”
She glanced at his open bag. “Lacese, our servers are designed to withstand power surges.”
“Not this one they aren’t. Don’t worry, I’ve done it before.”
“Do I want to know what that means?”
“Decidedly not. I’ll meet you all at the basement lift.” He hurried out of the armory before she tried any Justice jujitsu to stop him.
Selene glared at the disappearing form in seething annoyance. People obeyed her orders; it came with the job title. Yet Lacese seemed to simply…not care. About the title, the orders or anything else she said or did.
She stifled a grumble. He was getting in her head, and she couldn’t allow that to happen. They were deep in enemy territory now, and she had a job to do. She deposited her drones in the large pack they’d brought alongside the two Rogers had grabbed. While Rogers hefted the pack up and situated it over his shoulder, she approached Ava. “What’s Lacese’s story?”
The woman peered out the door, searching for movement. “He was NOIR’s Mission Director.”
“I know. I mean, why is he such an arrogant asshole?”
“Oh. Beats me. He came that way.”
“Right.” She sighed, annoyed anew that she’d wasted time inquiring. “Let’s move. We’ll follow the marked route to a lift that leads to the top floor, then use the roof access in the northeast corner.”
Twice they had to change course to avoid rummaging Rasu, and with their destination in sight they came within a nanosecond of running smack into an enemy, but finally they reached the lift.
She cringed at every tiny noise it made as it carried them up. Halfway to the top floor, she decided they needed to take a different lift back down, because given all this racket there was certain to be a cadre of Rasu awaiting their return at the bottom of this one.
Inversion (Riven Worlds Book Two) Page 10