by Terry Mixon
“I’d say the horde was paranoid about letting anybody into their treasure room, and by extension, into the city above. I looked on the far wall, but there are no stairs leading up. There’s only one entrance, and it isn’t leading to their castle.
“I also found an amazing number of crates. I’m not sure what they’re storing down here, but it’s like a huge warehouse. Why build something like this underground just to store your stuff?”
“It has to be something that they don’t want anyone else to get their hands on. Obviously not something they access very often, either. This whole ‘treasure room’ vibe makes me suspect that we’re looking at salvaged materials from the megacities.
“Old technology that maybe doesn’t work anymore but was worth socking away. Hell, maybe some of it does work. There’s no telling, unless we look inside every single crate.”
The marine officer raised his torch a little higher and looked around. “This chamber has to be at least four hundred meters across. Probably a couple of hundred meters from the tunnel blockage on your end to the tunnel blockage on my end. Looking up, the ceiling is at least forty meters high. That’s a lot of room to store salvaged material. Why keep it down here?”
“Probably because they’re terrified to use most of it,” she said grimly. “That also explains why it’s buried so deeply. They don’t want the AI to drop a kinetic strike on them for being naughty.”
“This is like storing seeds for future use,” Talbot said after a few moments. “This is what might grow Terra back into a technological world, if the AIs ever go away.”
“You mean if we ever manage to defeat them,” she corrected. “They’re not going away on their own. We’re going to have to stomp them and do it hard. And to do that, we’ve got to figure a way out of the trap we’ve gotten ourselves into.
“We’re going to have to bust down the stone wall leading toward the megacity and dig out whatever is behind it before the horde forces their way into the building above and kills us all.”
“No pressure,” Talbot said dryly. “It’s possible that somewhere in this pile of armor is a weapon that could breach the wall. That’s not exactly going to help us dig it out, but it’s a start. Somewhere in all these crates are probably a number of things that would help, if we only knew where anything was.”
“The horde has an index somewhere,” Julia said as she looked around. “We just have to find it. Let’s start looking.”
36
Jared was beginning to despair. They’d been searching the piles of captured gear for what felt like hours—but had to only have been twenty or thirty minutes—without success in finding the primary gear they needed, though they had found some useful items.
The guards had stopped beating on the outer door after about five minutes. At this point, he was certain they were busy searching for something sturdy enough to bash their way in and making sure the higher-ups knew what was happening. The question was, how long would it take them to build a ram or bring one here?
In the meantime, his people had piled a truly impressive amount of random gear into the foyer. It was almost full of stuff. Even if the horde managed to break the doors apart, it was going to take them precious time to dig everything out.
Unless they just decided to use a few of those antiarmor weapons. Those would be more than powerful enough to destroy the thick wooden doors and blow a good amount of the material they were blocking the foyer with back into his people like a giant shotgun.
He was going to have to hope that they weren’t that desperate to get at them. After all, based on what Ralph had told him, they weren’t going to be leaving the vault below anytime soon. With any luck, the horde would want to keep their building intact and use a less powerful means of gaining entry.
“I found it!” Kelsey said, triumphantly raising the Imperial Scepter above her head.
Jared had to be careful walking over to her because she was knee-deep in scattered supplies that might cause him to lose his footing or twist an ankle, which was something he desperately wanted to avoid.
“Do we have any way of knowing if it’s operational?” he asked.
Kelsey turned toward Carl as the young man cautiously made his way to them. She handed it over without a word.
The scientist had found a few of his tools and was able to remove a hidden access plate and plug a cable into one of the ports thus revealed. The device he held showed something on its screen, and Carl frowned.
“I believe the main memory is intact, but the EMP must’ve shorted out something in the control circuits. I can probably fix it, if I can find the parts and tools I need somewhere in this mess.”
“Then that’s the priority,” Jared said, raising his voice. “I want everyone looking for whatever tools and parts Carl tells you he needs, as well as any medical supplies or equipment for Commodore Stone.”
Even though they’d already been searching quickly, his words spurred everyone to even more feverish action. They were going through what remained of their piles at a rapid pace and throwing whatever they didn’t need or couldn’t use toward the foyer. Most of it didn’t make it, but at this point, that hardly mattered. The end was in sight.
Unfortunately for them, that was when someone chose to knock on the doors. Hard.
A loud, echoing boom seemed to shake the room as something massive slammed against the reinforced wooden doors. It sounded as though someone had finally found the ram they were looking for. Now it was only a matter of time until they broke the doors apart and the horde began tearing at the debris blocking them from getting in. His people needed to wrap this up as soon as possible.
“Lucy, I’m home,” Kelsey muttered, to his momentary befuddlement. Sometimes, he figured that he’d never understand her.
Jared walked over to Lily, who was busy tearing open a pack that she’d taken off of one of the pack horses they’d brought with them as part of their cover. She dumped it out as he spoke.
“Do you have what you need to get at our implants?” he asked.
She shook her head and kept pawing through the pile. “I found some basic medical supplies, but not my spare kit. At this point, I’d have to crack your skull open with a rock to get to your implants.”
“Hard pass. Is there anything that we’ve come across that you could use as a substitute surgical instrument?”
She paused long enough to shoot him a stare that told him that he was being an idiot. “Absolutely not. I could use a marine knife to cut open your scalp, but while it would cut through your skull quite easily, I’d be far too likely to cut into your brain and ruin your entire day. To get into your skull safely, I need the right tools.
“And even if I do manage to find them, I don’t know if Carl has the necessary equipment to reboot the damned things. You know that old saying, that ‘this isn’t brain surgery’? Well this is brain surgery. I have to find my spare medical kit.”
He understood. He really did. But that didn’t change the fact that they were running out of time.
“If you can’t find it in the next couple of minutes, we’re going to have to leave without it,” he said firmly. “As sturdy as those doors are, they won’t last long. Once they’re gone, the horde will have plenty of willing hands to pull out the junk that we’ve thrown in there. Find something that will do the job, or you will be using a marine knife.”
That seen to, he made his way over to Carl, who was once again searching frantically through the scattered gear in the corner of the room. Like Lily, he barely glanced up as Jared stopped near him.
“No,” the scientist said before being asked. “I haven’t found my kit yet. I found a lot of other tools and equipment that might be useful, and I’ve tossed them into one of the packs, but I need to find a very specific kind of equipment to generate the correct pulse to reset our implants.”
“Then I’m going to give you the same speech I gave Lily,” Jared said. “You’ve got a couple of minutes, and then we’ve got to get down the stair
s. Grab whatever you can and, if it might work, take it.”
“Got it,” his young friend said. “On the plus side, I did find both the FTL com and the small rings that Omega gave us. The com is burned out, but I can potentially rebuild it, if we can salvage the right kind of basic equipment. The quantum entanglement module isn’t subject to being ruined by an EMP.”
“What about the rings?” Jared asked.
Carl shrugged. “It’s alien tech, so who knows? Until we have a power supply capable of feeding it, we can’t test it. I packed both of them away for later examination, just in case.”
Even as Carl finished speaking, Lily shouted behind him. “I found the spare medical kit!”
Jared turned toward Ralph. “Go carry her stuff. All noncombatants, it’s time for you to head downstairs. Carl, find something that’s going to work. Kelsey, Captain Beauchamp, Elise, and Olivia, meet me by the horses.”
Once the four women had gathered, he made a gesture toward all the horses crowded into that side of the room. They were watching the humans who seemed to have gone nuts with wary expressions.
“I’ve got a crazy idea,” Jared said, “but I don’t know if it will work. Could we take the horses partway down the stairs with us? It would be a serious pain in the ass for the horde to have to get past them, either dead or alive.”
Beauchamp looked skeptical. “Horses are intelligent creatures. They’re not going to want to go into a dark hole.”
Kelsey was rubbing her chin. “We might be able to make it work, if we can fashion hoods to put over their heads. Or anything that would cover their eyes. If they can’t see where they’re going, the odds are much better that they’ll cooperate. I wouldn’t count on the warhorses for this, though. We need to stick to the pack beasts. They’re a bit more placid.”
The local woman considered that for a moment and slowly nodded. “That might work. Let’s see what we can get together in the next few minutes. If we can use some of the ropes to help take the horses down with us as a group, we can perhaps drive a few stakes of some kind into the wall to keep them from continuing down or backing up when we reach the midpoint in our descent.”
“Make the magic happen,” he told them and headed back over to Carl.
“Time’s up. Tell me you’ve got something.”
“Maybe,” his young friend said, holding up an unidentifiable piece of equipment. “I might be able to tinker with this enough to produce the output we need, but it’s going to be chancy. Our implants are embedded in our brains. If I screw this up, it could fry them and us. It wouldn’t even take that much of a charge.”
“We’ve run out of time, so we’ll just have to hope for the best,” Jared said, clapping the young man on the shoulder. “It’s time to make our way down and hope the hole in the ground doesn’t end up being our grave.”
Talbot wiped the sweat off his face with one arm as he stared at the remains of the powered armor and what the troops had been carrying. The antiarmor weapons had done a real number on everything. No suit was intact or even close to operational.
Even if any had been, the Rebel Empire believed in locking their marines down, so none of the armor could’ve been activated without the appropriate codes, or the built-in self-destruct charges would’ve detonated.
Carl could’ve probably done something about that, if he’d had his implants active, but he didn’t. Well, if wishes were horses, they’d all be neck deep in horse crap, as Kelsey liked to say.
What had survived intact was a plasma rifle suitable for powered armor. It would be locked, but Carl had gotten into the guts of similar weapons and overridden the codes before. These wouldn’t be nearly as troublesome as the armor’s self-destruct lockouts.
With his augmentation offline and no armor, this monster could very easily injure him if he fired it. That said, it definitely had the raw power to blow a hole in the obstruction. If, that is, they could find any of the pellets of tritium it needed for ammunition.
As he was considering his options, Julia walked up out of the darkness. In her free hand, she held a leather-bound book.
“What’s that?” he asked.
“It seems to be an inventory book,” she said as she sat on the floor and opened it. “It lists what each of the crates has in it, though unfortunately, since it’s written by non-technological people, some of the descriptions are rather obtuse. They don’t know what many of the things do, so they’ve made guesses at what the locations they were found in might have been for.”
He squatted and added his torchlight to hers before examining the page she was looking at. It listed crate numbers with odd designations like “red metal room” and “dark mirror room.” She was right, none of that was very helpful.
“Well, I suppose it beats a kick in the head,” he admitted. “By any chance do you see anything that references invaders or marines or fighting?”
“Not so far, but let’s flip through and see if anything looks interesting.”
He watched as she flipped the pages and read the neat script as quickly as possible. They were out of time, and he really didn’t hold out any hope that they’d find anything useful.
Then she stopped and poked a finger at a line on the page. “Look at this. ‘Monster Invasion.’ What do you think it means?”
Talbot felt his heart beat faster. “Maybe a lot. We have to find the crate listed here and get access to it to be sure. This isn’t really an inventory. It seems like it’s more of a map to take us to the areas in question, if you know what I mean. Let’s go find this one.”
“You’re in luck,” she said as she stood. “I think I’ve figured out how the numbers are patterned. If I’m right, this crate is somewhere over there.” She pointed off into the darkness toward a distant pile of crates.
She hefted the book, he grabbed the massive plasma rifle, and they started toward the crates.
“Can you use that?” she asked as she eyed the huge weapon.
“Not without ammunition. That’s what I’m hoping to find.”
“Too bad I left the pellets Corporal Boske made me save back on the grassland with the dead plasma rifle,” she said through gritted teeth. “It was exactly this model, and I’d really like to have it here to blow some of these horde asses up.”
The cold rage in her tone reminded Talbot of some of Kelsey’s worst moments. The times when she wanted to kill people that had hurt her or her friends.
He’d known Boske as well as a senior officer could, but Julia had worked with the woman. Learned from her. And, apparently befriended her before the woman had been murdered, along with so many others.
She wanted payback, just like he did, but this wasn’t the time, so he said nothing to encourage or discourage her. She had to work through her own feelings on this in her own way.
They arrived at the stack of crates and began looking for the numbers at ground level. The crates above them would be out of view, so he hoped they got lucky.
He didn’t, but he did find a number close to what he’d been looking for and called Julia over. “I think it might be further up this stack. Do you think you can climb it safely and look?”
Without answering, she jumped up on the crate and began pulling herself up.
“Found it,” she said once she reached the top of the pile near the ceiling. “How do I get into it?”
Before he could answer, Talbot heard a shout off in the distance and turned to face the stairs. Their companions were pouring out, torches raised high, so that meant that they’d run out of time.
37
Julia watched as her new friends and associates flooded into the treasure room. What the hell were they going to do now? They hadn’t managed to find anything to break down the wall. This was going to end very badly if they didn’t find ammunition for the plasma rifle.
She pushed against the crate, but it didn’t even move. It was damned heavy, and she had no leverage. It was going to take some kind of assistance for her—for all of them—to get this crate
to slide off the end of the stack.
“I need some help over here,” she shouted to the main group. “If you have some rope, that would be awesome.”
About two-thirds of their party rushed over to join them at the stack of crates, mostly looking around wide-eyed at everything around them.
Carl Owlet held up a coil of rope. “Got you covered.”
His words made her smile. Of course he did. The man always seemed to have what they needed.
“Throw the end up to her,” Talbot said. “Julia, run it around the crate and let the end of the rope fall down where we can get at it again. We’ll center it as well as we can, and then you can hold it until we get a little tension on it. We’ll spread ourselves out and pull until the crate slides off. What I’m looking for won’t be damaged if the container smashes to pieces.”
It took three tries for them to get the rope to her, but it was easy enough to run it down the other side of the stack until she had the middle of the rough hemp in her hands. She then held it near the top of the crate as the others spread out on either side and tugged it tight.
She was very careful not to get her fingers caught between the rope and the crate. Even with graphene-coated bones, that wouldn’t end well.
They sounded off together and started tugging on the rope. The crate shifted a little, and that gave her more space to put her feet on top of the crate below it. She put her shoulder into the one they wanted to fall, and she gave it all she had.
Unfortunately for her, the next tug didn’t move the crate at all. Instead, the stack began teetering forward, obviously unbalanced by their actions.
Not relishing the idea of a fall to the floor, Julia leapt for the stack directly behind her, even as the stack of crates she’d been standing on went over, eliciting shouts from everyone below.