by Greg Dragon
Helga wanted to strangle him. Why was he lying to Cilas when they both knew she had taken that shot and was now at fault for whatever would come from the szilocs?
“Commander, I will explain everything once we get out, but right now, we’re in the middle of a fight,” Helga said. “Our guns are hot, and we’re pinned down. Either lend us some help, or we are going to die.”
“Sunny, get over there,” Cilas said. “Q, stay with me, in case they manage to break in before I get this message out. Upload of the feed is near completion, but if we leave now then all this was for naught. Dead or alive, the Alliance needs to know what we’ve learned down here. Helga, they’re giant bugs, and we’re in PAS. If it gets to be too much, the three of you should make for the surface, and we will join you once the upload is done.”
“We found an exit near where you’re fighting, Ate,” Quentin said. “You should see it on your radar now, though much of the detail is still obscured. Sunny knows the way, and can lead you to it. The room with the exit hatch has metal walls, so the szilocs shouldn’t be able to pursue you once you’ve made your way out.”
Helga cursed when the heat warning on her auto-rifle went off, as she peppered the head of a new invader that had managed to slip past the door. Raileo Lei was in the zone, but she knew that his guns were just about done.
The OKAGI “Widow Maker,” which was his weapon of choice, was already cooling in its place on his pack. He always carried several weapons, but to see him down to pistols revealed the reality of their crisis, and Helga wondered just how much longer they had before the creatures would overpower their guns.
“How are you doing Ray?” she shouted above the gunfire.
“Guns getting hot, and they’re still pressing like mad,” he said.
What a way to die, she thought, down here below a moon that the Alliance barely knows about, on a mission that we shouldn’t have accepted, to creatures that no Rendron spacer has ever encountered before.
She glanced down at her auto-rifle and the ammo gauge was flashing red. It was too late; the gun was now frozen, locking the trigger so that it could no longer be depressed as it started the lengthy sequence of cooling off.
“Schtill!” she screamed, and Raileo, aware of what just happened, took one arm and shoved her back into the room with the stairs.
In a beautiful display of gunplay, he alternated shots, each having devastating effect. This was Raileo Lei at his finest, a matchless gunslinger with his back to the wall. With his hands a blur and his face a mask of somber focus, Helga pulled out her own pistols and ran up to assist in defending the room.
“Ate, go. You’re our pilot, and if you die then we all die. Leave me your pistols and catch up with Sunny. I can hold them off while you get the dropship.”
What he said made sense, but for his voice, which had a finality that Helga didn’t like. She loved Raileo, the same way she loved Joy, Cilas and Tutt, and to imagine life without them was just too difficult. Adan Cruser had died in the atmosphere of the moon of Dyn, and she still had nightmares of seeing him with that gaping hole where his mask one stood.
“No,” she whispered, and grabbed him by his pack, activating her rockets to pull him up and out of the room. Thype this mission, and this underground hell, she thought. No more Nighthawks are going to die on my watch.
20
Cilas Mec was on pins and needles as he surveyed his HUD, watching his three Nighthawks slowly making their way out of the facility. He wanted to ask for a visual, but didn’t want to distract them as they fought through the swarm of szilocs thirsty for their blood.
As he paced the room impatiently, he studied the linear map generated by the PAS helm’s AI. The layout of the facility had been a mystery when they first entered, but their powered suits were built to adapt to these situations. Separating his team had given their synced interface the reach that it needed to create a rough sketch of the underground.
Now that they had managed to explore the majority of the rooms, he could not only see their locations, but the path he would take to reach them. What concerned him, however were the dropships that had appeared above the moon. They were no longer present on the starmap, and he knew that meant they had broken atmosphere, and in a manner of hours, would be landing.
Pirates were an easy fight for the highly trained group under his command. Geralos, if they brought along Craqtii, would be tough despite his confidence. What he hadn’t counted on was the szilocs, who had slowed their progress to a crawl. Had they remained silent, as was intended by command, they would have had time to formulate a method to help some of the captives get off the moon.
“Never goes as planned, does it?” Quentin said, grinning. “Even when the plan is for it all to go to schtill.”
“Next time a cadet asks me what it’s like to be an ESO,” Cilas said, “I am going to grab him by his legs and march him to the fourth deck of Aurora, and when he starts screaming at the top of his lungs, I’ll say, you feel that, buddy? That’s how it feels to be one of us.”
He was about to say more when a chime on his comms alerted him to the satellite completing its uplink. The message with the maps, footage, and discoveries from the Nighthawk’s findings had been received.
Upon receipt and after some brief discussion, the Alliance council would send in their Marines. They would be better prepared for a full-on battle with the Geralos, and could eventually take the base with an infiltrator in orbit to shut out any reinforcements.
It was what Cilas hoped would happen, but with the dropships incoming, they needed to find a way out, fast.
“Nighthawks, get to the surface. We’re done here,” Cilas announced. “How are we looking, Helga?”
There was no immediate answer, and he and Quentin exchanged glances. Expanding the map on his helmet’s display, he scanned for their location and saw a blank space where before he could at least see their life signs. If the three Nighthawks were in the middle of a fight, Helga would have a difficult time answering her comms. Still, it was unlike her to not make the effort, so he knew they were at their limit.
“Ray?” he tried.
There was some static, but no voice. He could hear something akin to the humming of Sundown’s hot-edged las-sword, and then there was nothing, only static. What was happening, and why weren’t they answering?
Ice-cold fear found its way into veins too seasoned to allow for panic. But his Nighthawks were in trouble, and they were much deeper into the facility than he remembered. If they didn’t act, he could lose three members of his team, and there was still the question of the dropships Quentin had seen landing on the moon.
“I see them in the room leading out to the other exit,” Quentin said, and when Cilas glanced at his map, he saw their three dots blinking in and out in an area of the map that had yet to be defined.
“Something in there is interfering with their comms, and it looks as if our sync has been severed, as well. Let’s move, Q. We need to catch up with them, or none of us will make it out alive.”
Another tone in his ear, and Cilas looked up at one of the terminals to see that the computers were now reporting a new arrival to the facility. An image appeared above them, projected from cameras tucked away in the corner of the room. It was a three-dimensional grid of blue lines, which rotated to become a holographic map of the underground facility.
It showed the room they were in, with two blue blobs representing Cilas and Quentin. From there it contracted, showing more blue blobs scattered about inside what appeared to be a three-layered underground bunker. It was as Cilas feared; they had only scratched the surface.
In the three seconds of visuals revealed by the system’s display of the map, he saw more rooms below them, and hundreds more blue blobs swarming the room which led out to the exit.
Cilas felt foolish. In his mad dash to upload the information to the Alliance, he hadn’t thought to dig into the computer to look for information or a map. One-dimensional actions were suicide, and he had le
t the chaos of those szilocs shift his focus to the mission instead of his team.
Splitting them up had seemed the right thing to do, but in hindsight he wished that he had just led them to this communications room. Raileo was their resident hacker, and could have done wonders with this whole setup, yet he chose Quentin as his partner, and left the young Nighthawk with Helga to fend for themselves.
Suddenly he was angry, not only with himself, but for whatever they were in, because now he knew there would be many more captives trapped inside the rooms below them.
“Let’s go get our people,” he said to Quentin, and the big man, who had been waiting, slid open the door a crack before quickly motioning for Cilas to get back.
“Two lizards on approach,” Quentin whispered, pulling out his knife as Cilas raised his pulse-rifle and stepped behind the starmap.
When the door came fully open, a Geralos rushed in, and Quentin cut him off, spinning low and gutting him with the razor-sharp blade. He wasn’t armored, so his oily entrails spilled out onto the floor, along with the rifle from his lifeless hands. Hours of training at this exact maneuver had Quentin complete the dervish with another stab, this time through the glass of the dead Geralos’s mask.
Cilas had seen it all happen in the blink of an eye, but he too operated on instinct, and dashed past Quentin to kill the second Geralos that had been too slow on retaliating. There was no thought in either of their actions. They were both seasoned fighters who had performed these same maneuvers many times before.
When Quentin joined the Nighthawks, the two men had quickly bonded, having shared so many similarities, but it was on Meluvia when they fought together that they learned how efficient they were as a team. Helga was his heart, and Raileo was an unmatched sniper with the brains to match his aim, but when it came to fighting, he and Quentin operated of a singular mind. They moved out in silence with guns raised, ready for any and all Geralos surprises.
“Lizards jammed our comms, you think?” Quentin said, sounding out of breath.
“Of course they did, and it explains the szilocs invasion as well. They’ve gotten desperate and are willing to sacrifice this level to us to preserve whatever is happening below,” Cilas said.
He touched the area of his helmet that opened the comms to everyone.
“Nighthawks, this is Cilas. If you can hear this, the lizards know we’re here. Contact with mother has been made, so help is on the way,” he said. “That’s the good news. Bad news is that we have more lizards incoming. There are plenty more rooms below, with signatures moving on our location, and dropships have landed, bringing in more. It’s going to get hot, so find an exit and wait for us if you can.”
“Rend, this is Ate,” came a voice that forced Cilas to stop in his tracks. “We can hear you, but for some reason, you don’t seem to be hearing us.”
“Helga, do you copy?” Quentin tried.
“I copy, you big bastard. Are you alright?” she said, laughing nervously. “Finally, thype. Q, are you with the commander? Me, Ray, and Sunny are in this … what did you say it was, Ray?”
“A lizard lobby,” Raileo said, and Cilas didn’t know whether to laugh or be annoyed at their humor at a time like this.
“We’re in the lizard lobby, and there is a big ramp leading out to the surface,” Helga said. “The szilocs took off running. Can you believe that, Cilas? As soon as Sunny showed up with his blade, it’s as if they recognized him from before and decided they would rather keep their lives.”
“Q and I are coming,” Cilas managed, overcome with emotion from hearing her voice. Losing her to the szilocs would have crushed him permanently, especially after coming to terms with his poor decision-making. “Did you catch what I said about the lizards?”
“Yeah, they let us roam around blind while they brought in reinforcements,” Helga said, still sounding too happy for someone on the brink of losing her life. “I’m not worried. After what we just went through, I am convinced the maker is on our side.”
“They’ve lost their thyping minds over there,” Quentin muttered over private comms, and though Cilas wanted to agree, he was just happy to hear they were alive.
“It’s been hit after hit since we came down that shaft, Marine,” Cilas said. “But did you hear Helga, about the szilocs? If they recognized Sunny and chose not to fight, then it means that they’re intelligent, which is downright frightening.”
“Let’s not assume them to be geniuses for having fear,” Quentin said. “Most animals have the ability to learn, but it doesn’t make them strategists.”
Cilas sighed. “Q, those are not the same szilocs from outside. The thyping things are communicating somehow, which is bad. Their silence could very well be due to a greater strategy to strike at us when we least expect it.”
“But the lizards found a way to keep them out of here,” Quentin argued. “How do we know that they didn’t simply turn on the repellant once they got us away from the captives? We know that there’s more coming in from the dropships, and I bet they know exactly where we’re located. They see that they have jammed us towards the back, with only one accessible exit, and there’s maker knows what waiting out there for us, as soon as we make our break.”
“So, you’re thinking it was a coincidence.”
“I do. Sunny engaged them, and the lizards decided to push them back into their holes,” Quentin said.
“That’s a pretty big coincidence, Q, but I guess we’ll see if we encounter any on the surface. If they are communicating, then they will likely stay away, knowing that we’re with the Jumper. But if it’s like you say and this is the lizards’ doing, then we’ll be up to our elbows in szilocs once we leave. Either way, we’re thyped if we don’t speed up our egress, so let’s save this for later and get out of here.”
They pushed through the rooms that showed evidence of them having been there before. Either there were dead Geralos on the ground, or the telltale burn marks of Quentin’s rockets as he pulsed along across the floor. They were making good progress until they reached a new room, which was large and cavernous, with steel supports mounted in the center attached to grates on the ceiling.
There weren’t many lights inside this space, and Cilas thought it looked unfinished, which made him wonder if they’d gone off course.
“Do you know where we are?” he said to Quentin, and though the big man confirmed, Cilas noticed that he was moving slowly and checking the shadows, the same way he did when they needed to clear a room.
When they were near the center, something moved in Cilas’s peripheral vision, but when he raised his rifle, it was nothing but blackness and a discarded storage bin wedged into the dirt.
Now I’m seeing ghosts, he thought, annoyed, but redoubled his efforts to get to the end of the room, just in case it was in fact something. At the end, they made a left into another tunnel and made contact with another Geralos, who looked to have been waiting on them.
As soon as they spotted him, Quentin put a round in his knee, then climbed on top of his hunched-over form to put another in the top of his head. The wall shifted and a hidden door was revealed as another Geralos peeked out to check in on his friend. Cilas shot him in the face, then in the chest on his way to the ground. The door slid back shut, but there was no time to investigate, so they sprinted past it to another open door.
“Q, are you sure this is the way?” Cilas asked him again, ready to rip into him if he lied.
“Two rooms back was as far as I made it before abandoning Sundown,” Quentin said, and for a brief moment Cilas considered punching him in the chest.
“We’ve gone down a level, somehow, and I doubt we’re anywhere near the Nighthawks,” Cilas said. “Maps are jammed and comms are iffy, so we need to get back on course or we’re dead. Come on, Q, you’re the scout. What do you suggest?” he said to Quentin.
“You won’t like it, Cilas, but here goes. I say we retrace our steps, and use those shafts to go back up through the crashed ship and deal with
the szilocs blocking that hatch. We take our chances with them, since they don’t have guns, and we rendezvous with the others in the forest.”
Cilas stared into his mask to see if there was even a hint of humor on the big Marine’s face, but what he saw was determination, so he gave his suggestion some thought.
“Alright, Nighthawks, we’re jammed in,” Cilas started, and Helga tried to cut in but he quickly muted her comms. “Listen to me. Get out now, and find a place far away from here. Tutt and I are going to work our way back and will coordinate a rendezvous when we’re out.”
“I’ll set up a beacon, trackable by your PAS, Commander,” Raileo said, and Cilas unmuted his lieutenant’s comms to finally hear what she had to say.
“Cilas,” Quentin said, pointing in front of them, where through the open door was a ramp leading up and out into daylight. Helga was pleading for them to reconsider, and not to risk going back where she was sure the szilocs were waiting.
“Helga, we’re looking at a third exit, it seems,” Cilas said. “Get out now and we’ll catch you on the surface. Got that?”
“Loud and clear,” she said cheerfully, and Cilas quickly got off comms.
They took the ramp at a sprint, but as they got near the crest, Cilas saw a Geralos silhouetted against the sunlight. It was hard to make out his features, but all that mattered was that he wasn’t aware. Cilas fired three shots in succession, hitting him in his abdomen, throat, and faceplate. He died silently, but before he could fall, the Nighthawks were already past him with rockets at full blast.
Fourteen transports sat parked in two long rows leading from the edge of the ramp, all the way back to the end of the clearing. Their mirror-like sleekness reflected the sun, and Cilas had to wonder if this area belonged to something other than the Geralos.
It was a parking garage of luxury transports, hidden within the forest. There was nothing else there, just a rocky clearing in the middle of nowhere. Above them the sun was starting to descend, and the clouds were gathering menacingly.