by Terry Mixon
“There are vaults underneath the palace. Inside of them is a device called an override. It’s a piece of hardware that was designed to shut down the master AI. If we can get into the space station where this thing is, all we need to do is plug it in, and the war is over.
“We can order the AI to send out instructions to every unit that it controls, telling them to stand down. If we can get our hands on the override, then we only need to find a way to get back into space so that we can use my sister’s ship to escape the Terra system.”
“That sounds like a daunting task,” Mordechai said with a grimace. “If you have no small ships to escape Terra with, how will you ever get off this planet? Even if you do, the computer waits above. How will you stop it from just destroying you?”
“I’m not exactly sure,” Jared admitted with a shrug. “No matter what happens, it’s going to be complicated. We’re taking a risk, but we can’t afford to just give up. Even if the odds are against us, we must succeed. If the AIs have decided that killing humanity on Terra is a good idea, how long before they decide to do it everywhere?”
“The idea of the computers exterminating humanity is even more shocking than them enslaving us. Frankly, it’s terrifying.
“I know nothing of the worlds beyond Terra. Let me be honest. I know little about the areas of Terra distant from my own city. I’m not certain how much assistance I can be to you in this matter.”
The man’s expression firmed. “What I can say is that I’m not a man given to blind trust. Yet everything you’ve told me has rung true, and I’m an excellent judge of character. I’ve decided that I will do everything within my power to assist your people in getting to the Imperial Palace. The computers cannot be allowed to win this fight.”
The man’s words were a relief to Jared. This was the kind of breakthrough that he’d been hoping for. The only problem was that they had to win this fight before any of it mattered.
If they lost, the horde would occupy the ruined megacity and hunt them down. With them controlling the plains around the city, there could be no escape that didn’t involve getting the fusion plant back online and using the train system to escape the area. They couldn’t fight all of those mounted warriors.
Everything was resting on Carl. He really hoped the young man and his companions were making progress because they really needed some good news right now.
15
When the lift reached the bottom of the shaft and the doors opened, Carl saw that it let out into a long, dingy corridor lit by functional overhead lights. Proof that this area was powered. Somehow.
The scrapes that they’d followed into the lift were still visible, heading directly down the corridor. There were side corridors, but none of them were illuminated. For the moment, it made the most sense to track the quarry they’d come after.
Julia moved to the front of the group, seemingly ready to defend them if there was any trouble. Carl was more than confident that she could do so with her Marine Raider augmentation, even though she was unarmed. Anything that she had in her hands was a deadly weapon, including the heavy bag filled with air bottles that she now hefted.
The sight of the bag made him pause to check his equipment and to determine what the atmosphere around them was like. To his surprise, it was breathable. The carbon dioxide levels were only slightly elevated, and the oxygen was normal. Unlike the floors above them, life support was online down here.
“There’s breathable air,” he said as he took off his mask. “We need to conserve our air.”
Julia didn’t look convinced, and neither did the others.
“It’s safe,” he assured them. “I’ll let Ralph carry the tester, and he can check as we go. I’ll set it up so that the alarm will go off if the carbon dioxide levels start going up or the oxygen levels drop.
“Someone took the time to refurbish the life-support systems down here. More interestingly, they had the knowledge to do so. It takes a lot of know-how to disassemble a fusion plant without destroying it, and their work on the life-support system only confirms that whoever did this has training. Based on the fact that the power is still on, we can’t assume that they’re gone, so we need to be careful.”
Julia seemed to consider that for a moment before nodding. “Stand still and let me listen. If anyone is working around here, I might be able to hear them with my enhanced hearing.”
After about thirty seconds, she shook her head. “I can hear the air handlers, but that’s about it. I honestly don’t think that anyone else is down here. We’re seeing what they left behind after they finished taking the fusion plant. I’ll wager they left the lights on in case they needed to come back.”
“Why would they do that?” Austin asked. “If they’ve got a power supply, why leave it here? Somebody might come down and find it. Like, for example, us.”
Carl gestured around them. “This is a bubble of good air. Everything above us is lethally toxic. That’s one hell of a barrier to people without technological know-how. The locals would never have made their way down here on their own.
“And only the fact that Julia is insane got us into that lift. Honestly, any sane human being would think that this level had the very worst atmosphere. It’s only pure luck that it’s not. Seriously, the chances of anyone actually finding this place were very low.”
“So let’s take advantage of the situation,” Julia said as she started walking forward. “Let’s find out what’s down here.”
Carl expected her to keep walking forward until she found whatever was at the end of the scrape marks, but she didn’t. In fact, she stopped and looked inside the rooms as they passed. Each and every one of them was filled with unmarked boxes and what looked like salvaged equipment. Nothing belonging to the fusion plant from what he could see.
“Let’s get a decent idea of what we’re passing by,” he insisted. “A few minutes isn’t going to cost us anything.”
The room that he selected seemed to be mostly filled with parts from a power distribution system, undoubtedly from somewhere above them. It looked like whoever was stripping the lower levels of the megacity had been thorough. They’d taken everything that wasn’t nailed down.
Leader Mordechai was going to be seriously pissed when he found out. Thankfully, that wasn’t something that he or his friends had screwed up. Hopefully the man wouldn’t hold it against them.
After a few more rooms, Julia grew impatient and strode ahead, forcing the others to hurry to keep up. Carl didn’t blame her. They were almost certainly going to find parts and equipment stripped from the megacity in all of these rooms. They’d have plenty of time later to do a more thorough inventory once they found the fusion plant.
Where the hell had these people taken it? Why disassemble it and then move it all the way down here? He supposed it would make sense if they intended to hide out at this lower level and make sure that no one came looking for them, but Julia hadn’t heard anyone. Where had they gone?
Honestly, this wasn’t making a whole lot of sense. There had to be some aspect of the situation that he just didn’t get yet.
As they walked, he started wishing that they had a map of the lower levels. There was nothing in this corridor to give them a clue what they were headed toward. Admittedly, there were lots of plaques over the doors that had letters and numbers, but their meaning was obscure without an index. He supposed it was only meant to be helpful to maintenance teams.
Thankfully, they had the scrapes on the floor to follow. Tracking them to their ultimate destination took about twenty minutes.
When they finally reached the end of the corridor, he wasn’t really all that surprised to find a maglev train platform. Just exactly the sort of thing that Leader Mordechai had promised that they could get working and use from one of the upper levels. This station must’ve been used for maintenance purposes.
He’d seen stations just like this on other worlds in the Rebel Empire. The trains could go down the tunnels at high speed, reaching th
eir destinations in relatively short periods of time.
Unlike the more public stations that he’d seen before this, this one had none of the amenities one would expect to see when the general public would be using it. That only confirmed his guess that it was meant to serve the people that kept the city running.
The other thing of note was that there was no train sitting at the platform. There was also no fusion plant.
“This has to be where the power is coming from,” Austin said. “Whoever energized the system to get here needed to keep this online so that they could be certain that they could come back for everything else they salvaged. The cost of keeping a limited portion of the life-support system online wasn’t that much in the bigger picture.”
“I don’t see a train,” Julia said. “Is there a way to summon one?”
“There’s going to be some kind of control room where we could probably do that, but the question is whether or not we should,” Carl said. “Rather than doing anything hasty, we should go back upstairs and report what we’ve found. There’s going to be some fallout when Leader Mordechai hears what’s happened. It wouldn’t surprise me if he wants to come down and take a look at everything himself.
“Well, he might be a little old to make that trip, so he could send Jebediah instead. In any case, they don’t seem like the kind of people that’ll take this lying down. They’re going to want their stuff back, and they’re going to want to make somebody pay for taking it.”
Julia shook her head. “They’ve already got the horde to deal with, so they’re not going to go after another group of people while the fighting is still taking place.”
Carl sure hoped that she was right, but he wasn’t completely convinced. He only hoped that they could convince them that a technologically advanced group of people were probably armed with weapons that would stop them cold. A fight with people wielding flechette weapons would be a bloodbath.
It was probably a forlorn hope. There was going to be a reckoning at some point. Carl only hoped that he and his friends didn’t get caught up in the middle of that particular fight, because it wasn’t going to be pretty.
Kelsey fought for all she was worth, slashing with both swords at any horde warrior that came near her. She used her augmented muscles to jump into their midst from distances they didn’t expect and killed with single strikes.
If the enemy’s numbers hadn’t been growing so rapidly because they were rushing the position, that might have made a difference. Unfortunately, for every person she cut down, three more climbed through the openings from the street.
They were being overwhelmed.
She dumped Panther into her system, letting the combat drugs take the rough edges off the world, seeming to slow everything happening around her. In actuality, her nerve and cognitive speed had been increased, giving her more time to assess and react to everything around her.
Kelsey wasn’t a fan of how the drug made her feel—particularly when she came down from it—but in this kind of fight, it might just save her life.
She ducked under an enemy warrior’s strike and jammed one of her swords into the man’s torso. With her now free hand, she plucked a grenade off of the belt of one of the dead defenders at her feet, grabbed the metal ring in her teeth, and yanked it out.
She threw the grenade into the largest concentration of enemy nearby and retrieved her sword from the dying man’s chest, slashing at a woman trying to cut her down from the side. She took off both the woman’s hands in the same strike.
The explosion of the grenade shocked even her system, but the break in the enemy’s attack was just what she needed.
Resuming her two-sword attack, she pushed the horde warriors back and allowed the remaining defenders a chance to retreat. Many of them had already died trying to hold the line, but a few of them managed to extract themselves.
With a break in the number of attackers around her, she quickly sheathed her swords and grabbed more grenades from the bodies of defenders. Keeping in mind the lethal radius, she began hurling the grenades into pockets of the enemy inside the building.
She knew that there was always the chance that she’d catch a piece of shrapnel, but that was a risk she was going to have to take. Combat wasn’t safe. Everything was a calculated risk, and if she didn’t take chances, they were probably all going to die.
The explosions killed many of their enemies and stunned everyone still in the room. Everyone except her.
Kelsey followed the rest of the defenders out of the room and turned to protect the retreat down the corridor. That came in the form of a large metal barrier that slammed down when the man leading the raid manipulated a lever beside the door.
The horde warriors immediately began pounding on it, but they wouldn’t be able to break through before Kelsey and the rest escaped. This was the break they’d needed.
“Where do we go now?” Kelsey demanded. “Where did the rest go?”
The man, bleeding from a cut across his forehead, gestured down the corridor. “This takes us directly to the stairs. We go down three levels, and then we exit. There’s a trap set up on the fourth level, so anyone going that far gets blown up.”
Having said that, the man smiled cruelly. “There’s also some bombs buried underneath the floor in the room behind us. As soon as we get out of the area, watchers in other buildings will set them off and kill as many of those trying to follow us as they can.”
Kelsey nodded her approval. Working with the rest, she helped move the injured down the stairs and into the appropriate tunnels on level three. There was only a small group of defenders waiting to see if anyone else escaped, but it was enough to get everyone that needed a hand someone to lean on.
Once they were sure that no one else was coming, the defenders armed the booby traps, and everyone fled down the tunnel.
As they ran, Kelsey flushed her system of the Panther, and the world became duller as her senses seemed to slow. The world seemed so much drabber now.
Honestly, that was what she hated the most about Panther: having to let go of the almost god-like feelings it brought. The damned stuff was addictive.
Fifteen minutes later, they’d been through many twists and turns and even changed levels multiple times, so Kelsey knew that even if the enemy had come through the booby traps waiting to stop them, they’d never be able to track them in time to make a difference.
That wasn’t to say it was impossible. A number of the people with her were injured, and they were leaving a blood trail that a determined enemy could follow.
When they finally gathered at the new location, the man in charge grimaced. “It looks like we’ve lost almost half our people. That wasn’t what we were hoping for, but the enemy was more ferocious than we’d imagined possible. We’re going to have to combine forces with another attack group because we just can’t defeat a force this size by ourselves.”
“Aren’t they already engaged?” Kelsey asked.
The man shook his head. “None of the other ambushes have kicked off yet. This was the first group to arrive at a suitable location. I’ve heard your husband will soon be on his way to assist another such group. If you’d like to join them, I have no objection to having one of our people take you.
“I’m going to take the rest of our force and merge with another group. Our numbers might make a difference there. We might have failed to stop this particular force, but if we can exterminate the other two, that’ll give us an advantage in pushing the remaining invaders back.”
Kelsey considered turning down the offer, but if Talbot was about to get into a fight like this, she wanted to plant her back against his so that they could cover one another. She trusted her husband to stay alive, but in a melee like this, one inattentive moment could mean death.
“That sounds like a plan,” she said grimly. “Let’s be about our business.”
16
By the time he’d run out of ammunition for the sniper rifle, Talbot had made quite an impression on t
he horde forces below them. After the first few kills, the enemy had realized that he was able to hit them effectively and sought better cover.
While he didn’t manage to kill a lot of enemy officers, he convinced them to keep their heads down. That delay might prove useful for the defenders when it came to fighting off the other groups.
Richard and Lydia seemed very impressed at his accuracy.
“I can’t imagine how having a machine in your head allows you to shoot so well, but I’m glad you’re here,” Richard said with a grin. “I wish we’d brought more ammunition. We’ve kept their heads down longer than I’d expected. That’s going to help the ambush groups.”
Talbot was pleased, but fighting from a distance wasn’t his usual style. He didn’t object to it in principle. After all, keeping the enemy from attacking friendly units was a positive thing. The longer they managed to keep the horde at bay, the better their eventual chances of winning this fight. Still, he’d rather be in the rough and tumble.
“Any word on the other ambushes?” he asked. “In particular, the group my wife is with.”
The way the two locals glanced at one another made him uneasy. Something was wrong.
“Trot it out,” he ordered firmly.
For a moment, it seemed as if they were going to keep him in the dark, but Richard finally sighed and nodded. “The ambush didn’t go as planned. From what I’ve heard, they engaged the enemy, but the horde swarmed their position. They charged right into the ambush site.
“Your wife and the rest managed a fighting withdrawal, and she wasn’t hurt, but it was a close thing. She’s on her way to the same ambush site that we’ll be moving to, although she’s going to be down in the fighting zone, while we’re going to provide long-range covering fire. I’m sorry that we didn’t insist that she come with you.”
Talbot laughed before he could stop himself. “You don’t know my wife. No one can stop her once she’s made up her mind. And don’t mistake her small size for a lack of ferocity. If she wanted to, she could thrash me in a stand-up fight. She’s had her augmentation for a lot longer than I have and can fight in ways that none of us can really imagine without having seen it. Just trust her to do what needs to be done.”