by Jamie Sawyer
“Everyone intact?” I asked.
“Affirmative,” Mason said.
“I have eyes on the target,” Jenkins said. She poked her head from behind the crawler, looking to the fence and the guard tower.
“We’ve got to bring that thing down,” I said. “Lay down frag grenades, move up to the foot of that tower.”
“I’ll take the right,” Jenkins replied.
My M95 plasma rifle – now ancient by military standards, performance far surpassed by the later upgraded M110 model, but still my preferred long-arm – illuminated the area.
I dashed for another snow-crawler, took up a position behind it. Mason and Martinez hunkered down beside some cargo drums: from the fence, a heavy automatic weapon of some description began to fire, throwing rounds against those. I saw Jenkins from the corner of my eye, moving fast between burning crates. More Chino troopers were flanking us. Her null-shield lit as she moved.
“I’m on this,” she panted.
“Stay in cover! We’ll take the tower from the eastern ridge, move back around—!”
“I said that I’m on this,” she hissed.
The guard tower anti-air weapon swivelled on its mount, slowly sweeping over the compound. Fuck. That was a big-ass laser: if it hit Jenkins, combat-suit or not, she’d be wasted.
“Get back into cover!”
Brazenly, Jenkins pumped her grenade launcher.
The volley of grenades traced a clear, delicate trajectory; barely slowed by the wind. The tower was supported by four thin legs, planted into the snowy ground, and one of those was caught by the exploding ordnance. Jenkins kept firing. Her face, behind the visor of her helmet, was contorted in abject rage. Rounds hit her torso, bounced off her chest-plate. The combat-suit camo-field failed, illuminating her outline very precisely. It was as though sheer determination was repelling the enemy.
The structure wobbled.
From my position, I could just see the tip of the sentry tower: could see the soldiers crewing it yelling and waving below. They began to drop from the nest; to jump rather than fall.
Jenkins charged her underslung launcher again and again. The grenades whistled as they fired, peppering the foot of the guard tower.
“She’s bringing it down!” Mason said.
The tower slowly toppled into the snow. It was tall enough to catch a series of gantries as it went; throwing the scream of metal-on-metal to the wind, the pleasing concussive boom of another explosion. The gorge around me echoed with the sound. Snow began to slide from the steeper mountainsides, cascading against the perimeter fence.
Jenkins just stood there for a moment. The Directorate troops had ceased firing and started to fall back – moving inside the compound.
“You okay?” I asked, as I jogged over to her position.
She nodded at me grimly. “I’m fine. I just needed to work out some stress.”
Martinez exchanged a glance with me but said nothing. This was Jenkins now. She was different; had been changed by what had happened in Damascus.
“This is still a military operation,” I said. “Follow orders.”
Jenkins looked irritated behind her face-plate; as though she had forgotten that this wasn’t personal, that this was supposed to be a rescue operation rather than some opportunity to vent our anger on the Directorate. The expression was fleeting though, and she nodded in agreement.
“Solid copy that.”
Scorpio One flew low overhead. The Jaguar fired a volley of Banshee missiles from hard points under each of its stubby wings, and various positions inside the compound ignited in brisk blooms of yellow light.
“James has the airspace under control, at least,” Mason said.
“About time,” said Jenkins.
The dropships conducting strafing runs over the compound did wonders to suppress the Directorate. Meanwhile, the Raiders stayed on overwatch – keeping hostiles off the rooftops and picking out RPG placements. Baker’s Boys and the Vipers began calling in their objectives, securing buildings and searching the compound. Assisted by the drones, they made swift progress through the overground structures.
Seven minutes on the mission clock, the Legion assembled in an abandoned barracks.
“Nothing so far,” Martinez reported. “Whatever this place is, it isn’t a POW camp.”
Jenkins marched two captured Directorate troopers into the barracks. They had been disarmed but still wore battered hard-suits, and had been identified as officers. Tan-skinned, much older than most of the Directorate troops, both men were speaking at the same time.
I nodded at Jenkins. “Keep them covered. Suit: run translation.”
My combat-suit obliged. Selected the relevant dialect and began a translation.
“We know nothing!” they said collectively, my suit speaking in stilted electronic tones. “We are overseers of the mining facility…”
It went on. They both sounded very convincing. Had it not been for the couple of hundred Directorate troops that had just tried to kill us, I might’ve even bought it.
“Put them with the others,” Jenkins ordered Mason.
Mason prodded the two men with her rifle, encouraging them outside. Both remonstrated about being made to go out in the cold without full headgear, but Mason barked orders in broken Chino – using her suit translation package – and the two men quickly decided that their chances of survival were better outside than in.
They should be scared, I thought.
There was a yard in the middle of the compound, partially sheltered from wind and snow by a configuration of large buildings; overlooked by Hooper’s sniper team. Mason lined the men up with the rest of the prisoners. There had been ten or so soldiers with sufficient intelligence not to throw their lives away; with enough common sense to lay down their arms. Most were kneeling in the snow, fingers locked behind their heads.
“They aren’t Swords,” Mason said to me.
She was referring to the Swords of the South Chino Stars; the elite Special Operations unit that was responsible for the Damascus incident. And she was right – none of the prisoners were Swords. They were better equipped and more dangerous than the People’s Army, and would probably have put up more of a fight.
“Not every Directorate agent wears a uniform,” Martinez said. “We should watch them, jefe.”
If nothing else, we’d take them back with us. It was scant justification for the military operation, but it might please Ostrow. Mili-Intel could milk these people: see if they had any useful intel.
Jenkins prowled between the lines of kneeling prisoners, and we watched as she did her thing. By now, I’d seen the show so many times that it’d lost its impact on me.
“You know who we are?” she asked, her suit-speakers turned up to maximum volume so that they could be heard over the wind.
At least a couple of the prisoners understood Standard, and they nodded anxiously. Jenkins stood at the end of the line; her rifle stowed, her PPG-13 plasma pistol cocked. She waved it at the prisoners. As one now, the group quivered. The cold did nothing to reduce the hate-heat emanating from Jenkins.
“Then you will know not to fuck with us. We’re the Lazarus Legion, and we came here to get our people back. I want to know where they are.”
“We know nothing!” one of the solders shouted in Standard. “We only work here – guard the mines!”
The prisoners began to babble all at the same time.
“Bullshit!” Jenkins spat. She bolted towards the nearest prisoner and slammed her plasma pistol into the woman’s face. “We’ve been listening to your transmissions. You have Alliance prisoners down here!”
This one was less easily shaken. The woman was slim, muscled, with long dark hair and almond eyes. For the briefest moment, the prisoner reminded me of Elena. I shook my head and buried the thought. Face collecting snowflakes, the woman gave no response.
“I mean it,” Jenkins said. “Start answering questions if you want to live.”
Mason stood
beside me. She looked unimpressed by the display. “Do we have to go through this again?” she asked.
Jenkins pressed the muzzle of her pistol against the woman’s head and the weapon’s arming indicator flashed. The man beside the endangered prisoner recoiled – probably glad that it wasn’t him that was about to get wasted.
“Unless someone starts telling me what is really going on down here, I’m going to blow this bitch’s brains out. Then I’m going to kill someone every minute, until I get some answers.”
The male prisoner said something in Chino. Spoke too fast for my suit to translate.
“Don’t fucking mess with me,” Jenkins hissed at her prisoner.
The woman’s eyes remained steely cold and she stared at Jenkins. Snow had begun to plaster her hair.
“We have nothing for you here,” she said. “We have nothing.”
Jenkins kept the gun pressed there for a long second. Martinez and Mason watched her, an air of uncertainty hanging between them—
My ear-bead chimed.
“Lazarus!” came a gruff voice. It was Baker.
I held up a hand to stay Jenkins’ wrath. She paused, eyes still boring into the female prisoner’s head.
“I read you, Baker. What is it?”
“We’ve found something,” Baker said. “You should come down and see. I’m uploading my coordinates.”
My HUD flashed with Baker’s location: his surviving team had collected in a garage near to our position.
“Inbound,” I said. “Lazarus out.” I waved at Jenkins. “Stand down.”
With marked reluctance, Jenkins lowered the pistol.
“I really thought that she was going to kill that one,” Martinez said.
“Wouldn’t be the first time.”
Mason sighed. “And probably won’t be the last.”
“Mason, Jenkins; with me. Martinez, get those prisoners cuffed, then join us at Baker’s position.” I couldn’t trust Jenkins out here with the prisoners. “Keep watch on them, padre,” I said. “None of them dies unless I say so.”
“Affirmative,” Martinez said. He sounded more than a little relieved with my decision. He shook his head. “Retribution unrealised is a terrible thing.”
Baker cracked open the enormous shutter-style doors, and by the numbers we entered the depot. My drones flitted around me like fat flies – taking readings and reporting – but Baker’s Boys had been the first personnel on-site. The storage shed was a hulk of a building, a vast garage filled with industrial vehicles: ore scoopers, snow-crawlers and tractors, all arranged in neat lines.
Baker’s squad had been depleted to only three simulants. They squatted beside a snow-crawler, faces tight behind their illuminated face-plates.
“We’re not quite sure what we have here,” Captain Baker said. He nodded at one of his troopers; a green with the name ROBINS printed across his chest.
“I keep getting readings inside the shed, sir.”
Jenkins tutted. “We came all the way cross-compound because someone got readings? Jesus.”
Robins swallowed but stood his ground. “Bio-scanner readings, ma’am.” He held up his wrist-comp: pointed out the sensor grid shown on the vambrace unit. “Lots of readings. They’re coming and going.”
“There’s nothing else in this area,” Baker said. “Hooper has visual on the roof. Nothing above us, nothing outside.”
I patched into the kid’s scanner results. Blips appeared on my HUD. There were several life-signs – the micro-throb of possible heartbeats, the flush of heat signs. That could mean nearby bodies, but the readings were erratic and unclear.
“See?” Baker said. “Something isn’t right.”
“Could be a scanner malfunction,” Mason suggested.
Robins shook his head. “I don’t think so. We’ve all been detecting the same readings—”
“Listen!” I insisted.
I heard a noise over the comms.
A soft wailing: an intrusive spike of static at the back of my mind. It was strong enough that I winced, put a hand to the side of my helmet.
“You okay, Colonel?” Mason asked.
“Fine,” I said. “Anyone else hear that?”
Mason and Jenkins looked back at me with blank faces.
It sounded like distant moaning. I looked to the open depot doors. It was easily explainable as the sound of the wind moving through the structure, but the wind had dropped.
I swallowed.
I knew that noise. It was the Artefact.
This can’t be happening again. It had been a long time since I’d last heard the sound, and these days it rarely ever happened while I was awake: tended to come in dream and nightmare, mostly. I’d managed to repress it with my own brand of self-medication.
This is different…
It was coming, I realised, from beneath us. I slammed a foot on the ground. The combat-suit was heavy; that and the simulant inside made for a big weight. The metal decking produced a metallic thump. I did it again, producing the same echo: loud enough to be heard even inside my armour.
“There’s something underneath us,” I decided. I pointed. “Get that crawler out the way.”
Mason clambered into the cabin, activated the engine. With a low grumble, the big crawler pulled forward. The Legion and Baker’s Boys circled where it had sat: looked at the patch of floor that had been uncovered.
“Well I fucking never…” Baker said.
There was a circular hatch – big enough to accommodate a man in armour – set into the ground. The frost-covered metalwork was worn, had recently been used, and the nearby area had been disturbed with a series of footprints. My HUD glowed with heat markers. They had a power supply down there. Beneath us, probably unaware that they had been found at all, the bio-signs disappeared off my screen. Either moving deeper underground, or fooling the scanner. I’d come across Krell that could do that – could manipulate their biological processes to avoid detection – but I wasn’t aware of any such human tech. Still, the Directorate were full of surprises.
I prised open the hatch set into the ground, grunting as it came free, and the moaning sound became more precise. Something is calling me down there… Jenkins gasped. Baker started barking orders to his team, to give me room and provide covering fire.
I dipped my suit-lamps. Half-expecting to be met with a face full of flechettes, I peered into the shaft. A vertical shaft: precisely machined, made to accommodate human proportions. A series of metal rungs had been sunk into the compacted ice – forming a long and precarious ladder to whatever was beneath.
“There are lots of scanner returns down there,” Jenkins said. Her voice quivered with excitement.
“How many?”
She swallowed. “A hundred? Hard to say.”
“It’s like they’re on top of each other…” Mason whispered.
The shaft was deep enough that it disappeared into darkness. I unclipped a flare from my suit webbing. Flicking the activator, I tossed it down. Listened to the gentle chink as it hit the floor.
“You want to send a drone down first?” Mason offered.
“No,” I said. “I need to do this myself.”
I could see the flare at the bottom of the shaft now. Fizzing, throwing ragged light over a grilled floor plate. There was a facility of some sort below. My danger-instinct insisted that this was a very bad idea, but I needed to know what was down there.
“I’m going in. Jenkins, watch my six.”
“Affirmative,” she replied.
As I went, the moaning got louder and louder until I couldn’t dismiss it any more.
It took me a couple of minutes to clamber down the shaft. One hand on the ladder rungs, the other clutching my PPG-13 plasma pistol: half-aimed at the segment of tunnel directly beneath me. The ladder was glossed with ice but as I climbed I realised that there were also fresh markings on the rungs – as though they had recently been used. Boot prints.
“How’s it going, sir?” Jenkins asked.
/>
“Fine. Any movement up top?”
“Nothing so far. You want me to come down and help?” she asked, with painful eagerness.
“No. I’m good.”
It was a tight fit in full armour. My shoulders grazed the tunnel walls, and the expectation that I would be shot on the way down the shaft never left me. The flare light gradually diminished until I was alone. My left hand began to shake as I descended.
I reached the bottom of the shaft and panned the corridor with my plasma pistol; let the targeting software analyse for potential targets. This deep underground, the tunnels had been bored out of the ice: chemically treated to retain stability. The floors were decked with metal plating. Glow-globes were strung from electrical cabling in a line along the ceiling. Meltwater drip-drip-dripped from the ceiling and huge transparent icicles had formed overhead—
A hand brushed my combat-suit. Stained, bone-thin fingers.
I instinctively pulled away.
Then the noise hit me. A hundred voices, rising in a ghostly choir: individually quiet, collectively devastating. I couldn’t hear actual words but the overall impression was undeniable. Cries for help, for salvation.
“Shit…” I said, the word escaping my lips unbidden.
I’d seen war. I’d seen horror: alien, human and even – with the discovery of the Shard – machine. There was little that could move me, that could genuinely shake me. But what I saw in that tunnel did just that.
“I’m at ground level,” I said into my comm. “They have people down here.” I swallowed. “Lots… lots of them.”
Metal cages lined the corridor on either side of me, and skeletal hands were reaching from within. The cages went on for as far as I could see – as far as my suit-lamps would penetrate the dark – and each was crammed with bodies.
We’d found the prisoners.
Maybe I’d been stunned by what I’d seen, or maybe I’d just grown sloppy. Either way, I missed the prison guard until she fired the pistol.
She was facing me, but retreating – arm outstretched, firing again and again. I recognised the snap of a semi-automatic slug-thrower: a heavy calibre weapon firing at close range.
My null-shield failed to respond and two rounds hit my shoulder. There was a sharp spark of pain as the bullets impacted. AP rounds, I guessed: high-density anti-armour. Warnings flashed across my HUD, suggested immediate defensive action.