SNAFU: Future Warfare

by Geoff Brown

  “What was that?” Meyers muttered.

  A louder boom followed.

  “Breaching charges,” Ismail replied.

  Hunters filled the tunnels with a synchronized howl.

  “They’re behind us,” Meyers said.

  Santiago licked chapped lips. “Let’s move.”

  They scurried into the dark. Santiago picked a turn, then another, and another. He’d only been here a few times, and that was so long ago. Was it the Guerrilla Warfare training module? Some operation at the beginning of the war? His memories were slipping away. He opened a gate, entering a small tunnel that stretched on into infinity. It looked just like any other tunnel, only the green lamps were in slightly different positions. Or were they?

  “Wait a minute... “ he muttered.” Where are we?”

  “Are we lost?” Ismail said.

  “Haven’t been here before,” Santiago admitted.

  “I think... I think I know where we are,” Meyers said.

  Santiago cocked his head into the dark. “Lead on.”

  She took point. Santiago rotated to the tail-end position. Keeping a hand on Ismail’s grab handle, he glanced over his shoulder every twenty steps. Hunters called into the dark. Santiago idly realized he was hearing the same long, drawn-out howl over and over. Even the most well-trained animals would vary their tone and length. But these howls were precise. Unvaried. A mechanical mimicry of biology. Which, in a nutshell, was the Hivers’ philosophy.

  The Hivers they had encountered earlier weren’t equipped to perform explosive breaches. That meant Hiver infantry were coming. Humans, or what passed for humans in the Hive’s vision of humanity. Santiago suppressed a shudder. Sure, Neuvo Corazon had embraced genetic engineering and cybernetics, but they hadn’t discarded their humanity the way the Hivers had. He couldn’t understand their motives, and they never cared to explain. They just warped in their warfleet above the planet and dictated terms. When the government refused to surrender, the Hivers rained fire from above. That was… he couldn’t recall how long ago.

  Meyers came to a door. She opened it, entering what looked like a substation. Power generators lined the walls, cold and silent.

  “Eh?” she said. “I thought... where the hell...?”

  “Lost?” Santiago said.

  “I... shit. Yeah. We need to back—”

  Hunters bellowed in the dark.

  “Let’s not.” Ismail pointed. “Try that door.”

  The door led to a staircase that descended into the dark.

  “I’m not sure about this,” Meyers said.

  “Only thing deeper than Metro-2 is the Underground Railroad,” Santiago said. “Doesn’t matter what stop we’re at, so long as we get there.”

  They went down. At the bottom of the stairwell was a metal door. Locked. Meyers melted the lock and the trio stumbled into the room beyond. Santiago filled his lungs with stale air. He lowered his monocular and powered the IR lamp.

  The platform was tiny. Just a strip of concrete adjacent to massive rails. The tunnels were clear, at least. Maybe a train would come here.

  Like all the artefacts of civilization, Metro-2 needed power. The trains of the underground railway needed power. Power from the generators distributed across Metro-2 or tapped from reactors on the surface. The Hivers knew that too, and they always answered unexplained spikes in electricity demand with ground forces and orbital bombardments. The Resistance travelled almost exclusively on foot, or with vehicles that didn’t draw power from the grid. Central would authorize the use of the Metro-2 trains only in the gravest emergencies. With Alpha Priority status, Hivers on his tail, Santiago figured this qualified.

  There was a q-com station next to the rails. Santiago flicked the power switch. The touchscreen displayed a keypad. He fed in his serial number. A host of buttons appeared. He selected the one that called for a train. Moments later, the intercom crackled.

  “HELLO!”

  The Rangers jumped. Santiago turned down the volume.

  “... are five stops away,” the train engineer continued. “Where are you headed?”

  “Academy Outpost,” Santiago replied.

  “Ah! Excellent! So are we. We should be there in twenty minutes.”

  “We have Hivers on our tail.”

  “Hivers? Here? Shit.” The engineer sighed. “I’ll push ‘er as fast as she can go. But be ready for a hot extract.”

  Santiago stepped away from the console. His head felt heavy and foggy, overburdened by the toxins that were surely swelling his brain. He knew he had to do something, but...

  “Boss?” Ismail said. “I’ll go upstairs and lay some traps for our friends.”

  Ah, right. That. “Go ahead.”

  Ismail ran up the stairs. Santiago patted himself down, checking that his kit was where he’d left them. Meyers fiddled with her M592. Silence reigned in the dark.

  Long, long minutes later, Ismail sprinted back down, closing the door behind him. As he welded it shut with nano, he said, “They’re coming.”

  Santiago looked around. There was no cover on the platform. It was...

  Meyers went down to the tracks, crouching behind the thick concrete of the platform floor. The men followed her.

  “You know... this is... crazy,” Ismail said, gasping for air.

  “Got a better idea?” she asked.

  “No,” Santiago said.

  Santiago kept his ears open, listening for the sound of hissing air. A mine detonated in the stairwell. Training his carbine at the door, he breathed slowly, deeply, regularly. Waited.

  A lifetime passed in the dark.

  White-hot light flared from the doorframe.

  Santiago shouldered his weapon.

  The door fell. A dark shape leaped through.

  “Fire!” Santiago called, pulling the trigger.

  The hunter blew apart. Two more pounced out from behind it. Santiago tracked the one on the right. It halted for a moment, bringing up its weapons. He fired, and both the hunter’s hands exploded. Santiago put the creature down with a double-tap, scanned for more targets, and saw the other hunter die.

  And a cylinder bounced down the stairs and into the open.

  Santiago looked away.

  It burst in dazzling, ear-shattering flashes of white. Santiago’s monocular shut down. Flattening himself as far as he could, he extended his carbine above his platform and loosed a burst. Another. A third. Ismail and Meyers added their fire to his. When the flash-bang died Santiago looked up.

  A pair of corpses greeted him. Shattered bodies with triangular heads, torsos covered in pseudo-chitin carapace, their hands gripping Hiver gravity guns. The bodies began to burn.

  A hunter surged through the doorway. The Rangers pumped it with bullets. As it vaporised, it lobbed a grenade at them.

  Landing in front of Ismail.

  The Ranger swore and jumped up on the platform. Scooping up the grenade, he dashed to the door, brought the bomb to his ear, threw it—

  It exploded. The munitions on the Ranger’s suit detonated too.

  “Ismail!” Meyers yelled.

  When the dust cleared, there was nothing left of him larger than a leg. The massive explosion broke up the stairs, bringing it down in a wreck of twisted metal and rubble that sealed off the doorway.

  “Ismail,” Meyers whispered. “My God.”

  Air whooshed through the tunnel. The duo clambered up on the platform.

  Moments later, a sleek, shining maglev rushed into the station. The doors slid open.

  “All aboard!” the engineer called through the intercom.

  * * *

  The train was packed with men and materiel. All the seats in the front carriages were occupied, and much of the floor space taken up by supply crates. Wending their way to the rear, the Rangers found a pair of empty seats. Meyers collapsed into one. Santiago discreetly whipped out his Geiger counter first.

  They were cold. Thank God. Last thing he needed was to contaminate what co
uld well be the last maglev on the planet.

  The journey to Academy passed in a blur. At six hundred kilometres per hour, all Santiago could see of the outside world was an ill-defined gray stretch. Santiago opened his q-com and updated Central on his team’s status. The moment he received an acknowledgment, he closed his eyes and drifted into a twilight state somewhere between restfulness and true sleep.

  Meyer nudged him. “We’re here.”

  Santiago opened his eyes. That was fast. Too fast. Had he nodded off? He didn’t know. All he knew was that he felt even more tired than when he had boarded. Yawning, he followed the occupants out the train.

  An array of guards scanned the passengers with handheld scanners, searching for Hiver pheromones and cybernetics. When Santiago cleared the checkpoint, a guard approached him.

  “Please step aside, Sergeant Major.”

  “Is there a problem?”

  “No problem. But Central wants to speak to you and your team.”

  “Lead on.”

  The guard led the duo away from the crush of people and to the security office. Inside the office, a short man in a grubby suit awaited behind a desk. He wore no rank tabs on his chest epaulet, and needed none.

  “Major Khabarov,” Santiago said. “Finally showed up in person?”

  “Have to show my face once in a while, let people think I’m alive.” Khabarov gestured at the chairs in front of him. “Sit, please.”

  They sat. “You have something for us?” Meyers asked.

  “I’m truly sorry for the loss of your team. Their sacrifice was not in vain.”

  Santiago thought of Lenislaw, dying alone in the dark. Rook, consumed by golem and fire. Ismail, blown apart. The long line of Rangers and Resistors he had led and lost.

  “Thank you, sir,” Santiago said. “But you must’ve seen our report. We need to be in the hospital right now.”

  “Absolutely. But I’ve been told you can still fight.”

  “We don’t get in a medbox, we’re dead men walking.”

  Meyers coughed.

  Santiago grimaced. “Well. Dead Rangers. You get what I mean.”

  Khabarov smiled wanly. “I spoke to the medical techs. They said the medbox will need two weeks to fix you. We don’t have two weeks.”

  “Sending us into the fire again?” Meyers asked.

  “Yes. This could be our only chance to win the war.”

  “You said that about the last job, sir.”

  “This is a continuation of that operation. The Academy AIs have pored through the data you transmitted. They found schematics for Hiver cybernetics. Hardware, firmware, and software infrastructure. Coupled with all the intelligence we’ve gathered in previous missions, we’re confident we can penetrate the Hive Mind.”

  The Hivers distributed their computing capability across decentralized swarms, making them ultra-resilient and impervious to decapitation strikes. The Academy concentrated most of what was left of the planet’s major processors, becoming a gigantic hyper-computer several orders of magnitude more powerful than the Hiver equivalent. If it were allowed to.

  “You’re saying we can hack into the Hiver command and control system?” Santiago asked.

  “Not quite. The Hivers use quantum comms like we do. The only way to hack the Hive Mind is to access a dedicated communication and control node.”

  “Which they don’t normally employ, since they prefer decentralised networks and autonomous swarms.”

  “Yes. They only use C&C nodes to coordinate activities between different swarms during large-scale operations. Such as an upload-or-destroy mission.”

  “That’s all well and good, but what do you need us for?”

  “The Hivers are coming. We’re going to ambush them.”

  Meyers blinked. “They are coming. Here. To Academy.”

  “Yes.”

  “How did they find us?”

  Khabarov sighed. “The Hivers have been mapping Metro-2 and we can’t keep Academy Outpost secret. To analyze the data so quickly, we’ve had to run the Academy AIs at full power. The Hivers would have noticed the energy spike. They will come for us.”

  Santiago shot to his feet. “You’re going to sacrifice the Academy?!”

  “No. The Hivers aren’t interested in genocide. They want to assimilate us. There’s a large civilian community on the surface right above the Academy. They won’t drop a rock on us. They’ll send multiple swarms for an uplift-or-destroy operation. With those swarms will be landing ships with C&C nodes. If we can board a ship, we can plug our suits into the nodes and piggyback our AIs into the Hive Mind.”

  “You’ve just condemned the civvies above us,” Meyers said.

  “We have no choice. It’s the only way we have left to access one of their ships, and they only bring the ships down to deploy reinforcements from orbit. Actual infantry, not constructs. The one sure-fire way they would do that is if we lure them into uplifting a community and coming down into the Metro.”

  “How do you know they’ll take the bait?” Santiago asked.

  Khabarov smiled grimly. “They know I’m one of the few officers left in the military, and the commanding officer of the Rangers. I’ve leaked on unsecured and compromised channels that I’m Central, and I’m at Academy Station. They will come. They want my brain.”

  Meyers exhaled sharply. “My. God. Sir, are you sure...?”

  “Yes. And for what it’s worth, the operations plan calls for us Rangers to swarm the Hivers when they arrive, while the mainline Resistance holds the Metro entrances. I intend to fight on the surface.”

  “That’s pretty risky.”

  “Yes. But we’re all in this together. If we swarm them when they land, some of us are bound to break through. Besides, remember what I told you when the war began?”

  Meyers snorted. “I am Central.”

  “You are Central,” Santiago continued.

  “We are all Central,” Khabarov finished. “As long as there is even one of us left, the Resistance continues.”

  Central was a myth deliberately perpetrated by the Rangers. The civilians needed to believe the government had survived, the remnants of the military needed to believe their leaders were still fighting the war, and every swarm the Hive sent to the countryside to hunt ghosts was a swarm that could not hunt the Resistance or twist people into their brand of humanity. The closest the Rangers ever had to Central was the AI that mediated information flow across Resistance cells.

  “Just like the Hive,” Santiago mused.

  “We’ve got to adopt our enemy’s strategy. It’s the only way to win.”

  “To survive, you mean.”

  * * *

  Santiago used to think waiting was easy. He just had to lie in place until something important happened. As he injected his last antirad into his neck, he considered otherwise.

  Meyers, huddled under her camouflage blanket, swapped out her mask’s air filter and cleaned dust off the lenses. Santiago joined her, rubbing his hands against the chill, and looked out the mousehole they had bored out of the kitchen wall.

  Scattered across broken streets five stories down, the surface dwellers were huddling in little knots of humanity. Some entered nearby apartment blocks. Others gathered around ancient, rusted drums and started pitiful, flickering fires. Of Hivers, they saw none.

  At least, Hiver constructs. Hiver thralls, and the infiltrator strain, were something else.

  Santiago blew on his hands again. The Hiver orbital bombardments at the dawn of war started an ice age. What arable ground remained the Hivers seized for themselves and their collaborators. The Hivers didn’t bother occupying most of the planet. They simply fostered hardship upon hardship on the people, leaving them to fend for themselves. The only way out was to join the Hive. Or be swept up in an upload-or-destroy operation.

  Meyers peeked out the window. Across the building was a park. Most of the trees had died or shed their leaves, leaving large open spaces. A perfect place for a Hiver landing shi
p.

  Outside, a floorboard creaked.

  Santiago tapped Meyers shoulder. She shrank away from the window.

  SNAP.

  That was the lock fastened to the grille. The Rangers snatched up their weapons and moved out.

  The grille swung open on screeching hinges.

  Santiago leapt to one corner of the room, Meyers took the other.

  The front door unlocked with a heavy CLICK. The door opened. A hunter leapt through, howling.

  A proximity mine exploded.

  Santiago flinched away from the blast. Looking back up, he saw thralls pouring through a pink mist.

  The closest thrall aimed its arms at him. Its hands shot out, attached to its sockets with fine wires.

  Not a thrall. An infiltrator.

  As the hands landed on a sofa, Santiago pumped three hypersonic rounds into its chest. The infiltrator staggered, lifted its hands and tossed the sofa away, clearing a line of attack. Meyers blew its head off, but Santiago was exposed. And more infiltrators were coming.

  One launched claw hands at him. He ducked and charged into the threat, blowing its head off. Its partner leapt on Santiago. He brought up his carbine and it grabbed the weapon with both hands, trying to throw him. Santiago snaked his left hand down, drew his dagger in a reverse grip, and thrust out. The ultrafine tip sank into its neck and ripped out. Dark blood spattered across his mask’s lenses. He thrust into its eyes, felt the knife bounce off hardened metal. The Hiver didn’t even flinch; it continued to hold him in place for its friends to flank him.

  Snarling, Santiago jammed the blade into the crook of its right elbow and pulled, breaking its grip. He tried to kick it away, but the infiltrator was faster, crashing him against the wall, crushing him with powerful arms.

  And set itself afire.

  “Fuck! Fuck! Fuck!” Santiago yelled, twisting and turning, but the fucking thing had him in a death grip. He grabbed the Hiver’s burning back and violently arched his spine, making space to knee it in the groin and shove it aside. As its body fell apart, Meyers dropped it with a short burst.

  “You okay?” Meyers shouted.

  Santiago was broiling under the suit, but he hadn’t caught fire. “I’m good.” He retrieved his carbine and sheathed his dagger. Santiago’s q-com filled with chatter: Rangers reporting ambushes and attacks.