by Jacob Holo
The fury of the explosion faded. Kaneda dropped to the ground and rolled onto his hands and knees. The blast had scorched his armor black. He rose to his feet and looked down the tunnel, noting the way the walls bulged outward. Water dripped from cracks in the ceiling.
“What the hell ...” Alice groaned, picking herself up. “The bastard killed himself.”
“Our enemies are desperate,” Kaneda said. “We should expect more of the same. Three-Part?”
“Here, sir,” Three-Part said. He picked up his gun and shook the slush off it. “A little shaken but okay.”
The floor shuddered.
“What was that?” Three-part asked.
“I think it came from the icebreaker,” Alice said.
“Move!” Kaneda shouted. “Get away from it!”
The icebreaker contained ten thousand kilometers of heavy diamoplast cabling for constructing a supportive tunnel mesh as it descended. The cables were stored in large spindles and run to weavers and deployers on the outer surface of the ring. They were handled internally at extremely high tensions.
One of the cables broke free. It sliced through the ceiling and whipped towards the crusaders. Kaneda saw its trajectory would pass through Three-Part’s torso. He rushed forward, grabbed Three-Part by the wrist and pulled.
The Martian started to open his mouth when the cable cut into him. It sliced through his gun’s ammo belt and ejection port then severed his hand at the wrist. The cable whipped passed and smashed into the floor.
Three-Part screamed. Blood pulsed from his wrist. His armor engaged an emergency tourniquet before the first crimson drop touched the ground. The gel layer expanded, closing off the pressure leak. Three-Part fell to a knee, but Kaneda picked him up.
“Come on!” Kaneda said. “We need to get away from it!”
Three-Part struggled to his feet and together the three crusaders ran down the tunnel. Another tremor vibrated through the floor. Panels and insulation fell from the ceiling.
“The icebreaker is tearing itself apart!” Alice shouted.
“Keep moving!” Kaneda said.
They ran down the tunnel. The floor shook, but each tremor felt weaker than the last. Eventually, they put enough distance between them and the icebreaker. Kaneda stopped them next to another crusader squad.
“You and you,” Kaneda said, selecting crusaders in the squad with medical gear. “Attend to his wounds.”
“Yes, sir.”
One of the crusaders pulled out a meditracker. Three-Part extended his arm and let them work on him.
“How are you?” Kaneda asked.
“I’m okay, sir,” Three-Part said. “Painkillers solve a lot of problems.”
“Good man.”
“Well, the icebreaker is in pieces,” Alice said. “What now?”
Kaneda opened a channel to the lamprey bunker.
“Yes, sir,” Viter said.
“Send down the second icebreaker and the reserve engineering teams,” Kaneda said. “We need to clear this wreckage and keep moving.”
“Right away, sir.”
“And what if they take out that one?” Alice asked. “We don’t have any more.”
“We could use the fortress crackers to blast our way down,” Three-Part said.
“That won’t be necessary,” Kaneda said. “We’ll save the fortress crackers in case we need them at the capitol.”
“Then should we form a tighter defense,” Three-Part asked.
“No, precisely the opposite,” Kaneda said. “We are going on a full force offensive. There can’t be many dragons in these tunnels. We are going to flush them out with sheer numbers. I want everyone advancing down the tunnels as fast and as hard as possible.”
“We’ll lose more people to traps that way,” Alice said.
“I understand that,” Kaneda said. “But we’ll lose even more if they secure the Redoubt’s ocean access.”
“Sounds good,” Three-Part said. “Let’s burn a path for the icebreaker. They’ll be expecting us to regroup, not attack.”
“Alice?” Kaneda asked.
She sighed, then nodded. “You’re probably right.”
“Then we proceed immediately,” Kaneda said. He activated a data cheat and accessed his contingency plans. One of them had nav beacons set up for an advance down the tunnels without icebreaker support. It would do nicely.
Kaneda ran another cheat that helped him assign squads to specific navigation paths based on their current position and status. He modified the battle plan to emphasize a speedy advance for most squads while still holding a reserve for the second icebreaker’s defense. Once satisfied with the changes, he distributed it. One by one, the crusader squads acknowledged his new orders.
“How is he?” Kaneda asked the crusader working on Three-Part.
“Besides the missing hand, he’s fine,” the crusader medic said. “As long as he doesn’t have wetware issues with his left hand, he’s fit for combat.”
“Good. Three-Part?”
“I’m ready, sir.”
“Excellent,” Kaneda said. “Which of you has the least combat experience?”
“That would be me, sir,” the crusader medic said.
“Give up your weapon then return to the surface,” Kaneda said. “The rest of you are with us.”
The crusader medic handed over his Gatling gun and helped Three-Part connect the ammo feed to the back of his suit.
“Move out,” Kaneda said.
“I’ll take point,” Three-Part said. He moved in front of the other five crusaders and marched down the tunnel. No one protested his choice.
“We’ll take this tunnel back to a nearby fork,” Kaneda said. “Then head down through the crypts.”
“What crypts?” Alice asked.
“There’s a First Space Age burial ground near our position,” Kaneda said. “The dead had to be buried somewhere.”
The squad headed through the tunnel to a small circular room, took a left down a steep slope, and followed it for several minutes until it leveled out. They advanced, multitrackers turning the darkness into overlapping grids of information.
Kaneda once again felt a sense of nostalgia. He remembered walking down this same tunnel years ago with nothing more than a child-sized pressure suit, some basic climbing tools, a cutting torch, and a flashlight. Primal fear of the dark and its hidden monsters had almost overwhelmed him. He had been, what ... eight at the time? Nine?
Now the dark holds something far deadlier, Kaneda thought. Ironic, isn’t it, Ryu? You were such a coward back then. Now you’re the monster lurking in the shadows.
Kaneda remembered their weeklong negotiation. In the end, young Ryu’s price had been ten bars of chocolate and Kaneda’s entire Space Brain action figure collection. It had been worth it. The adventure through the tunnels never yielded the treasure Kaneda had yearned for, but the thrills and terror made it worth the price. Not even a skittish Ryu ran out of the drive to explore. But they did run out of rations.
“Someone’s been through here,” Alice said, stopping in front of an archway with faded Japanese characters.
Kaneda stepped to the head of the group and examined the cuts in the heavy door. Three sloppy lines formed a rough triangular hole. Crusaders couldn’t fit through. Even dragons would struggle to squeeze in unless they were child-sized.
“These tunnels are occasionally visited by treasure hunters,” Kaneda said. “Dragons wouldn’t leave evidence like this.”
“You’re probably right,” Alice said. “Anyway, the cuts don’t look recent. There’s no residual heat.”
Kaneda put his gauntlet through the hole and clamped onto the upper edge. He ripped the door off its hinges, set it aside, and scanned the interior. The crypt seemed a lot smaller than last time. It still stretched on for a good distance, but his multitracker allowed him to see the end. It was a long, rectangular hall with five paths from one end to the other. The paths were separated by frozen bodies stacked up to his neck.
Some were wrapped in burial cloaks, but most were naked.
“Crypt is too generous a word for this,” Alice said.
“Yeah,” Three-Part said. “They’re stacked like wood in a mill.”
“Form a line and advance,” Kaneda said.
“Yes, sir,” Three-Part said.
The crusaders spread out and marched through the crypt. Kaneda and Three-Part were the only two tall enough to see over the stacks of corpses.
“I’ve never seen anything like this,” Alice said. “What is this place?”
“It’s a rather long story.”
“I’ve got the time if you do.”
“Hmm, very well,” Kaneda said. “The Redoubt Campus was built near the end of the First Space Age. A group of corporations, mostly from the countries of Japan and the United States, established a base on Europa less than twenty years before global war consumed Earth.”
“The end of the First Space Age,” Three-Part said. “Now that was a war with only losers, especially the colonies.”
“Quite right,” Kaneda said.
“Why Europa?” Alice asked.
“Some records suggest the corporations pushed the bounds of ethics and legality,” Kaneda said. “I suppose the distance shielded them from scrutiny. They also expected global war and must have felt the best strategy was to be somewhere else. The high radiation of the Jupiter system made it an uncontested territory at the time.
“The campus was a massive research operation that produced ‘goods’ it could transmit back to Earth such as software and nanotech designs. The first steps from old carbon composites to modern diamoplastics were made in the Redoubt Campus.”
The crusaders exited through an archway at the rear of the crypt and proceeded down a steep slope.
“These days the campus has become a fixture of popular culture,” Kaneda said. “It has its share of ghost stories, both supernatural and technological. Chambers full of nanotech virus clouds that will turn men into goo. Secret vaults filled with lost technology. Vengeful spirits trapped in the ice. The campus is technically a historical preserve, but that doesn’t stop the rare treasure hunter or two. The people who go missing in these tunnels only add to the mystique.”
“Any truth to those treasure stories?” Three-Part asked.
“I doubt it,” Kaneda said. “I know I never found anything worthwhile.”
“You’re kidding,” Alice said. “You mean you too?”
“I was once young and stupid, just like everyone else.”
Kaneda inched up to a deep shaft. Two sets of cables dangled from pulleys at the top. Wreckage from what might have been a freight elevator sat at the bottom. He focused his multitracker onto the shaft and the various portals branching off it. Nothing showed up.
“Damn,” Alice said. “They could be hiding in any of those passages.”
“Press on,” Kaneda said. “Our presence will push the dragons further from the icebreaker.”
“They might have an ambush set up at the bottom,” Three-Part said. “I’ll check it out.”
Without another word, Three-Part dropped down the shaft. For anyone used to Earth’s harsh gravity, it looked like he was falling in slow motion. Still, the shaft was so deep he gained substantial velocity and hit the bottom in a shower of ice and wreckage.
Three-Part swept his surroundings before calling in. “Looks clear, sir.”
Kaneda dropped down the shaft and crashed into a pile of wreckage next to Three-Part. He stepped out of the way to provide room for the other crusaders dropping down. When they were assembled, Three-Part led the way through a side passage and down a gentle decline.
“So what happened to Europa after the First Great War?” Three-Part asked.
“Everyone just struggled to survive,” Kaneda said. “They couldn’t go home. They’d dismantled the original colony ship for parts and no relief was bothering to come this far out. Even if they had returned, most of the governments had destroyed each other in nuclear exchanges. They had to find ways to sustain the colony without supplies from Earth.
“My ancestors were a hardy, resourceful people and they chose their home well,” Kaneda said. “From ice comes water for drinking, oxygen for breathing, and hydrogen for fusion energy. But that alone is not enough. A technological society needs raw materials. Parts break down and have to be replaced. Much of what you’ve seen came from the colony ship, but that could only take them so far. They had to reach the ocean floor and find new sources of ore. Many of the tunnels we’ve seen grew organically from that original push to the ocean.”
“That couldn’t have been easy,” Three-Part said.
“It wasn’t,” Kaneda said. “Infighting plagued the early years. Many of these tunnels are littered with corpses. There were clashes and violent takeovers so vicious they make the Corporate Coup look like a friendly argument. But in the end Europa survived.”
“Is that a sense of pride I hear in your voice?” Alice asked wryly.
“Perhaps,” Kaneda said. “Europa survived the end of the First Space Age, and her people outlasted the Martian blockade at the end of the Second Space Age. Europan society is built on a shared history of doing whatever it takes to survive.”
“Officially, Martian historians hold that Europa struck first during the Second Great War,” Three-Part said.
“Really? I’d like to see their so-called proof.”
Kaneda received a SolarNet message from the lamprey bunker encrypted with a single-use scrambler. He activated his corresponding descrambler.
“Go ahead, Viter,” Kaneda said.
“Sir, the second icebreaker has reached the surface. Engineering teams are assembling it now.”
“Excellent, though I suspect that’s not why you’re using a scrambler.”
“No, sir. There has been some odd movement within the fleet. I’m not sure what to make of it.”
“Elaborate.”
“The fleet formation has changed,” Viter said. “One of the transports moved into the center of our formation.”
“Which one?”
“The Errand of Mercy.”
“And the other two?”
“No change, sir. They’re still holding position behind the fleet. A few Europan interceptors tried to swing around and engage them, but the Federacy escorts drove them off.”
“I see,” Kaneda said.
“Shall I take action?” Viter asked.
“No, but keep a close eye on that ship. Inform me of any other changes.”
“Yes, sir,” Viter said. He closed the link.
A KIA code from a crusader in squad gamma-twelve scrolled in front of Kaneda. He called up a record of the squad’s activities. Gamma-twelve and three other full-strength squads had corralled two dragons to a dead end. The dragons were now a gory mess smeared across the ice.
That wouldn’t be you, Ryu, Kaneda thought. You’re too smart to retreat down a dead end. You’ll be lurking on the fringe, waiting for someone to make a mistake. If you engage, it will be because you’re dictating the flow of battle, not the other way around. But where are you? I know you’re out there. You must be watching us, either directly or with dot-cams sprinkled throughout these tunnels.
“Have you noticed, sir?” Three-Part asked on a private channel. “We haven’t encountered any robots like those on Apocalypse.”
“Yes, I’ve noticed,” Kaneda said.
“What do you suppose it means?” Alice asked.
“Nothing good, I suspect.”
Three-Part led the way into a wide two-story hall with floors and walls of faux-marble and wood. It was all silicate plastic from Europan ocean sand, but his ancestors had achieved a clean, elegant look with the materials on hand. Second story balconies looked down upon a central hall full of toppled chairs, broken tables, and a few frozen cadavers.
“Classy,” Alice said.
“Stay alert,” Kaneda said. He focused his multitracker onto the balconies. “I think they’re in this room.”
/> “If they are, they have my multitracker fooled,” Three-Part said. “Nothing but standard background noise.”
“Let’s see if I can flush them out,” Kaneda said. He aimed his Gatling gun at the balcony to his immediate right and fired. Vari-shells blew the balcony into a shower of flaming plastic splinters. He swept his fire across the balconies, blasting each of them apart.
A blurry shape moved above the exit at the other end of the hall. His multitracker extrapolated its various inputs into a rough silhouette with a sniper rifle aimed at his chest. The dragon sniper fired.
Kaneda jerked his body sideways. The bullet struck with bone jarring force, cut a metallic groove across his chest plate, and hit the crusader behind him in the hip. The high-power shatterback pierced through triple layers of diamoplast plating before detonating in a hail of shrapnel that minced the crusader’s organs.
A KIA code lit up in Kaneda’s field of vision. He adjusted his aim, still firing, and drew a bead on the sniper’s last known position. The four other crusaders flooded the room with weapons fire, targeting the balconies and anything their multitrackers tagged as suspicious. The outer walls disintegrated into flying chunks of plastic, foam, and ice. The balconies collapsed to the ground, and the walls caved in.
Three shapes moved towards the exit. The sniper ducked through the passage while two dragons turned and fired with JD-50s. A shatterback ricocheted off Kaneda’s shoulder. He kept firing and charged their position. The other crusaders followed him in, plastering the exit with a continuous stream of vari-shells. Heavy detonations ate away the exit and the archway over it. When the crusaders were done, the portal was twice as wide.
Kaneda stopped at the icy rubble leading to the next tunnel. The dragons must have moved on. His multitracker couldn’t find any pieces of them in the ice.
“Sir?” Three-Part asked.
“They’re running for the ocean access,” Kaneda said. “Let’s see if we can catch them.”
“Yes, sir!” Three-Part said. He and Alice checked around the corner, then broke cover and charged. Kaneda and the other two crusaders ran after them. The tunnel sloped down a shallow staircase and widened at the bottom. Residential quarters branched off to either side. The crusaders rushed through.