Going Dark

by Linda Nagata

  No response, not for half a minute or more.

  “Movement,” Tran warns me.

  A few seconds later, a trembling figure comes into sight around the hood of the truck. It’s Damir, looking like a scared kid. “Facedown on the floor,” I tell him as Leonid returns.

  Leonid crouches behind me, putting an open case of white-phosphorus grenades on the floor at my feet. “If you don’t have Maksim in your sights, you’ve got nothing,” he warns me.

  “I understand. Now go.”

  Damir is down on the floor. I feel bad for the kid, but Tran matters more to me. The mission matters more. “Logan, let me know when Leonid is with you.”

  “Roger that.”

  “Shelley,” Tran says, sounding worried at last. “What are we doing?”

  I use my gaze to modify the link, taking it to a private channel. “We’re going to blow up the truck.”

  “Ah, fuck.”

  “If we don’t do it, Abaza will.”

  “But—”

  “Just listen. You’re going to have about four seconds to get over here, no second chances. And then you fucking fly down this tunnel—”

  “Goddamn it, Shelley, I don’t have my rig!”

  “—don’t wait, because if the firestorm doesn’t kill us outright, it’s going to suck all the oxygen—”

  “I know that! I know.”

  “Are you ready?”

  “Yes. All right. Fucking do it.”

  “Stand by.” I switch back to gen-com. “Logan?”

  “Waiting on Leonid …” Another thirty seconds go by. “Okay, he’s here.”

  “Confirm he has the explosives.”

  “Roger that. He has them.”

  “Okay. Trigger your countdown. And run. Tran?”

  “Here!”

  “When you see the smoke, run.”

  In quick succession, I pull the pins on three of the grenades and toss them across the floor so they bounce toward the truck. With luck, at least one will lodge against a tire. All three ignite into spinning columns of burning white phosphorus spewing a dense white smoke.

  Damir looks up in shock, while Tran breaks from behind the LTV, sprinting all out for the tunnel, his pack banging against his back. He’s got one HITR in his hand and two more strapped to the sides of his pack. The smoke is a screen hiding him from Abaza and his crew, but the smoke is already rising toward the low ceiling, and the grenades will burn for only fifteen seconds.

  Shouts erupt from behind the truck. I see sparks as bullets ping against the floor. They’re aiming at the grenades, not at Tran. They’re trying to keep the incendiaries away from the truck, which I admit is a smart move. Through the smoke I glimpse Damir retreating toward the locked gate. He’s got a pistol in his hand. It’s aimed at me.

  I dive across the tunnel. Rounds crack where I was just standing, skimming the walls and the floor, kicking up shrapnel. From my position on the floor, I look for Damir—but he’s hidden by the smoke. I fire three rounds anyway, just to discourage him.

  The smoke is at its densest around and beneath the truck. I can’t see if any of the grenades have lodged against the tires, but that just means there’s no way Abaza can see Tran. That’s what I tell myself. But where is Damir?

  And then Tran stumbles. He goes down, skidding on his belly, just as one of the grenades bursts into a roaring white incandescent fountain. A bullet must have hit it and kicked it out from under the truck. Burning white phosphorous sprays across the garage and someone starts screaming.

  Not Tran.

  He’s on his feet again, racing for the tunnel.

  “Don’t stop,” I tell him. “Don’t slow down.”

  Blood gleams on his right pant leg, from hip to ankle, a blazingly bright hue of red in the white phosphorous light. He reaches the tunnel, charges into it, but as he races past me, he starts to slow. “Shelley!”

  “Go!”

  One by one, I pull the pins on the next set of grenades, but this time I stand up and heave them directly onto the flatbed. As soon as the last one leaves my hand, I turn and run—but my right foot sticks as I push off on it. It must have been hit with shrapnel. I didn’t even notice. But now the joints are locked at a crazy angle. I run anyway, balancing on the heel, hoping the foot doesn’t fall apart. I imagine I can feel the joints in the left foot grinding.

  I’m still better off than Tran. He’s loping, favoring his wounded leg. I catch up to him and scream, “Fucking run!”

  He tries. He does. Burdened by the weight of his pack and three HITRs. Far ahead, I see Logan’s light in the darkness of the tunnel. And then the truck blows up.

  • • • •

  It’s a series of explosions. The first one is small. The second is massive. I lose count after that.

  A blast wave picks us up and hurls us another five meters along the tunnel. I crawl into the shelter of a chamber. Tran scrambles in behind me. We stay down, pressing our faces against the rock until the roar subsides.

  Air swirls around us, rushing out of the room, out of my lungs. I gasp for a breath. It’s like breathing air out of an oven. And it stinks. Tran coughs. I cough. I don’t think we’ve got much time. My lungs are twitching, burning in the noxious air.

  So I get up, grab a strap on Tran’s backpack, and haul him up. He’s still got two HITRs secured to his pack, but his own weapon, the one he had in his hands, is gone. My rifle has disappeared too. And the tunnel is cluttered with debris. Chunks of hot metal and plastic and—for all I know—body parts. I don’t look too closely. I just try not to trip over my bent foot as we stumble together deeper down the tunnel.

  Back in the garage there’s another explosion, but it’s not a big one. I hope like hell the munitions still in the armory don’t get hot enough to go off on their own.

  The fiery light from the garage fades quickly as lack of oxygen extinguishes the flames. We’re limping into deeper darkness anyway. The fucking plugs are hurting my ears, so I pry them out. We reach the missile chamber. I glance inside to see a few amber lights high above me and a glow against the back wall. I don’t stay to see more.

  The air gets a little better after that. Our pace picks up. And then I see Logan’s light ahead of us.

  “Watch out!” he shouts, waving the light up and down like he’s trying to blind me. The beam catches against swirling smoke. “Slow down, slow down! The tunnel stops here.”

  Coughing and wheezing, we stumble to a halt in front of a wall of solid rock. I reach out to touch it, harboring a delusional hope that it isn’t real—but of course it is. Despite the fiery air, it has a cold solidity that sends a chill of horror through my nervous system. Tran’s not doing any better. “Holy God,” he breathes.

  But then I look at Logan and realize he’s alone. “Where’s Papa?” I have to force the hoarse words past my raw throat. “Where’s Issam?”

  “I sent them ahead.”

  “Ahead where?”

  “There’s a test bore.” He’s speaking quickly as he turns his light, sweeping the beam at the wall behind him until it plunges into a dark rectangle in the stone, only four feet high. “Whoever built this UGF, they didn’t finish.”

  “You sure that goes somewhere?” Tran wheezes.

  “It’s not like we’ve got a choice! We need to move. This air is killing us.”

  I glance at Tran’s icon, yellow in my overlay. Fuck. My icon is yellow too. “Logan, you’ve got the light. You’re first.”

  “One of those HITRs is mine.” He unstraps one of the weapons secured to Tran’s pack. I grab the other one, but it turns out to be Logan’s gun, so we trade. As soon as I have my HITR in hand, its icon activates in my overlay.

  That’s when Tran realizes, “I dropped my HITR!” He looks back like he’s thinking of going after it. Fucking oxygen deprivation. I grab his shoulder to make sure he doesn’t move.

  “Go, Logan.”

  He’s still got the M4 from the armory. With that in one hand and his HITR in the other, he
slips into the borehole, stooping low to clear his backpack. I shove Tran after him. “You’ve still got your pistol. Now get your ass in there. We’ll take care of your leg when we’re the hell away from here.”

  That much talking sets off another coughing fit, but I move in behind Tran anyway. The tunnel is narrow. My shoulders scrape the sides, my pack drags the ceiling, and the butt of the HITR knocks against the floor.

  A wind is blowing past me. I want to take hope from that, because a breeze means there’s an outlet somewhere, right? But it’s a hot wind, blowing out of the burning cavern. It brings no relief, just poisoned air. I’m short of breath, coughing every few steps past a raw, dry throat. I trigger gen-com. In a hoarse whisper I ask, “Logan, how much time? Before the roof caves in?”

  “Twelve minutes.” Logan sounds short on breath too. “Ten seconds.”

  “You think”—I pause to breathe—“we can get out … by then?”

  “Issam thinks so … but I’ve got … no fucking clue.”

  • • • •

  We push on with all the speed we can muster. My back aches, my knees ache, my lungs feel like a rotting swamp, set on fire and smoldering. I have to stop after a minute to hack up a wad of phlegm. Tran isn’t doing any better. With blood loss on top of toxic air, he starts to stumble, and it begins to dawn on me that we are in a really bad situation.

  “Tran, you have to move faster.” Four rockets are going to ignite behind us, each with enough energy to punch a satellite out of orbit. “We have to get out of this fucking tunnel.”

  Tran does his best. Bent over, with hands braced against the walls to keep from falling, he staggers after Logan, wheezing with every breath. As I trail behind him, coughing in a cramped Hell of heat and darkness, my mind starts wandering hopeless paths. Issam thought he saw strangers coming out of this rathole, but if he was mistaken we are utterly fucked. We will die here and no one will ever know what happened to us. Delphi will never know … and I think it will always haunt her, wondering if I am dead or if I just abandoned her a second time.

  Five minutes more until the rockets ignite. We keep going. Four minutes. Three. There are noises ahead. A low, angry voice.

  “Shit,” I whisper. “That’s Papa.”

  I don’t want to say what I’m thinking, but Tran says it for me. “Something’s stopped them.” There’s a desperation in his hoarse voice that I’ve never heard before. “The fucking tunnel must be blocked.”

  “It’s not blocked.” I don’t know if that’s true, but right now we need to believe it. “We are going to get out of here.”

  Two minutes to go and I hear Leonid more clearly, “Move! Faster. You want to breathe clean air again? Don’t stop.”

  “Behind you!” Logan calls out.

  “Come on, then!”

  “Can you see the end?” Tran wants to know, his voice a raspy whisper echoing against the walls.

  “There’s no fucking end. No fucking fresh air.”

  Issam says nothing, but I hear him, a desperate whooping gasp at each indrawn breath.

  One minute left.

  No way to know what’s going to happen when the rockets ignite. That will mark the successful completion of the mission—but will it also mark our deaths? What the hell was I thinking in there, so confident we could get out?

  That confidence is gone. In my morbid imagination, I envision a torch funneling out through this borehole or a rush of superheated air and fucking nothing we can do but scramble on, putting one more meter and then another behind us because I was so sure we could handle an expanded mission that I never weighed what we could accomplish against the lives of my soldiers—

  A deep, rumbling wave of sound rolls in from behind us. The tunnel walls shiver under my hands. “Don’t stop!” Leonid yells. “Go, go, go!”

  The walls continue to vibrate, and then I hear the low, throaty roar of approaching wind, louder and louder until it catches up with me. I cringe as it sweeps past my shoulders. I am expecting heat. Extreme heat. Killing heat. And it is hot. Hot as the inside of a closed-up car on a summer day. Hotter maybe—but not hot enough to kill us outright.

  Then the wind heats up and I get scared all over again. Ahead of me, Tran stumbles, crashes to his knees. “Fuck!” he screams. “Fuck!”

  “Get up!”

  He does.

  And then there’s a thunderous crack! behind us. The sound hurts. It hits like a hammer inside my skull and I drop.

  • • • •

  For three or four seconds—hell, maybe it’s three or four minutes; I don’t know—I just lie there, stunned, held down by the weight of my pack, with my HITR underneath me, jammed against my chest, and my cheek pressed against the dusty stone. Tran is down too. I see the vague outline of his body, defined by Logan’s little light, and I hear the painful wheeze as he breathes. At least he’s breathing.

  The air is brown with dust. No wind blows. I think the cavern might have collapsed. Or the borehole caved in behind us. Something has blocked the tunnel back there, because I feel no more heat from the inferno.

  I make sure I’m linked into gen-com, and then I rasp, “Roll call.”

  “Holy fuck,” Logan whispers. “I’m still alive.”

  “Me too,” Tran concedes, stirring a little, lifting his head.

  I should probably get up too. “Papa!” I croak.

  He answers: “Da. Goddamn you, Shelley. This was not a plan.”

  “Yeah, I don’t know what the fuck I was thinking. Issam alive?”

  “So far. I still might kill him.”

  “We need to move.”

  “Da. Get up, little boy. You don’t get to die yet.”

  I hear Issam wheezing like an asthmatic. If I could do something to help him, I would, but all we can do is move on.

  In the mission Colonel Abajian assigned to me, I was to play my role as an arms dealer to the end, leaving as I came in the company of my bodyguards, with Damir driving the flatbed truck. There was no contingency for a post-inferno evacuation, or for rescuing an asthmatic Stanford scientist who’d gotten himself in with the wrong crowd.

  Issam makes it only a few more steps before he collapses. “Papa,” I call, “just get past him, go on ahead.”

  I send Tran forward too. As he squeezes past Logan, he notices the extra M4. “LT, let me carry that.”

  Logan hands it over with a warning. “Don’t lose it.”

  Tran really doesn’t need the extra weight, but I guess he needs the comfort. Carrying the M4 in one hand, he clambers over Issam and then follows the light that Leonid carries.

  I move forward with Logan. As we crouch beside Issam, my broken foot slips, pitching me to my mechanical knees. “Shit.”

  “Steady,” Logan says.

  I don’t think he’s noticed the condition of my foot yet.

  We help Issam sit up. His farsights are askew on his face and every breath is a labored gasp. I take his farsights off and fold them up to put in my pocket—but then an idea occurs to me.

  Logan?

  Here.

  Back me up.

  What?

  Gangster shit.

  “Issam,” I say out loud. Then I have to turn my head to cough. “Look at me, Issam.”

  He opens his half-closed eyes, focusing on me, his chest still heaving.

  My throat hurts. My lungs ache. I have to talk in a low, hoarse voice. “I want you to unlock your farsights.”

  At this request, Issam’s eyes widen even farther, so I know he understands me. Logan settles back on his heels, the harsh shadows cast by his little LED exaggerating his brief, cold smile. Issam’s farsights almost certainly contain extensive data gathered over two years among his “circus of murderers.” That is an invaluable intelligence asset. I don’t want it locked up and out of reach.

  I speak gently, use a reasonable tone, and make sure he understands his vulnerable position. It’s a technique of persuasion I learned from a mercenary. “Unlock your farsights for me, Issam. No
secrets anymore, okay?” I take a slow, shallow breath, struggling not to cough. “You need to give it all up if you want us to get you out of here, get you home.”

  He takes the farsights, holding them in two hands as if he doesn’t know what to do with them. “I have personal things …”

  “No.” I shake my head. “Nothing stays personal or private in this world. You know that better than most.”

  Still, he hesitates.

  I cock my head to listen. “Logan, can you still hear Papa?”

  “No. They’re too far ahead. We can’t wait any longer. We need to catch up.”

  I start to get up.

  “Don’t leave me,” Issam says.

  “Unlock the farsights,” Logan growls, “so we can get the fuck out of here.”

  Issam looks from Logan to me and back again. I think he suspects it’s an act. But why risk it? Why risk pissing us off? I watch the decision get made. He nods and slips the farsights on. His gaze shifts subtly. He mutters. “… select. Select. Yes. Yes, I’m sure!” He slides them off. Hands them to me. “No secrets,” he says. “All yours.”

  I put them on and check the security settings. Wide open. All biometric identifiers deleted. No passcode required. I shut off the network access and then I stash them in an inside zip pocket of my coat. “You’re going to be okay, Issam.” Logan helps me get him on his feet; I get his arm over my shoulder. “You’re going home.”

  In the narrow tunnel, we have to crab sideways. My pack keeps hitting the wall; the muzzle of my HITR scrapes the roof. Issam tries to help, but after a minute he’s dead weight, so I put him down again. Logan takes his shoulders, I take his knees, and we carry him.

  We stop every minute or so to breathe and to make sure Issam is still breathing. In the tight, low-oxygen environment of the tunnel, carrying him is an exhausting, dizzying chore, and I know I’m not thinking clearly. I’m not thinking of anything but the next step, so it’s a few minutes before I realize that we’re breathing cleaner, cooler air.

  Leonid and Tran have moved far ahead, but the borehole is straight, so Tran’s voice reaches us easily on gen-com. “Shelley, Logan,” he warns. “Stop where you are and hunker down. We’re going to blow the gate.”