But she didn’t want Liala to die, either. Liala was fascinating, and a huge leap forward in this particular phase of drysine evolution. And, yes, just as Kaspowitz and every other sane person on Phoenix had warned she shouldn’t do, she’d grown to like Liala, in ways that were entirely unwise but entirely human. And then there was Styx, and what she’d likely do to anyone who’d been involved in killing her second-in-command, however unlikely it seemed that she’d share the emotional sentiments that humans felt toward their offspring.
Inform Timoshene and Liala of what Hiro was considering doing? Timoshene would kill Hiro on the spot, and probably Liala would too, however inexperienced in killing. Besides, Hiro was Lisbeth’s old friend, a member of the extended Debogande family from those happy, relatively simple days on Homeworld. She could no more purposely get Hiro killed than any other member of her family.
Lisbeth’s audio caught distant thunder, a reverberation she saw on the parren visor alert with Porgesh script alerting her to probable gunfire, location undetermined.
“Shots fired on Fortitude marine attempting entry through the hole,” Ruei announced. “No hits, I expect they will attempt an explosive entry.”
“The nanobots are best avoided,” said Liala, turning back the way they’d come. “They metabolise slowly, but in an agitated state they could be dangerous. This way, I estimate a high probability of a transmitter’s location in a neighbouring building. We must first reach the ground.”
They’d barely made it another fifty metres down the previous sloping passage when a large explosion shook the floor, followed by the sound of shooting on coms. “They are through,” said Liala, accelerating to her four-legged gallop on the treacherous floor. “Entry in force, we must move rapidly.”
Lisbeth tried to run, more confident now in armour, but stumbling repeatedly on decayed steel and synthetic fittings. The passage floor began to slope down, branching in multiple directions as they passed lower levels, and surely the ground was not too far away as these buildings were not especially tall…
“Dse Pa and I are withdrawing to a new ambush point,” came Ruei’s voice on coms. “They are descending by cables from the new hole, we hit some but return fire is too accurate from our old positions, we are both damaged.”
“Continue harassment,” Timoshene replied as he ran. “They must be slowed.”
Ahead, the passage dropped alarmingly into near-vertical freefall, where drones using the mass-transit system would have no concerns of gravity. Liala took a left turn to an adjoining passage, while Lisbeth, now trailing by some metres, saw Hiro turn to check on her… and freeze in alarm at something behind.
“Lis get down!” But she had no time to get down before the blast smacked her like a mallet and sent her skidding then tumbling as the passage went vertical… and then she was falling, barely able to realise that she was certainly dead and would land on her head… only to skid once more with a screech and clatter of sliding armour, then tumble several more times, and finally come to a gasping halt.
For a moment she lay on her back and tried to process what had just happened. Her visor was flashing error messages, then auto-diagnostic as it tried to find its own answers. Her ears were ringing, and several voices were talking at once… one was Hiro’s. “Lis went down the hole, I’m going after her.”
Which motivated her to get her elbows beneath her and raise up to look. The passage had levelled out slowly like a children’s slide, easing out her fall without an impact… only half of the entire passage was collapsed, chewed and melted as though by a thousand steel-eating moths, littering the way down with jagged steel beams and tangles of old filament wiring. How the hell had she missed all that? She must have gone through one of the gaps by sheer luck.
“No Hiro, it’s too dangerous,” she said breathlessly. “The bottom levels out slowly, I’m fine but I missed a major collision by millimetres. If you try it, you won’t be that lucky.”
Whatever Hiro had been going to reply was interrupted by another explosion further up. “Lis, they’re shooting down the passage, guided munitions, they’re turning corners and chasing us. I’m going with Liala… look you’ve done enough, just hide and let them chase us instead.”
“I hear you.” It was tempting. One of her visor warnings told her of a missing rifle. She looked about, and found that sure enough, her back-mounted rifle had been detached in the fall and now lay beside her. She rolled and grasped it, that motion creating waves of feedback as the suit diagnostic figured how badly it had been knocked around, and recalibrated. The rifle had a few scratches but responded to suit armscomp through glove sensors as she held it, interlocking with suit systems and informing her that everything worked. It really was a beast of a gun, usable outside of armour only by the very strongest human, and probably not at all by the more slender parren. Still it was modest compared to a Koshaim-20, and in the armour felt no more difficult than holding a crowbar.
She rolled to her knees and looked around. This was the ground floor, or what was left of it. The mad nanos had been to work here as well, but the wide floor seemed mostly concrete or similar, and thus at least solid. But the broad ceiling was collapsing, the space looking as though ravaged by fire, remaining surfaces stained black, what might have been machinery, fittings or furniture collapsed into piles of unrecognisable rubble.
Lisbeth stood up and walked through it, avoiding stepping in anything that looked gooey or dripping. There were several of those, though she could not tell if they were secretions from the nanos, or what happened to the alloys and chemicals they were metabolising once dissolved. Liala’s optics were advanced, and she had not said just how small the nanos were, or if parren optics could detect them.
At the front of the room, what once might have been broad windows overlooked a street outside. Lisbeth couldn’t imagine that deepynines had had any use for streets. All the hacksaw bases she’d seen were a hive/warren of multi-function chambers interlocked by passages. Individual buildings with streets between them seemed common to many organic civilisations, the function of a concept of private property combined with a need for at least some open space, both of which AIs lacked. Whatever the arrangement that had seen deepynines build here, it had been on parren conditions to please parren hosts.
Only peering out past a decaying support frame did she recall that the display on her visor was all non-visible light — the road more than ten metres in either direction lost all semblance of realism, fading into blackness as suit sensors lost sensitivity. Above, she saw a flash of tracer fire, then another, answered by a roar of heavy cannon — that would be Dse Pa, encouraging any pursuing Fortitude marine to take immediate cover or be dismembered. Twenty seconds of ammunition on a drysine drone, she recalled one marine analysis saying… Dse Pa alone against Fortitude marines would run dry soon enough.
Her suit was not equipped with any parren version of tacnet, but she could ask. “Liala,” she said into coms, and her voice sounded foreign to her ears — dry and tense. “Location please.”
“We are in the neighbouring building, Lisbeth,” said Liala. “There was a bridge adjoining above ground level, I believe the transmitter will be in the next building beyond.”
She wasn’t trained for this… but Hiro was going to try and stop Liala from reaching that transmitter, and she couldn’t just warn Liala or Timoshene because Timoshene in particular would just kill him. What the hell she could do about it, Lisbeth didn’t know, but she couldn’t just sit here and hide.
She peered out both ways, saw nothing, then ran straight across to the equally-devastated bay-opening off the roadside, leaping fallen structural supports with newly-acquired skill. A vertical support presented and she ducked behind it, pausing with rifle held vertical as she’d seen parren and human marines do in training to present no silhouette for an enemy to see. As she waited, the beam-flicker of a laser-scan began to her left, and worked its way across the decayed debris toward her hiding place. The suit’s threat-detection hi
ghlighted it, in the way an adult might observe something obvious for a small child, and suggested that the thrumming on audio might indicate a hover drone on the road outside. Which had probably seen her cross. Dammit.
The thrumming grew louder, and the visor gave her a range from that audio, numbers decreasing. It was coming into the room, hover propulsion of some kind and probably armed. Shit. If it drew up alongside her, it would see her. Ahead of her were walls and new passages, one of them would likely lead in the direction Liala, Timoshene and Hiro had taken, but if she made a dash for it the drone would see and probably shoot her. So the first move she made had better be to shoot it first.
She’d done it in drill, mostly with Phoenix marines who’d determined that she could hit things at relatively close range, but not much else. Well, this was relatively close range. She rehearsed the move in her mind, activating the rifle targeting and seeing the spot appear on her visor, currently pointed at the ceiling… just turn the corner, line up that sight on the drone, and pull the trigger. Simple. Only her heart was hammering so hard it was an effort just to keep the rifle still. Now if she could just…
Something hit her cover with an almighty clang, sparks and fragments flying… it was shooting at her! She dove flat, the one instinct Phoenix marines and the terrifying firefight on Joma Station had managed to instil in her, and something clanged hard off her arm. She got up and dove two steps for new cover, a pile of collapsed supports that had peeled off a wall, and rolled behind as shots blew bits off… and returned fire on full auto, spraying like a madwoman until the weapon told her it was too hot and stopped.
But return fire had stopped as well, so she rolled to her feet and ran for the first passage, finding a wall and propping her back against it, then aiming back the way she’d come. Flipped to rifle-fire, recalling how horribly inaccurate full-auto had been. The drone zipped across her arc and she tracked it with determination, rapid shots with the butt to her shoulder as she squeezed the trigger repeatedly. The big ball-drone spun at one hit, then fell in an explosion of debris at a second.
The exhilaration was shocking, born mostly of terror and brain-sizzling adrenaline. She wanted to scream in triumph, but all that came out was a desperate gasp. Short-lived, as something small hit the debris to her side at velocity, and she guessed it was a grenade a millisecond before it blew up with a force that would have killed her if not for the armour. But she recalled this bit of marine training too — don’t shelter from the grenade if you don’t have to, take the blast, trust your armour and keep your weapon ready. And when the parren-armoured figure edged its rifle around the corner ahead, she saw it through the smoke and ringing ears, and sent it jumping back with semi-accurate fire. Then she turned and ran, up the passage and around the bend, where any pursuer would have to risk ambush to follow.
“Lisbeth, I have your position,” came Liala’s voice. “Follow my directives, we are beneath the transmitter now.”
Liala’s directives flashed to Lisbeth’s visor, lighting the way ahead as she ran, taking a right as the passage forked. “Drones!” Lisbeth gasped. “They’ve got drones, I shot one!”
“I cannot hack the drones unless they enter my direct sight,” Liala replied. “Lisbeth, I would advise that you hide and leave the mission to those of us who are combat qualified.”
Lisbeth kept running. She half-expected Liala’s directions to vanish from her visor, the best way for the drysine to stop Lisbeth from following her, but they did not. It suggested indecisiveness… or something else.
About another curve in the passage and Lisbeth heard gunfire ahead, rifle pops and the harsh roar that could only be Liala’s cannons. Another left, and the passage opened onto a scene of devastation — a vertical hole carved through multiple levels of building above, floors and walls collapsed into debris that hung like strange alien growth from a jungle canopy. The nanos had been busy here, gnawing their way through floor after floor for endless millennia… and she skidded to a halt as the hole in the floor became visible past accumulated piles of junk.
The hole continued straight down, many metres wide and disappearing deep into the rock below where doubtless most of the collapsing building had gone as well. But she could not stare into the black depths for long, bullets were striking the upper levels, then an explosion that tore more debris loose and sent it falling into the depths. She took cover, peering upward. Liala, Timoshene, Hiro and Tanden must be up there somewhere… why couldn’t she hear them? They must have changed frequencies, she decided… either that or the surface-level parren jamming had made its way down this far, but that couldn’t be right — Liala wouldn’t have been able to speak to her just now.
Something fell on the other side of the hole, just crashed down amidst collapsing steel floors and lay still not far from the hole’s edge. A parren armour suit… and her visor ID read ‘Tanden’. Lisbeth ran left, finding a way through a wall that was more holes than wall, noting the rubber insulation of large cabling that remained mostly uneaten amid the porridge of what had once been a high-tech installation. Power conduits, she thought frantically, fighting her way around the hole. Liala said the nanos metabolised power cabling in particular. The big thing a city like this one might once have built underground was a power reactor of some kind. If that hole led to a reactor cavern, the nanos would have eaten all the connecting conduits… and a high-power transmitter might be just the kind of thing to be built directly above a reactor, the kind of transmitter that could once have beamed directly to bases elsewhere in this solar system.
“Liala, I’m at the big hole in the ground,” she announced, scrambling a detour to breach another wall. “Tanden’s down, I’m trying to get to him. Why can’t I hear you?”
“Lisbeth, the transmitter is high above, on the roof. The floors here are all eaten through. Tanden fell when the floors collapsed. My weight is greatest but my distribution best. Be wary of Fortitude marines on higher floors, we forced them back with fire, but they pursue.”
Lisbeth reached Tanden, and found him struggling to move, half buried in the rotted junk he’d fallen in. She grabbed his armoured hands and pulled, gratified to feel her own armoured power kicking in, hauling his great weight easily through debris to the cover of another wall. One of his legs was kicking uncontrollably, showing all the signs of an armour malfunction. Worse, her visor’s IR vision showed far too much heat coming off the back-mounted powerplant. Now Tanden popped his visor, then a loud cracking sound as he popped the armour’s emergency release, separating upper and lower torso.
“Help me get out!” he gasped. “The nanos are eating it!” Now the temperature readings and convulsing limbs made sense. She helped to dislocate the armoured shoulders outward, giving Tanden room to wriggle, then heaved the upper half along the floor, leaving the parren half-behind, fighting to get clear. The discarded armour cooled as the powerplant went into automatic shutdown, but still the limbs twitched and shuddered.
“They must have an attack mode that accelerates their metabolism,” said Lisbeth helping Tanden crouch behind cover, clad now in simple jumpsuit, dripping with sweat. “Are you hurt? Are the nanos hurting you?”
Without coms, Tanden could barely hear her through her helmet, eyes wide in a stunned, uncertain way as he felt around for his balance. Then she realised that without his helmet visor he couldn’t see a damn thing — it was pitch black out there to organic eyes.
“I’m not hurt,” he said through gritted teeth that suggested it was an untruth. “The nanos don’t attack me, just armour. Electrical circuits.” He flinched as a new volley of gunfire echoed from above. “They ate all the circuits leading up to the transmitter. Liala and Timoshene climb.”
Movement from across the hole, and Lisbeth pressed Tanden flat, nearly forgetting her armoured power. The movement resolved into a parren marine… no ID on her visor, so clearly Fortitude. Possibly the one who’d shot a grenade at her earlier, and chased her this far. He scanned about the hole, looking up and about, trying t
o make sense of what he saw. Without Liala, a knowledge of how the nanos worked, or an engineering degree, Lisbeth reckoned it might take him a little longer.
“Liala?” Lisbeth asked, heart hammering as something else occurred to her. “Why did you change frequencies? My coms won’t detect your channel anywhere. I want to talk to Hiro.”
“I’m afraid that’s not possible right now, Lisbeth.”
Her heart nearly stopped. “Liala? Where is Hiro?”
“I think we both know that Hiro wants to kill me, Lisbeth.” And Lisbeth cursed herself for a fool, because not only was Liala every bit as smart as Styx, she was apparently far better socialised as well, having spent all of her young life in the company of organics.
“Liala…” she tried to gather her thoughts. What could she say to keep Hiro alive? Should she say anything? That was a horrifying thought, but… and a new thought interrupted the previous train. Why was the Fortitude marine across the hole kneeling?
She levered herself up to risk a glimpse. The marine knelt by the side of the hole, head back, hands to his helmet as though clutching it in some kind of anguish. Had the nanos gotten to him too? But no, he wasn’t in any pile of obvious debris where the nanos seemed to congregate, and his suit’s movements were controlled. IR vision showed no elevated heat levels from the powerplant. He just sat there, head in hands, rocking in great apparent distress. It was the strangest thing to see from a fearsomely armed and armoured parren warrior… and then she realised that she had in fact seen it once before, when Major Thakur had defeated Aristan in the catharan on Elsium months ago. And then her jaw dropped open.
Croma Venture: (The Spiral Wars Book Five) Page 39