by Aer-ki Jyr
He got back a host of negatives, confirming his suspicion that this wasn’t a tunnel shaft that was being used by The Word.
“So we need to dig down to it?” Harry asked.
“Maybe,” David said, focusing his Pefbar into as narrow a cone as he could to reach down to the base of the vertical rectangle where the tunnel met with it.
Suddenly there was a rumble from underneath and David jumped to his feet. “Maybe not. Everyone fall back,” he said, planting a special waypoint on the battlemap for them to scatter away from.
Beneath them David and some of the others whose Pefbar was advanced enough saw the rotor blades begin to spin within their casing, then once they got up to speed they elevated and broke through the thin metal, digging into the dirt and rising up towards the surface.
As David ran through the snow he looked back visually, seeing a mound of snow push up from below, then a stream of dirt burst out, blanketing the white landscape with something their eyes could actually lock onto. A few seconds later the dirt flew off the rotating auger as it came into view, with the square shaft rising up to the surface underneath it, forming a metallic hut that the falling snow started to blanket.
The rotors spun to a stop and David walked back over to it, hiking up and over a meter thick mount of snow/dirt around the new pavilion and stepped inside the two opposite walls, getting some cover from the snow as he spotted a control panel.
“It’s a lift,” he said over the comm. “Five with me, then come down in shifts.”
David switched his comm over to a frequency that would reach the dropship pilots, then ordered them to reposition their circle around the lift shaft as Harry and four other Archons stepped inside shoulder to shoulder with him, leaving just enough room for them to maneuver if/when combat broke out, otherwise they could have squeezed in more than twice that number.
David pressed the ‘down’ button and the floor began to lower them into the metallic hole. Once their heads passed below the rim and descended another two meters, an iris closed above them, shutting out the cold and the dim light, leaving them in total darkness.
Fortunately that wasn’t a problem, given that their Pefbar allowed them to see quite well, not to mention that their armor also had lights if needed, though none of the Archons turned them on, not wanting to make better targets for themselves when the lift reached the bottom.
There was no door on it, so a crack formed at their feet first, then it expanded up into a full square opening that led them into a very wide and deep tunnel at the base of what looked like a loading dock and a pair of ramps…with absolutely no one in sight.
Harry noticed the single control panel on the wall beside the lift shaft, noting it only had one button.
“You pressed that from up there?”
“Barely,” he admitted. “Saves a lot of digging.”
“No lights,” Mike-10395 observed, looking at the ceiling and walls that were clearly synthetic rather than having been cut out of rough stone…then again, with an Ocean nearby one didn’t want to have to worry about potential leakage. Still, this tunnel entrance was the nearest to the base coordinates at some 420 miles away, meaning someone had gone to a lot of work to carve out and line the tunnel…yet they hadn’t bothered to add lights?
“Maybe they haven’t finished yet, or maybe they don’t need them,” David said, pressing the ‘up’ button on the lift and hopping off it as it returned back to the surface so the next group could make their way down. “That’s a lot of tunnel to light if you’re hardly ever going to use it.”
“We would,” Mike noted.
David frowned as the lift disappeared above the entrance. “Point.”
“You think the other tunnels are like this?” Harry wondered.
“No, I think we got the spare,” David said as he got on the teamcomm. “Looks like we’re going to need the mongooses after all. Get them unpacked once the dropships move. Should be able to fit four.”
“Wide tunnel,” Harry remarked after he’d finished. “Too big for this little exit.”
“I was thinking the same thing,” another acolyte remarked. “Unless all the tunnels are the same size.”
“A lot of extra digging,” Harry replied, with the Archons looking out down the tunnel as far as their Pefbar would allow. They could see the floor, walls, and pointed ceiling forming a house-like pentagon, but there was nothing visible as the tunnel disappeared beyond their view a few dozens of meters ahead, depending on the individual Archon.
David went ahead and flicked his suit’s lights on, but they didn’t penetrate much further. The other five did likewise, brightening the immediate area with small floodlights, but the massive tunnel, easily wide enough to hold a four-lane highway, swallowed them up, not letting them see very far ahead, but according to the reconnaissance scans the tunnel descended at a shallow angle until it reached a depth of several kilometers below the seafloor, then it flattened out and wiggled its way out towards the center of the Arctic, intersecting with another spur line before connecting to the main base.
There were no other stops, so far as the limited scan could see, but a small outcropping or checkpoint wasn’t out of the question…though David got the feeling they weren’t going to find anything but empty tunnel until they got out to their destination.
It took longer than he expected for the first group of mongooses to come down. They’d packed them into the dropships in case there wasn’t any local Word transportation for them to pirate, given the hundreds of miles that they weren’t going to travel on foot. Each of the mongooses had been equipped with a backup fuel canister underneath the seat sufficient to get them out and back at least once on the furthest length of tunnel…with David’s being the shortest of them all, meaning they shouldn’t have any problems, and could probably make it on a single load, but given the lengths involved they didn’t want to take chances, which is why they brought a mongoose for each person, giving them the option to double up if one or more became damaged.
This was The Word after all, and even though he didn’t feel like there was any danger here, they weren’t above using booby traps, so they’d also brought a long a few multi-seaters that could carry extra gear, including some drones. Only if they got very lucky would they get to the base and find the doors open, and with this entrance not having any defenses whatsoever David pretty much ruled out that possibility.
Whatever was waiting for them they’d tackle while the drilling team created their own back door…he just hoped the base didn’t have a self-destruct nuke tucked away, and they’d brought ultra-sensitive detectors to try and smoke out that possible threat, but if it was well-shielded they’d never know until it was too late.
Which was why the drones got to go first, both in the tunnels and the drilling shaft.
Once all 32 Archons and their rides were down the shaft…with the mongooses having to be pushed more than driven through the thick snow…David mounted up his low to the ground four wheeler with a small gear satchel attached to the back in place of a second rider and trolled his way up to the front of the group, with the onboard lights punching much further down the tunnel than their armor’s had…yet still they were ate up by the distances involved.
“Travel by twos,” David ordered, pulling out ahead but at a speed the others could easily match as they formed up. “3 second spacing. If we come up on something I don’t want us pancaking. If anyone has trouble say so immediately. It’s a long walk back if you fall off the group, and the tunnel is smooth enough we’re going to be moving fast. Let’s go.”
David, now with Harry flanking him on the left and both of them with meters of space between them and the walls, accelerated smoothly, dragging the others behind him in a long convoy of nearly silent vehicles, but with the lack of any other sounds they made for a buzzing swarm of bees as they zipped off down the annoyingly straight tunnel, with David feeling the slight downhill as he passed 100km per hour. He continued to accelerate further, eyes focused ahead in
case any obstruction might occur, but none would come.
Over the next several hours the mongooses would fly down empty tunnel enroute to the branch point…which was likewise undefended. It was merely a splitting of the tunnel, with no sign of anyone in either direction. The spur turn was the largest they had to navigate, but while the rest of the tunnel appeared straight there were very shallow adjustments as it almost imperceptibly zigzagged its way across the Arctic bedrock, allowing the mongooses to maintain their high rate of speed.
The closer they got to their target the more angst David felt. He knew the drilling team was even now coring its way down to the base, and he wondered how close they had to get to breaching before The Word would become aware of their activity. If it’d been Star Force, they would have put some small sensors on the Ocean floor above, or maybe that was just paranoid thinking. After all, The Word had built this base by digging under the Arctic because they couldn’t venture out into the ocean without Star Force’s aquatics fleet noticing.
So no, they probably didn’t know they were being drilled down to, but thanks to David’s group’s easy insertion, it was questionable as to who would get to the target first, and what they would find when they got there.
David didn’t like going in blind, but given the size of these tunnels, the obvious difficulty in crafting them, and the fact that only the Masters knew of their existence told him that this was finally the rat hole Star Force had been looking for the past 45 years, and he was eager to get inside and ruin their day.
3
After more than 5 hours of travelling through the dark, annoyingly straight tunnel the view ahead finally changed. What had been a black pit directly ahead of them solidified in the faintest glare of their headlights and David immediately eased off the accelerator.
“Hold up,” he ordered, gradually slowing down his mongoose to a stop as the rest of them caught up and idled behind him, still keeping decent formation spacings. David activated the zoom on his helmet and got a decent look at what appeared to be a massive door or wall ahead, blocking the tunnel off, though they were still far enough away that the dim lighting wasn’t very distinct, and they were so far away he didn’t have a hope of reaching out with his psionics for any additional information.
“Break out a drone,” he ordered, flicking on his Pefbar and adding it to the view of dozens of mongoose lights just before there was a small flash ahead, followed by a super-loud ping/screech as something flew past them over their heads…then the boom of a cannon caught up to them as it reverberated down the tunnel.
“Get against the walls!” he said over the comm as he drove his mongoose up against the right side just as another ping/screech sounded, this time closer to them and he could see just a tiny blur of a projectile coming up from a low angle as it deflected off the floor of the tunnel and passed through the Archon formation…hitting one of the multi-seaters.
The four wheeler got hit in the back quarter, shredding and spinning it about at the same time while throwing the single rider and cargo off violently into the side wall, with the momentum transferring and pushing the broken vehicle back down the tunnel the way they’d come.
“Eyes on with snipes, rockets ready,” David said, having neither on his mongoose, but he knew others did. “What have we got?”
Another projectile whizzed by them, this time not hitting the floor until it was passed them all, and David could see it gouge out a shallow trench in the floor where it hit.
“Cannon attached to the ceiling,” one of the acolytes reported. “Marking now.”
“Take it down,” David said unnecessarily, for a split second later a rocket whizzed back the other way, followed by two more at intervals, streaking down the long tunnel towards the laser dot the sniper had on the inverted tank turret. Another projectile shot through the Archons before the first of the rockets hit, followed quickly by the others.
“Target neutralized,” the sniper reported.
“Anyone hit?”
“Just got my bell rung...but my mongoose is toast,” the Archon that had went flying said as he leaned against the wall while he got his spinning head under control.
“Get a drone out and up there,” David said, breathing a sigh of relief. “Let’s see what else they’ve got waiting for us.”
After a couple of minutes of unpacking, a little dog-sized remote control drone zipped past David and headed up towards the wreckage of the cannon turret, still too far away for David to see, even with zoom. He altered his comm settings and pulled the transmission frequency from the drone so it showed in a small popup window on his HUD, giving him an eyes-on view of the tunnel as the end doors/wall gradually grew larger.
He guessed they were at least a half mile away, but by the amount of time it took the drone to travel the distance it might have actually been farther. Eventually the view of the doors widened, including a crack between the two half, confirming that they actually were doors and not the back wall of a perpendicular tunnel crossing, with a junked turret still hanging from the peak of the ceiling over a small debris pile beneath it.
As David watched a trio of small objects rose up from the floor, looking for all the world like Doctor Who’s Daleks. A few moments later they started acting like them too, firing blue plasma streaks out towards the drone and knocking it offline with 3 quick hits.
“Anti-personnel turrets,” David announced unnecessarily, for the rest of them had been watching as well. “I want snipers with eyes on along the walls while the rockets advance up the center with me. Mongooses stay put.”
“I’ve got a bead from here,” one of the snipers offered.
“How stable?”
“Twitchy, but I think I can chew it up a bit.”
“Give it a try.”
With the words barely out of his mouth a yellow lachar flash lit up the tunnel, followed by four more in rapid succession, then one of the other snipers observing chimed in.
“He’s making good hits. I think we might be able to take them all out from here.”
“Please do,” David prompted, with seven other snipers starting to take pot shots at the turrets…that suddenly decided to retract into the floor.
“Damn it, they pulled them back in.”
“Hold on,” David said, pulling a pack of explosives off his mongoose and setting it on the floor before he hopped on. “I’ll get their attention. Rockets and two snipers move up to half distance and stand by.”
David turned his mongoose back on and slowly rolled it out and hugged the right side of the tunnel, giving the snipers as much room as possible. His armor could stand up to a few wayward shots, but he wasn’t eager to take any friendly fire. He gave the snipers some time to reposition as he maintained his right side line and accelerated up to about 30 kph and held that speed, zooming ahead with his helmet and looking for any surprises, intent on stopping where the drone had been killed.
He didn’t get that far before a couple of the turrets popped out of the ground and started firing at him…with several yellow flashes answering back. Both hit, with the former impacting David on the chest and being repelled by his shields at first, then one hit lower and punched a hole in the mongoose’s front bumper shield, but it didn’t slow the machine.
The leftmost turret blew apart after a few well-placed hits…then it was replaced by four more popping up, one of which came out of the wall.
David slid the mongoose to a stop just short of where the dead drone lay as the plasma and lachars crisscrossed, then it took a few too many hits and lost power…as did his shields as they were overwhelmed with several consecutive hits, leaving the remaining plasma streaks to gouge into his green armor.
The Archon jumped off the mongoose into a backflip and came down behind it for some cover to let his shields regenerate as the snipers continued to do damage to the turrets that were just a bit too far ahead of David for him to see with his Pefbar, but he could confirm that there were no minds around the tunnel doors and turrets, meaning all o
f these were automated/remotely controlled defenses.
He pulled his plasma pistol off his back rack, kicking himself for not bringing a rifle. The one he had on his back was a stinger, given that they planned to take The Word personnel prisoner. Some of the other Archons had plasma rifles and a mix of other weapons, but not him. He just had a plasma pistol and a bunch of ammo, along with a stinger pistol and rifle, plus some Kiritas grenade/mines that he was still too far away to use.
“Rockets ready,” someone said over the comm as David ducked down behind his quickly shredding mongoose corpse.
“Test shot…don’t waste ammo,” he said, showing nerve under fire as a single rocket zipped past him. He couldn’t see it hit, but he could hear the explosion.
“Door hit,” Harry told him, referencing the fact that it had missed the small turret and blasted into the barrier behind it…which was ok, given that David expect them to have to blow their way through anyway.
“Get closer,” he said as his shields flicked back on, indicated by an icon on his helmet’s HUD.
“Permission to get reckless?” Harry asked.
“Define reckless.”
“Mongoose plus det pack.”
David smirked inside his helmet. “Don’t hit the drone on the way by…or me.”
“Keep your head down.”
David did as instructed, though there wasn’t much of the mongoose left to hide behind. He’d resorted to dropping down on his belly to stay behind some of the debris, but the turrets kept pounding it, whether on auto-tracking or remote he wasn’t sure, but they were methodically eating up his cover, with one of the rear tires exploding into a spray of rubber just before another mongoose zipped past him and drew their fire.
Harry’s icon fell off behind it, though David couldn’t see anything directly, and it stayed put on the ground as they both waited several long seconds for the very large boom to come. When it did the loose mongoose parts blew back over top of him in the concussion wave, exposing him a partial view ahead.