by Ron Bender
The driver locks the truck up behind me and takes off, a cloud of grit billowing up from the wheels.
One-handed, I snug my goggles tighter to my face and I walk forward, gun up. Radon gas, traces of powdered uranium from the grinding mill, and leaching chemicals linger in the air. The red soil and deep tan colored clay, churned up by the mine’s operation, has covered every surface I see with grime.
My oxygen system suggests switching to internal tanks. At this point I opt not to.
Bransen chose this location to give himself every advantage. I can’t get a signal out, can’t hear, and have to be careful with my optics.
I head to the office. The door slides open as I reach the top landing. Ducking inside the profound silence created by insulation and active white noise catches me off guard.
The main room is dominated by a table with a horizontal screen. Ongoing maintenance and production output reports are tiled around its edges. Sitting in the middle of the screen is a short-range proprietary handset communicator. The mine must have hundreds of tiny short link com stations that use a wire between them to work. It also let the control system track the movement of each handset in the mine.
The only other door leads to a locker lined changing room, showers, and a single battered metal door. A sign on the wall indicates that behind that exit is a lift.
I pick up the handset and turn it on. Bransen’s voice comes on air. “Well that took you long enough. Did ya stop in the market to sample a pussy or two? Maybe find a new momma for Maggie?”
I fight my rising rage and say into the com. “Your driver must’ve warned you about the check points. You should listen to people around you. It’ll cut down on your stupid comments.”
“You don’t get to be a bitch to me, ever. You understand that?” he snaps. “Especially in my own place.”
“Are you done pissing, Bransen?” I try to sound bored with him. “Is Maggie nearby? I want to talk to her.”
“She’s here but she got feisty enough that I had to put her under.” He snorts with laughter. “Can’t be sure if the shit I used on her was addictive, or highly addictive, but it sure shut her up.”
There was no point in making a retort. He knows I’ll kill him if I get a chance.
“What? Not even a little rise outta you?” he snorts, “I heard from your buddy’s that you turned cold when you were working.”
I say nothing.
“Get in the lift.” He orders, “Push the button for the bottom level.”
The screen on the desk continues to scroll data. My eyes catch on a maintenance chart blinking in one corner. I capture a half-dozen still frames. Part of the chart has keycodes for shutting down various pieces of machinery.
The doors to the lift grind open as I walk up to it. I can see it’s an ancient looking cable run cage lift. Tentatively I put my weight down inside. The cables creak and groan but the whole thing feels stable. I step in.
“Hey, just a reminder, Lee, don’t jump around too much in there, because you’re one heavy sum-of-a-bitch. I’d hate for you to get stuck partway down. Know that I’m watching you the whole way. None of your horseshit tricks like back at the breakers. I’ll give you more directions when you’re at the bottom.”
I stare into the cam angled into the lift. After I punch the button for the lowest level, I rip the cam off its mounting and toss it into the corner. With a jolt the elevator starts the squeaking and grinding process of its descent. The gap around the car is big enough for me to get a downward view. It’s a long way.
Anyone wants to kill me they just have to get under the elevator and fire a handheld missile straight up, or even shear the cables from the top. Out of a sense of preparedness and curiosity I poke one onto the mesh of the cage. I push, and then push harder. Bulletproof. Rounds would deflect or deform, maybe even get jammed into the material. Knowing doesn’t make me feel safer.
The further I drop the hotter, more humid, and closed in the air around me feels. I sweat around the seal of my goggles. After years in the sand, this is stifling to breathe. Only the illusion of breeze wafts in as I pass through widely spaced floors.
The cage arrives at the bottom and I pull the doors open. Only the space around the lift is lit. Passageways are cut through the earth, branching outward into the perfect black. Dialing up my optics and swapping out filters I can see branching service corridors and safety stations leading in each direction.
The curved cylindrical walls trickle here and there with water. The floor is damp and pocked with patches of harder looking stone and thick yellow clay. Crude metal walkways of rust pitted rebar and expanded steel mesh rise over the muck. Dozens of ropy cable bundles are bolted onto the walls and ceilings and lead down each corridor.
The first step up onto one of the walkways puts me into the crossfire zone of three different passages. I take a second to check down each of them. They seem endless. Unlit trams rumble along. Glimmers of movement in the black. In the background there’s the roar of boring machines pushing against stone.
“If I wanted you dead without meeting you face-to-face, I’d’ve greased you with the turrets out front.” Bransen says. “Go left, all the way to the end.”
As I walk, I send out pings, checking the walls, trying to find Maggie or at least the location of his men. I know they’re here; he doesn’t strike me as a ‘I’ll meet you alone’ type.
A reinforced airlock door is set into smoothly ground stone. The door opens on its own. When I step through, I find myself on a well-lit raised gantry; steel supports, mesh flooring, and tube steel railings. Fifty feet below me I can see a portable liquid salt reactor, massive air blowers, water pumps, and six lines of massive robotic trams, sitting stationary waiting for instructions. Above me, the walls and ceiling, even though dark, are riddled with connecting passages and service access holes. Here and there up the walls are ladder rungs. They looked drilled in and epoxied into place.
Crossing the gantry Bransen interrupts my movement. “Wait right there, Lee.”
I stop. I can’t leap to anyplace above me and down puts me into with the trams. He picked a good spot. I can be flanked, dropped on, or overwhelmed from the front. There’s a very high probability that I might not make it out of here. On impulse I start a short run event log recording. It was meant to provide context for actions during debrief. Here it might become a black box for anyone finding my body…A door opens on the other side of the manmade cavern. Bransen steps onto the other end of the gantry. His eyes look confident, but tired.
I lift my pistol and keep it trained on him.
“Shooting me gets her killed.” He slowly pulls a sawed-off shotgun forward on a quick-sling and stalks towards me. “And to think I getting worried you weren’t gonna show.”
“You obviously don’t have kids.” I start analyzing the ranges as I speak.
“Nope. Never will either.” He wrinkles his brow. “I thought it through long time ago. Family just gets in the way … gets you killed, gets you leveraged into shit you don’t want to do.”
“Maggie wasn’t in the way when you grabbed her.” I start a full pressure-up of my internal air supply.
“No,” he says, “She was a means to an end. The moment we saw you we knew what you were. We knew you’d never come along if we didn’t have her. We needed you because we figured if there were more like you hiding out there, they’d show up to help you. You boys seem to be made that way. We let you broadcast your distress code and they came like dogs to a whistle. Now they’re on our payroll. We have all the time we need to sift the intel we got from them.”
“They can’t know much.”
“They know enough; plenty about the exiled government; chain of command, communication protocols, that kind of thing. Best of all, they know where all those nukes and bio-chemical weapons are stashed. It’s still top priority, keeping those safe.”
His description of what they were after sets me even further on edge.
“Since no one is making those k
inds of things in quantity like they used to, we figured we’d just take theirs.” He laughs and leans against one of the railings, shotgun pointed at my chest. “They aren’t in a position to use them even if they wanted too. We are, and we will. Just have to go round’em all up. Then we’ll be a position to change the pecking order of the whole damned world.”
I’ve calculated every angle, every distance. If I can get fifteen feet closer, even if he amps up completely, I can hit him once before he can do anything to Maggie. I sigh and let my shoulders hang in defeat.
“Don’t do that Lee.” He mimics my stance; his tone is coy. “Don’t try to play me. You’re goddamned programmed to keep fighting. You’ll put one metal foot in front of the other and keep swinging as hard as you can until you die or get killed. You’ve been the biggest pawn on the planet. You didn’t know you were still in the game. Hell, you never left it.”
He shakes his head. “You sat on the board collecting dust and getting all mopey, waiting for someone to give you marching orders.”
I sidle forward slowly, hoping that keeping him talking will let me close the distance. “A pawn on the board still blocks the pieces against it.”
“Yup.” He gestures openly, “But unlike a chess piece, you get to choose, Lee. You can die here with your daughter, or you can change color and come work with me. I mean, your commanders abandoned you, ignored you for years. I can have you working with your old unit by next week, making good money, providing for Maggie in ways you’d never thought you’d be able to.”
“Kidnapping my daughter isn’t the best way to start a trusting relationship.” A warning light in the corner of my optics blinks. The air pressure around me shifts rhythmically a few times. Doors above me have opened and closed.
His back-up is here.
“Texas wasn’t my idea, Lee.” He shrugs. “My Boss—"
“Phillip Townsend.” I say. We’re both stalling for time; him to get his men get into position, me trying to close the gap.
“Yeah. Phil. He wanted you dead. He said to kill the girl, kill you, and get the intel. Personally, I was happy you survived. I want you on our side. I think you’ve got a lot more in you that you’d be willing to give. You just never were given the chance to commit.”
“You’re going against orders just talking to me, aren’t you?” I take a step. “Should I be grateful?”
“I’m not a pawn Lee. I can make up my own mind here.”
“So how does this work?” I take another half step. “Me coming on board with your team?”
“We got three options. Option one; we keep your daughter safe while you work for us and you get supervised visitation during down times. Just until Phil calms the hell down about you.”
“That doesn’t work for me.” I test the railing gently. It doesn’t budge. “What’s option two?”
“You open that little cover over your main ports and let me hook you into a machine for a couple of hours. After that we can set you up in a house overlooking the water someplace. I like the new Salton Inlet area. Lots of nice new beaches. A whole submerged city to go diving in. Surfs not bad either. A brand new CitOne enclave in the Hidden Spring Canyon. Really pretty.”
“That’s what the other guys did?”
“Yup. Worked out well for everyone.”
“And we’d be neighbors huh?” I widen my field of vision to max and pretend to glance around the room. I can see at least three snipers in overhead positions.
“Yeah I got a place there. I’m a better neighbor than the Ferals and Nulls you’re used to. I’m not gonna try turning you into a hood ornament for my truck. What do you say?”
“I’m not really comfortable with that option.” I move closer still. “A lot of conditioning went into not opening that port cover.”
“See what I mean Lee?” He sighs, “Even now, you’re still a pawn. You need to think for yourself. Or at least think about Maggie.”
I close to striking range. “What’s the third option?”
He smiles, draws a breath. “Third option—"
I lunge.
The hydraulic rams in my legs slam open. All the compressed air in my internal tank instantly evacuates through slit-vents below my shoulders. For all my size I’m a blur.
With all his talk of me joining him, I risk that the snipers aren’t there to kill me. Bransen doesn’t block my rush. Instead he leaps away almost as fast as I come at him. From mid-air the shotgun belches out a single round.
Mine are all aimed for his head.
The snipers above us don’t fire at all. His single shot hits me. I’ve shrugged off slugs from weapons like his before. But this time I’m hit by something new.
I get a flash of an overload warning and then I’m trapped inside my skull. Blind, unable to move my limbs, I fall to the gantry like a brick. I’m barely breathing … I know I’m bleeding but I don’t know if any of my systems are working to keep me alive. Even my hearing is muffled, I have nothing.
˜˜˜
I fight a surge of panic and then abruptly my optics and hearing come online.
“Fuck me that boy is fast.” Bransen’s says as he approaches. “Did you see that? Did you know he could do that?”
“He’s an officer.” Vic replies with his classic dry style. “Different buildout. Different specs. Plus, he’s been on his own a long time.”
Vic. In my mind he’d been dead for years. In Texas he was a voice on my com-link, transient, and then gone, captured. Hacked.
The friend I’d known is not the individual in front of me. If he’s with Bransen now then the person he was is gone. He’s no longer my friend.
“Parts wear out, need replacing or modification,” Vic says. “We’re designed to utilize a wide range of common parts. There’s a handful of customized components but those were spec’ed to handle wear and tear. I have no idea what’s been changed on him.”
“You’re saying that he may be full of surprises?”
“Maybe.”
“I thought the bastard was gonna get a shot off,” Bransen says. “That would’ve been bad.”
“You can’t have been that concerned.” He steps around Bransen and I get a look at him. It’s weird to see someone who looks like me. But he’s had modifications done in the last few years. His were done in a full shop, by military technicians. His eyes are under a fully sealed visor, and his shoulder mounted weapons pods look like they carry more ammo than standard. They swivel to point at me. “You and Phil checked us all out. You knew that all of the Hercules have EMP shielding as standard gear. You knew what would work.”
Other voices grow louder behind me. “Hustle people. We need those chains down here. The clock is running. He’ll come around quicker than you think.”
The sounds of chain being hauled down from an overhead winch echo around me.
I’d been hit with some kind of EMP producing round. It had penetrated my plates, right where the shielding unit had been located. The heavy pulse of electromagnetics overwhelmed my electronics and tripped an emergency cut-off. Vic was right in his understanding, but wrong in his thinking. I had been forced to find parts. But just because I lived in the dust didn’t mean I hadn’t installed upgrades. Almost all of the pulse had been converted into electricity and dropped into my power cells fast charger. The rest of the spike’s juice was bleeding out as heat. The unit I’d found brand new; it handled more juice, had a faster switching times, and higher shunt values. The downside was its size. It used more than double the volume over the original part. I ended up having it installed in a different location than what my design specs laid out.
My systems had almost finished a hot reload. My modified electrostatic musculature wasn’t responding and the medical nanites read off-line.
From where I am, I watch Bransen walking away. “I’m gonna move the girl down to the chamber. I want him to see her when he wakes up.”
Vic rolls me over and leans in. His optical rails glide and dilate under his visor. I force myself sta
y still.
He whispers, “You should’ve taken Bransen’s deal instead of making him waste time like this. Now he’s in a hurry, and that means now it’s going to get ugly with your little girl.”
Chains hit the gantry behind me.
“Hayworth, keep that big-assed rifle on him.” Vic stands up. “Get him chained, hooked and hoisted. Don’t mess around. He needs to be up there and strapped in ASAP.”
Two unarmed technicians drag the hoist chain past Vic who turns and moves to the center of the gantry. Near the door Bransen used, is a heavy weapons operative. Looking up I can see the opening that they want to hoist me up to.
Timing is critical. Training kicks in. I trigger my signal jammer at full power and start to move. I feel slow, but my hands move quicker than the technician’s mouths. They make no noise as I grasp, and crush their necks in clenched fists.
Hayworth, the heavy weapons man near the door yells as I roll and stand in a single motion. I throw one of the dead techs at him while closing range on him. I keep the second corpse as meat shield. Bullets pepper the body until I’m almost on him.
Vic is close behind me. I know it.
I leap at the gunner, tossing the second corpse under my legs as I fly forward. I’m hoping the human debris will slow Vic down and buy me a fraction of a second more time.
One arm goes across Hayworths throat, slamming him into the doorframe. His weapon is useless, pinned cross body between us. I grab his belt and yank him around.
The stiff fingered jab Vic was releasing at me kills the gunner instead, tearing through his floating ribs and ripping into his vitals.
I can’t stay here pinned to the wall. Letting Vic stay entangled with the corpse grants me two hard blows, one to either side of his head. His sealed visor cracks with the first blow, and shatters with the second. He shakes his head violently to clear the broken glass from his optical rails.
I duck away trying to make a grab at the heavy machinegun on the ground. I miss my chance as he flings the feebly moving body aside. His weapon pods swivel to follow me but they don’t fire. At least for now they still want me alive.