by John Conroe
Rikki finished accessing the FC and moved up next to me. “Gun log indicates last weapons fire three months, two days, and four hours ago. Last drone incident four years, six months, and seventeen days.”
“What did the guns fire at if there haven’t been drones in here for four years?” I asked, pretty sure of the answer.
“Expert system triggered Mark 7 weapons when this station was attacked by a muroid swarm.”
I had done my homework on rats, so I knew that Muroidea was the family of mammals that covered rats, mice, voles, and hamsters. Stepping forward, weapon ready, I shone my headlamp around the concrete floor and risers out in front of the guns. It was all chewed up, long streaks ripped through it by hypervelocity rounds, the old, dirty surface concrete torn open to reveal a lighter color, at least where it wasn’t stained red. Some of the red parts had grey hairs stuck to them.
There was older projectile damage too, identifiable because it had darkened in the moisture of the tunnel over the intervening years, but still somewhat lighter than the original concrete.
“What logic did it use to decide the rats were a threat?”
“Loss of several sensor units in the tunnel due to chewing.”
Great. Rats were eating the guards’ eyes and ears. I looked around some more, but other than bloodstains and hair, there was no sign of rat bodies or remains. Probably cockroaches cleaned them up. But the air smelled, bad. Like something was rotten. I hate the subway.
“Weapons units will not fire on us. We are cleared for movement.”
“What about Zone Defense control? Will they know we’re here?”
“No alerts sent. Intercession successful.”
“Great,” I said, not sounding the least convinced, even to myself. “Let’s go.”
We stepped off the weapons platform and onto the bed of the tracks, walking forward into the dark. The air was still and dank, smelling like rot and mold. I’ve smelled worse actually, been in some basements and places where sewer pipes had broken open. But it wasn’t pleasant. And there was the sound of water dripping up ahead, because a bazillion rats aren’t enough, no, you gotta park the whole East River overhead too, ready to flood in on your head. Have I mentioned that I’d much rather have the drones of Manhattan overhead if it meant clear skies? I know, I know… suck it up, Ajaya.
We moved on, with me taking steps smoothly and carefully. Faster than I would have moved in the open Zone. I felt the pressure to move it along, mostly because Rikki was running on batteries till we got out of the tunnel and the sun came up. I had two power packs in my suit pockets to juice him back up a bit, but they wouldn’t fully charge his systems. The big Decimator was a wonder of modern technology, with much superior flight characteristics, weapons systems, and sensor suites to Rikki’s old Berkut shell. But all that tech took more power, no matter how power efficient it was. So I wanted to keep us moving along. My own fear had absolutely nothing to do with it… nothing at all.
We were out of sight of the guns before we saw our first rat. Just a single individual, about the size of one of those toy dogs people carry in bags and purses. All by itself. And it charged right at me like I didn’t outweigh it by seventy times or so. Leapt right off the edge of the tunnel side and met the flash hider of my rifle muzzle, face first. It fell backward and I snapped out my collapsible baton with my left hand, crushing its skull as it tried to scramble back to its feet.
We made it another forty meters before the next ones showed up. A pair, both stopping to study me, neither of them paying any attention to Rikki. Drones are just part of their environment these days and they posed no threat nor were they a food source.
One of the rats started to move forward but the other sat back on its haunches and opened its mouth. My subsonic 5.56 round took it through the chest, blowing it almost in half before it could squeak out a call. Instantly, the first rat turned around and fled back down into the tunnel before I could get a bead on it. Rikki made a high-pitched clicking noise and the rat froze. Snap! My hasty shot hit it from the rear and traveled the length of its body, tumbling it end over end.
We paused for a few seconds to listen and feel. Yes… feel. In a tunnel as still as that subway, you can literally feel any air movement at all. Moving objects, living or dead, shift air around, enough for a reasonably attentive person to sense. Paying attention to shit like that can save your life.
But other than the constant, unceasing drip-drip-drip, there was nothing. I stepped forward and Rikki slid ahead, lifting higher till he was just under the tunnel ceiling. From up there, he could use thermal and sonic sensors to scan ahead, looking to spot any more rats before I might see them. I took my time, stepping carefully and quietly, making as little sound as possible. We moved twenty meters, then forty more, without incident. I paused and listened from time to time. Even knowing that my drone was observing the way ahead with his superior systems, I still used my own senses. There were just too many small hiding places for a rat or even, possibly, a drone, to hide, allowing it to come out after the Decimator had passed it by. Been down that road before.
The tunnel began a gentle slope downward. The floor under the rail tracks was at first damp and then began to actually glisten here and there with real wetness.
We were a little over a hundred meters beyond the body of the last rat when I saw Rikki stop moving. I froze immediately. After a second, the drone swiveled in place and came back my way. Lowering itself to the track bed, he extruded his landing talons, short stubby little feet that could grip a telephone wire, power cable, railing, or the edge of a building roof. In this case, they gripped a pair of loose bricks.
Still frozen in place, I watched as he lifted up to my eye level, facing me. A green laser-generated hologram appeared just centimeters above his faceplate. Green words filled the empty air. That was new.
Five rats sixteen meters ahead of this unit’s last forward position. Coordinated strike required. 49% chance of successful elimination without alarm.
I nodded, checking my rifle. Fifty-fifty wasn’t great odds, but there wasn’t any other choice. Either kill the rats and move forward or the rats alerted the rest, and yet we would still have to move forward. Facing the horde was inevitable; it was just a matter of putting it off as long as possible.
Rikki spun the Unit 19 airframe around and shot back up to his former position, the payload of bricks clutched in his mechanical talons. Cautiously, I moved ahead down the tunnel, still trailing the Decimator as it now moved slowly over the tracks ahead. Suddenly powerful light shone down from the belly of the drone, illuminating a handful of rats, three on the tracks, two on the sides, all staring up at the sudden brightness.
Three ticks came from the drone, then after a pause, two ticks, and finally one. At the one, I squeezed my trigger smoothly until I felt the sear release and the rifle slapped against my shoulder softly. Even as the first rodent on the concrete side disappeared in a mist of blood and kicking feet, I snapped a second round off at the one next to it. A brick hit one of the three rats on the rail, but the other two squealed and darted away. Rikki shot forward like a bullet, swooping down, lights still shining, dropping his last brick like a bomb. It tumbled one of the rats long enough for me to shoot it, but the fifth rat got away around a slight bend in the tunnel, squealing loud enough to wake the dead.
“Audio sensors indicate large numbers of rats approaching at significant speed. Prepare accordingly,” Rikki announced.
We’d planned for this, knowing that getting past whatever colony of rats held this tunnel as home territory required confrontation. I had rather hoped it would come later—much later.
The first thing I did was to pull two improvised incendiary devices from my vest and place them upright on the tunnel floor. Each of these had a length of exposed fuse which Rikki could ignite with one of his more powerful ranging lasers. While not strong enough to cause damage to a flying drone, at full power the focused beam of light could ignite flammable substances, like match hea
ds and… fuses.
With the incendiaries set in place, I moved up about eight meters and set another device on the subway floor, ahead of the burners. This was an impact-detonated binary explosive device fitted into a plastic body that would shape the direction of the explosion toward the rat swarm. At least that was the theory. One side of the bomb had several hundred BBs while the back side was thicker plastic painted with a glowing, luminescent green circle for me to shoot.
Moving back ten meters behind the incendiaries, I switched rifle magazines, chambering a full power LAP round, then loosened some of the other goodies in my vest. A new sound caught my attention, a heavy rustling that rose rapidly in volume as thousands of rats moved my way.
Rikki pulled back till he was hovering directly overhead and began a countdown.
“Thirty meters to contact, twenty-five, twenty, fifteen, ten, five—igniting fuses now.”
A blue line of light shot from the underside of the hovering Decimator, touching one of the devices. Sparks shot up as the fuse ignited, then the beam switched to the other, setting off that fuse a few seconds later.
I watched the sparking bombs to make sure they were really burning, waiting until what looked like about a thousand small eyes appeared as points of reflected light in the darkness. Then, after taking a deep breath, I shut my eyes.
A full-body shudder ran through me and I felt a desperate need to open my eyes, a response to the deep-seated primal sort of fear that suddenly clenched my insides and turned them to water. Carnivorous rats are terrifying in a way that exceeds even an Indian Tiger drone.
I can fight a single drone. Fighting thousands of chomping rats was almost impossible. Thirty or even fifty rounds of ammo wouldn’t scratch the surface of those numbers. Yet here I was, in the dark, in a tunnel, getting ready to fight the impossible fight. With my eyes shut.
Sunlight came to the subway a few seconds after my lids clenched shut, piercing the thin skin over my eyes, accompanied by a horrendous squeal, magnified by ten thousand rodent throats at once.
After what seemed like forever, but was probably really only two or three seconds, the light diminished to mere blinding. I turned my head till my face was looking at the side wall of the tunnel, and then carefully, slowly, opened my eyes.
Twin white-hot stars burned on the tracks, magnesium from the fire starter kits, burning hot enough for me to feel the heat back where I was standing, while thick smoke rose in steady streams to the ceiling of the tunnel. Beyond the eye-searing points of light, a dark blanket of fur rustled and moved in waves. Thousands and thousands of rats surged back and forth, moving about like a living carpet or an ocean of dark fur and naked tails.
“Shooting the mine,” I announced.
“Acknowledged,” my drone said as I lined up my sights on the plastic back of my homemade claymore mine. The little rifle fired, loud in the tunnel, even through my suit’s earplugs. The bomb went off an instant later, ten times louder, adding a huge cloud of white smoke to fill the space.
Both incendiaries burned out a few seconds later, leaving just the light from my headlamp to illuminate the smoke-filled tunnel.
It took an agonizing ten or more seconds for the lowest part of the subway to begin to clear, as the bomb smoke kept rising, flowing along the tunnel top in both directions. A twitching mass of red and black met my eyes, hundreds of dead and dying rats giving testimony to the effectiveness of my father’s lessons. It made my already clenched stomach flip-flop over to see all the blood and little bodies, but I couldn’t take any time to think about it. Instead, I pulled an old-school road flare from my vest, ignited it, and tossed it forward before moving into the mess. Rikki kept pace overhead, his fans moving swirls of smoke in at least four directions.
Then I was stepping through the carnage, trying to ignore the crunching and squishing under my feet as I watched through the light of my flare. Twenty meters more and I had to throw another flare, the light from the first not quite reaching far enough for me to see what I dreaded to see.
It swirled through the dark of the tunnel to land in a writhing sea of dark fur and thousands of little red eyes. They covered the tunnel from wall to wall, the mass extending as far back as the hissing flare could illuminate.
“Application of modified M84s is indicated.”
“Yeah, if only I had fifty of them,” I said, pulling the first of the flashbangs from my vest. They were thicker than before, made so by the wrapped layers of duct tape and steel BBs I had wound around them.
Rikki dropped down and extended his talons. I placed the grenade in his claws, made sure they closed tight around the body of the bomb, especially the striker arm. It refused to budge as I pushed and twisted on it, making it okay for me to pull the safety pin out.
“Armed.”
“Affirmative,” he said, rising back up near the tunnel ceiling.
I pulled another M84, clenched it tight in my fist, and pulled the pin. In the red light of the flare, the rats were lining up facing me, moving forward like the tide.
“Throwing in three, two, one,” I said, then threw the grenade as far down the tunnel as I could before dropping down and covering both ears and opening my mouth.
Overpressure in a tunnel is a real danger; in fact, it was the major reason that Rikki couldn’t use any of his complement of on-board micro missiles. Even the air-to-air weapons had too much explosive force, and forget about the battery of thermobaric missiles he carried. Those would kill me as fast as they killed the rats.
The flashbang went off with a clap of thunder and a flash of light, a wave of pressure blowing past me. I felt a few BBs ricochet off the ceiling and ping down around me, several bouncing painfully off my stealth suit. Most of them were absorbed by the rats and when I stood up to look, all I saw was blood and little rodent body parts—everywhere.
Rikki shot ahead in the tunnel, moving past the site of the first explosion, deeper into the darkness till he disappeared.
“Next M84 to be released in five, four, three, two, one,” he counted as he flew back my way and once again, I dropped down to kneel, hands over ears.
As soon as the second grenade detonated, I was up and running, racing through the carnage to make as much distance as possible before the rats recovered. My feet slipped and slid but I didn’t look down to see what I was running through, my eyes staying focused up ahead. As the second flare got closer, I pulled another one and ignited it with its striker cap, holding it up and out to the side as I passed the one on the ground.
The dead and twitching bodies had thinned to just a few, but the main body of the swarm was up ahead of me, now running away from me, moving faster than I could. They’re tough and vicious, but fire and explosions were more than they could take. The question was, how long would their panic last?
The answer came much faster than I wanted. The distance between me and the end of the horde suddenly shortened as they slowed almost completely to a stop, which forced me to do the same. Up ahead in the darkness, I could hear water splashing, lots of water, and lots of splashing, as if the rats were racing into an entire pool of water. I stopped completely and held the flare up to try and see.
“The tunnel appears flooded, wall to wall. I calculate the depth as being over three meters in places, but the water does not completely fill the tunnel. The rodents are swimming across the surface.”
We had pregamed lots of things. Forcing the rats to flee ahead of us was one of them, as was a flooded tunnel. The good news was the flooding didn’t go to the ceiling. The bad news was the water was filled with panicking, soon to be angry rats. No place for me to be swimming.
“How far have we come?”
“Approximately .65 kilometers.”
Still more than two clicks to go. It was sooner than I had hoped, but there was nothing for it. Rikki would have to carry me.
Chapter 9
The Decimator had the power to carry my full weight, a feat which we had tested the last time we were in the Zone, when he c
arried Harper and myself down an elevator shaft. The issue was the same as before: battery life. Hauling my full weight and the weight of my gear would drain his very advanced batteries at a hellish rate.
“Can you determine how far the water extends?”
The blue beam of his powerful range-finding laser shot out into the distance. It was just a one-second pulse, a straight blue line into the darkness. Then he tilted his nose down slightly and sent out another pulse. Another few degrees of nose declination and he blasted blue light one more time.
“Most accurate estimate is eight hundred, seventy-nine meters, plus or minus five meters.”
Most of a kilometer.
“Current power reserves?”
“Seventy-seven percent. Sufficient to cross the water with AJ as payload.”
“How much will you have left?”
“I estimate fourteen percent power at completion of travel.”
The two recharge packs I had with me could each give him something like a ten to fifteen percent boost. So at the very best, we might finish the water, recharge maybe twenty to thirty percent, and then have to complete a bit more than one kilometer just to get out of the subway. It was tighter than I wanted, but there was nothing to be done about it.
“Okay, cut any extraneous power bleeds and let’s do this.”
“Affirmative.”
He floated down till he was about a meter off the ground while I slung my rifle on my back and tightened down all my gear. Then I climbed on top of him, lying on my stomach, my feet hanging off the back of his airframe. I had to splay out my boots a bit to avoid disturbing his rear thruster fans, and the relatively sharp edge of his forward wing surfaces were my only handholds.
“Ready,” I finally said after shifting all around and not finding any position that was going to be any better.
“Affirmative,” he said, and suddenly we were flying.
My face was down and turned to the left, my headlamp lighting the wall of the tunnel, at first about a meter and half of space above us to the ceiling. But that distance got smaller and smaller as we travelled over the splashing, squealing rats below, the ceiling getting uncomfortably close to my head. Rikki dropped closer to the surface of the water and for a time, the horde of floating rodents was loud and very near. They got louder as we passed over them and then I realized that the downdraft from his fans was pressing on the ones right below us.