Something hissed from the tunnels and Cass highlighted the direction on his visor. He watched the tails emerge first, probing the rim of the tunnel before poking its head out. He kept a hand around his back in case there were others, but no other sounds came after the lone dross leaped fully out of the tunnel. He shifted his feet and brought his arms back in front of him. He twisted them both together and the scraping sound of metal blades drawing out from his wrists joined with the alien’s hissing.
He took one step forward and the dross charged at him. Immediately, Cass halved the visor’s display to show a second alien charging from behind. It blended in with the darkness and was barely visible even as it charged. He was caught between the two of them but concentrated on the one in front of him. He knew they would jump at him from a few meters out. He had seen hundreds of humans die from that attack, even after shooting the alien dead in mid-air. The force of their bodies landing on them was still enough to crush most bones.
The first one leaped and Burke twisted on his feet, heaving his arms up in the air to catch the alien with his blades. They both pierced it, one in the chest and another in its stomach but he didn’t stop moving, turning on his feet with the momentum of the alien’s jump and swinging its body away from him. The blades let out a squelch as the alien’s flesh was thrown away from him. The body was sent flying in the direction of the other dross but it had been too heavy and imprecise. The second alien dodged it easily, darting out of the way and then bounding right into him.
Burke’s arms had been down after recovering from the throw. The dross crashed into his armor and knocked him down onto the ground. He scrambled to get back on his feet but the alien was smothering him, clawing and gnashing all over his aegis trying to find a place where its teeth would sink in. The armor held without any warnings of fissures or breaking, but it wouldn’t last forever; less if the sound of the alien’s attacks attracted others that could overwhelm him and keep him pinned to the ground.
The alien’s movements were too chaotic and close for him to aim carefully. He flailed his arms and the blades randomly. They clashed and were deflected by the creature’s claws and then it jumped back away from him. He turned on his back and readied his legs to meet the alien’s charge, knowing that he didn’t have enough time to get to his feet. He kicked out when the dross was close, triggering the jump in his leg as he did so and launching the alien through the air.
He knew it wouldn’t be enough to kill the creature and he didn’t stop once he was back on his feet. He started running toward the alien instead of waiting for it to jump again. He lunged forward with his right arm, thrusting the blade into the alien’s head as it went to bite him. The blade punctured its skull smoothly and killed it instantly. The body fell over when Burke twisted his arms, its tails spasming for a few moments as if they didn’t realize the rest of the body had died.
“You’re good at killing these,” Cass said.
“I wish I’d had this armor in the war,” he commented as he looked around to see if any others had heard the fighting. “We still need to be careful. Their strength was always in their numbers. We’ve avoided that problem so far.”
He left the corpses behind and pressed on toward the drone. Cass manipulated the marker she had been using to display its location, shrinking it as they drew closer to it. There were more tunnels and wrecked vehicles outside of the city, and they were slowed down while carefully maneuvering between them, meticulously checking the corners of each one before stepping out. The ruined war machines were the most charred pieces in the wreckage. Some had broken apart in the years that they had sat exposed on the planet, crumbling away like old bones. Some of the tunnels had opened up under the heavy armored tanks and swallowed them up, effectively sealing the tunnel away. The dross’s strength were in their numbers, Burke reminded himself once again, not in their intelligence, but the display of such stupidity from the enemy that took over his home made him angry.
He stopped when they reached the drone’s location. He stood on a patch of solid ground and stared down at the earth and the marker that Cass was displaying over it. He shook his head.
“It didn’t crash here,” he said. “Somewhere close by and the dross must have dragged it underground.”
“Yes,” Cass agreed. “The signal is still active but there’s no way to know which tunnel leads directly to it. I suggest finding the closest one and exploring.”
“I’ve never gone into one of their tunnels before,” Burke clenched his jaw. “I understand why Havard’s first teams never came back.”
“Don’t worry. I’ll protect you,” Cass said cheerfully.
He turned and walked to the last tunnel he remembered passing. He stood and stared down into the darkness below him and took a deep breath before stepping into it. The tunnel floor was angled sharply downward, but not steep enough that Burke couldn’t keep upright. He balanced himself as he slid down, alternating his eyes between the drone’s signal marker and the ground at his feet.
Cass intensified the light sensitivity of the visor and the tunnel was visible in a washed out green hue as they descended deeper into the earth. The drone’s signal whipped above them as they slid down under it and passed it. Burke cursed as they continued to move farther away from it. When they finally reached the bottom, with the armor’s boots slamming with a thud into the flat ground, the signal loomed high above them.
“I think we picked the wrong entrance,” he whispered.
Cass didn’t answer. She was busy producing an impromptu map of the tunnel network, estimating the size of it by the length of the drop they just travelled and the amount of holes on the surface. She displayed it in the corner of the visor’s display as Burke began to walk; with each step the map updated a new portion of the tunnel that became visible. When they reached turns and alternating paths, she continued to add to the map with markers to highlight unexplored paths, in case the ones they initially chose led them further away from the drone.
They were underground for hours. They turned back often when reaching dead-ends, or reaching sections of tunnels that abruptly sloped downwards to where Burke could see and hear things moving. He took each step slowly then, knowing that alerting one of the dross might awaken the entire nest below him. The alien’s numbers wouldn’t help them much initially in the enclosed tunnels, but if enough came from all sides he would be trapped no matter how many he killed.
Sometimes pathways would be blocked by collapses, either from the ceiling falling in and filling the tunnel, or from the floor breaking away and leaving a gaping hole in the floor. Burke avoided these just like the descending pathways. He had never heard of anyone exploring deep into the dross’s burrows, but he guessed that most of the aliens slept much deeper underground than he currently was. There were too many to fit in the smaller tunnels he traversed now, which meant they must have larger quarters under his feet, where it would be easier for him to be swarmed and overwhelmed.
He often felt they were going in circles. Each turn lead to other diverging paths, most of which led downwards. They seldom found upward slopes, and those that they did opened into even more branching paths. The dross had clawed their way indiscriminately through the earth. Some tunnels breached into the basements of homes, breaking directly through one wall and then continuing through the opposite wall as if they had ignored the room entirely. Other times they followed a path through ancient, dried out sewer systems. He moved slowly in those areas, the sound of each step magnified and echoing between the old stone walls.
Eventually, through trial and error, they climbed up a particularly long tunnel and into a small chamber where the drone sat. There were no dross guarding it and that set Burke immediately on edge. He tried to remind himself that they were animals, with no sense for what might be important enough to protect, but he couldn’t shake the feeling that stumbling upon it was too easy. He moved carefully around the chamber and checked each of its corners. They were empty but he still didn’t relax. There wa
s a second tunnel on the far end of the chamber that led elsewhere. He moved to that before he approached the drone.
“Oh no,” Cass whispered. “Oh, you’re going to be angry. I’m angry.”
“What?” Burke whispered back.
He stepped into the tunnel and saw that it had a slight slope, ascending upwards. He looked up and the light from the surface, now early morning, frazzled the low light filter on the visor. There was a tunnel that led directly up from the chamber.
“Oh fuck,” he spat. “Really?”
“I said you’d be angry.”
He turned from the light and let his eyes adjust to the visor once more. He shook his head as he moved to the drone. It was larger than he expected, roughly twice the size of his aegis. Parts of it had been shredded apart, either from the crash or the dross attacking it on the surface. Despite its battered appearance, it still looked to be in better shape than the wrecks on the surface. The drone hadn’t been on Earth long enough to be beaten and weathered like the other things humans left behind.
The drone seemed to be lodged into the ground, stuck in a third tunnel that led out of the room, seemingly downward, like a dross had tried to drag it deeper into the underground and instead gotten it stuck in a tunnel that was too small. Burke carefully knelt next to it and started prying pieces of its outer armor apart to expose the inside.
“Do you see what might have caused it to crash?” he asked as he worked.
“No,” Cass admitted. “I don’t understand how this happened.”
“The crash?”
“This model of drone is a common one. The only alteration ACU did was to automate it to the point that no one could remotely access its systems, only its signal if they knew its frequency. The rest of its hardware is normal.”
“What do you mean?”
“Meaning,” she clarified, “it was to observe the planet from low orbit, occasionally flying closer to the surface but not close enough for the dross to lunge at it. It would hover at least a hundred meters in the air.”
“Then how did it crash? Mechanical failure?”
“That’s very rare, but possible,” she spoke slowly, uncertain.
Burke kept pulling at the drone’s innards, peeling more protective layers away with the assisted strength of his armor. When he broke into the core of the drone, where processing and storage units were, he lowered his hands and leaned his head closer into the hole he had made.
“Can you see everything?” he asked. “What parts do we need?”
“Just one part. One moment.”
She highlighted different sections of the drone’s components as she cycled through them and eliminated the unimportant ones from the visor’s display. She did this more for his benefit than hers, narrowing the search down so he knew which pieces to avoid when he went in to extract something.
“There,” she said finally, highlighting one piece inside the mess of wires and electronics. “Grab that part but don’t pull it just yet. I need to check something.”
He leaned his head back and reached inside the drone with his right hand. He recognized the part as a computer core, but it was the largest one he had ever seen. The part had a handle, as it was a common component that was switched out between systems, or used temporarily as an independent processing piece. He closed his hand around it and waited until Cass let him know to pull.
The drone whirled to life a few seconds after his hand made contact. She funnelled power from through the aegis and into the drone. Sparks sprayed harmlessly around Burke’s arm but it still made him uncomfortable. The noise was the worst of it and he shifted inside the armor as he heard it.
“Try to be quick,” he murmured.
“I’m just making sure all the data is moved from the permanent drives,” she explained as she worked. “I wish Havard had told us exactly what he wanted. That would have made this easier. Huh, that’s odd.”
“What?”
“There’s nothing but standard data on here. Nothing about the dross. There’s atmospheric data. Temperature readings. There’s no mention of the aliens in anything it recorded.”
“Then why the fuck did he send us to get it then?”
“I don’t know,” she said quietly. “I’m finished.”
He pulled on the handle and felt it resist. Even with the augmented strength of the aegis, the drone’s core remained lodged inside of itself. He turned his head and looked at the back of the machine, embedded in the tunnel, and wondered if part of it had been crushed around the core. He kept his hand around the handle and shifted his body onto the floor, bracing his right leg into the drone’s side to anchor himself as he pulled harder. Still, the core didn’t budge.
He pressed harder with his foot against the drone and yanked on the handle at the same time. He strained both his arm and leg as he pushed and pulled in opposite directions, pushing the drone away from him as he pulled the core towards him. He felt something snap from around the core and it suddenly came out whole as the drone’s body was pushed away.
He held the core in his hand, intact, as he watched the rest of the machine collapse into the tunnel. It was like a blockage had been punched apart, and the stuck drone now fell in pieces through the hole. The sound was horrendous, like thousands of pieces of metal grinding and tearing each other apart. The vibrations of it falling shuddered through the ground and his armor as he sat there, dumbfounded, holding the processing core above his head and staring at the now vacant tunnel. When the grinding stopped, a cacophony of alien wailing and hissing erupted from the ground beneath him.
“We need to run,” Cass said frantically.
He didn’t move.
“Burke! Run!”
* * *
Burke scrambled out of the chamber and shot up to the surface. Cass smoothly removed the low light filter from the suit’s visor but the morning light still dazzled his eyes in the first few seconds. He didn’t have time to stop and adjust to the change. The earth felt alive below his feet, shaking as if every alien within the city had been woken up and was clawing its way toward him. There was no more time to be careful and methodical; he pushed himself into a run in the direction of their ship.
He drew out the grappling line at his belt without stopping. The tremors in the ground seemed to be following his steps and he needed both of his hands to fight. He threaded the line through the handle of the drone’s core and tied it around his waist. Cass tightened it by retracting the line in until it caught around the armor. With his hands free, he reached behind his back and grabbed his rifle in one quick motion. As if the aliens had been waiting for him to draw his weapon, the ground around him began to burst.
There were five dross. They emerged from the earth in a spray of dirt and dust, immediately lunging out toward him. He raised the rifle to his face and Cass linked the visor’s display with the scope of the assault rifle. He squeezed the trigger and the first barrage of bullets punctured the alien’s heads. He made a bloodied pulp out of two of them and then turned to the remaining three.
One leaped into the air toward him. He swung the rifle in its direction and shot another two rounds through its skull. He dived immediately to the side after releasing the trigger. The alien’s body slammed into the ground where he had just been standing, with enough force that he felt the rippling vibration of the impact through his legs. The other two dross were already charging at him and he led with his rifle to face them.
The aliens dug their claws into the ground as they ran, tearing through the earth to pull themselves faster as they moved. The disturbed dirt cloaked the air around them in a haze of brown but Burke had spent years aiming through the mess they left in their wake. He lined the scope up on the closest one and sent a single bullet to leave a crater in its head. The dross’s body recoiled from the bullet and then slumped over, hitting the ground with the remaining momentum it had gained in its run and skidding for a few more seconds before stopping.
The last dross was closer than he anticipated whe
n he turned to it. He squeezed the trigger instinctively, not having time to properly aim, and landed a few stray shots into the alien’s shoulders. It wasn’t enough to slow the creature, never mind stop it, and it collided into him just as Cass braced the armor’s defenses against the weight of the attack. Burke barely stayed on his feet, the boots of the armor scraping through the earth as the alien pushed him back. He held the rifle in his right hand and braced against the dross’s head with his left, pressing back as the alien gnashed and clawed against his armor.
The outer plates of the armor held against the dross’s teeth and claws, but not without warnings of microcracks and fissures beginning to form. The alien clamped its jaws around Burke’s arm before he thought to twist it, springing the blade into the creature’s mouth and piercing through the back of its head. He jerked his arm wildly with the blade, puncturing its skull from within before the dross went limp. He withdrew his arm and stepped away from the corpse, only then realizing that he had been holding his breath.
“We needed a whole squad to kill five of these in the war,” he gasped.
“No time for that now. You need to keep running.”
Another series of cries filled the air as if to prove her right. He started into another run, ignoring the sound of fresh tunnels being clawed open behind him. The earth erupted and then fell like rain, splattering around him in chunks. He pressed on passed the new holes and remembered the missions he had during the war. He had been sent out with a handful of other soldiers in a light buggy, with the sole purpose of drawing out as many of the aliens as possible and leading them back to a slaughter. He had to maneuver the buggy around the emerging tunnels as he jumped and dodged them now.
He felt the ground tremble directly below him and he jumped before it gave way into a hole. He landed on top of a wrecked tank and stopped for a moment. He could see the collapsed road that he had jumped down on his way to the drone. The tunnels there were clear but his breath caught when he glanced behind him. He could barely see the ground behind him from the aliens that swarmed over it. It was worse than what he had seen while flying over the planet. He had disturbed their nest and they charged toward him, an unstoppable stampede that would tear him to pieces.
The Bounty Hunter: Into The Swarm Page 6