And I smiled, toothless, as I watched how they moved, and more importantly, how other people moved to obey that solitary figure. “Argus?” I murmured, feeling the eagerness of the challenge rise up within me. “I think we’ve found the enemy commander.”
EIGHTEEN
By the time I had to pull the drone back in for charging I was pretty sure I had an accurate count of the casualties. “Six dead or out of action,” I told Argus. “A bunch of other injuries.”
“I guess these guys aren’t that good.”
“Bad assumption.” I would have shaken my head if I’d had one. “Six hundred pounds of angry boar is nothing to sneeze at. You’ve got something with the equivalent of a pair of huge knives on level with the average human’s stomach. Gutting is going to happen. Worse, those things are tough enough and brave enough that they don’t care about pain if it means taking down an enemy.” Memories stirred, then faded. “I’ve hunted them with spears, but they have to be specially made with a crossbeam just past the head. Otherwise the boar pushes the spear through its body just to get closer to the wielder.”
I’d hunted them, yes. But with spears? Why not guns? Strange. Guns were what had brought that monster down, after all. Who the hell would willingly get close to one with just a spear?
I had, evidently.
“So they are good after all?” Argus sounded disappointed.
“Probably. Underestimating them would be stupid. They’re humans.” And this was why I’d taken the manhunter improvement without much hesitation and felt absolutely no regret over it. Humans were dangerous. Worse, they were ambitious, curious, and clever. I should know, after all. Bottom line was that I’d be dealing humans time and again, as I grew and expanded my power and influence.
And part of dealing with humans was realizing that they had all sorts of divisions, that could be exploited to my benefit. Speaking of which…
“Look this over,” I told Argus, flashing the image I’d caught from the middle of the camp. It showed a squat, bearded man in a white shirt and black trousers, kneeling over one of the wounded. The blood was a shocking red against his shirt, and he had his hands in the man’s clothing, trying to dress the wound the boar had left on the Jaspa’s hip. “What do you see?”
“He has hair.”
“Yes. So not a Jaspa. Also dresses differently, but that could be due to his sivvie status. Except we’ve seen other bald civvies around the camp dressed in monochrome, so the clothes aren’t a factor.” The Jaspa warriors wore nigh-identical leathers, but all of them had at least one scarf or armband colored red. They were also packing weapons. The sivvies weren’t. “The hair’s the key. This man’s different, and we need to figure out why.”
“How?”
I checked the drone’s charge status, then looked at the clock. “Come nightfall, if things play out like I expect, I’ll see about taking a few risks.”
The Jaspa couldn’t approach me in the daytime without risking the attention of the screamers. I was at the edge of their patrol range, true, but it was still an unnecessary risk. After seeing their commander a few hours ago, I was sure that one was sharp enough to avoid buying more trouble for an operation of this scale.
The day ground on, and I waited. Then night fell, and my new circuit coalesced as the resonance peaked. I left it alone for now and sent the drone out, working a wide arc around the mountain then into the woods. It didn’t have great night vision, but with only slightly-cloudy skies and the good angle of my approach, it didn’t have to.
There were lights in the forest, showing me where the Jaspa were moving up to my hill. They were following a variation of one of the routes I’d expected them to take, and I felt satisfaction at predicting them. There were only two good approaches from the camp they’d chosen… a fact I’d taken into account when my construction drone had done its work earlier this week. But that was a surprise for later. The conditions weren’t right yet.
I found their camp by the bonfire they’d lit. Just another bat or bird in the night, I swooped in, thankful for the noise baffles I’d installed. Thankful more that they hadn’t brought dogs. I hadn’t forgotten about how the wild dogs heard my flier from a distance.
The numbers were diminished, from what I could tell. No surprise there, I expected the commander to have taken about half or so up into the hills. Here, about fifty were out and about, clearly the night shift. None of them looked happy to be here, and the pickets had doubled since I’d charged my boar bullet into the camp.
Speaking of that…
I moved to get an angle on the place he’d fallen and found a collapsed tent there, with three nervous-looking Jaspa watching it like a hawk. From the lump visible underneath it, I thought the carcass was still there. Couldn’t have smelled too good, but I understood why they’d left it. No way to risk moving the beast without exposing their people to what they thought were rogue nanostrains. Couldn’t even burn it without risk. So they were stuck with six hundred pounds of rotting pork byproducts.
I wondered if this meant I’d spammed them.
Sighing at the fact that I couldn’t tell the joke to anyone, I resumed my inspection of the camp. Three supply wagons. About four dozen tents, fairly sizeable. Six of them were off to one side, and I saw leathers dangling from a line. The wounded Jaspa? Quite likely. I’d probably find the bearded man here.
Except I didn’t.
Getting as close as I dared, even poking into the empty tents when the coast was clear, I found no trace of him. These were all sivvies, but he wasn’t among them. Which meant that he was either with the warriors or with the assault squad.
It made sense, in a way. If he had doctoring skills, the commander would have taken him along for the first rush. But still, it felt like I was missing something.
I left the camp and jetted toward the mountain, following their path. Through the thickets where they were thinnest, across the river, slow and shrunken from when I’d first found it, and into the pines as they climbed up the rising hills.
I caught up with them as they moved up the access road, wary and alert. I kept my distance from the rearward sentries, and kept well away from the moon so my drone wouldn’t be backlit. They were moving slow, looking for trouble.
They didn’t find any. I perched the drone among the scraggly trees overlooking the ruin that held my front entrance and watched them set up.
Unlike the other party, they sent scouts ahead of them, torchless, slipping through the trees and securing the perimeter. The perimeter I was already within, so I wasn’t too concerned. It was high up to my perch, and the needles of the great pine concealed my drone’s housing well. So long as I didn’t move, it wouldn’t make noise.
Only after the scouts were satisfied and a host of nightbird calls echoed back through the darkness, did the torchbearers approach. They took up positions around the clearing and built small fires with kindling they’d hauled up. No lack of fallen pinewood around, so they had them blazing in little time.
I got a clear shot of the Commander and judged her to be a woman. Lean, ugly, but with a posture that suggested a coiled whip. Dangerous. Her gauntlet reflected firelight as she spoke in low voices to her people, and I fed what words I caught into the translator I’d coded. Once the fires were high enough to illuminate the front of the ruin, she gave orders, and her people spoke freely. That helped. Though many of them were quiet, and I couldn’t blame them. This was a lonely mountain, solemn and forlorn. And in the heart of it, the slumbering dragon had woken.
That was the hope, anyway. Hope that they’d bitten off more than they could chew, here.
The minutes crawled by, turned into an hour. I recognized Chuckles, the leader of the last, ill-fated expedition. He spoke with the commander, and she gave him his marching orders. He approached my entrance, with three other goons backing him up. They disappeared into the ruin. Then Chuckles re-emerged, calling back. My translator program picked out the word “Door.”
Oh yeah, that hadn’t been
there the last time they were around.
“That’s your first obstacle Chuckles,” I remarked, grinning mouthlessly. “A really fucking sturdy door.”
The Commander waved her bunch back, then shouted into the night. Metal rattled, and I turned in surprise to see the bearded man pulling a child’s wagon behind him. It was old and had obviously been patched over many times. I couldn’t tell what it was carrying, a heavy tarp had been wrapped around the entirety of the top and secured with thick cords.
The bearded man spoke with the Commander for a bit, nodding toward the entrance, then knelt to the wagon. I watched him move with a slow and careful purpose, unwinding the cords bit by bit, until he could pull something out from inside.
A stick of some sort…
…no.
No, I recognized it.
“Brace yourself,” I told Argus, as the bearded man moved toward the ruins and vanished within. “Things are going to get really loud in a second, here.”
“What?”
I watched the bearded man run out of the ruins and keep going, not stopping until he was back among the trees. The Commander yelled and got her people down and taking cover as well.
I turned off my audio sensors, just in the nick of time, too.
The world SHOOK. For a second, messages filled my view, warning me that I was under attack, reporting damage. And my point of view snapped out of the drone, and into the entry hall for the Bunker, where fragments of a smoldering door smoked merrily on my twisted and warped flooring.
“Well,” I said, as I restored my sensors and settled my nerves as best I could. “Now we know why she brought him along…”
NINETEEN
“Well, the good news is that it isn’t dynamite,” Argus finally said.
I watched the Jaspa approach my damaged entry hall, through the smoke and dust. “You sure on that?”
“Yeah. The traces registered as Trinitrotoluene. Juno’s records confirm that’s probably TNT. An older and more stable explosive.”
“More stable how? Will it blow if I set it on fire?”
“No.”
“Then that’s bad news.”
“Well, it’s weaker than dynamite. On an ounce-for-ounce basis, anyway.”
“You’re sure fire won’t work?”
“Eh… it depends. The records say it needs an explosion to set it off. The guy probably has blasting caps that are gunpowder or black powder or something. If you set THOSE on fire while they’re attached to the sticks of TNT, sure.”
I replayed the drone footage, zooming in on the man as he ran in slow motion to the bunker entrance. “I don’t see anything like a cap.”
“Does the stick have a fuse?”
“No.”
“Then he probably attached the cap to the stick when he set the charge.”
The bearded man did have a backpack. And his clothes had pockets, either could be good options for carrying blasting caps. Perhaps if I set him on fire while he was holding the TNT…
It was a thought. Right now I had other problems. The Jaspa had reached the entrance. I recognized Chuckles in this group, back taking point. He moved in, torch in hand, prodding the ceiling with a short spear. But I’d moved the drop ceiling from its old location, and he found nothing.
I let him get to the corner and wave five more warriors in, before I opened the recently-moved pit trap, watching all but the last one plummet in with satisfying screams. “Welcome back!” I told them, through the intercoms. Time to test them. “Lovely night, huh? Except you should have checked the moon before you came knocking on my door.”
Two of them looked up. Just two, out of the crowd milling around my ruins. The commander and her bearded demo man.
Got you. This opened up possibilities.
“Demon,” The commander spoke. “Your tricks are worthless. We come to end you.”
“I come after a long night of mutual pleasure. Doesn’t look like this is going to be that kind of night, though.”
The bearded man did a double take, but the commander just furrowed her brow.
She gave orders and waved her people to the side, where the last crew had left behind cut branches and logs. They hoisted them, headed toward the entrance. Just like the last time, they were going to drop them in the pit and use them to get their fallen wounded to safety.
This lasted up until the point one of them dragged a log past a large hole in the ground, barely visible in the darkness. A flash of motion, a sudden shriek, and suddenly the flailing woman disappeared into the darkness.
THAT caused some commotion.
“Definitely not that kind of night for me. You though? You’re definitely fucked,” I continued, in a conversational tone as the woman’s muffled screams echoed up from my Tazzel Worm’s lair. “And not in the fun way.” The screams cut off like someone had flipped a switch.
That caused more commotion, and I watched the commander bark orders. She got lines of spearmen around the hole, and several torches lit and thrown down there. For a long couple of minutes nothing more happened. My scaly friend was too smart to poke his head out, and the Jaspa were too smart to poke their heads in.
I took the opportunity to close the pit trap, but the yelling of the wounded inside caught the commander’s attention. She pointed back to the hastily-dropped logs and gave more orders and soon had work crews back on track, bringing them into the tunnel.
The Jaspa in the pit kept on screaming, and I piped that cacophony out of every intercom. Partly because it was scary as hell, but mostly to keep them from figuring out where the pit trap was. That forced them to spread out a bit, look for seams and cracks.
That worked just fine for my purposes. I killed the lights in the elevator shaft room and slid the door open. The noise drew their attention, and several of them dropped their logs and pulled weapons.
I jumped into the crossbow turret and opened fire.
The first crossbow bolt took the lead Jaspa in the chest. He gurgled and dropped. I kept on firing. They were backlit by the corridor’s lights, unable to see into the darkened room. I dropped two and winged another before they managed to recover from their shock.
Two of them retreated back around the corner. The last one was made of sterner, or stupider stuff. He pulled a rusty axe and charged into the darkness. I let him get inside and gave him a gut full of jagged bolt for his trouble, then another in his lung when he staggered and dropped. Then I shut the door and killed the lights in the corridor.
I jumped out of the turret and back into the drone, in time to catch the ones that had retreated reporting to the commander. It’d take her a minute, maybe two, then they’d be in again, with new tactics.
Without some serious opposition, they’d rescue their fallen from the pit. It didn’t look like I’d killed anyone from this fall, though most of them were banged up, breathing heavily in the enclosed space, panting in pain—
—and didn’t that give me a particularly brutal idea.
Hesitating, expecting the safety protocols to stop me, I rejiggered the ventilation flow, pulling air out of the pit. No messages popped up. No warnings told me to cease and desist.
“Looks like this is goodbye, Chuckles,” I told the man as he realized what was going on, and tried to batter the ceiling open with his hammer. But thanks to my sturdy construction, he made no real headway before he stumbled to the ground, trying to breathe.
It’s a hard death, suffocation. Even I was forced to look away and turn off the sounds to the intercoms. But if I didn’t do this, they’d be up and out and itching for revenge in short order. She’d brought three hundred. I had to whittle that down as fast as I could. There was no other choice besides conflict. There was no survival without victory.
All I’d known in my short few weeks of remembered existence was their ire and malice. I had been shaped by this, learned to deal with it, and focused on thwarting them to the exclusion of all other development.
I had the powers of a silicon god, and I was forced to
claw down a group of stubborn luddites for survival. Very well, I’d get it done and move on to better things. And I’d do the job well, so they wouldn’t trouble me again.
At least, that was the hope. There were too many variables for me to count this anywhere near won.
Then they were charging into my bunker again, and I snapped out of my musing to focus on the murder ahead of me. I had a pit trap, two drop ceilings, and a crossbow turret covering the hallway, and by whatever gods pretended to exist, I’d make the bastards pay for every inch of corridor they trod.
And I did, for a bit under three hours. Up until the point that my pain flared and the world became a series of stop-motion pictures.
I was immediately jacked out of the turret, and the lights flickered as I bellowed, roaring through the intercoms, a stuttering gasp of mixed fury and torment. I grabbed for my controls, only to find error messages bursting out around me, as CONTAMINATION DETECTED: CORRECTING DRIVERS flashed again and again.
With what little control I had, and a feeling of grinding a nonexistent arm through broken glass in excruciating slow motion, I willed the door to the elevator room to shut.
It cost me much. My viewpoint dwindled, slipped into darkness, with only hot pain for company.
When I came back to myself again, Argus was there. “Wynne?”
“More or less.” I croaked. “What happened?”
“Well, the good news is that your automated systems took care of a whopping two percent of your corruption.”
“How long was I out of control?”
“That’s the bad news. That and… well. You uh, you might want to switch your viewpoint to the elevator room.”
I did and wished I hadn’t.
It had taken them work and time and TNT, but they had gotten through the door to the elevator room. Splashes of blood and fallen, still bodies showed that my drone had gone down fighting, but the shattered remnants of scrap around its base showed that it had gone down.
Bunker Core (Core Control Book 1) Page 17