It was either a supply delivery or a guard change. I was still on the rope when the transport left and had to remain still again, but it didn’t come so close this time and the buffeting wasn’t so bad.
The canopy of giant ferns felt so cool when I got under it. Rolling over to land gently on my feet, Merle and Morag were nowhere in sight. I unclipped myself and brought the SAW up ready. There was a quiet whistle. I responded and part of the surrounding flora came to life. Merle gestured to me, images of the surrounding jungle seemed to slide off him as he did so, showing me where Morag was. I indicated where I was going and moved into position after shaking the rope, signalling for Mudge to follow.
Waiting beneath the fern canopy in violet light was the closest to a pleasurable experience I’d had since we’d got here. Perhaps it was the presence of the plants, but the air didn’t seemed quite so bad.
There had been another moment when an airborne combat remote had flown by as Cat had been coming down. She had remained still and the reactive camouflage had done its work. As had the heat-masking properties of our inertial armour suits. They were designed to dampen our IR signatures and make us more difficult to spot using thermographics.
When Cat was down Merle had touched the rope with the control wand. Normally we would have used our internal comms to transmit the command codes but we intended to remain comms dark our entire stay. No transmissions. In the cave in the roof of the cavern nearly two miles above us, the rope untied itself. We then kept well back as three thousand metres of it fell towards us. This made more noise than I was happy with, but we needed the rope and there was only so much we could carry.
Then it was time for another long tab carrying that fucking container. We went deeper into the stone guts of the planet. It got colder and the air stank more, burning the backs of our throats as we headed towards one of Merle’s Cemetery Wind caches. We travelled in the dark. Our lowlight optics powered by an internal light source let us see where we were going. It also made everything look green. Most of the time we walked, taking it in turns to carry the container while someone took point and the rear. Other times we were forced to climb. All the while a tremendous weight bore down on us. We stopped periodically to rest and eat. Nobody said much. Everyone was too tired.
Merle and Pagan, who I think was trying to prove something to us, scouted the cache position before coming back for us. We left the container and moved forward stealthily, ready for trouble and grateful that we found none.
It was just another small cave. The entrance had been camouflaged by the simple expedient of painting a sheet of material to look like the rest of the rock. The place was full of supplies and something even better.
‘I’m not in the military so forgive me if I don’t get the strategic reason we humped that fucking container about when there’s all these supplies here,’ Mudge said, sounding genuinely pissed off.
‘We didn’t know if it would still be here or if it had been compromised,’ Merle told him.
‘Mudge, Morag, I want one of you on the entrance and the other a little further out. Okay?’ I said. ‘The rest of us are going to do a sweep in here then sort out what we need.’ There was some muttering from Mudge but he nodded.
‘But the shiny cars?’ Morag protested. She was referring to the four Fast Attack Vehicles.
‘You can look at them later,’ I told her.
Grudgingly she joined Mudge, making for the entrance. I could understand her interest. They were a welcome sight and had long been the envy of most third-world soldiers like myself. They looked like a bizarre hybrid of performance sports car, old-style dune buggy and tank. With an independently driven four-wheel-drive combat chassis powered by a well-protected hydrogen power plant in the rear of the vehicle, the FAVs were heavily armoured, hermetically sealed and designed for stealth operations. This put them out of reach of all but equatorial special forces units – and apparently Cemetery Wind. The power plant’s cracker could remove hydrogen from water to power it. This meant if you had a ready supply of water the vehicle’s range was only limited by wear and tear. They made the Land Rovers we’d used on Dog 4 look like go-karts.
These ones had been modified for Lalande 2. The independent suspension had been reinforced and the tyres were made from intelligent smartfoam. This, along with twin front and back winches linked to grapples, gave them a limited climbing capability. They would cling to rock, and what they couldn’t cling to they could use the winches to get over.
We swept the cave thoroughly and then Pagan and I ran diagnostics on the FAVs. Cat and Merle cherry-picked what we wanted from the supplies. Merle assured us that it would be fine to take the quiet-running FAVs as long as we stuck to the deeper tunnels away from habitation.
We were still moving in the darkness using lowlight. There was a generator and lights here but we’d decided against them. It was like living in a permanent green twilight. I gathered Pagan, Cat and Merle around me.
‘You find any surveillance?’ I asked Pagan.
‘If it’s here then I can’t see it.’
His answer did not fill me with confidence.
‘There’s nothing active here,’ Merle said.
I wasn’t sure I liked that either.
‘When’s our next scheduled RV with Rannu?’ I asked Pagan.
‘Twenty-three hours,’ he said.
Day or night was meaningless under all this rock. Our bodies were going to find their own clocks. Pagan was hard-wired into a monitor and he showed us the rendezvous point on it.
‘Okay, that’s about twenty miles south and maybe three below Moa City. Good choice – there’s nothing there,’ Merle told us. ‘There’s so much tunnel down here, they would tie up all their manpower just trying to patrol a small part of it. They’ll keep their people close to strategic locations.’
‘I agree,’ Pagan said. ‘Our biggest risk is going to be remotes.’
‘Risk the FAVs?’ I asked. I tried not to sound hopeful. Cat and Merle nodded. I think everyone was relieved, I knew I was. ‘Okay, we take what we need and we do it quickly. We find a place to camp and stay there for fifteen hours. That’ll give us more than enough time to get to the RV point and hopefully we can find out what’s going on.’
Merle raised his eyebrows. Fifteen hours was a long time, but if the others felt anything like me then they needed the rest.
‘We camp up and get our heads down. Two on, four off – four-hour shifts. Cat and Merle, you get the middle shift, and yes, I am picking on you,’ I said.
Merle nodded; Cat gave me the finger. It meant a broken night’s sleep but it made sense. Cat and Merle were most used to the environment.
This was how it was going to be from here on in: always on guard, always on edge. Sleeping when we could. No respite for as far into the future as I could see.
Morag drove. The conversation had gone like this:
‘I’ll drive.’ I’d told her no. ‘What, you think I’ll be able to run the weapons better than you?’ She’d had a point. She’d driven.
The drive hadn’t felt right. Morag had complained that the vehicle was heavy, sluggish, even though she was jacked into the FAV. I guessed the higher G made a difference. When we cornered it always felt like we were going faster. Still it was the closest to fresh air I’d tasted since we’d left the ship.
We found a place to camp. I’d fallen asleep as soon as my head touched the mat. When Cat woke me up for my watch I had my arm round Morag. I hadn’t felt her lie down next to me when her watch finished. She didn’t wake as I got up. Everything ached.
The RV point was a tall cavern. What I could make out of the rock formations looked impressive. I couldn’t help admiring the thin wavy drapery formations and the stalactites probably formed over millions of years hanging from the roof. Against one of the walls was what looked like a frozen waterfall of flowstone.
Mudge, Pagan, Morag and I wove our way slowly through towering, almost tree-like stalagmites. We were wearing our reactive camouflage
. Merle and Cat were covering us from raised and concealed positions. As quiet as we were trying to be, every footstep seemed to echo loudly to my enhanced hearing.
We’d parked the FAVs a little over a mile away and taken a circuitous route to get here. We had planned a number of different and faster routes back to the vehicles if things went tits up. We’d also set up a number of escape and evasion fallbacks and longer-term RV points if things went really bad.
There was no sign of Rannu, but without comms to establish contact it was a case of sweeping the cave hoping to see him, or that he’d find us. Rannu and Pagan had established a series of identification passwords and every so often we would stop and whisper, ‘Nudd,’ hoping to hear ‘Ludd.’ I had no idea what the words meant. So far nothing, and I felt exposed creeping around and whispering. It didn’t feel like there was anyone here.
I had really hoped that Rannu would be here. He would know what the situation was down here and would be able to brief us. I also just wanted to see him again. Considering he’d once pulled my arm off and beat me near to death with it, he’d become a good friend.
Our compromise was inevitable, but I think it was me that gave us away when I stepped into the pool at the base of the flowstone waterfall. To get further up the wall I’d had no choice. I tried to ignore the faint hissing noise and the smoke rising from where my boots and the reactive camouflage suit had made contact with the acidic liquid. The submerged part of the suit started to flicker and distort. That was when the remote that had been sitting inert on a ledge near the top of the flowstone formation rose into the air.
I froze. Nothing happened. It didn’t go straight for me or anyone else, which meant it had been alerted but was not sure. A small wisp of acidic smoke drifted up past my eye level. It was a medium combat remote. I knew that normally they were capable of autonomous action to a degree. If Demiurge had, as we suspected, overrun Lalande 2’s net, then this remote might contain a small portion of Demiurge, making it capable of intelligent thought.
Medium combat remotes were reasonably tough but nothing I couldn’t handle on my own. The problem was the noise I’d make doing it and whether or not it could communicate our presence to anyone through the rock. Transponders were used to relay and boost comms signals in the higher, more inhabited levels, but down here you would have to plant them as you went.
Was this a coincidence, a random patrol? It seemed like it had been waiting for us. I didn’t want to think about what that meant. I wished I’d brought a silent weapon. I remained still as the cylindrical remote dropped down to hover on its fan-like rotors over the pool just in front of me. It began flying in an ever-increasing circle from the centre of the pool, radiating outwards.
The remote curved round to just in front of me and stopped. The sound of acid eating my boots seemed deafening. One of its gauss weapons swivelled round in my general direction. Its sensor array still looked like it was searching. A wisp of acidic smoke drifted up from the pool. The remote’s array stopped moving. Its gauss weapon pointed straight at me.
The impact sounded like loose metal dropping into gears as Merle put two silent rounds into the machine. There was an unhealthy clunking noise and the remote splashed into the pool. Smoke rose from my reactive camouflage where the liquid had splashed me. Nothing else happened immediately.
‘Fall back to the FAVs.’ I thought I’d said it quietly but it seemed to echo up the tall cavern.
We fell back in good order but quickly. Illuminated by the green light of lowlight optics, the others looked like flickering disturbances in the air. When I checked thermographics, the IR-dampening properties of our inertial armour made us look like heat ghosts against the cold rock.
We made it back to the FAVs. We’d parked on a ledge off to the side of the tunnel we’d been using as a road. A gentle slope branched off from the main tunnel up to the ledge. The photoreceptive paint on the FAVs camouflaged the vehicles to look the same as the surrounding rock. Pagan, Cat and I provided cover as Merle, Morag and Mudge started up the vehicles. Merle passed me on the way to his FAV.
‘You took your time,’ I whispered.
‘I was hoping it would miss you.’
I heard the noise first, the whine of a straining vectored-thrust gunship engine. I magnified my optics on thermographics and saw the telltale heat signature of a gunship being flown far too fast in a tunnel with so little clearance. A spiral of lights was heading towards us very quickly.
‘Down!’ Pagan, Cat and I sheltered behind the FAVs. They rocked as the railgun tracer rounds impacted into them, scoring off the paint, making them more visible. Suddenly the cavern was alight with ricochet sparks flaring in our lowlight vision.
Pagan leaned over the bonnet of his FAV and fired two grenades down the tunnel. He had climbed into the vehicle next to Mudge before the multi-spectrum smoke and ECM grenades exploded. His laser carbine would have been useless against the gunship but the smoke and ECM would make targeting us more difficult.
Normally we would have texted the ignition codes to the FAVs but being comms dark meant we had to do it manually by plugging in. This was taking longer.
My audio filters kicked up a notch as Cat fired a long burst from her railgun, one hypersonic bang ripping into the next. The railgun drowned out the long burst from my SAW.
The smoke eddied violently as blindly fired rockets jetted towards us. Cat and I leaped into our FAVs. Morag didn’t bother with the slope; she just drove off the fifteen-foot ledge. I shot forward. I hadn’t had time to put on my harness. The dashboard rushed up to hit me and I felt the subcutaneous armour on my nose give and blood squirt out. The smartfoam on the tyres tried to grab at the smooth, steep rock slope with some success. The front wheels were forward of the vehicle so fortunately they hit the ground first, the heavy-duty suspension cushioning the blow. Morag slewed the wheel hard to the left, battering me against the side of the vehicle. A concussion wave rocked us and we were driving through fire.
Fingers of flame reached for us through the disruption in the air as we drove. Mudge and Pagan emerged from the flame behind us and then Merle and Cat.
The FAV’s suspension and tyres made light work of the rough ground beneath us as I struggled into my harness and then jacked into the vehicle’s weapon systems. Suddenly the view in my IVD changed to provide a compressed three-hundred-and-sixty-degree panorama around the vehicle. Information scrolled down and cross hairs appeared in my view as I wrapped my hand around the grip for the weapon system’s smartlink, connecting it to the receiver in my palm. The grip also had manual triggers. I brought the front and rear ball-mounted, point-defence lasers online first.
Behind me the cavern burned. Fire swirled around the gunship as it flew through the flames, skimming over the ground. The flames made it look like an even more violent and predatory piece of military tech. I didn’t recognise the model – it looked new, next generation. Only the best for the Black Squadrons.
The pop-up turret unfolded from the middle of our FAV. It had a railgun mounted on it with two light anti-armour missile batteries on either side. I couldn’t get an angle on the gunship because of the other two FAVs behind us. Cat and Pagan could, however. Sparks were flying off the front of the gunship as the two FAVs’ railguns chewed away at its armour.
There were flashes from underneath the gunship’s wing-like weapons pontoons as it launched missiles. Red laser light glittered off chaff foil as the missiles exploded mid-flight, taken out by Mudge and Pagan’s anti-missile point defences. The panoramic view in my IVD showed the force of the explosions kick up the rear of their FAV, lifting the wheels high in the air as Mudge struggled to control it.
The gunship appeared again through its own missiles’ flames, the triple-barrelled railgun on the nose rotating as it fired. Sparks were flying off the rear armour of Mudge and Pagan’s FAV. Pagan was returning fire. He risked firing off a salvo of missiles but the gunship fired its own chaff dispensers and point-defence lasers. More fire filled the cavern.
‘We need to split up,’ I told Morag. I knew that the FAV’s on-board sensor would be providing a detailed topographical map of the tunnels ahead. She would have overlaid the three-dimensional map onto her IVD, offering her various routes to our various RVs. The only problem was the map was incomplete because not all of the cave systems had been explored and it was almost a year out of date.
Morag yanked the steering wheel hard to the right into an even tighter tunnel and then sped up. The armoured vehicle was smashing stalagmites as we drove over them and tearing stalactites off the roof of the tunnel. The two other FAVs shot past the entrance to our tunnel, then the gunship shot past as well. I can’t say I was disappointed, but on the other hand we needed to get the pressure off Pagan and Mudge. I had about a millisecond to think about reversing out behind them when a second gunship went past. As it did there was a flash of white light. Just behind us part of the rock exploded, caught fire and started to melt. Warning signals lit up my IVD letting me know that part of the FAV had also melted.
‘They’ve got door gunners with plasma weapons, so stick to tight tunnels,’ I told Morag. She just concentrated on driving. Now we would have to go back. Then the third gunship turned into the tunnel behind us. Morag went faster. Possibly too fast.
I was exchanging railgun fire with the gunship but its higher rate of fire was telling on the integrity of our rear armour. After my audio dampeners had filtered out the worst of the impact noise it sounded like heavy rain. Ahead of us I could see several pillars where stalactites and stalagmites had joined to make thick columns. The FAV was accelerating towards them.
‘Morag!’ Her response was to go faster.
War in Heaven Page 32