by Jamie Sawyer
“If all else fails, retrieve the Key. Take it back to Command and make sure that they send a rescue party – for Elena.”
“Not necessary. You’re going to be fine,” Jenkins said. She just couldn’t accept the finality of it all.
I shook my head. “This might not be about me any more.”
“What about Kellerman?” Martinez said. “You really think that he will leave you alone down here? He might send troops after you.”
“Fine; the more personnel he has out in the desert looking for me, the less he has on-station guarding you when you extract. You’ve seen how few people he has left. Ten or so security troops? I don’t think that he will send anybody. He won’t want to risk his own skin, and for all he knows I’m doing just what he ordered. Let’s hope that Kaminski has made extraction safely.”
“I can’t believe we’ve lost him,” Jenkins said, shaking her head. “But there were so many of them out there.”
No post-extraction debrief, this time.
Martinez slammed a fist across his heart, the heavy gauntlet thumping against his ablative chest armour. “Christo watch over him. We’ll have a full prayer later.”
“See you on the other side, ’Ski,” Jenkins added.
I didn’t have that luxury, but I hoped that she was right. With Kaminski dead, I’m a step closer to having to fight through this thing on my own, in my own skin. Eventually, every simulant operator developed the same dread: of being forced to fight in their own imperfect, natural body. Right now, Kaminski might be doing just that – back on Helios Station. And I was too, but in the darkened tunnels beneath Helios’ desert.
“So what do we do now?” Jenkins asked.
“We just keep going. What’s our distance to the Artefact?”
Martinez consulted the crawler controls. “A kilometre, I guess. But these tunnels – they aren’t properly mapped.”
The idea of traversing a kilometre through the caves filled me with anxiety. Self-belief, and the lack of any viable alternative strategy, was all that kept me going.
“There’s no other way,” I said, trying to explain myself to my team. “If I stay in the tunnels, the Krell will come sooner or later. At least if I make it through, I’ll be in a better position for evac. Don’t get me wrong, Martinez. I don’t want this to happen. I know there are no guarantees out there.”
They fell silent for a long moment. I just couldn’t see any other way through this, and whatever happened I knew I couldn’t leave the Key. I craved for the information that it carried, wanted it even more than the next transition. Any risk, any gamble, had to be worth taking if there was even the slightest chance that I’d make it off Helios with the star-data.
“Are you absolutely solid that you want to go through with this?” Jenkins asked. “There has to be something else that we can do—”
“There isn’t. If this works, I can escape with the Key – with the star-data. If it doesn’t, then you can escape with the star-data. That’s all that matters now.”
“All right, Cap,” Jenkins said with a solemn nod. “Whatever you want.”
Martinez sighed and nodded in agreement too.
“Then stock up on ammo,” I said. “Gather all the supplies we can carry. We’ll cover the distance on foot. That cavern back there isn’t going to stay sealed for ever. We’ve got to move fast.”
I unsealed an ammo crate and strapped spare power cells onto my H-suit, for the PPG-13 pistol. The others followed my example. Jenkins shouldered the remaining demo-charges and flamer cells. Martinez loaded up on grenades.
I did a final check on our supplies, and then turned to the team. They were hyped-up, a curious mixture of anticipation and reluctance.
Jenkins did a motherly check over my environment suit, making sure I had my oxygen tank and water supply. I was too tired to argue with her. I bit my lip as she patted down the leg panels. Just the touch of her hand through the fabric against my injury was enough to send a jolt of pain through me. Then she checked on the connecting piping for my respirator mask. Away from the airborne dust particles of the desert, the atmosphere was an easier breathe, but there was a danger of atmospheric toxicity from the weaponry we carried. Jenkins’ flamer could contaminate a whole cavern with burning material.
“Everything looks sound,” she said. “Wear your helmet for extra protection. You need some more painkillers before we go?”
“I’ve finished everything that Kellerman left for me,” I said, jerking a thumb at the empty lockers.
All that was left was the Key. I grasped the box in which it was housed, and flipped open the catches. I took it out, turning it over in my hands. It felt unusually heavy, unnaturally cold. I slipped it into a tool holster on my suit belt.
Martinez unsealed the hatch. He took point, with me next and Jenkins at the rear.
The crawler was thoroughly wasted. Exposed metalwork was twisted and decayed; huge acid-drenched holes bored into the armour plating. Stinger-spines pierced the roof. The gun-turrets poured thick, black smoke.
“I’ll miss the old bitch,” Martinez said.
We moved as quickly as possible through a series of narrower passes. Always in single file, with weapons panning every shadow and crevice. It was utterly dark, save for the occasional flash of some alien insect scuttling around on the floor. Martinez and Jenkins acted as my eyes. I considered what they saw: using the full sensory suite of the combat-suit, the assistance of an onboard AI. They had been forced to deactivate their suit camouflage systems, because otherwise they would have been effectively invisible to me. My H-suit carried a small and ineffectual shoulder-lamp – mounted just below the camera – but it was weak, and didn’t illuminate any more than a few feet ahead of me. I prayed for an HUD, for some proper tactical information.
I checked the clock, set into the rim of my helmet so that I could see it from inside the suit. Fourteen hours had elapsed since I had awoken in the sand-crawler. In different circumstances, that would be the mission timeline. Now, it felt like every passing second was living on borrowed time. Something squirmed in my gut – either fear, or perhaps hunger. I hadn’t eaten since we had left Helios Station. I hadn’t felt like it, but Kellerman hadn’t stocked the crawler with rations anyway.
You don’t have a plan, a voice whispered in my ear. You have nothing. Just give up now – there’s no point in carrying on like this.
I scrambled over rocks as Martinez and Jenkins effortlessly stalked alongside me. They didn’t experience hunger and they didn’t tire.
“Terrain opening up,” Martinez declared. “Another big cave.”
I tuned up the amplification on my audio sensors and used them to guess the size of the chamber by the drip-dripping of water in the distance; moisture trickling from above. I had to rely on my ears over my eyes now.
Martinez held up a hand – a blurred shape ahead of me. He fell into a crouched bracing position. Something had changed; the tone of the dripping had shifted, become harsher.
“Cap, you’ll want to see this,” he muttered.
“Defensive positions. Jenkins, cover our retreat.”
“Affirmative, Captain,” Jenkins replied. Unspoken: “like it will do us any good.”
I staggered ahead to Martinez’s location. He fell back to meet me, guiding me by the elbow. I wanted to shrug him off, to quarrel with him that I wasn’t an invalid, but one look out into the darkness made me think twice about that.
I’m becoming Kellerman. We’re both broken.
I sniggered to myself. Back at Helios Station, he had warned me that he and I had more in common than I might think. I was reacting just as he would.
“Leave me, Martinez. I can do this.”
“All right. I’ll light us up.”
Martinez took some flares from his armour webbing. He activated them one at a time, and tossed them into the cavern. They fizzled bright red and green, illuminating a large area in fitful multi-coloured light. The experience was strangely disorienting: I could sud
denly see again, although the cave was so vast that I couldn’t tell where it ended. I blinked against the bright light.
“Thanks, Martinez. What am I meant to be seeing?”
“Over there,” Martinez pointed.
I scanned the site, maybe a hundred metres away from us. The floor was littered with destroyed sand-crawlers. Not like the transport we had driven down here; these were unmodified civilian models, now just burnt-out wrecks.
“I’ve run a bio-scan,” Martinez said. “No reads.”
“These must have been Kellerman’s pioneers,” I said to myself. “Form up on that nearest crawler. I want to check it out.”
“Why?” Martinez asked. “This is a bad place. Full of espíritu malign. We need to move on – make the most of our lead-time. The Krell will be on our tail—”
“Are you questioning my orders, Martinez?” Suddenly, for whatever reason, it was very important that I investigated the crawler.
Martinez shrugged his enormous shoulders.
Both of them followed me down to the crawler. It was extensively blackened, probably by boomer-fire. Unlike many of the crawlers, at least this one was still the right way up.
“Looks dead to me,” Martinez said. “They must have taken a longer route down here.”
Mapping the tunnels, just like Tyler said.
A noise – scratching, like clawing from an animal seeking release – came from inside the crawler. The entry hatch had been sealed shut by fire, but the noise was loud enough to be audible from outside. I clambered towards the crawler, over rocks and through fetid water pools. The flares were still burning brightly, and threw dancing shadows across the shattered hull.
“I’m going inside.”
“Negative, Cap,” Jenkins said. “Let me go first …”
I had to get inside the crawler, although I didn’t know why. I easily yanked open the hatch, the metal frame creaking as it gave. It was hardly necessary to use the hatch – there were holes in the crawler outer plating, big enough for me to squirm through, and every view-port had been blown out.
“At least let me come in with you,” Jenkins said, following me. She activated her suit-lamps to inspect the interior. “Christo …”
The scene was horrifying and yet strangely calming.
Death comes to us all, a voice whispered in my ear. Even those who would deny it.
There were six still figures in the passenger compartment, eternally harnessed. They wore hostile-environment suits, like mine, with helmets covering their faces. Instead of bodies in the midst of flight – desperate to escape the crawler – the dead were inexplicably tranquil. Like they had known what was coming when their crawler ignited, greeting death without a fight.
“They’ve been dead for a long time,” Jenkins muttered.
“The crawler burnt out,” I said. “They probably suffocated from the smoke—”
“I miss you.”
I turned to Jenkins, although it didn’t sound like her voice. She had braced herself in the hatch, unwilling to completely enter. She scowled behind her face-plate.
“You said something.”
“I didn’t,” she said, shaking her head. “Must be hearing things, Cap.”
I placed my pistol on the lap of the nearest corpse. It was propped upright in the seat, poised as though resting rather than dead. Gloved hands sat on the knees. The helmet had completely fogged during the fire, and the originally off-white H-suit had become a dirty, smoky black.
“They strapped in even though they knew they were going to die,” I muttered.
“This is some bad shit,” Jenkins insisted. “We should move out.”
Just then, her lamps illuminated a scrawled message on the crawler cabin wall. I motioned for her to keep the area lit.
Three simple words.
Three familiar words:
DON’T FORGET ME
I swallowed and recoiled from the wall.
Am I going mad? This can’t be happening.
“You see that?” I asked Jenkins. She had to be my touchstone, my litmus test against insanity.
“Affirmative. Doesn’t mean anything to me.”
Of course it didn’t, but it meant something to me. Something that Kellerman hadn’t known about. This isn’t happening, I insisted.
“Someone wrote that before they died,” I said to Jenkins.
“Looks that way.” Jenkins looked on impassively, unimpressed. “It’s really better if we keep moving – the Krell could be here at any moment—”
But I couldn’t listen to her. This place was something special. Had to be: no one knew of those words, no one but Elena. I had to examine the crawler, whether Martinez and Jenkins wanted me to or not. With irrational determination, I reached over and lifted the helmet of the nearest corpse—
Elena’s face stared back. Big, dead eyes. Mouth open in a scream. She had been dead for years. Face contorted, withered; charred to blackened bone by the extreme temperature. Hair plastered to her head.
Fuck no – please don’t tell me that she died like this! She was never on Helios—
I shuddered and withdrew from the body.
It wasn’t Elena’s face. I rubbed the H-suit chest-plate clean, looking for some means of identifying the body. A name was printed on a stitched ID tag: S TYLER.
“Tyler’s sister. So she made it this far.”
With a determination that I couldn’t explain, I tore off the ID tag. Jenkins watched on with an uneasy grimace, but I ignored her. I stuffed the tag into another pouch on my belt.
You’ll go mad just like Sara and her people. Just a matter of time.
“Cap, we should go,” Jenkins implored.
“It didn’t do her any good,” I said, taking a final look around the cabin. “We need to remove the body, do something to consecrate her passing.”
But there was nothing I could do, in the circumstances. I’ll come back here, I thought to myself, and see that she is properly sanctified. She should have a proper burial. Even as the thought formed, I knew that it wouldn’t happen.
“No time. We need to move.”
“Double-time it in there,” Martinez said over the comm. “I’m getting some ghost signals on the scanner.”
Martinez’s voice brought me crashing back to reality. We were in enemy territory, surrounded by potential hostiles. He and Jenkins were right – we needed to keep moving. I was being irrational, and I couldn’t explain it.
“Affirmative on the withdraw,” I finally said, nodding to Jenkins. She looked relieved at my command. “Let’s get moving.”
We backed out of the crawler. Jenkins jumped down first, and her boots cast up plumes of dust. Her head bobbed as she covered the nearby rock formations and natural permutations of the cavern floor, searching for targets. Content that the area was clear, I clambered down from the transport, and followed Jenkins. Martinez had deployed away from the crawler. He had thrown out some more flares, creating a lighting perimeter hundreds of metres around the destroyed vehicles.
“Holy Christo,” I muttered.
There were bodies, just like those inside the crawler, in every direction. Many were sprawled out on the floor, face down, and all were crawling away from something. In the same direction, I realised: back the way that we had come.
“The suits are from Helios Station,” Martinez said, crouching to examine one of the bodies.
All of the H-suits were emblazoned with crew and station badges from the outpost. There were hundreds of them down there, but it didn’t look like they had all died at the same time. Some were crumbling, ancient corpses, while others were still old, but fresher.
“It goes on like this for some way,” Martinez said, motioning out into the darkness beyond the flare light. “They must’ve put up a good fight. They were probably running from something.”
“But they didn’t stand a chance,” I said. “Look at the injuries.”
There had been multiple causes of death. Some of the corpses were torn to shreds
by Krell weaponry – puckered with stinger-spines, swollen by exposure to bio-toxins and boomer-fire, torched by Krell flamers. Jenkins prodded at one of the more desiccated corpses, bone and fabric crumbling on contact.
“Mostly Krell weapons, but some of them died from standard-issue tech,” she said, rising up to full height. Her face looked pale. “The impact wounds look like shots from a carbine or pistol.”
“They shot each other.” Among the tangle of bodies, there were even human weapons; all civilian-issue, the sort of gear we had seen back at Helios Station. “They either went mad, or decided it was better to die down here than go on.”
Martinez crossed himself. The action looked bizarre in his combat-suit. “La misericordia de Dios.”
Then I saw something else. I scraped the floor with my glove, brushing aside an age of dust and small debris. The floor underneath was smooth, machined. Even in the twitchy light of the flares, I could see that it was a dark metallic compound.
“These caves aren’t natural.”
“Gets worse up ahead,” Martinez declared, pointing into the dark. “No rock at all.”
I paced over to Martinez, stepping through the minefield of corpses. Careful to avoid touching their outstretched arms, careful not to look on their terror-filled faces.
He was right. The tunnels became much narrower, and the rock-hewn walls gave way to the same metal.
“So something made these tunnels,” I muttered, cautiously eyeing our route through the cavern.
“What are your orders?” Martinez asked. He was just ahead of Jenkins and me, caught in the jumpy light of the flares: red on one side, green on the other. “I’m just going to say this once: I think that you should go back, compadre. We can get the ship, fly to the Artefact, and you can sit tight down here – maybe track back to the crawler—”
“We go on through the tunnels,” I said. “Nothing else that we can do.”
I knew that there was danger out there in the dark, and I knew that there was sense to what Martinez was suggesting. But something drove me on: something indescribable, beyond human terminology.