Here we are with a brand new chapter of Dust. Nicholas and his people have made it into the southern bunker and so far things seem to be going well. No hostile encounters, no sign of whatever spooked the Conglomerate troops and they've found something that could help them! That's got to be good news, right?
Right?
~
Chapter 28:
The squad of Alliance soldiers moved quickly and quietly through the bunker. It was several levels deep, hidden completely beneath the arid plains. Even its primary exit was concealed by sand dunes and camo netting to protect it from aerial observation. From the outside, it looked like a simple bunker, but inside it was several stories of reinforced plascrete and steel surrounding barracks, armouries and CNC that provided additional defence for the Alliance’s HQ, keeping ground forces well back and forcing them to slog through a killing ground to get past the base.
There were six primary levels; the tram line was at the lowest section of the fourth floor, so they needed to get to the top level for outside access. Beneath them was storage, environmental control, hydroponics, water processing and other non-mission specific functions. Above them were the barracks, garages and operations centers.
The men and women moved as quietly as they could. The air was still dead, still tinged with the faint hint of rot. Nothing moved inside the bunker. The only sounds were the light scuff of boots on the floors, the careful short, sharp breaths of the soldiers and beneath that, the frantic beating of their hearts. Occasionally, there would be the skitter of vermin – transplanted Terran and Alcatar native species – that had gotten into the bunker. Silk strings from flycatcher spiders hung from the ceilings. Cobwebs were woven into corners, across door frames and between abandoned furniture.
The four eyes of Alcatar skin rats glinted red in flashlight beams, while Terran mice and rodents scurried out of the path of the humans. In the months since the bunker had been abandoned, an entire ecosystem had formed up as animals that had been kept in check by the presence of humanity now spread through the empire they’d inherited.
It was tempting to take the presence of animals here as a good sign, but the Alliance hadn’t programmed the Second Variety to target anything but humans. Even after A-Day, the machines wouldn’t hunt anything that wasn’t Homo sapiens. Sometimes animals would wander into areas patrolled by burrowers and end up filleted when the underground machines mistook them for humans, and if something got in their way they’d kill it but it was never by design. Humans were what the Second Variety were made to kill and humans were what they wanted to kill.
Nicholas did keep an eye on the animals they encountered, watching to see if they panicked or acted in ways that were at odds with the humans’ presence, like they knew something else was coming. Rats were among the species that could tell the difference between a skinjob and a human. Dogs could, at least for the earlier models, but once you hit series 035 and up, they ran into trouble. He’d seen Lorelai playing fetch with a stray dog and teasing a cat with string. He wondered where she was now, but he put the thought from his mind. This was enemy territory and he had to stay focused on his surroundings.
As they got deeper into the bunker, the troops found signs of violence. Doors broken off their hinges or cut through. Furniture tipped over. Shattered glass that they carefully walked around to prevent it from crunching under their boots. Stains. The first one was someone’s lunch. They’d dropped it, the plate shattered on the floor, the food left forgotten until it turned mouldy and withered away, leaving an oily green-black slime behind.
The second stain was a smear of dried blood on an elevator’s call buttons. Kawalsky shared a look with Rashid and Sergeant Mallory. There wasn’t enough power for the elevators, but even if there had been, that was as sure a sign as any that they didn’t want to be in them. You didn’t take an elevator in a burning building and that went double for penning yourself into a tiny space in in a hostile environment.
There were no sign of hostiles, no machines resting in darkened corners or lurking in the hallways ahead. No sounds other than themselves and the bunker’s scuttling tenants. Kawalsky was tempted to think that the Connies had just been spooked, but he didn’t even need to think about that cryptic, unsettling message they’d discovered in the terminal to remind himself otherwise. All he had to do was think of how his people would have handled this bunker. None of them would let ambience like this drive them out. D’Antonio’s people weren’t jittery. No, there was something here. They just hadn’t found it yet.
Or, part of his mind pointed out rather redundantly. It hasn’t found us.
~
The second level up from the tram station was the center of operations for the bunker; officers’ quarters, secure communications, battle planning and command center. Most of the time those duties were handled by the HQ facility, but the bunkers were bases in their own right with their own responsibilities, command staff and functions. They had to sweep the area each bunker covered, maintain the perimeter defences including the SV fields, run patrols and recon as needed.
They stopped at the base commander’s office, one Colonel Geoffrey Townsend. “I didn’t know him that well,” Kawalsky explained. He didn’t usually have to go through the bunkers’ security to get to HQ.
“I did,” Rashid answered. “Not personally, but a chunk of my friends worked here in the southern bunker. Said he was a stickler for the regs – very form and font – but wasn’t a dick about it. He was a good CO.”
The computers in Townsend’s office were down and his personal devices’ batteries had died weeks ago. There was a small leather journal sitting on the desk. Rather than the personal notes Hamamoto had kept, this was an official Alliance logbook. More officers used them than one might think. EMPs couldn’t knock out a pen and paper and hackers couldn’t read documents that weren’t on any server. There were security and technical concerns with physical copies too, so it was a matter of give and take.
Townsend’s logbook was written with the brevity and shorthand of a man who’d worked his way up from lonely nights on FOBs and defence lines to run one of the most vital positions on the planet. Everything was terse and to the point. Kawalsky flipped through the book. Most of it was as dry as it sounded. Notations on perimeter maintenance, communications from the HQ, weather observations and other technical and personal records.
Several days before the end of the books, there was a slightly larger log than usual, with an appendix below the commander’s normal daily notations. As he read it, his blood chilled.
Col. Masri reported anomalous motion in East bunker’s NE quadrant this morning.
Cause was refugees. Boy (est 8, white skin, blonde hair, brown eyes), girl (est 6, brown skin, black hair, brown eyes). Intercepted before they could enter the SVs killzone and brought to East bunker. Boy is mute. Girl keeps repeating herself. Unable to answer any questions. Believed to be trauma response.
Col. Masri has asked Col. Deering and I to maintain watch for additional civilians. Unlikely children could have made it this far without assistance. Will increase personnel for and range of perimeter patrols in case anyone else is out there.
The next entry was also brief.
At 1529, perimeter team investigated motion alert in our NE quadrant within SV killzone. Response teams found deceased male civilian at indicated coordinates. Evidence suggests SVs responsible. Remains have been handed over to Medical for post-mortem analysis. Have not heard from Col. Masri regarding her survivors’ situation, but will discuss this with her when she is available. Our casualty may have been a relation or acquaintance of her children.
The day after that, Colonel Townsend had another note on East Bunker.
All tram lines and service tunnels to East bunker have been blocked. Col Masri did not get out. Have ordered sweeps of all access points to ensure bunker security.
There was only one other entry. It lacked the same careful hand that had filled the rest of the logbook and its six words were as unsettling as they were cryptic.
We have to lock the doors.
“Didn’t anybody in this bunker talk like a normal human being?” Andrea muttered. She was sitting on the floor, pen light in her teeth as she popped batteries from one of her devices into a dead datapad.
“Normally, yeah,” Rashid admonished. “But something about watching everyone around you get cut to pieces by living buzzsaws has been known to fuck with your head. Wild, I know.”
The crew-cut woman raised her head. She pressed her lips together, then gave a brief choppy nod by way of apology. Rashid, like Kawalsky, had had friends and colleagues here at HQ. Unlike the captain, the lieutenant had heard some of them die when the base was overrun. They’d all seen men who’d charge head-first in fire and women of iron caliber fall into weeping, terrified balls when confronted with SVs. There’d been a man in Kawalsky’s platoon. Gunner Jhergren. Big man, nearly seven feet tall. Nothing seemed to scare him. He’d once walked into a burning building to rescue his comrades. Whether it was finding out that his unit was surrounded by Connie kill-squads, or realizing the bridge they were set to blow was being guarded by a garrison five times their size, he’d never shown any fear. He’d been an icon for the rest of the men and women in the unit.
He’d died weeping, screaming and pleading as a pair of SVs took him apart bit by bit.
There wasn’t much anyone could do to make war worse than it already was, but ever since A-Day all of Alcatar had been trapped in that reality. Even the bravest men and women and the stoutest souls could crumble when they were confronted with a saw-mouthed metal monstrosity. Could, and had.
The worst part, Rashid thought silently. The worst part is the machines don’t even care. A human could be swayed, their hand stayed. Debasing yourself in your final moments meant nothing to one of the butcher-drones. Then again, neither did an attempt at dignity in those last seconds. All of it was just so useless. That was part of the horror of it, how impersonal it was even when you were looking them in their dead machine eyes.
“What do you think, sir?” he asked. “It sounds like a David and a Havva in the east bunker.” When the bunkers fell, the skinjobs were new. Not everyone would have heard about them, let alone known all their faces. “What about here, though?”
Nicholas set the logbook back down on the desk. “I don’t know, lieutenant. Maybe something from the eastern bunker got in before they sealed it. Maybe something got in that Townsend didn’t have time to record.” The fate of south bunker and its men and women was a story that would never be written, an unknown history to join all the others that Alcatar had swallowed long before the machines ever turned on their creators.
Andrea rose to her feet with the newly invigourated base commander’s personal tablet in hand, handing it off to Corporal Krieger. There was only standard OS security on the device and she had it cracked in oments. “Here you are, sir,” the corporal said as she handed the ‘pad to Kawalsky. “Good to go.”
“Thank you,” Nicholas answered, giving each of the women a nod in turn. He skimmed through the files. Nothing useful. More personal logs and minor bureaucratic notes, exactly what a CO should be keeping on his work device. There was only one file with the same date as the last logbook entry. It was a simple status listing of the bunker’s sections.
Medical quarantined.
Level two barracks quarantined.
Level one barracks unsecured.
Elevator system disabled.
External combat posts compromised.
Upper garage disabled due to fire.
Lower garage secure.
Food stores secure.
Cargo services secure.
Armoury secure.
“Fuck,” Kawalsky breathed.
“What is it, sir?” Rashid asked.
Nicholas handed him the datapad. “Just before they fled the bunker, the armoury was noted as secure and stocked.”
The other man’s expression turned somber. “Shit.”
He’d realized the same implications of that sentence as Nicholas had. The Connies had taken almost all their ammunition on the way out of the GQ section. Not enough to make the trip back to the hive a death march, but enough to make any prolonged firefight – such as with a group of Conglomerate soldiers twice their number – unfeasible. They needed the bunker’s supplies... but the longer they spent here, the more likely it was that they’d catch the attention of whatever had spooked D’Antonio’s scouts.
Nicholas hadn’t expected the armoury to be intact. He’d assumed that it would have been looted by the Connies during their recon into the bunker or by the Alliance personnel. Whatever had happened here had happened fast and by the time HQ was in a position to respond like they had with East bunker, they’d had their own problems. Dominoes falling one by one by one...
“We could use those supplies, sir,” Mitchum said.
“LT’s not wrong,” Mallory suggested. “I don’t like staying here a moment more than we have to, but if we’re travelling cross-country, we’ll need more gear than what we’ve got and we can’t guarantee scavenging runs.”
“Especially if we end up getting into a firefight during the trip,” Kawalsky said. He pinched the bridge of his nose. “Christ.” Everything about this place gave him the creeps, more than areas that he’d seen decked in blood and entrails. It was the silence and profound absence of human life – and the knowledge that somewhere within that silence, they weren’t alone. “Mallory,” he ordered.
“Yessir.”
“Assign three men to accompany the first lieutenant and I to investigate storage and the armoury and see what we have to work with.”
“Sir,” Mallory began to protest. “I don’t think-”
“The armoury is a secure part of the base, sergeant. System’s dead, but panels are still working. We can’t remote unlock anything. The armoury will need my codes.”
The sergeant’s jaw worked. He didn’t like the idea of the captain going deeper into this hell-hole, but he was right. “Yessir.” He gestured to Krieger, Gerome and Bahrain to accompany Kawalsky and the 1st LT.
Nicholas looked over at Mitchum. “Ready?”
The young lieutenant snapped a salute. He wasn’t letting his unease show, but it was there. Nicholas could feel it; they all could. “Khatri,” the captain continued, looking at his second in command. “You’ll take the rest of the unit and get a look at the garages. Maybe the residents were nice enough to leave us something we could use. Locate and secure an egress point, too.”
“We’ll have a ride waiting for you, sir,” Rashid promised. “Just don’t do anything stupid.”
Nicholas flashed him a smile. “Have I ever done anything like that, Lieutenant?”
The lieutenant stared back at his superior, a man who had frequently done solo supply runs to New Berlin and made nice with the most advanced killing machine on the planet. “No, sir. Of course not.”
~
The smell of rot was getting sharper the deeper Kawalsky and his team went into the bunker. The air turned heavier and greasier, but they couldn’t find the source of the stench. Nicholas didn’t want to go looking for it, either.
There were no windows in the bunker and no sources of natural light. The overall illumination here wasn’t any different between the tram station or command level, but going down felt on a psychological level as if the lights were fewer and farther between, the shadows deeper and the darkness more pervasive. Twice they stopped. The first was when a motion sensor triggered and a storehouse door slid open, squandering the last bits of power in its system to reveal a room filled with cleaning supplies and charging stations for maintenance bots.
Several of the machines were currently docked, their own batteries run down from months of use. They were waiting for enough power to be recharged so they could continue their duties, following their programming even in the absence of any humans to guide them or to care that they were keeping the abandoned bunker clean. One of the shelves was tipped over, boxes and bottles of custodial supplies scattered on the floor. Stains, once red but turned brown by time, marred stacks of paper, cardboard boxes and plastic labels.
The second time the squad stopped was when Gerome signalled the group to halt. Kawalsky silently moved up next to the other man. Goodfellow tapped his left earlobe. He had the best hearing in the group and was one of the best recon soldiers Kawalsky had ever served with.
Nicholas didn’t question what had unsettled the scout, just listened. The silence was more pervasive than the babble of a crowd, but if he concentrated... there. Through the vents, sounds echoed up from the lower level. Maybe the one below them, maybe the lowest one in the bunker. No way to tell with the distortion from the echoes bouncing up through the vents. The sound, already barely perceptible, would have been totally inaudible if the bunker had been operating; the hum of light fixtures and the whir of vent fans and circulating air would have buried it completely.
Instead, he could just about hear the soft tapping of movement.
Not the rapid click-click-click of many tiny metal claws on concrete or the even padding of human-like feet nor anything else he’d come to identify with the movements of the SVs. It was a delicate, soft tinking of single points against a hard substrate. He couldn’t tell whether it belonged to something big or little, but it moved with an even, steady pace. Tink. Tink. Tink.
It sounded like... he didn’t know what it sounded like. Nothing human, but nothing like any of the SVs he’d seen before. Adrenaline made the flesh over his spine goosebump beneath his clothes as a jolt ran down it. New. New wasn’t good.
At Kawalsky’s raised hand, the group stayed still and silent, holding position waiting for whatever it was to pass. If they could hear it, it just might be able to hear them, so they held their breath like children hiding under the covers.
It was long moments, but sound coming up from below faded away as whatever it was moved on. Nicholas’s skin crawled. The relief he should have felt didn’t stick. The machines didn’t wander aimlessly. Sealed in a powered-down bunker, whatever down there should have gone dormant until it was aware of their presence – and if it knew they were here, it should have been on a beeline right to them.
If it was active and not hunting, then there was something different about it. He’d only met one other aberrant SV, but that comparison already fell short. Somehow, he didn’t think whatever this thing was, it was going to be half as friendly as Lorelai.
Kawalsky pursed his lips. All he knew so far was the faint sounds of something moving below him and his instincts were already screaming at him to turn tail... but they needed those supplies and instincts or not, he couldn’t run. The Connies had had that luxury. He and his people didn’t, not if they wanted to survive getting to Gatekeeper base.
God damn it.
The armoury was just up ahead, so he signalled for the squad to move on. This was as deep as they’d go and they’d just have to hope that whatever was down on that lower level either stayed down there, or it was something harmless that everyone was worrying about for nothing. That as possible, right? Even probable, with odds as good as him getting that Hellstorm Patriot Command Base after all.
~
Neither the south bunker’s upper or lower garage were in great shape. The former was even worse. Townsend’s note was accurate. A fire had gutted most of the upper garage’s interior and destroyed most of the vehicles there. Cause of the fire was unknown, but the effect was plain to see.
Burnt and heat-warped frames of ATVs and bikes littered the floor and a handful of supply trucks had been reduced to blackened frames. Not every vehicle was accounted for; most of the rest were missing and others were in the back of the garage, left in pieces from routine repairs that had never been completed. The only thing left had that was remotely usable was a flatbed truck tucked in the back of the upper garage, only slightly singed by the fire. Unfortunately, it hadn’t needed to be burnt to a crisp comrades to be nearly inoperable.
“Talk to me, Cortez,” Rashid said. The other man was underneath the truck, tutting and hmming. He was the unit’s mechanic. Colmec was handy with machines, but she was closer to a combat engineer than a repairwomen. Before the Conglomerate had bombed half of Alcatar into wreckage, Cortez had run a highly-rated automobile repair shop. After the bombings, most of his customers were dead, so he’d signed on with Corporate Alliance Security.
The other man, at least ten years Khatri’s senior, pushed himself out from under the truck to answer the lieutenant’s question. “It’s a piece of shit, sir. A lot of the parts have been stripped and what’s left is rusted garbage. It was probably someone’s pet project.”
“Can we get it working again?”
Cortez ran a hand through his thinning black hair. “I think so. These older rigs are built for reliability. A lot of the parts are interchangeable with other vehicles. Probably why this one’s been plundered. Anything decent was pulled and plugged into the vehicles that cut and run. If we can find enough leftovers I can probably get it running in a few hours. No guarantees on how long it’ll last or how it’ll handle.”
“That bad, huh?”
“I wasn’t kidding when I called it a piece of shit, sir. If this rolled into my shop, even if we got top of the line parts for what’s missing, it’d fail half the safety checks. There’s a reason it’s still here and it’s not just the time it’d take to put it back together.”
“But it’s what we got.”
“It is, sir.”
“All right. Well, if we can’t get parts for it, the quality of the ride is academic. Take Shei and look around the lower level to see if they’ve got anything you can use. I’ll join you in a minute.” As the other man turned to go, Rashid caught him by the shoulder. “Keep your eyes up,” he reminded Cortez. “This place looks empty, but there’s something here that made Connie troops tuck their tails and run, right?”
“Right, sir. We’ll be careful.”
Famous last words. Rashid checked in with Dunst and Andrea, letting them know what Cortez needed. The fire had wrecked a lot of the garage, but there were still sections that had taken little or no damage, and they needed to get the bay doors open. He repeated his warning to keep their heads on a swivel. There’d been no word from the captain yet, but that didn’t mean anything. Unless something happened, both teams were running radio silent. So far, they were doing good. Maybe today was taking a turn for the better.
Unfortunately, it took less than twenty minutes after Rashid had that thought for a problem to appear. He’d made it down to the lower garage. Colmec and Dunst were still working on the bay doors. They’d been locked down in an effort to keep whatever was in here trapped. Lock the doors, huh commander?
Without power, it wasn’t easy overriding the system. Rashid didn’t have anything to contribute other than staying out of Andrea’s way as she tried to perform mechanical surgery on the flame-warped mechanisms, so he found himself in the lower garage, helping Cortez and Shei in their search for parts.
The men moved carefully and as quietly as possible as they sorted through cabinets and storage closets, finding several of the parts they needed, all of which were of dubious quality. They’d probably been sitting on the back end of a tech’s to-do list for refurbishing or straight up scrap for weeks. A couple looked like they’d been pulled out of the truck to begin with and probably had, swapped out for new parts that themselves were cannibalized to get the vehicles that weren’t fit for the crusher working.
It was risky using vehicles in open area. Sound carried for miles underground and it pointed you out to every SV around like ringing a dinner bell. The Connies had learned that as their caravans and convoys were gutted from beneath, stranding the soldiers among a pack of screaming killing machines. The Alliance and their civilians had gotten a taste of the same after A-Day and there were still plenty of the original models out there. The Queens were still pumping out plenty of the fuckers. They hadn’t been replaced by the skinjobs, only reinforced.
Vehicles were always a balance between speed and stealth. A man on foot was quieter, but more vulnerable. Travel times got longer. You used more food and water, you risked injury, death or encounters with something you couldn’t outrun – not always the machines, either. There were plenty of dusters who’d help themselves to whatever they could strip off your corpse, not counting the various and plentiful ways the universe provided of offing yourself without any outside help whatsoever.
Clunk.
It was a soft noise, a muted thud of something shifting and bumping up against metal. It came from the set of storage lockers that Rashid had been about to investigate. The lieutenant froze for a second. It could have been something shifting inside the cabinet.
Could have.
“Cortez, Shei,” he called. The other men looked up. Rashid didn’t say anything else, but made quick, curt hand signs in Alliance military code.
Cortez approached the locker from the left. Shei and Khatri came in from directly ahead. Rashid had his pistol drawn and the trooper had his rifle in low ready position. Cortez met the lieutenant's eyes. Rashid came him a small nod. The other man reached out, grabbing the door handle and he yanked the locker open.
Something inside screamed-
-instinct kicked in, Rashid a hair’s breath from raising his pistol when the shape inside registered-
-he grabbed Shei’s weapon. “Hold fire!” he barked, wrenching the gun away from the locker, just an instant before the private would have started shooting.
“Jesus,” Cortez whispered as he saw what was inside, “Mary and Joseph.”
“Yeah,” Rashid agreed. “And Great Shiva, too.”
There wasn’t an SV in the locker waiting to spring out and attack them. It wasn’t a service droid or even some escaped vermin that had been given free reign of the bunker until now. Instead, inside the cramped storage cabinet was something that defied all odds and every expectation that the soldiers had had for what they’d find. It was a survivor.
Or at least, what was left of one.
~
The armoury doors slid open. Bahrain and Gerome went in, clearing the first room. Krieger, Mitchum and Nicholas followed next, the squad sweeping the armoury before they got to work. The rooms were lit solely by emergency light panels, the same sickly orange glow that had filled much of the comm center and all of the southern bunker. The armoury, sealed and untouched for months, hadn’t worn down its lights as fast as the rest of the facility and it was better illuminated than the hallways, tram station or other parts of the bunker.
The southern bunker’s personnel hadn’t been able to make a stand like they’d seen in the HQ and comm center. They’d either evacuated or, more likely, been overrun before they could do anything. It didn’t seem real that a base full of hundreds of soldiers could fall, but Nicholas had seen it happen. If one got in, if it opened the doors for others then you weren’t looking at a single killer that could be taken out by a fire team. He’d seen a hive doors’ open and out of it marched dozens of children, their mouths and hands still wet and red, the stuffed animals they carried likewise gore-spattered.
Testament to the speed at which the base had fallen, the armoury was nearly a picture-perfect image of organization and readiness. Nearly. There were still traces that hinted at what had happened here.
Some crates had been toppled and a few boxes of ammo had been torn open, but otherwise the room was exactly as reported in Townsend’s logs. Locked cabinets full of munitions and weaponry, racks of rifles, carbines and shotguns sat along the walls and divided the room into rows, while heavier ordnance and weaponry were kept in secondary secure chambers off the main one.
“God damn, sir,” Bahrain murmured. “Is it Christmas already?”
“Don’t get too excited, private,” Kawalsky advised. “We don’t know what we have for transport yet and we’ll still need food and medical supplies. Let’s start three collections. One assuming we’re on foot, the second if we have ATVs and the third if Khatri and his team can get us a working truck.”
“Yessir,” Feroze agreed. He eyed the open door leading to the heavy weapons section. “And a wish list too, captain?”
Nicholas smiled. “Essentials first, private. Then we can start getting greedy.” There was a small computer station here for sign-ins, maintenance logs and tracking supply levels. Aside from whatever had been ransacked, it would be accurate enough for their needs. It wasn’t like that they had time to do a full inventory. Gerome used the last of their cutting torches’ fuel to cut open the cabinet holding the keys to the lockers and side doors. If the base had had full power, alarms would have gone off across multiple levels, signalling everyone that their weapons cache was being rascaled. Instead, there was an aborted squawk from the intercom before Krieger severed the alert.
Security substations were still receiving those warnings, but without power to run their computers or personnel to check in on them, the troops’ breaking and entering went by unnoticed. Nicholas left Gerome at the door to keep watch. The rest of them ransacked the armoury as quickly and as quietly as they could, loading rucksacks with magazines, batteries, grenades and everything they could get their hands on as they sorted out what they’d need, what they wanted and what they could actually carry depending on what Khatri’s team could procure.
Mitchum had even dug up some replacement IFF signallers. They still wouldn’t work on anything that Lorelai called the ‘Second Built’, but as the defences around HQ’s back door proved, there were still some SVs out there that responded to those signallers. Not a whole lot and in addition to trading information, a lot of those post A-Day designs would helpfully update the attack protocols of any of the originals that they came across.
Nicholas had no idea how many of the units in the plains around the bunkers had been compromised, but every clockwork motherfucker that they could dissuade from attacking them was a victory. Kawalsky caught Danny looking at one of the spare IFFs. When the younger man noticed him staring, he smiled and tried to play it off. “In case we need extras,” was all he said.
Danny’s crush on Lorelai hadn’t faded one bit during their travel. She’d been nice to him and a little flirty, but nothing overt. He’d never said a word about it, but Nicholas had known he’d been jealous of the attention she’d given to the Connie trooper and a little hurt by it, too. If their alliance had lasted more than two days, Kawalsky might have taken him aside and talked to him about the practical advantages of having an in with the Conglomerates, but Lorelai’s apparent defection and everything after had put that on hold.
“Good call,” he said to Mitchum. “Never hurts to have a few spares. Someone might always need one.” That was about all the comfort or confidence he could offer the younger man right now. It would have to do until they had a more opportune time.
As the men in the squad dealt with their own tasks, Krieger was sitting cross-legged on the floor, her gear hooked into the terminal. Most of its passcodes were specific to the personnel of the southern bunker, but she was working on cracking them to see what other information they could get out of the system.
“If we get anything at all, it won’t be much,” she’d told Nicholas. “Most of the computers are offline and the servers are down. It’s not a network, it’s a bunch of tiny islands with no way to bridge them.”
“I know it’s a long shot, but if there’s anything there, you’ll find it,” he answered, patting her shoulder. His hopes weren’t high, but if there was even the slightest chance of finding out what happened here or what was inside the bunker with them, it was worth the attempt.
They’d just about finished collecting the most essential supplies when the corporal spoke up. “Sir,” she called, keeping her voice low. “I’ve got something.”
Nicholas knelt next to her. “What is it?”
“Like I said, it’s not much, but there’s a few connections that this terminal can still access. Most of them don’t have anything. Storage logs, usage reports from the on-site firing range. Nothing we could really use, but one of the hardlines is to a working security console.”
“Camera feeds?”
“No, sir. Not even motion sensors,” The woman brought up a wireframe floor plan of the base. “My access is still fairly low-level, but I have a partial map – including the off-spec rooms – and status readouts for the doors with power.”
Kawalsky nodded. The Alliance colour map was fairly basic. Greyed-out doors were those the network had lost contact with. Green was simple; unlocked, low-security. Blue were high-security doors requiring command-level access or higher. Yellow indicated a secure door that someone without proper authorization had tried to open. Orange were low-security that needed to remain closed such as fire doors, sealed blast doors or laboratory airlocks. Red... red was a doorway that should have been sealed but no longer was. All across this level, there were reds and yellows as someone or something had tried to breach – and often succeeded – every barrier between it and whatever it was looking for.
He didn’t have to think very hard to guess what that was, the last and most precious commodity left on Alcatar. Beating human hearts.
Nicholas looked over the map, then frowned. On the level below this one, a light code had changed, going from green to orange and then back again. “Did you see that?” he asked. He pointed. “Right there.”
“Sir?”
“The fire door on the southeastern stairwell. It just opened, didn’t it?”
Krieger frowned. “I didn’t see it, sir.”
Nicholas bit his lip, thinking. It had been so quick that even he wasn’t sure about it. It could have been an artefact of the way the corporal had had the map oriented. “Do you have access logs?”
“I think so, sir. Yes, there we go.” Some of the most mind-numbing text ever to be put down in writing appeared on the corporal’s screen. Every time you opened a door with an electronic lock in an Alliance base, a timestamp was sent to the main security server comprising an alphanumeric code identifying the door, what time it was opened and if applicable, who opened it.
Nicholas had no idea what code represented what door, but at the very top of the log was a timestamp less than thirty seconds old. As both soldiers watched, within seconds a new entry appeared and the stairwell fire door on this level went from green to orange and then back again.
Somewhere, in the distance, within the darkened silence of the abandoned base, they could hear the thud of the door closing.
~
The woman was emaciated, almost literally skin and bones. She looked terrible and smelled worse. Her eyes were sunken and her hair was thin, parts of it having fallen out from malnutrition and stress. No one asked what she’d been doing in a storage locker. The woman was frightened beyond any sense of telling friend from foe. She must have squeezed herself in there when she heard them coming.
She’d wedged herself into the locker like a trapped animal and stared at them with wild, feral eyes, baring her teeth whenever one of them stepped closer. She was so weak that she couldn’t have fought back, but she was also so frail that pulling her out of the locker risked seriously injuring her.
It took a lot of coaxing and the offer of rations to get her to come out on her own. Andrea took the lead in getting her out of there, speaking in the same gentle tones that Rashid had used on her when his unit found her. The woman moved jerkily, like a frightened cat ready to leap back into hiding at the first sound. Her clothes looked like an Alliance uniform, but they were so filthy and stained with oil, grease and other substance best left undescribed that that was all they could tell from them.
Under Dunst’s supervision they gave the woman some water and rations. Not enough to make her sick, but enough to make sure she didn’t pass out. Just the effort of getting out of the locker she’d hidden herself in had exhausted her. Humans could run on adrenaline for a long time, but she didn’t have any reserves left.
“Prognosis?” Rashid asked Yosef once the man stood up from checking the woman over. Her eyes never left him. She didn’t speak. It didn’t even seem like she was breathing, but she wasn’t a machine. That split-second of realization had meant the difference between life and death for her and Rashid was still working off the jitters from it. He’d never killed the wrong target before and he didn’t want to start anytime soon.
The medic spoke to Rashid quietly. “She’s not good, LT. Severe malnutrition and dehydration. She wouldn’t have lasted another day, but from what I can tell there’s nothing wrong with her other than the lack of food and water. If she’s strong enough, she’ll recover. If she’s not...” he trailed off.
Khatri nodded once. At some point, the body just got too weak to carry on. “She’s been on her own for months,” he guessed. Andrea was dabbing food crumbs off the woman’s filthy cheeks, the other soldier as still as carved stone, like she thought any movement might provoke an attack. He’d seen PTSD before. The woman was deep into it, running purely on instinct. Her body had survived whatever had happened here. It was too soon to tell if her mind and soul had too.
“You think there’s any chance that she’s what spooked the Connies?” Shei asked.
Rashid just looked at him. The woman was on the cusp of death from starvation and thirst in a facility that had enough food to feed hundreds of men for months. “No,” he told the other soldier. “I don’t.” Then, like a bolt of lightning between his eyes, realization struck.
The food stores and the armoury were on the lower levels below the tram line connection. It would have been easy to get to them... but she’d rather let herself starve than go down there. He clicked his radio. “Captain,” he said in a quiet tone. “We have a situation.”
“Yes,” was the quick, hushed answer. “So do we.”