Fire Base (Drop Trooper Book 6), page 16
Wade wasn’t quite ready to sit upright, but he was staring at me, disbelief on his face.
“How the hell would you know anything about it?” he wondered.
“You think there’s really any difference between a Corporate Council executive and a shot-caller in a Trans-Angeles gang, Wade? Neither one could ever have enough money because the money’s just a token of respect, and once you stop getting respect, then it’s over. You’re dead.”
“Fascinating,” Zan-Thint interrupted, “but not relevant. You say you work for the money-changers who are the real power behind your corrupt Commonwealth, and that is little surprise. How much do they know and where did they learn it? Are there traitors inside my own people?”
“They know about the artifacts,” I told him, not even trying to conceal the truth now. Either Ogbah would get us out of this, or we’d die. “They know you think they’re weapons and that you have at least two, still, and they want them.” I tilted my head to the side in a shrug. “Honestly, I think they want to find out what you know about them almost as much as they want the artifacts themselves. They know what you have, the ships, the troops, but they don’t know where you’re hiding them. Which, I guess, is why the three of us are here instead of every single ship and soldier they can muster.”
Come on, Ogbah. For God’s sake, do something. I’m running out of shit to say.
I wanted to hunt around the back of the cavern, try to spot him again, but I knew that would be madness. I had to focus on Zan-Thint and his people…and keep them focused on me.
“They’re ready though,” I said, now beginning to pull it out of my ass. “They have everyone marshalled, prepped to go after you the second we, or any of their other agents, find out where you are. And if you’re right about them being the ones who really run the government, I’d be plenty worried, because that means they can involve the DSI or the Patrol. And you may have a fleet and an army, but you don’t have a government behind you. You don’t have an economic base. How are you going to keep all those troops fed? How are you going to pay for reactor fuel without someone tracing the transaction? You think using cut-outs will protect you? Come on, you’re the one who just gave me the speech about money. How much money do you think the Corporate Council is willing to spread around to get hold of what they think is Predecessor weapons?”
“Thank you for your concern,” Zan-Thint said, doing a convincing impression of sarcasm, “but whatever plans your Corporate masters may have for me, you won’t be around to see them.” He tossed the stun baton on the ground and motioned to the squad of soldiers who’d accompanied us inside. “Get them off the furniture. It isn’t as if we can buy another at the shop and I don’t want their blood staining it.”
The Tahni soldiers loomed over us, but I wasn’t looking at them. Instead, I was watching in disbelief as Raheem Ogbah ran across the chamber, the loose ends of his checkered headdress flapping behind him.
One of the technicians saw him first, gabbling something in their language and pointing at him, bouncing from one foot to the other as if he had to go to the bathroom. Zan-Thint spun around, his sidearm coming up, and his soldiers started to raise theirs as well, until they seemed to realize all at once that they’d be trying to shoot through their commander and swung the muzzles upward.
Zan-Thint fired, which was perhaps the only thing that saved Raheem Ogbah’s life. The Tahni soldiers were infantry by trade, their rifles linked to reticles hanging down over one eye from their open helmets, and those rifles fired nearly a thousand tantalum darts per minute. Their commander was a senior officer who had likely been the equivalent of a battalion commander during the war and if he’d ever seen combat from a grunt’s-eye view, he’d had dozens or hundreds of his troops in front of him to do the shooting.
His sidearm was large and heavy, a smaller version of the KE rifles, using electromagnetic coils in the eighteen-centimeter barrel to launch the same sort of metallic needles as the rifles except at a far slower muzzle velocity and a much lower rate of fire. He missed, but not by much, and I was sure I spotted one or two of the rounds tug at the right sleeve of Ogbah’s ugly green jacket as he ran.
He threw himself behind a bank of equipment maybe twenty meters ahead of us and to our right and as he did, he screamed something that took a second to penetrate through the echoing ricochets screaming off the cavern walls from Zan-Thint’s fusillade.
“Get the fuck down!”
There was no question of having the time to get my feet beneath me or freeing my hands. There was only time to throw myself forward and roll off the edge of the weird, Tahni furniture and hope Vicky and Wade were smart enough to follow my lead. The stone floor rushed up to meet me and I twisted around desperately, introducing it to my shoulder instead of my face, though the eruption of pain from the impact was enough to make me willing to debate if it had been a good idea or not.
I forgot all about that pain when Vicky’s knees came down into my side and my ribs creaked from the weight of her, driving the breath out of me. Bright flashes obscured my vision and a roaring thundered inside my head and I thought for one second that she must have broken some of those ribs. Then the concussion struck me and sent us both tumbling, and I finally realized that the whole fucking cavern had exploded.
17
Okay, I might have been exaggerating, but that was what it felt like when the bomb went off.
Where did he get a bomb? And what the hell is he doing here?
They were questions I should have been saving until later, but I’d been tossed pretty hard against the couch-thing and Tahni furniture is, apparently, built to last, because it felt like slamming into a solid stone wall. My vision was blurred and cloudy and I was convinced I had a concussion until it penetrated through the haze over my thoughts that the haze over my vision was actually smoke, and that the cavern was filled with a billowing white cloud of the stuff, rolling in from the heat exchanger…which was no longer there.
In its place was a crumbling hole in the floor of the chamber and through it was pouring lava. Or was it magma? I was no sort of expert on volcanoes at the best of times and particularly not when fighting with a slight concussion and possible cracked ribs, and all I could remember was that lava and magma were the same thing except one was when it was under the ground and one was when it came out. This was the type that was coming out.
And it was hot. The heat was turning the cavern into a convection oven and the pain in my ribs wasn’t the only thing trying to steal my breath away. There was a small river of the shit and it was flowing towards us, not quickly but inexorably.
On the bright side, Zan-Thint and his Tahni goons weren’t shooting at us or Ogbah anymore…they were running, which seemed like a damned good idea to me. I rolled to the side, ignoring the dull ache in my chest and side, and tried to get to my knees, but it wasn’t easy with my arms tied behind my back and I fell on top of Wade, earning a curse I could barely hear over the ringing in my ears. I hadn’t noticed the ringing until now, and I hoped it was a lingering effect of the explosion and not from a concussion.
Of course, it wouldn’t matter either way if we didn’t get away from the damned lava.
Something yanked at my arm and I tried to pull away, sure it was the Tahni coming back for us, but it was Ogbah, standing over me with a small, curved knife in his hand.
“Turn around, moron!” he snapped. “Let me at the damn ties!”
I thought he was being a little harsh, but I figured I’d cut him some slack since he’d come here to rescue us. Why, I still wasn’t sure, because you couldn’t have paid me enough money to try to sneak into a Tahni base under a volcano. Except of course, here I was doing the same damned thing, and I still couldn’t have sworn as to the why.
I don’t know what that knife blade was made of, but it sliced through the Tahni flex cuffs like they weren’t there and I pushed myself to my feet, then yelped when my palm touched the ground. It was scalding hot already, not enough to penetrate our insulated fatigues but enough to leave my fingers stinging. I hauled Vicky to her feet and turned her around to let Ogbah cut her free, then both of us helped Wade up. He still seemed a bit out of it from the extended hit from Zan-Thint’s stun baton and he was unsteady on his feet even after his hands were freed.
Something burning and chemical was clogging my lungs and I coughed fitfully and tried to find a way out of the cavern.
There wasn’t one. The lava had followed natural cracks in the stone floor, curving around our end of the chamber and spreading out in a broad swathe almost to the entrance, forcing Zan-Thint and his people back into the corridor, which was good, but cutting us off from the only way out of here, which was…not so good.
It couldn’t really get any worse.
“What the fuck is going on over there?” Ogbah asked.
I’d been so absorbed staring at the blocked exit, I hadn’t bothered to look behind me. I saw Ogbah’s face first, two shades paler than the dark tan it had been a moment ago, his eyes wide and white. He was staring at the artifact, the alien weapon, the seed pod that had been old when humans were wandering the plains of Africa, hunting and gathering,
It was pulsing, beating like a living heart, the vibrations so violent I could feel the rhythm in my sinuses. It was, I thought in a flash of insight, the heat. The lava had pooled around the base of the platform, radiating up through the metal, turning the silver red, then yellow, then white. But where it touched the artifact, the biomechanical surface didn’t smoke or singe…it flinched away, like living tissue. And began to split up the middle.
The similarity of the thing to an outsized insect egg sac had struck me the first time I’d seen one of them back on Hausos ,and now I regretted the image, because it looked very much like that egg sac was hatching. And I didn’t want to know what was going to come out.
“The suits!” Vicky yelled, though the word broke into a hacking cough. “Get into the suits!”
“I ain’t got a fucking suit!” Ogbah reminded us, using the material of his keffiyeh to cover his nose and mouth, trying to block out the volcanic gases threatening to overcome us.
“We’ll get you out,” I promised, running to my Vigilante. “You can ride on my shoulders.”
“Oh, fuck that!” Ogbah exclaimed.
I ignored the protest, figuring he’d make the right choice when breathing got a little more difficult. The interior of my Vigilante was a refuge, even if an illusory one, and an immense sense of relief coursed through me as the chest plastron swung closed and the HUD flickered to life. I hesitated before plugging in the interface jacks, remembering what Zan-Thint had said about them, but just for a second, because having the suit fuck with my brain still sounded better than cooking in lava.
“You guys buttoned up?” I asked, scanning up and down the readouts in my helmet display, making sure the Tahni hadn’t deactivated anything when they’d had my suit.
The external cameras cut in and I was treated to a thermal image of the cavern, full of reds, yellows, and whites…except for the pod. It was a cool blue, broken only by a single line of pale-yellow expanding upward and gradually outward. And as that gap widened, it was clear that something was moving inside it.
“Cam,” Vicky said, “we have a problem.”
“You said it,” I agreed heartily, staring at the thing.
“It’s my jets, Cam. They still don’t work.”
“Oh, fuck,” Wade said. “How are we gonna get you across that?” He pointed with his Gatling laser at the lava. I couldn’t feel the heat anymore, but I knew it was getting worse and Ogbah was going to cook right up through the soles of his feet if we didn’t get him out of here.
“I can walk it,” Vicky insisted. “Let’s just go.”
She was trying to gut it out, but I knew the truth. I knew exactly how much the armor could take and, while the lava might not eat through the feet, it would heat it up enough to cause third-degree burns on Vicky’s legs.
“No,” I declared before I’d even come up with an alternative. Luckily, I was pretty good at thinking on my feet. “We’ll get you out of here the same way we got you down. Cunningham, take her left arm, I’ll get her right.”
“You aren’t going to be able to keep me up for more than a couple seconds!” Vicky objected.
“We don’t need to,” I told her. “We just have to keep you up long enough to keep the heat from conducting through the metal.”
I switched on my external speakers. “Ogbah, I appreciate the hell out of you coming here to rescue us, and it’d be a damned shame for you to die here, so why don’t you climb up on my back so we can fly you out of here?”
“Fuck this shit,” he grumbled, but he took the offered articulated left hand I held out and scrambled up the side of my suit. I couldn’t see anything but his right hand, which was holding on white-knuckled to the shoulder mount for my Gauss rifle. “Fuck it right up the ass.”
“Dude,” Wade said, an edge of tension in his voice I hadn’t heard even when we were facing twice our number of High Guard troops on a Tahni colony world. “If we’re leaving, we gotta go. Something…something’s coming out.”
I looked back at the artifact and something black and chitinous protruding from the split up the center of the thing, something that looked a lot like a hand. But not a human hand.
“Jesus!” The word clawed its way out of my throat as if of its own accord and I couldn’t have sworn whether it was an expletive or a desperate prayer.
I’d been afraid before. I’d been afraid so often that fear had lost any power over me, I’d thought. But it was back with a vengeance, a full-on panic I couldn’t explain, a terror of something not just unknown but unknowable.
I dipped my Vigilante’s shoulder under Vicky’s arm, waited for Wade to do the same on the other, my teeth clenched with impatience.
“Now!”
The jets screamed in counterpoint to my own yell, but unlike me, they kept screaming, and their banshee shriek rattled through the armor of my suit and right through my bones. I wanted to yell to match the suit’s frustration because we weren’t lifting off the ground and the heat readout was building up into the red, like it did when a suit that weighed a ton tried to lift itself and another suit that weighed a ton.
But then we were rising, just a half a meter above the lava, then a meter, edging forward toward the cargo entrance, though not nearly fast enough for me. Ten meters forward and then we began to dip down again, just shy of the entrance, and I had to cut the jets to cool the turbines, though cool was a relative word since the heat was already conducting through the armor, overpowering the internal climate control, and drenching me with sweat.
“Up, Goddamnit!” Ogbah screamed. “Lift up! My fucking pants are catching fire!”
Like we weren’t trying, or something. The temperature gauge was still hovering near the red, but the lava was up to the ankles of the Vigilantes and even the thick armor there couldn’t hold together against that kind of heat for long.
“Lift,” I told Wade. “Lift now!”
Up again, though there was a new timbre to the jets this time, higher-pitched and straining and I thought I was going to have to override the safeties on the turbines and risk the whole assembly shattering and taking me with it. But we climbed again and this time, I wasn’t going to go back down until we cleared the damned lava, mostly because I didn’t want to hear Ogbah screeching again.
I was so wrapped up in getting past the lava, I didn’t even look in the rear-view display. Or maybe I was afraid of what I’d see, but I told myself it was because the Tahni were still up ahead of us, and I had to concentrate on not running headlong into them. I needn’t have worried, though, because the Tahni hadn’t even managed to get into the battlesuits they’d had stored and under maintenance, and, from the lack of burning, melting bodies, I had to assume they’d hauled ass when the lava started to flow.
We finally got ahead of the shit in the near end of the entrance passage, and even then, it was still coming, just not as fast as we were flying. The temperature gauge for my jets was buried in the red and the suit was flashing reds and yellows at me and informing me in a scolding, nanny voice that it was about to shut down, and I wished I could take the time to shut it up.
Wade and I were a half-second slow letting go of Vicky’s suit and she shook us off, either frustrated at the idea we had to help her along like some sort of invalid, or maybe just as eager as I was to get out from under the lava-spewing volcano. Ogbah slid off my back and sprinted forward ahead of us before dancing back as if he’d just remembered there might be a bunch of armed Tahni outside.
“The artifact,” Wade said, still facing back the way we’d come. “The lava is going to destroy it, right?”
“How the hell would we know?” Vicky shot back. “You’re the Corporate Council guy, the expert on all this shit! You guys have one of these things, right? Didn’t anyone try to cut it open?”
“They don’t tell me shit like that! I don’t even know if they know what’s inside!”
I froze, unable to speak for a half a second, unable to think.
The thing coming up the passageway behind us was something out of a drug-fueled nightmare, only I don’t think even the largest hit of Kick or Zed could have conjured up an image so utterly alien. It was black, so black it seemed to absorb all the light, to dampen it and cloak the thing in shadows, and even the infrared and thermal filters in my helmet optics couldn’t paint a clear picture of it. To lidar and sonic detection, it was invisible, and all I had to go on was the visible-light optics, so it was hard to even estimate the size of the thing at first. But I knew how tall the ceiling was, and this thing was nearly up to it, occupying a good half the width of the tunnel. Maybe three, four meters tall, five meters from its flattened head to the undulating, spiked tip of its prehensile tail.
