‘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.