The protesting winch dragged us out of the water. Smoke poured off the FAV, the photoreceptive paint long gone. I hit the door release and slid it back. Morag did the same. I ditched my gear and started free-climbing up the rock. Morag ran into the cave system.
Morag reached the rock ledge, which supported Mudge and Pagan’s FAV, just before I did. She hacked the door mechanism and managed to feed a snake through the crashfoam, then took control of the FAV and fired one of the front and one of the rear winches. She stepped back. I watched feeling helpless as the winches dragged the vehicle up and over onto its wheels.
Morag reached in and pulled the manual release for the crashfoam dissolver. I ran forward and we pulled an unconscious and badly battered Pagan out of the FAV. Nothing looked broken but I didn’t like the look of the swelling on his face and skull. Mudge was battered but conscious and grinning. He was obviously very, very high.
‘I love these cars,’ he managed. I just shook my head.
The FAV’s armour was pitted, scored, burned, buckled in a couple of places and a blackened mess, but it seemed intact.
Opposite me, aided by patches of burning wreckage and guttering plasma fire, I could see a much larger cavern almost directly opposite this ledge. It would provide easy ingress for the final gunship if it knew where we were, and we’d been making a lot of noise.
‘Is the FAV running?’ I asked Morag quietly.
‘They’re hurt.’
‘We need to leave.’
Morag concentrated for a moment.
‘I think it’ll run. Not well, but it’ll run.’
On the other ledge I could see Merle signalling, asking if we were all clear. I signalled for him to wait.
That was when the final gunship dropped through the hole in the cavern roof that Morag and I had fallen through. As it did, two more Themtech exo-armours leaped off it. They had us. It was over.
Then in the mouth of the large cavern opposite me it seemed to get as light as day. The gunship became a fountain of white liquid flame as it dropped into the lake. The two exo-armours followed in rapid succession. Involuntarily I held my hands up in front of my face and backed away from the light. Beneath the water I could make out the three pools of plasma fire still burning, the surface of the lake bubbling as the water boiled.
‘Stay where you are, mate, or I’ll light you up,’ a booming voice echoed through the cavern. Even amplified I could make out the strong New Zealand accent.
That’s when we heard the giant’s footsteps. I saw its heat signature as I magnified my optics. It had been far back in the tunnel but was making its way quickly towards us to the sound of metal resonating off rock.
Cat moved their FAV back into the tunnel that had brought them to the ledge they were on and threw her brother a Laa-Laa. Merle extended the man-portable missile launcher and took cover, his reactive camouflage turning him into another piece of rock. Not that the light anti-armour missile would do much against the armoured metal giant that stalked out of the tunnel and waded into the lake. I recognised the enormous bipedal, roughly humanoid-shaped mech as a German-made Landsknecht, although it seemed bulkier than others I’d seen. I guessed that this was something to do with the heavier gravity. They had been superseded by newer, better models but were still serviceable and had still been seeing action on all the colonial fronts at the end of the war with Them.
Its armour was pitted and scorched and it had obviously seen a lot of action judging by the patchwork of repairs all over it. On some of the less damaged parts of the mech I could make out intricate patterns that reminded me of the knot work that Pagan favoured, only different somehow. It had a medium missile battery on either shoulder and point-defence lasers mounted on its chest. The plasma cannon which it had used to destroy the gunship had cooled down to only red hot.
‘You fellows were sure making a lot of noise,’ the amplified voice with the Kiwi accent said.
‘Who are you?’ I shouted.
‘We’re the resistance,’ was the amplified reply.
12
Most of them may have been military but it looked less like a resistance base and more like a refugee camp. Gaunt, hungry, harried, haunted-looking men and women looked at the FAVs with suspicion.
We’d managed to get Pagan’s vehicle running and I drove him. He’d come to and told me that they’d fired the missile figuring they were dead anyway. Pagan had been badly kicked about but was otherwise okay. Mudge was much the same. Cat’s FAV towed ours. Morag was reasonably sure that if she could find the right parts, despite the kicking it had taken, she could get it running. I was beginning to think FAVs were worth their exorbitant price tag.
We told ourselves we’d gone with the Kiwi voluntarily, after the inevitable argument about whether or not it was a trap or just a bad idea. When we drove into the network of caverns we were well covered. Somehow, even when there’s not enough food to eat, there are always enough guns. In this case there were also mechs. There were four of the fighting machines including the Landsknecht that had escorted us in. There was another Landsknecht, a Steel Mantis, a light fast scout mech and, most impressive, a Bismarck-class heavy mech.
The Bismarck was basically a heavily armed weapons platform slung between four heavy-duty, insect-like legs. With a three-hundred-millimetre mass driver and two heavy missile batteries as well as various point-defence and anti-personnel weapons, its firepower was something to be respected. But it would be nearly useless in this kind of war. They had all the toys, but this was a hard planet to forage for food on. These people looked like they were starving. Compared to them, I just felt healthy and well fed.
We climbed out of the FAVs into a circle of gun barrels. I tried my best don’t-fuck-with-us look, but as the adrenalin wore off the high G settled on me like a dead weight around my shoulders, pressing down on a sore spine. I spat. My throat felt red raw and the spittle had a pink look to it.
‘So, are we hooking up with the local resistance or being robbed?’ Cat muttered under her breath.
‘Who’s in command?’ Pagan asked.
Nobody said anything. Most of the people around us were Maoris and had the squat powerful build of people born to high gravity. Except their bodies had started to waste. Many of them had tattoos that looked like they’d crawled onto their faces. The Landsknecht mech that had brought us in still towered over us.
‘I think we should give these people food,’ Morag said.
Pagan hissed at her to be quiet. Cat and Merle looked less than pleased with her suggestion.
Generator-run portable lights and free-standing lamps lit the cavern network. There weren’t enough of either to completely light the place and much of it remained in darkness. There were laser-cut niches in the rock that seemed to be bunk spaces. I’d find out later that they were called miner coffins and in the early colonisation period were where dead miners were left in state until they could be disposed off. There were a lot of them.
The circle of guns broke as four people walked through the crowd towards us. The woman looked like she’d had a hard life. She probably wasn’t much older than me but she looked worn. She was muscle and hard edges in inertial armour with a sleeveless leather jacket over the top. When she turned to say something to one of the others I saw that the back of the jacket bore a stylised demon head with bulging eyes and a protruding tongue — gang colours of some kind. Half of her face and the visible skin on her arms were tattooed with swirling patterns that looked like they were trying to engulf her dark but still somehow sallow skin.
Next to her was the biggest hacker I’d ever seen. I could tell he was a hacker because of the mishmash of military and black-market tech that seemed to grow out of half his head. Despite his squat muscular bulk and the heavy G, he moved with a surprisingly easy, almost predatory grace. Like the others you could see where skin had tightened over food-starved flesh. His face and most of the flesh I could see was tattooed. It made him look somehow otherworldly. He wore a sleeveless leather jacket as well. All four of them did.