Waiting patiently in the pit, the Rangers were soon joined by the squad from third platoon. Ash elected to take the two tunnels on the right, and after a short discussion they began to advance, while Tian took up the rear, dropping radio boosters as they moved. The tunnels were not lit, so they reengaged their night-vision. For the first hundred yards they encountered no movement, and Thandi began to suspect the tunnels had only been meant as a diversion to assist the main force on the surface rather than as a serious attack.

Eventually they caught up with the drones they had pushed back earlier, together with a few Special Forces soldiers, who were attempting to set up a defense. The Rangers sealed their facemasks, rolling out tear gas grenades to great effect in the cramped caves. After a brief and intense firefight, they killed the defenders and continued forward.

The tunnels opened up into a cavern, and Thandi caught sight of beautiful crystal formations embedded in the rock walls. Ahead of them was a maze of corridors, and the squads stopped to develop a plan.

They were almost finished when Ash interrupted the chatter, her face pale. “A dropship has been shot down.”

Toska rolled her Shrike into another approach down towards the valley floor. Elmira’s radio communication kept her well informed of the location of the Rangers. As soon as she was cleared hot for a run, she had no problem lining up an approach, without fear of accidentally shooting her comrades fighting desperately below.

She waited until she was close enough, then squeezed a burst from the nose mounted minigun before banking away over the ridgeline.

“Good guns,” came Elmira’s curt reply.

Toska suspected that she hadn’t done much damage, since the drones were once again hiding amongst the rocks, but at least her repeated attacks kept them from trying anything new.

“Two more runs and I’m winchester,” she called.

“Copy that,” Elmira replied.

A bright red light appeared on Toska’s indicator panel, and she was so surprised she had to check it twice. Throughout several decades of operational experience, the light had almost never illuminated, and as she processed the implications she felt her stomach drop out of the aircraft.

The red glow indicated that an enemy search radar had swept over her aircraft, trying to create a target lock—no doubt for a missile. It wasn’t an immediate concern since the Shrike was an effective stealth fighter, almost invisible to all forms of electromagnetic tracking, and whoever was aiming at her would have to be very lucky to get a return strong enough for a true missile lock. But it was an unwelcome development, only reinforcing Toska’s sense that the operation was not going well.

She began a series of fast turns, as she watched the light’s behavior. Whenever she banked, it flicked off, but then quickly came back on again after she levelled out. That could only mean that someone with a handheld system could visually see her fighter and was trying to track her across the sky. At night, that would have been impossible, but in the brightening morning sky, she would be easily visible.

She thumbed her radio switch. “Raven, this is Falcon. Be advised I am getting a fire control radar alert. Seems to be a manual tracker.”

“Copy that Falcon,” came the quick response. “We’re scanning for contacts.”

Far below her, Raider snipers perched on the ridgeline alongside the combat controller were checking every inch of the valley floor through their scopes, looking for enemy soldiers.

A high pitch alarm shrieked a warning in the cockpit. Acting on pure instinct, Toska threw the fighter into a high-G snaking curve, dumping chaff and diving down into a neighboring valley in a bid to cut the line of sight.

Whoever had been aiming that missile had obviously managed to get a lock, and fired.

Now she was shaken—nobody had ever heard of a Man Portable Air Defense system that could defeat the stealth of the Shrike. With a sickening realization, she understood there was an even greater danger, and she hit the all-coms radio switch to broadcast to the entire task force.

“All ships all ships, exit the airspace immediately!” she called, though her punishing maneuvering left her fighting for breath. “They have a stealth defeating MANPAD on the ground. I repeat all ships, get out of the airspace!”

Out of the corner of her eye, she saw the bright flare of the missile racing off across the mountain tops, and she breathed a sigh of relief. Then, with horror, she saw the black speck in the distance—the new target the weapon had locked on to—desperately corkscrewing away.

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One of the dropships had gotten too close.

On board the ELINT ship, several things happened at once. A high pitch alarm tone sounded throughout the ship, which banked violently, as the hull shuddered with the strong G forces. Rose was thrown hard against her minigun controls, but she had been careful to strap herself into the roof mounted harness. Christie too had been strapped in, but her equipment was tossed straight across the cabin as the aircraft swung around.

“Hold on!” called the pilot.

Rose felt a rapid series of thunks, as chaff counter measures were fired out of the tail. There was an incredible bang, and Christie’s chest erupted in blood as chunks of metal punched through the skin of the dropship.

More alarms blared, and Rose felt the aircraft begin to spin violently. She prepared herself for the end, but the spinning began to slow as the pilot brought the aircraft under some degree of control. From the cockpit, computerized voices shrieked “Terrain, Terrain,” and “Pull-up” in different cadences.

“Brace yourselves!” the pilot called. “We’re going in.”

Christie was slunk over in her seat, unconscious and still bleeding, and Rose saw the mountainside pass by the window near her head, so close she thought she could touch it. There was a violent jerk as they impacted the ground, and the aircraft began to roll. Then everything went black.

Inside the lab, Kayla began to calm down as she checked over her wounds.

Weslan looked on with deep concern. “That looks really bad,” he said, wincing as she pulled back a blood-soaked piece of her combat suit, to reveal the torn flesh of her arm.

“Yeah. You got some bandages or something?” she asked.

Weslan scurried off to the lounge and returned with a first aid kit.

The other researchers had gone back to their rooms after Weslan had patiently insisted that everything was fine, and that the amped up soldier wearing a fixed expression of merciless rage and waving a gun around was completely under control.

“I’m sorry I scared Julie,” Kayla said. “I just… had a difficult day, and I thought maybe she was caught up in all this.”

Weslan nodded gravely. “Yes, well, we are ‘all this’. They lied to us, and we didn’t know the truth until it was too late. They’ve already killed some of our friends.”

“I’m sorry.”

Weslan was preparing her bandages when he stopped, alarmed. “You’ve already stopped bleeding. How is that possible?”

“What? She felt her arm and winced with the pain. “No, that’s a deep wound, it will take a while longer.”

“I meant your leg.”

“My leg?” Kayla looked down. “Oh wow, I got shot in the leg too? I can’t believe how stupid I was.” She shook her head. “You know that evil woman who’s in charge? Rayker?”

“Yes,” Weslan nodded, with a painful grimace.

“Well, I thought I could take her down, and I was wrong. She did this to me. Don’t worry it will be okay in a few hours—but I just need a bandage on it.”

“Kayla… how—what is happening? What are you doing here?”

“Um… well, you see, I’m here to rescue you.” She flashed him a manic smile.

Weslan just stared at her in confusion.

She grabbed his arm. “Listen, I promise I will explain—but can you please get that bandage on?”

Weslan snapped out of his stupor. “Oh, yes of course. Sorry.”

“So, after your last email,” Kayla continued while he worked on her wound, “I decided you owed me a proper explanation, and I came out to Caldera to chase after you.”

She recounted the events at the university and explained about Fayel’s crystal, but provided only a vague and unspecific description of how they had located the lab. Weslan was stunned to hear that they were not near the city of Rackeye, but were in fact deep in the Sentry mountains, hundreds of miles away.

Kayla realized that the hallway where she had lost the Raiders had to be some type of teleporter. Did that mean there might be way to get the others back?

“So… you’re some kind of soldier?” Weslan asked with a frown.

“Yeah. Pretty poor excuse for one really,” she said, rubbing her free hand through her hair.

“And they sent you in alone?”

“Well, no—there were a lot of us, and things went really wrong and they’ve all disappeared through that teleporter, so now I’m completely alone. And unable to contact the task force.”

Weslan’s forehead wrinkled. “What task force?”

“Oh, there’s a big army out there, fighting off the drones as we speak.”

He shook his head, apparently unable to process this information.

When he finished with the bandages he sat back down. “I did this, you know? I should have tried to resist, I should have sacrificed myself—” He stopped as tears welled up in his eyes.

Kayla almost wanted to snap at him, but she took a deep breath, and offered a silent prayer of thanks to Valkyrie for her relentless training. No pain, fatigue or fear was going to distract her from moving to the next problem.

She put a hand on his shoulder. “Weslan, I know you didn’t want to hurt anybody. I know you’re one of the good guys. But right now, we need to focus on how we’re going to get everyone out of this mess alive. Right?”

“I don’t know—what can we do?” he said hopelessly.

“Why don’t you tell me about the drones. How do they work?”

Weslan began to describe the system he had designed to control them, but they were interrupted by a chirping noise. Kayla had placed her helmet to one side on the bed, and when she placed it back on her head, she heard a female voice and felt a rush of relief.

“—any call signs, please respond. This is Viper two, we are inside the objective—please respond.”

“Viper two, this is uh… Tiger One,” Kayla stammered.

“Tiger One, what the hell is going on? Where are you all?”

“Uh… I- No, I’m just a Ranger—I’m alone here. Everyone else is gone.”

“A Ranger?” the voice said incredulously. “Who is this—”

“Kayla? is that you?” a new voice said.

Kayla almost cried with relief. “Thandi—Christ, it’s good to hear your voice. Yeah, It’s me.”

“Where are you? We just penetrated some side tunnels, leading out to the valley, and everything is a maze down here.”

Side tunnels? Kayla reached into a pouch for the map she had sketched, as she tried to recall seeing something similar.

“Stand by,” she said, pulling out the pencil and beckoning to Weslan. “I need you to draw everything you know about this place on this map.”

They worked over the map for several minutes, then Kayla talked with the Rangers until they were able to figure out their location and a route through the maze. She talked them through some directions that bypassed the main lab and would bring them to the Researcher’s area.

“Do not engage If you can possibly avoid it,” she cautioned. “Rayker is way more dangerous than you think.”

“Solid copy,” Thandi confirmed.