Wace and Geddan were more or less unhurt. They had been forced to take a circuitous route across the level above to escape the Salv, but they’d been able to join up with some paratroopers mounting a counter-attack. By the time Rann and Iva rejoined them, the worst of the battle was over, the remaining ambushers cornered and gunned down. With their advantage of surprise exhausted, the Salv lacked the numbers and firepower to overcome the loyalists.
“They’re sloppy fucks, these ones.” Geddan nodded towards a grey-uniformed corpse he’d left in his wake. “Conscripts. Hardly know one end of the gun from the other. We cut through them nice and easy.”
“Good to hear it,” Rann replied. His relief at finding Wace and Geddan was tempered by the stubborn pain in his stomach and jaw. It took no small effort to keep the grimace off his face. He was sure the others could tell, regardless.
It was honest pain, battle-pain, nothing to be ashamed of. That didn’t make it hurt any less.
He appraised the paratroopers alongside whom Wace and Geddan had fought. There were four of them, though only three could still walk. One sat propped up against the cracked wall of a narrow telegraph-room, groaning, with his bullet-shattered knee clumsily bound up in bandages. Their sergeant had been wounded as well, and wore a makeshift tourniquet on her bleeding forearm.
“We’re going to sit tight here until the regulars arrive. Can’t press on like this,” she told Rann. Her voice was hoarse, edged with pain and frustration. “As far as you can go, Dauman says. Well, this is it for us.”
“Do you know where the others are? Our people, I mean?”
“Somewhere.” The paratrooper sergeant shrugged bitterly, while her crippled squadmate gave a miserable whimper from the floor. “All scattered around. Our lieutenant got killed on the floor above. We’ve no maps, no way to radio out through all this fucking concrete. If there’s atomics in here, they could be anywhere. I swear this place goes on forever.”
Rann gave her a look of sympathy that was surely as useless to her as it felt to him. “We’re going to keep moving. I don’t want to give the Salv time to ready more surprises for us. If we find a corpsman, we’ll direct him your way.”
The wounded woman smiled morbidly. “Don’t go to any trouble on our account. The regulars can’t be far behind. I can still hold a gun. We’ll live.”
Rann, who had heard similar sentiments from a lot of now-dead soldiers over the years, just nodded.
He and his squad helped the beleaguered paratroopers drag some heavy furniture around to barricade their telegraph-room against further ambush. There was no way to tell how long they might need to hold out. Reinforcements were likely still hours away, given the sheer size of the complex. Before heading out, he left the paratroopers some spare rifle magazines, and a couple of field dressings for their wounds. He hoped he wouldn’t come to regret his generosity.
“Good luck, bluecoats,” the injured sergeant called after them. “All the shit I used to say about you marines, I take it back. Well – most of it.”
“Aye, and you’ve got some sinew, for a load of nancy flyboys,” Geddan replied magnanimously. Iva shot him a schoolmarmish look.
They cautiously pressed on, room by room and corridor by corridor. They were a long way inside the mountain now, having descended multiple floors below the entrance level. There seemed no end to the switchbacking, forking hallways and junctions. Some areas had lost electric power and were pitch-dark, forcing them to proceed by torchlight. Rann was no claustrophobe, but he hated those dark, narrow, not-quite-silent stretches more than words could express.
The one blessing was that the enemy’s numbers had thinned out dramatically. There were no more coordinated ambushes, just a handful of Salv taking potshots down the corridors. They still had to keep watch for traps – tripwires held taut at ankle height, strips of plastic explosive wadded to doorframes – but these seemed shoddy and haphazard. When Geddan stepped on a concealed pressure-plate, it turned out to be a dud. Evidently, the Salv had exhausted their better hardware defending the slopes.
They didn’t see any others from the incursion force, though sporadic gunfire in the corridors behind them indicated that there was still some fighting going on. The bombardment outside was a constant low-level earthquake, so familiar that it barely even registered.
Every now and then, Rann would look back at the others, and imagine for a second that he saw Lidaro among them. He knew exhaustion and battle-fatigue could make a man see phantasms. Lost comrades returned to life, long-dead wives or children, or stranger things loping across the battlefield. His mind could feel the boy’s absence, and was trying in some foolish way to fill it.
Typical of Lidaro. A single day dead, and already a restless ghost.
*
Nearly an hour after leaving the paratroopers behind, they found the rails.
Beyond a guard post whose guards had already fled, they found themselves midway along a wide, sparsely-lit tunnel. The tunnel stretched off into the distance, ahead and behind, longer than any of the corridors they’d traversed so far. It had an industrial feel to it; scaled for machines, not humans. There were scuffed steel rails set into the floor, creating a small-gauge trackway.
Rann wondered where the rails originated – he hadn’t noticed any elsewhere in the complex. There must have been a cargo hatch hidden on the upper mountainside, far from the main gate. Perhaps this section of the fortress had been kept secret even from its defenders.
“Those’ll be for moving heavy gear,” Geddan said. “Reminds me of the tracks we used to run carts on in the coalpits.”
Rann crouched down briefly to examine the rails. They were well-worn, smoothed to a dull shine. They’d clearly seen plenty of use. “Is this how they move their atomics around?”
Iva grimaced. “Wish we had a radiation counter to check. Almighty knows what kind of dose we might have picked up already.”
“I feel fine,” Wace said calmly.
“You would do, at first. Then your arsehole starts bleeding, and your hair starts falling out.”
“Let’s find the endpoint,” Rann cut in. He was trying his hardest not to think of the triage camps outside Indeleon, the way those people had simply rotted apart from the inside out. He reassured himself that none of the Salv ambushers had looked radiation-sick. “If they’re bringing in heavy equipment on these rails, odds are their scientists will be there assembling it. We have our orders.”
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The others voiced no argument. Their faces told a different story.
Guided by Rann’s compass-needle, they followed the railed tunnel towards the heart of the mountain. They pushed through a series of sliding doors that partitioned the tunnel into long gloomy sections. Water from leaking pipes trickled down the walls and splashed underfoot. They met no opposition, only finding a few hastily-planted, easily-bypassed tripwires. At long last, the Salv seemed to have reached the end of their defensive resources.
Rann recalled Dauman’s words at the briefing. Believing our enemy to be defeated is a very dangerous form of complacency.
After what felt like miles of wary trudging, the tunnel ended in something like a loading bay, a wide, brightly-lit space with thick square pillars supporting its high ceiling. The rails continued across its bare concrete floor, with a steel cargo trolley sitting abandoned halfway along them. The place looked undamaged, but very much cleared-out. Aside from the trolley and some empty wooden pallets stacked beside the pillars, it was empty of both equipment and personnel.
Except for the man standing in the middle.
He was not kneeling to take aim or crouching behind a barricade, but standing insouciantly out in the open, in front of the cargo trolley. He was dressed in the crisp grey-and-black uniform of a Salvator senior officer, though he carried the same stubby marque of submachine-gun as the other defenders. Even from a distance, the bay’s glaring striplights threw his hollow, sunken features into sharp relief. His head was shaven smooth as bone, perhaps emulating Nilen.
The officer saw the marines approach. He made no move to run, or to fire at them, letting the submachine-gun dangle in one hand. Trapped and out of rounds, Rann judged.
As they drew closer, Rann could see the open doors of a freight elevator at the far end of the loading bay, at the terminus of the railtrack. It had been visibly sabotaged – the roof of the elevator cage was frozen halfway down the doorway, its electrics shorted and sparking. Another doorway beside it opened onto a descending concrete stairwell lit by a chain of failing bulbs. Heavy bundles of power cables were bracketed to the walls of the stairwell, following the stairs down out of sight. A brushed steel sign bolted to the railings read CHAMBER-1.
Rann frowned momentarily at that. Then he saw Wace aligning his sights on the officer, the stock braced against his shoulder, ready to fire.
“No,” Rann said. “We take this one alive.” Ignoring Wace’s indignant grunt, he gave the signal to advance.
They charged into the bay by twos, rifles lining up on the lone officer. “Drop that weapon and kick it over here!” Rann shouted hoarsely.
“Fucking drop it!” Geddan bellowed in concert.
The officer obeyed smoothly, almost nonchalantly. His gun clacked to the floor. He slid it across the concrete with a quick tap of his boot. It came to rest near Geddan, who kicked it hard into the corner of the bay. That was when Rann noticed the slumped shapes piled up there, half-hidden by one of the pillars. His heart froze in his chest.
There had been a massacre. He counted ten bodies heaped against the wall, a tangle of contorted limbs and bullet-riddled torsos in a huge mingled pool of crimson. They all wore the grey field gear of Salvator conscripts. Their uniforms were tattered and threadbare, with rusted buckles and missing buttons. There were no weapons scattered around them; they had not died fighting. It looked as though they had been stood against the wall and gunned down in a line.
Wace and Geddan cursed when they saw the corpses. Iva just stared. The officer, standing there unarmed in the sights of four rifles, smirked.
The dead conscripts were even younger than the one that had tried to bayonet Rann. They looked pathetically small and stunted. Their cheekbones stood out sharply under their papery-white skin, while their too-big uniform sleeves revealed skeletally thin wrists. These boys had been starving, barely fit to walk, let alone fight. Some still had their eyes open, staring ahead in frozen terror. Rills of blood trickled from their noses and gaping mouths. The concrete wall behind them bore a constellation of bullet holes and wild splatters of red, still horribly fresh.
“Why?” Iva said in a quiet, choked voice. She was gripping her rifle so tightly that its barrel was quivering.
The officer’s smirk faded. “They refused my orders. I told them to attack, and they would not. They betrayed the People’s Salvation.” His voice was a thin rasp, with just a trace of a rhotic Crown City accent. He was gaunt, but nowhere near as emaciated as the dead boys. Officers starve last, Rann thought.
“They are...children,” Geddan growled.
“They were deserters. Deserters are shot. Is that not true of your king’s army, Forester?” the Salv replied levelly. There was hatred in his dark eyes, and a cold defiance. And something else, something unhinged.
Geddan looked at the officer with barely restrained fury. “Murderers are shot.”
“Or hanged,” Wace said.
“Your darkskin talks out of turn. You’d do well to discipline it,” the officer said, addressing Rann. Wace bristled, baring his teeth, his finger twitching on the trigger of his rifle.
“Easy. Don’t rise to it,” Rann warned him. “Remember our orders.”
Machine-gun fire pattered somewhere in the complex behind them, cut off by the abrupt low thud of an explosion. Wace didn’t take his eyes off the Salv. “There must be more officers around here for us to bring in. Doesn’t need to be this one.”
“Wace. Listen to him,” Iva said, with what sounded like very forced calm. At any other time, Rann might have resented her for undermining his authority. Right now, his belly a sheet of bruises and his mouth tasting of blood, he could only be grateful. He did not want to see his squad fall apart here, so close to the end.
He met the Salv’s stare with all the disdain he could muster. “You are now a prisoner of the Kingdom of Greater Kauln,” he said, his voice level but raw from shouting and breathing gunsmoke. “You will be treated in accordance with the laws of war, provided you co-operate with us. If you do not, you will be treated as an active enemy combatant. That means you will be shot, right here, right now. Do you understand?”
The Salv said nothing. His sunken eyes darted from Rann to Wace and back again. His hands were clasped into pale fists, fingers stained with streaks of gun-oil.
“Why are you still here?” Rann pressed. He tried to block out the conscripts slumped against the wall, the way their dead eyes caught the light. One of them looked uncannily like Lidaro. “You know it’s over. The Crown City fell weeks ago. The People’s Salvation is finished.”
“And your fucking First Marshal is dead,” Wace put in with a hard, hate-bright smile. “Did you hear, Salv? They found Nilen in the ruins of the palace. I heard his own bodyguards did it, when they realised it was over for them. Dragged him into a courtyard and shot him to pieces.”
The officer glowered back at them with supreme contempt. A heavy detonation far above made the lights flicker and sent a drift of dust pattering down from the ceiling.
“Answer me,” Rann said. He pointed his rifle towards the stairway leading down, with its bracketed tracks of thick cables. “What have you got down there, in Chamber One? What are you all so keen to die for?”
“Must be atomics,” Wace muttered. “Just shoot him, sergeant, and then let’s get clear before they go off in our faces.”
“Is that what it is? Atomics?” Rann kept his eyes on the scowling Salvator. “We know some of your scientists made it to Delan’s Rock. Are they down there, hard at work?” There was no answer, so he continued. “You can’t have any bombs ready to use. You’d have blown up our landing grounds if you did. So what’s down there, a reactor? Some kind of assembly plant?”
“The lower levels hold our stores,” the officer said. “You’re wasting your time.”
“Then why did you destroy the elevator? Afraid we’ll raid the pantry? You’ve already lost the mountain. I don’t think you shot these boys for failing to defend a storeroom. And I don’t think you’d still be here if that’s all there was to defend.”
“I have relinquished my weapon. I’m not defending anything. Nor do I need to.”
“You’re stalling, Salv. It’s not going to work. You’re going to take us down there.”
“He’ll lead us into an ambush,” Iva protested.
Rann glanced at her, then back at the Salvator. “We’ll keep him ahead of us. Go slowly. If they’ve laid traps, he’ll be the one to set them off. Any sign of his friends, we withdraw immediately, and you have my permission to shoot him on the spot.”
“Sooner do it now,” Wace growled. His rifle was still trained on the officer’s head.
“That’s up to him, Wace,” Rann said coldly. “Simple choice. Walk, or die.”
There was a pause in which the only sound was the muffled crack and rattle of distant gunfire. The blood of the slain conscripts dripped down the wall. Rann saw the defiance in the Salvator’s expression crumble by degrees. A fanatic and a murderer, yes; but this one was not suicidal.
“I will show you,” the officer said at last, through tightly gritted teeth. “It’s a long way down.”
“We’ve just climbed a mountain,” Rann told him. “We can handle a few stairs.”