Seafall, One Hundred and Five Kilometers Below
Lumiara, Survivor’s Refuge
4454.2.28 Interstellar
Mick, Janus, and the rest of the away team were hunkered down in the hallway outside the security checkpoint. The unseen defenders had already opened fire on them, cratering the opposite wall with some sort of heavy machine gun.
“What do we do?” Lira asked.
“Do you want to talk to them?” Mick asked.
“I’ll talk to them once you’ve knocked some sense into them,” Lira answered. “I’m not negotiating this from a position of cowering in terror.”
Janus turned to the captain. “Any thoughts?”
“Well, I’m certainly not going out there to talk to them,” he said with a grin. “Bounce some explosives around the corner. We’ve just heard the one person. Maybe that’s all that’s left of the garrison.”
Lira smacked her domed helmed with her palm. “That would defeat the purpose of our coming here.”
“Actually,” the captain said, “If there was only one compartmentalist left, the purpose of our coming here is already defeated.”
“And it doesn’t help us either way if they have an automated turret out there!” Mick said.
Janus watched the discussion, listening with one ear and mind chipping away at the problem. The problem was threefold. The most obvious was that, whoever was manning the checkpoint, they were shooting at anything they heard or saw. “Mick?”
“Yeah, boss?”
Janus tossed him his assault rifle back. “That red pipe over there,” he said, pointing toward the ceiling across from the checkpoint.
“Got it,” Mick said. He didn’t ask questions. He just swapped magazines, racked the bolt, caught the round from the chamber, and aimed. Bam!
Steam gushed into the hallway.
“Hey!” the guard shouted.
Janus pulled the pin on a regular smoke grenade and rolled it into the hallway.
The security checkpoint opened fire. The sound was deafening. There were two, maybe three of the big guns firing now, and Janus worried they might damage the facility this time.
Then the sound stopped, except for the clatter of someone frantically reloading.
Janus looked at Fury and tossed his head toward the security checkpoint. “Disarm.”
The jungle dragon didn’t hesitate. She wove her way through the group and rounded the corner into the smoke and fog, going low and fast.
There was a clatter and a muffled shout.
“Ancient Stars. I forgot how terrifying she can be,” Mick said with a grin.
Janus winked at him, and after a few more seconds, he tapped Mick on the shoulder and the two of them followed Fury in.
He felt a rush of relief as they stepped out into the clear. There had indeed been two sentry guns set up, and when he’d blocked both their thermal and visual sensors, they’d both opened fire as he’d hoped. Then they’d paused—Janus wasn’t sure if they’d run out of ammunition or if it was a programmed stop to keep them from overheating—and in that moment, Fury, whose skin temperature tended to run closer to steam than a post-human or a human in an aspirant suit, had come out of the smoke and fog and knocked the guns off their tripods before knocking the guard into a wall.
The sentry guns whirred as they tried to right themselves. “Watch those muzzles!” Mick said, pulling Vix out of the way. The guns were still live; if they sighted a target, nothing would stop them from firing.
Fury snarled.
The compartmentalist security guard was backed up against a wall, legs splayed. His bullpup carbine was just out of reach, and Fury bared her teeth as he tried to creep his fingers toward it.
“I wouldn’t,” Janus said.
“What’s she going to do? Bite my head off?”
“She breathes fire,” Janus said, and the guard’s eyes widened.
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“Got it,” Devere said, kicking the carbine away.
“All right, Fury,” Janus said. “You can let him up.”
Fury huffed, blowing in the man’s face and making him flinch, then she sauntered back over to Janus with her eyes crinkled and tongue lolling.
Janus chuckled and shook his head. “Come on. You can get up.”
The security guard slid himself up the wall, hands raised. “What do you people want?”
“Your help,” Janus said. “Although it looks like you might need ours more than we need yours.”
The hint of a sneer played out on the guard’s face.
The sound of running boots rang out in the staircase behind the security checkpoint.
“Looks like there’s more than just him to this base,” Mick said. “Weapons down, everyone.”
The team mag-locked their weapons to their suits, and Janus holstered his chem pistol. The security guard moved to retrieve his weapon, and Fury snarled at him.
“I’d leave that where it is, mate,” Mick said with a wink.
A squad of fourteen black-armored troops poured into the security checkpoint from the back, weapons raised, falling into positions of mutual support. They looked professional, well-trained, and deadly.
Several of them were at least partial cyborgs, based on the way they moved.
“All clear, ma’am!” one of them said, the barrel of his weapon steady.
After a few moments, a single set of footsteps rang out on the steps, and Janus saw a slender figure come down behind the checkpoint booths. The woman Janus assumed was the base commander wore heavy black boots and a neat, gray military uniform. Her gunmetal gray hair was chopped short. Her eyes scanned across the away team as she approached before returning to stare at Janus.
Then she turned to the security guard. “Pick up your weapon and go upstairs.”
“Yes, ma’am,” the guard said, his face bright red.
The base commander looked at Janus and crossed her arms. “What do you want?”
“You look like you could use some help.”
“Not from you,” she said. She turned her head to the soldier who’d called her down. “Get the checkpoint set up again, and put four people on it. We’ve gotten lax.”
“Yes, ma’am,” the soldier said, slinging his weapon and snapping his fingers at three other black-armored troops to get the guns set back up.
“You’re going to want to be gone by the time the sentry guns are active,” the base commander said.
Janus clenched his jaw in frustration. The compartmentalist wasn’t giving him anything to work with. “We have three submarines waiting outside the range of your turrets. We have technicians and supplies we could share.”
The commander thought about it for a full ten seconds while her men set the sentry guns back upright. Then, her eyes flicked to the captain, and she raised an eyebrow. “You’re well dressed for your kind.”
The captain bared his teeth. “I’m the captain of the Seraphine. You probably know me as the Apostate.”
The commander’s lips thinned to a severe line. “Between you, Parameter, and the Irkallans with you, I have the combined source of all our ills. I’m very tempted to have you all shot. Tell me why I shouldn’t?”
“The Emissary is at odds with the exceptionalists,” the captain said. “If he can’t secure your assistance, his people will die.”
The commander grunted. “A good enough basis to have a conversation, at least. I’d like to hear how much you’ll suffer when I throw you back into the sea.”
***
With the security checkpoint set up and under far more competent guard, the commander and ten soldiers escorted the away team upstairs. They were allowed to keep their weapons, but only after unloading them and stowing them in their packs. Janus didn’t feel completely defenseless, but he understood the message. Their hosts were being marginally respectful, but the balance of power was wholly in the compartmentalists’ favor.
Another way to look at it might have been that, if Janus’s people resisted, the troopers might resort to blows instead of gunfire, although with the reinforced aspirant suits on, the Irkallans would have the advantage. I probably shouldn’t have told that guard Fury can breathe fire, Janus thought.
They arrived on the third level. Like in the first stairwell they’d climbed, the passage to the next level—the fourth level—was blocked off and reinforced.
“They really did a number on you, didn’t they?” Mick asked, looking at the barricade.
The commander sighed. “I suppose I don’t have to tell an Irkallan Hunter what it’s like to nearly be overrun when your families are standing behind you.”
“Our families are usually standing next to us,” Mick said. “But I do see your point.”
“Good.”
Janus did too, perhaps more than Mick did. Hunters liked to wander, so the idea of Mick and his kin standing side by side with their families and facing imminent destruction at the hands of triliths was a noble but unlikely one. Hunter culture had evolved to preserve useful genetic lines, and so, from a purely biological standpoint, it made sense to Janus that they didn’t aggregate in families. They stood their ground because they were Hunters, with a sense of duty and unbroken legacy that Janus had only encountered elsewhere in the Verazlans of Krandermore. It was something that had been difficult to swallow in his relationship with Lee.
But what the commander had talked about was something completely different—and probably a cultural misunderstanding on her part. If Janus was guessing correctly, the people here faced something far worse than any Hunter had stood against since the fall of Prometheus Base, which the Hunters had called Haven because it was the place they were welcome when they were too old or broken to live on the road.
The first landing led out into a fortified lobby with two exists, one of which had been blocked off by a heavy steel barrier that had been welded in place and had two levels of embrasures through which soldiers could fire. The open exit was guarded by two more sentry guns, like the ones downstairs, except these had been sandbagged in place so they’d be much harder to knock over.
“Make sure the sentry guns are set to fire in sequence,” the commander told one of her men. “I don’t want them overheating like they did downstairs.”
“Yes, ma’am,” the soldier said, staying behind and activating his wrist comma.
Mick opened his mouth to ask a question, and Janus punched him in the shoulder.
The commander looked at Janus, then at Mick. “Ask your question, Hunter.”
“You lot seem pretty competent.”
“Why didn’t we set them in sequence in the first place?”
Mick nodded.
“When the Apostates’ people attack, they do it in waves. There’s no reason to them at that point, no restraint. The only way to stop them is to break their momentum.”
“I guess that means they don’t use tools or tactics,” Janus said.
“They’re very clever, Mr. Invarian. Don’t let them fool you. If it weren’t for the double-violent lights and the turrets outside—for which we can thankfully print more ammunition—those things would have come at us from every side and pried us out of our shells like pentapi in a mollusk colony.”
“About the group living on the diving deck—”
“Not here,” the commander snapped.
They entered the base’s commercial district, and Janus immediately saw why.