Steel World (35 page)

“Two.”

We were all up. I flexed my muscles, which had cramped slightly from crouching low for so long.

“Three—GO!”

Just like that, he was racing up the tunnel. I rushed after him, with Carlos bringing up the rear. We tried to run quietly, but that wasn’t really possible. We were wearing heavy boots and running over a rough floor with corkscrew-like gouges in it. I found it hard not to stumble. I had to look down often just to keep my footing.

We almost reached them before they sensed us. Almost.

At the last second, some alert saurian craned his long neck around and saw our charge. We didn’t have our lights on, but we could see their body heat. There was very little illumination. Saurians have excellent night vision, and they don’t need special gear to see in dark tunnels.

The saurian made a raspy, croaking sound, and it was the last sound he ever made. Sargon stopped, leveled his tube and fired. I barely had time to throw myself against the wall of the tunnel.

There was a flare of green light inside my helmet. Fortunately, the visor was built to automatically dampen extremely bright illumination so as not to blind me with the amplified input. Still, I winced from hitting the sharp tunnel walls and from the assault on my eyes.

The saurian in armor fared much worse. He was taken out, blown apart by a direct hit. Sargon’s aim was excellent, but taking the shot wasn’t the best move I’d ever seen a weaponeer make. The plasma bolt tore through the saurian and caromed off the ceiling—bouncing down again right into the machine we were supposedly rescuing.

“I can’t believe it,” Carlos said. “He frigging killed it!”

“We don’t know that. Move up!” I shouted.

“What’s the point? Let’s get out of here.”

I didn’t listen to him. Maybe the data unit was still intact. I pressed forward, hammering my snap-rifle on full auto into the surprised lizards.

We were lucky in one regard: the saurians were working hard to drag the machine, just as we had been a few hours ago. It was insanely heavy, bulky and unforgiving.

They weren’t wearing helmets—maybe it was too hot for them—so I aimed for their heads. It wasn’t as hard as it sounds. When surprised, the dinos had a well-known behavioral tendency: they all perked up, lifting their heads high and twisting their long necks rather than their bodies. As a result, they were all arching and staring at us for a moment, trying to figure out what they were facing.

Sargon was the first one to close with them. He rushed up, put his tube to his shoulder and took out a second lizard, this time one that was pretty far from the machine.

My snap-rifle jumped in my hands, chattering. I could hear sliver-like bullets spraying out, ricocheting and sparking from the metal roof of the tunnel. I knew I had to be hitting them—right in the face—but they weren’t going down.

The few seconds of surprise passed, and the lizards responded to our attack with deadly effectiveness. As Sargon was the closest, they turned on him like a pack of hungry wolves. They leapt, hind-claws leading, their tails making curved lines behind them.

He never had a chance. He dropped his tube, got out his combat knife, and managed to sink it into the chest of the first saurian who reached him. But then the weight of those hind legs hit him, sending him sprawling. The saurian he’d knifed staggered, but the rest closed in, biting and tearing. I heard a screech that was probably human, and I saw a reptilian head lift up with a bloody trophy. I wasn’t even sure it was a limb—it could have been a ripped-loose strip of skin and flesh.

“Don’t worry about hitting Sargon,” I said, “he’s gone.”

“Concentrate on the closest one!” Carlos said, breathing over the microphone in his helmet in what sounded like panicky gasps. “He’s permed. I can’t believe it, we’re all going to be permed right here in this hole.”

“Shut up, and keep firing.”

We laid fire into the leader until he went down. The one Sargon had gutted was down as well. With the two he’d shot earlier, that left four of them out of the fight.

The last two got smart and retreated behind the smoking hulk of the revival unit.

“Are they running or getting guns?” Carlos asked.

“It hardly matters which. We can’t break off. They’ll come after us, and they run a lot faster than we do. Let’s charge.”

“Okay. You left, me right.”

“Go!”

We’d been hugging the ragged walls of the tunnel, but now we fully exposed ourselves and rushed forward. We ran to the machine, stumbling over dead bodies and uneven spiraling cuts in the steel floor. We each came around the sides of the tunnel—and met up with two armed lizards.

They were picking up gear from a sled of sorts they had on the ground. I could tell right away it was some kind of air sled, a machine built to help carry heavy loads. I’d used them before, guiding them with tugs and nudges.

One of the two was looking right at me when I came around the machine. He opened his mouth at me, but I didn’t hear him make any sound, not even a hiss. I don’t know if his yawning action was a challenge, a greeting or a laugh.

We both fired at the same time, but Carlos slammed into the dino, spoiling his aim.

I was stunned for a split-second. Carlos had not stopped his charge—he’d plowed right into the lizard that was going to shoot me. The other one hadn’t gotten his rifle up yet. Maybe he was loading it or configuring it—I had no idea.

Two bullets found me in the crossfire. They bit into my right shoulder, punching through the fabric of my uniform like I was wearing a windbreaker instead of light infantry armor.

My right arm didn’t work quite right anymore, but I shot the lizard in the skull with a burst that caused visible damage. Even with the strange glare of night vision, I could tell most of his snout was missing.

I turned my barrel in the direction of the second lizard, who was still working on his gun. Maybe it was jammed, I don’t know, but he never fired it. I killed him before he could get it into action.

Then, I moved to Carlos and pulled him away from the dead saurian. The two were entangled. I saw a curved blade and a lot of blood. Carlos had been gutted.

“You going to make it?” Carlos asked me with a strange, rattling voice.

“Yeah. I’m good.”

I was lying. My shoulder was on fire. I could feel the blood trickling down into my suit, dribbling with cooling runnels all the way to the tips of my gloves and the soles of my feet. The air conditioners chilled the blood as it ran over my skin, making a sticky, cold mess that was worse than sweat.

“How about you?” I asked him.

“No way,” he gasped. “I’m dead. But if you get the hell out of here now, Sargon and I—we won’t be permed. You can tell them.”

“Is that why you did it?” I asked. “Is that why you hugged this lizard and got yourself killed?”

“Partly, yeah,” he said. “But no matter what, I don’t owe you anything now, McGill. We’re even.”

It took me a second to understand what he was talking about.

“You’re still hung up on that first training exercise? Where Graves suffocated us—is that what you’re talking about?”

“You know damn well—” he broke off to cough wetly. I didn’t have to look to know that the mess he was coughing up was dark with clotted blood. “You know what I’m saying. You came back for me, so I threw myself on a lizard for you.”

“Okay,” I said. “We’re even, but we’re not finished yet. I’ll see you around after some hot bio revives you.”

He laughed and coughed. His head was moving, but the rest of him was deadly still. It was strange, almost as if he was paralyzed—which he wasn’t, as far as I could tell. His body was in shock, I guess: Already dead, but still functioning for a few minutes more.

We talked a bit longer, quietly, until he died. It didn’t take more than two minutes. When I was sure, I let him down carefully, took pictures of the fallen in case there was any argument from the bios, and went to the machine.

If I ran out right now, I knew I’d make it. Carlos, Sargon and I would live. But that wasn’t why I’d come down here. I’d come to save Graves, Natasha, Anne—all of them.

I flipped on my suit lights and climbed all over the machine. I found the front panel and dug around on it. I didn’t see any obvious data ports or removable storage devices.

I heaved a sigh. This was a lot of work for nothing. My shoulder was stinging and getting stiffer every minute. Soon, it would be hard to defend myself without a regrow.

I got out my tapper and searched it, but there was precious little on alien tech. It was against Galactic Law to study and reverse-engineer an alien device like this. If you couldn’t do it on your own, you had to let the original builders keep their monopoly.

As a last ditch effort, I engaged my helmet computer. It identified items I looked at—but most of us found that distracting. When you looked down at your gun, it told you all about the snap-rifle in your hands. If you
lifted a fork, it told you
fork
in glowing letters with a command section that would honest-to-God look up the word fork and give the dictionary definition. Because these systems were annoying, we usually kept them flipped off. But right now, I needed all the help I could get.

I turned it on and carefully eyed the machine. It needed time to recognize each component—if it could. That meant staring fixedly at each item for about ten seconds before the computer popped up its best guess at what the hell I was looking at.

A few times, the results were hilarious. I wasn’t in any mood to laugh, but I had to when it saw the stiff, dead upraised claws of a saurian corpse and identified them as
fingers
.

“Moron machine,” I said. “Scales, claws, wrong dimensions and shape. Hell, they don’t even have the same number of joints that we do.”

The computer ignored me and went right on happily identifying things. Sometimes, the identifications shifted as my point of view and angle shifted. To get a full scan, I tried looking down on an object, then staring at it head on, and finally looking at it from below.

During the last of these three steps, while I was looking at a keyboard-like device on the front panel, the identification system spit out an interesting classification on my screen: data slot.

I frowned, because I didn’t see anything like a slot. I flipped on my lights, then got all the way down on my knees and crawled under there.

Data slot
, it said again.

“Are you sure?” I asked.

As it wasn’t voice-activated, it didn’t react to my query. I tapped at my arm. The test was run again, and the answer came back the same:
data slot
.

I opened my helmet and peered at it up close. The only thing it could be talking about was a rectangular section of metal in the surface of the machine under the control panel. Experimentally, I pushed my finger up to it and applied pressure.

The metal folded inward, and allowed my finger to push inside. I pulled it back, and it snapped shut.

“That’s got to be it,” I said aloud. “But how can I get anything out of it? I don’t have a data stick—certainly not one that will fit that slot. And I don’t—”

Growling in frustration, I realized I was talking to myself. Was that a sign of shock or insanity? A little of both, I suspected.

I got back to my feet and began disassembling the panel. If the data slot was there, it had to lead somewhere in the guts of this machine—quite literally, in the case of a revival unit.

I’d been trained on data systems of every variety in college. But we’d never been allowed to fool with alien tech. That was something most professionals rarely saw unless they worked for a very rich company or Hegemony itself.

Fortunately, our suits came with a small toolkit. I disassembled the outer housing and pulled the front panel right off.

I was immediately disgusted. My lips curled away from my teeth slowly and stayed there.

It was a hybrid. I could tell right away these “machines” didn’t come to Earth with a nice metal casing over them. Inside the box was a blob of flesh. It looked like a fatty ham, skinless and pink. Embedded in this wall of meat were numerous probes. These probes were connected with wires to the front panel.

I ripped them out by the handful. I was horrified to see the flesh shiver as I did this. Could it be alive? Could it
feel
what I was doing, somehow?

I tried not to think about it. I tried not to think about anything. I took the housing off completely and ripped it loose from every connection, ignoring the disturbing, shuddering reactions.

Finally, I had it off. It was big, about the size of a refrigerator door torn off its hinges. I put it on my back, but my right arm protested.

I thought of the air sled the saurian had been using earlier. I tried it, but it was dead. It looked undamaged, but possibly it wouldn’t work for a human. I cursed and gave it a kick.

It was time to do things the hard way. Cursing steadily, I took a strap from Carlos’ rifle, attached it to the panel and began to drag it behind me.

I looked at my watch. Adjunct Leeson had said he’d give us an hour, and I had eighteen minutes to go.

I began trotting with the panel sparking and banging behind me. If there were any other lizards around in these tunnels, they sure as hell weren’t going to have to work hard to track me.

-27-

In the end, I made it out of the tunnel with about four minutes to spare. We’d marched into that hole carefully
, looking around every corner. On the way out, I’d been running for my life, despite my heavy, bumping burden..

When I came out of the tunnel mouth, they almost blew me away. There were six weaponeers and a full squad of light troops aiming at me. I must have looked like I had scales to these people because every finger was on a trigger, and they looked like they were sweating and itching to pull them.

“Friendly!” I shouted breathlessly. “Hold your fire! It’s me, Recruit McGill. No pursuit is inbound.”

Leeson himself stalked forward. I saw Veteran Harris behind him, waving down the upraised guns. The squadron let their muzzles drift down to aim at the steel floors disappointedly.

“I can’t believe I gave you clowns an hour,” Leeson said. “About one minute after you left, I regretted it. If you only—”

He broke off as I emerged and removed my helmet. He’d noticed the burden I was dragging behind me through the tunnels and now stared down at it with a heavy frown.

“What the hell is that, Recruit?” he demanded.

“That, sir, is the front panel of a revival unit. It will probably look more recognizable if I flip it over.”

I got down on my knees and strained. “Could you help, sir? I’m injured.”

“Are you shitting me? What did you
do?
You’ve damaged it—you’ve torn it apart. That’s a very expensive piece of equipment, McGill. Do you realize that?”

I looked up at him. “Sir, did you really think we were going to be able to go down there and haul back the entire system intact in one hour? That would have required a full squadron and a lifter.”

“I didn’t expect you to tear it apart!”

“Well, sir, this is the section of the machine that contains the data slot.”

“What are all those meat-thermometer-looking things dangling from it?”

“As far as I can determine, those couplings connect our human-tech computers with the organic alien components inside revival units.”

“That will be enough,” said a new, loud voice.

We both looked up. A stern, pissed-looking bio named Thompson stood with her hands on her hips. She was a centurion, which surprised me. Most bios weren’t officers.

“I’ll take that piece of scrap, Adjunct,” she told Leeson.

“Can you do anything with it?” he asked.

“I can remove it from your possession. Those are my orders. This mission you sent the recruit on was ill-advised, Adjunct. Authority levels have been superseded.”

Adjunct Leeson chewed his lower lip for a second. “Sir, I know the revival units are sacred cows for you bios, but we are talking about permed legionnaires, here.”

Centurion Thompson glared at him. “Please release the component into my custody immediately. I have an air sled with me.”

Leeson stepped out of the way and waved them forward. I watched as two orderlies helped her load the broken panel onto an air sled. I would have liked to have had one of those handy earlier today. It was too small to have carried the entire machine, but it would have helped a lot in getting this piece out of the tunnels.

The centurion threw a rattling plastic tarp over the scrap of metal when she had it loaded and then carefully pushed the air sled away. She refused all help from the grunts around her and only allowed her orderlies to touch the wreckage. She handled the air sled personally and attentively. She guided it away as if it was carrying an injured infant.

Leeson stared after her with an unpleasant expression. “Sanctimonious bios,” he growled. “They’re all like that, you know. More worried about their machines and their protocols than they are about the people they’re supposed to be caring for. They think they’re some kind of lab coat-wearing priesthood.”