The Black Garden: Chapter 24

Once a lithium fire got going, it stayed going for as long as it felt like burning. Even the Khememmu kept a safe distance from the straight pillar of flame and black smoke towering into the sky from the remains of the car, surrounded by the barbequed remains of several Hellions.

As always, Ratty and I had to wait for the others to catch up. She and I were the DWO-6 strikers, the first ones in and the last ones out. Gaius was our combat controller, responsible for tactical positioning and orbital support. His angel’s manifolds were better suited to defense than offense. Blackie was our long-range support, while Lilia provided guided and autonomous unit support. Ratty’s unfiltered entropic presence attracted demons like a magnet, bunching them and making them easier targets. Her aura was strong enough to jam weapons, foul engines, rust iron and steel, fragment drone swarms and cause generalized ‘bad luck’ for our opponents, who became more likely to stumble or misstep as the local reality area leaned more and more toward chaos. As a Biomancer, I had some innate protection against entropic fields. I also relied on simple solid-state gear that resisted entropy, and rarely needed to use guns or anything other than Tsariel’s manifolds, which were unaffected by Ratty.

I was halfway through my second cigarette when Lilia crested the shattered berm and dropped down to the other side, waving. “Ratty, Z, can you get into any of those shelters before the fire does? Half the Taga are evacuating their guy while the other half are fighting fires. We need files, crystals, any data.”

I ground the cigarette out against my thigh and pouched it, then looked to Ratty. She nodded back. “Roger that, on our way.” 

The shelter door Blackie had hit was the entry to the suspected command center of the encampment. Ratty put a boot to the tangled remains of the thick steel door and kicked it in with an explosive CLANG that sent parts and pieces scattering across the concrete slab floor. Everything in here looked brand, shiny new: the floor and insides of the shelter still had that showcase look and smell. Once I’d sniffed, I locked my visor back into place and looked around. There were four computer stations, command chairs made for Nu-suht but adapted for humans via foam wedges and other props. Mostly-empty weapon racks gaped near the main entry door. As I scanned the room, my HUD made a weird blarping sound as the sensors in my helmet picked up an anomaly: a thin rectangular crack in the floor at the other end of the shelter, between the rows of sleeping pods.

“Huh. There’s a hatch in the ground.” I took one of the few remaining rifles from beside the door and let my suit attempt to hack the biometrics.

“Tunnels between huts, maybe.” Ratty plugged her C-shell’s override unit into one of the chaise-shaped terminal command chairs. There were no screens here - just the comfortable lounges the I.T guys would lay on while connecting to whatever network they were using. 

“Maybe. We need to get the Khem into those tunnels and make sure no one pops out of one of them.” I frowned as my Z-suit tried and failed to get around the weapon’s security. “Once you’re done, can you crack this for me?”

“Sure. Just getting a map and…” Ratty trailed off. “Oh. Huh.”

“What?” I trotted back over to her with the rifle in one hand and a case of ammo in the other.

“Not tunnels between huts,” she replied. “Tunnels between encampments. This is only one node of a massive underground system, looks like.”

“Really?” I blinked a couple times.

“Yeah, here. Look.”

I glanced over the map while she unplugged from the terminal suite and used her suit’s considerably more developed hacking functions to break the lock on the rifle. She was right. The subfloor map showed a network of numbered tunnels right underneath us, which connected all the buildings, then went straight for about another thousand feet before turning a corner into what looked suspiciously like some kind of station with a much wider tunnel that headed toward the south-east. There was no map of the larger connection, but there were two arrows indicating the tunnel led to ‘B-13’ and ‘B-11’. We were in what I assumed was ‘Base 12’.

“Fuck. At least thirteen of these camps,” I said. “Reinforcements could arrive any minute, then, unless we blow the tunnel.”

“Right. I have some putty and charges. Let’s see if we can head it off.” Ratty was already marching toward the hatch.

Lilia broke into the chat. “You’re clear to go down. Proceed with caution and watch for traps. Back out if anything seems even remotely off.”

“It’s fine. Average life expectancy for soldiers going down into hostile tunnels is three seconds,” I chirped back. “Plenty of time to nut.”

The hatch opened into a brightly lit concrete chute with a ladder. It was so new that there was no wear on the bright yellow rubber grips. I went first, being smaller and lighter and also able to catch shrapnel and bullets with Tsariel’s active defense. I slid down using the side rails and landed quietly in a boxy, bare concrete room with a single caged overhead light and a very heavy bulkhead door. The door was at least twelve centimeters thick, with a big silicone gasket. It would be airtight when sealed, but it was hanging half-open. A security panel beside it throbbed with a red strobe light, warning the occupants that they hadn’t closed the door.

“They left the bunker in a rush.” Ratty’s heavy boots crunched into the concrete as she dropped the last few rungs and landed behind me. “Here. Gun.”

“Thanks.” I took it, gave it a once-over to make sure I knew how it operated, then tucked it against my chest and dropped the muzzle. “I’ll be the canary. Just watch my ass; people keep shooting at it.”

“We went over this. Clench and tuck it in or something.”

I used a foot to push the door open all the way, careful not to let it swing so far out that it would close and trap us inside, and swiveled into the hallway with the rifle raised.

“Clear.” I’d been expecting a rough dirt tunnel, like a trench with a roof and supports. Maybe some shotcrete here and there. But that was not what we stepped out into. It was a clean, fully manufactured corridor, lined with lights and doors and neatly organized cabling and pipes under covers. It was tall enough for a Nu-suht to walk comfortably, about eight and a half feet, and wide enough to fit three people across. Frowning, I went over to one of the walls and used my helmet’s zoom to take a detailed look at the structure of the walls.

“Self-healing concrete,” I thought to her. “Looks pretty new. It’s got ribboning... so they had an environmental printer down here. Bored out the tunnel and printed all this right into it.”

“This looks like a habitat.” Ratty followed the tip of her rifle with a light predator’s step, her armor whirring and crunching in the deep, echoing silence. “Or a prison. Are the locks on those doors biometric?”

I waited for her to position, then moved to the first of the locks. “No. Roach Actual can probably break into them, though. Or the Khem. Or I can-”

“Move.”

I moved aside as Ratty strode up, set herself, then booted the door ahead of her. Even with the power of her armor’s exoskeleton behind the kick, it barely shivered. She gave it a few more kicks, but it didn’t budge.

“Well, everyone knows we’re here now.” I snorted. “Will you let me try?”

She let out a wheezy sigh through her helmet filters. “Knock yourself out, angel boy.”

I called the Long Hunt to hand. Ratty set down on one knee behind me, on just enough of an angle to fire into the room or on anyone who came bursting out of the doors or around the corners of the branching hallways up ahead. I found my center and charged the door, slashing deeply, confidently... but instead of separating, the impossibly sharp blade snagged on some kind of cross-sectional reinforcement. I grunted, sliding the sword out, and tried again – slower, this time, using it more like a cutting torch instead of a letter opener.

“This is spaceship-grade hardware,” I said. “It’s layered against mono-edge weapons. Not impossible, but not fast.”

“Maybe they’re keeping treasure down here,” Ratty remarked. Her gun was trained levelly on the hole. “But my suit’s picking up-”

“Blood,” I said. “And shit. Someone’s dead in there.”

‘Someone’ turned out to be three someones: two humans and a Vaktus, all with the look of mercenaries. The humans lay stone-dead in their racks, while the Vak had rolled off his bed and crumpled to the ground, all four arms clutched around his stomach. The dead men’s eyes bulged, slack mouths full of blood. They were ghostly pale, abdomens severely bloated... they had died during, or just after the fight upstairs.

“Voidsign,” I said, as Tsariel gave a psychic flinch. “Hella voidsign. I think our boys might be praganan.”

“Gregnant?” Ratty added somberly.

“Pergnet.” Even as I said that, something pushed up against one of the men’s bellies, distending it as it slithered inside of him briefly and then fell still. “Whoaaa. Yeah... yeah, they’re carrying.”

Ratty had already switched ammo, slapping anti-demon rounds into her rifle. “Lifesight?”

“I can try. But if I do that, those demons are gonna bust out of there like the Kool-aid Man.” My eyes narrowed slightly.

She patted the top of her rifle. “Cool. Still got all my flamethrower charges.”

Tsariel’s manifolds slithered restlessly in the air around me as I focused in on one of the humans. I didn’t try to image the demon directly - only to map its shape via the deformation of its host’s abdomen. The scan lasted for maybe two seconds before the man’s corpse exploded into a welter of gore and a horrific, tinny shriek of rage that filled the corridor.

I leaped back as Ratty opened on the demons - plural - surging toward the door. ADRs plugged the flashing black horrors as they gawped and roared at us through the basketball-sized hole. I took a big step back as long, scythe-like claws plunged out into the open, scrambling and digging - only to fly apart as they went down under a hail of gunfire and manifolds flung into the room.

“Damn. Someone’s cranky.” It normally only took a couple of bursts of ADRs to demolish Abyssal drones, but these ones soaked round after round, hit after hit. One of them finally went down in a tangle of mantis-like legs and viscera, the other two immediately surging past it to clamor at the door. One of them flung itself forward and jammed its mouth into the hole, misshapen pincers the size of my forearm snapping at the air. It had a long, cylindrical muzzle-like face, with a mouth surrounded by forward-pointing spines, long hooked arms, and a familiar barbed tail. “They look like a grown up version of the parasite I pulled from my gut.”

“No shit?”

I pulled my rifle around and joined Ratty to join in shredding the thing as it tried to gnaw and claw its way into the open. The demon’s head blew apart into black chunks, ichor spewing as it slumped down and the third began to seethe and push at the door. But it hadn’t opened for us, and it wasn’t opening for them. All it could do was hawk globs of digestive fluid at us through the now-ragged hole, and as it tried, me and Ratty concentrated our fire and shredded it. The thing dropped like a stone to the floor behind the bulkhead.

“Damn. Nearly out of ammo.” Ratty reloaded on automatic when there was no more noise or movement from inside the room “Looks kind of like-”

There was a thump and screech from the door behind us. I somehow teleported about fifteen feet back up the hall toward the stairwell. Ratty whirled on it, but held fire as the trapped demon let out a feral, bestial howl of frustration, futilely banging its claws and jaws against the metal.

“-Like a Nu-suht,” I said. I hadn’t recognized the morphology while looking at the larval form swimming and screaming inside of its jar, but the adult forms were immediately recognizable. “I don’t think these doors were only made to keep people out. They were made to keep these IN. We need to save our ADRs if they can’t break through.”

“Z, Ratty! Get up here!” Lilia’s voice broke in over the team chat. “Everyone we didn’t burn is waking up!”