Authors: David Macinnis Gill
Hell's Cross
Outpost Fisher Four
ANNOS MARTIS
000. 0. 00. 00:00
Â
Â
The green light blinks inside the pigeon. I hold it in both hands, explaining how my father forced me to steal it, how I stole it back, and how I intend to drop it off the Zhao Zhou Bridge.
“You're wrong, Durango.” Vienne shakes her head and puts a hand on my chest. “
We
have got a problem, and
we
are going to fix it.”
I pull her close. “I love it when you talk kick butt.”
“Cowboy,” Mimi says, “we have an issue.”
With a snap, two glow torches ignite. A badly dressed Ferro captain and a sour-faced soldier step into the glow. Behind them is another Ferro, a blighter who obviously likes to stay in the shadows.
“Perhaps, Vienne,” the Ferro says, “you should introduce comrades.”
“This is your crew?” I ask.
“Crew is an overstatement.” Vienne clears her throat. “This is Durango, my old . . . chief. Durango, meet Nikolai. His brother, Yakov, and Mother Koumanov. There are two more Koumanovs on the surface guarding the tram house.”
“I'm chief of this crew,” the sour-faced woman says. “We've been hired to rescue miners from the Sturmnacht, and that's what I intend to do.”
“Cowboy,” Mimi says, “I am reading an alarm signal in the distance. It is faint but persistent.”
“I knew I recognized your face! I'm the one who hired you pikers.” Fuse pokes out his hand. “Fork over the down payment. You're fired.”
Mother lowers the shotgun propped on her shoulder. “No refunds.”
“Knock it off,” I say. “Everybody shut up and listen.”
There are no sounds at first. Then, almost imperceptibly, the ring of an alarm.
It gets louder.
Fast.
“Mimi,” I ask, “what is that?”
“Standard Sturmnacht emergency siren.”
“They know we're here?”
“They know an intruder has triggered their silent alarms, yes.”
“That's a Sturmnacht emergency siren,” I tell the group, “which means we've lost the element of surprise. Fuse, we need sanctuary, stat.”
“Hell's Cross is bloody well close,” Fuse says.
“Can you get us there without running into the Sturmnacht?”
“Did the bishop wear a feathered boa?” he says. “Follow me!”
Â
Chapter â-1
The Gulag
User: Dolly -- bash -- 122x36
SCREEN CRAWL: [[email protected] ~]
Last login: 239.x.xx.xx:xx on ttys001
Â
AdjutantNod04:~ user_Adjutant$
SCREEN CRAWL: [[email protected] ~]
Â
Â
R0 - HKCU\Software\... \Main,Start Page = about:blank
O4 - BEKM\..\Run: [IgfxTray] C:\ONIX3\OSCIPHER\kernal\igfxtray.exe
O4 - BEKM\..\Run: [HotKeysCmds] C:\ONIX3\OSCIPHER\kernal\hkcmd.exe
Â
O23 - Service: Unknown owner â
Â
OVERRIDDE STRING:'OHwhatAtangledWEBweWEAVE';
WARNING! VIRUS DETECTED! Node1666; kernal compromised (quarantine subroutine (log=32)....commencing.....
Â
Running processes:
C:\ONIX3\OSCIPHER\Kernal\big_bad_wolf.exe
C:\ONIX3\OSCIPHER\Kernal\MIMI01.exe
C:\ONIX3\OSCIPHER\Kernal\MIMI02.exe
C:\ONIX3\OSCIPHER\Kernal\MIMI03.exe
C:\ONIX3\OSCIPHER\Kernal\MIMI04.exe
C:\ONIX3\OSCIPHER\Kernal\MIMI05.exe
C:\ONIX3\OSCIPHER\Kernal\“God_Mode.exe”
Â
$ Node1666; (quarantine subroutine FAILURE);
$ Disk recovery sequence FAILED:
Â
ððÃÃÃûÆY¼,Uâ r_T)e ³;_“_7 Ã&_ó_Ã
Â
Terminal prompt:~ mimi$ delete executable file “Dolly.exe”
Terminal prompt:~ mimi$ Type Y to confirm or N to abort
Terminal prompt:~ mimi$ Y
Â
>...
Hell's Cross
Outpost Fisher Four
ANNOS MARTIS
000. 0. 00. 00:00
Â
Â
Fuse's secret passage to Hell's Cross starts with a narrow ventilation tunnel. For half a kilometer, we crawl on hands and knees, our arms and legs cramping the whole way. When we reach the end of the shaft and crawl out into the main corridor, we're covered head to foot in brown-black dirt.
Jenkins tries to slap the dirt off his uniform, but it's as sticky as it is smelly.
“I carking hate mines.”
“Keep it down, Jenks.” I hold up a glow stick to get my bearings. “What now, Fuse?”
“This is the main corridor,” he says. “We're close enough to smell it, right?”
From above, we can hear the sound of the Manchesters in action and the rumble of harvesters grinding the permafrost into chunks.
“Mimi, picking up any biosignatures?”
“Several,” she says.
“How close?”
“Close enough to respond quickly.”
“All right, you poxers,” I whisper. “Kill the lights. No talking.”
As we snake single file, ventilated wind blows down the corridor, stirring up more dust and filling our lungs, so much more than the last time we were here. My lungs ache, and fighting the urge to cough, I feel like I'm going to suffocate.
The Manchesters' vibrations shake the ground, and I can feel them through my boots.
“Cowboy, a patrol is closing on your heading.”
“How many?”
“Four. Fifty meters.”
I tap Fuse's shoulder, the signal to stop, then whisper to Vienne, “Hostiles.” She passes the message down the line, then asks, “What's our response?”
“Let them pass,” I say.
Vienne huffs, a sign that she would rather take them out. Me, too, but if you take out a patrol, then more patrols come looking for them, and in a blink, the corridor is swarming with Sturmnacht.
“Thirty meters,” Mimi says.
Dim light flashes ahead. We press against the corridor wall, our filthy clothes letting us blend in with the rock.
“Fifteen meters,” Mimi says.
The soldiers' voices echo down the corridor. Their lights become brighter. I take short, shallow breaths, trying to be as silent as possible, and I pray the others will follow my lead.
“Eight meters.”
I can hear distinct voices now. They're older, mature, probably veteran CorpCom regulars pressed into service for Lyme. Tougher than your average Sturmnacht.
“Three meters.”
I can see them now. Like Mimi said, four soldiers carrying battle rifles slung across their backs. They're in clunky body armor, and they're smoking. Strolling along.My fists clench, itching to have a go at their chins. I feel Vienne tense beside me and put a hand on her arm, as if to say, “Don't do it.”
They're on us.
So close, I can smell their body odor.
“So I says to her, Rupta,” the sergeant says, “who's to say there's going to be a tomorrow.”
I close my eyes, hold my breath, and
wait
wait
wait
for them to pass.
Their lights never touch us. They walk past our line, and I let out a slow breath of relief.
“And do you know what she says to me?” the sergeant asks.
Fuse coughs, as if in answer.
Oh,
kuso
.
Hell's Cross
Outpost Fisher Four
ANNOS MARTIS
000. 0. 00. 00:00
Â
Â
Someone coughs again.
“Intruders!” a Sturmnacht bellows.
Their flashlight beams swing around and hit us full in the face. We're lined up on the wall like we're ready for an execution, hands thrown up to block the light.
Frozen like roadkill.
Their four rifles swing around to firing position, taking aim at the Koumanovs.
“Hands up!” the sergeant barks.
I step out into the corridor, hands up, ready to talk our way out of this. “We surrender,” I say, “so how about we put down the guns and talkâ”
“Shoot them!”
“Hey! Iâ”
But the sergeant isn't listening to me anymore. His eyes widen as Vienne grabs his wrist, lifts his arm, and punches through his clunk armor. She torques his arm out of the socket, then slams him into the rock wall.
The Sturmnacht charge her, firing.
Brppt!
The bullets hit the spot that Vienne just left, as she leaps up the wall, somersaults, and lands behind them.
She rabbit-punches the first soldier. Spins and lays the second out with a roundhouse kick to the face as he turns toward her.
She is reaching for the third when he shoots her in the belly.
“Missed me,” she says, and grabs the back of his head and yanks him forward, slamming the peak of her helmet into his nose. She puts him down with a right cross to the chin and stands panting in the middle of the carnage.
“You sure know how to cause a ruckus,” I say.
Vienne takes a deep, cleansing breath. She puts fist to palm, then bows to the soldiers.
“Mimi, they're still alive, right?”
“Of course.”
“Just making sure,” I say aloud, but in a whisper. “Let's get these pikers out of sight.”
We make quick work of trussing up the soldiers and dragging them into the darkest part of the corridor. If our luck holds out, we'll be long gone before they wake up.
“Mimi, how's it looking?”
“All clear.”
“Let's go, you lot. Double-time it. Fuse has point.”
A few minutes later, the corridor widens and the darkness fades. Ahead, I spot a two-story square building with two octagonal towers. The towers stretch thirty meters into the murky, soupy black, the perfect place for a sniper.
“Still clear, cowboy.”
Good to know. I wave the crew forward, and we sprint until we reach a wide door made of heavy steel. The doors stand open, leading down a courtyard littered with detritus and wreckage, and in the corner, something that looks like a pile of junk with tiresâone of Fuse's custom-made turbo bikes.
And more dust.
Always the dust.
“Welcome to hell,” Fuse says. “Make yourselves at home.”
Â
“It's even uglier than I remembered,” Vienne says.
“Stinks worse, too,” I add.
The courtyard is paved with girth tiles that form an intricate quasicrystal pattern. The tiles lead to the middle of the courtyard and a statue of Bishop Lyme, the man my sociopath of a father named himself after. The bishop holds a pickax in one hand and the Book of Common Prayer in the other. Known as the Great Poxer, Lyme once released a smallpox virus on his enemies, killing tens of thousands of people.
This is the man my father models himself after.
Fuse directs all of us up to the second floor. We enter the same room where Vienne and I first encountered the miners last year, receiving a less than warm welcome.
“Last time we were here,” I ask Vienne, “didn't you threaten to shoot Ãine?”
“About six times.”
“Aren't you glad you didn't?”
“Sort of.” Then she nudges me with an elbow. “I'm not so trigger-happy now.”
That's too bad,
I think,
because now, we need you to be trigger
-
delirious.
Above us, the rumbling stops.
Hell's Cross is as quiet as a graveyard.
“The Sturmnacht will be on our tail in no time,” I say. “Now how about we see a map? Fuse?”
“Not me, chief,” he says. “I give it over to this lot when I hired them.”
“Yakov.” Mother snaps her fingers. “Map.”
Vienne pushes Yakov aside.
“I've still got it.”
She opens her robes and pulls out a sheath of electrostat. It displays a map of Fisher Four, including the tipple and, on the surface, the different lifts connected to the tramway and the active mine shafts a kilometer west of us.
Fuse peers over my arm, pointing out the changes.
“Map's out of date, chief,” he says, x'ing out objects with a grimy finger. “Here's the tunnel from the tramway, right? I've closed every tunnel except the one Vienne came through and the one on the other side of the bridge, which is propped up with stick and wire and liable to cave in at any second. Also, these four corridors leading to the Cross? There's just the one left, the one we came through. It runs from Zhao Zhou Bridge, south through Crazy Town, and down to the old slave labor quarters.” He taps the map. “The slave quarters are where the Sturmnacht's got the miners locked up.”
“Where's Ãine hiding out?” I ask.
Fuse taps the map of Crazy Town. “My missus is in these air locks, a couple hundred meters off the corridor.”
“If we go traipsing down the corridor,” I say, “we're sure to run smack-dab into another Sturmnacht patrol. Got another secret route in your repertoire?”
He flashes a snaggle-toothed grin. “Does Jenkins fart in his sleep?”
“I dunno,” I say, “but I hear he wears a feathered boa when no one's looking.”
“Hey!” Jenks yells. “You swore you'd never tell!”
“Can we get back to business, children?” Mother Koumanov says. “Before the Sturmnacht find that patrol.”
“Here's the plan,” I say. “We form two teams and strike simultaneously at two targets.”
“Two targets?” Mother says. “We were paid for one job, and that's all.”
“Divvy back the coin,” Fuse says. “And you'll not have to do that one.”
“Stow it, Fuse.” I look Mother straight in the eye and don't blink. “Your crew gets the miners. My team gets Ãine. Deal?”
“Deal,” she says.
“Then your crew will strike the Sturmnacht at the holding cells. Subdue hostiles and then extract the miners.” I mark the map. “There's an ore tram right here. Use that for the extraction, then disable it with C forty-two. When we hear that boom, we'll know the job's done.”
Mother nods. “Agreed.”
“Me and mine will cut through Crazy Town to the air lock and rescue Ãine. We'll need a power sled for that, obviously.”
“Dibs on the sled!” Fuse says.
“Aw, chief,” Jenkins says, and hauls the chain gun onto his broad shoulder. “Can't we just blast our way through? Them Sturmnacht can't stand up against my fifty cal.”
“We might be able to fight our way through hundreds of Sturmnacht,” I say, “if this weren't
a rescue mission
.”
“Carfargit,” Jenkins says. “You're as bad as Fuse's wife.”
“Watch it,” Fuse says. “I'll take no guff from a poxer who farts feathers.”
“Enough of this foolishness,” Mother Koumanov says. She slaps the electrostat, then points at Vienne. “You're with me.”
Vienne shakes her head and crosses her arms. “I'm with Durango.”
“You were paid to do a job,” Mother says. “In advance.”
“Keep your money.” Vienne tosses a pouch at her. “I'm back where I belong.”
Nikolai and Yakov move behind their mother, arms crossed, an act of solidarity. Nikolai looks at Vienne and then at me.
“If girl is wanting to leave,” Nikolai says, and spits, “I say good riddance.”
“Let me do the talking, Nikolai,” Mother says. She stands, tucks the pouch in her pocket, and follows Nikolai to the door.” She looks back at Vienne. “You and I could've done great things working together.”
“You,” Vienne says, “don't know the definition of working together.”
“And you,” she says, “have picked the wrong side.”
I wait for Mother to make a grand exit, then I turn to Vienne, holding up my rucksack. “Help Fuse get a turbo sled ready. There's something I need to do.”
She puts a hand on my shoulder. “Need a bodyguard?”
“I'll just be two hundred meters away,” I say. “What could go wrong?”