Cold Welcome

^{CHAPTER FORTY-ONE}

The next day began just like the one before. Ky woke the others. They ate a quick breakfast, mounted up, and rode along at fifteen kilometers per hour for another four hours, before coming to what looked like just another open space. But the passage ahead stopped at a blank wall that did not move when a vehicle was aimed at it; the vehicle stopped instead. A search for dimples on the wall found nothing.

“Maybe there’s an elevator,” Betange said. “We should check all the walls.”

“And the floor,” Ky said. “Remember that first one.”

“Which we couldn’t get back down,” Droshinski pointed out. “Maybe this is the end.”

“A dead end, it looks like,” Yamini said.

“We’ll stop here for the day,” Ky said. “We’ll look in every chamber, feel every wall and the floor. If the enemy hasn’t found a way into the old part of the facility, then we’re safe enough, and even if they have, they have to figure out how to get through the various shut doors.”

“Unless they just blow holes in everything,” Cosper said.

She wished he hadn’t said that. From the expressions on others’ faces, they wished the same thing. She had finally fallen asleep when an insistent warbling noise and flashing lights woke her; everyone was waking up as well. The formerly blue-white ceiling lights now flashed yellow.

“What is it?”

“Something—not good.”

“The bad guys,” Ky said. “They did something that triggered a warning system. Maybe blew a hole in a wall. Load up. We’ll try again to get that door open; maybe it will work in an emergency.”

When Ky pressed a command rod to the first vehicle in the line, the flashing lights and warbling siren stopped. “That’s a relief. Now maybe it will tell us what to do next.”

“Sir—” Barash’s voice sounded shaky. “There’s something showing up on that door.”

Dimly at first, then brightening, rows of symbols in red appeared on the door. They did not look like any writing Ky had ever seen; she had no idea what they meant. The symbols pulsed, demanding attention.

“I don’t understand,” Ky said. She was sure now that whoever had made the place, it could not have been anyone from their culture. She walked up to the door; the symbols pulsed faster. How could she communicate with an automated system—it must be an automated system—that didn’t speak her language? Or could it have learned, in the time humans had occupied part of this facility? She repeated what she’d said slowly: “I do not understand what to do.”

The symbols all disappeared. A single short vertical mark appeared, this time in blue. “One,” Ky said. Two lines. “Two.” A circle. “One circle.” A hexagon. “One hexagon.” One side glowed brighter, and then the glow moved around, pausing. Ky counted them out. “Six sides.” An arrow sign. “Arrow.” A line drawing of a vehicle. “Truck,” Ky said. She patted the nearest vehicle for emphasis—surely it was observing, whatever it was.

Those symbols disappeared, replaced by red ones: a flashing red circle, then stick figures moving into the vehicle symbol. Outline of a rod touching a vehicle. A moving arrow, with a line of vehicles after it. That was clear enough.

“Mount up,” Ky said, climbing into the lead vehicle. A screen rose from the front, showing red arrows on the floor leading away; when Ky put the vehicle in motion, it followed them, and the door in front of them opened. It was, she saw, at least three times as thick as the others they had passed through, and it opened much more slowly.

Beyond, the passage looked very different. Narrower, round in cross section, with a floor that appeared to be a series of grooved metal plates rather than a single smooth surface. Instead of the bright overhead lights, dimmer lights were spaced at intervals. The vehicles bumped up onto these plates; when all were on, Ky heard a series of metallic clunks and felt something below make a hard connection with the bottom of the vehicle. Ahead, on the screen, a line of red arrows stretched into the distance. Onto the screen came other instructions: stick figures sitting still, then one trying to step off and disintegrating. The pulsing red circle again. Stick figures’ arms out, then disappearing. Pulsing red circle. Clear as the signs in tram systems: SIT DOWN, DO NOT EXIT WHILE MOVING. KEEP ARMS INSIDE VEHICLE. DANGER.

She yelled instructions back to the others, heard them passed on. The door behind them slid shut more slowly than the others. Then, with a solid jerk, they were moving, the grooved plates sliding faster and faster. Dim lights flashed past, finally forming a pale stream along both sides. She had no idea how fast they were going, or where, but they were moving much faster than they had in the trucks. Away from danger, she hoped.

The moving plates made much more noise than their previous near-silent progress. A steady low roar reverberated from the tunnel walls. When it changed pitch, Ky looked quickly at the screen. Instead of tunnel walls she could just make out a black void stretching to either side. Then the walls closed in again, the familiar noise returned. Ky yawned. According to her implant, they’d been moving 2.4 standard hours.

At 5.2 hours, the moving track stopped. Sharp sounds of metal adjusting to a new normal echoed off the walls, as did voices when they spoke. Ahead a dark opening led into darkness.

“That door didn’t close behind us,” Gossin said. She’d been in the last vehicle that time.

“And this one didn’t open for us—it’s just open.”

Ky turned on her helmet light and walked toward the opening. Another passage like the ones they’d driven through before and shadows that might be doors not too far ahead. The air smelled stale.

“Lights,” she said. She didn’t expect lights to come on, and they did not. She tipped her head back. Her helmet light revealed the same kind of light fixtures. “Bring the vehicles forward,” she said to the others. “Slowly. We need to take a rest anyway, if this place has water.”

The others had their headlamps on by then, a small constellation in the darkness, and one by one the vehicles moved into the space where Ky stood, avoiding her and parking to one side as usual. The rooms were in the same relative position as before, but no lights came on when they entered the mess and the washroom, and no water came from the faucets. Nothing worked in the kitchen—no burners heated.

“Electricity’s out,” Corporal Lakhani said. He had found an outlet and inserted a tester. “Completely.”

“If the emergency signal was from the bad guys breaching the facility… if they figured out we had to be somewhere below and started blowing walls… they might have damaged the whole system.”

“Then why lights along the moving plate things?”

“I don’t know. Different source? And if that, then why not here? I don’t know that, either.”

“Are we safe from them?” Gossin asked. “Will that track move for them?”

“Again—I don’t know. Get your packs; we’ll have to go on foot. As much food and water as you can carry, your weapons, ammunition.” As she talked, Ky found the duffel in which she’d stowed all the evidence left from the shuttle, and shoved its contents into various pockets. “Let’s get going.”

She felt a sudden change in air pressure, then stillness again. “They are blowing the doors,” Betange said. A dull deep sound vibrated underfoot.

“Keep going,” Ky said. But shortly after that, they found the entire tunnel blocked by a mass of dark rock, and nothing that responded to the control rods on the floor, overhead, or on the side walls.

“We missed a turn,” Ky said. “Backtrack.” Straight into the enemy, but maybe the enemy had other problems. Surely Mackensee had landed by now; the hunters would have hunters on their tails. Would they realize it, turn and fight? Or try harder to overrun their prey?

Kurin found a panel a hundred meters back; it opened into a side passage, too narrow for the vehicles. “And we wouldn’t have found this if we’d been riding,” Kurin said. They shut the panel behind them, hoping a turn of the wheel on the far side meant it was locked, and walked up a smooth ramp until it turned sharply, steepened, then turned again. Just beyond that turn they found another door, closed but not locked, thick as a spaceship pressure door. Gossin spun the wheel on its far side.

“Two doors between us,” Ky said, looking around the group with her headlamp. Even Sergeant Cosper was tired. “We can risk one hour rest,” she said. “Set your implant alarms for noise, as well.” They all slumped down, falling asleep almost at once. Ky closed her eyes, heard nothing but their breathing, and woke when her implant woke her. The others were already stirring.

Now she could hear a vague, disturbing sound through the door. Were the enemy troops already into the side passage? Or just banging on the walls? “Hurry!” Ky said. They moved as fast as they could up the ramp, arriving at another identical pressure door that operated the same way. Beyond was an even narrower passage of raw rock hacked into a semblance of a stairway. Ky hoped that meant it was near the surface.

Ky led the way. The stair turned, turned again; uneven steps and the bright patches and black shadows cast by their helmet lights made it hard to see their footing clearly. Ky’s breath burned in her chest; her legs hurt. Soon they were all panting; Ky knew the others must feel as bad.

“Five minutes,” she said. She leaned on the rough wall, catching her breath. Then started again. Up, up, turn and twist, duck beneath a rock that hung down. How close were their pursuers? Would they go to the end and then backtrack or just find the panel right away?

“We’ll hear if they blow the panel,” someone said, just as a muffled whoomp reached them. Ky tried to speed up.

Finally the stair ended on a cramped rock landing not big enough for all of them at once. They could see daylight beyond, at the end of a widening passage. They had traveled through another night. Ky squinted against the brightness. This passage smelled—stank, in fact—of something alive. Some animal. She closed her eyes for a long moment, then opened them, looking down and away from the entrance. It might be wolves, or that tall heavy-legged hairy thing with tusks and a nose like a fire hose—but that wouldn’t fit in here. She saw an uneven lumpy heap. Wolves? Giant wolves?

“Quietly,” she said to Lakhani. “Hand me a stronger light. There’s something in here.”

It looked like a pile of fur. Even with the light she couldn’t be sure of the shape, except that it was big, much bigger than any of them. She tried to move the light along the margins of the pile, looking for clues to its identity. Something moved—squeaked—wiggled—a small subdivision of the pile or rather two such, with bright eyes, black noses, very red mouths with very white sharp teeth.

Not wolves; they had rounded ears, a round head like a cartoon animal. Paws with long claws. Some memory stirred in Ky’s mind; her implant finally offered a picture of a smaller but similar shape: the bear cubs she’d seen in the Port Major zoo. Black, with white chevrons on their chests. The adult bear in the zoo hadn’t been as tall as a human when it stood on its hind legs. This adult bear was huge. The cubs squeaked again and wriggled back into the fur pile. She could hear them suckling, slurping.

So it was a mother bear, a huge mother bear, with her cubs. Ky backed up cautiously, trying not to make a sound. The bear’s nose quivered, its lips lifted over fangs as long as Ky’s hand, and then it yawned. Deep in folds of fur tiny eyes opened, then closed again. It lifted one massive paw and scratched at its chest; the claws were as long as her fingers, stout enough to shred a human torso. She turned the light off and backed up again.

“What is it?” the others asked, when she’d retreated to the narrow passage. “Can we go out now?”

“There’s a huge bear,” Ky said very softly. “With cubs. The cubs are awake; the bear was asleep but is waking up, I think. If it wakes while we’re trying to get past it, we’re dead.”

“We could stun it.”

“If we knew we had enough charge. We might be able to kill it, with the rifles, but I’d rather use ammunition on our enemies.” The enemies who had certainly found the passage entrance and were following.

“We have to do something—”

“For now, we’ll wait. Maybe it’ll go back to sleep and we can sneak past.” Did bears snore? Some dogs snored. As they sat quietly waiting, she heard other, smaller sounds in the cave. Little high-pitched squeaks, the skittering of small paws. So the bear wasn’t alone in the cave… mice, that would be, or something similar. No sound from the bear. She crept forward, dared another look at the bear. Eyes closed, mouth closed. From here she could hear the cubs still suckling. She aimed the light around the cave floor, side-to-side, and surprised several smaller animals: they looked like mice, but with furry tails. One of them scurried across to the bear and burrowed into the fur under that massive paw. The bear didn’t move.

So… if they made no more noise than some mice, maybe it wouldn’t notice them. She edged back to the others, and very quietly explained what they needed to do. Boots off. Sock feet only. Single file. If the bear moved, freeze: hold still.

Ky set off in the lead, not hurrying. Underfoot, the rock’s cold penetrated her socks almost at once. She couldn’t hear the ones behind her, only the beat of her own pulse. As she came even with the bear, she could see it a little better in the dim light. It wasn’t black but brown; the hairs backlit by the cave entrance seemed frost-tipped. The bear stirred; Ky froze. She dared not turn her head to look. It grunted, sighed, and settled down once more. Another meter. Another. By the time she reached the mouth of the cave, her feet felt like blocks of ice, but the bear hadn’t roused. She stopped and glanced back.

Her little troop was moving as carefully as she could have hoped, faces taut with fear, but coming on steadily. She looked outside. The cave opened onto a ledge, with a steep drop-off; she could not tell how far down without exposing herself to anyone on the opposite slope. That slope rose higher than the cave, taking up most of her field of view, great blocks of gray rock streaked with snow glittering in the sunlight. She could not see the sky, for the overhang of the cave entrance, but she could tell that their own slope was shadowed. She could hope that anyone watching from there would be blinded by the sun in their eyes, unable to see into the cave mouth. She could see no movement.

When the others came up behind her, tapping her shoulder to indicate they had all made it past the sleeping bear, she spoke softly. “I don’t see any movement, but we can’t be sure. I’m going out to look—”

Sergeant Chok held up one finger.

“Yes?”

“I’ve had both scout and mountain training. Let me.”

Ky nodded. “Fine. We need a hiding place—without a bear in it.”

He grinned at her, put his boots on, and eased past her, dropping to hands and knees. The rest leaned against the cave wall as close as they could get to the cave entrance. Time crawled past. Ky put her boots back on; the others did the same. The bear made no noise behind them. Finally Chok returned, upright this time, and signaled. Ky led the others out into sharp-smelling cold air. The ledge continued, slanting down and angling slightly to the right. The overhang disappeared; far above the sky showed clear blue with a few streaks of cloud. Beside them layers of rock plunged toward the ledge. Erosion had made these into steps of various heights, mostly inconvenient. All around was the musical tinkle of melting ice and water dripping and trickling away over rock.

They came to the hiding place Chok had found—a narrow cleft between rock layers, barely big enough for all of them. They edged into it one by one. It was cold, dark, dripping, and claustrophobic. Worst, from Ky’s point of view, was the lack of an alternate exit. And the obviousness. They were still too close to the exit, in the most obvious hiding place.

The forest below them gave better cover if they could get to it. Forest on their slope and the one across from them, with a snow-covered spoon-shaped space between. “We need to get down there,” Ky said. Heads nodded. Once more they came out into daylight and started downslope.

They had descended almost to the trees when they heard noise from behind and above: gunfire, a roar, screams. Everyone flattened against the wall. Ky could not see the cave entrance itself, but could see the wider ledge in front of it, then a small shape, flying through the air. One of the cubs, Ky realized, as it squealed frantically, pawing the air before it hit the ground and bounced, tumbled, and finally the squalling ceased. Then the bear—so huge, even at that distance, her growling roar echoing off the opposite slope, her forelegs sweeping one human form after another out into the air, the rag-doll corpses trailing blood, the weapons they’d held falling separately, still firing. The bear dragged herself forward as more gunfire ripped into her, as smoke and light and louder noise burst from the cave. Someone had fired a rocket grenade at her.

“They didn’t—” Cosper said. He covered his ears as did the others. A spray of blood, and the bear overbalanced, falling end-over-end. Rocks skittered down the slope. A stream of smoke wavered across the gap to the opposing slope and ended in an explosion that echoed back and forth. Ky looked back up at the cave. A group of humans—tiny and hard to see—rushed from the cave. Cosper said, “That was stupid—that rock could—” when a loud crack, like a close strike of lightning, silenced him.

Above the ledge, the overhanging slab leaned slowly away from the mountain. With ponderous grace it rotated until it came down on the ledge with a shock they could feel, breaking loose the front of the ledge. Overhang and ledge both tumbled down the slope, followed by an avalanche of smaller boulders.

“Move!” Ky said. “Now!”

They hurried as best they could, as the noise grew behind them: rocks falling, sliding. Were they far enough away? Ky risked another glance back and saw a growing scar above what had been the cave. Finally the noise lessened, but they kept on to the shelter of the first trees. A cloud of dust hung above the avalanche scar.

“That bear—she’d have killed us all,” Betange said in a hushed voice.

“She saved us all,” Ky said.

They had just made it into the first sparse line of trees when Ky heard the unmistakable whine of aircraft. She didn’t have to tell anyone to get down; they were all flattened into the snow before the craft came in sight. From their position, she could now see along the mountainside. A standard tensquad VTOL pod with Slotter Key AirDefense markings flew over their hiding spot, settling vertically into the clearing.

“Our ride home?” Gossin asked.

“Wait,” Ky said. The canopy popped on one side and three figures climbed out. She thumbed the viewer controls and zoomed in. They wore unfamiliar uniforms; the Black Torch logo showed clearly. They looked at the body they’d landed near, then up the slope at the scar and the cloud of dust still visible. Another rock broke loose, rattling down the slope. Ky couldn’t see, but could imagine, what they saw from their position. A dead bear, dead men, a rockfall. Would they fly away or investigate more? If they chose to investigate…

“It would be really handy to have that flier,” Ky said softly to Chok. “We have a good position.”

“Are they all out?”

“No, but I’m betting they will be.”

Sure enough, another clambered out, and then another, until ten of them stood in a pattern that minimized the view of someone from above, in the cave. Then they started up the narrow cleft, directly toward Ky and the others.

“If we’re really lucky, they won’t get a single shot off,” Kurin said.

“Wait.” They had numerical advantage, eighteen to ten, height advantage, and the mercs were acting as if they were out for a walk in the park. But they carried heavier weapons. Ky passed the word down her line. When the mercs reached the scraggly conifer she’d chosen, Ky’s group fired as one. Six of them dropped at once, clean kills; the others dove for the snow. Ky’s troop won the brief firefight.

“Let’s go get our ride out,” Ky said. Surely someone in her group could fly it.

They were almost to the flier when she heard another coming, fast and low. “Into the trees!” Without hesitation, her people scrambled into cover.

Two fliers, not just one, painted in bold splashes of dark green and white with a big gold logo and their name—MACKENSEE MILITARY ASSISTANCE CORPORATION—on the side. They hovered briefly, then landed. A team emerged from each, cautious. Ky recognized the lean, rangy form of Master Sergeant Pitt. She let out a breath she hadn’t realized she was holding. The entire group, after a cursory look around, stared up the slope at the fresh scar of the rockslide and the scatter of bodies.

Ky signaled her people to stay down and eased her own way toward Pitt, close enough to hear Pitt’s exasperated, “She has to be around here somewhere! That didn’t happen by itself.”

“Good afternoon, Master Sergeant,” Ky said. Pitt whipped around and Ky found herself staring into the muzzles of many weapons.

“Why didn’t you fly yourself out and save us the trouble?” Pitt asked, nodding at the first flier. She signaled to the others, and they relaxed.

“I don’t have a license for this craft,” Ky said. “Can you give us a lift?”

“Yes,” Pitt said, “at a price. I want to know how you got past that monster.” She pointed at the bear.

“Carefully,” Ky said.

“You’ll have to do better than that, Admiral Vatta,” Pitt said. “Call in your wolf pack and let’s get you back to your formidable great-aunt.”