SNAFU: Future Warfare

Human Strain Benjamin Cheah

As the hunters fell upon him, Sergeant Major Abel Santiago prayed his instincts were right.

They appeared so swiftly, so silently, it was as though they had grown from the shadows at the end of the tunnel. Their skins colored in midnight hues, Santiago saw them only as moving blurs. Pressed against the wall, he counted the outlines. Two, three, four, eight, twelve. This wasn’t an ordinary patrol. It was a reconnaissance in force.

Santiago breathed as deeply as he dared. If they were going to pass over him, it wouldn’t do if he passed out. If they were going to attack him, he needed oxygen to fight. To flee.

“Boss, what’s the call?” a voice whispered in his head. It was Staff Sergeant Sera Meyers, his second-in-command.

Santiago swallowed, mind-keyed his quantum communicator, let his suit translate his thoughts into words. “Stay put. Let them pass, but prepare for the worst.”

“Acknowledged.”

The rest of his team were spread out behind him. They had cover. Little nooks and debris to hide behind or under. All Santiago had was the wall. If anyone was going to be detected, it was him. But if they passed over him, they were safe.

Santiago adjusted his position just so, pressing his chest against the wall, turning his head to watch the hunters. His suit’s active camouflage layer shifted, mimicking the colour and texture of the wall. Every fibre of his being screamed that he was giving his back to them. But as so many people had learned the hard way, hunters were likelier to recognize the front profile of a human under active camouflage than the back. Not that his animal brain was convinced.

They came.

Half of their number crawled along the floor on all fours. The other half traversed the ceiling, inverted. This close, he heard the sound of their passage. Claws going click-click-click, tails swishing softly, the almost inaudible thuk as their adhesion pads engaged and disengaged. They were closer, closer, closer.

One of them broke off, taking to the wall. Right in front of Santiago. It approached him, beheld him. Its skull was a smooth dome interrupted by a line of dark unblinking eyes. Massive jaws jutted out under its head. The hunter growled, raising a paw lined with sharp claws. Mounted under its wrist was a personal laser. Lifting its tail, Santiago saw it terminate in a fine, almost invisible, stinger.

Nothing to see here, all you are seeing are bits of circuitry and wires, go away.

The hunter stared at him, perhaps running through its sensor suite, trying to reconcile multiple anomalous data sets. Santiago kept still. He had to keep still. Hunters roamed in packs, and they would not, could not, stray from their packs. He just had to hold on.

The hunter cocked its head and noticed its pack-mates scampering off. It took to the floor and raced to catch up.

Santiago remembered to breathe. Softly. The last of the hunters had passed. And if they passed over him…

“FUUUUUUUUUUUUUAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRRGHH!”

“Hold position!” Santiago q-commed. “Do not engage!”

The men held position.

Crunching, chewing sounds bounced off the walls.

Santiago waited.

Breathed.

Ten minutes later, he stepped away and looked around. The hunters were gone.

“All clear,” Santiago said. “Who was it?”

“Lenny,” Meyers replied.

“You saw what happened?”

“A hunter poked him. He moved.”

Santiago sighed. Goddammit. Before the Hivers came Lenislaw was a civilian. He had made his bones in the Resistance but he had no place among the Rangers. Lenislaw hadn’t been conditioned to iron discipline the way Santiago was. This was supposed to be an all-Ranger operation, but Central said there were too few Rangers left.

“Distribute his load. Five minutes.”

“Roger.”

Santiago knelt, bringing his M592 gravitic accelerator carbine to his shoulder, and kept watch. Five and a half minutes later, Meyers spoke.

“We’re done.”

“Form up. Move out.”

“And the remains?”

“Mark them on your map. We’ll come back for him later.”

It was a polite fiction and they knew it. If the Hivers wouldn’t take the corpse the rats would. But Santiago, Meyer, and the rest of the team were only human, and they needed that last inch of faith in their fellow humans.

The tunnel ended in a metal door recessed into the wall. They stacked up, weapons at the ready. Meyers inspected the frame for traps and alarms. Grabbing the doorknob, she turned. Pulled.

Beyond was once a bustling concourse. Now there was simply darkness. Santiago lowered his enhanced vision monocular over his left eye and the world filled with false colour. The shops were shuttered forever. Glowing mould and alien roots covered the ceiling and walls. Water dripped and gathered in dank corners. Santiago gently swept debris away with his boots, ears primed for errant noise.

At the end of the concourse was another door to another tunnel. It led to a staircase that spiralled down to darker depths. A gentle hum filled Santiago’s ears. He peeked over the railing, aiming his M592 down.

All clear.

Keeping to the outer edge of the stairs, they descended the creaking steps. Santiago kept his eyes open for lasers, motion detectors, ultrasonics, magnetics, even simple tripwires. There was no telling how the Hivers would secure this route.

At the bottom of the stairs, a door awaited. Its hinges had rusted, the frame welded shut. The third man on the team, Rook, aimed his forearm-mounted nanospray and squirted, generously slathering the frame. He stepped clear.

“Breaching,” he called.

Blinding light banished the dark. The metal melted, and the door fell. A gentler light flooded through the doorway. Santiago stepped through, the monocular automatically reverting to real-sight.

The corridor beyond was white. Clean. Sterile. Santiago pulled up his maps on the monocular and picked a waypoint. In his augmented vision, a thick green line grew at his feet and snaked down the passageway.

Navigating a labyrinth of white corridors, he followed the line to a pair of unmarked doors. Santiago and Rook took one door; Meyers and the last Resistor took the other.

Santiago held up three fingers. Dropped one. Another. The last.

Meyers nodded.

Santiago dropped his fist, shouldered his carbine, and opened the door.

A man wearing spotless blue overalls spun around. His hands were empty, his face slack, his eyes set. His pupils were unnaturally dilated, the sclera an empty white.

Santiago shot him in the face.

The thrall’s head caved in. Santiago fired again and again until it dropped. Turning his back to the nearest wall, he scanned the room. This was a target-rich environment, full of blue-uniformed thralls. Santiago aimed at the closest and cut loose. The M592 whined, the clack-clack of the moving bolt louder than the bullet in flight.

Caught in the crossfire, the thralls dropped, twitching. Santiago checked for more targets, saw Rook on the ground grappling with a thrall. The Hiver flipped Rook onto his back, mounting him. Rook’s dagger flashed in his hand, stitching into the target again and again and again, to no effect. The thrall brought a fist crashing down. Rook rolled, guiding the fist into the floor. The tile powdered. The Hiver reared up and Santiago drilled it twice in the face.

“Clear!” Santiago called.

“Clear!” Meyers agreed.

Rook coughed. “Shit. There went the element of surprise.”

Santiago nodded. Shattered circuits and snapped wires flowed out of the broken heads, carried by pseudo-blood and whatever was left of their organic brains. Like all Hivers, the thralls were networked to every other Hiver in the area. The rest of the swarm would come. Soon.

The corpses smoked and hissed. Santiago stepped back as their skin blackened and crisped, their limbs curled, tendons snapped. Then in a flash of blue light they disintegrated, leaving smoking puddles on the floor.

Meyers extracted a scanner from a pouch, running it over Rook. “You’ve been tagged,” she said.

Hivers sprayed targets with pheromones in close proximity, marking them for other Hivers. Some variants mixed in different chemicals, with less pleasant effects.

“Meyers, Rook, exterior security,” Santiago said. “Clean up as best as you can. Ismail, you’re up.”

Meyers and Rook left the room. Ismail set down and opened his heavy haversack.

Santiago surveyed the room. The walls were lined with computers, most of which he had no idea how to use. He did, however, recognize a dataport. He removed a memory stick from a utility pouch and plugged it in. The tip of the stick glowed red.

Windows lined the control room. Beyond, Santiago saw a sprawling assembly line. Assemblers digested raw materials and alchemized them into feedstock. The fabricator turned the feedstock into goods, rolling them out for collection and storage. Robots scurried around the assembly lines, performing a thousand different tasks. Before the War, this was the largest, most sophisticated underground fabricator on the planet, capable of producing almost anything the programmers could dream of. Santiago pressed his hands against the glass, allowing himself to believe that one day true humans would possess such a fabricator again, that in some not-too-distant future it could produce the goods they needed to reclaim the land and sky.

Ismail hauled the Special Demolition Munition from his bag and dashed Santiago’s hopes forever.

“SDM ready,” Ismail said. “Just give me the word.”

“Roger.”

Santiago watched the memstick. It contained a limited artificial intelligence, closer to a search engine than a true AI. The AI scoured the fabricator’s databanks, copying a treasure trove of Old World knowledge. Most of it would be useless. But the Hivers were running the fabricators now, producing the cybernetics and biomechatronics that defined them. If there was any hope of understanding the enemy’s strengths and weaknesses, it lay in the stick.

The memstick turned green.

Santiago pulled it. “We’re done. Ismail, set the timer for thirty minutes.”

It pained him to give the command. But the Hivers had to believe this was a demolition, not a data extraction.

CLUNK

“What was that?” Ismail asked, closing the SDM’s control panel.

“Came from above us.”

CLUNK-CLUNK.

Not a hunter. They weren’t that clumsy. But it was coming closer. Santiago plugged the stick into a suitport and powered up his q-com. Tuning it to a channel reserved for the mission, he began uploading the contents of the stick. Now they just needed to survive long enough for Central to receive its contents.

“Coming out,” Santiago called.

“Come out,” Meyers replied.

The team regrouped outside.

CLUNK

“That came from the ceiling,” Meyers said.

“We have to—”

Five feet away a ceiling vent opened. A large cube dropped down, slowing into a mid-air hover. Klaxons screeched. The cube pulsed multi-coloured lights in rapid patterns. As Santiago shut his eyes and turned away, the walls and floor around the cube cracked, buckled, and exploded.

Chunks of ferromagnetic material gathered around the cube, twisting and separating and re-forming into springs, cogs, legs, arms, claws. It rolled, crawled, walked towards them.

“Golem!” Meyers yelled.

Rook hosed the construct with full auto fire. The intense gravity fields around the golem assembler snatched the rounds out of the air and repurposed them as mass.

“Run!” Santiago shouted.

They fled, retracing their route. The golem graduated to long, loping bounds, each step a heavy thud. Santiago rounded a bend…

The corridor was filled with thralls. All were armed with improvised weapons: clubs, knives, engineering tools.

Santiago turned up his GAC to full power and fired. His first round blew a hole clean through the nearest thrall, and into two more behind. He worked the crowd with short bursts in full auto. The team took his cue, mincing up the thralls as they surged forward. The wall of flesh fell before them.

Revealing a floating golem assembly. Its energy fields ripped out metal and bone from the corpses, assembling a twisted facsimile of a skeletal giant.

Behind them, the other golem advanced.

“Run!” Santiago again ordered.

Santiago pulled down his map, solving the maze that lay before him. He raced down a corridor, turned right, blew through another thrall, another right turn, and the exit was before them.

Running up the stairs two and three at a time, Santiago didn’t dare look back, tracking the golems by their heavy crashing footfalls. They were getting louder. Closer.

At the top of the stairs, he brought up his wrist-mounted nanospray. He doused the steps in front of him, keying the nano for command detonation. Meyers slipped on the liquid. Santiago caught her and hauled her past him. Ismail was right behind, huffing and puffing.

Rook was the last. Half a storey to go. But the golems were gaining on him,

“Come on!” Santiago yelled.

Rook scrambled. Thirty steps to safety. Twenty-five. The golems ate up the stairs behind them, lengthening their legs and arms, widening their gait. Rook glanced over his shoulder, and cursed.

“Look at me, damn you!” Santiago shouted. “Fucking run!”

Rook ran.

Fifteen steps.

The golems nipped at his heels.

Ten steps.

Rook jumped, clearing several steps at once.

Five steps.

A golem reared up and extruded a pair of metal-encrusted bone scythes above him. The curved blades hooked into his torso, piercing his armour and reeling him in.

“Shit!” Rook yelled.

Santiago fired. The rounds halted in mid-air, then whipped around and meshed itself with the golem.

“Go!” Rook screamed. “Fucking go!”

Cursing, Santiago jumped clear and detonated the nano. The blast consumed Rook and collapsed the stairwell. The golems fell into the darkness below. Santiago staggered away. The survivors grabbed him, pulling him away from the rising dust cloud.

“Rook?” Ismail asked.

“Didn’t make it.”

Meyers shook her head. “Damn. Did you deny him?”

“Yeah.”

Meyers patted his shoulder. “You did good. At least they can’t turn him against us.”

“No time to rest guys,” Santiago said. “The SDM is still active.”

They ran back the way they came. Out the door, back through the tunnel, out into the concourse—

The ground rumbled.

“Initiation!” Ismail called.

The earth trembled. Crumbled. Hardened concrete broke and fell. The Rangers sprinted. Dust fell from the ceiling. An extended roar reverberated behind them. Santiago didn’t dare stop. A Hiver must have triggered the SDM’s anti-tampering mechanism. The two-kiloton fusion weapon was a ‘clean’ bomb, but it still released prodigious amounts of neutrons, which would punch through all but the thickest shielding material. Run, or die.

They ran.

They sprinted down the length of the concourse before Santiago called for a halt. They leaned against walls and benches, panting and gasping. Santiago’s eyes were blurry. His gorge rose, and he swallowed it down. He was fine, he had to be fine, it was just fatigue, but his dosimeter was crackling through his earpieces. He unhooked the device from his suit and examined the screen.

Six grays.

“Fuck me.”

“You’re not my type, boss,” Ismail said.

“Check your dosimeters. Now.”

“Fuck… “ Ismail muttered.

“What’d you get?” Santiago asked.

“Six grays.”

“Meyers?”

She stepped aside and emptied her guts onto the floor. Santiago’s will broke. He took a deep breath, ripped off his mask, stepped back and turned away as his stomach rebelled. A stream of yellow-green exploded from his mouth. As he blew his nose, expelling more waste, he heard Ismail retch.

“Meyers,” Santiago gasped, massaging his belly. “Dosage?”

“Six grays,” she whispered.

“Antirads. Now.”

Santiago fished a small orange case his thigh pocket. Inside was an autoinjector and four spare cartridges. He pressed the needle into his neck and hit the plunger. Cool liquid invaded his blood. Sighing, he discarded the used cartridge and replaced it with a fresh one.

The medicine circulated rapidly through him. The nausea faded. His eyes focused. He spat out the last drops of bile, kept the case, donned his mask and took a deep breath.

“Good news, bad news,” Santiago said. “Bad news is, six grays is a lethal dose. Good news is, a medbox can still reverse the damage. Antirads will buy us time to get to one.”

“And where’s the nearest?” Ismail said.

A soft buzzing filled the air.

“Wasps,” Meyers hissed. “We have to go.”

Ismail sprayed the puddles with nanospray. “Burning. Stand clear.”

They couldn’t leave any trace behind. Who knew what Hivers could do with DNA.

They ducked into a corner. “Burn,” Santiago said.

A flash of light. The wasps buzzed, swooping in on the fire. Soft thud-thud-thuds rose above the beating of a thousand wings. Dark shapes slinked across the ground. Hunters.

Using touch and squeezes, Santiago signalled the duo to follow him. He lowered his monocular, switching to passive infrared. He could just about see beyond arm’s length, but he didn’t dare switch on his infrared lamp. Not with the hunters so close behind.

Dropping to a crouch, he extended his left arm ahead of him and moved slowly on the balls of his feet. With each step, he lifted his foot just enough to clear the floor, toeing aside bits of glass and debris in his path. Meyers felt around his back, and latched on to his suit’s rear grab handle. She was so close he could feel her body heat. Sense the sickness in stasis within her.

Glass crunched behind him.

Santiago paused, listening.

Ismail? Meyers? Who knew? Who cared? He skulked into the dark, away from the fire.

Now there was no light, period. Nothing but complete black. Swallowing, he paid extra attention to the rest of his senses. A faint, sweet smell of decay hung in the air. Through his soft-soled boots, he felt the cracked, broken earth. He swept for obstacles with his left hand and guided himself around them.

The buzzing grew louder. Closer. Santiago swallowed. They wouldn’t escape them. They had to—

Meyers twisted around. A stone bounced off a distant wall, breaking glass.

The wasps flew away, investigating the new sound. A hunter screamed, and its fellows yodelled. Santiago picked up the pace. He remembered to breathe. To breathe was to think, and it was the thinking man who lived. He turned down random corners, putting as much space as he could from the fire, guiding his feet with his pre-War memories of the concourse.

Tak-tak-tak

Santiago halted. Activated his infrared lamp.

On the ceiling, a hunter awaited, its tail poised to strike.

Santiago snapped up his carbine.

The hunter screeched, dropping. It flipped around in mid-air, landing on its feet, bringing up its lasers. Santiago fired.

On impact, the ceramet rounds flashed into brilliant plasma. Santiago flinched. His right eye was temporarily blinded. The monocular blanked out, and when he could see again, the hunter lay in pieces before him.

More hunters howled. One, two, three of them.

Which meant there were at least ten more. Howling was not a means of communication. It was echolocation and psychological warfare. They already knew where the Rangers were.

“Go active,” Santiago ordered. “Ismail, proxy mine.”

Santiago activated his infrared lamp, sweeping for targets. Then the monocular winked out as the hunter self-destructed.

An infrared spotlight appeared behind him. Then another.

“Mine set,” Ismail said.

“Let’s go.”

They charged down the corridor. Turned right. Santiago took three steps before he heard the buzzing. A swarm of wasps descended from the ceiling, stingers exposed.

“Move!” Meyers yelled, pushing past him. She raised her nanosprays and squirted. The aerosol blossomed into white fire. Burning wasps dropped from the sky.

“Back! Back!” Santiago ordered.

He turned and ran, aiming for a hallway to his right. Behind him, the proximity mine exploded.

The hall graded down, leading to a pair of escalators flanking a staircase. Clunks sounded above them. A ventilation grate fell from the ceiling. A golem cube dropped.

“Fuck you!” Santiago extended his wrist and hosed it with nano. Closing in, he kicked the assembler against the wall and ordered the nano to ignite.

The cube melted.

Santiago blinked. He hadn’t expected that. Damn things could be killed. He ran—

Meyers grabbed his shoulder, reversing his momentum.

“What the hell?”

“Look down! Tripwires!”

Thin lines glittered in the infrared lamp, sealing off the escalators and the stairs.

Behind them, a second mine exploded. Hunters howled.

“Follow me!” Santiago called, jumping over the tripwire that guarded the stairs. He landed awkwardly, slipped on a step, and landed on his ass. Painfully.

Ismail laughed.

“Real funny,” Santiago groused, getting up.

Santiago ran down the stairs, leaping down the last five steps. He turned to cover the team, and saw hunters pouncing on the ceiling.

“Contact front!”

Santiago dumped his mag into them, squeezing the trigger as fast as he could. Ismail and Meyers added their fire to his. A pencil-thin beam snapped out past his head, missing him by an inch. Plasma flash-blinded his right eye.

“Grenade out!” Meyers yelled. Pulling a plastic pipe bomb from her vest, she pulled the pin and tossed it at the head of the stairs.

Santiago ducked away. The bomb exploded; a burning gob landed by his foot.

Navigating with his good left eye, he raced to the platform. To his right, the maglev track was blocked by a stationary train.

To his left, the tunnel had caved in.

The hunters bellowed.

Swearing, Santiago called up the map, searching for…

There.

Jumping down onto the track, he turned right, squeezed himself between the train and the wall then crab-walked down the tunnel.

A soft buzzing filled the air.

“Go passive!” he whispered, dousing the infrared light.

The world went dark again. Navigating solely by touch, he inched his way along the wall.

The train rocked. Clunk-clunk-clunk.

His fingers touched a corner. He eased himself into the space, finding a tiny nook. The back wall was smooth and unmarked. A junction box lay at head height.

The buzzing grew louder.

Santiago ran his palm along the right side of the box. A hidden panel slid open. Inside was a tiny dataport. Santiago ran his suitjack into the port.

Click.

Santiago pressed against the far wall, and it swung on silent bearings. He motioned the team through, and slid the door shut. It locked behind him.

The space beyond was dark and tight. Feeling along the left wall, he found a button. Overhead lights snapped on revealing an airlock door.

“Is it safe to ask where the hell are we?” Ismail asked.

“Metro-2,” Santiago replied.

“Metro-2, here?” Ismail whistled. “How far does it go?”

“Everywhere,” Meyers replied, reloading his carbine. “Wherever the Metro goes, there’s a connection to Metro-2. It’s the only reason the Resistance has held out for so long.”

Metro-2 was the city’s final redoubt against total war. But only as long as the Hive wasn’t aware of it.

“The Hive isn’t stupid,” Meyers said. “They know we couldn’t have disappeared into thin air. They’ll start looking for the Metro-2 connector.”

“And drop a rock on us,” Ismail continued.

“They stopped doing that a while back,” Santiago said. “Now they prefer uploading Resistors into the Hive mind. Dead or alive.”

“And so we prefer denying compromised connectors to the enemy now,” Meyers added. “With SDMs.”

Ismail sighed. “This war. Either they kill us or we kill ourselves.”

“Or we kill them. Let’s go.”

The airlock cycled open. Beyond was a white-lit decontamination chamber. Santiago activated his suit’s IFF system, letting the embedded sensors know they were friendly. When the door closed, the nozzles on the ceiling hissed.

“No more decon solution?” Meyers asked.

Santiago clucked his tongue. “Looks like it. Only thing coming out is pressurised air.” He pulled a Geiger counter from his pouch. “Guys, check your suits. We need to know if we’re still hot.”

The Geiger counter crackled. The neutron flux had blasted the suits, exciting and displacing molecules. The now-radioactive material was emitting the full range of radioactive particles: alpha particles, beta and gamma rays, fission by-products. Santiago wondered if the neutrons had embrittled their gear too. They couldn’t afford to find out the hard way.

The Geiger counter said he was emitting 2.5 Sieverts of radiation, slowly dropping. Meyers and Ismail reported similar results. But the team was still absorbing radiation. The antirads could only protect them for so long, hours maybe. Already Santiago felt his fingers turning cold, his skin itching under the suit.

It was psychological, he told himself. That or the antirads.

He almost believed it.

“Dump your water,” Santiago ordered.

“What?” Meyers said. “Why… oh. Damn. Damn!”

“You drank some?” Ismail said.

“Yeah. I was… oh shit.”

Santiago shrugged. “Probably not hot enough to kill you. Well, not any faster anyway.”

All the same, he emptied the contents of his irradiated canteens and water bladder into the chamber’s drains. A soft chime whispered in his earpieces. The stolen data had been transmitted.

The airlock cycled open. The Rangers emerged into a brightly-lit tunnel. Santiago opened a nearby door. The room beyond held supplies. Ammunition boxes, weapon racks, medicine closets. A lonely fabricator in the corner. But no medbox.

Most of the crates were empty. Logistics cells roamed Metro-2, restocking equipment stores like this one, but as the war dragged on the resupply schedule had grown increasingly erratic. Part of Santiago rejoiced at the arsenal before him. Another raged at the bastards before him who had taken so much. A third insisted they take everything they could carry, while the last warned there was still a war on and other teams would need the supplies too. Santiago acknowledged each then coldly shoved them all away. The mission would dictate equipment, and their first mission was staying alive.

First priority was water. There was a water dispenser in a corner…which lacked a water tank. Entering the adjacent washroom, he turned the taps. Nothing. Santiago gathered a mouthful of saliva and swallowed it down. He’d been through worse.

After water came gear. As they topped off ammo and nano, they replaced their M592s with the racked ones. Those had never been zeroed, but M592s could launch projectiles at such ludicrous speeds zeroing wasn’t strictly necessary. They threw their old equipment into the fabricator’s mass digester, where it would be broken down into feedstock.

They peeled themselves out of their suits and wiped the suits’ computers, condemning the materiel to the digester. Maroon splotches crept across Santiago’s skin. They itched, but he refrained from scratching. When he peeled off his mask it took a mass of hair with it. Ismail and Meyers fared no better. Standard decon procedure was to wash off contaminated materials from their bodies. They made do by spraying themselves down in the washroom with nano, configured for cleaning instead of killing.

The fabricator churned out replacement suits, and after suiting up the team reconfigured the fresh suit computers and electronics. When Santiago powered up his q-com, he had a voice message waiting for him.

“This is Central,” a cool female voice said. “Proceed to Academy Outpost and link up with friendly forces. Prepare for high intensity operations. This is an Alpha Priority mission.”

Santiago passed on the message. Ismail frowned. “Academy’s on the other side of the city.”

“They’re bound to have a medbox there,” Meyers replied. “Water too.”

“How do we get there? If we’re walking… “

Ismail’s voice trailed off. Sure, they were Rangers, the best of the best and all that, but acute radiation syndrome cared little about that. Santiago could feel the invisible death gnawing through his veins, killing him by inches.

“The Underground Railroad,” Santiago said. “With Alpha Priority we can call the train.”

“It’s still functional?” Meyers asked.

“It better be.”

Metro-2 was an intricate network of service tunnels and corridors, denser than the civilian Metro. Digital maps were deemed non-secure and never stored on suits. There was a time when maps were posted at every junction, but Central had them torn down after they realised the Hivers were aware of Metro-2. Direction arrows were painted over, signs removed, even the alpha-numeric lettering that designated different sections were whited out. All that remained were sterile walls of white concrete, greying by degrees. Santiago had to navigate by memory alone. And, he knew, one of the side effects of radiation poisoning was decreased cognitive function.

No. He could not give in to despair. He had to keep going.

White lights gave away to lamps filled with bioluminescent bacteria, throwing a soft green glow into the darkness. They were filled with water, and for a moment Santiago entertained the thought of taking a sip from them. But that was the height of stupidity. Still, his tongue grew sticky fur and his skin tried in vain to reabsorb the sweat in his suit.

A soft metal crash reverberated behind them.

“What was that?” Meyers muttered.

A louder boom followed.

“Breaching charges,” Ismail replied.

Hunters filled the tunnels with a synchronized howl.

“They’re behind us,” Meyers said.

Santiago licked chapped lips. “Let’s move.”

They scurried into the dark. Santiago picked a turn, then another, and another. He’d only been here a few times, and that was so long ago. Was it the Guerrilla Warfare training module? Some operation at the beginning of the war? His memories were slipping away. He opened a gate, entering a small tunnel that stretched on into infinity. It looked just like any other tunnel, only the green lamps were in slightly different positions. Or were they?

“Wait a minute… “ he muttered.” Where are we?”

“Are we lost?” Ismail said.

“Haven’t been here before,” Santiago admitted.

“I think… I think I know where we are,” Meyers said.

Santiago cocked his head into the dark. “Lead on.”

She took point. Santiago rotated to the tail-end position. Keeping a hand on Ismail’s grab handle, he glanced over his shoulder every twenty steps. Hunters called into the dark. Santiago idly realized he was hearing the same long, drawn-out howl over and over. Even the most well-trained animals would vary their tone and length. But these howls were precise. Unvaried. A mechanical mimicry of biology. Which, in a nutshell, was the Hivers’ philosophy.

The Hivers they had encountered earlier weren’t equipped to perform explosive breaches. That meant Hiver infantry were coming. Humans, or what passed for humans in the Hive’s vision of humanity. Santiago suppressed a shudder. Sure, Neuvo Corazon had embraced genetic engineering and cybernetics, but they hadn’t discarded their humanity the way the Hivers had. He couldn’t understand their motives, and they never cared to explain. They just warped in their warfleet above the planet and dictated terms. When the government refused to surrender, the Hivers rained fire from above. That was… he couldn’t recall how long ago.

Meyers came to a door. She opened it, entering what looked like a substation. Power generators lined the walls, cold and silent.

“Eh?” she said. “I thought… where the hell…?”

“Lost?” Santiago said.

“I… shit. Yeah. We need to back—”

Hunters bellowed in the dark.

“Let’s not.” Ismail pointed. “Try that door.”

The door led to a staircase that descended into the dark.

“I’m not sure about this,” Meyers said.

“Only thing deeper than Metro-2 is the Underground Railroad,” Santiago said. “Doesn’t matter what stop we’re at, so long as we get there.”

They went down. At the bottom of the stairwell was a metal door. Locked. Meyers melted the lock and the trio stumbled into the room beyond. Santiago filled his lungs with stale air. He lowered his monocular and powered the IR lamp.

The platform was tiny. Just a strip of concrete adjacent to massive rails. The tunnels were clear, at least. Maybe a train would come here.

Like all the artefacts of civilization, Metro-2 needed power. The trains of the underground railway needed power. Power from the generators distributed across Metro-2 or tapped from reactors on the surface. The Hivers knew that too, and they always answered unexplained spikes in electricity demand with ground forces and orbital bombardments. The Resistance travelled almost exclusively on foot, or with vehicles that didn’t draw power from the grid. Central would authorize the use of the Metro-2 trains only in the gravest emergencies. With Alpha Priority status, Hivers on his tail, Santiago figured this qualified.

There was a q-com station next to the rails. Santiago flicked the power switch. The touchscreen displayed a keypad. He fed in his serial number. A host of buttons appeared. He selected the one that called for a train. Moments later, the intercom crackled.

“HELLO!”

The Rangers jumped. Santiago turned down the volume.

“…are five stops away,” the train engineer continued. “Where are you headed?”

“Academy Outpost,” Santiago replied.

“Ah! Excellent! So are we. We should be there in twenty minutes.”

“We have Hivers on our tail.”

“Hivers? Here? Shit.” The engineer sighed. “I’ll push ‘er as fast as she can go. But be ready for a hot extract.”

Santiago stepped away from the console. His head felt heavy and foggy, overburdened by the toxins that were surely swelling his brain. He knew he had to do something, but…

“Boss?” Ismail said. “I’ll go upstairs and lay some traps for our friends.”

Ah, right. That. “Go ahead.”

Ismail ran up the stairs. Santiago patted himself down, checking that his kit was where he’d left them. Meyers fiddled with her M592. Silence reigned in the dark.

Long, long minutes later, Ismail sprinted back down, closing the door behind him. As he welded it shut with nano, he said, “They’re coming.”

Santiago looked around. There was no cover on the platform. It was…

Meyers went down to the tracks, crouching behind the thick concrete of the platform floor. The men followed her.

“You know… this is… crazy,” Ismail said, gasping for air.

“Got a better idea?” she asked.

“No,” Santiago said.

Santiago kept his ears open, listening for the sound of hissing air. A mine detonated in the stairwell. Training his carbine at the door, he breathed slowly, deeply, regularly. Waited.

A lifetime passed in the dark.

White-hot light flared from the doorframe.

Santiago shouldered his weapon.

The door fell. A dark shape leaped through.

“Fire!” Santiago called, pulling the trigger.

The hunter blew apart. Two more pounced out from behind it. Santiago tracked the one on the right. It halted for a moment, bringing up its weapons. He fired, and both the hunter’s hands exploded. Santiago put the creature down with a double-tap, scanned for more targets, and saw the other hunter die.

And a cylinder bounced down the stairs and into the open.

Santiago looked away.

It burst in dazzling, ear-shattering flashes of white. Santiago’s monocular shut down. Flattening himself as far as he could, he extended his carbine above his platform and loosed a burst. Another. A third. Ismail and Meyers added their fire to his. When the flash-bang died Santiago looked up.

A pair of corpses greeted him. Shattered bodies with triangular heads, torsos covered in pseudo-chitin carapace, their hands gripping Hiver gravity guns. The bodies began to burn.

A hunter surged through the doorway. The Rangers pumped it with bullets. As it vaporised, it lobbed a grenade at them.

Landing in front of Ismail.

The Ranger swore and jumped up on the platform. Scooping up the grenade, he dashed to the door, brought the bomb to his ear, threw it—

It exploded. The munitions on the Ranger’s suit detonated too.

“Ismail!” Meyers yelled.

When the dust cleared, there was nothing left of him larger than a leg. The massive explosion broke up the stairs, bringing it down in a wreck of twisted metal and rubble that sealed off the doorway.

“Ismail,” Meyers whispered. “My God.”

Air whooshed through the tunnel. The duo clambered up on the platform.

Moments later, a sleek, shining maglev rushed into the station. The doors slid open.

“All aboard!” the engineer called through the intercom.

The train was packed with men and materiel. All the seats in the front carriages were occupied, and much of the floor space taken up by supply crates. Wending their way to the rear, the Rangers found a pair of empty seats. Meyers collapsed into one. Santiago discreetly whipped out his Geiger counter first.

They were cold. Thank God. Last thing he needed was to contaminate what could well be the last maglev on the planet.

The journey to Academy passed in a blur. At six hundred kilometres per hour, all Santiago could see of the outside world was an ill-defined gray stretch. Santiago opened his q-com and updated Central on his team’s status. The moment he received an acknowledgment, he closed his eyes and drifted into a twilight state somewhere between restfulness and true sleep.

Meyer nudged him. “We’re here.”

Santiago opened his eyes. That was fast. Too fast. Had he nodded off? He didn’t know. All he knew was that he felt even more tired than when he had boarded. Yawning, he followed the occupants out the train.

An array of guards scanned the passengers with handheld scanners, searching for Hiver pheromones and cybernetics. When Santiago cleared the checkpoint, a guard approached him.

“Please step aside, Sergeant Major.”

“Is there a problem?”

“No problem. But Central wants to speak to you and your team.”

“Lead on.”

The guard led the duo away from the crush of people and to the security office. Inside the office, a short man in a grubby suit awaited behind a desk. He wore no rank tabs on his chest epaulet, and needed none.

“Major Khabarov,” Santiago said. “Finally showed up in person?”

“Have to show my face once in a while, let people think I’m alive.” Khabarov gestured at the chairs in front of him. “Sit, please.”

They sat. “You have something for us?” Meyers asked.

“I’m truly sorry for the loss of your team. Their sacrifice was not in vain.”

Santiago thought of Lenislaw, dying alone in the dark. Rook, consumed by golem and fire. Ismail, blown apart. The long line of Rangers and Resistors he had led and lost.

“Thank you, sir,” Santiago said. “But you must’ve seen our report. We need to be in the hospital right now.”

“Absolutely. But I’ve been told you can still fight.”

“We don’t get in a medbox, we’re dead men walking.”

Meyers coughed.

Santiago grimaced. “Well. Dead Rangers. You get what I mean.”

Khabarov smiled wanly. “I spoke to the medical techs. They said the medbox will need two weeks to fix you. We don’t have two weeks.”

“Sending us into the fire again?” Meyers asked.

“Yes. This could be our only chance to win the war.”

“You said that about the last job, sir.”

“This is a continuation of that operation. The Academy AIs have pored through the data you transmitted. They found schematics for Hiver cybernetics. Hardware, firmware, and software infrastructure. Coupled with all the intelligence we’ve gathered in previous missions, we’re confident we can penetrate the Hive Mind.”

The Hivers distributed their computing capability across decentralized swarms, making them ultra-resilient and impervious to decapitation strikes. The Academy concentrated most of what was left of the planet’s major processors, becoming a gigantic hyper-computer several orders of magnitude more powerful than the Hiver equivalent. If it were allowed to.

“You’re saying we can hack into the Hiver command and control system?” Santiago asked.

“Not quite. The Hivers use quantum comms like we do. The only way to hack the Hive Mind is to access a dedicated communication and control node.”

“Which they don’t normally employ, since they prefer decentralised networks and autonomous swarms.”

“Yes. They only use C&C nodes to coordinate activities between different swarms during large-scale operations. Such as an upload-or-destroy mission.”

“That’s all well and good, but what do you need us for?”

“The Hivers are coming. We’re going to ambush them.”

Meyers blinked. “They are coming. Here. To Academy.”

“Yes.”

“How did they find us?”

Khabarov sighed. “The Hivers have been mapping Metro-2 and we can’t keep Academy Outpost secret. To analyze the data so quickly, we’ve had to run the Academy AIs at full power. The Hivers would have noticed the energy spike. They will come for us.”

Santiago shot to his feet. “You’re going to sacrifice the Academy?!”

“No. The Hivers aren’t interested in genocide. They want to assimilate us. There’s a large civilian community on the surface right above the Academy. They won’t drop a rock on us. They’ll send multiple swarms for an uplift-or-destroy operation. With those swarms will be landing ships with C&C nodes. If we can board a ship, we can plug our suits into the nodes and piggyback our AIs into the Hive Mind.”

“You’ve just condemned the civvies above us,” Meyers said.

“We have no choice. It’s the only way we have left to access one of their ships, and they only bring the ships down to deploy reinforcements from orbit. Actual infantry, not constructs. The one sure-fire way they would do that is if we lure them into uplifting a community and coming down into the Metro.”

“How do you know they’ll take the bait?” Santiago asked.

Khabarov smiled grimly. “They know I’m one of the few officers left in the military, and the commanding officer of the Rangers. I’ve leaked on unsecured and compromised channels that I’m Central, and I’m at Academy Station. They will come. They want my brain.”

Meyers exhaled sharply. “My. God. Sir, are you sure…?”

“Yes. And for what it’s worth, the operations plan calls for us Rangers to swarm the Hivers when they arrive, while the mainline Resistance holds the Metro entrances. I intend to fight on the surface.”

“That’s pretty risky.”

“Yes. But we’re all in this together. If we swarm them when they land, some of us are bound to break through. Besides, remember what I told you when the war began?”

Meyers snorted. “I am Central.”

“You are Central,” Santiago continued.

“We are all Central,” Khabarov finished. “As long as there is even one of us left, the Resistance continues.”

Central was a myth deliberately perpetrated by the Rangers. The civilians needed to believe the government had survived, the remnants of the military needed to believe their leaders were still fighting the war, and every swarm the Hive sent to the countryside to hunt ghosts was a swarm that could not hunt the Resistance or twist people into their brand of humanity. The closest the Rangers ever had to Central was the AI that mediated information flow across Resistance cells.

“Just like the Hive,” Santiago mused.

“We’ve got to adopt our enemy’s strategy. It’s the only way to win.”

“To survive, you mean.”

Santiago used to think waiting was easy. He just had to lie in place until something important happened. As he injected his last antirad into his neck, he considered otherwise.

Meyers, huddled under her camouflage blanket, swapped out her mask’s air filter and cleaned dust off the lenses. Santiago joined her, rubbing his hands against the chill, and looked out the mousehole they had bored out of the kitchen wall.

Scattered across broken streets five stories down, the surface dwellers were huddling in little knots of humanity. Some entered nearby apartment blocks. Others gathered around ancient, rusted drums and started pitiful, flickering fires. Of Hivers, they saw none.

At least, Hiver constructs. Hiver thralls, and the infiltrator strain, were something else.

Santiago blew on his hands again. The Hiver orbital bombardments at the dawn of war started an ice age. What arable ground remained the Hivers seized for themselves and their collaborators. The Hivers didn’t bother occupying most of the planet. They simply fostered hardship upon hardship on the people, leaving them to fend for themselves. The only way out was to join the Hive. Or be swept up in an upload-or-destroy operation.

Meyers peeked out the window. Across the building was a park. Most of the trees had died or shed their leaves, leaving large open spaces. A perfect place for a Hiver landing ship.

Outside, a floorboard creaked.

Santiago tapped Meyers shoulder. She shrank away from the window.

SNAP.

That was the lock fastened to the grille. The Rangers snatched up their weapons and moved out.

The grille swung open on screeching hinges.

Santiago leapt to one corner of the room, Meyers took the other.

The front door unlocked with a heavy CLICK. The door opened. A hunter leapt through, howling.

A proximity mine exploded.

Santiago flinched away from the blast. Looking back up, he saw thralls pouring through a pink mist.

The closest thrall aimed its arms at him. Its hands shot out, attached to its sockets with fine wires.

Not a thrall. An infiltrator.

As the hands landed on a sofa, Santiago pumped three hypersonic rounds into its chest. The infiltrator staggered, lifted its hands and tossed the sofa away, clearing a line of attack. Meyers blew its head off, but Santiago was exposed. And more infiltrators were coming.

One launched claw hands at him. He ducked and charged into the threat, blowing its head off. Its partner leapt on Santiago. He brought up his carbine and it grabbed the weapon with both hands, trying to throw him. Santiago snaked his left hand down, drew his dagger in a reverse grip, and thrust out. The ultrafine tip sank into its neck and ripped out. Dark blood spattered across his mask’s lenses. He thrust into its eyes, felt the knife bounce off hardened metal. The Hiver didn’t even flinch; it continued to hold him in place for its friends to flank him.

Snarling, Santiago jammed the blade into the crook of its right elbow and pulled, breaking its grip. He tried to kick it away, but the infiltrator was faster, crashing him against the wall, crushing him with powerful arms.

And set itself afire.

“Fuck! Fuck! Fuck!” Santiago yelled, twisting and turning, but the fucking thing had him in a death grip. He grabbed the Hiver’s burning back and violently arched his spine, making space to knee it in the groin and shove it aside. As its body fell apart, Meyers dropped it with a short burst.

“You okay?” Meyers shouted.

Santiago was broiling under the suit, but he hadn’t caught fire. “I’m good.” He retrieved his carbine and sheathed his dagger. Santiago’s q-com filled with chatter: Rangers reporting ambushes and attacks.

Light spilled through the window. The world rattled. Pure sound flooded his ears, rattling his brain. Meyers looked out the window.

“They’re landing at the park!” she shouted.

“We have to go!” he yelled back.

They burst out of the apartment and down the stairs. As the Rangers reached the ground floor, the windows shattered. Hypervelocity slugs ripped through the air, blasting through the façade of the building, blowing holes in the walls around them. Santiago hit the deck, pressing Meyers down with him. There was too much fire in front of them; Hiver forces must be attacking their building.

“I’ll draw them away!” Meyers yelled. “Finish the mission!”

“But—”

“We’ve both been tagged. But the heat from the one that burned you would have neutralized most of the pheromones on you. If there’s anyone who can get close to the landing ship, it’s you! Now go!”

Santiago snarled. Rolling off her, he snatched up his weapon. “See you in Valhalla.”

“Hell no! You can visit me in Folkvangr!”

Snorting, Santiago turned around and crawled away. Meyers fired through the holes, screaming war cries, then picked herself up and sought better cover. Reaching the rear door, Santiago got up too and burst out. Behind him, the apartment shook under the hammer blow of multiple explosions.

He ran.

Alone.

As the city died around him, Santiago pressed himself down into the street. The suit adjusted, shifting its tones. With slow, measured, movements, he lowered his monocular and crawled down the middle of the road. It flew in the face of infantry doctrine, but the Hivers had read the textbook too.

A squad of Hiver infantry rounded the corner ahead of him. Infrared aiming lasers and spotlights slashed through the night.

He froze.

The enemy soldiers pressed themselves to the walls, pausing for the moment it took their suits to blend in, and stalked down the pavement. At such close quarters, they looked more like insects than men. Swallowing, Santiago stayed still, breathing as shallowly as possible. Even if they saw him, maybe they’d mistake him for a corpse and move on.

They moved on.

Santiago remained motionless. Breathing. Laying. Waiting. The tail-end Charlie would be watching their backs, and if Santiago moved, he was dead.

Gunshots echoed behind him. He couldn’t tell who was firing on whom; the gravity guns both sides employed produced the same screeching-tearing noise at hypervelocity speeds, the same silence at subsonic. Cautiously, Santiago inched forward, moving one limb at a time.

Down the road, a car flung off the ground. Whirling around a gravity singularity, it shredded apart, recomposing itself into four wheeled legs. Streetlamps twisted, bent, and broke off from the pavement, drawn to the singularity. The golem in birthing rolled down the street. Towards Santiago.

Cursing, he picked up the pace, crawling up onto the pavement. Under the golem, pipes burst free from the ground, gushing wastewater. Santiago slithered for the bend as fast as he dared. If he stood and ran now the golem would notice him. Slowly, inexorably, the golem came. The whirlwind of metal formed gears and wheels, arms and claws.

Santiago turned the corner. An irresistible force gripped him. Gnashing his teeth, he pressed himself into the road. He stretched his arm out, trying to pull himself forward. The golem’s gravity wash damn near ripped his arm off. A gale whipped around him. Santiago’s body tensed, every fiber of his being contracting, squeezing every last joule he could spare. The fence around the park creaked and groaned. The posts bent sharply, and exploded from the concrete. One smacked the road next to Santiago’s head. He kept crawling, forcing himself forward, dragging himself away from the singularity. But it was no use, he was being pulled back, back, into the maw of the—

The golem moved on. The singularity passed.

Santiago relaxed, panting. His muscles burned. He glanced around; saw no Hivers and no signs of movement. He ran for the parking lot, leaping over the gap in the fence.

A Hiver landing ship lay to his one o’clock, three hundred meters away. It looked like a pyramid with the top sliced off, disgorging troops and Hunters from three sides. The heat of the landing had flash-incinerated the grass, leaving ashes dancing in the heated air. Pressing himself against a stump, Santiago brought down his monocular and called up his combat map. Green dots filled the screen, intermixed with an array of red dots. It was a fracas, small teams fighting little wars of their own, linking up with others to coalesce into a more powerful one or breaking off to engage a threat from another axis. Swarm versus swarm, Rangers against Hivers.

With his suit computer, he tagged the flow of Hiver reinforcements and the landing ship. The q-com would update the Rangers’ net, feeding them fresh data. Taking a deep breath, he transmitted on the whole tactical net, reaching every Ranger around him.

“This is Sergeant Major Abel Santiago. I have eyes on the objective. It’s crawling with Hivers. I need a distraction so I can penetrate the target.”

The Hivers spread out, forming a defensive perimeter. Hunters formed up into packs, infantry gathered into squads. On the combat map, green dots swirled around red dots, converging on Santiago. He looked and looked but could not find a dot with Meyers’ name. The Hivers assembled into a swarm, sending their hunters forward to engage the new threat, infantry close behind. A squad of infantry rushed his way.

Santiago balled up and rolled aside.

The troops stormed past him, oblivious.

He stayed where he was. Waited. When he was sure the road was clear he looked up. Checked his map. The Hivers were forming a defensive circle around the park, responding to Ranger probes from every direction. Too busy to look inwards.

Santiago got to his feet and sprinted for the ship.

The interior was a dark, empty cavern. No Hivers emerged from the darkness to tear his head off.

At the far end of the hold was a door. Past the door, a staircase. He ascended the steps slowly, carefully, weapon ready.

A small antechamber waited at the top of the stairs. Soft light flooded his monocular, and he lifted it. Taking quiet, measured steps, he entered the room beyond.

It was the control room. Three Hivers were plugged into a console across him. In the center of the room was a spire that seemed to grow from the floor. Two more Hivers sat by it, thick cables connecting their temples to the machine.

None of them had seen him.

Santiago raised his carbine and fired.

The first one at the spire died without knowing why. Its partner turned around, and Santiago splattered his brains across the floor. The other Hivers whirled around to face the threat, their cables disconnecting. Santiago blasted them with rapid fire. One rolled away, producing a hand weapon, but Santiago got off-line and shot it before it could react.

Santiago blinked. And giggled. These weren’t Hiver combatants. Otherwise he wouldn’t have had a chance.

He inspected the spire. It had to be control node. He’d seen pictures of one once, in the early days of the war when there was still a functional air defense net. A Ranger team had sneaked into a downed Hiver landing craft, live-streaming video feeds of the interior. The craft had self-destructed before the Rangers could hack the node, but this one probably wasn’t in danger of blowing up anytime soon. Using an adaptor, he plugged his suit into the node.

A cold female voice entered his earpieces. “This is Central. We are inside the Hive Mind. Stand by.”

Santiago called up his map. The red dots were regrouping. Small detachments formed up, racing back to the dropships. The green dots formed into smaller groups, attacking weak points in the enemy line and fading out. Some Hiver constructs, their logic trees disrupted, got caught in an endless loop between running for the ships and running for the front. Red dots disappeared, but more green dots vanished.

CLACK-CLACK-CLACK

Santiago primed a grenade, tossed it into the antechamber. He found cover behind the spire as the grenade exploded. The concussion jarred his brain, left him dizzy. When he looked up he saw a pair of blood-soaked Hunters flow into the room, moving around to flank him on both sides.

He fired at the nearest one, blasting it apart. Ducking, he stepped around as he heard a laser CRACK.

The cable tightened, arresting his motion. The other hunter leapt at him, claws slashing. He tried to block the slash with his carbine. The creature latched on to it and broke it in half. As the hunter tossed the broken carbine aside, Santiago drew his dagger.

The Hiver closed in, slashing both hands forward, tail zapping from above. Santiago stepped aside, checking an arm with his left hand and slashing out with his dagger. The cable popped free from his suit. The blade slid harmlessly off the hunter’s arm. Santiago kept moving, chasing the recoiling stinger. Grabbing the base of the tail, he stabbed the blade in. He sprayed the wound with nano and jumped back, mind-keying a command.

The tail exploded. The blast knocked the breath out of Santiago’s lungs. The Hiver stumbled towards him, bringing its right claws slashing down.

Santiago stepped in to his left, his left hand slapping its arm over his right shoulder, and slashed upwards with his right. He felt the knife slide across its throat. He retracted the knife, ramming the blade into its neck. The dagger bit in, opening a hole. Retracting the knife, Santiago sprayed the wound with nano, kicked the hunter away, and blew its head off.

Gasping for breath, he staggered away and plugged himself back in. He panted, sucked in huge gulps of air.

Tik-tik-tik

Looked up.

More hunters spilled through the doorway.

“Fuck.” He brought both nanosprays up.

The Hivers halted.

He stared at them.

They stared back.

Nothing happened.

A cool voice filled his earpieces. “This is Central. We have control of the Hive Mind. All Hive personnel are now under the control of the Neuvo Corazon Armed Forces. The war is over.”

The announcement repeated. Santiago listened to it five times before finally hearing the last four words.

He collapsed. Blinked at the ceiling. When he finally found the strength to sit up, the hunters had departed. A lifetime later, he tuned his q-com.

“Major?” he whispered.

“Santiago! Abel! My God, man, you did it!”

“What the hell happened? What did we do to them?”

“The Academy AIs were coding a virus to corrupt the Hive Mind since the war began. The intel you collected helped us complete it.”

Every member of the Hive was in constant contact with each other. If a C&C node uploaded a Trojan horse into the Hiver command net, every single Hiver would be infected in minutes. Khabarov couldn’t have told him, of course. Operational security. As he pondered Khabarov’s words, a thought slammed into Santiago’s brain.

“We… we did to them what they were going to do to us.”

“We won the war.”

“We turned into them.”

“We won the war,” Khabarov repeated. “Look. You need treatment. Get to the outpost and into a medbox. Now.”

Santiago picked himself up. Dusted himself off. Left the ship. Wandered out the park.

The Hivers gathered themselves into little groups. They dropped their weapons into neat piles and kneeled on the ground, hands to their heads, dutifully awaiting collection. Hunters prostrated. Golems disintegrated. Wasps landed. Gunshots rang out in the dark. The shooting was entirely one-sided. The Hive’s starships were doing nothing to stop it. They must belong to Nuevo Corazon now.

Santiago pulled off his mask, letting the frigid air caress his burned skin and fill his lungs. Looking up, he saw billions of stars with uncounted worlds. Most were lifeless, some not, more than a few occupied by different strains of humanity. Including the Hiver homeworld.

Now ready to be conquered.