The Mandel Files (171 page)

“OK, that’s where your infrared signature cuts off.”

“Got it.” She loaded the coordinate into the suit guidance ‘ware, then pushed her thumb into the flinty rock and scratched a line. “Hey, Dennis, you got any intuition loaded in your skull?”

“No, sorry about that, Suzi,” Dennis said. “All I got is espersense, see? Handy enough for our kind of work.”

“Yeah, right.” He had the most gentle Welsh lilt, almost purring. She couldn’t visualise his face, must have seen it back at Listoel and on the Anastasia, though.

Whoops and cheering came over her earpiece. When she looked back out into the cave there was a rust-coloured dog dashing round the huts, three armour suits in pursuit, their boots tearing long gashes in the thick carpet of moss. She would have just zapped the fucking thing.

One of the team caught up with the dog. It howled as the gauntlet clamped round its hind leg.

“Lock it in one of the huts,” Melvyn said.

Suzi called up the feed from the security centre. It was a roof camera in Moorgate station. The last two tekmercs were disappearing into the service tunnel. Quarter of an hour, maximum.

She felt the hot calm of a combat high building inside. Checked round the cave. The two tech specialists rigging the lake cave charges had finished, walking down the staircase with Melvyn.

Melvyn ordered the solaris spots to be turned down. They were reduced to a vague ginger glimmer, filling the cave with dusky shadows. Her photon amp cut in, washing away the murky outlines with opalescent blue and grey silhouettes.

She could hear Melvyn’s footsteps as he made a final inspection round, clumping on the rock, then the softer wet thuds as he walked over the moss.

“Radio silence until after we blow the charges,” Melvyn said. “You know the form once they enter the kill ground. Get to it.”

“Amen,” Suzi mumbled. She plugged her suit’s interface socket into an optical lead the tech specialists had laid out, careful not to tug the thin fibre with her gauntlets. The suit’s ‘ware meshed the image from the lake cave sensors into her photon-amp feed. It seemed to be working OK.

The only noise left was a regular gurgling coming from a pump. It was directly opposite her, to one side of the staircase. Water from the lake was seeping through hairline splits in the rock, dribbling down the wall where it was collected in a rough pool that the Celestials had chopped into the floor. The pump fed their irrigation pipes, and supplied the communal washroom.

She couldn’t hear the dog any more, not even with the suit’s external mike boosted up to full sensitivity.

Dennis tapped her on the arm, and pointed back down the crack. She gave him a thumbs-up and retreated down past the scratch on the wall.

The image from the lake cave wasn’t particularly clear, the sensor was sitting behind one of the biolum panels, looking down on the entrance which Leol’s squad would come through.

Twelve minutes. The prick was taking his own good time.

Weapons Check.

Symbology zipped through her mind. Everything was on line, rip gun magazines charged, hardware functional, targeting sensors operative. Just like the previous eight times.

Something moved in the lake cave. A reconnaissance disk, skipping erratically through the air like a clockwork bat. Sensors picked up its datalink emission, high-pitched chittering.

The first tekmerc came through the entrance, rip gun tracking round the cave. There was a burst of coded radio pulses. The rest of the squad began to move in.

Suzi crossed herself, and started counting the tekmercs. Talbot Lombard was hustled along by the eighth squad member. He looked terrible, white, sweating, little spasms running down his spine.

More coded radio chatter was exchanged. The reconnaissance disk coasted along the passage towards the village cave.

Fifteen, sixteen... Suzi realised she was mouthing the numbers silently as the tekmercs emerged, and jammed her teeth together.

She switched inputs to the village cave sensors. The tekmerc’s reconnaissance disk darted nervously out of the passage, hovering above the first stair. A couple of the squad followed it, spinning out of the entrance in a fast, well-practised motion, crouching down, rip guns swinging in wide arcs.

The flatscreens in the middle of the village suddenly flared white, casting a wintry glow over the huts circling the podium. A star was erupting into a phosphorescent nebula with a dense arc-bright core.

Looked like the Co-Defence League’s kinetic missiles had snuffed the Dolgoprudnensky spaceplane. Clean and sweet.

Eight tekmercs were in the village cave. Four of them descending the staircase. Talbot Lombard stood on the top of the stairs, looking round in trepidation.

The first charges in the lake cave detonated. Suzi heard the explosion through her suit pick-up mike. The ground trembled.

A tekmerc was punched out of the passage by the blast-wave, somersaulting through the air. The pair holding on to Talbot Lombard lost their footing and went tumbling. Lombard landed heavily, mouth wide, screeching unheard torment.

“Go,” Melvyn said.

Suzi cancelled the optical sensor inputs, and headed forwards. The second set of charges in the lake cave went off. She wished they’d brought enough charges to bring the whole fucking roof down on the bastards. Would have made life a bloody sight easier.

She reached the mouth of the crack as the first glare flares ignited. Small nova-bright spheres soaring out of shoulder launchers on the tekmercs’ suits, swarming like a miniature galaxy above the village. Black overload spots ruptured right across her photon-amp image.

Tekmercs were coming out of the lake cave passage so fast that for one moment she thought they were equipped with jetpacks again. They were diving for cover, behind troughs, into crannies. The crash team opened fire, rip gun bolts slamming out from the walls, furious dazzle streaks that boosted the light intensity to a near-universal glare sheet. Her photon-amp image dimmed alarmingly, greying out to protect her retinas. She saw the bone-dry huts catch fire as a sleet of glare flare embers rained down. A tekmerc was speared by two rip gun bolts, disintegrating into a jarred purple corona of ionized molecules. Her pick up mike had cut out, she could feel the suit vibrating from the sonic battering. The energy pouring into the cave had turned the air into a cloying orange haze, fast gusts were roaring past her down the crack as the pressure build up escaped into cooler areas. Temperature displays were flashing amber caution warnings. The suit’s heat exchanger was already operating near its safety margins, and she was partially sheltered. It wouldn’t take long before heat alone snuffed the tekmercs.

Activate Weapons Suite.

Target graphics materialized over the burning huts, graded scarlet circles. She brought the rip gun round. Dark, humanoid figure running with inhuman speed, spitting starpoints of intolerable light. Framed by red circles. Her rip gun discharged short beams of solid sunlight, the muscle armour thrumming as it compensated for the jackhammer recoil. She wiped the segmented line across the fleeing figure, watching the suit outline crumble.

Then her reflexes were automatically flattening her back against the rock. “Shoot and shift,” Greg had told her, down in Peterborough and a long time ago. “Stasis is death.”

A fusillade of tekmerc rip gun bolts chewed the mouth of the crack. Molten rock sprayed out.

“Dennis, where’s Reiger?”

He was crouched down, firing up at the staircase. “I can’t...” His voice dissolved into a roar of static as the tekmercs cranked up their ECM. He jumped back fast as lava pebbles splattered his suit.

“Shit!” she screamed.

There was a lull in the firing. The air in the cave was choked with glare flares. All they had to do was wait until the tekmercs ran out of chaff.

One of the crash team up above the solaris spots opened fire with his plasma carbine, pulses jabbing down and splashing open against the floor, violet ripples expanding on the edge of visibility. Two pulses hit an armour suit, flinging it into the air, spinning madly; its legs were missing. Tekmercs answered with a deluge of rip gun bolts from around the cave.

It was a knock-on effect. Every bolt revealed someone’s location. The crash team fired on exposed tekmercs who shot back.

Melvyn ordered a round of airbuster grenades into the cave. They exploded five metres above the ground in a blaze of ragged plasma, lightning tendrils lashing down, grounding out through tekmerc armour suits.

Suzi squeezed off a couple more bolts. One of them catching a tekmerc head on. Total detonation. This time there was no return fire.

The ECM jamming blanket ended abruptly.

“Suzi? You OK, girl?” Dennis asked.

“Yeah. No problem. Snuffed two. Can you spot Reiger for me?”

“I’ll try.”

“Did any of them get out?” Melvyn demanded.

“Isaac here, chief. Thought I saw two of them make it to Dean’s cave.”

“Dean? Dean, respond please.”

“One was heading for Neil’s cave, chief.”

“Snuffed him,” Neil called.

“Dean, respond.”

The glare flares were definitely thinning out. She saw explosions away on the other side of the cave, orange fireballs splattering against the rock.

“Robbie, Lilian, get a reconnaissance disk down Dean’s cave fast,” Melvyn ordered.

Another bout of rip gun bolts ricocheted round the cave. More explosions smothered the rock opposite her. This time she caught the black darts fficking through the air before the blasts.

“Hey, the pricks are using missiles,” she cried.

The pump casing was torn open, glowing metal fragments whirling away. A narrow jet of water fountained horizontally out of the rock wall above the pool; chunks of rock flaked away from the gash that had opened, skittering along the blackened smouldering moss. New cracks multiplied across the wall with frightening speed.

“Take out those flicking missile launchers,” Melvyn shouted.

Tekmerc rip gun bolts mauled the wall, splintering the rock, concussion clawing the cracks apart. Two more spouts of water gushed out. A third formation of missiles impacted.

Suzi knew the rock wall was going to collapse under that kind of onslaught. “Dennis, where is that fucker?” She had to fight against crushing the rip gun butt she was wired so hot.

“Left of the stairs, behind a trough.”

She swivelled like something mechanical. Five possible troughs. Infrared was no use, the whole cave still crawled with energy. The rip gun smashed the first trough apart.

There was nobody behind it.

Then the rock wall shattered.

CHAPTER 38

The first cave was a small one, with a single red-tinged biolum globe jammed up between the saw-teeth rock snags of the roof. Rosy light made it seem warmer than it was. Someone had hacked a circular depression in the floor, four metres across; it was full of some transparent gel with a tough flexible plastic sheet stretched across the top.

Greg tested it with his hand, and watched a sluggish ripple ride across to the other side. Eleanor would like to hear about this, she adored waterbeds. He smiled furtively, wondering what she was doing right now. New London was on Greenwich Mean Time, which meant they would have finished the day’s picking by now. She would probably be sitting outside by the camp’s range grill, supervising the evening meal.

The clump of Teresa’s boots as she climbed down out of the crack broke his train of thought.

“Tol,” Sinclair called. “Tol, me boy. You’re all right, ‘us only me.” He looked at the other two openings in the cave walls, and grimaced ruefully. “Ah, well. I was hoping the lad would be down here. Your tin men, they won’t be going shooting at civilians, now will they?”

“No,” Greg said. “If he does wander back into the village cave, he’ll be quite all right.”

“That’s fine, then. He’s a good lad.”

Julia and Rick were already down in the cave, Jim Sharman was bringing up the rear. Julia ignored the gel bed.

“Where now?” she asked.

Sinclair pointed to one of the openings. “This one. It goes into one of our storage caves.”

“Carlos,” Greg said. “Lead out.” He could hear faint whines and thuds coming along the crack to the village cave. Melvyn getting ready. He wished Suzi had come with them.

The passage sloped downwards. Greg watched the rock grow darker, from burnt ochre at the entrance to a deep slate-grey; it was harder, too, more brittle. Almost like flint, he thought.

By the time they reached the store cave his breath had become a white mist. There was a sprinkling of hoarfrost on the walls. It was a small cave, barely more than a wider section of the passage, with an uneven floor. A rough lash up of metal shelving stood along one side. Composite cargo pods were stacked opposite them, the names of various shops and New London civil administration departments stencilled next to long bar codes. There was a weak vinegar smell coming from the apples and plums on the shelves. The globes of fruit were large, gene-tailored, their skins crinkling.

Carlos walked past the end of the shelves, helmet lights picking up the thicker rime covering the rock.

“This is it?” Greg asked Sinclair. “The drone was here?”

“That’s right, Captain Greg.”

“Dead end,” Carlos said.

“You knew that,” Julia said. “And you still brought us down here.” Her mind boiled with weary frustration.

“‘Tis what you wanted,” Sinclair said sullenly.

“It’s all right,” Greg said. They were in the right place, he would have known otherwise. There were levels of intuition, and this seemed to be the most intangible, yet perversely the most resolute. He reckoned that if he shut his eyes and started walking he would wind up standing beside Royan and the alien. Close, it was close now.

“Wait there,” Greg told Carlos. He ordered up a secretion, the neurohormones acting like a flush of icy spring water in his brain. His thoughts seemed to lift out of time as he walked down the cave towards Carlos, mind fficking methodically through the impressions of his sensorium, searching for evidence of Royan, that unique spectral imprint his soul discharged in its wake.