‘If someone’s controlling our mosquitoes, that must mean there’s someone still alive down there,’ said another.
‘Not necessarily,’ said Marroqui. ‘We can’t rule out the possibility they’re just running on automatic.’
‘Or maybe your mosquitoes were compromised from the moment we walked in here,’ Luc suggested.
They all stared at each other.
‘Fuck it,’ said Marroqui, breaking the silence and stepping over one of the blackened corpses on his way back into the corridor. ‘There’s only one way to find out.’
They made for another elevator platform, checked it for possible sabotage, and then climbed on board, riding it down in silence before disembarking on the next level down. Luc glanced over at one of Marroqui’s squadron, hearing him mutter something repeatedly under his breath that sounded a lot like a prayer.
Marroqui had Luc keep to the rear as they advanced down a high-ceilinged passageway lined with tables and benches. They saw the bodies of more Black Lotus fighters, slumped across tables or curled up on the ground as if they were sleeping. The first wave of mosquitoes had killed them all.
They crowded through a narrow doorway and into the control room. An isometric plan of the entire complex hovered above a dais at the room’s centre. All it took was a quick glance to see that it matched the updated version they had received from the mosquitoes.
The bodies of more of Marroqui’s men were scattered around the dais, their faces contorted in death. Luc tasted the acid rush of bile as it surged up the back of his throat.
He glanced down, seeing through the steel grid flooring on which they stood that another room lay immediately below this one. Just visible were cryogenic pods of a design he recognized, lined against a wall: emergency medical units, designed for deep-space retrieval; almost tiny spaceships in their own right. Their status lights were dark, indicating they were empty. Clearly, Antonov’s men had been slaughtered with such rapid efficiency, they had not even had time to place any of their injured inside the units.
They all heard the faint echo of something scuttling along the corridor beyond the control room entrance. Luc watched as Shig ducked outside for a look.
‘Here they come!’ Shig yelled, pulling the lower half of his body back around the door frame, then leaning out into the corridor and opening fire. A moment later he made a grunting noise, his feet giving way beneath him as he flopped backwards in the low gravity, red mist staining the air behind him.
Luc twisted around in mindless desperation, searching for another exit. He glanced back down through the thick metal grille and saw a ladder reaching down to the floor of the room below. Dropping to all fours, he peered through the grille. The top of the ladder terminated somewhere on the far side of the control room, hidden behind tall banks of equipment.
He ran past the dais and around the side of a tall steel cabinet in the same moment that Marroqui and his surviving Clan-members opened fire on something behind him. Set into the floor above the ladder was a flat metal hatch, but before he could reach down to pry it open, something picked him up and slammed him against the nearest wall.
He hit the floor a moment later, ears ringing, and felt it lurch beneath him like the deck of a ship caught in a storm. He had just enough time to work out there had been an explosion before the steel panels comprising the floor came apart from one another, sending him tumbling down into the room below, along with the contents of the control room. He just barely managed to scrabble out of the way of the steel cabinet before it landed on him. Someone’s torso, still encased in plastic and metal armour, rolled and bounced as it hit the ground, coming to a halt just centimetres from his nose.
When he looked back up at the ceiling of the ruined control room, he saw several mosquitoes gazing back down at him with insect-like eyes.
Managing to pull himself upright, he stumbled towards dim light spilling through a nearby doorway, squeezed past the dais from the upper floor, which had landed on its side, then ran blindly down a passageway until he stumbled across another elevator platform. He slammed the control panel with his fist and gripped the railing like a man adrift in a storm as it carried him down to the lowest level.
The platform came to a jerky halt at the bottom of the shaft, two rough- walled tunnels angling away from it in different directions. Luc headed down one at random, but didn’t get far before more mosquitoes emerged from the gloom, tick-tacking through the still silence towards him. He retreated back the way he’d come and headed down the other tunnel instead, with the uncanny sense that he was being herded in one particular direction – proof, if any were still needed, that Antonov must still be alive.
‘I’m here, Antonov!’ he shouted, and heard the hysteria creeping into his voice. Grabbing a metal bar from a pile of junk, he wielded it like a weapon, then laughed at the ridiculousness of it. He couldn’t possibly defend himself from mosquitoes while armed with nothing more than a chunk of scrap metal, but there was something comforting about the feel of it gripped in his armoured fist nonetheless.
More mosquitoes emerged from the gloom up ahead, but they scuttled backwards at his approach, clearing the way.
‘Are you there?’ Luc shouted again. ‘Show yourself, Goddamn it! Show your fucking face!’
Turning a corner, he found himself at the entrance to a cavern dug out of the rock, a deactivated digging machine at the far end sitting next to a mound of excavated rubble. He swallowed in the dry air, then set his eyes on something that took his breath away.
A transfer gate, embedded into one wall of the cavern.
At first Luc couldn’t quite convince himself it was real. A thick metal torus surrounded the mouth of what might otherwise have been nothing more than the entrance to a passageway, leading him to wonder if it had only been tricked up to
He stepped up to the gate and saw it consisted of a short cylindrical passageway, no more than a couple of
