'Stand by,' Ferreira hissed in shock. 'Alley Kat's damaged. Airburst off its stern damaged the port main engine. Hold on… yes, power's down, but it'll make it. Hell Bent's undamaged. Looks like the Hammers didn't have much time to set up, and they were too far off our track to get a good shot at us. Those Gordians are hopeless at high crossing rates, and we were moving very low and fast. Otherwise…'
Anna shook her head. 'Doesn't make sense,' she said. 'Why wait? Why didn't they take us on the ground?'
'Don't know,' Michael said, shaking his head. 'Okay, folks, we'll worry about that later. Let's get dirtside. Tac, we good to land?'
'Affirmative. NRA approach control has cleared Alley Kat in first, followed by Hell Bent, then us.'
'Roger that. All stations, get your neuronics back online. The Hammers know where we are.'
Shaken by the Hammer ambush, Michael had the common sense to let Mother bring the lander in; AI or not, she was ten times the pilot he was. He watched the forward holocams track Alley Kat and Hell Bent while they reduced speed, their noses rising for landing. Ahead, the gaping mouth of a cave loomed; Michael knew it was big enough to take the landers, but it would be a squeeze. More unsettling was the ground around the cave entrance. It looked like it had been worked over by a giant earth-bot, the ground scarred by countless craters and littered with the shattered remnants of trees, soil, and small debris scoured away by lander blasts. The cliff into which the cave entrance was cut was just as battered, whole slabs of limestone blasted off to leave pale scars hundreds of square meters in size.
'Command, sensors. NRA reports kinetic weapons inbound, time of flight forty-five seconds. They suggest we expedite.'
Michael swore. The Hammer's command of space exposed every square centimeter of the planet to the threat of having tungsten-carbide slugs the mass of a small crowbar dropped on one's head. The best defense was to move fast, to be somewhere else when the slug arrived. Silently he urged Alley Kat and Hell Bent on. They were now hovering, the ground underneath the landers erupting into a thick, roiling cloud of ionized driver mass, dust, and dirt that swallowed them altogether before they entered the cave mouth. Widowmaker wasted no time; it moved through the cloud and into the cave, sudden darkness the only indication that they were inside.
The landers taxied on into the darkness, twisting and turning to follow the laser-smoothed floor of an ancient cave. Michael tried not to flinch when the tunnel walls shook from the kinetic slug strike; large lumps of limestone broken free by the impact shock wave crashed onto the lander's armor, a stark reminder of just how vulnerable the tunnels were to kinetic weapons and tacnuke bunker busters.
On and on they went until they were deep underground. Michael allowed himself to relax only when Mother brought the lander to a halt and started to shut down its systems, the hundreds of meters of limestone overhead more than enough to keep out the most determined Hammer attack.
'Not before time,' he said with considerable feeling, throwing off his safety straps and removing his helmet. 'Anna, can you liaise with the NRA. Check that their local security detail has the tunnel secured behind us and see what they want to do about off-loading the cargo.' Anna nodded; she still looked shocked. 'And Jayla, can you finish the shutdown? I want to see how the hell the Hammers knew we were coming.'
'Sir.'
The air outside the lander was thick with dust laced heavily with the unmistakable smell of ionized driver mass from the landers' engines. Michael jumped down and made his way past Hell Bent to Alley Kat; her enormous bulk loomed black and menacing over him. As he approached, red lights started to flash and the cargo ramp hissed down, thumping into the ground with a dull thud. Captain Adrissa walked down, followed by Rasmussen and Solanki. Anger blazed in their eyes.
'You thinking what I'm thinking, sir?' Michael said.
'We are. Some traitorous sonofabitch tipped the Hammers off, and we think we might know who it was. Follow me.'
'Oh,' was all Michael said. Adrissa pushed past him and made her way back to Hell Bent. Scrambling to catch up, Michael followed. When they made it there, it was obvious that something bad was happening. Two of Kallewi's marines had a man-Leading Spacer Sasaki, Michael's neuronics told him-grasped firmly, a small crowd of curious spacers standing in a loose circle around them.
'Lieutenant Acharya!' Adrissa barked.
'Yes, sir?' Hell Bent's command pilot replied, his face a tangled confusion of surprise and shock.
'Last time I looked, you were Hell Bent's ranking officer,' Adrissa snarled. 'So take charge of this rabble. You understand me, spacer?'
'Yes, sir,' Acharya stammered, clearly startled by the ferocity of Adrissa's verbal attack. 'Yes, sir. Understood.'
'I hope so. You two,' Adrissa said to the two marines. 'Come with me and bring that man with you.'
Without another word, Adrissa turned and started to walk back to Alley Kat. She managed only a few meters before Vaas and his chief of staff appeared out of the gloom.
'You and your ships okay, Captain?' Vaas said.
'We are, thank you, General,' Adrissa replied, grim-faced, 'but I think we have a problem. Is there somewhere we can interrogate one of our people?'
'There's a small cave 50 meters past your first lander,' Cortez said. 'It has lighting and a table and chairs.'
'That'll do. Take Leading Spacer Sasaki there,' Adrissa said to the two marines. 'I'll be along presently.'
She turned back to Vaas and Cortez. 'I'm sorry, sirs, but it seems we may have a traitor among us.'
Vaas nodded. 'We suspected that much. The Hammers were tipped off. They never operate in that area. There's no point, 'cause we don't, either. Seems you were lucky, though, very lucky. I think they received word too late to lay a proper trap. Otherwise…'
'Quite so,' Adrissa said. 'Anyway, we'll get to the bottom of this.'
'I think you will, but I want one of my security people to sit in. Maria Dalaki. She'll be able to verify any Hammer-related information you uncover. She'll be with you in ten minutes.'
'That's fine, General. Let me get things started here.'
'When you're ready, just follow the signs to the NRA's command center,' Vaas said. 'We call it ENCOMM for short; easier to say than NRA Command. I'll be there. Nine hundred meters up the tunnel, you'll find a sled station off to your left. It's marked. Take a sled heading west and get off at the end of the line. It's obvious; you can't get lost, and for Kraa's sake, if you open a blast door, make sure to close it.'
'Blast door?' Adrissa said with a puzzled frown.
'The Hammers like to push missiles carrying thermobaric warheads into our tunnels,' Vaas said. 'We get most of them, but some slip through, hence the blast doors. We've learned the hard way that fuel-air explosions and tunnels are a bad combination.'
'Ah, right. I'll make sure everyone knows that. If it's okay, I'll send Helfort on ahead.'
'Fine. I'll have someone meet him,' Vaas said. 'Okay, unless there's anything else, I'll see you back at ENCOMM.'
Adrissa watched Vaas and Cortez walk away before turning to Rasmussen. 'I need two officers with interrogation training to get the truth out of Sasaki and a third to witness the proceedings. If there's enough evidence that Sasaki betrayed us, I'm court-martialing the bast-I'm court-martialing him.'
'Yes, sir. I'll get onto it.'
Adrissa waved Michael over. 'You get to the command center, ENCOMM or whatever it is they call it,' she said. 'We need someone they trust to stay close; at the moment that's probably only you. Your neuronics online?'
'They are, sir.'
'Okay, if you need me, just comm me. I'm going to try to get a neuronics network set up.'
'Sir.'
Michael set off. He had not gone far when Anna commed him.
'Hi, Anna. What's happening?'
'I've been pinged to be part of the interrogation team.' Her avatar grimaced; clearly, she had no stomach for the task.
'Didn't I tell you never, ever to volunteer for anything, Anna?' Michael shook his head. 'Never!'
'Volunteer? Me? Hell, no, but Adrissa's nothing if not efficient. We downloaded our service records when we arrived in 5209. Knew I should never have agreed to go on that damn interrogation course. Anyway, that's where I'll be.'
