'Well, scut,' he said. 'You didn't leave much, did you?'
I did not answer. I watched the exoseg die. Why in the world had I advanced on it like that? Lunacy. Sheer lunacy. I was losing it. We were all losing it, in the Camp of the O's.
'Good work, Thinker,' Snow Leopard said.
'Override encoded transmission from Command,' Sweety interrupted. 'I have recorded, amplified, filtered, and repeated.' At last! We were all getting the same report, each from our own Tacmods.
The burst was almost inaudible in the howling roar of the deceptors. I strained to hear it, closing my eyes for better concentration. '…obtain objectives…' a piercing shriek drowned it out, then it warbled back in. '…by the magma. All units…' Another ear-shattering screech. Then a few more words, very faint. '…the lower levels. Maintain blackout but…' inaudible, drowned out in a rushing blast of static.
'What does it mean, Snow Leopard?' I asked.
'Hard to tell, Thinker. Something's happening in the lower levels of the base, or the starport, or whatever is down there. Sounds like it involves magma. Maybe the base is being torn apart. But whether we're supposed to go further in, or get out, it's not clear.'
'So what do we do?'
'We continue the mission. This corridor leads somewhere, and that's where we're going. We're inside the rim of the caldera and not far from the edge. I want that starport. That's our mission. Priestess, you're in charge of Redhawk. Let's go.' Snow Leopard was right next to me. I saw him clearly through his faceplate—his square cut, chunky face was deathly pale, and blue veins were throbbing faintly at his temples. His pink eyes glowed, eyes from another world. I had been close to him once, but now he was lost to us all. Our One was always decisive. I'm glad he was, because I sure as hell wasn't.
We set off, Priestess pulling Redhawk in a jury-rigged trav we had fashioned as a stretcher. Redhawk was mercifully unconscious. The dead exoseg glowed as we passed it, still faintly burning. Dying flames licked here and there on the walls, and wisps of dirty smoke drifted past us. It was dead quiet. There had been no reaction to our killing of the exoseg.
It appeared the Omnis did not know we were there.
Chapter 4:
The Souls of the Dead
'All right, Beta—you know the drill,' Snow Leopard said quietly. 'I'm in first, left—Three next, right. Cover, advance; cover, advance. Five next, Manlink, left. Nine is backup.' He looked back at us. We were all in position, sprawled motionless among the rocks behind our weapons, clinging to the near-vertical cliff like lizards. The entrance was just ahead and above, on a steep slope. It was a black, gaping hole in the cliff face. Warped cenite beams and a tangle of cables dangled from the hole. An anti had touched the caldera here, sheering off megatons of rock and exposing a hardsited, camfaxed entryway leading from the shore of the lava lake. Our corridor had been split in two, ending in a sheer drop, but it had led right to the entryway. The lake glowed off to one side and a fiery sky rolled overhead. We were exposed to whoever—or whatever—might be looking.
'E's on flame,' Snow Leopard added. 'I want to avoid laser, vac or x—and biobloc won't help us if they're O's. Five, give us smoke.'
Psycho aimed carefully, and a smoker exploded with a faint pop off to the left of the entrance. My adrenalin count went up. The wind whipped the smoke over the entrance, obscuring it from view. My faceplate switched to darksight, and I could see it again. The earth rumbled. Snow Leopard scrambled to his feet and up the slope, then picked his way through a tangled mass of wreckage and was suddenly gone, into the dark. I exploded to my feet and charged up the slope and into a nightmare tangle of shattered bulkheads, melted cenite beams, and shredded decking. Snow Leopard lay motionless on his belly near the left wall. I went to ground on the right behind a massive chunk of metal, my E pointed down tunnel. It was dark and quiet.
'One advancing.' Snow Leopard was off; I covered him. Psycho stepped into the tunnel in a puff of smoke. I was sweating. There was no sign of life. Snow Leopard stopped, again in position on the left. I advanced, a low rush, passing Snow Leopard by, breathing hard, my E at the ready. I slid to a stop by a pile of wreckage. My tacmod was silent. A power strip ran overhead on one wall, and dead light panels lined the ceiling. There was an airlock ahead on the left. It was partially open, a dead black hole. I suddenly realized this was not an Omni installation—it was human. Systies!
'Open airlock,' I hissed. 'This is a Systie base!' There was Inter lettering on the power strip: DANGER NUKEFLOW 22TVF, and smaller letters: ERIDOS POWER SYSTEMS. I could make out something on the airlock too: EMERGENCY LOCK—1T AT—DANGER AUTOACT—KEEP DOOR CLEAR.
'Five, up,' Snow Leopard ordered.
'What's it look like, Sweety?' I asked my tacmod.
'No life, Thinker. I detect organic matter. Bodies—humans.'
'Nothing alive?'
'Negative life.'
'You got that, One?'
'Smoke, Five.' Normally it would have been deceptors, but normality did not apply to this place. Deceptors were too damned noisy.
Psycho fired right into the doorway and the smoke exploded violently out into our corridor. Snow Leopard and I burst in through an airlock partially blocked with wreckage, our fingers twitching on flame. We skidded to a stop in a room swirling with thick black smoke. It didn't bother us at all. There were bodies everywhere. Nothing moved. Psycho popped in the door, Manlink at the ready. We froze. It was dead quiet but for the hissing of the smoke. There were plenty of rooms and corridors ahead of us. We moved forward, scanning every room. My heart pounded, adrenalin surged, sweat trickled down my temples. We found only bodies, dead Systies, not even in armor. They had been caught completely off guard.
###
'Let's get these stiffs out of here.' As the smoke slowly drifted out the airlock, it became clear what had happened. The outer airlock, at the end of the corridor closest to the lava lake, had been shattered in microfracs by our antimat. An explosion of wreckage had shot down the corridor at supersonic speed; one jagged chunk of cenite planking had lodged in the doorway of the second airlock, two emergency doors which should have autoacted instantly to save the installation. But the doors slammed up against cenite metal that blocked the doorway, and all within had died instantly as Andrion 3's poisonous atmosphere rushed in. The twisted slice of cenite, still lodged in the airlock, put a chill to my blood. What a stupid way to die.
Corpses were sprawled across the deck, faces swollen purple in death, limbs already stiff. They were all in litesuits, DefCorps duty uniforms. Some of them had been seated before a large control panel, monitoring the instruments. The first room was the duty station; the living quarters were beyond. There were dead in there, too— in the cubicles and the mess hall and the ex room and the store room. It looked like a neat little world the Systies had made for themselves here, in the Camp of the O's, but it had certainly ended abruptly.
'Move it, Thinker. Get that one.' We dragged them outside, into the corridor. I reached down for the corpse.
A female, her swollen face contorted in horror, frozen hands clawing at nothing. A sudden end to her life. I got ahold of her tunic and dragged her through the airlock.
'Give me a hand here.' Psycho was helping Priestess carry Redhawk into the room. There was a growing line of dead out in the corridor. A grisly, obscene spectacle. There must have been twenty of them, but I did not have the heart to count.
'Redhawk, can you sit up?' Snow Leopard stood by the control panel, puzzling it out. There were several
