was a terror that didn’t bear consideration.
Von Paleske shut off the torch and replaced it in his backpack, then held his rifle at the ready and nodded to Shannon, his gaze calm and businesslike. She grabbed the rust-coated handle of the heavy, ancient door and gave it an experimental tug; it didn’t budge. The bolt was severed, but the hinges resisted, frozen by nearly two centuries of inaction. Shannon slung her rifle again and grabbed the handle with both hands, planting a boot against the wall and giving a hard, breaking yank. The hinges squealed loud enough that Shannon was sure the racket could be heard from orbit, but finally the door swung open and Von Paleske ducked inside, followed closely by Sergeant Morales, the next in line behind him.
Shannon crouched low, her back against the wall just outside the open door, waiting for what seemed like hours until finally Von Paleske emerged from the dark chamber and signaled “all clear.” Shannon waved him back inside, then turned and motioned for the rest of the team to follow her as she stepped through the door.
She emerged from the tunnel into what looked like a small storage room. Ancient plastic tubs, warped with time, were stacked in one corner, taking up about a quarter of the space in the chamber. She scanned the room carefully on IR and thermal and saw nothing else significant: no active electronics, no sensors, no monitors; just the door from which she’d emerged and one other opposite it. Sergeant Morales had already posted herself next to the other door and was still scanning it with her own hand-held sensor for any electronic signatures. After a moment, she turned to Shannon and signaled that she wasn’t detecting anything.
Shannon felt a touch on her arm and looked around to see Tom Crossman standing next to her. He leaned in to touch helmets. “I’m leaving Reynolds here at the tunnel entrance to watch our backs,” he told her. They could, she knew, have left a remote drone to do the same thing, but that would run the risk of the control signal for the machine being detected. Better to do things the old-fashioned way until they secured the facility.
“Keep someone on the EM sensors scanning for power conduits,” she told him. She didn’t have to tell him why: they had no detailed plans for the part of the bunker that Riordan had rebuilt, so they were going to have to try to intuit which way to go by tracking electricity usage. He nodded confirmation then went to instruct their point-man.
Once everyone was in position, Morales put her hand on the door’s latch and shot a questioning look at Von Paleske. He nodded and she slowly pulled the door open, allowing him to angle through it; she followed him out while Crossman waited against the wall beside the opening. After a moment, Morales leaned back inside and waved for the others to follow.
The hallway outside was still the ancient stone passages of the old bunker and Shannon began to wonder if they were actually in the right place… until they followed the corridor around a curve to the right and it abruptly ended in a decidedly modern hermetically sealed barrier of opaque grey polymer. Shannon felt a momentary chill run through her and she was sure they’d been spotted by sensors at the door… but a quick glance at Sgt. Morales and a horizontal slice in the air from her hand told her that there were no active electromagnetic signals present.
Shannon paused for a moment, reminding herself that there was always time to think. There was no EM signal and the door had no obvious keypad or handle. Perhaps it wasn’t as much a door as a simple seal for the bunker’s climate control. They had two choices: blow the door and storm in or take the risk that the other side wasn’t being directly monitored and burn through slowly and quietly.
She almost waved for Von Paleske to come forward with the cutting torch, but she stopped herself in mid- motion. There was a tickling in the middle of her back, a strange feeling in her gut. She turned and motioned for Tom to come forward, then touched helmets with him.
“Set charges,” she instructed. “We’re blowing this door. I want people on either side ready to toss in grenades.”
“Flash-bangs?” He asked.
“Frag,” she corrected him. “I’ve got a funny feeling about this one, Tom. Once we’re through, we charge through whatever’s in our way until we reach Antonov.”
He moved to pass on the orders and Shannon took a deep breath, closing her eyes for a heartbeat as she prayed silently that she was making the right call. The squadron deployed in a stack around the door as Morales and Von Paleske placed the charges and the two others closest to the door, Jurgensen and Wellington, pulled out frag grenades from pouches on their chest.
Everyone was set in seconds and Tom gave Shannon a questioning glance. She nodded, then moved to the side of the stack, her carbine held muzzle down. From the other side of the door, Sergeant Morales held out her hand and did a silent count-down: three fingers, two fingers, one… and then she mashed the button on the remote detonator and ducked her head.
The shaped charges detonated with a thump that Shannon could feel in her chest, shaking the walls and drowning out the clatter of the wreckage of the door in the corridor beyond. Smoke billowed through the room, obscuring Shannon’s vision as Jurgensen and Wellington immediately tossed their grenades through the jagged, gaping hole where the barrier had been and ducked back again. The explosions of the fragmentation weapons were kettle drums to the snare of the door-buster, but to Shannon they sounded louder and harsher, the tinny echoes of their fragments bouncing back into the room like off-key notes from a piano.
Tom slapped Von Paleske on the shoulder and the point man swung around the jagged edge of the hole created by the breaching charges and led them into the roiling smoke beyond. Shannon’s helmet automatically switched to thermal and infrared, seamlessly integrating the scene into a visual representation for her: beyond the barrier, the walls ceased to be bare rock and were instead lined with modern polymers, lit by glowing panels in the ceiling-some of them were cracked and broken, sparking or dark from the force of the explosions.
A body was sprawled on the floor just a few meters past the breach, clad in nondescript dark-colored armor, a rifle on the floor by its outstretched hands. A shard of polymer from the door had been driven through the rear armor plate by the force of the blast and the ballistic cloth that held the armor inserts together had been shredded by the grenades. Blood pooled around the body, though not as much as Shannon would have expected. She was about to order one of the squad to check the man-she assumed it was a man, from the broad shoulders and nearly two meters of height-but then he lurched onto his knees, reaching in unnatural, jerky motions for the rifle just beyond his grasp.
Shannon acted without thinking… the rifle was closest to her. She kicked the weapon away, then turned on the ball of her plant foot and smashed a heel into the man’s chest. Blood splashed as he sprawled away and Shannon stumbled backwards; she felt as if she’d kicked a brick wall. Crossman stepped up beside her and leveled his carbine, squeezing off a burst. Three rounds of tungsten-core ceramic jacketed 8mm impacted the helmet’s splintered visor, one snagging the edge of the helmet and ripping it off his head.
Shannon froze, breath catching in her throat, eyes wide. The face beneath the helmet was ruined and bloody from the impact of the rifle rounds, but it was also just as obviously not the face of a human. From behind heavy, boney brow ridges stared the black eyes of a biomech, no more cold and lifeless in death than they had been in life. Tom hesitated as well, all the implications of what he was seeing running through his thoughts, until Shannon slapped a hand on his shoulder.
“Just go!” she told him urgently. He nodded sharply and moved out down the hallway with Shannon and the remainder of the unit behind.
Shannon gritted her teeth and swore to herself in the privacy of her helmet. They had those fucking things here, on Earth… they were already producing them. How many more did they have? An army? Were they all here or did Riordan already have them in Capital City to support his coup attempt? She felt an overwhelming urge to run, to get them all out of the complex and call down an orbital strike, but she fought it back: nothing had changed. They still needed Antonov alive and this was their only chance at him.
No audible alarms were sounding as they moved through the complex at a trot, but she knew that was meaningless: they had to assume that the place was on alert. Tom fell behind her to watch the rear and she moved ahead, coming up just behind Von Paleske and Morales near the front of the unit. The halls were wide and yet she felt increasingly claustrophobic, paranoid that the enemy was going to burst through the featureless white doors that lined the corridor. Yet those doors remained closed and they didn’t bother to investigate them: their plan was to head straight for the holding cell.
They came to a fork in the corridor and Shannon waved Von Paleske to the left, both on instinct and an overlaid computer rendering based on the data mined from Fourcade’s ‘link. They had barely rounded the corner when Von Paleske pulled up short and Shannon and Sergeant Morales nearly ran into his back. Shannon had the briefest glimpse of three hulking, black-clad figures thirty meters away down the corridor before a hail of gunfire
