here. They did, however, make a separate discovery that none of them had been expecting. At the very rear of the facility was a single large elevator going straight down into the earth below.
“No wonder this base looks so small,” O’Reilly exclaimed. “All the good stuff is buried underground! “Damn, I wish we knew what they were working on,” he muttered a moment later in a more somber
tone. “God knows what we’re about to walk into.”
Anderson agreed, but he was concerned with a more immediate detail. According to the panel on the side of the wall, the elevator was down at the bottom level. If someone had gone into the lower floors of the base only to flee when they got word the Hastings was coming, the elevator should have been on the top floor.
“Something wrong, LT?” Dah asked.
“Somebody took that elevator down,” he said, tilting his head in the direction of the panel. “But they never took it back up.”
“You think they’re still down there?” the gunnery chief asked, her tone making it clear she hoped they were.
The lieutenant nodded, the hint of a grim smile on his lips.
“So what happened to their ships?” Private Shay asked, still not piecing it all together.
“Whoever attacked this base came for something,” Anderson explained. “Whatever they were looking for wasn’t up here. They must have sent a team down to the lower levels to finish up the job. Probably only left a few men up here to keep an eye on things.
“But they weren’t counting on an Alliance patrol ship being close enough to respond to the distress call so quickly. When their scout ship sent word someone was coming through the mass relay they knew they had about twenty minutes to pick up and clear out. I bet they never even bothered to tell their buddies down below.”
“What? Why not? Why wouldn’t they tell them?”
“These elevators might go down two full kilometers,” Corporal O’Reilly chimed in, helping to spell it out for the inexperienced private. “Looks like the com panel to the lower level was destroyed in the gunfire. No chance of getting a radio message to anyone down below through that much rock and ore. And it could take ten minutes for the elevator to make the trip one way.
“If they wanted to alert their friends in the basement, it’d take half an hour: ten minutes to call the elevator up from the lower floor, ten minutes to send someone from the top down to warn them, then ten more minutes back up again,” he continued. “By then it’d be too late. Easier just to bug out and leave the others behind.”
Shay’s eyes were wide with disbelief. “They just abandoned their friends?”
“That’s what separates mercenaries from soldiers,” Anderson told him before turning his focus back to the mission. “This changes things. We’ve got an enemy unit down there, and they have no idea an Alliance squad is up above waiting for them.”
“We can set up an ambush,” Dah said. “As soon as those elevator doors open we start firing and rip those sons-of-bitches to ribbons!” She was speaking quickly, a wicked gleam in her eye. “They won’t stand a chance!”
Anderson thought for a second, then shook his head. “It’s obvious this is a seek-and-destroy mission: they aren’t planning on leaving any survivors. There could still be Alliance personnel alive on the lower levels. If there’s any chance we can still save them we have to try.”
“Could be dangerous, sir,” O’Reilly warned. “We’re assuming they don’t know we’re here. If they somehow do, then we’ll be the ones walking into an ambush.”
“That’s a risk we have to take,” Anderson said, slamming his fist against the wall panel to call the elevator back up to the surface. “We’re going in after them.”
The rest of the group, including O’Reilly, responded with a sharp, “Sir, yes, sir!”
The long, slow elevator descent was even more agonizing than the wait in the ship’s hull at the start of the mission. Minute by minute the tension grew as they sank deeper and deeper beneath the planet’s surface.
The lieutenant could hear the faint hum of the elevator winch, a dull drone boring into the back of his skull that grew steadily fainter but never entirely disappeared as they dropped ever farther down the shaft. The air became heavy, warm, and moist. He felt his ears pop, and he noticed a strange smell in the air, an unfamiliar stench he imagined was a mixture of sulfurous gases mingling with alien molds and subterranean fungi.
Anderson was sweating profusely beneath his body armor, and he kept having to reach up with a free hand to wipe away the fog condensing on his visor. He did his best not to think about what would happen if the doors opened and the enemy was ready and waiting for them on the other side.
When they finally reached the bottom of the shaft the enemy was waiting for them, but they sure as hell weren’t ready. The elevator opened into a large antechamber — a natural cave filled with stalagmites, stalactites, and thick limestone columns. The artificial lights strung across the ceiling illuminated the entire chamber, reflecting off thick veins of glistening metallic ore in the cavern’s countless natural rock formations. At the far end was a passage that served as the cave’s only other exit, a long tunnel that wound around a corner and out of sight.
The enemy forces, close to a dozen armed and armored mercenaries, were coming toward them from the far side of the chamber. They were laughing and joking, weapons at their sides as they headed for the elevator that would bring them back to the planet’s surface.
It only took Anderson a fraction of a second to decide they looked like murdering raiders and not Alliance personnel, and he gave the order to fire. His team had been poised and ready as the elevator doors opened and they reacted almost instantaneously to his command, charging forward from the elevator with a barrage of gunfire. The first wave of their attack ripped into the pack of unsuspecting mercs. The fight would have ended right then if it wasn’t for their body armor and kinetic shields.
Three of the enemy combatants dropped to the floor, but enough of the deadly projectiles were deflected or absorbed so that the rest of them were able to fall back and dive for cover behind the boulders and stalagmites that littered the cavern’s floor.
The next few seconds of the battle were utter chaos. Anderson’s team pushed forward, scrambling to use the cave’s rock formations for cover. They had to fan out quickly, before enemy crossfire could pin the entire group down in a single location. The cavern echoed with the staccato recoil of assault rifles and
the sharp zip-zip-zip of bullets ricocheting off the rock formations and walls, and the incandescent tracer bullets that made up every fifth round ignited the room with a ghostly luminescence.
Sprinting to a nearby large stalagmite, Anderson felt an all too familiar shudder as his kinetic shields repulsed several shots that would have otherwise found their mark. He hit the ground and rolled as a line of bullets struck the floor just in front of him, disintegrating the stone and sending tiny showers of water and dust up under his visor and into his face.
He came to his feet spitting out the foul grit, instinctively checking the remaining power on his shields. He was down to twenty percent — not nearly enough to give him a fighting chance if he had to make another run through direct enemy fire.
“Shield status!” Anderson shouted into his radio. The numbers came back at him rapid fire: “Twenty!” “Twenty-five!” “Twenty!” “Ten!”
His team was still at full strength, but their shields had taken a beating. They had lost their initial advantage of surprise, and they were now facing an enemy squad nearly double their number. But Alliance soldiers were trained to work as a team, to cover each other and watch one another’s back. They trusted their teammates, and they trusted their leader. He figured that would give them the edge they needed over any band of mercs.
“Dah, Lee — move up on the right!” he barked. “Try to flank them!”
The lieutenant rolled to his right, emerging from behind the stalagmite shielding him from view and firing a quick covering burst in the direction of the enemy. He wasn’t trying to hit anything; even with the smart-targeting technology built into all personal firearms it was almost impossible to hit a human- sized target without taking at least a half second to steady and aim. But inflicting damage was not his goal; all he wanted to do was disrupt the enemy so they wouldn’t have time to line up Lee or Dah while they alternately advanced, darting in and out of cover.
After a two-second burst he rolled back behind his own cover; it wasn’t good to stay out in view in one place for too long. Even as he did so, Shay popped out from behind a large boulder to lay down another covering burst for his squad-mates on the move, and as he ducked back to safety O’Reilly filled in.
As soon as the corporal pulled back, Anderson poked his head out and fired again. This time he emerged from the left side of the stalagmite; jumping out from behind cover in the same position twice in a row was a sure way to
