The Black Garden: Chapter 29

As the world looped and spun, I hunkered down into my composite tin can and ran through the plan. We had orbital data from the scans we now knew worked on the bunkers. We had the map Lilia had ripped from the officer’s quarters showing the entry to a hyperloop intake station down from the main barracks area where we had penned the Ravagers. There was now more evidence that it was part of a system of tubes under the ground, radiating out from the core of New Warder. Scans suggested that the interior of each hyperloop tube was only about eight feet in diameter. The loop’s shuttles were loaded into the system like bullets in a gun, fired down the tubes from station to station. They were just large enough to run personnel and supplies from some kind of centralized supply point to each of the twenty-something bunkers positioned throughout the jungle. The problem was that we lost the trail at the fringes of New Warder. The city’s mass concealed anything built underneath it. Ditto with the mining complex out in the ocean: ships, undersea cables, and other facilities blinded our eyes in the sky.

The only way to map the system was from the inside. To do that, we needed an access point of some kind: a control box, a call panel. We hadn’t found either of those things in the personnel area underneath Bunker 21, so this was clearly a scenario the enemy had planned for. They had physically isolated system access from inside the bunkers. However, for the hyperloop to function, there HAD to be hardware located inside the tubes, something that allowed controllers to connect their hypernet to the shuttles. Those terminal connections were our goal.

Once we found them, SPECTER’s centipedes would slide into the system and give it system access, allowing it to rip a comprehensive structural map and any other data it could mine out. Shuttle loads, frequency of transit, patterns, stations... once we knew the full extent of the tumor growing beneath New Warder, we could arm the Fleet with the information needed to extract it. The blueprints stored at the bunker had not included any of those details, which suggested they were on a ‘need to know’ basis. The officers stationed in the bunker had not needed to know, and I was pretty sure I had figured out why.

“These bunkers. They aren’t defensive structures,” I remarked to Hura as we galloped - or flew, I wasn’t sure - on our way to our insertion point. “Not really.”

“What is your theory?”

“They’re launchpads for these Ravagers and the Rage. If you look at the distribution of the bunkers, they initially seem random. But I tried overlaying the gravitational and topographical maps, and I noticed something. Every single one of them is built inside downhill channels that direct away from New Warder and toward the nearby Confluence settlements. My bet? When the order goes out, hundreds of pre-seeded mercenaries and militia will be hyper-looped to the bunkers and the system will be shut down or even destroyed. Once the men are in place, someone triggers the parasites inside them. Boom. The Ravagers start racing down the path of least resistance—downhill—spreading the Rage to anyone they meet.”

“It is entirely possible,” Hura admitted. “We must also consider: how many of these portable breaches does the Directorate possess? These outposts may be intended as rupture points, permitting more demons access to Ideni. Should a sufficient number of Breaches manifest at once, a new Bohu-class Abyssal will be born. The planet will experience Voidout.”

In accord with the Harbinger’s warning. I thought back to SPECTER’s observation: the probability that some Abyssal superintelligence had joined the fray, an intellect equal to or exceeding our own artificial super-intelligence. If it could travel through time and dimension in the way the angels could—or if it was something like Leviathan, an intelligent interdimensional field, the intellect of the spaces BETWEEN... then this was just an exercise. A data point. This abyssal intelligence was probing Ideni because it was a newly settled, relatively sparsely-populated and lightly defended world. Recently terraformed, a planet occupied by the newest species to join the Confluence. Humankind.

I closed my eyes, and let the sudden, terrible anger shudder through my muscles for several seconds, waiting until it settled in the muscles of my jaws. “There will not be a Voidout. Not while I’m here.”

“You seem certain.”

I focused on my breathing, on Tsariel’s distant presence, on the sensations of the shell and Hura’s mass. “I am.”

Confluence humans were survivors. Orphans, the ones tough enough or lucky enough to face The End - capital T, capital E - and make it to the epilogue. We had let the Confluence gently glue our pieces back together, and most of us had moved on to live peaceful, dignified lives. But me and every other Hunter who had lived, died, or had been unmade and forgotten, we had discovered how to bind our shards and pieces with metal. With fire. And we would never break again.

***

Hyperloops are complex structures. For one thing, a hyperloop’s superconducting magnets must be kept stupid-cold, over minus three hundred degrees. But there’s a problem: heat can’t leak away in a near‑vacuum, so every time a shuttle screams down those skinny two-and-a-half meter tubes at 1,200 kilometers an hour, the leftover air squishes up in front of the nose and gets warm. Inside the pod, passengers, computers, and brakes add even more heat. This means the shuttle carries something people smarter and more knowledgeable about physics than me call ‘thermal debt’: built-up heat that must be exchanged, somehow.

On worlds that didn’t resist magic—worlds that had been exposed to multiple Breaches—it wasn’t as much of an issue. But a largely intact Local Reality Area, like Ideni’s, made magic unreliable and extremely energy-intensive. Plain old physics applied here. There are three main methods hyperloops use to handle this thermal debt. The first is via a liquid helium cooling array that serves the magnets directly. The second is via extraction systems, which directly remove the thermal waste from the tubes. The third is by recycling heat into energy the system can use. When a loop shuttle arrives at a station, the track’s propulsion coils brake the shuttle and recycle all that kinetic energy back into the track system to be used to launch the next shuttle. Clamps engage, and guide the shuttle into an airlock. It’s held in place while people or cargo load in, then sealed in prep for launch. The clamps hold and position the shuttle while extractors and coolant injectors chill the composite exterior. Meanwhile, the tube outside the airlock is vented by vacuum pumps, chilled, and resealed. Once the interior of the airlock and the tube are synced to the correct pressure and temperature, the airlock opens, and then the shuttle - extremely chilly on the outside, comfortably toasty on the inside – shoots out into the newly-depressurized tube like a bullet down the barrel of a gun.

Our goal were the Comically Large Extractors required to vent the airlocks and vacuum tubes. Unlike the ventilation shafts inside the bunker system, the loop extractors were big boys. Minimum one square meter, plus maintenance tunnels, because SPECTER had noted that the extractor shafts would need to be de-iced and cleaned frequently due to the rainforest humidity. It was one of the trade-offs the enemy had made for their small, easy-to-hide hyperloop network. The smaller the tunnel, the faster the thermal buildup, the larger and more robust the extraction system. Or as we would say in the scene: the smaller the twink, the bigger the asshole.

That meant, of course, that the system extractors were well hidden and well protected. SPECTER had predicted several ingress points and put together an enemy heatmap for us. The area around the heavily camouflaged main vent array was solid red. There was less intensity around the vent chimneys and external maintenance shaft entries. Vornn and the Nu-suht only had so much available manpower. Right now, that manpower was swarming the ruined camp and ranging out into the forest, responding to the decoys being laid down by Team 2. Getting there was an effort, so I did what any soldier would do while cradled in the guts of an eldritch pony: I took a cat nap.

Some time later, there was a sharp shove to the side of my helmet. “Zealot.”

“Wuh?” I jolted awake, grunting. “Oh. We’re here. And we’re...” I checked the time. “Half an hour late.”

“The garrison reoccupying Bunker 21 were at the upper range of the predicted numbers. We avoided detection, but it took time.” Hura’s body flexed around me as he prepared to decant me. “We have reached an entry to the maintenance shaft. There is one sniper turret and three drones. We will extrude you toward the top of the turret. Dispatch it, take over its nest, and we will deal with the drones.”

“Roger that.” I drew a deep breath, let it out, tuning into Tsariel. She already knew what we were up to, waiting poised in her bubble of hyperspace.

Hura’s abdomen split down the middle, his liquid mass coiling around my limbs to hold me in place. We were nearly fifty meters off the ground, high in the forest canopy. Hura had extruded multiple tentacles out into the branches of the towering tree around us, anchoring himself about three meters over an oblivious Nu-suht turret nest. The machine was mounted to a small platform blind, whirring softly as it scanned the forest floor. The long rifle barrel twitched now and then, dripping with condensation, but the machine didn’t react as I called the Long Hunt to hand.

Hura’s mass flowed, contracting into a thin teardrop as he silently lowered me, upside down, toward the gun’s power bank like a spider on a strand of web. I braced the sword at my hip as I thought the invocation: “Lady of Separation, of all things Divided...”

The monofilament blade almost stroked through the metal shell. The turret didn’t even so much as sputter as its power cut, and it fell to either side in two clean, solid pieces. I reached down until I was standing on my hands in the remains of the turret. The Khem’s mass retreated up along my legs, carefully releasing them, and I swung them down to crouch on the platform as Hura slithered back into a blob of darkness that vanished silently into the tree.

“Hold position,” he said.

I pulled the coil launcher around, and ran one final check over it - can, grip, sights, magazine, safety - before bracing it and settling in to wait. Even with my helmet on zoom, there was nothing to see as Hura hunted down the patrol drones. They were likely no bigger than the ones I was carrying on my belt. At one point, I thought I saw something flicker through the understory, but other than noting its presence, I didn’t so much as twitch. Ten minutes or so passed in silence.

“Done.” Hura’s voice broke in. “Come down. We will ingress.”

I rose and stepped over the edge of the platform, twisting like a diver. Tsariel let me fall about halfway before a branching net of manifolds laced out, briefly making contact with the surrounding trees to slow my descent. I landed with a soft hydraulic hiss on the spongy forest floor. Hura was already back in his humanoid shape, the muscles of his back flexing as he pulled a pile of brush away from the dull brown entry hatch that led into the maintenance system. The access panel was the same kind as the ones Lil had hacked inside the bunker. I covered it with a hand, and the Coyote’s autohacking tools got to work.

“Do not engage any drones you observe inside the system. I will deal with them,” Hura said, watching me as the suit did its work. “Do not make contact with any of the walls. We suspect they are lined with sensor mesh. Again, we will deal with it.”

“Got it.” The panel beeped and flashed green, and the hatch disengaged with a soft hiss of releasing air. As it swung open, my suit registered a deep chill. It was twenty degrees Celsius and seventy percent humidity outside the tunnel; inside, minus twenty and zero humidity. A thin rime of frost began to form around the edge of the tunnel entry as I sunk to one knee and took out two of the tiny BlackFly drones. Like their namesakes, they were a non-reflective, dull greyish blue-black with next to no thermal signature. They flittered off my hand and swooped around each other as they quickly calibrated with my wetwear.

“We need to keep the door sealed,” I said. “The temp exchange is going to trigger some kind of fucking alarm if we let it equalize. Can you plug it up?”

“We will assist.”

As the drones entered the dim tunnel, Hura flowed over the doorway like a membrane, leaving them inside. I switched to FPS drone view, and suddenly, I was able to fly directly down the maintenance shaft and in. Dim amber lights lit a tall, narrow concrete shaft, just big enough to fit a human-sized engineer and their tools. It terminated in a ladder, where I found the first of the pressure sensors. Sensors and cameras were tagged as the flies buzzed down the chute and into a longer corridor. The walls in here were white and smooth, as if coated in a thick layer of rubber.

“Lots of nitrogen and helium gas-off down here,” I remarked, steering the drones up toward a pipe running along the ceiling. I used it for cover as I buzzed down along the tunnel in the direction of the hyperloop station. “This skin on the walls is the sensor mesh?”

“Yes.” Hura was also tuned into the feed.

“How do we deal with it?”

“This kind of sensor is designed to respond to changes in temperature and pressure, as well as kinetic intrusion. Footsteps, primarily. We will liquefy and flow along the walls and floor, with our contact surface matching the temperature to maintain environmental homeostasis. You will ‘surf’ along our outer surface. You will need to engage your internal life support and retain any heat until we emerge into the station.”

“Got it. My shell can soak about twenty minutes of thermal buildup before I start to fry in here.”

“We estimate fifteen minutes of transit time. Minimize your movements.”

There were ways I could extend the Coyote’s thermal absorption for longer, but that was a problem for future Min-joon. As my fly-cams plunged deeper into the tunnel, I spotted the first issue: a floating sentry drone, bobbing along the passage toward me. It looked like the black, bulbous sphere I’d seen on my second trip to the airport, swiveling like a gyroscope as it drifted down the hallway. This was why I’d chosen to pilot the flies close to the ceiling. Before the sensors could sweep over them, they hummed up to the freezing pipes that ran along the tunnel, landing on one of them. The flies crawled over them until they found the place where the pipe met the tunnel roof. Both the flies wiggled into the seam, crouching down.

“NVO-Tactician drone,” Hura grunted. “Directorate-made. Standard law enforcement patrol model. It is an older model.”

I considered myself an experienced operator, given I had been with CEIDR since its second-ever troop intake. But now and then, I was impressed by how much casual knowledge Hura had gained over his decades of service. “Run into them before?”

“Of course not: we simply memorize the makes and models of Directorate UAVs out of an abundance of enthusiasm,” Hura replied flatly.

Sarcasm from a Khem. That was a new one. I couldn’t see shit with the flies while they were hunkered down, so I put them on low-energy standby and waited. “Ohh. So you’re like those people who are really into trains. And I mean, REALLY into trains.”

“We are not.”

I grinned.

There was a weird humming, rippling sound through the feed as the drone passed below: the anti-grav units, high-temp stable electromagnetic coils like the ones that powered my rifle. They didn’t require the total precision, size and power of the hyperloop coils, which were much bigger. They also had a lot more ‘waste’ resonance when used for anti-grav, making a distinct sound as they passed by solid surfaces. The camera feed from the flies fritzed, the connection becoming tenous as the drone hovered under their position, then restrengthening as it continued on its way.

“So, at least one of these things, and the sensor mesh.” I ran through the very short list of things that could feasibly hurt or deter a Khememmu. Those were extreme, highly-charged electrified barriers, concentrated electromagnetic burst weapons, black holes, a direct hit from an orbital lance - that one was a ‘maybe’ - or a thermonuclear device... and that was about it, actually. Khem thrived in the vacuum of space, the crushing depths of the ocean, and could survive being thrown into a volcano or almost anything else short of being hurled into an actual star. They were the ultimate extremophiles: the only reason they hadn’t taken over the multiverse was that they were compelled to fight to the death against Abyssal entities, and the battle was fairly evenly matched. There were massive battles taking place in the past, present and future against the Hells that we knew nothing about, Khem Mothermoons and billions of their infant angel-host spawn warring against armies of eldritch horrors in the voids between galaxies: dying, voiding out, or consuming demons by the millions. I shook myself out of the brief reverie before my brain tried to wander down that path toward madness, and grimaced. “I can’t think of any other defenses they might have installed here that could cause problems for you. Not less the sensor mesh is electrified.”

“It is not. The drone would not be able to stably levitate if it was.” Hura paused. “It has passed. Reactivate the drones.”

One of the drones buzzed to life as I tuned into it, but the other was still flickering, the delicate electronics damaged by the intense cold of the pipe and the passing drone. I managed to get it to stagger up, wings flicking, before it froze up and tumbled off the frosty pipe to the ground. “Shit. We lost one. We need to go, now.”

Hura didn’t argue. He flowed away from the door, pulling it shut behind him, and crawled toward the ladder leading into the tunnel system. “We will retrieve it and deal with the drone. Hold steady, prepare to cover.”

I had expected Hura to be an asshole as a commander, but found myself feeling a growing twinge of real respect as he slithered past me in his amorphous liquid state and fluidly rappeled down into the maintenance system. Weirdly, he reminded me of Jak; of how Jak might be once he’d been seasoned as a Confluence officer for ten, twenty years. I was grateful for it. Big explosive blow-ups and teams made of conflicting personalities sure made for great TV, but drama fucking sucked when you were trying to get shit done without being killed.