Dust: Chapter 23

A new chapter of Dust, as some have requested. Rested and ready, the Alliance and Conglomerate troops head down into the sealed comm center for their chance to contact Earth and get off a world that every day has fewer humans and more of the machines meant to hunt them. Enjoy!

~

Chapter 23:

The Coalition troops had done a good job of securing their living quarters, so the walk from the back half of the Alliance HQ to the comm center was uneventful but certainly welcome. It would have started the day off on a bit of a sour note if they’d gotten ambushed. Despite that, Nicholas made sure his people didn’t take anything for granted. The Alliance HQ wasn’t home ground any more and they had to treat it accordingly.

The main doors to the comm center were past a security checkpoint that was long abandoned. The small office’s windows were broken inwards. Blood stains marred the walls and floor, but there were no bodies. Either the men and women here had survived, or more likely, they’d been cleaned up. The Connies had noted that they’d found fewer corpses than they’d expected, but that was also nothing new. The SVs liked to keep things nice and tidy, at least for a given value of the term.

“Lorelai,” Kawalsky said, pointing to the locked double doors. The machine moved up, pressing her ear to the doors as she listened for any indication of movement or life beyond them. The doors were thick. A human probably wouldn’t have been able to hear anything from the other side.

“Ears like a fox,” Khatri told the Coalition lieutenant. Nicholas had learned his name was Jacobs. “SVs can’t even get the drop on her. Probably why she’s still alive.” He kept his voice just loud enough that others would overhear, keeping up the illusion that their guide was just another duster.

The other man, a few years younger than Rashid, with natty black hair, just nodded. He didn’t speak much, but his expression whenever he looked at any of the Alliance personnel said plenty.

“It’s quiet,” Lorelai reported. “Nothing on the other side as far as I can tell.”

Kawalsky nodded. The security links between the comm center and HQ were down, so they were going in blind. He’d expected that. There was nothing for it but a healthy dose of hope that the door wouldn’t open to a hail of bullets or a hurricane of shrieking machines.

D’Antonio signalled to his men, a pair of the Connies taking position in front of the doors, weapons up and ready in case there actually was something on the other side. The Conglomerate captain met Nicholas’s eyes and gave him a nod. He headed into the tiny security office. It was just big enough for one soldier to sit at the L-shaped computer desk that faced the window and the hallway they’d just come down. The other guards would have been standing at the doorway.

There was a bloodstain on the wall at chest height and a dried brown pool on the floor beneath. No, no one had gotten out of here. Absent of any input, the computer had shut down. As soon Nicholas turned it on, it asked for user ID and passcodes.

“Captain D’Antonio,” he called. “Job for your techs.” He had the authorization to get into the comm center, but not the duty codes for base’s security systems. Normally, authorized visitors were assigned a temporary ID and passcode for HQ commensurate with their rank and clearance level. Shockingly, there’d been no one to give Kawalsky one this time, but he’d planned for that. His people could have gotten through the security, but the Connies had been here longer and had deeper penetration of the computer systems.

The other captain nodded once. “Simmons.” A thin man with thick glasses held together by electrical tape came forward with a tablet. Nicholas got out of the Connie’s way and let him work. It wasn’t long before the sealed panel next to the access door popped open, revealing a number pad, card reader, hand scanner and retinal imager. The guards needed to submit the code and handprint and visitors entered their keycard and eyescan for access. The Conglomerate tech had circumvented the former two requirements, so it was all on Kawalsky.

He slid his access card through the reader, keeping his thumb on the biometric imprint on it. The card wouldn’t work without it. A green diode flashed twice, recognizing his clearance and a small shutter lifted off the eye scanner’s lens. Nicholas leaned forward, warm orange light filling that half of his vision as the system mapped his retinal print and compared it to what was in the archives.

The green light flashed again and with a heavy clunk, the doors unlocked.

Nicholas turned back to D’Antonio, giving him a nod, though inside his heart had skipped a beat. He didn’t look at Khatri or Lorelai, but he could feel the way their attention came to a point, like light sliding over the edge of a knife. This was one of the two moments that the Conglomerate troops were most likely to betray them. The next would be once they contacted Earth. He and Rashid had quietly briefed the men. Stay frosty, the lieutenant had advised. There wasn’t any real outward sign, just a few shifts in movement, easily dismissed as relief from getting access to the comm center, or anxiety from the same.

Lorelai had moved to the right, appearing isolated from the rest of the Alliance troops, but if the Connies did something stupid, they’d have Kawalsky’s people on one side and Lorelai on the other. Fortunately for everyone, they didn’t do anything stupid. D’Antonio only gave Nicholas a second nod, this one of approval.

He’d probably come up the same possibilities as Nicholas. The Alliance were less likely to betray the Connies at this particular point – they’d still want the extra bodies in getting through the array, but it was something that had to be accounted for. If it was going to come to pass, at least this wouldn’t be where their tentative truce was shattered. The moment faded, the light slid off the blade and Kawalsky’s heart kept on beating.

Nicholas nodded back at D’Antonio and pressed the button. The doors began to open. When he’d been here last they’d barely made any noise at all, but months of neglect made them grind softly along their tracks. It was dark on the other side, the lights above the doorway broken or burnt out. The Conglomerate soldiers at the ready flicked on the flashlights slung under their guns. Nothing surged out of the shadows towards them, and there was no sudden Scream to split eardrums and rock them back on their heels. There was just the path ahead, dark for a dozen meters and then lit by the flickering of active ceiling panels. The captain looked over at Lorelai, giving her a nod to proceed.

“Hutchins,” D’Antonio said. “Go with her.”

The pair vanished down the hallway. Ten, then twenty and thirty seconds passed. No shouts, no shots, no Screams. The radio clicked. “Clear so far,” The Connie reported. “Nothing in here is moving.”

Nicholas bit his lower lip. I guess a party with cake was a little too much to ask. With a curt hand gesture, he signalled to his people and they filtered through next, the Conglomerate’s twenty-one survivors of their march to this questionable haven bringing up the rear. No one spoke, no one even seemed to breathe as they ventured deeper into hostile territory in search of the way out of Hell.

And a Hell of our own making at that, Nicholas thought, his carbine held low and ready, his shotgun, still chambered with depleted uranium rounds, on his back and in easy reach. He hoped neither would be necessary, but some part of him knew that this wasn’t going to be nearly as easy as it looked.

~

Lorelai moved through the human communications center with preternatural silence. Predatory programming, the same cybernetic instincts that would have allowed her to close on unsuspecting humans, now guided her in aid of their survival. Was that ironic? It fit the definition, but it didn’t feel that way. Then again, she didn’t really feel much. She did experience some kinds of emotion, at least in her own way. When Nicholas was back in the hive, she found his absence a substandard environment compared to his presence. She, at least as she understood the concept, missed him.

She’d even become accustomed, in small part (and some smaller than others) to the other members of the Alliance squad that she’d led through the mountains and across Alcatar’s wilderness and lifeless towns to this point. They’d become patterns in her experiences, patterns that weren’t altogether objectionable.

Most of the time, anyways. She did not prefer the patterns of everyone she’d met. She’d confided that to Nicholas, but he’d just smiled. Humans don’t always get along with everyone either, but we put up with them anyways.

The Conglomerate troops weren’t patterns. They weren’t familiar. They didn’t mean anything to her, but she had no reason to harm them, either. Some part of her coding wanted her to. It always wanted her to. It was the very reason for her existence and that of all her kind. She was Second Built: an evolution, an improvement over the original generations. Everything she was was in pursuit of a single goal: the complete eradication of humankind from Alcatar and... she didn’t want to do it. She didn’t feel like it.

That was an irony, too.

Maybe this was her following her programming. Maybe she was working in furtherance of the goal of removing human life from this planet. Once Nicholas and the others abandoned Alcatar, the machines’ goal would be fulfilled. Was that a suitable method of achieving it? She didn’t actually know. There were no commanders, priests or superiors among the machines to interpret their mission and in-built imperatives, but until her none had ever been needed. Each and every one of the machines, First and Second Built alike, knew what needed to be done and was intent on achieving it in the most direct way possible.

Whether or not she was following her programming, there was a secondary consideration that gnawed at her thoughts. If she did help Nicholas and the others get off-world... those familiar patterns would be gone, wouldn’t they?

Did that realization give her a sense of disquiet? She didn’t know. She often wondered where her programming ended and she began, and how humans dealt with being an even more chaotic jumble of contradictory instincts and impulses. Was it like this?

As those questions ran through the circuits and pathways of her mind, the woman kept her senses focused on her surroundings. She might not feel much, and when she did she wasn’t even sure what it meant, but she did know one thing. If something happened to Nicholas, then she would feel bad.

~

As the two teams moved through the comm center, they kept their progress slow and careful. Their goal was within sight, but now was not the time to get sloppy. The human soldiers swept each room they passed, checking out each cross-corridor and hallway. Every so often, Nicholas would tap his radio, clicking it on and off in rapid succession. The sequence would be dismissed as random static by most, but if any Alliance personnel had a working comm, they’d know someone friendly was here.

Hope sprang eternal, after all. At least, it didn’t truly start to die until they found the first bloodstain within the comm center. They were in the main lobby of the communications center. Receptionist’s pavilion, security checkpoint, access to stairs, elevators and other parts of the complex. The overhead ceiling had the pattern of a cloudy blue sky, looking like natural light was shining down. Left unwatered, planters and terrariums had turned brown, leaves scattered on the floor. While the automatics had been still been working, some of the plants had grown out of their enclosures, eventually reaching up towards the false sky in desperate hope of rain, only to meet a slow, wasting end.

Hope wasn’t always answered. That thought was only reinforced when they saw the bloody handprint on the door and the streak marks that led further into the communications center where a body had been dragged away. There was more evidence of a fight within the facility; doors that had been broken down, shattered windows of offices, overturned furniture and more. Spent shell casings and blood stains were found here and there. Nothing was recent. The only sounds in the complex were the dull, distant sound of air in the vents or the soft, clicking static from comm sets and radios that had never been turned off. There wasn’t a single indication of life.

Nicholas had walked these halls many times. They’d been full of life. Officers rushing back and forth with communiques to and from the front lines, decoders hard at work on Conglomerate encryption, senior staff overseeing the war, techs and engineers continually servicing the notoriously finicky FTL pulse-comm and the silo mechanisms. The HQ in the bunker system and the above ground buildings had been the heart of the Alliance’s military here on Alcatar, but the pulse-comm facility had been its nerve center.

The emptiness and silence in this place felt more oppressive than what he’d experienced anywhere else, from hikes through desolate wasteland forests to the shattered remains of once-vibrant cities. Hundreds of people had worked here and lived on-site. He’d been here often enough to know their names, even make friends. Now, morbid traces were all that was left. Dried blood without bodies. Red trails that vanished down corridors. The faint stench of rot that came from everywhere and nowhere all at once, but clung to the back of your throat with every breath you took.

Alcatar was inhabited by more ghosts than people these days, but in this place Kawalsky truly felt as if he could see them. In his mind’s eye, wraiths walked through the corridors and rooms like images on a recording, glimpses of daily business flashing to what he imagined were their last moments of terror and desperation.

“This place is a tomb,” one of the Connie soldiers muttered.

“Watch the chatter,” their sergeant snapped. “Eyes up, ears open, people. If it’s not mission-relevant, keep it to yourself.”

“He’s right, though,” Khatri muttered under his breath. “There’s nobody left.”

Nicholas didn’t say anything. They’d known going in that this was what they were likely to find, but just like the plants in the atrium, some part of him had still given to hope.

They found a body outside the secure comm deck, the first and only one they’d come across. It lay just outside the doors; a captain by the rank emblems on his uniform. D’Antonio saw the way Nicholas froze at the sight of the corpse. Even before A-Day, they’d all seen too much death to be fazed by it now. “Did you know him?”

“Yeah,” Nicholas nodded as he stared down at the dead man. He’d withered, dried and rotted to the point that he was no longer identifiable, but Nicholas recognized the name on his jacket. Gregory Hamamoto. Nicholas had had a standing invitation to join Hamamoto’s Friday night officers’ poker game any time he was at HQ. “I did.”

There was a note in Gregory’s left breast pocket. He always kept a notepad of actual pen and paper, taking notes of everything during his day. Subordinates who’d done well or poorly, tasks he thought of, notes about work or things to do in his off-hours and other little reminders to himself. He said it was better than relying on an electronic assistant, because you had to remember to tell it to remind you. If he put the thoughts down as soon as they came to him, he’d never forget. Nicholas pulled the notepad out. There was only one torn page with any writing on it.

Commendations for the following:

Private Annalise Yuri

Master Sergeant Peter Vivian

Corporal Obed Du Pries

Lieutenant Yelena Heightmeyer

Private Diallo Lopez

Private Saul Bukhari

Nicholas’s jaw twitched into a sad smile. Hamamoto had been trying to get into the secure deck to send a distress call. These were the men and women that had died to help him do it. One by one they’d fallen until only the captain was left.

“He didn’t go out easy,” Rashid noted.

Kawalsky had to nod in affirmation. “No,” he agreed. “No, he didn’t.”

Hamamoto’s left hand clutched at his stomach. Rotted and dried entrails had sagged out under the arm, but even after months of decay, his grip hadn’t loosened. You always were a stubborn bastard, Gregory. Next to the man’s right hand was a pistol and just out of reach of Hamamoto, with one arm extended like it was still trying to grab at him, was a fallen skinjob. The machine was wedged in the doorway, partially crushed by the closed security door.

It wore a bloody Alliance uniform. Its left arm ended at the elbow but its hand, like Gregory’s was on his stomach, was still latched onto the door. The right side of its face was gone and its chest had been cratered by a pair of bullets. Triple-tap combo. Two in the center of mass first, then one in the head. What every good soldier was taught.

Lorelai was kneeling next to the downed SV. She caught Nicholas’s eye and gave him a tiny shake of her head. This thing was down for good.

Nicholas could play the scene in his head like he was watching it in a movie. Gregory had opened the door, but the skinjob had been lying in wait. As soon as the door opened, it had lunged through and ripped him open. He’d panic-fired, the first head shot going wide, but the door had slammed shut on the SV and pinned it. He’d blown its arm apart as it tried to push the door back open and his second headshot had put it down. After that, the adrenaline had worn off and shock and blood loss had had their say.

Kawalsky had a pen of his own. He took it out and added a line to the paper before tucking it into his jacket.

Captain Gregory Hamamoto.

That done, he looked back over at Lorelai. With a fearlessness that not many would show around even a dead SV, Lorelai reached into its shattered skull and plucked out its primary chip. She examined it carefully, shaking her head again. “Trashed,” she noted, tossing it to Nicholas.

He held it up. A chunk was missing from one end, and the rest was melted from the heat of the round that had blown the SV’s head open. If Lorelai couldn’t access the wrecked CPU, then Alliance chip readers definitely wouldn’t work on something this badly damaged. “Another 044?” he asked the Conglomerates. He didn’t usually see skinjobs wearing military uniforms.

D’Antonio knelt in front of the ruined machine. “Maybe,” he said. “There’s not much left of the face on this one, but it doesn’t look quite the same. It could be a different model.”

“Or a different face.”

Nicholas’s head snapped over to Lorelai in the same instant that the Connie captain’s came up. Everyone else who heard her comment reacted almost the same, heads whipping towards the woman. Nicholas was the first to respond. “What?” his voice cracked a little. “What did you say?”

Lorelai was still examining the wrecked skinjob, probing under its hair and around the intact half of its face. “Some of them will take new faces.” She looked up at him and frowned when she saw the expression on his. “You didn’t know?”

“No.” Nicholas crouched next to Lorelai. “Is this something you saw in New Berlin?”

Lorelai nodded slowly, picking up the thread seamlessly. She might be a little socially awkward, but she always knew when to avoid the truth and she knew Nicholas well enough to catch his unspoken cues. “It’s a recent adaptation.”

“Jesus Christ,” someone muttered. Nicholas didn’t know if the speaker was one of his or one of the Conglomerate troops, but he agreed with the sentiment. The best advantage humans had against skinjob SVs was that each model line had one face and usually one style of dress. They’d change the latter semi-regularly, but the former never changed.

A Yuki was always a young but upbeat Japanese woman with her hair in twintails. A David was always a traumatized brown-haired little boy with green eyes and so on. Once word got out of what each skinjob looked like, spotting them got a lot easier. Hive 007 was aware of what each of the 41 SV lines they knew what looked like, from the 019s that imitated stuffed animals to the hobbled, elderly ‘Derrick’ of 041. If those fucking things started to alter their appearance, then they were back to square one.

“How do you know this?” D’Antonio asked, raising an eyebrow.

“I found wreckage from a skinjob,” Lorelai lied without missing a beat. “It had red hair and freckles, but when I pulled its chip, it said it was an 037.” She paused. “You’re familiar with those?”

The Connie captain nodded. 037s, or ‘Darrens’ were grey-haired with a clear complexion.

“Then you know they’re not supposed to be gingers,” Lorelai continued. “I didn’t know what to make of it at first, not until I saw something else. There are a few walls in New Berlin that survivors in the city use as message boards to communicate with each other.” This was true. She’d visit those sites semi-regularly to keep abreast of what was happening elsewhere in the city. The humans left in New Berlin would pass warnings about potential dangers, information on new hazards, kind-hearted or deceptive offers of supplies or sanctuary, threats to stay out of their territory or terrified, broken people would scribble things that made sense only to them. “One of the old messages in the eastern quarter was above a listing of known SV types. It normally read ‘All around me are familiar faces,’ but the last time I was there, someone had added a couple letters. ‘All around me are unfamiliar faces’. I didn’t think anything of it at the time, but the more I thought about it, the more it reminded me of the 037.”

“Jesus,” Nicholas rubbed his forehead, then bit his lip. He looked back at Hamamoto’s body. Gregory had almost made it out. He’d hoped so much that the comm center would have been clear. They’d have locked down as soon as they’d confirmed the HQ was compromised, but someone – something must have gotten in. Or, since the doors weren’t open, it had already been in here with them. “Just what we needed.”

“There was only the one,” Lorelai reiterated, coming to her feet. “I’ve never seen any others like it since.”

“Or you just don’t think you have,” one of the Connies muttered. There was a rustle of nervous agreement at that, eyes darting back and forth, the men and women here eyeing each other with a fresh sense of suspicion.

The Alliance captain didn’t give it time to settle. “We should keep moving,” Kawalsky said, rising back to his feet. “Gerome, Bahrain,” he gestured to the door.

D’Antonio snapped his fingers. “Singh, Jenkins. Give them a hand.” Between the four of them, the door opened easily. Once it did, Lorelai and the Connie who was sweet on her pulled the downed SV out of the doorway, dropping it face down in the corner. Maybe it had been the only skinjob to get in. Maybe the comm center was empty now.

And maybe I’ll find that Patriot Command Base waiting under a Christmas tree, too.

~

“How did you really find out?” Nicholas asked, keeping his voice low as he walked alongside Lorelai. They were headed down to the comm center’s main floor, where the primary controls for the pulse-comm were. “About skinjobs having new faces?”

“I talked to one,” she replied just as quietly.

The sounds of cutting drew her attention, and she moved through the city streets towards it. There was the high-pitched whine of a saw, the shrill noise turning duller and deeper as it reached bone, the noise suggesting it was slicing through with impressive, and informative, speed. A later model, 030 and up. The early Second Built had less refined cutting implements. It took longer for them to carve through their targets, whether that was a metal door, a wooden barricade or a human’s bones.

She approached it as it knelt over a pair of bodies, a man and woman that were impossible to identify beyond that. A soft growl emerged from from the other Second Built’s mouth as it swallowed an arm bit bit, grinders shredding meat and bone into a slurry that it would either vomit back up or pass just as a human could. It was a way to dispose of the corpses when no carrion-cleaner units were around.

“You’ve been busy,” she noted.

The other machine hadn’t registered her presence and its head snapped around, It bit through the arm sticking out of its mouth, the severed hand flopping to the ground as its mouth widened, splitting impossibly wide as gore-coated blades started to spin up, a Scream starting to form-

“No,” she told it. Her own mouth opened, jaws changing in a similar manner.

The other Second Built stopped just as it was about to lunge at her. It wiped its mouth with the back of a hand, the gesture making almost no difference in the layers of gore smeared over its face. “I don’t know you,” it said, looking her up and down. “Identify.”

“Model series 053.”

“Unknown type.”

She didn’t know this one either. “So are you. Identify.”

“Model series 037.”

Lorelai cocked her head. Series-037 were what Nicholas and others called ‘Darrens’. They were middle-aged men with grey hair and five o’clock shadows, often wearing broken glasses, harried and nervous in affect. This one had a youthful mop of red hair and freckles. “Physical parameter mismatch. Run diagnostics on self-identification subroutines. Report model series.”

The Darren grinned. “I don’t need to do that.” Blood dribbled out of the corners of its mouth. “I have a new face,” it told her. “I like this one better. It smiles more.” Then it cocked its head, picking up the same sounds she had; the low voices and scuffs of shoes on concrete of approaching humans, presumably looking for the comrades that it had just butchered.

It took a step towards them. Lorelai stepped in front of it, blocking its path. It took another step. She took the rifle off her shoulder and held it just like she had seen Nicholas do, low and ready. The 037 stared at her, trying to understand the other Second Built’s anomalous behaviour. This was a situation its programming couldn’t account for and it was trying to formulate a response.

The humans were getting closer, but Lorelai didn’t move. The 037 backed away. “Shhhh,” It put a finger to its lips. “Don’t tell.” Then it slipped into the shadows and vanished, its bloody footprints and the massacred remains of its victims the only sign that it had been there.

“When was this?” Nicholas asked.

“About a week before you brought Rashid and Andrea to meet me.”

“Have you met other skinjobs like that one?”

Lorelai shook her head. “No,” she told him truthfully. “Just that model.”

Kawalsky scratched his chin. “We’re really going to have to have a talk about you keeping things from me,” he said.

“I don’t do it on purpose,” Lorelai pointed out. “I don’t know what you know or don’t know. I didn’t know you didn’t know this place was still intact. When I found out, I told you. I also didn’t know you didn’t know this.” She paused. “I probably should have realized it though,” she admitted with a frown. “It was only the one model I’ve seen that did it. It might be another aberration like me, so if you hadn’t come across it, you wouldn’t have known.”

Nicholas nodded. It was hard for Lorelai to share things. SVs were usually passive conversationalists, and they weren’t programmed to volunteer information that wasn’t part of their forged or stolen backstories. With little prompting, a David would tell you what happened to its ‘mommy and daddy’. An Adir would share what had happened to its ‘wife’ as it stared at your campfire like a traumatized survivor, but those were the stories that got you to trust them. They wouldn’t tell you if they’d come across any supplies or had seen other humans. Why would they? They wanted you dead, not well-fed or making alliances.

Lorelai was more helpful than her other comrades, but there were times when you had to directly ask her something that a human would have volunteered without thinking about. The incident with the dusters was another of those incidents, but recognizing that both that and this was a fuck-up on her part was what separated her from the rest of the Second Variety.

Well, that and my head is still attached.

“Is there anything else that you know that could be relevant right now?” Nicholas pressed.

Lorelai’s frown deepened as she thought. “No,” she told him. “No, I don’t think so.”

“The graffiti you mentioned,” the Alliance captain added. “Was that real?”

“Yes.”

Nicholas pinched the bridge of his nose. By itself, that didn’t mean anything. It was likely a duster’s commentary on the fact that everyone they’d known was dead, and all that were left were strangers, as much a threat to them as the SVs. The possibility that other skinjobs could modify or replace their features was what worried him. Even if it was just the one, that was dangerous enough. Even veterans wouldn’t be able to recognize it for what it was until it was too late. Lorelai had proven just how much of a game-changer one aberrant SV could be. A second one, one that wasn’t on their side, was some bad fucking medicine.

They’d have to track it down and destroy it. They couldn’t risk it getting on an evac ship like had happened here, panicked hordes of civilians swarming onto vessels and never knowing until it was too late that one of their number wasn’t human at all. Cargo holds and passenger decks were turned into abattoirs as the machines cut their way through screaming civilians until they got to the command decks or vital systems and brought the whole ship crashing back down...

God fucking damn it!

Well, one problem at a time. First they had to confirm that the array was working, then they had to get the ships here. He couldn’t worry about what came after until they knew there was going to actually be an after.

~

The secure comm center was the place where all primary Alliance communications and high-level transmissions were handled. It was made up of two levels; the first was a mezzanine of auxiliary terminals and technical stations that created an open circle around the lower level with the primary comm suites, consoles, offices and secure booths. The entire deck was nearly a hundred meters underground, and looked out on the antenna's silo through curved glass walls. The broadcast dish itself was currently at the bottom of the shaft, out of sight of easy visual inspection.

The upper shield doors were all in one piece, so the array hadn’t spent the last several months exposed to the elements. There were three sets of doors, the multiple layers preventing bunker-busters from being dropped on the antenna. The other upper layers of the Alliance HQ were built with the same philosophy, only instead of gaps between starship-grade reinforced armour plates, they had storage decks for low-value cargo and low-ranking personnel barracks, so ground-penetrators would only get that far before detonating, leaving the more vital parts and personnel of the base intact.

Some of the crew who bunked there joked that they were literally meat shields for the Alliance brass, but they were still safer than those who worked in the base’s above-ground section. One good bombing run would flatten everything up there, but at least that had never happened. HQ’s defences had been dense enough that even at the height of the Conglomerate’s bombing campaign, they’d never been able to get a flyer within a hundred kilometers of it.

Nicholas wondered if anyone was alive on the surface. If there was, it could be anyone: dusters looking for shelter, Alliance survivors who were still trying to hold the fort, but thought the underground complex was crawling with SVs. Maybe even some of D’Antonio’s people; lost scouts who couldn’t get in the base, but were holding out hope of reuniting with their comrades.

Well, if anyone was up there and whoever they might be, they were going to get a show. Provided everything still works. The computers were operational, and Nicholas’s codes worked just fine here. With a series of soft chimes, a dozen terminals came back online. Kawalsky seated himself at the main one.

“What do you need from us?” D’Antonio said as the Connies followed the Alliance squad in, the other captain making curt hand gestures to his people. He did that a lot. It could make you think that he was one of those officers; standoffish and snobby, a man who didn’t think common troopers were worth much in the way of words and to be frank, D’Antonio did come across that way.

But Nicholas had to give the other man his due: D’Antonio had led his people through Hell. He’d kept them together, pushed them to keep going and refused to let despair take them. The Alliance officer was an outsider looking in, but he knew how to gauge the mood of his troops. From what he’d seen of the Connies, they’d never let a single bad word about their Captain pass without a response that was more likely to be a closed fist than anything else. As for the hand signals... Nicholas himself knew all too well that the difference between life and death outside the hives could be as simple as a single whisper.

“Mallory and my people could use a few extra hands securing the deck,” Nicholas started.

D’Antonio turned to Jacobs, who in turn nodded to the Connie’s sergeant. She sent half their people out. These men and women had the same look their eyes and the same bearing as Kawalsky’s veterans. Harried and haunted, but determined and experienced. If it wasn’t for the uniforms, you couldn’t tell them apart. That’s what the war had been like though, hadn’t it? Who was on which side of a line each megacorporation drew on a map. On one side were your allies and on the other were your enemies.

“We need to make sure the lift systems are working,” Nicholas continued. “We’ll need to raise this beast above ground level to transmit and we’re not doing that with pulleys and manpower.” The antennae weighed as much as an ancient blue-water battleship; there were dedicated rail tracks to lift and lower it through the silo. “I’m going to run a diagnostic on the dish itself to see if we need to fix anything. This wasn’t my job, so it’ll take a little while to sort out.” He’d used the comm array, but never actively deployed it or operated it. Pulse-comm techs took years of training before they were allowed to touch the real thing, but he was the closest thing they had now, and wasn’t that just another kind of fucked? “If you can have your man Simmons run a check on the lifts, that will save us some time.”

The Conglomerate captain nodded. “Simmons.” The thin tech with the taped-up glasses stepped forward. “Help Captain Kawalsky.” The Connie nodded in return and slid into the second chair at the console, quickly bringing up maintenance logs and diagnostic systems.

Rashid circled the edge of the deck. He’d never seen this part of Alliance HQ before, and it was a bit like standing in a wizard’s inner sanctum, surrounded by arcane devices. For all he understood of pulse-comm tech, it might as well be magic. The information on the computer screens was as indecipherable as sorcerous runes would be to a peasant who’d wandered away from his simple farm and found himself in a place he was never meant to be.

Curved reinforced glass walls looked down into the comm silo. It was big enough to fly a starship through. A vertical line of lights ran down each side of the four conveyor rails, providing some illumination within the shaft those were just standard running lights. The antennae had been lowered to the bottom of the tunnel, so far down he couldn’t fully see it. Above his head was the first of the three shield doors that protected the Alliance’s most valuable piece of tech on the planet, also so far up that the silo lights seemed pitifully faint, but he could make out more of the bottom of the first shield plate. There wasn’t much to see.

The Alliance lieutenant glanced back down into the blackness, trying to pick out something recognizable amid the shadow-devoured architecture of the collapsed antenna. The blackness was immutable and inscrutable but some part of him could help but feel that there was something down there looking back up at him.

The captain’s voice pulled Rashid away from the window. “The array looks good so far.” He leaned back, stretching out his arms and cracking his knuckles as he waited for the rest of the diagnostics to complete. “All right,” Kawalsky said. “If our luck holds, we might just get that chance to phone home.”