The Bounty Hunter: Into The Swarm (8 page)

Burke was high enough to see the location of the drone on his visor.
He looked down again and considered the drop. The slope looked steep but not
enough that he couldn’t climb it. He didn’t like the tunnels waiting at the
bottom. He readied himself to jump instead: he swung an arm around to secure
the rifle still magnetized to his back, leaned forward, and tensed his legs. He
triggered the mechanisms and launched himself from the top of the ridge.

He was used to the height of his augmented leg’s jump alone, not
combined with the new function of his armor. He was propelled further into the
air than he expected and felt his stomach lurch as he fell for longer than he
anticipated. Cass fortified his lower armor to the fall as he landed cleanly
over the dross tunnels. His feet hit the road with a loud thud and left indents
in the asphalt. He built up more momentum than he planned in the fall and knew
that he made too much noise. He whipped around immediately, ready to snatch the
rifle from his back if many aliens heard him.

Something hissed from the tunnels and Cass highlighted the direction
on his visor. He watched the tails emerge first, probing the rim of the tunnel
before poking its head out. He kept a hand around his back in case there were
others, but no other sounds came after the lone dross leaped fully out of the
tunnel. He shifted his feet and brought his arms back in front of him. He
twisted them both together and the scraping sound of metal blades drawing out
from his wrists joined with the alien’s hissing.

He took one step forward and the dross charged at him. Immediately,
Cass halved the visor’s display to show a second alien charging from behind. It
blended in with the darkness and was barely visible even as it charged. He was
caught between the two of them but concentrated on the one in front of him. He
knew they would jump at him from a few meters out. He had seen hundreds of
humans die from that attack, even after shooting the alien dead in mid-air. The
force of their bodies landing on them was still enough to crush most bones.

The first one leaped and Burke twisted on his feet, heaving his arms
up in the air to catch the alien with his blades. They both pierced it, one in
the chest and another in its stomach but he didn’t stop moving, turning on his
feet with the momentum of the alien’s jump and swinging its body away from him.
The blades let out a squelch as the alien’s flesh was thrown away from him. The
body was sent flying in the direction of the other dross but it had been too
heavy and imprecise. The second alien dodged it easily, darting out of the way
and then bounding right into him.

Burke’s arms had been down after recovering from the throw. The
dross crashed into his armor and knocked him down onto the ground. He scrambled
to get back on his feet but the alien was smothering him, clawing and gnashing
all over his aegis trying to find a place where its teeth would sink in. The
armor held without any warnings of fissures or breaking, but it wouldn’t last
forever; less if the sound of the alien’s attacks attracted others that could
overwhelm him and keep him pinned to the ground.

The alien’s movements were too chaotic and close for him to aim
carefully. He flailed his arms and the blades randomly. They clashed and were
deflected by the creature’s claws and then it jumped back away from him. He
turned on his back and readied his legs to meet the alien’s charge, knowing
that he didn’t have enough time to get to his feet. He kicked out when the
dross was close, triggering the jump in his leg as he did so and launching the
alien through the air.

 He knew it wouldn’t be enough to kill the creature and he didn’t
stop once he was back on his feet. He started running toward the alien instead
of waiting for it to jump again. He lunged forward with his right arm,
thrusting the blade into the alien’s head as it went to bite him. The blade
punctured its skull smoothly and killed it instantly. The body fell over when
Burke twisted his arms, its tails spasming for a few moments as if they didn’t
realize the rest of the body had died.

“You’re good at killing these,” Cass said.

“I wish I’d had this armor in the war,” he commented as he looked
around to see if any others had heard the fighting. “We still need to be
careful. Their strength was always in their numbers. We’ve avoided that problem
so far.”

He left the corpses behind and pressed on toward the drone. Cass
manipulated the marker she had been using to display its location, shrinking it
as they drew closer to it. There were more tunnels and wrecked vehicles outside
of the city, and they were slowed down while carefully maneuvering between
them, meticulously checking the corners of each one before stepping out. The
ruined war machines were the most charred pieces in the wreckage. Some had
broken apart in the years that they had sat exposed on the planet, crumbling
away like old bones. Some of the tunnels had opened up under the heavy armored
tanks and swallowed them up, effectively sealing the tunnel away. The dross’s
strength were in their numbers, Burke reminded himself once again, not in their
intelligence, but the display of such stupidity from the enemy that took over
his home made him angry.

He stopped when they reached the drone’s location. He stood on a
patch of solid ground and stared down at the earth and the marker that Cass was
displaying over it. He shook his head.

“It didn’t crash here,” he said. “Somewhere close by and the dross
must have dragged it underground.”

“Yes,” Cass agreed. “The signal is still active but there’s no way
to know which tunnel leads directly to it. I suggest finding the closest one
and exploring.”

“I’ve never gone into one of their tunnels before,” Burke clenched
his jaw. “I understand why Havard’s first teams never came back.”

“Don’t worry. I’ll protect you,” Cass said cheerfully.

He turned and walked to the last tunnel he remembered passing. He
stood and stared down into the darkness below him and took a deep breath before
stepping into it. The tunnel floor was angled sharply downward, but not steep
enough that Burke couldn’t keep upright. He balanced himself as he slid down,
alternating his eyes between the drone’s signal marker and the ground at his
feet.

Cass intensified the light sensitivity of the visor and the tunnel
was visible in a washed out green hue as they descended deeper into the earth.
The drone’s signal whipped above them as they slid down under it and passed it.
Burke cursed as they continued to move farther away from it. When they finally
reached the bottom, with the armor’s boots slamming with a thud into the flat
ground, the signal loomed high above them.

“I think we picked the wrong entrance,” he whispered.

Cass didn’t answer. She was busy producing an impromptu map of the
tunnel network, estimating the size of it by the length of the drop they just
travelled and the amount of holes on the surface. She displayed it in the
corner of the visor’s display as Burke began to walk; with each step the map
updated a new portion of the tunnel that became visible. When they reached
turns and alternating paths, she continued to add to the map with markers to
highlight unexplored paths, in case the ones they initially chose led them
further away from the drone.

They were underground for hours. They turned back often when
reaching dead-ends, or reaching sections of tunnels that abruptly sloped
downwards to where Burke could see and hear things moving. He took each step
slowly then, knowing that alerting one of the dross might awaken the entire
nest below him. The alien’s numbers wouldn’t help them much initially in the
enclosed tunnels, but if enough came from all sides he would be trapped no
matter how many he killed.

Sometimes pathways would be blocked by collapses, either from the
ceiling falling in and filling the tunnel, or from the floor breaking away and
leaving a gaping hole in the floor. Burke avoided these just like the
descending pathways. He had never heard of anyone exploring deep into the
dross’s burrows, but he guessed that most of the aliens slept much deeper
underground than he currently was. There were too many to fit in the smaller
tunnels he traversed now, which meant they must have larger quarters under his
feet, where it would be easier for him to be swarmed and overwhelmed.

He often felt they were going in circles. Each turn lead to other
diverging paths, most of which led downwards. They seldom found upward slopes,
and those that they did opened into even more branching paths. The dross had
clawed their way indiscriminately through the earth. Some tunnels breached into
the basements of homes, breaking directly through one wall and then continuing
through the opposite wall as if they had ignored the room entirely. Other times
they followed a path through ancient, dried out sewer systems. He moved slowly
in those areas, the sound of each step magnified and echoing between the old
stone walls.

Eventually, through trial and error, they climbed up a particularly
long tunnel and into a small chamber where the drone sat. There were no dross
guarding it and that set Burke immediately on edge. He tried to remind himself
that they were animals, with no sense for what might be important enough to
protect, but he couldn’t shake the feeling that stumbling upon it was too easy.
He moved carefully around the chamber and checked each of its corners. They
were empty but he still didn’t relax. There was a second tunnel on the far end
of the chamber that led elsewhere. He moved to that before he approached the
drone.

“Oh no,” Cass whispered. “Oh, you’re going to be angry. I’m angry.”

“What?” Burke whispered back.

He stepped into the tunnel and saw that it had a slight slope,
ascending upwards. He looked up and the light from the surface, now early
morning, frazzled the low light filter on the visor. There was a tunnel that
led directly up from the chamber.

“Oh fuck,” he spat. “Really?”

“I said you’d be angry.”

He turned from the light and let his eyes adjust to the visor once
more. He shook his head as he moved to the drone. It was larger than he
expected, roughly twice the size of his aegis. Parts of it had been shredded
apart, either from the crash or the dross attacking it on the surface. Despite
its battered appearance, it still looked to be in better shape than the wrecks
on the surface. The drone hadn’t been on Earth long enough to be beaten and
weathered like the other things humans left behind.

The drone seemed to be lodged into the ground, stuck in a third
tunnel that led out of the room, seemingly downward, like a dross had tried to
drag it deeper into the underground and instead gotten it stuck in a tunnel that
was too small. Burke carefully knelt next to it and started prying pieces of
its outer armor apart to expose the inside.

“Do you see what might have caused it to crash?” he asked as he
worked.

“No,” Cass admitted. “I don’t understand how this happened.”

“The crash?”

“This model of drone is a common one. The only alteration ACU did
was to automate it to the point that no one could remotely access its systems,
only its signal if they knew its frequency. The rest of its hardware is
normal.”

“What do you mean?”

“Meaning,” she clarified, “it was to observe the planet from low
orbit, occasionally flying closer to the surface but not close enough for the
dross to lunge at it. It would hover at least a hundred meters in the air.”

“Then how did it crash? Mechanical failure?”

“That’s very rare, but possible,” she spoke slowly, uncertain.

Burke kept pulling at the drone’s innards, peeling more protective
layers away with the assisted strength of his armor. When he broke into the
core of the drone, where processing and storage units were, he lowered his
hands and leaned his head closer into the hole he had made.

“Can you see everything?” he asked. “What parts do we need?”

“Just one part. One moment.”

She highlighted different sections of the drone’s components as she
cycled through them and eliminated the unimportant ones from the visor’s
display. She did this more for his benefit than hers, narrowing the search down
so he knew which pieces to avoid when he went in to extract something.

“There,” she said finally, highlighting one piece inside the mess of
wires and electronics. “Grab that part but don’t pull it just yet. I need to
check something.”

He leaned his head back and reached inside the drone with his right
hand. He recognized the part as a computer core, but it was the largest one he
had ever seen. The part had a handle, as it was a common component that was
switched out between systems, or used temporarily as an independent processing
piece. He closed his hand around it and waited until Cass let him know to pull.

The drone whirled to life a few seconds after his hand made contact.
She funnelled power from through the aegis and into the drone. Sparks sprayed
harmlessly around Burke’s arm but it still made him uncomfortable. The noise
was the worst of it and he shifted inside the armor as he heard it.

“Try to be quick,” he murmured.

“I’m just making sure all the data is moved from the permanent
drives,” she explained as she worked. “I wish Havard had told us exactly what
he wanted. That would have made this easier. Huh, that’s odd.”