“Private Crawford, how are you getting on with that door?” he shouted.

  Private Crawford had one of the exits open and he used his body to stop it from closing while he frantically crammed high-impacts into his magazine. The indentation of a bullet appeared in his chest and then another. He keeled over, his eyes wide through his visor and his corpse landed on the threshold, preventing the door from shutting. Another soldier made it through the gap before turning and firing into unseen opponents on the other side of the mainframe.

  A man landed next to Conway from the gantry above. His leg buckled under the extra gravity and the weight of his kit. He screamed with pain and fumbled for his injector. Conway couldn’t let up and he fired at what he thought might be a Ragger sprinting across the floor. He didn’t know if he scored a hit and when he stopped firing, the soldier was already limping towards the door in awkward, painful strides.

  Bit-by-bit, the vestiges of Conway’s squad escaped from the room. Bodies lay everywhere and in the palls of smoke and the heat shimmering in the vanishing air, Conway bore witness to the carnage. The Fangrin poured in through at least two entrances on the far side of the room, but their human opponents had become secondary. To Conway, it was almost like he didn’t exist.

  He scrambled towards the door, his stupid pride reluctant for him to leave until he was sure his squad was clear. A bullet hit him in the side of the head and deflected somewhere he neither knew nor cared. His suit computer rebooted and Conway stumbled, with his head ringing. Luck and millimeters separated the living and the dead and he knew that next time the result might be different.

  The impact of the bullet brought him a moment of clarity. “The Fangrin are much more scared about what the Raggers will do with this data,” he said, not sure if the words went out on the comms or not.

  “Lieutenant! This way!” shouted Sergeant Lockhart.

  The clarity vanished and Conway realized he was staggering - he guessed the headshot had screwed with his coordination. He got to the doorway and fell through into welcome darkness. Hands kept him upright and others slammed the door shut behind him.

  Lockhart yelled orders, using his voice and the force of his will to drive the squad onwards.

  “Come on!” said Barron, pulling Conway’s arm around her shoulder. He was a big man but she didn’t let him fall.

  One step after another, they advanced down the corridor. Conway’s vision blurred and he stumbled. The imposing figure of Sergeant Lockhart appeared. He stared into Conway’s eyes, his expression giving nothing away.

  “This’ll help,” he said, pressing an injector against Conway’s suit.

  He felt a sharp pain followed by the sensation of icy fluid flowing through his veins. The drugs hit his brain and Conway found his vision clearing. Within a few seconds he felt almost normal and fifteen seconds after that, was convinced he could lift a pickup truck over his head.

  As soon as he was able, Conway carried himself on his own two feet. His surroundings become clear – they were pounding along a tunnel – another one of many. Torchlight highlighted the dust, the walls and the battered combat suits of soldiers trying to get away from a fight they couldn’t win.

  Conway pushed himself to run ahead of Barron. He gave her a last clap on the shoulder as thanks, and saw how exhausted she was from the effort of supporting him. He caught a glimpse of the ammo readout on her Gilner and it had a full magazine. The mark of good soldier – she never forgot.

  “I picked up Crawford’s,” she said with a wan smile.

  The words brought home how many were gone. Conway did a headcount of the people around him. Fifteen. Damn.

  “Freeman, have you got that extractor?” he panted into the comms. The sweat was thick on his brow and he could hear the life support motor in his helmet whirring to keep him cool.

  “Right here, sir.”

  “Still at twenty percent?”

  “Yes, sir. Still at twenty. It might be enough.”

  “It’ll have to be. We’re not going back for more.”

  This section of the comms hub was extensive, with many linked passages and rooms. Conway called a halt in one of the rooms and closed the manually-operated door behind them.

  “Tools and shit,” said Kemp prosaically.

  The Fangrin construction tools weren’t anything that Conway was interested in. He sat on the edge of an iron-bound crate and fed his last few bullets into a magazine. His combat suit was filthy and covered with impact marks he couldn’t recall happening. Not that anyone else had got off lightly. Lockhart approached and Conway noticed that the man had found time to trace the words Iron Dogs into the grime on his chest plate.

  “What next, sir?” Lockhart asked on a private channel. “I doubt they’ve given up chasing us. As soon they kill the Raggers in the mainframe room, they’ll come looking for us.”

  Conway couldn’t think of a way out, though he didn’t confide it. “We keep looking. Freeman reckons there’ll be a construction tunnel leading to the surface. We get out and we wait for pickup.”

  “You know what I’d do, if I was a Fangrin and I thought all the positional data for my entire empire was about to be stolen by not one, but two hostile species?”

  “Do I want to hear the answer?”

  Lockhart ploughed on. “I’d drop the biggest damn bomb right in the middle of it all.”

  “We’ve already threatened to nuke the place ourselves,” said Conway. He hadn’t told anyone. “We’d already be dead.”

  “Well, maybe up till now the Fangrin thought they had the highest hand. Once they start thinking everyone else has four aces…”

  He didn’t need to finish the sentence and Conway found the words made sense. The Fangrin were loyal to each other in the same way that humans were. Sometimes the hard decisions were unavoidable and a few ground troops didn’t weigh heavy on the scales given the consequences of the comms data falling into the wrong hands.

  “We’d better move,” said Conway. He could feel the drugs still at peak potency, promising him he could climb mountains.

  The door lever was stiff with age and it lifted reluctantly. Conway checked the passage outside and listened carefully. It was quiet like the grave. With a rising sense of incoming death, Conway led the troops onwards.

  The squad hurried through tunnels which seemed to follow no recognizable pattern. A lot of rooms were given over to storage. Occasionally, Conway saw old pieces of Fangrin kit like freestanding terminals or flat panels meant for wall mounting. He guessed the aliens’ original plans for this facility were once grander than they ended up.

  “Good to see that wastage happens wherever you go,” said Kemp. “There must be a zillion Fangrin tax dollars’ worth of crap down here. Forgotten and gathering dust.”

  “Who cares?” grunted Corporal Brice. She normally had a medic’s stoicism, yet here she was sounding as pissed off as everyone else.

  “Keep it together,” said Conway. “We’ll get out of here.”

  He kept them heading away from the mainframe room. It wasn’t as easy as he expected, since the tunnels were so intricate and intertwined. His HUD drew a rough map based on his footsteps, but it was easily confused by dead ends and too many side passages.

  At least the Fangrin and the Raggers didn’t show up. The squad weren’t mentally ready for another engagement so soon after the last one. They’d fight, but their minds were elsewhere. They felt trapped and the danger was that some of them already accepted they were going to die.

  “What crap,” said Private Stewie Marks. “We should be home by now.”

  “I’ve got family, soldier. I’m not letting them down.”

  “Nor me, sir. I always make the same promise before I leave – I’ll come back with flowers and a medal.”

  “They don’t give medals for ass scratching,” said Kemp. “If they did, you’d need wider shoulders.”

  “Stick it, Kemp. You’re going home to a basement dump somewhere in Shitsville.”

  “That’s bull crap,” said Kemp, suddenly on the defensive. Conway listened carefully, but the soldier didn’t elaborate.

  The passage ended at a door. Conway shrugged when he saw it and gripped the lever with one hand. He bent his legs and pushed until the seal broke. The soldiers stood frozen as he swung it outwards. Air from the facility blew through the opening without much force.

  The space beyond the door was enormous, with a ten-meter ceiling and no sign of the far wall. Twenty meters ahead, the Fangrin had left a huge truck parked up. It looked like a similar model from the mines on Graxol-4, scaled down a lot. The torchlight was enough to illuminate the patina of dust, making the yellow paint appear muddy. Elsewhere, he recognized a rock chewer and a row of much smaller, tracked borers that the aliens used to make personnel tunnels.

  “Cut the lights,” said Conway.

  The squad complied and the darkness became absolute.

  “What’s in there?” asked Torres.

  “Plant and machinery. The stuff they used to make this place.”

  Conway waited for his HUD to enhance the image. It didn’t work too well in a complete absence of light and he knew what to expect when it did – hints, shapes and edges.

  “This must be the main construction base,” said Lockhart. “They abandoned all this gear and kept the hub running.”

  “Where’s the exit?” asked Kemp.

  Conway tried to orient himself. It was useless and anything he decided on was only guesswork.

  “Let’s go look for it.”

  The squad advanced cautiously into the construction room. Stone rattled down from the ceiling nearby, creating a suggestion of movement in Conway’s periphery. He spun towards it and then cursed himself for getting jumpy. The truck was close and he pressed on, heading towards the rear part of its load bed.

  He saw a light at the same time as everyone else. The beam of a torch or something like it, lit up the ceiling twenty meters to the north and then went out. The squad moved at once for cover. Conway pressed himself against the caterpillar tracks and scanned the darkness.

  Nothing came. He held tightly onto his rifle and his breathing sounded loud. He could feel his heart thumping and he told himself it was down to the drugs putting an increased strain on his system. The place where the flechettes went into his skin was a nagging ache and he wondered what the pain would be like in a couple of hours.

  The squad waited. Conway increased the sensitivity of his helmet microphone and listened. The place was near as dammit a total vacuum and he heard nothing he could be sure was footsteps.

  “We’ve got to keep moving,” he said on the open channel. “We’ll take a wide path away from where we saw the light.”

  They crept away from the truck and darted to the next. Conway would have preferred a wall at his back, but the image enhancers weren’t able to distinguish dark greys from black – not with certainty you could trust. He put it from his mind. If the squad kept moving, they’d run into a wall sooner or later. Just so long as they didn’t run into Raggers or Fangrin at the same time.

  “You sure miss your hearing when it’s gone,” said Kemp.

  Conway didn’t point out that their enemies couldn’t hear any better in a vacuum than the members of the squad. He saved his breath since he agreed with Kemp one hundred percent.

  They came to a row of personnel cabins, again built from the same plans as those on Graxol-4. The Fangrin didn’t mess with a solid idea in the same way a human didn’t. Conway wasn’t too interested in the contents of the cabins until Corporal Freeman came up with a suggestion.

  “The work teams must have had comms,” he said. “Unless they took a car up to the surface every time they wanted to get a message out.”

  “Everything looks like it’s a hundred years old,” said Conway. “None of the portable kit can hold a charge for that long.”

  “Unless it’s wired in to the central power supply. Could be they did that when the work was near done.”

  Conway wanted to get out as soon as possible, but he also wanted to speak to the carrier group. “Search them,” he said. “And watch out.”

  They split into teams of five and Conway led his team into one of the cabins. It was a metal box built cheaply and the Fangrin used them for many different tasks. The outer door was opened by a handle and led into a small airlock space with another door. The temperature was the same as it was outside and Conway found no indication of depressurization when he opened the inner door.

  “Power’s off,” he said, ready to change his mind about the search.

  “Doesn’t mean there’s no power,” said Freeman, clearly eager to test out his theory that the Fangrin had a comms link somewhere close by.

  The first cabin had no comms gear. The floor was littered with paper, the crumpled sheets perfectly preserved in the vacuum. Conway saw a discarded metal cup in one corner. It looked as if the Fangrin had cleared out the valuable gear and not bothered sweeping up.

  After the first cabin came the second, similarly empty and with the same detritus left behind after the decent stuff was removed. Conway had counted eight cabins, and probably a bunch more behind those ones.

  “Got something,” said Kemp. “Fifth cabin along.”

  Conway got there fast, with Freeman only a pace behind. Cabin five must have been forgotten when the other gear was being taken, or the occupants stayed here after the rest of the crew went elsewhere. In the first room, Conway saw a desk, covered in more paper. He only glanced at it and saw printed lines which he took to be construction plans for the site.

  Private Kemp stood triumphantly next to a metal box which rested on a second desk in the next room. A blank screen on the facing side of the box was flanked by buttons and dials.

  “That belongs in a museum,” said Freeman. Nevertheless, he hurried over and slid the device closer towards him. “Power button here,” he said, giving it a push.

  “Dead,” said Conway. “Shit, I knew this was a waste of time.”

  “Find the supply cable,” Freeman instructed.

  Kemp leaned over so he could look under the table. “This one lying on the floor?”

  “Give it here.”

  A moment later, Kemp had fished out the cable. One end was attached to a socket in the wall and Freeman plugged the other end into the Fangrin comms box. The screen lit up.

  “If we’re lucky, this will ping a signal to a relay unit somewhere close by and the relay unit will link in with the main antennae on the surface,” said Freeman.

  Conway wondered about the limitations. “This kit will carry one of our signals, right?”

  “That’s the plan, sir.”

  It didn’t take long. “Done,” said Freeman. “Want me to get you a comms link to the carrier group?”

  “Do it.”

  The connection was awful and Conway’s earpiece crackled like bacon in pan. He waited for one of the comms teams at the other end to answer, wondering if there was any good news left for him.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  By the time the Star Burner re-joined the combat, it was almost over. The Fangrin, along with the remnants of the carrier group had destroyed four Ragger warships in rapid succession. Dominguez located another heading away at high speed. The Fangrin picked it up it too and filled it with railgun slugs.

  “A bad day for everyone,” said Kenyon, counting up the losses.

  Dominguez wasn’t so sure. “Bad for them - we got off the lightest.”

  “Makes a change.”

  In spite of the numerical superiority of the Fangrin fleet, they had suffered significant losses. From twenty-three spaceships they were reduced to eleven, two of which were too badly damaged to be effective in future hostilities.

  “Eight Raggers did this,” said Kroll. “They didn’t seem too scared to fight either.”

  “Yeah but they didn’t win,” Dominguez replied. “They attacked a much bigger fleet and the expected outcome is what happened.”

  The Fangrin didn’t settle immediately. They kept up evasive maneuvers and they launched sporadic bursts of shock pulse missiles. All the while, Dominguez scanned for railgun charge-up signatures and came up with nothing.

  “They’re either wiped out or else they ran for it, sir.”

  “They could be watching from half a million klicks out in space.”

  “Yeah, maybe. They could have a thousand warships on the blindside of the planet.”

  Griffin got the message and shut up. He checked in with the Imposition and the order was to hold position.

  “I hope Admiral Kolb comes up with something,” he said. “The carrier is the only spaceship with the capability of picking up those couplers. Without that, we’ve got no more excuses to stay here.”

  “The odds are a bit more in our favor, now,” said Dominguez. The tone of her voice made it clear she wasn’t advocating hostilities with the Fangrin.

  “We’ve got troops on the surface. This is a real shitty situation,” said Kroll.

  “Don’t stop looking on the bright side, Lieutenant.”

  “Sorry, sir.” He sounded like he meant it. “What I meant to say is that this is going to take some fast thinking.”

  “Here’s Admiral Akaxz,” said Kenyon.

  Griffin got ready to listen in. “Let’s hear what the big dog has to say.”

  The Imposition was able to communicate via the comms relays it had left in orbit and would be able to do so for a long while yet until it went out of range.

  “You must leave here,” said the Fangrin.

  “We have two dropships still to dock,” said Admiral Kolb.

  “They have nowhere to go. Your carrier’s engines are offline.”

  “We will have restored some output within fifteen minutes. After that, we will leave this place at once.”

  “My battleship is preparing a missile to destroy the ground facility. Our agreement was forged under duress and no longer stands.”

  “The ships of my carrier group assisted in the battle against your enemies.”