Chapter Sixty-Eight - Darkness

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***

The darkness was... strange.

No, alright, it was normal darkness. Just a lack of light from above. The thing is, I could still ‘see’ perfectly well. My cybernetic cat eye was pretty good about low-light, and it was messing with my head that my meat eye wasn’t.

Strangely enough, the ears helped me see more.

I hadn’t noticed how accustomed I’d gotten to my new ears, I guess. They were supposed to have some sort of sonar to them, and I had noticed that I could see a sort of mental image of things that were around a corner, but it was all very subtle. A sort of impression that faded into the background when I wasn’t paying attention. Something about the system had to be there to prevent it all from disorientating me.

Now, in the deepening darkness of the mines, that system came into play again. Or it would be more accurate to say that I noticed it more. I couldn’t see into the deeper darkness, but I could sense what was there anyway.

Freaky.

Kinda cool though.

My grapple system lowered me down metre by metre until finally my foot touched the ground. I’d left Whisper in the Fury, figuring that a long-ranged, low-rate-of-fire weapon like that wouldn’t be of much use in a mine. Looking around, I had the impression it was the right choice.

The moment I touched down, I deposited the two Mecha cats I was holding. The suckers were pretty heavy, but at least they had little handles on them. The mecha deployed while I looked around.

There were big chunks of rock and stone all over, fallen pieces from whatever had caused the hole above, I figured, but the walls themselves were smooth, as if someone had polished them.

I unclipped myself from the grapple’s harness, then used an aug-command to send the whole thing wheeling back up.

Reaching into my coat, I pulled out my Trench Maker, then tugged up the hood on my cloak. The cat-ears on my helmet actually served to keep the cloak in place, which was handy.

Then with a flick of a switch, I turned on the cloak and faded away. My coat’s invisibility came on too, and with the two combined, I figured I was nearly entirely covered. My head from any direction but straight ahead, my legs from the same. Only the bottom of my boots and maybe my hands and guns when I stuck them out would be visible. That was pretty decent, I figured.

“Myalis,” I muttered. “Remind me to get a stealthy gun.”

Gladly.

My Trench Maker was fun, but it was the loud kind of fun. “I’ll need some silent grenades too.”

I see three options there. Either chemical grenades, that spread toxins or solutions to break apart Antithesis, or Flesh Melters. The nanites are silent. Both options are fairly slow-acting.

“And the third option?” I asked.

Black hole bombs, by dint of being what they are, do not let any sound escape.

“Huh,” I said. “That’s something.” I didn’t have the points for any gear like that just then, which was really starting to get annoying. I liked being able to buy my way out of trouble. “Let’s wait for Gomorrah to arrive, then we can look into farming for points.”

Wonderful!

Gomorrah’s timing was on-point. I heard the faint whine of the grapple system from above, and my favourite nun came sliding down like a spider on the end of a thread. She touched down and swung her flame-thrower around in an arc, the gun tucked under her armpit. Her other hand held onto the handle on the back of one of my mecha cats. “Cat?”

“Hey,” I said while bringing a hand out from under my cloak to wave.

“Didn’t see you there,” she said. “Honestly, I can’t see much. Are we safe?”

“Safe-ish?” I tried. I couldn’t see any Antithesis, but I hadn’t been looking all that hard. The ground was a dusty mess, and thanks to that, it wasn’t hard to see the trails left behind. Paw-prints, or the nearest thing to paws that the aliens had, other spots where things had dragged across the ground.

Gomorrah removed her mask, then pulled something out from within it. The insides? A box materialized by her feet, and she knelt down, opened it, and replaced the insides of her mask with a new insert.

“What’s that?” I asked

“Night vision,” she said. “Or dark vision? I’m not entirely sure of the mechanics. It lets me see in low-light. And I won’t be blinded by sudden changes in brightness.”

“Neat,” I said. “Why not just get a whole new mask?”

“I have modular gear,” she said. “Most of it’s covered by my habit.”

Interesting. It only made sense that she’d have her own way of doing things. Probably less wasteful than my own, actually.

“That way, I think,” she said, pointing off to one side.

“I’ll go ahead,” I said. “We need some way for you to know where I am.”

“My friendly fire does tend to be a bit literal,” she said.

With your permission, I can send microsecond updates on your relative location to Gomorrah, and with the assistance of Atyacus she will know where you are at all times.

“Sounds fair,” I muttered. “Gomorrah, Myalis is sending Atyacus my location information. No need to try and get me hot and bothered.”

“Adorable,” she said. “I’ll send you the same, I guess.”

It took a bit of fiddling, but soon Gomorrah had an outline around her whenever I looked her way, one that moved whenever she did. It was kind of neat. “Ready?” I asked. The same aura appeared around my three cats too. They weren’t stealth models, but they were pretty quiet already.

“Lead away.”

I stepped out ahead, Trench Maker low to my side and attention out ahead. The mines got a bit cleaner as I moved past the spot with the opening above. Somehow, I didn’t expect to feel the weight of all that rock above me pressing down. Not literally, just a sort of... awareness that there was a lot of shit above me, and it might not stay there.

Kneeling down a little ways into the tunnel, I brushed my meat fingers over the floor. “How is it so smooth?” I asked. It wasn’t smooth-smooth, but it wasn’t as rocky and pebbly as I would have thought a mine would be.

From the company records, it seems as though they adopted some Vanguard-level technology to mine. Mostly to discover mineral deposits, but they also use a plasma-jet system to burn into the earth.

“Hmm,” I said. Some sort of melting effect would explain the smoothness. It reminded me a bit of melted plastic, like leaving a bottle on a heating vent for too long.

The company is supposed to back-fill some mines once they are done extracting from them, but in most cases they mark the shafts as filled without doing so, or fill them with what seems to be industrial waste.

“How surprising,” I said, my tone about as flat as the floor.

The mine bent a little, and it was as I moved forward around that bend that I noticed the first Antithesis to greet me.

A Model Four, one that seemed to be injured.

I raised my Trench Maker, then hesitated. Loud. It would attract all the rest, which was both good and not.

Then more aliens joined my new pal, some Model Threes that seemed a bit smaller than I was used to, and with a strange shuffling, a large worm appeared. A Model Eight. I hadn’t seen one of those in a while.

The Model Threes surrounded the Model Four, then on some unseen signal, they tore into it, chopping the Model Four apart and tearing limbs off before tossing them to the worm.

You missed out on some points there.

“What the hell?”

Antithesis have no sense of individuality. No more than a leaf on a tree can think for itself. This is the hive pruning itself for more resources. A good sign.

I tucked my Trench Maker away, then pulled up my Icarus. I had some options for the kind of explosive I wanted to thump ahead from the launcher, but really, there was an HE option and I was a high explosives kind of person.

Lining up the shot took a second, then I pulled the trigger and felt the launcher kick back with a satisfying ‘fwump’.

The HE round landed right in the middle of the pack and I flinched back as an explosion rocked past me.

I hadn’t considered what being in a tunnel would do with an explosion like that.

At least it was significantly worse for the aliens.

Targets Eliminated!
Reward: 60 points
New Total: 95 points

I grinned. The worm alien was missing its front half, and the Model Threes were scattered across a few dozen metres, the bits of them that were still recognizable.

I was going to pat myself on the back for a job well done when I heard some motion coming from deeper in the mine. A lot of motion.

“How many aliens are we dealing with?” I asked.

Likely several hundred to the low thousands, depending on how entrenched the hive is. As long as it has biomass, that number is likely to redouble every twenty-four hours.

“Ah... shit.”

***