The Black Garden: Chapter 30

Not really happy with this chapter, but I'll have to rewrite/edit once the book has rested for a while.

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For some reason, every personal interaction with Khememmu seemed to involve bondage. I was starting to think that was by design. To ride the wave of creeping, frigid peristalsis that was Hura, I had to let him engulf part of my body so that he could suspend me inside of a creeping ring of goo. I hung in the middle of the Hura-hoop like some weird Berlin performance artist, swaying gently as I tried to figure out the best position for my rifle.

This was the best option we had to evade the sensor mesh. The rubbery white skin that coated the tunnel interior was as sensitive as mine, so sensitive we couldn’t even land the BlackFlies or use the Tarantula on it. Hura had to match its texture and temperature while spreading out our combined weight. Hence the living shibari harness: by suspending me within a semi-rigid spiderweb of Khem, Hura was able to evenly spread our weight between the walls, ceiling and floor as he slowly crawled along the walls of the tunnel.

“Well. This isn’t the weirdest or most intimate thing that’s happened to me these last couple weeks, but it’s up there.” I kept my focus on the environment, minimizing my respiration, heart-rate, and body temperature to stretch out the C-shell’s thermal absorbers. Even with my body temp reduced by several degrees and shivering suppressed, the suit was like a sauna by the ten-minute mark. “I’ve definitely got some questions about your, um, arrangement of mass around my torso here. Very tasteful variation on the hishi-kikkou, by the way.”

“We told you. We spent a significant amount of time in Japan.”

“... I now have several more questions.”

Hura didn’t dignify that with a reply, but the C-shell creaked a bit as the living harness around my body contracted. “We approach the hatch to the extractor.”

The ingress was a sealed round hatch in the ceiling of the corridor, just big enough to admit an average-sized Nu-suht and their rig. Hura flowed into place to let me hack it, Mission Impossible-style, while I hung in front of the panel. My mirth dried up right about then, replaced by focus as I watched the Coyote do its work. This hack took longer than the one on the front door, and I found myself swallowing, sweating as the C-shell’s internal temperature continued to rise. After nearly a minute, the hatch finally beeped and let me unseal it.

“Fucking finally.” The seal released with a frosty hiss, and almost immediately, the muffled thrum of the hyperloop’s extractors became an overwhelming roar. Hura wrapped around me and slithered up into the hole, pulling me and the hatch along behind him into a brightly lit maintenance well. The walls were slick with ice, the wind strong enough that it nearly pulled me off my feet as Hura set me down. There was no sensor mesh in here. My heart lifted as I spotted an access panel set beside the shield for the extractor fan itself.

“No way. It can’t be this easy.” I vented the Coyote’s built-up heat with a sigh of relief, a blast of boiling hot air that melted some of the condensation from the walls. As my suit’s temperature stabilized, I carefully crunched my way over to the panel, holding my fingers poised ahead of the panel. A Nu-suht holo array appeared. My wetware quickly translated it: [Project Maintenance Security: Please Connect Via Hypernet]. I rigged the Firekey, connecting it to my suit, then used the other end of it to tap the panel. We had two discrete instances of the Centipede crawler, and I was willing to burn one of them here. It could give us insight into the whole system.

“We must also remove the shield... and perhaps the extractor’s fan blades, if it uses them,” Hura mused, as he left me and wandered over to examine the cover of the huge pump and the thick steel pipes that funneled heat outside the system, out into the jungle. “We are unsure how we will do this.”

“You leave that to me and Tsariel. Separating things from other things is our gig.” I felt something deep in my bones crawl as SPECTER’s program engaged, the Firekey pulling its payload from my body. I could almost imagine the transparent insects wiggling their way into the system as the red glowing display began to flicker and glitch, throwing layers of overlapping Directorate characters across the display. We waited in tense silence, my pulse quickening when the chaotic mess vanished, replaced by the maintenance system menu. I had no time to read anything: SPECTER was in their system now, speeding through it at a pace no human brain could ever hope to approximate. My brain hummed.

<Operator Zealot. This is a local node, isolated from the rest of the system.> SPECTER’s message projected into my awareness. <We have retrieved a partial schematic of the station and data on arrivals and departures, but the rest of the system is not accessible from this location.>

“Shit.” I knelt back. I turned to Hura and said: “They segmented the system network. This node is local to this bunker only.”

“The enemy is unfortunately competent.” Hura continued to roam the room, crawling it for anything we could exploit. “Then again, they have been planning this for at least a decade.”

“I hate it when the bad guys know what they’re doing.” I skimmed rapidly through the partial schematic that SPECTER uploaded to my HUD. It wasn’t what we needed, but it was still useful: technical diagrams of the station. We now had a comprehensive overview of security cameras, vent shafts, and the internal checkpoint between the station and the bunker. We hadn’t been able to find that on our first run through, let alone breach it. “Fuckers. The station is masked by a whole-ass secret wall. We scanned that wall while we were down there and didn’t see shit. They really overbuilt this whole system... this is some Bond villain-level shit.”

“If there is one thing the Directorate possesses, it is resources.”

I frowned, quickly disconnecting the Firekey and purging it. The panel returned to its idle state, as if nothing had happened. “Well... we burned one Centipede to get this station map and vent control. Useful, but not enough. Fuck.”

The side of Hura’s head split with several eyes, which thoughtfully examined the projected beam of the control panel. “We deduce that the only viable access points for the entire system will be in the central hypernet core—which is almost certainly in a secure location within New Warder—or aboard the hyperloop transports themselves. They must interface with the central core for navigation and control.”

“Right.” I rapidly mapped several possible courses through the extractor system, letting my wetware figure it out. There was one that could take us directly into the airlock. “But there’s no way to sneak onto a shuttle without a fight. Not unless we can force an evacuation.”

Hura absently morphed one heavily muscled arm into a knotted rope of tissue, suckering his fingers onto the extractor’s shield to give it an experimental tug. It didn’t budge. “Breaching this or destroying any part of the ventilation system will cause a security incident. If we encaul you, together we can impersonate a Nu-suht in armor identical to the infantry currently fielded at this site. The disguise would not be sufficient to enter through the bunker... but if we have access to ventilation control, we can penetrate the station from the airlock in between dockings.”

I shook my head. It didn’t feel right, and the risk of a fight was still unacceptably high. Wading in against a horde of demons was one thing. Wading in against an entire company of Directorate armed with QFDs, team comms, and thumpers was way more likely to get us killed. Well... me killed. Hura would probably survive.

I eyed the shield over the extractor. Then the slippery, refrozen ice on the walls.

“I think I’ve got it,” I said, after a couple moments. “All we need to do is get this shield off, wait for the next shuttle... then uh... try not to get sucked down a tube at a thousand kilometers an hour through a small hole.”

***

Hura was correct in saying that disrupting any of the extractors would result in security and maintenance being called in en masse to investigate. However, there was a threshold of damage within the normal ‘wear and tear’ parameters we could cause before the alarms went off - as long as the system thought it was just ice buildup.

It took Tsariel a few tries to create the manifold I needed. Like all artists, she sometimes needed to make a bunch of ‘sketches’ when she tried something new: in this case, a scalpel-like blade so fine and so sharp that it caused the air around it to shimmer and distort. Hura watched with some amusement as I cut a small hole into the shield the same way that I would incise the skin around a breast or a tumor: delicate, curved strokes, teasing the molecules apart to create a wedge of space just large enough for the tarantula drone to squeeze through.

“In you get, little buddy.” As soon as the robot scuttled through, I went to fit the plug back into the shield.

“Hold. We will accompany the drone.” Hura stretched his arm out toward the hole, the limb liquifying - then splitting off a baseball-sized round mass that separated from him completely. It grew tentacles as it slithered into the hole after the Tarantula. “Just in case.”

I felt my brows nearly touch my hairline. “… You can split off mini-Huras.”

“So it would seem,” Hura replied drily.

“Well, obviously. What I mean is that’s a really fucking rare ability for a Khem to have, especially for uh...” I paused, realizing I might be venturing into dangerous territory.

“For a Khememmu of my size,” he finished flatly.

I winced. “Yeah.”

He vented air through several spiracles, like an irritated pipe organ. “We are running short on time. We will monitor the control panel while you seal the hole.”

We discussed loading the second centipede onto the drone but decided against it; the risk of it being destroyed and losing the single-instance payload was too high. Our revised goal was to determine whether or not breaching the shuttle pods from the outside was feasible or not, and if so, by what means. If we could get the tarantula inside one of them by itself and hide in there, we might not get the system map, but we could get some equivalent intelligence. Best case scenario was that SPECTER or one of the wonks in our mission intelligence support nexus could remotely access the drone and use it to rip the map without any further risk to personnel. Worst case was that we would have no choice but to breach the shuttle ourselves, in the flesh.

“We found the manual override,” Hura affirmed, as I piloted the tarantula into the icy blackness of the tunnel. “The ventilation sequence should be dormant. It will delay the launch of the shuttle that is currently in the airlock, and will alert the shuttle operator— an AI, we assume. If we are fortunate, they will accept the short delay as routine maintenance of the system. If we are not... have the drone’s self-destruct ready.”

“Already ahead of you.” My vision was that of the tarantula’s as we scuttled through the tunnel. It was completely blind, because it was so cold and dark that neither its optical or thermal arrays did fuck all. It could still track gravity, though, so I ran along the downslope. It slid and scrambled into the void, the sound of the pumps getting closer and closer. The pump system was warmer than the surrounding vent, filling the space with a steady dull roar. I switched on the tarantula’s flashlight: ahead of us were an array of slowly moving fan blades.

“They are too large for our micro-mass to stop. You will need to dash through,” Hura noted. Said micro-mass slithered up onto the tarantula’s back, riding it like a tiny pony.

“Don’t worry. Decades of playing action RPGs on console have trained me for this very moment.” Holding my breath, I got the little mechanical spider to tense, waiting until I could spot the pattern. On the second pass, I dashed forward, sprinting between the fan blades. On the other side, I used the drone’s laser to cut a small hole in the filter, squirming through into the next section, and the next: three fans, three filters. We emerged from the last filter with a triumphant leap... straight into the abyss of a vertical shaft I hadn’t been expecting.

The ‘oh fuck’ had barely left my lips when the Mini-Hura flung out strands of sticky web, catching us before we slammed noisily into the sealed grille that divided the ventilation shaft from the airlock.

“Nice catch. I thought that last shaft was, uh, less vertical.” Face burning, I magnetized the drone to the shaft wall and began to crawl down. “So now all we have to do is open that grille, and-”

The room and pumps rumbled to life with a wailing banshee scream as the system began to evacuate the air from the airlock. The tarantula and Mini-Hura had no chance: they were sucked off the walls, back up the tube, and straight into the last set of fan blades. I heard the deafening CLANG BANG CRUNCH of shattering metal before the feed cut.

“Fuck! HURA!” I barked his name more out of shock than anything as I was abruptly thrown out of first-person mode and back into the room. He was at the control panel, his body taut as he wrestled with the system.

“The shuttle agent has overridden the maintenance cycle. They must be in a rush to move personnel and supplies,” he reported. “We cannot re-re-override without alerting them to our presence. I will sacrifice my micro-mass, and we will retreat.”

“FUCK.” I paced back and forth in front of the shield to vent my agitation when a series of horrible clanking and grinding noises emitted from the inside of the howling evacuation system. I realized, with a mixture of horror and wonder, that the damaged filters were disintegrating, and sure enough, there was a shuddering groan before the system completely shut down.

The lights in the maintenance room and the screen of the control panel both turned red as an alarm began to blare.

“Hura: if we get down there now, that shuttle is stuck inside the airlock.” I gestured at the shield. “We can get that map.”

Hura took only a moment to reach internal consensus among his selves. If we evacuated, we would have to fight our way out into the jungle. If we went down, we would have to fight our way out through the tunnel system. Realistically, we were unlikely to survive, but we could probably get the map and save hundreds of Fleet lives and millions of civilian lives.

“We are Taga Avaya. We are Leviathan’s Spear. We are the masters of the crushing depths of the ocean and the eternal void of space. There is no void which we fear, and no abyss we shall not conquer.” Hura dropped his chin slightly. “Destroy the shield. We will breach the shuttle ourselves.”