ANGIE, START ME UP

1563 4D

Laden with ammo-stocked carapieces, ballistic sidearms, and missile-turning wryshields, they moved through a series of laterally-staggered streets toward West 36, or Level 636 West. Ellichik and Andrew agreed on a lift site, and they dropped in a small car to Level 638. Andrew looked at Grendel apprehensively as they dropped, jammed together, but layers of eyeshields obscured Grendel‘s face. “Grendel, you okay?” Andrew asked.

The big man’s helm nodded. “Yeah, this thing touched me up with some KT. I’m fine. Heh. Oughta carry that shit with me all the time.”

On West 38, before they could open the door, a blast threw the liftcar against the back of the shaft. “Damn!” said Ezzar. She reached up in back of her and pulled a canister from her carapiece. “Let’s fog the place.” With the punch of a finger, she armed it.

“Yes. Slow things down out there. Four, on my count, four,” Ellichik said, grabbing the door to shut it fast after it opened. “One, two, door, four!” At the word “door” the door drew back, at “four” Ezzar threw the canister into a hall patterned by horizontal bars of light, and Ellichik rammed the door shut again.

A “Phoot!” and thick gray mist began to leak into the car. Shouts and running feet. Scrabbling at the door, then a brief clicking sound. Someone, a bugboy maybe, arming ballistics to shoot through the lift door. Ellichik said, “Six Three Seven”, the car rose immediately, and the battering of bullets came from beneath their feet.

The level above lay eerily quiet. They listened for a long moment, then Ellichik peered out with a torch, stepped out, surveyed the understreet, and beckoned, saying, “We’ll check the stair, about a minute west.” They moved cautiously, finding themselves in a street that jogged right or left occasionally but had no side corridors or turns. They came to a dead end.

“This wasn’t here,” Ellichik said. “It looks like new stone, sealed from the other side. We’ll have to go back, unless you know some of your tunnels.” He turned his helm toward Andrew.

“I didn’t see any on the way,” Andrew said. “If they’ve done this, they might have closed off all the utilities as well.”

After a jog back past the lift, cross-corridors opened out, and Ellichik stopped them. “We’re in militia space here,” he muttered. “Better find another…" A blazing beam lanced past his head. They all dived off into niches on both sides of the understreet.

“Well. Visitors.” A melodious soprano voice sounded in Andrew‘s earset. “We thought being pinned down here was lonely. Did Torre send you over to keep us company?”

“Who are you?” Ellichik‘s voice.

“Melasine. Torre sent me up here to keep an eye on the andros. There wasn’t supposed to be fighting. They’re all scared to death.”

“Where are you? We can’t see you.” Ellichik again.

“Behind the big guy, oh, he’s an andro, with a gun!” Andrew and Ellichik stared across at Grendel and Ezzar. A door cracked open behind the two; then closed again. “Get away from us. They’ll kill us if you’re fighting here.”

Lances of light filled the understreet briefly, igniting the dust in starlike flashes. Then a huge beam blinded Andrew; Angie shielded his senses. Dead space, dark and silent, surrounded him, while the stone trembled under his feet and he smelled fresh dirt.

“Come on, Angie, start me up, honey,” came Grendel‘s muttered voice. Six figures in collechi-marked helms came sprinting up from the way Andrew‘s group had come, illuminated in gold outline in Andrew‘s heads-up by his helm‘s IDer.

“Come on,” one of them said, “We flanked them and cut them off. Bugs ahead.” And they dashed away, trying to target their foes before the beam effects wore off. Grendel and Ellichik followed, Andrew and Ezzar in the rear. Andrew seized his sidearm.

The next few seconds took a jagged swift shape for Andrew that had no equivalent in his memory or experience. The helm amplified his sight. In a split-second flicker, seven bug-headed figures rose from behind a smoking thermal shield and in a lightning flicker, without weapons, disemboweled the first three humans to reach them. In the same interval, Grendel spurted ahead of the others, his arms came up at a dead run, and he hurled a long metal rod, spinning it laterally, sending it into the figures to decapitate two of them the instant after they had killed. Light lanced from Ellichik‘s beam gun and exploded a third.

A red figure flared in Andrew‘s eye interface just in front of him; he raised his weapon and clenched his finger, and the figure’s head blew apart. He stopped, spun; Grendel traded swipes with another red figure, and Andrew put a shot in its side. A fire stabbed in his left shoulder; he glanced that way and Ezzar buried her blade, finishing with a long ripping stroke, in the exoarmor seam of the one that had nearly killed him. A beam blast from Ellichik blew its head off at the neck. Grendel threw the remains of his opponent aside and scanned the corridor ahead.

The last one had simply vanished, leaving the six surviving humans standing over their writhing and dying cohorts. Ezzar stared off into the gloom beyond the scene. She pointed. “I see it,” she said.

“Yeah. There.” Grendel raised his big gun to a dead-steady lock, and fired one shot, lighting up the understreet further down for a thousand strides. A scream, ragged and undulating, came back at him.

“That’ll keep him out of it for a while,” Grendel said. He returned to the headless bodies of the bug soldiers and gathered up their long black knives, still wet with blood, and their scabbards. Before he wiped the blades clean, he stabbed each of the bodies deep in the thorax, rending any superganglia that might reanimate them.

“Clear, we’re gonna shoot through again,” one of the surviving newcomers said tonelessly. They all ducked into niches, and the huge blaze of energy filled the understreet once more. “Now,” he said, “Help us get Wisnener out of here. We can save him. The others are gone.” Four more helmed figures appeared, armed, surveying the street further along.

“There’s andros back there, with a woman,” Andrew said, pointing. “Why not get them to help out here?”