Web of Extinction Read online

  Five rats sixteen meters ahead of this unit’s last forward position. Coordinated strike required. 49% chance of successful elimination without alarm.

  I nodded, checking my rifle. Fifty-fifty wasn’t great odds, but there wasn’t any other choice. Either kill the rats and move forward or the rats alerted the rest, and yet we would still have to move forward. Facing the horde was inevitable; it was just a matter of putting it off as long as possible.

  Rikki spun the Unit 19 airframe around and shot back up to his former position, the payload of bricks clutched in his mechanical talons. Cautiously, I moved ahead down the tunnel, still trailing the Decimator as it now moved slowly over the tracks ahead. Suddenly powerful light shone down from the belly of the drone, illuminating a handful of rats, three on the tracks, two on the sides, all staring up at the sudden brightness.

  Three ticks came from the drone, then after a pause, two ticks, and finally one. At the one, I squeezed my trigger smoothly until I felt the sear release and the rifle slapped against my shoulder softly. Even as the first rodent on the concrete side disappeared in a mist of blood and kicking feet, I snapped a second round off at the one next to it. A brick hit one of the three rats on the rail, but the other two squealed and darted away. Rikki shot forward like a bullet, swooping down, lights still shining, dropping his last brick like a bomb. It tumbled one of the rats long enough for me to shoot it, but the fifth rat got away around a slight bend in the tunnel, squealing loud enough to wake the dead.

  “Audio sensors indicate large numbers of rats approaching at significant speed. Prepare accordingly,” Rikki announced.

  We’d planned for this, knowing that getting past whatever colony of rats held this tunnel as home territory required confrontation. I had rather hoped it would come later—much later.

  The first thing I did was to pull two improvised incendiary devices from my vest and place them upright on the tunnel floor. Each of these had a length of exposed fuse which Rikki could ignite with one of his more powerful ranging lasers. While not strong enough to cause damage to a flying drone, at full power the focused beam of light could ignite flammable substances, like match heads and… fuses.

  With the incendiaries set in place, I moved up about eight meters and set another device on the subway floor, ahead of the burners. This was an impact-detonated binary explosive device fitted into a plastic body that would shape the direction of the explosion toward the rat swarm. At least that was the theory. One side of the bomb had several hundred BBs while the back side was thicker plastic painted with a glowing, luminescent green circle for me to shoot.

  Moving back ten meters behind the incendiaries, I switched rifle magazines, chambering a full power LAP round, then loosened some of the other goodies in my vest. A new sound caught my attention, a heavy rustling that rose rapidly in volume as thousands of rats moved my way.

  Rikki pulled back till he was hovering directly overhead and began a countdown.

  “Thirty meters to contact, twenty-five, twenty, fifteen, ten, five—igniting fuses now.”

  A blue line of light shot from the underside of the hovering Decimator, touching one of the devices. Sparks shot up as the fuse ignited, then the beam switched to the other, setting off that fuse a few seconds later.

  I watched the sparking bombs to make sure they were really burning, waiting until what looked like about a thousand small eyes appeared as points of reflected light in the darkness. Then, after taking a deep breath, I shut my eyes.

  A full-body shudder ran through me and I felt a desperate need to open my eyes, a response to the deep-seated primal sort of fear that suddenly clenched my insides and turned them to water. Carnivorous rats are terrifying in a way that exceeds even an Indian Tiger drone.

  I can fight a single drone. Fighting thousands of chomping rats was almost impossible. Thirty or even fifty rounds of ammo wouldn’t scratch the surface of those numbers. Yet here I was, in the dark, in a tunnel, getting ready to fight the impossible fight. With my eyes shut.

  Sunlight came to the subway a few seconds after my lids clenched shut, piercing the thin skin over my eyes, accompanied by a horrendous squeal, magnified by ten thousand rodent throats at once.

  After what seemed like forever, but was probably really only two or three seconds, the light diminished to mere blinding. I turned my head till my face was looking at the side wall of the tunnel, and then carefully, slowly, opened my eyes.

  Twin white-hot stars burned on the tracks, magnesium from the fire starter kits, burning hot enough for me to feel the heat back where I was standing, while thick smoke rose in steady streams to the ceiling of the tunnel. Beyond the eye-searing points of light, a dark blanket of fur rustled and moved in waves. Thousands and thousands of rats surged back and forth, moving about like a living carpet or an ocean of dark fur and naked tails.

  “Shooting the mine,” I announced.

  “Acknowledged,” my drone said as I lined up my sights on the plastic back of my homemade claymore mine. The little rifle fired, loud in the tunnel, even through my suit’s earplugs. The bomb went off an instant later, ten times louder, adding a huge cloud of white smoke to fill the space.

  Both incendiaries burned out a few seconds later, leaving just the light from my headlamp to illuminate the smoke-filled tunnel.

  It took an agonizing ten or more seconds for the lowest part of the subway to begin to clear, as the bomb smoke kept rising, flowing along the tunnel top in both directions. A twitching mass of red and black met my eyes, hundreds of dead and dying rats giving testimony to the effectiveness of my father’s lessons. It made my already clenched stomach flip-flop over to see all the blood and little bodies, but I couldn’t take any time to think about it. Instead, I pulled an old-school road flare from my vest, ignited it, and tossed it forward before moving into the mess. Rikki kept pace overhead, his fans moving swirls of smoke in at least four directions.

  Then I was stepping through the carnage, trying to ignore the crunching and squishing under my feet as I watched through the light of my flare. Twenty meters more and I had to throw another flare, the light from the first not quite reaching far enough for me to see what I dreaded to see.

  It swirled through the dark of the tunnel to land in a writhing sea of dark fur and thousands of little red eyes. They covered the tunnel from wall to wall, the mass extending as far back as the hissing flare could illuminate.

  “Application of modified M84s is indicated.”

  “Yeah, if only I had fifty of them,” I said, pulling the first of the flashbangs from my vest. They were thicker than before, made so by the wrapped layers of duct tape and steel BBs I had wound around them.

  Rikki dropped down and extended his talons. I placed the grenade in his claws, made sure they closed tight around the body of the bomb, especially the striker arm. It refused to budge as I pushed and twisted on it, making it okay for me to pull the safety pin out.

  “Armed.”

  “Affirmative,” he said, rising back up near the tunnel ceiling.

  I pulled another M84, clenched it tight in my fist, and pulled the pin. In the red light of the flare, the rats were lining up facing me, moving forward like the tide.

  “Throwing in three, two, one,” I said, then threw the grenade as far down the tunnel as I could before dropping down and covering both ears and opening my mouth.

  Overpressure in a tunnel is a real danger; in fact, it was the major reason that Rikki couldn’t use any of his complement of on-board micro missiles. Even the air-to-air weapons had too much explosive force, and forget about the battery of thermobaric missiles he carried. Those would kill me as fast as they killed the rats.

  The flashbang went off with a clap of thunder and a flash of light, a wave of pressure blowing past me. I felt a few BBs ricochet off the ceiling and ping down around me, several bouncing painfully off my stealth suit. Most of them were absorbed by the rats and when I stood up to look, all I saw was blood and little rodent body parts—everywhere.
/>   Rikki shot ahead in the tunnel, moving past the site of the first explosion, deeper into the darkness till he disappeared.

  “Next M84 to be released in five, four, three, two, one,” he counted as he flew back my way and once again, I dropped down to kneel, hands over ears.

  As soon as the second grenade detonated, I was up and running, racing through the carnage to make as much distance as possible before the rats recovered. My feet slipped and slid but I didn’t look down to see what I was running through, my eyes staying focused up ahead. As the second flare got closer, I pulled another one and ignited it with its striker cap, holding it up and out to the side as I passed the one on the ground.

  The dead and twitching bodies had thinned to just a few, but the main body of the swarm was up ahead of me, now running away from me, moving faster than I could. They’re tough and vicious, but fire and explosions were more than they could take. The question was, how long would their panic last?

  The answer came much faster than I wanted. The distance between me and the end of the horde suddenly shortened as they slowed almost completely to a stop, which forced me to do the same. Up ahead in the darkness, I could hear water splashing, lots of water, and lots of splashing, as if the rats were racing into an entire pool of water. I stopped completely and held the flare up to try and see.

  “The tunnel appears flooded, wall to wall. I calculate the depth as being over three meters in places, but the water does not completely fill the tunnel. The rodents are swimming across the surface.”

  We had pregamed lots of things. Forcing the rats to flee ahead of us was one of them, as was a flooded tunnel. The good news was the flooding didn’t go to the ceiling. The bad news was the water was filled with panicking, soon to be angry rats. No place for me to be swimming.

  “How far have we come?”

  “Approximately .65 kilometers.”

  Still more than two clicks to go. It was sooner than I had hoped, but there was nothing for it. Rikki would have to carry me.

  Chapter 9

  The Decimator had the power to carry my full weight, a feat which we had tested the last time we were in the Zone, when he carried Harper and myself down an elevator shaft. The issue was the same as before: battery life. Hauling my full weight and the weight of my gear would drain his very advanced batteries at a hellish rate.

  “Can you determine how far the water extends?”

  The blue beam of his powerful range-finding laser shot out into the distance. It was just a one-second pulse, a straight blue line into the darkness. Then he tilted his nose down slightly and sent out another pulse. Another few degrees of nose declination and he blasted blue light one more time.

  “Most accurate estimate is eight hundred, seventy-nine meters, plus or minus five meters.”

  Most of a kilometer.

  “Current power reserves?”

  “Seventy-seven percent. Sufficient to cross the water with AJ as payload.”

  “How much will you have left?”

  “I estimate fourteen percent power at completion of travel.”

  The two recharge packs I had with me could each give him something like a ten to fifteen percent boost. So at the very best, we might finish the water, recharge maybe twenty to thirty percent, and then have to complete a bit more than one kilometer just to get out of the subway. It was tighter than I wanted, but there was nothing to be done about it.

  “Okay, cut any extraneous power bleeds and let’s do this.”

  “Affirmative.”

  He floated down till he was about a meter off the ground while I slung my rifle on my back and tightened down all my gear. Then I climbed on top of him, lying on my stomach, my feet hanging off the back of his airframe. I had to splay out my boots a bit to avoid disturbing his rear thruster fans, and the relatively sharp edge of his forward wing surfaces were my only handholds.

  “Ready,” I finally said after shifting all around and not finding any position that was going to be any better.

  “Affirmative,” he said, and suddenly we were flying.

  My face was down and turned to the left, my headlamp lighting the wall of the tunnel, at first about a meter and half of space above us to the ceiling. But that distance got smaller and smaller as we travelled over the splashing, squealing rats below, the ceiling getting uncomfortably close to my head. Rikki dropped closer to the surface of the water and for a time, the horde of floating rodents was loud and very near. They got louder as we passed over them and then I realized that the downdraft from his fans was pressing on the ones right below us.

  I held tight to his wings but he kept his flight stable and there was no air movement in the tunnel to rock his airframe. I closed my eyes and counted seconds in my head. Rikki had estimated about ten kilometers per hour carrying my lanky ass as the best (and by that I mean the most energy-efficient) speed he could make. I kept myself busy doing the math in my head while still trying to count the time. Over five minutes to clear the water, that’s what I came up with. At a mental count of five minutes and forty-six seconds, he came to a stop and I opened my eyes. We were now over wet concrete and steel rails, but none of it was submerged. The edge of the underground lake was just behind us.

  I slid off his airframe, noticing he was now wobbly when before he was rock solid.

  The rifle came off my back, weapon light on, and I did a quick sweep of the area. A few sets of beady red eyes met my lights but otherwise the bulk of the rats seemed to be still on the water. Still, our time was short. We had to get a move on, as they would catch up eventually.

  “Status?”

  “Power reserves at eleven percent.”

  I pulled the first power pack from a pocket and plugged it into his recharge port. Then, while he was still hovering, I pulled a pair of nylon straps from yet another pocket and attached these to four tie-down points on his airframe. My own small pack I slipped on backwards so that it was on my chest.

  “Change to vertical.”

  He obliged, lifting his nose to the ceiling so I could slip an arm through each of the straps.

  “Power off all fans and non-essential systems.”

  “Affirmative,” he said just as his full dead weight hit my shoulders.

  Rikki is made of ultra-light components, mostly titanium and carbon fiber, but between his missile loadout and his batteries, he still tips the scales at just over thirty-five kilos. That makes him a pretty heavy backpack, but the tunnel was straight and smooth and most of the rats were behind us. He had carried me; now it was my turn to carry him.

  It was easier to say than do. I’ve carried packs with more weight, but they were all ergonomically fitted to balance on my body in the most efficient way. Rikki was a big slab of triangular composite material whose rear thrusters banged on the back of my legs while the barrel of his e-mag gun occasionally banged into the back of my head.

  I tried to remember that I had ancestors, hell, probably living relations, who had hauled stranger and more awkward items high into the Himalayas without complaint. Aama had told me many stories of almost superhuman feats of strength and endurance in air so thin that outsiders could barely walk in it unburdened.

  So it was head down and one foot in front of the other. Just a kilometer. The slope upward was very moderate and the footing was pretty good. I saw other rats but only had to shoot twice. Both times, the noise and muzzle flash drove them away. I had figured it would take about fifteen minutes of slogging to get to the East Broadway station. Turned out it only took thirteen. It’s entirely possible that Rikki announcing the arrival of the rat pack at the edge of the water behind us motivated me to pick up speed near the end of my trek.

  Regardless, the seven-meter-wide tunnel suddenly opened up to a much wider space with raised platforms on either side of us and the back end of an abandoned subway car blocking the last part of the station.