Ferdinand leaned heavily against Ian’s side and grunted with every step. We had to take the elevators or Ferdinand was done. He couldn’t climb three kilometers of stairs.
Ian stopped just before the main tunnel.
The wireless signals had been surprisingly quiet. Either that, or we’d been out of range. I had no idea what was going on ahead of us. Had they already created a blockade?
“Do you have a plan to get us through the checkpoints?” I asked Ian. Identity chips only worked if the person with the chip was alive, so we couldn’t kill a soldier and chop off an arm. I didn’t know how many explosives Ian had brought, but certainly it wasn’t enough for the vast number of checkpoints we had to go through on the way back up.
“I’ve got a codebreaker,” he said. “The bigger problems are the number of soldiers between us and the elevator and the lack of cover.”
“I’ve got my shielding cuff. It’s good for around eight deflections if they’re using pistols. If they’re using long guns, then the protection drops fast.”
“I also have a von Hasenberg prototype shield. Ideally, we’d save them until we reach the surface,” Ian said. “Until then we’ll have to rely on speed and shock.”
I glanced at Ferdinand. He was barely standing. He was a few centimeters shorter than Ian, but he was solidly built. I might be able to carry him for a short distance if Ian helped me get him over my shoulders.
Ian caught the direction of my gaze. “I’ll carry him,” he said. Ferdinand made an indignant noise, but Ian overrode him. “You can barely walk and you expect me to believe you can run for several kilometers?” Ian asked. “Your sister’s life is on the line. Swallow your pride and deal with it.”
Ferdinand bowed his head and nodded.
“We run for the first checkpoint, shouting about a medical emergency,” Ian said. “If they open the gate, we get through before we start shooting. If not, you apply the codebreaker while I shoot.” He handed me the com-sized device he’d pulled from his belly pack. “After that, keep moving and keep shooting. I’m going to seal the gates behind us.”
As far as plans went, it was pretty thin, but we were on a short time line and trapped in the ground with a military base above us. It would have to do.
Ian and Ferdinand tried various carry positions until Ian decided that a fireman’s carry with Ferdinand over his shoulders gave him the best balance and mobility. It was less comfortable for Ferdinand, but he just clenched his jaw and held on.
As we neared the main tunnel, the wireless signals picked up. Apparently the tunnel to the pit hadn’t been deemed a high enough priority for repeaters for the whole length.
I pulled Ian to a stop as I listened in. Pain spiked down my spine, but there were few enough signals that I could endure it. A four-person fire team was on the way down to retrieve us. They were still on the first level. Our level was on lockdown. The soldiers supervising miners were told to stay in place and report any unusual movement.
“They’re on lockdown,” I said. “They won’t believe a medical emergency.”
Ian’s mouth firmed into a grim line. “I’ll activate my shield. We’ll go in shooting.” He pulled out a small silver disc about three centimeters tall and eight centimeters across. He clicked the button in the middle, then clipped it to his belt. “I’ll provide cover and a distraction while you use the codebreaker. Can you stop their transmissions?”
“No.” But right now, I wished I could.
“Then speed remains our first priority. Ready?”
Nerves and adrenaline made a toxic soup in my belly, but I nodded anyway.
Ian broke into an easy jog for the final meters of our tunnel, then we were in the main tunnel. He shot the soldier at the first checkpoint, a perfect head shot, before I realized he was shooting.
I snapped out of my shock and ran for the control panel. I attached the codebreaker and hit the override button. While the codebreaker worked, I popped up and looked for a target, but Ian shot them before I could aim.
An avalanche of wireless signals drove a pike through my skull. I looked at a few, but they were all calling for emergency backup while the people up above tried to figure out what was happening. They deployed a new squad to send down and told the fire team to haul ass.
The gate unlocked with a click. I pulled the codebreaker free, then provided covering fire while Ian opened the gate. He put a strip of insta-weld compound on the closing mechanism, then firmly pulled it closed behind us. Now we had to move forward or die here.
I shot a female soldier as she peeked out of one of the side rooms. She fell with a scream. Ian ducked into the guard station and slammed a hand into the emergency lockdown control. Doors banged closed and another burst of wireless signals flew through the air.
Ian grabbed a blaster from a downed soldier and tucked it into his waistband. The doors to the various side rooms remained closed as we advanced. They were solid metal, so I couldn’t see inside, but I kept a wary eye on them.
I attached the codebreaker to the second control panel. The soldiers at the far end of the tunnel had finally organized. Blaster bolts sailed our way and Ian’s shield took a number of hits. But without the ability to duck into the side rooms for cover, they had no escape from Ian. He methodically shot them down.
His face was a mask of icy calm and I worried about the price his soul was paying in order to help me. The gate clicked open, faster this time. The codebreaker had figured out the pattern.
We moved through the gate and into the soldiers’ section of the level. Ian sealed the gate closed behind us. A door on my right opened and I shot the soldier before I could think about it. The man behind him clipped my left arm with a bolt before Ian put him on the ground. I flexed my left hand. Searing pain accompanied the movement, but my hand still worked. Good enough.
The soldiers could open the doors in this section from the inside, but I guess they didn’t want to give the miners the ability to open the doors in their section during lockdown. It was hard to quell an uprising if those rising up could let themselves out.
I counted five soldiers down in this part of the hallway. At least two were down beyond the next gate. How many were left?
We dashed to the final checkpoint and I put the codebreaker to work. Ian watched our backs, but the hallway was eerily silent. The wireless signals were still flying fast and furious, but most of them were coming down from command. A few soldiers trapped deeper in the mine with the miners were requesting an override to the lockdown.
The gate clicked open and we were through to the elevators. The control panel was illuminated red and nothing happened when I pressed the call button.
“Don’t bother,” Ian said. “They won’t work under lockdown and even the codebreaker won’t be able to override it.”
I stared at the stairwell door. We were three kilometers underground, which was likely over nine hundred floors. If a typical floor had fifteen steps, there were—I did some quick mental math—over thirteen thousand steps between me and the surface.
“I don’t think I can do the stairs,” I said. “I’ll give it a shot, but I want you to promise to leave me behind if I can’t keep up.”
Ian grinned at me and some of his iciness melted. “I appreciate your honesty, but we’re not taking the stairs quite yet. Hopefully. Help me get the elevator door open.” He put Ferdinand down and leaned him against the wall. He handed him a blaster. “Shoot anything that moves in the hallway.”
Ferdinand nodded shakily.
I wedged a combat knife in the sliver of space between the doors. Ian pulled them a few centimeters apart then ran into resistance. He strained, his arms flexing, and I heard metal snap. The door opened to reveal an empty space where the elevator car should be.
The elevator shaft was dark and silent and the air was calm. Still, Ian carefully glanced up, checking to make sure he wasn’t about to be flattened by a descending car. “Stay here and keep the door open,” he said. Before I could protest, he hopped down into the shaft. The top of his head was below the door level.
The elevator car to the right was also missing, but the car to the left was in place. Ian slid between the left two tracks and scaled the elevator car with an ease that never ceased to amaze me. He disappeared from view and a few seconds later, the car moved upward.
“Ian!”
The car moved down far enough that I could see Ian standing on top of it. “I hope you’re not afraid of heights,” he said with a grin.
Heights didn’t usually bother me but I had a feeling that standing on top of an elevator car in a shaft that was nearly a kilometer deep was going to test that truth before all was said and done.
“Let the door go and I’ll open this one for you. Can you help Ferdinand over so I can grab him?”
I agreed and let the door go. It refused to close completely. By the time I’d helped Ferdinand hobble two doors over, Ian was waiting for us. The elevator car was half below the door, leaving a meter-long gap at the top. My brain gave me a vivid image of what would happen if the car moved upward while I was pulling myself through that gap.
Ian hauled Ferdinand up first while I kept a wary eye on the hallway. “Give me your hands,” Ian said.
I tucked the blaster in my belt and raised my arms. Ian grabbed me around the wrists and lifted me easily. Sharp pain lanced up my left arm from the blaster graze, but the bleeding had already stopped thanks to my nanos doing their job.
The top of the elevator had a short safety rail around the three sides away from the wall and a control box with a few manual switches. Ferdinand sat next to the controls in the middle of the car.
“How did you know about this?” I asked.
“I had an adventurous childhood, remember?”
Perhaps, but I’d been trained to break into buildings and didn’t remember anyone mentioning that elevators had manual controls on top. Or had they? I frowned as I searched my less than stellar memory.
Ian drew me closer to the center of the elevator car. “Stay away from the edges,” he said. I nodded my agreement, still trying to remember if I’d ever learned about elevators.
Ian pressed and held a button on the control panel. We moved upward with stomach-dropping swiftness. The bottom of the shaft fell away with alarming speed. I crouched down, then when that didn’t feel stable enough, sat on the roof of the elevator car, as close to the center as I could get.
Ian laughed. “It’s disconcerting at first,” he said, “but it’ll get better once you’re used to it.”
I’d take his word for it. Thanks to the smart glasses I could see, but I wasn’t sure that was actually a positive in this case. The frame holding the elevator tracks flashed by, punctuated every few seconds with an ominous creaking, grinding noise.
Ian glanced around, checked on Ferdinand, and looked up, waiting for the ceiling to come into view.
In a pitch-dark tunnel. Without smart glasses.
“You can see,” I breathed.
Ian cut a glance at me, then Ferdinand, but my brother hadn’t heard me. Yet Ian had. He nodded once, sharply.
I bit my lip to stem the tide of questions I wanted to ask.
We rode in silence for the rest of the trip. It took nearly fifteen minutes to reach the top. Ian stopped the car with our platform level with the bottom of the door. I’d lost signals during the trip, but now I could once again feel messages pressing against my skull.
“The soldiers are still on the first mine level,” I said. “Command pulled the fire team back and now it sounds like they’re planning an ambush. At least two teams, probably a fire team and a squad, so at least twelve soldiers. They are trying to capture us alive.”
The three of us versus twelve of them in fortified positions was not good odds, even if they weren’t shooting to kill. Ian must’ve decided the same thing because he was back to looking grim. He cracked open the door and surveyed the hallway beyond before opening it all the way.
“Hold this,” he told me.
I stood and moved gingerly to the door. I purposefully did not look over the side of the elevator. I held the door open while Ian picked up Ferdinand again.
“We need to move fast,” Ian said. “Before they have time to dig in further.”
“You set the pace since you’re carrying Ferdinand,” I said. “I’ll keep up.”
Ian nodded and set off at a ground-eating lope that was a flat-out run for me. I gritted my teeth and kept pace, even when it felt like my lungs would explode from my body. I didn’t get a break until we hit a gate, and even then, it was only the ten seconds it took for the codebreaker to unlock it.
By the time we made it far enough that we could see the elevators at the end of the tunnel, I was plastered in sweat and Ian was barely breathing hard, despite carrying another full-grown person. I would hate him if I had the energy to spare. Still, we’d covered the distance in ten minutes instead of the thirty it’d taken us going the other way.
Ian stepped into one of the side rooms and the lights came on. The room was a large rectangle, empty now. It could’ve been barracks or a mess hall. We checked all of the rooms clustered at the end of the tunnel, assuming that, like the level below, these used to be the soldiers’ rooms.
They were all empty.
“They could’ve left us a few blasters at least,” I grumbled. “Maybe some combat armor. A handful of grenades.”
Ferdinand looked up from his position on Ian’s shoulder and smiled at me, then rolled his eyes. My heart twisted at this small sign that my brother was still in there somewhere, maybe bruised and battered, but not broken.
I sobered. We were woefully underprepared to face a military unit in a fortified position. I’d hoped to be in and out before they realized I wasn’t who I said I was. Even if Ian was some sort of Genesis Project supersoldier, he couldn’t singlehandedly defeat a dozen soldiers and I was only of moderate help.
I needed to give us a chance. I used the codebreaker to unlock the final gate, then stepped through and asked Ian to hold it open. I wedged the tip of my knife into the edge of the gate’s control panel. The face panel popped off, revealing the wiring underneath.
There was no handy diagnostic port this time. I cut the network cable then carefully separated the individual strands of optic cable. I forced myself to work slowly even as the seconds ticked by, each one reducing our chances.
I opened the cable port on the side of my secondary com and gently fed the correct cable into each slot. I’d taken this com to MineCorp in case I needed to use this same procedure, but I’d been lucky there. Now karma was swinging back around to punch me in the face. I didn’t have time for this right now.
Once all the cables were in place, I set the com to fix the connections. Optical signals needed precise alignment and my just shoving the cable into the connector wasn’t good enough. The com would minutely adjust each cable until the signal worked. It could take up to five minutes.
I set the com down on top of the control box. I could use it from that position and it wasn’t at too much risk of falling.
“If you’re done on that side, you can come through and let the gate close. I just didn’t want it to lock you out if anything went wrong. This will take a few minutes, then I’ll need a few more. I’m planning to unleash a virus on the base that will take out any connected systems. How long do you think it will take us to reach the upper floor by elevator?”
“You’re taking out the power?” Ian asked with raised eyebrows. He came through the gate and set Ferdinand down next to the elevators.
“Ideally. Depends on how hardened their systems are.”
“Fifteen minutes should be safe,” he said.
I nodded. “Let’s get ready.”
Ian and I wedged open the nearest elevator doors but found a car instead of empty space. “Can you go through the roof?” I asked.
Ian grimaced. “I can, but it’ll be easier if I don’t have to.”
We tried four more doors before we found an empty shaft. Ian hopped in and claimed the elevator to our right, where we’d already opened the door. He lowered the elevator until we could climb up through the gap.
When I checked the com, the connection was good. I poked around on the network for a second just to see if anything obvious came up, but I didn’t see anything. It didn’t matter. If there was the smallest opening, the virus would find it. It was designed to penetrate military-grade installations.
I set up a simple script that would release the virus then wipe the com. It would run after a fifteen-minute timer. I cut the connection to my smart glasses and triple-checked that everything was set up correctly directly on the com. I checked the current time then kicked off the script.
“We have fifteen minutes. We need to be upstairs by then, just in case.”
Ian climbed onto the elevator, then waved off my attempt to help Ferdinand up. “You first,” he said. Once I was on top of the elevator with him, he continued, “This is the control box.” He pointed at the control panel. “This switch needs to be flipped to up, and the manual override set, like so. Then you must hold this button to ascend.”
“Why are you showing me this?” I asked slowly.
“You’re going up on your own,” he said. “I’m taking Ferdinand up the stairs.”
“No,” I said flatly.
“Yes. If they ambush us on the landing, we’ll be sitting ducks if we’re both in the elevator. They won’t expect me to take the stairs.”
“You plan to climb over four thousand stairs carrying another person? You won’t have to worry about me, I’ll be in a cell long before you make it to the top.”
“Want to bet?” Ian asked softly. He had a confident, arrogant tilt to his head that was wildly compelling. “What are you willing to lose?”
I huffed. “My life, apparently.”
“Trust me, Bianca. You know I wouldn’t put you in unnecessary danger. You go up in the elevator and provide a distraction. You don’t even have to shoot at them. Give them some sort of sob story. Tell them I went crazy, but you escaped. Whatever, just keep them distracted. I’ll follow and take care of it.”
“I left my com behind. I won’t be able to talk to you,” I said, grasping at straws.
“But I can talk to you, right?” he asked, a speculative look in his eyes. He turned on his mike. “Testing.”
I caught the signal, just as he’d intended, but I didn’t give in. “Everyone else in the base can hear you, too.”
He turned the mike off again. “I’ll be careful with it. You can do this, love,” he said. “You know you can.”
Maybe I had known that, once, but that same confidence had also gotten me in a world of trouble.
He stepped closer and touched my jaw, a gentle press of fingers that tilted my head up so he could catch my gaze. “You are stronger than you know, Bianca.”
Bitter laughter bubbled out and I couldn’t stop it. “I’m sorry to disappoint—”
He pressed his finger against my lips, cutting off my words. “You do not disappoint me. Never. We are in a Rockhurst mine, rescuing your brother, because of you. Ferdinand is alive because of you. You can do anything you set your mind to. I would never, ever bet against you because that would be a sucker’s bet.”
His expression showed exactly how serious he was. He really did believe I could do anything. I stared at him in wonder, and then let his confidence buoy my own.
“Fine,” I agreed. “Show me how to open the door.”
He did, then he kissed me, a hard press of his lips against mine that I felt in every cell of my body. While I was still reeling, he climbed down and vanished through the elevator doors.
I touched my lips and firmed my resolve. I could do this.
I would do this.