Chapter 5: Fuel for the Fire

When they arrived at the mouth of the second tunnel, the SWAR team were already preparing to venture inside. Their black APC was parked nearby, and they were checking their gear, one of them talking to the flock of Valbarans who had given the briefing at the start of the operation. Several Kodiaks had formed a protective perimeter, their engines idling as they stood guard, and a few of the alien vehicles had lined up nearby. It looked like Hernandez had been right – they might try to send them through the tunnel if the SWAR guys found an exit into the compound on the other end. The tankettes were slightly shorter and narrower than the tanker Bug had been and would probably be able to make it through.

“Here’s the plan,” Simmons said, relaying their new orders. “The Spec-Ops guys are going in first, and if they find a way through, we’re going in after them. Our job will be to secure the exit and lock it down until the Valbarans can get their vehicles inside the wall. If the tunnel leads to some kind of underground facility, the Valbarans will follow us in on foot, and we’ll start the clearing operation.”

Evan watched as the SWAR operatives lined up outside the tunnel, then moved into the shadowy opening one by one, their rifles at the ready. He noted that they didn’t have any Jarilans with them, despite the fact that every IFV in the company had been assigned a trio of the aliens. Did they have some means to detect pheromones on their own, or were they just that averse to working with the insects? They must have a lot more autonomy than the average Marine, judging by their unorthodox gear, so maybe that was a decision that they had the authority to make.

“I’m glad we’re not goin’ first,” Hernandez muttered, shifting his weight uncomfortably. “You ever been inside a Bug hole before, Evan?”

He took a moment to decide whether it was an off-color joke or a genuine question, eyeing his friend suspiciously through his visor.

“Nah, can’t say that I have.”

“I’ve spent a lot of time in hives,” Jade added, walking over to join them. “I lived in one for most of my life. As long as you can sense pheromones, you won’t stand any chance of getting lost, and it’s not as dark as it looks. At least back home, we had bioluminescent fungi that grew on the ceiling to provide illumination.”

“We have night-vision, so I’m not too worried about that,” Hernandez replied. “I just ... don’t like enclosed spaces, y’know?”

“You live on an assault carrier,” Evan scoffed. “Your quarters are about the size of a walk-in freezer. How the hell can you be claustrophobic?”

“I dunno,” he replied with a shrug, eyeing the mouth of the tunnel warily. “Maybe it’s somethin’ about havin’ a thousand tons of earth over my head.”

Evan’s heart skipped a beat as the sound of far-off gunfire echoed through the tunnel. He exchanged a worried glance with his companions, sliding down his visor preemptively. After a few more minutes of tense waiting, the SWAR team reemerged. They looked none the worse for wear, though one of their number was splattered with Bug juice, the mucous-colored fluid sticking to his visor and his prosthetic forearm.

Delta company’s lieutenant and the flock of Valbaran commanders stepped forward, Evan listening in as the Spec-Ops team gave their report.

“The tunnel comes out into some kind of courtyard,” the man with the cockroach-themed faceplate began. “It’ll put us inside the compound, on the other side of the wall. We need to send in the armor first because they’ll be expecting us. We cleared the tunnel on our way through, but that doesn’t mean they won’t send more of ‘em in after us.”

“Then we shall send in the Cozat’li tankettes first,” one of the Valbarans said, turning to her companions as the panels on their suits flashed in colored patterns.

“They will form a safe perimeter and cover the infantry as they emerge,” another added.

“It’s all the cover we’re gonna have, so I hope those things can take a hit,” the operative replied skeptically. “And for fuck’s sake, watch your fire. You all saw how that tanker went up.”

“I will tell my Commandos to be careful,” one of the Valbarans said. “Don’t worry, they will do their jobs.”

“We could send in the Bugs first,” another member of the SWAR team added. He was clad in black Marine armor that had an exaggerated ballistic collar, the exposed forearms of his prosthetics patterned with elaborate tattoos that looked like they had been laser-etched into the polymer. He took a step forward, leaning his heavy XMR over his shoulder. It was configured as an assault rifle, but the attachments and tightly-packed coils made it look heavy enough that an unaugmented person would have trouble carrying it. Like his friends, his matte black visor was decorated with a decal – this one a stylized smiley face that came off distinctly sinister. “They’re expendable,” he added, nodding to Jade and her companions. “Let them take the first volley, then we can move up behind them and get a better idea of where the shooters are.”

Hernandez glanced over at Evan warily, perhaps wondering if he was about to start a fight with someone who could clearly rip his arms out of their sockets. Evan knew better now, keeping quiet as he stared daggers at the operative through his opaque visor.

“Not an option,” the lieutenant replied sternly. “The Jarilans are Coalition auxiliaries.”

“If you say so,” the operative replied with a shrug. No Marine would dare talk to a superior officer like that. Were these guys even part of the Navy’s chain of command, or did they answer directly to the admiralty?

“Alright, let’s get those tanks rolling,” the roach guy said as he waved the idling vehicles forward. “Leave the buggies – they’ll only get in the way.”

The Marines began to line up near the tunnel, the UNN vehicles covering them. The company numbered almost a hundred men, and that was without the Jarilans. Combined with almost the same number of Valbarans, there were too many people to make it through without causing dangerous holdups. The commanders chose around sixty people – three squads of Marines and their Jarilan auxiliaries, and two squads of Valbaran Commandos. The SWAR team would lead them. Six of the tankettes would drive ahead of the infantry to secure the exit, while the rest would follow behind.

“Of course we would get picked,” Hernandez grumbled as he checked the magazine on his XMR. “I’m startin’ to wish we weren’t so good at our jobs.”

“What do you think about the Valbarans?” Evan asked, nodding in the direction of the little aliens.

Two squads of six were gearing up nearby, loading PDWs and tightening the belts on their rigs. They seemed to have adopted mostly standard Coalition gear, but their outfits were nothing like those worn by UNN Marines. Their pressure suits clung to their figures, patterned with red and orange camouflage, sporting odd color panels on the forearms and on the twin cables that hung from the backs of their heads. The ceramic plates that they wore were mounted beneath the surface, only covering the chest and thighs as far as Evan could tell. Their helmets followed the shape of their snouts, with a dark visor that closed over their scaly faces like a jaw.

“I’ve heard that they’re stronger and faster than they look,” Jade said.

They were interrupted as one of the tankettes trundled past them, lining up with the mouth of the tunnel. There was a little less than a meter of clearance from the walls and ceiling, but it looked like it would fit.

“If anything tries to come down the tunnel from the other side, they’re gonna be in for a nasty surprise,” Brooks chuckled as he watched five more of them pull up to form a row. “Suddenly, making tiny tanks doesn’t seem like such a stupid idea.”

“Alright, move out,” the guy with the roach helmet shouted. He waved the tankettes on, the little vehicles proceeding down the tunnel carefully, the lead driver popping her head out of the hatch on the front armor to get a better view. The rest of them followed after it, then the SWAR team jogged behind them, disappearing into the shadows.

“Expect to face resistance on the other side,” Simmons warned, the column of Marines starting to move. “Keep your heads down, and for God’s sake, don’t shoot anything that looks like a fuel line.”

They made their way into the dark tunnel, their flashlight beams reflecting off the resin-coated walls. It was as smooth as plastic, transparent, with small imperfections here and there like plaster that had been spread around by hand. As Jade had posited, there were clumps of what looked like moss on the ceiling at intervals, the plants giving off an eerie, bioluminescent glow. Evan couldn’t see very far ahead, as the bulk of the tankettes blocked his view, and the same was true when he looked behind him. Slowly, the sunlight began to fade as they traipsed deeper underground, following the gentle downward curve of the tunnel.

“Even the floor is covered in that resin shit,” Hernandez muttered, aiming his flashlight at the ground as he walked beside Evan.

“It’s Worker saliva,” Jade explained, Hernandez giving her a grumble of disgust. “They smear it on the walls, then it hardens into a rigid layer.”

“How do they dig these tunnels?” Evan asked as he glanced up at the ceiling.

“By hand, for the most part,” she replied. “Workers have shovel-shaped primary hands for that reason, and their secondary hands are usually much more dexterous, designed for fine work. They’ll build tools and weapons, perform surgery.”

“Surgery?” Hernandez repeated, turning his helmet in her direction.

“To a Bug, being a surgeon and a mechanic are pretty much interchangeable,” she said with a shrug. “Wetware and hardware are almost always intertwined.”

“So, what?” Hernandez continued. “They’d pop open the guts of a Warrior like a mechanic would pop open an engine compartment?”

“Essentially, yes. I’ve noticed that humans tend to associate manual labor with a lack of intelligence, so they often assume that Workers are simple-minded. That couldn’t be further from the truth. Without Workers constantly building and maintaining, the hive would collapse. Literally and figuratively.”

There was a crunching sound, Evan watching as the tracks of the tankette ahead of them rolled over a mess of green goop and shell fragments that was staining the left side of the tunnel. It must be one of the Bugs that the SWAR guys had taken out, run over by each of the vehicles in turn. He stepped around it gingerly, what must have once been a Drone now indistinguishable from a bug on a windshield.

The passage began to slope up, indicating that they were past the halfway point. Sunlight started to bleed past the chassis of the vehicles ahead of them, Evan eventually seeing glimpses of sky.

The tankettes began to accelerate. They would have to clear the mouth of the tunnel quickly and spread out lest one of them be disabled and block the path. While they were only expecting to face small-arms fire, it was still a possibility.

Evan heard the gunfire as the vehicles opened up with their railguns, bursts of automatic fire echoing down the tunnel. They might be far smaller than the cannons mounted on the Kodiaks, but they were still devastating weapons against anything but fortified emplacements. The infantry ran after them, the squads of Marines and Commandos pouring out of the tunnel mouth, emerging into an expansive courtyard. It was larger than he had envisioned, maybe two or three square kilometers.

The immediate impression that Evan got was that of an industrial park made of meat. The land here had been flattened by what must have been a huge earthworks project, creating perfectly level ground upon which the plant had been built. It wasn’t dissimilar from an oil refinery, a sprawling network of towers and tanks that were linked by networks of fleshy cables and pipes, more like a living circulatory system than anything resembling machinery. There were rows of bulbous, round containers that looked like giant bladders sprouting from the ground, joined together haphazardly by thick cords that seemed to pulse with a gentle motion. These were organic, made from flesh and resin rather than soil, their surfaces discolored and uneven. They were the size of houses, probably distillation or processing tanks for whatever the hell the Bugs were making here. They weren’t alone. He could see some that resembled water towers sitting on skeletal stilts and clusters of huge, spherical structures in the distance that looked like storage tanks of some kind.

He could see resin racks filled with the same cylinders that the Bug tanker had been carrying on its back, each one positioned beside a dugout that resembled a loading bay, where the vehicles would presumably take on their payloads. There were a few buildings here and there, either standing alone or reinforcing some of the larger organic structures, the same style as those that they had encountered at the anchor site when they had first landed. Instead of doors, their facades were made from branch-like supports that created uneven openings in the packed dirt, and termite-like chimneys rose from their sloping roofs. Some of them were clearly warehouses where they stored materials and supplies, long buildings arranged in seemingly random patterns rather than orderly rows.

Above it all towered the spires that Evan had seen during their approach. They looked like skyscrapers as envisioned by a madman, thick pipes that resembled intestines winding their way up towards their pointed spires, weaving inside and around them. Some were draped between neighboring towers like vines, sagging as they bridged the gaps. Evan couldn’t make sense of any of it. There was no pattern, no obvious logic, just a mass of interconnected structures. Save for some of the free-standing buildings, it didn’t look like there would be any rooms to clear. This was all machinery, technology – there was no inside in any real sense. Not unless it extended deeper underground.

The six Valbaran tankettes had formed a wedge to protect the tunnel exit, and the SWAR team were already taking cover behind them, firing over and around their armored hulls as they engaged Drones that were hiding in the mess of organic pipes. There was plenty of cover for the aliens, the creatures using the network of cables and structures like a jungle gym, climbing all over them to attack from unexpected angles. There were dozens of them, plasma bolts raining down from every direction, splashing against the armor of the vehicles.

The Marines and Commandos rushed out, diving into cover behind the tanks, popping up to return fire. Evan’s helmet dampened the deafening racket, his HUD picking out and tagging targets among the mess of flesh and machinery, struggling to help him make sense of the chaos.

“How the hell do they expect us to avoid hittin’ the refinery!?” Hernandez yelled into his mic, his XMR rocking back against his shoulder as he rose up to fire over the sloping hull of the nearest tankette. “They’re swarming all over the goddamned thing like ants!”

“Our slugs shouldn’t penetrate structures at these voltages!” Jade replied, ducking back down to reload her weapon. She held it in her upper hands, slamming in a new magazine with the lower pair. “Just try not to hit anything that looks important.”

“How am I supposed to know what looks important, Jade?” he said sarcastically as another shot from his rifle sent one of the defenders toppling a good thirty meters to the ground. “It looks like someone smeared a goddamned funhouse with roadkill!”

The Bugs suffered from no such constraints, pouring fire into the enemy, a hail of plasma bolts raining down on them. Evan put his back to the tank that he was using as cover as he reloaded, turning to see more of the little vehicles driving up out of the tunnel behind them. They began to spread out into the compound, some of the teams taking the opportunity to advance along with them, the tanks staying in close formation to protect their charges.

“We gotta push!” one of the SWAR guys yelled. “We can’t lose this beachhead!”

Three of the tanks and one of the squads remained to guard the tunnel, while the rest moved deeper into the compound, keeping the wall to their backs. The Drones couldn’t do much against the armor, dropping like flies as the Marines and Commandos took pot shots with their XMRs. Even at their lowest setting, the slugs traveled at around 300 meters per second. Rather than tearing the Bugs apart, the slugs behaved more like bullets, sending them crumpling to the ground. The tankettes couldn’t fire in the direction of the plant – not when they were loading anti-materiel rounds – so their guns remained mostly silent.

Evan and his team followed behind the SWAR operatives, two of the tankettes preceding them as they drove between the bladder-like containers. Now that he was closer, Evan could see that they were more rigid than they had appeared, the thick cables connected to them via organic sockets that made him very uncomfortable to look at. They must contain some kind of pressurized gas or fuel. As they made their way through the narrow gap between two of the three-meter containers, the tankettes had to drive over the trailing cables, which were fortunately fleshy and flexible enough not to split open. This place hadn’t been designed with wheeled or tracked vehicles in mind – the Bugs would just step over the obstacles.

A squad of six Drones rounded one of the containers ahead of them, the same variety that Evan had encountered before. They were covered in a spiky shell colored in autumn tones, their jaw-like mandibles clicking, their array of eyes spread around their helmets like those of a spider. They leapt onto the leftmost tankette, swarming over it like termites. They pried at anything that resembled a hatch or entry point with their chitinous fingers, firing their plasma pistols at the armor, trying to melt through. Before the humans had time to respond, the turret of the tankette swung left, the long barrel of the gun knocking a couple of them off the hull.

One of them tried to climb to its feet as the tank trundled past it, but a SWAR operative put it down with a controlled burst of gunfire that splashed the nearby container with its blood. The second never had the chance to get up, another of the augmented soldiers planting a boot on its chest, pressing it into the dirt as he took off its head with a couple of point-blank shots. Gore and shell fragments spilled onto the soil, the dense coils that lined his barrel glowing red with heat.

Another of the Drones climbed up onto the turret, turning its attention to the softer targets below, but there were two dozen guns waiting for it. The barrage of XMR fire took it apart, along with its remaining companions, the tank rolling over their ruined bodies as they fell beneath its tracks.

“We gotta clear this place out before we can think about shutting down production,” Simmons said, sweeping his rifle across the towers and raised platforms ahead of them. “There’s a lot more cover in there, but it’s gonna be close quarters.”

“That is why we are here,” Tatzi added, the serrated bayonet on the end of her rifle glinting in the sun as she marched along behind them.

As the tanks cleared the cluster of storage tanks and moved deeper, pipes and walkways crisscrossing over their heads, another squad of Drones launched their attack. They came from the right this time, firing down on the squad from a high perch on one of the raised platforms. Evan’s squad scattered, taking cover behind the nearest container, the SWAR team keeping pace with the tanks as they began to return fire. The right tankette’s gunner had a clear shot from this angle, the barrel of the cannon rising to point at the aliens. The little vehicle began to spew tungsten at them, the shrouded barrel telescoping back into its housing with each shot, the recoil making the tank shudder. The rate of fire was fairly slow, chugging, but it was firing 30mill slugs of the type usually used to take down small spacecraft and Warriors. They eviscerated the Drones, scattering their dismembered body parts in showers of gore. The rounds went straight through the platform, shattering the resin, sending a piece of it collapsing to the ground some ten meters below.

“Guess it’s not the size that counts, but how you use it,” Hernandez mused as he gave Evan a pat on the shoulder. They moved out of cover, continuing on, watching every angle. There was sporadic gunfire from other areas of the plant, but it seemed like most of the defenders had either been killed or were regrouping.

They marched further into the organic refinery, following a winding path through the maze of fleshy pipes and organic structures. There was no logic to the way that the Bugs laid out their facilities, no straight roads joined at right angles, no grids. The placement seemed random, meandering, even if it was probably very carefully planned. It immediately made Evan lose his sense of direction.

“What do you suppose is runnin’ through all these tubes?” Hernandez wondered, craning his neck to look up at the tiered levels of catwalks and pipes above. They were nearing the huge towers now, their spires rising some 50 meters towards the raging auroras.

“It looks like they’re distilling biofuel here,” Jade replied. “If I had to guess, I’d say that they were separating organic compounds for different applications. Fuel, weapons, who knows.”

“How do they expect us to shut it down without blowing it up?” Evan added. “Is there a big off switch somewhere?”

“It’s probably controlled by organic computers,” one of the Jarilans replied, Evan noting that her IFF tag identified her as Cardinal. “We had them back home – biological systems that were controlled through pheromone inputs.”

“So, what?” Hernandez asked skeptically. “It has a nose instead of a touch panel?”

“Basically,” the Jarilan replied with a shrug. “Humans use voice commands to operate a lot of their technology, and the principle isn’t really any different. Instead of sound patterns, they respond to scents.”

“We’ll let you guys handle the fart computers, then,” Hernandez muttered as he turned his attention back to their strange surroundings.

Evan now found himself on a kind of street – which was the only approximation that he could make in this wholly alien environment – just wide enough to let a Scuttler pass through unhindered. It was a winding dirt path that led through the bowels of the refinery, clusters of tanks and containers boxing the team in from both sides, the innumerable pipes and cables forming a kind of hellish canopy above their heads. To their right was the large base of one of the towers, the network of organic infrastructure trailing below ground like the roots of a great tree. There were buildings made of soil and resin surrounding it, probably control stations of some kind, none much larger than a prefab structure. The path was branching, leading off into the plant seemingly at random.

“I think we’re on the right track,” Jade announced, her long antennae wiggling. “I sense ... authority, maybe some kind of command center. It’s near the base of this tower.”