Warsong (Hunter-Killer #2)

Chapter 24 - The Things that Crawl in the Dark

The single-person vehicle made her feel horribly exposed. Brackenshaw was used to having the armour of a full skiff wrapped around her, along with a platoon of hardened Scout Cadre soldiers. Now, alone with nothing but a thin canopy and personal body armour between her and Rychter's whipping sands, she felt like a sitting duck.

But by the Everflowing these things could move.

The skiff responded to the lightest touch to its control stick, whipping from side to side, rising over dunes and rock formations at the flick of a wrist. She marvelled at the sheer manoeuvrability of the thing. It reacted to shifts in her weight, to the squeeze of her thighs against the leg rests, almost like it could anticipate her moves. The canopy glistened with fiery lines of blue to form a HUD, the skiff's rudimentary brain picking out landmarks, assigning distance counters and sending out regular seismic pulses to search for any tell-tale vibrations in the sand.

A thin snake of dust snarled in her wake, and in a zig-zagging tail beyond it the other pilots raced, following her lead. Four volunteers including the bull-headed Corporal Hynan formed a queue, weaving back and forth with the ease of experts, the scouts quickly acclimatising to their new transports. At the back of the queue, to her surprise, Kelso Vannigan matched them step for step.

The kid might've been a spook, but she gave him his due. The machines delivered on his promises, so far, and he didn't seem like he was going to be dead weight. More than that, once they set off on his recommended course the specialist had kept his mouth shut, deffering to Brackenshaw's expertise in live fire operations.

They were getting close now. The HUD canopy blinked out a warning and she exhaled, long and deep. Less than a kilometre now before they reached the site of HK-Rupture's first encounter with this latest threat.

"Everybody stay tight, eyes sharp," she said over the local comm. "We're getting close."

"Seismics are quiet," Hynan confirmed.

"Just how I like them."

"But our new buddies don't show on seismics, do they?"

"Apparently not, but keep them running anyway."

She swerved deftly around a hunk of protruding rock and shot up the incline of the dunes that ringed the Scraegan warren they had assaulted not so long ago. Everything had seemed a hell of a lot simpler back then. Small waves of sand arced out from the flanks of her skiff, propelled by the swell of the lifter engines and soon she cleared the dune top.

Below her the jutting rock of the Scraegan warren squatted grimly, still pockmarked with craters and shell impacts. The ground was a torn up mess; nothing had been repaired, at least not at surface level. She took a moment to scan the area, swinging the her vehicle in a crescent where the HUD display outlined the features of the terrain. No sign of any hostile activity, Scraegan or otherwise. The other skiffs pulled up alongside her in a loose line, sensors blanketing the target area.

"Looks quiet," Kelso said after a moment. "Looks like we're not getting out of this, sergeant."

"You'd be disappointed if we could," she chuckled back. "After all the time and money you spent putting these toys together you've been itching to try them out."

"True enough."

"Don't worry, specialist, we'll put them to good use. Everybody on my lead. Time for some cave-diving."

She led the snaking column of single-seater skiffs hurtling down the slope, aiming straight for the battered and broken entrance of the warren. Darkness brooded there; a world beneath a world that she was about to go plunging into. Brackenshaw couldn't deny a faint thrill at being one of the first humans to delve into these depths, but it was tempered by a healthy dose of fear than any sane person ought to have had.