12 Miles Below

Gear rustled and clinked as our team trekked through the rocky ground. Wordlessly, we reached a good stopping point for the day, and sounds of packs settling down on the ground rang out as we all split into our respective task. A camp was setup and manned pretty soon, before we split into different groups for meditation or overwatch. Today was ration bars a la salt. Not a lot of fresher things to find in a dead serile mite city, unfortunately. Not even bugs.

I’d spent some time underground already with four other Winterscar knights and Captain Sagrius, they’d ‘escorted’ me to the undersider city where Kidra was last known. I say escorted with quotes here because we were all powerful enough to solo travel around the underground even back then, so the escort was mostly ceremonial. The trouble was what could possibly be waiting at the end, that’s what they’d come down for.

The same applied here. Even the exact same knights had come down with me. Allaris, Zent, all the regulars I’d seen at the Winterscar courtyard, running drills and practice with Kidra. Not every single Winterscar knight, but ten of our best along with the Captain.

Now most were running occult drills and training within the digital sea inside Cathida’s armor, forcing the engram herself to drill them. Others were sitting around the camp, quietly talking or keeping an eye out to the distance. Captain Sagrius had become a nexus of sorts, due to the amount of clan knight souls he carried within him.

Those were venerable knights within, each having decades of experience. They’d come down and then deliberately followed Lord Atius because they’d already lived a full life. Their estate and dependents were grown and taken care of. The wealth of experience among all of them were exactly what the new Winterscar knights needed down here. They felt they could do the most good by coming with us on the expedition.

The Winterscar knights had a more… religious aspect to it. I’ve told them everything already - they all knew I hadn’t done anything dramatic with the gods, just happened to be in the right place at the right time and made the best of things.

They were convinced I was on some kind of quest that would change the world. In their defense, we were camping out with the first Feather in centuries to break free mentally, and escorting her down to where she’d be able to break free physically as well. And the mites certainly seemed to think there was something to Wrath and her destiny. So while helping her be free isn’t going to change the world - Wrath herself might go on to do something that could.

We grabbed our gear, packed the camp up, and set back off. Searching through empty streetways and taking quick glances through buildings.

Underground remained consistent to what I’d been used to on the other hand. A routine quickly took place in our group. We would search through different sections of the mite city for that terminal, find a place to camp out when we struck out for the day, sleep and move on the next day.

Drakes were easy to spot, they stayed on rooftops to sleep, and their detection range was shorter than Father’s, so he spotted them far before they could spot him.

Spider nests were even easier to avoid, they only enjoyed setting up in tunnel sections that were off the beaten path. As Wrath explained, mites seemed to just know when a nest settled into one of the main branches, and they’d come to mess it up within the year. A long time to me, but to spiders a single year was more like a ten minute nap. Waking up every ten minutes with a swarm of ants biting and ruining everything would get old fast, and spiders weren't immune to that.

And then there were the Screamers. The scouts, and territory claimers of the machine empire. While we could avoid almost all the other machines by simply being slow and steady, Screamers were designed to find lone humans anywhere they hid.

In fistfights between humans, there’s ingrained reflexes everyone has to unlearn. Like the instinctive need to look over one’s shoulder before throwing the first punch. People who’d been in dozens of brawls would instantly recognize that tell. People who’ve been in hundreds of brawls would simply know when someone was about to attack even without that tell. Body language, gut feelings, instinct, and experience all combined together into its own kind of foresight.

Father had that when it came to duels and combat. With anything really. I had a theory that what made him tick was superb pattern recognition abilities, letting him read an opponent’s mind.

While he could learn an enemy’s behavior within seconds, it took me a few thousand repetitions before I got to that instinctive understanding.

Using the fractal the mites had given me, I didn’t have a thousand repetition. I had hundreds of thousands. Possibly millions all put together.

Screamers… felt almost safe to be around. I knew them. At that instinctive level. I knew how far they could move, where their reach was, the small ways their joints would align, everything. Even the abnormal screamers could be spotted from a mile away. If they moved differently from the rank and file, it was so disturbingly obvious, it would be like spotting a man walking with a heavy limp among a crowd.

Those Screamers that survived a few encounters with Humans and brought with them some changes to their fight. Just the way they ran felt different to me.

What I wasn’t used to was their hunting patterns. On the bridge, I only saw what they could do in full attack mode. The Winterscar knights traveling with us hadn’t any real experience trying to hide away from Screamers either. By the time they stepped underground, they were already some of the most dangerous knights in the world and never really needed to fear machines.

Which meant while I knew almost everything about fighting against Screamers, only Father, Wrath and the souls of the clan knights could know how Screamers actually operated.

Wrath was out of that count because she was too used to having perfect connection at all times with the machine network. She only knew in theory how Screamers would track us down. The clan knights could give us wisdom, but they couldn’t be out here to actually keep a watch.

So with the short straw left to Father, he had to take on an airspeeder’s worth of work for the team and help navigate down here without drawing more attention than needed. And he did do that job almost perfectly.

The real icepick in the wall had been our drake kills. Each one that died, the rest of the Screamers would start to swarm around the area, searching for what killed their higher rank.

A group of our size would be spotted at some point, no matter how sneaky we were. We heard them first, as usual. All we did was find a nice dead end to bunker into, dropped our backpack and gear behind us, drew rifles and waited.

They came after us soon enough. A group of seven today, far more feral than any of the machines Wrath had worked with. There was a kind of humanity to her people, the way Yrob would look after food or his own brothers. The delicate way he’d treat Tamery and some of the other humans around him.

These ones simply wanted blood and death.

“Eliminate targets.” Father called out, waiting behind the firing line with folded arms, watching for anything off.

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We did, using regular bullets Wrath had made over the journey. Screamers hit the ground, broken, lights flickering off. The rest adapted to the rifle fire, and began to leap and jump out of the way.

We let them reach our ranks, pretending like we couldn’t aim our rifles any faster or more accurately. A few knights ahead drew knives, took a step forward and executed slow but functionally perfect dodges and cuts at their throat. The same motions and movements that the clan knights had taught them all over the last few hours spent in the digital sea.

The Screamers lasted a few seconds before they were all dispatched. Not because they’d been particularly smart or clever in their attack - I could take on all seven in a pack with just fists and dance through all their strikes. No, we had to give the illusion of there being an actual fight. The armor we wore had all been modified to look like houses that didn’t exist within our clan. Cloaks and tunics helped hide the real weapons we carried, and I had my occult armguard wrapped up nice and tight inside one of my bags.

If any machines tapped into the recorded video footage left behind, all they’d see is a larger than usual surface clan party making their way underground. Once we reached Abraxas’s teleportation network, we’d switch up our looks again and be truly undetected.

Even Wrath joined in with little personal feeling into it.

“If the situation were reversed, you would also not have great issues killing other humans.” She said over lunch, which were disappointing ration bars again. “You are not a monolith faction, many of your kind will attack others already. If we were to narrow down the analogy, it would be as if you were in the desert fighting fanatics who cared only to kill machines like me, would never listen to reason, and view you as a heretic.” She waved one of the recovered power cells, tapping the side of her leg and letting the replica relic armor open up. “Additionally these fanatics would carry water flasks on them, which you would require to survive this desert.”

“You mean imperials like me?” Cathida said with a cackle. “Well, you’d be right. And we do have our own water bottles too. Humans need more than glorified battery acid to keep the insults going.”

“And ration bars.” I added, feeling my appetite vanish after the third bite. I’d gotten spoiled on the good stuff up in the clan. "Though they're doing good as fuel for getting upset."

But Wrath’s topic did stick in my mind. If Imperial crusaders came after Wrath and were also just as happy to cut my throat, how would I feel about fighting back?

Crusaders and Imperials held a special place in clan culture. Pilgrims brought with them hundreds of goods and items that were almost essential to making clan life more bearable.

“On your analogy, I think you’re right,” I said, taking another painful bite of my ration. “I would fight back without issue. They’re not pilgrims, and while their heart could be in the right place in defending humanity and all that, they’re still trying to murder people I care about. That’s where I’ll draw my lines.”

Wrath smiled with a nod, looking away from the ration bars for the first time in a while.

I waved the bar back into her vision. “You want?”

She shook her head. “I do not need food to survive, only power cells. Any ration bars I consume will be one less bar available when the expedition truly needs it.”

Cathida spat, or made the sound of that. “Stop doing that. It’s annoyingly hard to hate something that’s always trying to do good. Really pisses me off.”

“You signed up for the wrong expedition then.” I said, tapping my half eaten ration bar at the helmet.

“I didn’t sign up, I got dragged into this! Goddess damned squirelings, the lot of you.” She grumbled.

Wrath quirked her head, then had that look to her like she’d figured out a new way to mess with something. “Would you like some of my glorified battery acid? I will always have some to share with a fellow machine. I am generous.”

Cathida was extra cranky about that.

“Tracks.” Father said as our group jogged and jumped from rooftop to rooftop.

“Found the machines?” I asked. This section of the city had almost no machines at all. We’d killed a few stragglers of Screamers that gave chase, but no follow-up converging swarm came. Gave us a good chance to cover ground fast across the upper more exposed sections of the city, so none of us were complaining.

“No. Humans.” He said, pointing down at the ground that absolutely did not have bootprints, footprints, poetic scribbling, or graffiti.

“Human?” I asked. “You sure? Not seeing any footprints here.” I gave a glance at the main road, shifting through Journey's HUD settings to see if there were any other spectrum of vision that Father was seeing. It looked like a regular road to me.

“Not footprints.” Father clarified. “A displaced trail of dust. Hover skifs.”

With that pointed out, I could see it. Everywhere else had a thin layer of dust collected over. But the main road had dust just lightly swept off to the sides of the buildings.

Skiffs were faster than relic armor, but only on straight and long paths. A winding road like this wouldn’t let a skiff do anything quick. "odd place for a skiff." I said. "Hoversleds?"

“Larger ones may only fit on the grand highways.” One of the clan knights confirmed. “Smaller airspeeders and skiffs will cut from one biome to another, they can even be faster than a full convoy as a result. Less secure however.”

“Refugees from Capra’Nor?” Wrath asked.

“Too far from the city.” Father said. “Too dangerous of a territory. These are merchants.”

“Could they be the reason for the lack of machines in the sector, master Tenisent?” One of our knights asked.

Father gave a very slight shrug. “Possible. If they were using larger skiffs, they would have drawn all the attention. We will need to find them.”

“You sure that’s a good idea?” Cathida asked. “Thought this expedition was all about pretending to not be who we are. As much as I like the idea of running where the fighting's good, the mission is still the mission.”

“I have a counterpoint. A larger group of merchants would be ideal camouflage.” Wrath said. “Although they may delay our ultimate destination.”

Father shook his head. “Merchants don’t travel unknown territory. They will know the path. That is why I wish to find them.”

“And to know the path, they gotta have a map.” I finished. “We find the merchants, we can find where the terminal is.”

He nodded.

But there’s a problem with following tracks. Footprints had a clear direction forward. Skiffs just shoved dust out of the way in all directions, so we had no clear direction.

We were roughly traveling north, and the path could be going either west or east when we hit on it. But any merchants traveling would have to pause for either camps, or firefights. And after those, there might be traces that could point us the right direction.

We went east. Fifty fifty chances but at worse we’d probably have lost a few hours to backtracking. We got lucky here, about an hour down the road we found traces of a firefight, dead and stripped bodies of Screamers along with other hints we were going the right way. All the footprints seemed to be going down the trail.

We had a chance to catch up to them so long as they hadn’t left the biome yet. Could take a few hours, so we took less breaks and kept on a full sprint. “They will not take any shortcut that leaves them within the same biome for more than a day.” Father said. “Machines swarm where there is a void. The longer a group is known about, the faster swarms arrive for them. Past a day, they will be overwhelmed.”

He was right, it didn’t take us more than a day to find them. The further down the line, the more damage they’d taken. We passed by a half-cut skiff, similar to hoversled, only far fatter with actual engines and a crude gimbal for the engine.

This one still had that engine working, just the actual skiff itself had the critical parts keeping it hovering cut. Once a hoverboard stops working, that’s it. There’s no fixing that, hover tech was golden era tech. The faulty parts could be replaced, but a hoversled’s only useful part was the hovering tech. May as well call for a full replacement.

The marchants clearly thought the same, everything on the skiff was gone, even the engine looked like it had been stripped for valuable parts on the quick, and left to rot.

We found the culprit later. A dead drake, metal plating bent and husk burnt out. Bullet dents littered the creature’s body from multiple directions, meaning it had been sprayed down religiously from every direction. A coordinated team.

Further down, we found another skiff and this time bodies. None of them relic knights, more regular undersiders, soaked in blood and clearly dead. Seven in total.

“They didn’t have time for proper burial.” Father said, touching one of the bodies. “Signs of postmortem hypostasis. Less than four hours ago. We’re close.” He looked up. “They are not going to survive for long.”

Given the trend going from only a dust trail, to machine bodies and now human ones, it was clear this convoy had bitten more than they could chew on.

We went back into our full sprint, following behind.

There weren’t any sounds up ahead in the dead city, so we had no warning of what happened next. We turned a corner and found ourselves right in front of a firing line. Nineteen Undersider knights with rifles all pointed right at us, and another twenty five or so unarmored men and women sitting on over-stuffed skiffs. Also pointing weapons of various kind at us too. They looked beyond stressed out, harrowed and gaunt.

Well.

Think found our merchants.

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