Smitty's arm was through at the bicep, entry and exit, clean enough that the bullet hadn't broken the bone, messy enough that it had been bleeding for a while. He was holding his left hand slightly away from his body with the specific careful posture of someone trying not to jostle something that would object to being jostled.
"You need that looked at," Roger said.
"I need a lot of things," Smitty replied. "Currently prioritising getting out of this tunnel."
"You and Doss, go. The entrance is behind me - two lefts and a straight. I'll cover the rear."
"You're not coming."
It wasn't a question. Smitty had apparently read the answer on Roger's face before Roger had finished the sentence.
"I'll be out before you reach the surface," Roger said. "There are still wounded up there that nobody's found yet."
Doss looked at him carefully. "Roger-"
"I know the layout now." Roger gestured toward the passage behind him, the one that had taken him twenty minutes of careful Sound Localization work to map. "I'll move faster alone. Go."
Doss held the look for a moment longer. He'd gotten good at these looks over the past two days, the ones that said I think you're lying to me about your reasons but I also understand that arguing with you right now costs time neither of us has. He gave a short nod, took Smitty's good arm across his shoulders, and moved toward the exit.
Smitty glanced back once. He said nothing. That was, Roger had learned, how Smitty communicated things he didn't have words for.
Roger waited until their footsteps faded past the first junction. Then he turned back into the tunnels.
He found a dark alcove where two passage walls created a ninety-degree corner and stood in it, back against the junction, and waited.
The tunnel network had woken up. Rapid footsteps from multiple directions, voices overlapping, the particular acoustic chaos of a confined space where everyone was reacting to the same information at the same time. The shots from earlier - his shots, Smitty's M1911, had run through the passages like a message being passed hand to hand, and the Imperial Guard's underground garrison was now in the process of deciding what to do about it.
Roger listened through it, sorting signal from noise the way he'd been practicing since the skill first arrived. It was harder underground than in the open. The tunnel walls threw echoes that his Sound Localization read as presences, creating ghosts, sounds arriving from two directions simultaneously, neither one accurate, requiring him to triangulate rather than just receive. He'd gotten better at it since entering the tunnels. Faster at filtering. Less likely to mistake an echo for a footstep.
Not perfect. Getting there.
He reached into his skill interface and spent the point he'd been carrying since Chapter 10.
He'd been weighing it since the surface. The ranged tree was the obvious choice, Steady Aim, Eagle Eye, both of them would extend his effectiveness in the wide open terrain of the ridge. But he was underground now, in confined space, with a pistol in his hand and operatives on three sides of him.
Lethal Impact, LV1.
Not a name that made him comfortable. The System's vocabulary tended toward the clinical.
[SKILL ACTIVATED — LETHAL IMPACT (LV1)]Passive. All attacks deal increased terminal damage.Effect: +100% terminal force on successful hits.Secondary: Chance to trigger penetration effect - round continues through first target if conditions are met.Note: Penetration probability increases with proximity and velocity.
He read it twice. The doubled damage was, as advertised, largely redundant, at the ranges he was operating, a single .45 round from the M1911 was already doing the work. What interested him was the secondary effect. A round that kept going.
In a tunnel, where operatives moved in single file because there was no other option, a penetration effect wasn't a bonus. It was a multiplier.
He filed it, holstered the calculation, and went back to listening.
The voices in the passages were sorting themselves into patterns he could now roughly follow. Search teams moving systematically through the outer branches, probably four to six per team, organised, looking for him specifically. A larger concentration somewhere deeper in the network, which was where the tunnel system opened up into the garrison's main chambers. And a secondary group somewhere between the two, moving in a way that suggested they were guarding something rather than searching for something.
The garrison command, he thought. Underground fortifications always have a command centre. Whoever's running this network is down here.
He turned the idea over.
He had enough ammunition to work through the search teams methodically. He could clear his way back to the surface with reasonable confidence, especially now that he had the tunnel layout partially mapped in his head. That was the conservative option. Surface, report, done.
Or.
He'd spent thirty hours watching the Imperial Guard execute an extraordinarily competent defensive operation. They'd held this ridge through six previous assaults. They had tunnel systems that ran beneath the entire plateau, supply chains that survived bombardment, and unit cohesion that bordered on the fanatical. None of that happened without someone directing it. Someone who knew the network, planned the defence, kept the garrison organised.
If that person was underground right now, waiting out the Federation's artillery while his troops ran search patterns looking for an infiltrator-
Roger checked the M1911's magazine. Eleven rounds, thanks to Tactical Capacity. He had two spare magazines in his vest.
Thirty-three rounds, he thought. Against a command element in confined space with a penetration passive and Night Vision.
He was going to do something stupid. He was aware of this. He did it anyway.
He needed them to come to him rather than the reverse, moving through unknown territory toward a defended position was how you walked into an ambush. He needed something that would pull the garrison's protective element away from wherever it was and concentrate it somewhere he chose.
He thought about it for ten seconds, which was the amount of time he had before the nearest search team's footsteps told him they were about to round the corner into his alcove.
He fired twice - deliberately, loudly, into the ceiling of the passage ahead, then put his back against the wall as the search team came around the corner running rather than walking, rifles forward, committing fully to the threat they'd heard.
He stepped out behind them and shot the last two before they'd processed that the threat was behind them. The first three turned at the sound - too slow, too close, the tunnel too narrow for their rifles to be useful at this range.
Bang. Bang. Bang.
Three rounds, three results. The penetration effect triggered on the middle shot, he felt it rather than saw it, a slight difference in the M1911's report, and two men dropped instead of one.
[SCENARIO DATA UPDATED]Active threat neutralised - Search element eliminated.Scenario Completion Data: +30
Five down. He kept moving.
The gunfire would do exactly what he needed it to do: the garrison's protective element, hearing sustained close-range fire in the outer passages, would conclude their command position was compromised and move to reinforce or evacuate. Either response required them to show themselves. Either response was preferable to him moving blind toward a fixed position.
He pressed deeper into the tunnel.
What he hadn't anticipated, what the situation had, per its usual habits, not bothered to consult him about, was the second search team converging from the opposite direction.
He heard them with Sound Localization approximately four seconds before they would have heard him, which was enough time to choose a side passage and press into it. Not enough time to clear it before they passed the junction.
He stood in the dark and waited as boots went by a metre from his position. Six men. Moving fast. Not looking into the side passages because they were looking for someone ahead of them, not beside them.
He let them pass.
Then he fell in behind them.
It was the most straightforward deception available in a tunnel system: follow the people who are looking for you. They're not checking behind them. They're not expecting you to be between them and their own command element. Sound Localization told him their pace, their spacing, the rhythm of their footsteps, enough that he could match his own steps to the ambient noise they were generating without adding a separate pattern.
They moved through two junctions. Three. The tunnel widened. The smell of the outer passages - standing water, earth, old timber shifted into something different: cooking residue, lamp oil, paper. The garrison's interior.
Voices ahead. More of them. A larger space.
The six-man team stopped at a doorway, rough-hewn timber frame, oil lamp beyond it throwing warm light into the passage. One of them said something to whoever was inside. An answer came back. The team filtered in.
Roger stayed at the last junction, just outside the lamp light's reach, and listened.
The room beyond was occupied by at least a dozen men. There was a command element in there, he could tell by the way voices were being organised, the specific register of someone accustomed to being listened to. The garrison's senior officer. Whatever operation was being coordinated from this tunnel network, the person directing it was ten metres ahead of him in a lit room.
He thought about what he was actually capable of doing with thirty-one remaining rounds, one skill he hadn't fully tested yet, and no backup.
Don't go in, he thought. That's not the play.
He needed to make them come out.
He needed to make them come out before they'd finished figuring out what was actually happening.
He moved back to the last junction and raised his voice - rough, urgent, in the garrison's language via Universal Integration and put everything he'd absorbed from a lifetime of watching films into sounding like a man delivering the worst possible news:
"The infiltrators are in the east passages, there are at least six of them, Federation special forces, they have your access maps - they know the command position, they're already moving-"
He fired three shots into the ceiling. Loud. Definitive.
Then he moved. Fast. To the side passage. Into the shadow.
The room exploded.
Not literally, the detonation was purely acoustic, a burst of shouting and movement and the particular aggressive energy of a confined space where everyone had just received information that required immediate action. He heard boots, many of them, the sound of equipment being grabbed, orders being given with the compressed urgency of a command element that had decided it needed to be somewhere other than where it was.
They came out of the room in a group, not all of them, but most, the ones who could move, flowing into the main passage and turning east, toward where he'd said the threat was.
Roger, in the side passage, counted them as they passed.
Eleven. Twelve. The senior officer in the middle of the group, he could tell by the way the others were orienting to him even while moving, the gravitational pull of command.
He let them clear the junction.
Then he followed.
The passage they were moving through was narrow enough that they were effectively in single file. Sound Localization gave him their exact spacing. Lethal Impact's penetration effect gave him a multiplication he hadn't had yesterday.
He raised the M1911.
He fired until the magazine ran dry, reloaded in the dark with the Rapid Reload skill cutting the process to something under two seconds, and fired again.
The passage went quiet.
He stood in the dark for a long moment, listening through the ringing in his ears for anything still moving.
[SCENARIO DATA UPDATED]Command element neutralised - Tactical objective completed.Scenario Completion Data: +120
[SYSTEM ALERT]User Level: 3 → 4Skill Point awarded: 1
Roger looked at the notification for a moment. Level four. He hadn't expected it this quickly, the data accumulation from the command element alone was apparently substantial, which made sense. Removing a command structure was a different class of objective from removing a patrol.
He filed the skill point for later.
Right now he needed to find the exit before whoever remained in the garrison's network finished processing what had just happened to their chain of command, and before the Federation's surface operation started dropping ordnance on the ridge again without knowing he was still below it.
He turned, oriented himself using the tunnel map he'd been building in his head, and started moving toward the surface.
Behind him, the tunnel was silent in the specific way that large, organised things are silent when the thing organising them is gone.
Roger climbed toward the light, breathing through his mouth, and didn't look back.