Up Against It - M. J. Locke [172]
While they waited in the lock for the air to cycle out, Xuan asked, “Where does the slurry pipe exit?”
Amaya answered, “The chem plant. There’s a maintenance hole at the distillation unit. That’s where Geoff exited. It’s the only logical place.”
“All right. Now, there are only four possibilities.” Xuan ticked them off on his fingers. “The first is that our foes will not yet have found where Geoff exited. That is very unlikely—the explosion tells us they are on alert, and they will have explored the area while we’ve been preparing. So we should expect one of the other three possibilities: that they have posted a guard outside the pipe; that they have entered the pipe and we will encounter them somewhere along its length; or worst-case, that they have already climbed through the pipe and are at the longwall when we exit this lock.”
“Maybe Geoff managed to kill them all,” Amaya said in a hopeful tone. Xuan gave her a look, but did not reply.
Kamal anxiously eyed the lock door. “How do we know they aren’t already somewhere inside the mine that we haven’t checked?”
“We’d know if they were here,” Amaya said.
“Amaya is correct. They would not be trying to hide from us, if they were already inside. We would be dead.” The two young people looked at each other, but said nothing. Xuan continued, “How much do you know about explosives?”
They shook their heads. Kamal said, “Geoff is our expert.”
Amaya said, “The munibots have this software that lets you tell them what you want a blast to achieve, and they do all the drilling and setting and exploding for you. But Geoff is the only one who knows much about it.”
Kamal went on, “But the software is about how you want the bots to expose seams of ore or causing a controlled tunnel collapse or whatever, not using them as weapons. They might not work well.”
Xuan peered into his pack at the explosives there. “Oh, I think they should do just fine for our purposes.”
Kamal asked, “Are we really going to have to kill them?”
Xuan saw the troubled glint in the young man’s eyes behind his faceplate. Xuan paused. What else could he say?
“They intend to kill us, if they can.” But he couldn’t bring himself to tell them to kill. He had dedicated himself to seeking enlightenment. Would he truly abandon his Dharma now? Should he not take the way of peace and let fate decide how events played out?
Their worst fears were realized. As they started to leave the elevator, Xuan saw a suited figure moving along the conveyor away from them, toward the methane hopper station. He carried a weapon, and his back was to them. He had clearly just finished scouting out the longwall tunnel.
Xuan waved the others back into the airlock. Peering around the edge, he spotted another helmet above the rim of the hopper, then a third.
No air was present to carry the sound of their entry and the hopper was quite a distance down the way; the intruders did not notice them. Xuan motioned Kamal and Amaya to silence. He pointed at a partly overturned mine cart in the shadows at the conveyor’s near end. They both nodded, and the three of them shot across the opening to the cart and sank behind it. From concealment, they watched as the helmeted figures lofted themselves up out of the hopper at the other end of the longwall.
Xuan changed over to the frequency the mercenaries had been using before. Nothing. They must have changed it to avoid detection. He ran a scan and found their frequency, but it was gibberish. Encrypted.
The mercenaries gathered their weapons and supplies, and then headed down the longwall toward Xuan and the others. They were heading for the lock. Xuan pulled a charge out. He activated the signal receiver on the charge, set up the detonator for the charge, and removed the safety on the detonator. He gripped the explosive in one hand, and positioned his other thumb above the detonator switch. Amaya and Kamal stayed as still as they could, their eyes wide through their visors.
When the figures entered the lock, Xuan cocked his arm to hurl the charge into the lock after them, but after a long pause,