Keep Quiet in the Dark Zone
"Hah... hah. Why the hell did it get so cold all of a sudden?"
"Because that bizarre broadcast cut the power to the entire facility, obviously."
"Even so, dropping this fast is just wrong. We're indoors, not outside."
"Inside or out doesn't matter much. If this really is a space-themed Dark Zone, then outside is vacuum sitting at near absolute zero. Thermal radiation will equalize the interior and exterior temperatures before long."
"This son of a bitch just can't stop lecturing 'cause he went to school a little longer...!"
The fact that space sat near absolute zero had very little to do with the length of anyone's education, but the hulking man at the head of the party was in no mood to be reasonable. He had been running Dark Zones with these like-minded companions for quite some time now, stacking experience and building up their "seed capital" bit by bit — and it had been a long while since he'd felt this powerless.
If some overwhelmingly powerful enemy or some unsolvable problem had been standing in their way, he could have at least accepted it. But the temperature had started plunging not long after they'd entered the Dark Zone, and the sheer unfairness of it sat in his gut like a stone — injustice and absurdity, served together.
"This Dark Zone run is a total wash. Never mind smashing those goddamn Slaughter Robots — farming anything is a nightmare."
Why did convicts risk their lives diving into Dark Zones in the first place? To explore the unknown and gather intelligence for the nation and the megacorps? As if. They were here to scrape together every inexplicably expensive scrap of junk they could find, haul it out, and sell it.
Money. Money. Money. It always came back to the money. No money, so you committed a crime. Wanted more money, so you committed another. And now they were clinging to cash just to stay alive.
Damn it. Body's getting sluggish, and now my head's filling up with this garbage.
Filtering the air — already creeping toward freezing — through a gas-mask canister was making his thoughts go fuzzy. Lee Duho, the giant leading the way with a massive hammer in hand, glanced back at the three teammates trailing him.
Two of them were veteran convicts of roughly his own build, men he shared a cell with. The third, the only slender one among them and the proud owner of some truly unimpressive musculature, was the same man who'd just been chewed out for being too well-educated.
His name was Ahn Moon-ho.
They had recruited him as a staff officer of sorts — the one brain their brutish, sweat-soaked party actually needed. Smarter and more impressive people weren't hard to find if you poked around the prison, but Lee Duho had seen something else in him: guts.
Ahn Moon-ho wasn't particularly strong. He had no power, no faction. And yet he went around helping other inmates, spreading some half-incomprehensible ideology as he did. People like that became targets inside a prison sooner rather than later, and Ahn Moon-ho knew it — and kept going anyway. So Lee Duho had decided to keep him close: protect him, and put that talent to work.
"Hey. So, Professor Ahn. What's your read?"
"On what?"
"On whether we can keep exploring like this. Those Slaughter Robots that turn people into paste — we can handle them one at a time. But look at the situation. It's a mess."
"...If that ominous announcement was accurate, most of the facility's power is down. Any door that opens electronically is going to be a problem unless we smash it or find a way around. Which means the prime farming spots will be hard to reach. And with the temperature still dropping... I'd give us four or five hours of operational time, being generous."
"Tsk. Four or five hours, being generous. When we put our minds to it, we used to strip a whole Dark Zone in seven or eight hours, no sweat. You're telling me we've only got half that this time?"
"If it were heat, we could stretch our time with rest and water. Cold is different. The human body has a hard, clear limit."
Ahn Moon-ho adjusted a pair of glasses that weren't there, a precise little flick of his fingertips, and Lee Duho's face twisted. Even a short-schooled man like him knew you couldn't hold a hundred percent in murderous cold. The air was already brushing freezing, and his body was getting heavier by the minute.
Doo-sik and Doo-pal are running the same implants I am. They're thinking the same thing right about now.
Lee Duho flicked a glance at his sworn brothers — his younger siblings, Doo-sik and Doo-pal. Both men nodded without a word, tightening their grips on a heavy double-barrel shotgun and a Chainsword. They understood. Keep exploring like this, and it was only going to get more dangerous.
"That said, I believe we can continue the search. The risk just climbs with it."
"Climbs how much?"
"Exponentially, the longer we stay."
"Exponen— for fuck's sake. Use small words?"
"Roughly speaking, our operational capacity drops by at least twenty percent every hour. And given that none of us have proper cold-weather gear... the moment it hits twenty below, we'll be lucky to hold half our normal condition."
Twenty below without winter gear. Teeth chattering, the whole body shaking itself apart, muscles seizing until you went stiff as a board. And thirty, forty below? An ordinary human would already be a frozen corpse from hypothermia.
"Luckily we've got blood-flow pump implants, so we can hold our core temperature a little longer. You're the problem, Professor."
"We can just extract now, if it comes to that. Dark Zone deployments are a weekly minimum, not a maximum."
"Except we already paid for today's intel, and we still need that 'seed capital.' We can't walk out empty-handed."
Anyone could enter a Dark Zone, and Ahn Moon-ho was right — there was no cap on attempts. But going home with nothing today meant going into debt for the next run. Gear and consumables weren't free.
"Then we've got no choice. Farm as much cargo as we can and get to an exit as fast as possible."
"Do we have to? What if we restore power to the facility ourselves, wipe out everything in our way, and farm in peace?"
Lee Duho let a little greed show. Ahn Moon-ho shook his head, unconvinced.
"Restoring power means going down into the hazardous sectors beneath this facility. One wrong move and we won't just fail to farm — we might not make it out at all. I'll follow your lead. You're the leader. But I wouldn't recommend it."
High risk, high return, or low risk, low return. Every convict who dropped into a Dark Zone ran into the same tired dilemma, over and over. At this point you could replace the official prisoner's dilemma with this one and nobody would notice.
Lee Duho thought it over, then landed on a conclusion that was neither one thing nor the other. They'd push as far as they could, and if it went south, they'd extract immediately.
Right on cue, a Slaughter Robot came charging at them, red optics blazing. Lee Duho smashed it aside with his hammer. Lee Doo-sik carved through the major joints with his Chainsword. Then something slimy and wrong burst out of the robot's chassis, and Lee Doo-pal blew it apart with the shotgun.
The upper levels had already been stripped clean by other convicts moving through at speed. There was no reason to linger. Money, information, survival — whatever you wanted, you had to go down. On that, at least, they all agreed.
"Current temperature: one below."
"Breath's starting to show."
Past merely chilly now — the kind of cold that crawled into your bones and made you shiver. Lee Duho rolled his arms and legs at intervals, working the stiffness out and stoking a little heat.
The convict who walked point took the biggest share of the loot, and he earned every bit of it. He was the first to spot a threat and call it out, the first to intercept it, and the last man covering the team's retreat. If they lived, the point man lived first. If they died, the point man died first.
Lee Duho held that position on loyalty and responsibility alone. The moment he descended to the lower level — the one marked with a yellow label — he sucked in a startled breath.
They had just stepped into a wide corridor when a string of ominous electronic chirps went off around his ankles — beep, beep — and something clunked down from the ceiling.
"Shit!"
Lee Doo-pal swept his light upward. An automatic turret was already tracking them, its ugly muzzle trained on their heads. Fortunately, Doo-pal's trigger finger was a fraction faster. A blast of buckshot punched down the barrel and sympathetically detonated the loaded ammunition.
The shotgun's report was short and fat, the kind of noise you could get away with if you vacated the area fast enough. The turret, unfortunately, was another matter. It kept screaming and burning. The hidden ammo cache inside the ceiling went up with it, a chain of explosions and white flashes that might as well have been a Times Square billboard announcing they were here to the entire lower level.
"Fuck! Run!"
Nobody blamed Doo-pal. Anyone would have made the same call. What threw them was the ambush itself — who the hell expected ceiling turrets on top of the Slaughter Robots?
...Clank. Clank. Clank.
"Three Slaughter Robots, front!"
"I'll drop one with the taser!"
Ahn Moon-ho drew his taser gun, lined up the shot with care, and fired a cartridge. One of the Slaughter Robots locked up and started convulsing. The taser was meant for nonlethal suppression of hostile inmates, but the situation was too urgent for niceties. The robot would do.
"Nice — one's stunned!"
Lee Duho didn't break stride. He drove forward like a freight truck and slammed into the Slaughter Robot's chest. The thing's brutally solid shock baton was built to pulp human bone; even a casual swing of an arm or leg could crush meat like overripe fruit. But against a human with implants?
"Hrah!"
The heavy hammer came around in a horizontal arc, and the Slaughter Robot's chassis folded into an L and went flying. An ordinary person would have been neatly separated at the waist. The robot's one virtue was durability, and it forced its crumpled body back upright, servos grinding and shrieking.
Still scattering that unpleasantly red glow from its optics, it moved as if the damage meant nothing. The Chainsword came in next. The joints weren't separately armored. The spinning teeth bit in and sheared through the internals in seconds — arm, leg, and finally the neck. Right on cue, a grotesque mass of slime erupted from the chassis. Lee Duho wound up in the form of a baseball player from a sport that no longer existed and put everything he had into the swing.
If baseball had still been a thing in the 2040s, that would have been a magnificent home run into the cheap seats. But there wasn't one Slaughter Robot. There were three. And the last one was still very much alive, closing on Ahn Moon-ho and Lee Doo-sik in the rear.
Lee Doo-sik finished reloading and dumped both barrels to keep it off them. The reports hit like cannon fire.
Damn it. Armor's too thick. Shotgun's barely scratching it.
Worse, the Slaughter Robot seemed to have learned something from the fight. It charged with both arms crossed in an X. Most of the buckshot splashed off the heavy plating. Doo-sik swung the stock, trying to knock it aside — but you didn't need a lab test to know which was tougher, a crude homemade shotgun's stock or a Slaughter Robot's armor.
The stock shattered. The robot closed the last of the distance and reached to twist Doo-sik's head clean off his shoulders —
A somewhat anticlimactic gunshot cracked from somewhere in the dark, and the Slaughter Robot's head snapped hard to the side.
For a second they thought it was Ahn Moon-ho. It wasn't. He still had the taser in both hands, dumping current through the cartridge.
Then who the hell—?!
Two more shots, no pause between them. The remaining two Slaughter Robots' necks folded completely. Hitting the unarmored nape through all that chaos was impressive enough. Identifying friend from foe in this messy dark was what made the hair stand up on the back of their necks.
The two men who'd been sprinting to save Doo-sik and Ahn Moon-ho pulled up short and stared into the blackness.
Footsteps. Faint, but unmistakably human. Then a figure stepped out of the dark and snapped at them, thoroughly irritated.