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Of the seven thousand coalition soldiers attacking Bunker Zero, only two penetrated the upper defenses. Kaneda and Ryu Kusanagi sprinted down the narrow steel corridor. Sonic cancellers in their boots turned booming metallic footfalls into whispers. Form-fitting smartskin shrouded their bodies in active camouflage. Not even shadows marked their passing.

Kaneda glanced at the utility trench underneath the grated floor. He followed three thick liquid nitrogen lines and a cluster of purple ultrahigh voltage cables. Whatever they fed took a lot of juice and needed constant cooling. It had to be their target.

“There’s a four way junction ahead!” Ryu said over his comm-collar. Low-power laser receptors and emitters lined both their necks, allowing secure tight-beam communication as long as they shared line-of-sight contact.

“The lines go to the right,” Kaneda said.

“They’re gaining on us!”

“I know. Stay focused.”

Kaneda planted his feet in the junction and turned sharply. His suit’s smartskin struggled to keep up, revealing him with a brief, slender outline. He dashed down the right hand corridor.

Ryu crouched as soon as he rounded the corner. He pulled a grenade out of his bandolier, armed its micromind for proximity detonation, and forced it through the floor’s grating. It landed on top of the liquid nitrogen lines. The grenade’s smartskin activated, obscuring it from view. Ryu stood and ran after Kaneda.

“Security door,” Kaneda said, stopping a hundred meters after the junction. He placed his hand on the door. Passive contact scanners in his glove evaluated the obstacle. “Reinforced diamoplast half a meter thick.”

Ryu stopped next to him. “There’s the security terminal. I’ve got this one!”

“Covering.” Kaneda turned, snapped up his JD-50 assault rifle and dropped to a crouch. He mentally keyed the rifle to full auto.

Ryu placed his hand on the security terminal. Microscopic filaments extruded from his hacking glove and penetrated the terminal’s casing. The filaments uncoiled into the terminal, expanding and exploring at Ryu’s command, looking for ways to bypass its protocols through direct intervention.

A distant clicking noise echoed down the corridor, exactly the kind of sound a hundred narrow metal legs would make.

Kaneda placed a hand against the cold steel wall. He felt the subsonic vibrations of explosive ordnance, maybe fifty levels above them. Help isn’t close, he thought. We’re all alone down here.

The rapid clicking grew louder.

“They’re close,” Kaneda said, gripping his rifle with both hands.

“Just a few more seconds!”

The rapid clicking thundered in his ears.

“Almost there!” Ryu said.

“We don’t have much time,” Kaneda said, speaking softly despite the on-edge pounding in his chest. A quick glance at his biometrics showed a heart rate of 312 pulses per minute, and that was without a fresh shot of adrenalmax.

The proximity grenade at the junction detonated in a flash of light and shrapnel. Two nitrogen lines ruptured, spewing jets of cryogenic fluid into the corridor. The liquid nitrogen expanded into gas with explosive force.

A concussion wave shot down the corridor. The wave threw Kaneda and Ryu into the security door. Kaneda slammed his head against the door, but the thin layer of impact gel in his helmet absorbed most of the shock.

“Damn it!” Ryu shouted.

Stars danced across Kaneda’s vision. He shook his head and brought his rifle back up.

“You okay?” Ryu asked.

“Just get the door open.”

“Right. Almost there.”

Kaneda toggled through his visor’s tracking modes, overlaying thermal atop the visual spectrum. The corridor was a black, billowing cloud.

“Almost!” Ryu said.

Two six-legged outlines came into view, one on the wall, the other on the ceiling. They stood half as tall as a man with internal power plants glowing rusty red despite the rapid cooling.

Gun-spiders.

Kaneda fired. Forty diamond-tipped shatterbacks spewed out of his rifle in two seconds. The synthetic, shatterproof diamonds tore through gun-spider armor like paper. Once inside, the explosive shatterbacks blew them apart. Shots that missed tore chunks out of the walls and ceiling. Lights in the corridor flickered and died. Detonations ripped steel panels off. A secondary blast boomed from an unseen enemy in the junction, splattering the walls and floor with what his visor identified as napalm. The thick gel burned and fought the leaking jets of nitrogen in a swirling thermal dance.

Kaneda ejected the spent clip and slapped in a fresh one.

“Got it!” Ryu said.

The security door slid open. Ryu rushed through and placed his hacking glove against the terminal on the far side.

Kaneda backpedaled through the door in a low crouch. He mentally keyed two grenades in his JD-50’s underslung launcher for timed detonations and fired both into the corridor. The security door slid shut after he cleared it. Two more explosions echoed through the bunker.

“Now,” Kaneda said, standing and turning. “Where are we?”

The wide room stood two stories tall. Harsh overhead lighting washed out most color. The white tiled walls and floors added a sense of sterility. Pods filled the room in neat rows like an artificial forest, each with a man or woman lying inside.

“This doesn’t look like it,” Ryu said.

“The lines lead here,” Kaneda said. “How long will the door hold?”

“Ten to fifteen minutes. More if we’re lucky. I fried the controls pretty good. They’ll have to burn their way through.”

Kaneda walked to the closest pod and looked at the woman inside.

“Careful,” Ryu said. “These people could be implanted with chest-devils.”

“Nothing is showing up on my tracker,” Kaneda said.

He looked inside the pod. The woman’s head was recently shaven, leaving a brunette fringe. Kaneda could make out tight circular scars along her scalp. Her chest rose and fell with slow breaths. Bones stood out at her neck and joints, and her cheeks were horribly sunken.

A tremor ran through her body. She opened her eyes and looked around the room with a vacuous gaze. Her mouth opened, but no sound came out. Saliva trickled from the edge.

“What is Caesar doing with these people?” Ryu asked. “Is this where he makes his thralls?”

“We should keep moving,” Kaneda said. “This isn’t it.”

“All right, but where do we go from here?”

Kaneda looked around. “The power lines are probably routed deeper. There, to the left. That looks like a power distribution panel. Most of the cables coming out of it go down.”

“Okay. So?”

“We’ll head down. There’s a flight of stairs on the far side.”

Kaneda detected a heat spike from a holographic emitter on the ceiling. A pillar of light coalesced into a tall, fit man with a buzz of white hair. He straightened his crisp black suit and adjusted a blood red tie before walking towards them. The man stood a head shorter than Ryu and Kaneda, the simulation of his former body compressed by Earth’s heavy gravity.

“Caesar,” Kaneda breathed.

“Well, isn’t this the absolute opposite of a surprise,” Caesar said. “Kaneda and Ryu Kusanagi. It would have to be you two freaks that breached my defenses. I certainly never expected the regular Federacy fodder to make it this far.”

“He can’t see us, can he?” Ryu asked. “I mean, he’s walking right towards us.”

“Keep moving,” Kaneda said. “He’s trying to distract us. Head for the next level.”

Caesar walked past them and stopped at the security door. “Now I know you gentlemen just arrived, but I have to break some bad news to you. My quantum core is not here. You took a wrong turn. The power lines you were following are for a little experiment I’ve been playing with. So sorry, but it just has to be said.”

“Kaneda?”

“Don’t let him get to you.”

“But—”

“Don’t listen to him,” Kaneda said. “We have a job to do.”

“In fact, it’s even worse than that,” Caesar said. “There’s only one way out of these sublevels. Back the way you came. You both expended a lot of ammo getting here. Right now, I have over fifty robots amassing on the other side. I’ve even arranged for a few prototypes to join them. It’ll be fun to see how long you last.”