Dead Dolls
an excerpt

Schreber swore, violently in the polyglot of the slum he grew up in, and then cringed until he remembered that there was no one to beat him for it down in these tunnels. He swore again, just because he could.

The exit he preferred had been sealed off sometime while he was working with Perry and couldn't get into the tunnels to check on it. He had mining nanos left but if someone bothered to seal it they probably were doing something they didn't want interrupted. It wouldn't do to show up uninvited, the welcome would likely be exciting but brief.

He'd found two other exits completely blocked by cave-ins, leaving him with only one option. He wasn't happy.

Early in his explorations of the tunnels, when he was part of the sweeper team that cleared the sector, he'd found a possible exit in this section. It wasn't an ideal exit by any stretch of the imagination. It didn't lead directly out of the tunnels, but instead entered a third set of tunnels, caves actually, that were partially flooded.

Schreber was not a strong swimmer.

He didn't think he'd be able to get out through the flooded sections, but there was water and he could eat some of the animals that were down there, so it was a good place to hide if nothing else. He'd taken the precaution of concealing the entrance to the caves in any case.

Schreber wouldn't have considered the caves at all if he weren't being followed.

Sound carried oddly down here, he knew that, and at first he told himself that it was just the echoes of his own movements. Then he heard the sound of someone walking while he himself was resting and making no sounds at all. Someone was in the tunnels and the only entrance was the one he came in by. Schreber had no illusions about his worth in the Syndicate, especially after he'd killed Perry. Anyone coming in from his entrance was not a friend.

To make matters worse, he was sure there was more than one person down here with him. He'd heard voices a few times, women, at least two. He hadn't heard them moving, but at one point he'd thought they were right behind him. There might be more entrances than he had thought. Which would be good, if he could avoid the other people in the tunnels, or kill them before they killed him.

So he hunted them, the women he could hear but not see. Staying to the section of the tunnels where he'd first heard them and moving away from the battle around the warehouses. No one would want to move toward that so the women must be heading away. It wasn't until he had followed them for a while that it occurred to him that he knew of two women that would be leaving the warehouses.

One of them made very, very scary spiky-bug-things that exploded into a mass of flechettes that shredded grunts into mincemeat.