The tube curved and then opened up to a small natural chamber. There were a few shafts and tunnels leading away, some up, some down, and a few in the walls. But there was only one exit wide enough to accommodate a person—and it was covered in goo.
“Shine your light down there, TenSix.”
The bot complied and then—suddenly—jumped back.
“There is a life form directly beneath us,” TenSix said in a hushed voice.
“What kind of life form?”
“An extremely large one.”
“Keep that light on.”
I crawled to the edge of the shaft and peeked down. Four or five meters below, a large shape undulated. I saw scales and ridges and other things that I couldn’t quite identify. But TenSix was right. Whatever was down there was huge. And it was sliding along right below us.
It didn’t want to admit it, but the bot was right. That thing could have eaten Kira.
But I had to be sure.
“You have any weapons?” I asked TenSix.
“Do I look like a combat bot?”
“Okay, then it will have to be this.” I keyed on the judder knife.
“It is highly unlikely that a twenty-centimeter-long knife will do significant damage to a creature of that mass.”
“It goes out to thirty. Besides, you said you didn’t know what this lifeform is.”
“I don’t, but I can tell it’s big. Very big.”
“If I don’t make it, find the Larks’ camp. Let them know what happened.”
“Of course.”
“And wish me luck.”
“I don’t believe in luck,” TenSix said.
“Wish me luck anyway.”
With that, I dropped down through the shaft.
I landed on top of the creature, but it was like landing on the top of a boulder. There was no give at all. And then the boulder started bucking.
This was it. Adrenaline shot through my system as I plunged the judder knife into the creature’s back. It immediately reacted by letting out a rattling scream and bucked even more ferociously, throwing me part way back up into the shaft.
I needed to get off this thing’s back or it would smash me against the lower tube’s ceiling.
Once I fell back down on the creature, I flung myself off to one side and slid down off its body—a second before the beast bucked again. Now I had my back against the wall—literally. As far as I could tell, I was in a lava tube that was almost entirely filled by the bulk of whatever subterranean horror I was dumb enough to mess with.
Without really thinking, I hacked at the creature’s side, cutting through a mess of scaly flesh and muscles. Hot, foul-smelling bile splashed out at me, burning wherever it came into contact with my skin.
Instinctively, I jumped back, but I had misjudged how close the walls of the tube were. I slammed into the wall, knocking the breath from my lungs.
This was a mistake. A big mistake.
I was pinned in less than a half a meter of space between the creature and the stone wall.
What the hell was I going to do?
The monster screamed again, shaking me from my reverie. I slashed at the scaly flesh, trying to dig my knife deeper into the creature’s guts.
But then the creature figured out where I was. All of a sudden, tons of flesh pressed against me, pinning me back against the wall.
Somehow I managed to keep my knife hand in front of me and continued carving even as the monster tried to squash the life out of me. I felt myself enter the creature’s body, sliding into a wet mess of severed muscles, blood vessels as thick as my arm, and oozing walls of fatty tissue.
The stench was horrible—a putrid mix of sulfuric gas and decomposing flesh.
I couldn’t breathe. I could barely see. And I had no idea what was happening to me.
All I could do was keep pressing forward, cutting my way deeper and deeper into the belly of the beast.
But I was rapidly running out of air.
Finally, the mass of flesh gave way and I emerged in a sticky tube, segmented and filled with secretions. There was air in here, but when I tried to breathe, my lungs burned painfully. I wouldn’t last long in here at all. I needed to get out.
And it was obvious that the creature wanted me out of its gizzard as well. The monster thrashed around, making it impossible for me to stand.
Although I didn’t know for sure, my frantic guess was that I was inside of some sort of worm—one that was so large, its bulk filled the lava tube. Which meant I only had two ways out: the mouth or the anus.
I had a hunch that the mouth was closer, so I started crawling to my right, the direction the worm had been traveling when I attacked it.
As I moved, I continued to slash at the walls of the tube I was in—which was probably the creature’s intestine. By the dim glow of my light stick, I saw five bulbous pulsing sacs connected by a web of what could be blood vessels. I slashed at each of them, spraying myself with some thick liquid in the process.
That caused the worm to thrash again and I was flung off my feet, face first into the fleshy walls of the intestine. I sputtered and coughed, gasping for air.
Panic welled up inside of me. I needed to get out of here, before I suffocated to death or was dissolved by digestive enzymes.
I leapt forward, cutting and hacking. I think at one point, I must have hit the creature’s brain. Or, at least one of them. Because the monster started shaking like it was having a seizure. I felt like I was inside of a sani-pod during an earthquake.
I stumbled again, and fell. But when I tried to rise, my limbs were too weak to hold my weight. Another coughing fit overcame me as the toxic air inside this gullet burned my lungs. I tried again to rise, but everything grew bright around the edges of my vision
