little higher now and we could stand upright. We moved forward cautiously at a fast walk. My tacmod showed the others up ahead. The walls flowed past us, featureless. If anything had been here, it was long gone.
The corridor ended in a vast, darkened hall, a cavern cut out of the rock. We stepped in cautiously and I triggered the darklight on my E. The sheer size of the place dwarfed us. It was like a cathedral of stone. I stopped breathing. Facing us, glowing a mysterious green, stood two massive stone figures, carved right from the face of the rock wall.
The two great sentinels, a male and a female, stood side-by-side, shoulder-to-shoulder, clutching fantastic implements. The entire chamber was evidently their crypt. Even through the mold, I could see the fine, clean features of those two incredible messengers from the long dead past. Vertical lines of spidery runes spoke to us from so long ago that we could understand nothing. In between the runes were figures-thousands of people, from far away and long ago, from ages lost to history, engaged in elaborate, mysterious activity. These must have been the ancestors of Andrion 2’s human inhabitants. There were colors, faint pale colors in the green of the darksight, and I realized that it had all once been blazing with color, brilliant, radiant color, all the way down here in the bowels of this fossilized city. This had been the pinnacle of thousands of years of development and sacrifice and learning and culture. What had happened to them?
“Thinker! Move it!” Priestess pulled at my arm. I had been transfixed for a moment, lost in the past. I tore my eyes away from them. There was another dark doorway, right in the wall, between the massive legs of the two great figures. We trotted forward, our E’s pointed up ahead. The doorway led to a long straight tunnel, plunged in eternal darkness, far beneath the earth.
“Priestess. Wait.” I raised a hand to the corridor wall. I could see it in the darksight, haloed in green. The walls, the walls-my holy God! The walls were lined with life-sized figures, ghosts from the ages, carved and painted, a long procession, males and females, faded and peeling, hundreds of them, thousands of them, along both sides of the corridor, carrying strange devices, holding up banners that had not seen the light in thousands of years. Phalanxes of brutal soldiers, troops of sweating laborers, streets full of long-haired girls dressed in sheer garments, hundreds of little children holding hands. A royal court, a golden king and a silvery queen, and princes and princesses, and torches and incense and great ships and magnificent palaces. Heavenly landscapes, forests and rivers and waterfalls and great far-off mountain ranges. All of this, following us along that corridor.
“Priestess-look at…”
“They’ve been dead a thousand years, Thinker-let’s go!” I tore myself away from the wall, and followed Priestess into the dark. All those long-dead people. I never asked for this. The world up above in the sunshine was beautiful-why would anyone live down here?
“Priestess, Thinker, take the first left,” Snow Leopard ordered. “We’re going straight.” My tacmap showed the plan. “There are several corridors branching off this one. Watch your map. It’s a real maze, and he’ll be trying to get past us. You’ll be in a blocking position there. The map still says there’s no way out.” He sounded excited, anxious to bag the Scaler.
Nobody said a thing about those great stone figures, although everybody had seen them. The Legion was very task-oriented. Lord, we are barbarians!
Another corridor loomed on the left. Priestess hesitated at the entrance, waiting for me.
Into the unknown, again, with just enough blood in my adrenalin flow to keep my systems going. We looked into each other’s eyes through our faceplates and struck fists. The Legion salute-we would return together or die.
A dead, dark tunnel of black stone, with wet rot coating the walls. We always fought the unknown in the Legion. Once we know our enemy, it is always so much easier. But dealing with the unknown is bad for the soul. The enemy might be a harried, helpless savage, or it might be a DefCorps squad, waiting in the dark to slice us into bloody pieces before we could even react.
The corridor widened. We stopped, every sense alert. Little warnings tingled in the back of my mind and my skin crawled, but Sweety was silent. A large stone chamber faced us, murky pools of black water on the floor, scraggly black vegetation growing up the walls and hanging from the roof. I did not want to go in there.
“Hold it,” I said. Priestess had already stopped. We paused at the entrance to the chamber. Ancient metal rings, coated with rust, studded the walls.
An empty chamber. “I don’t like it,” I said. “What do you suppose this is?”
“It could have been anything.”
“I don’t like it,” I repeated.
We scanned the chamber carefully. Sweety noted mold, tiny parasites, slugs, worms, and billions of airborne microorganisms. It looked all right, but it did not feel all right.
Suddenly our tacnet exploded and we could hear autovac, shattering the dark, echoing through the corridors.
Snow Leopard screamed, “Fire! Fire! Fire!…Stop! Cease Fire! Freeze!”
Priestess and I froze as well, listening to the transmissions.
“I got him!”
“Don’t move!”
“He went down!”
“Don’t move!”
“Where is he?”
“Cease fire! Cease fire.”
“He moved!”
“Tenners, cease fire!”
Priestess and I leaned against the wall, side by side, our E’s pointed into the darkened chamber.
“Sounds like they got him,” I commented.
“That’s good,” Priestess said. “Good.”
“Element, up! Lifies up! On me!” Snow Leopard ordered. Evidently they were securing the Scaler.
“Thinker, Priestess, remain in place.” Snow Leopard never stopped thinking. He didn’t need us. I let myself slide down the corridor wall to a sitting position, my muscles relaxing. Priestess did the same. I felt good, despite that awful tunnel. This empty chamber was creepy, but there was plenty of room so I could breathe. We weren’t going to be meeting the Systies after all-at least not today! It was wonderful, sitting there looking at Priestess. I felt the blood pumping through my veins. I had never been so alive.
Snow Leopard was in his element. “Careful, zap him if he moves. Medic up!”
Priestess’s arms twitched, a reflex to the call for a medic. The life team leader called his own medic, the other man on the capture team. Priestess started giggling. I put my arm around her shoulders and squeezed. I just wanted to hold her, to look into her eyes. Even with the faceplate and the mud, even with the green glow and the dark, she was youth and beauty and life. We embraced, silently, awkwardly, and I swear I could hear her heartbeat. I never wanted to leave her.
I felt a faint shudder in the floor and we tensed, the moment of tenderness evaporated. Suddenly, the chamber floor erupted before us with a tremendous crack. Rock shrapnel ricocheted wildly in all directions, peppering us with jagged flecks of stone. Dust and earth filled the air. A scream echoed in my ears, and we were airborne. I landed on my back, breathless. I raised my head. Dust swirled all around me.
A new sound consumed the room, a metallic chittering, harsh and bone-chilling. I raised my E. The dust cleared. A grotesque, massive exoseg head appeared, covered with coarse black bristles, jerking from side to side in super-fast motion, giant bulging compound eyes glittering black. Long, nasty antennae probed and snapped like great whips. A hideous wet mouth emerged, pincers open, front legs brushing the rubble aside as the creature rose up out of the hole.
“Exoseg Gigantic Soldier…” Sweety warned me.
Too late, Sweety!
I stared stupidly at the impossible apparition. My comtop shrieked with alarms and Sweety relayed information to me in a rapid-fire staccato. I could not believe how calm she sounded.
The creature seized Priestess bodily in its two front legs, raising her in the air. She screamed a nightmare scream, arms pinned, her E still strapped to her chest. The creature opened its maw. It was going to eat her headfirst!
I came out of my shock at the last possible instant. My E had been aimed at the exoseg but I had been
