hundreds of battle cruisers and dreadnoughts, sleek and deadly, with enough firepower to atomize Bititu and its fanatical defenders.
We slowly, agonizingly drifted toward the asteroid. I felt naked and alone despite my armored space suit and the soldiers surrounding me. Not a sign of life from the asteroid. Not a glimmer of light. It merely hung there, growing slightly larger as we slowly approached it, a massive elongated chunk of rock, pockmarked with craters and scored with strange grooves, dark and solid and ominous.
I checked the watch set into the wrist of my suit. I had set it to count down to the instant when we would begin firing at the surface facilities. A hundred and nine seconds to go. A hundred and nine eternities.
At last I saw something glint on the asteroid’s surface. The reflection of sunlight? No, Jilbert was too faint and red to make that kind of glitter. Then another, and the front shield of one of our landers flared with the impact of a laser blast. Missiles were leaping from hidden fissures in the asteroid, blazing toward us. Our bombardment plan was instantly forgotten as we began to shoot at the missiles. They exploded in silent fireballs, each one closer to us as we drove onward toward the asteroid.
A lander was hit, bodies and fragments scattering, tumbling, flailing through the dark emptiness. Another, and then another. Dying voices screamed in my earphones.
“Fire at the surface targets!” I bellowed into my helmet microphone. “Heavy weapons, fire at the surface. All other platoons, antimissile fire.”
My well-trained troops began shooting at the targets we had picked out. But the enemy was firing missiles from spots that had looked like nothing but bare rock until a few moments earlier. A missile exploded scant meters from my lander, I could feel the heat of its flare even through the armor of my space suit. Fragments ripped into us, clunking against our armored suits. A trooper’s oxygen tank exploded in a brief deadly flare of flame, killing him instantly.
We were hitting the ground targets, I could see. Explosions peppered Bititu’s surface. Missiles were still blazing toward us, several more landers were blown away, but we were hurtling toward the surface now. We would be there in a few seconds. Smaller weapons were blasting at us now; I could feel the lander shuddering as small solid slugs racked us. A trooper was hit just next to me, space suit erupting into fountains of gushing blood that froze in the vacuum into solid red pellets.
We huddled behind the lander’s forward shield as lasers and projectiles racked the vehicle from one end to the other. Half the troops on the lander had already been killed by the time we thudded onto the asteroid’s rocky surface.
I jumped in the negligible gravity, rifle in hand, and blasted a partially open hatch set into the rock. It snapped shut. It took an effort to keep from soaring into space; I adjusted the flight pack on my back to negative and felt some semblance of weight that helped me to flatten onto my belly while laser beams and volleys of slugs zipped over my head.
My earphones were ablaze with frantic voices:
“They’re all around us!”
“I’ve got seventy-percent casualties! We’ve got to get off this rock!”
“Where’s the weapons platoon? I need backup.
I slapped a magnetic grenade on the hatch and backed away. It blew noiselessly in the vacuum, smoke dissipating almost before my eyes registered its presence.
“Get into the tunnels!” I yelled into my helmet mike. “The only troops left on the surface are going to be the dead. Get inside! Move!”
I rolled another grenade into the opening of the blasted hatch, then slid into the tunnel headfirst, spraying rifle fire into the murky shadows to clear out any defenders who might have survived the grenade.
The tunnel was barely wide enough for me to crawl through and so dark that I had to turn on my helmet light, despite the infrared sensors in my visor. I heard something slithering behind me and rolled onto my back, aiming my rifle down the length of my torso.
“It’s just me, sir!” came a trooper’s voice, and I saw a space-suited figure, as anonymous as a faceless sculpture, crawling down the tunnel behind me.
Rolling onto my stomach again, I came face-to-face with my first Arachnoid. It was black, fully a meter wide, with eight spindly legs covered with what seemed like barbs. It held an oblong object in its front two claws, something with fins and a glasslike lens pointing at me. Behind that weapon I saw a face with horizontal mandibles clicking rapidly and eight glittering eyes, no two the same size.
I ducked my head, digging my visor into the bare rock of the tunnel, and pulled the trigger of my rifle at the same time. I felt a blast of heat against the armored top of my helmet, heard a high-pitched wail and the scuttling sound of claws on rock.
When I looked up the spider was gone, but there was a patch of sticky pus-yellow goo on the tunnel floor where it had stood. I saw a side tunnel veering off from this one. Pulling a rocket grenade loose from my belt, I set it for impact and fired it down the side tunnel. It exploded almost immediately, showering me with a hail of pebbles and dust and smoke.
I crawled past the side tunnel, ordering the trooper behind me to take his buddies along it. My earphones blazed with frantic voices:
“There’s millions of ’em!”
“They’re behind us! They’re all around us!”
“We’ve gotta get out of here! There’s too many of ’em!”
There was no way out of here. We could not get back aboard the landers even if we wanted to; they had lifted off the asteroid as soon as we had disembarked.
Slithering forward on my belly, I peered deeper into the tunnel. For a few moments I saw nothing, but I realized I could hear scraping noises and eerie, whistling screeches. Somehow there was enough air in the tunnel to carry sound, or maybe the rock itself was conducting sound waves. Farther off, I could hear the
“There’s more of ’em!”
“It’s like a trapdoor. Look out!”
The tunnel was widening. The light on my helmet was deep red, not much help in seeing, but Intelligence hoped that the Arachnoids’ eyes could not see that end of the visible spectrum. It occurred to me that if we could produce sensors that detected wavelengths our eyes could not see, the Arachnoids might similarly have developed technology to aid their natural senses. So I switched off the lamp and inched along the black tunnel, depending on my visor’s infrared sensors to warn me.
Something exploded somewhere behind me, too big an explosion to be one of our grenades. A cloud of dust roiled along the tunnel. Then I heard that scraping, skittering noise again and a spider popped out of another side tunnel. I blasted it in half with a bolt from my rifle. Edging to the lip of the tunnel entrance, I peered into the darkness. My visor showed the faint outline of something in there, inching slowly toward me. I waited until it became clear. Another spider. I killed it with a shot in the middle of its eye cluster.
I worked my way past the sticky remains of the Arachnoid. The tunnel was almost high enough for me to get to my hands and knees, and getting wider all the time. The Arachnoids, I realized, needed more width than height to accommodate the shape of their bodies.
“My squad’s down to six effectives. We’ve got to get out of here!”
“Keep moving toward the center of this rock,” I bellowed into my helmet mike. “Nobody’s getting off until the last spider’s killed.”
“Look out, sir!”
I rolled over and saw half a dozen Arachnoids dropping out of a hatch in the top of the tunnel, behind me. The trooper who had shouted the warning fired at them. Two of the spiders rushed at me. I shot the first one in the belly, it was that close. The second was on top of me, jamming its pistol against my chest and firing point- blank. I knocked the gun away with the butt of my rifle as the beam cracked my suit armor and burned my flesh. With a roar of pain I pressed the muzzle of my rifle against the spider’s underside and fired. The Arachnoid exploded, spattering the tunnel and me with sticky yellowish pieces.
The trooper behind me was dead, his head blown off, but there were two dead spiders beside him, and
