was trying to get on his nerves.
Freeman did not answer. A minute later, he reached the top of the cord and pulled himself up to the ledge. I was not there to offer him a hand. I had walked a few feet into the cave to have a look around.
“You see a gravity chute?” Freeman asked.
“Not exactly,” I said. What I saw was a wide corridor carved out of solid rock. The entrance was so large, I thought I could run six lanes of traffic through it.
Ray Freeman had made a rare mistake when he said that the aliens had not had enough time to dig a gravity chute. He had underestimated them. Judging by this digging, they could have bored right through the center of New Copenhagen and popped up in the Hotel Valhalla pool had they wished.
Not that Freeman commented on the immense excavation when he saw it. He simply gazed down one side of the corridor, then the other, and said nothing. He knelt, unloaded his gear, and brought out the S.C.O.O.T.E.R.
“Ever used one of these?” Freeman asked.
“I’ve seen one in action,” I said, “on Hubble.”
Freeman placed the S.C.O.O.T.E.R. on the ground, then opened the top of the case to access the control panel. The panel included a four-inch screen with touch controls. They had improved the robot’s design. Freeman could give it voice commands using the interLink.
“Right or left?” Freeman asked me. The tunnel branched out in both directions.
“Doesn’t look like it matters,” I said.
A moment later the little robot rumbled off to the left, faltering over divots and skirting around large rocks, its sensors sweeping the area for signs of danger. I think I would have preferred the S.C.O.O.T.E.R. to have more balls and less brains. It found a rut along the wall of the cavern in which it could both travel and hide. The rut was just big enough for the robot, but it was useless for Freeman and me.
The ambient light inside the tunnel was just as bright as it was outside. I got the feeling that the glowing tachyons of the ion curtain had found their way into the mountains.
“This could take a while,” I said. “The S.C.O.O.T.E.R. I saw on Hubble was better at survival than reconnaissance.”
Wanting to kill time, I picked up the trackers and began placing them. I did not get very far, however. Within a few minutes, the S.C.O.O.T.E.R. found the Avatari. But they weren’t the Avatari we expected.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
Freeman sat fiddling with the S.C.O.O.T.E.R.’s controls as I lugged three trackers up the hall to the right. About twenty yards in, I started passing arterial hallways that led down into the heart of the mountain. The halls were fairly uniform, about six feet from floor to ceiling and somewhere around twenty-five feet from wall to wall. I tried to imagine a platoon of eight-foot-tall Avatari soldiers running through these halls. It seemed impossible. I would need to hunch my back to fit in there, and Freeman would need to crouch. I had no idea how a bunch of animated statues like the Avatari would fit; those bastards had another foot on Freeman.
As I peered into one of the tunnels, something surprised me, at least it surprised me once I realized what I was seeing. The grand corridor might have been brightly lit with the stuff that made the ion curtain, but the ancillary tunnels were dark as night. I relayed this piece of intelligence back to Freeman, but he did not reply. He might have been too busy guiding the S.C.O.O.T.E.R., or more likely he had already seen this in the S.C.O.O.T.E.R.’s video feed.
Looking for the right place to set up my first tracker, I walked just deep enough into a tunnel for my visor to switch to night-for-day vision, then called back to Freeman. “Think I should set up trackers in this tunnel?” I said.
“You wouldn’t want to go too far in there,” Freeman said.
“Any particular reason?” I asked.
“Because it’s full of giant spiders,” Freeman said.
I leaned the tracker against the wall and trotted back to have a look at the control screen. I did not like what I saw.
No one would ever describe the creature we saw on the tiny black and white screen as a “Space Angel.” Apparently the Avatari considered the humanoid form efficient for combat but not for mining. The creatures in these shafts looked like enormous spiders. They had eight multijointed legs. The two forelegs were shaped like a knife blade; the rear legs did not taper down to points. They were broad at the base—limbs made for mobility.
“I don’t like the look of that,” I said.
Freeman had switched to manual controls so that he could bypass the S.C.O.O.T.E.R.’s self-preservation programming. Using a joy-lever and dials, he guided the little robot toward the closest miner, then directly under its belly. Through the fish-eye lens, I watched as the spider-thing slashed at the granite floor with its forelegs. There must have been real power in those legs—they hacked through the rock as easily as a shovel digging in dry sand, showering the S.C.O.O.T.E.R. with rock and debris.
“Think that thing can cut through armor with those legs?” I asked.
Freeman, who seldom speculated on anything, said, “Yes.”
Scary or not, these things would have been useless on an open battlefield where men with guns could pick them off before they got within striking range. I saw no sign of guns or projectile weapons on the creature. Twisting through mountain tunnels, however, this creepy, ground-hugging bastard would have an advantage.
“Let’s kill the specker, grab its carcass, and get out of here,” I said.
Without saying a word, Freeman had the S.C.O.O.T.E.R. spin so that the camera showed the cavern. The walls were covered with dark spots that seemed to quiver in place.
“Those aren’t …” I started to say, but I knew they were. They were more spider-things. The S.C.O.O.T.E.R.’s camera only captured a small portion of the cavern, but I could see hundreds, maybe thousands, of spider-things wedged in together, slashing and scraping at the walls.
I wanted to make a joke about having seen enough and heading back to base. Instead, I said, “They don’t seem very alert. If their soldiers are avatars of real aliens, these things might just be drones.”
Freeman drove the S.C.O.O.T.E.R. out from under the spider-thing and guided it up a peak.
“Probably,” I added.
Now that I could see much more of the cavern on the screen, I lost all sense of proportion. I might have been staring into a nothingness as vast as the skies. What I saw was an endless vault with rough-hewn walls on which crawled thousands and thousands of spider-things, and I knew I had only seen the tip of the iceberg. Even with the S.C.O.O.T.E.R.’s enhanced optics, the camera only captured a tiny sliver of that enormous hive.
“Got any bug spray?” I asked Freeman.
He switched S.C.O.O.T.E.R. to autopilot mode.
“You know it’s just going to come running for safety now,” I said as he stood up, went to our gear, and slung the satchel of demolition equipment over his shoulder.
Freeman tossed me a particle-beam cannon. “You take point,” he said.
“Good idea,” he said, so we spent fifteen minutes placing our trackers along the main tunnel. If we did need to beat a fast retreat, we could start the trackers using controls in our helmets …if we made it that far.
That done, we started down the main corridor. I took a second gun slung over my shoulder. Creatures like these spider-things could probably snap a cannon in two with one swipe of their powerful legs. On the off chance that one of them broke my first cannon without cutting me in two along the way, having a second weapon would come in handy.
Then it came time to enter the ancillary tunnel that led down into the main cavern. I boosted the volume on the ambient noise and heard scraping and thumping, but it came from far away. I had point—not exactly a significant position with only two of us—but it meant that I would plan our route and lead the way. In a situation
