like this, it was all a crapshoot. At the end of the tunnel, we might run into an ambush—a horde of giant alien spider-things just waiting for us, or they might not even register us at all.
Were these avatars of thinking beings, or robotic drones, or maybe living, breathing, eating creatures? Did they sling webs? Visions of spiderwebs with threads the size of nylon cables played in my mind. I imagined those creatures trapping us, tying us tightly, then eating us alive. In my mind, I saw spiders with bayonet-like mandibles. I tried to erase these thoughts, but they lingered as I bent my back and started down that tunnel.
The ground sloped down at a twenty-degree angle. The world around me went dark for less than a second, then my night-for-day lenses took over and I saw everything around me in black-and-blue-white images. My sense of depth, however, disappeared quickly.
The tunnel was clearly not natural. Though it was pitted with pick marks and inch-deep lines, the roof of the tunnel was flat and straight, as were the walls. The spider-things had hacked the tunnel out of a solid granite slab.
The ceiling had to be almost precisely six feet tall. Standing six-three with two extra inches for my helmet, I had to duck my head as I walked. Freeman, who quickly fell back behind me, could only get through by walking in a crouch.
“Maybe we can trap these things if we place charges around the entrance,” I suggested.
“No,” Freeman said.
“Any reason?” I asked.
“They just hollowed out this entire mountain, they would be able to dig themselves out.”
“So why bring all the demolition gear if you’re not going to use it?”
“We might find a generator or some central control,” Freeman said.
I realized I was thinking survival, and he was talking strategy.
The tube curled down like a spiral stairwell in which the steps had washed away. As I continued down, I moved toward the wall for a closer look. The walls and ceiling were anything but smooth—though flat, they were pocked with yard-long grooves into which I could fit my hands.
“Any guesses on how many of those things can fit through here at once?” I asked. Before Freeman could respond, I had my answer.
“Incoming!” I yelled into the interLink.
I saw two front legs first. They were shaped like an ax handle and tapered down to ice-pick points. I flattened my back against the wall as hard as I possibly could, and aimed my particle-beam cannon. That was all that I could do.
“How many?” Freeman asked.
“Just one, so far,” I said.
It rounded the corner and scuttled past me. There was nothing resembling flesh on this creature. It might have had an exoskeleton or it could have been all armor, but I saw no soft spots on its body. And it was big. The sharp arches of the spider-thing’s forelegs came almost to my chest.
Behind those legs came a featureless, ball-shaped head. It had no eyes and, to my relief, no mouth. The spider-thing had a low-slung body that cleared the ground by no more than a foot. The damned thing thrust past me without so much as a sideways glance, leaving me shivering in its wake.
I watched it from the back as it continued up the slope and around the curve. Unlike the insectile forelegs, the short rear legs looked reptilian. The forelegs clawed at the ground, breaking the rock and hard-packed earth loose. The rear legs swept up the debris. I felt a strong impulse to give that thing a particle-beam enema but resisted.
“It’s on its way toward you,” I warned Freeman.
“I see it,” he said.
“It walked right past me,” I said. “It doesn’t seem to care about visitors.”
Moments later, Freeman let me know that the spider-thing passed him as well. We continued down the tunnel, then, all of a sudden, I found myself facing a cavern that stretched far beyond the limited range of my night-for-day lenses. Using optical commands, I initiated a sonar sweep and pinged the cavern to determine its size. I got no reading. Something in the cave either dampened or absorbed my ping.
The spider-things were everywhere, digging at the floor, clinging to the walls, digging at the ceiling. I watched one near me as it dug, scraping the granite with its front-most legs, pushing boulders out of its way with its outermost legs, then sweeping at the dirt and debris with its hind legs. The spider-thing had dug a shallow pit around itself. Most of the spider-things around the cavern had dug themselves into pits.
I stood on a ridge overlooking the scene. A path led on, winding down the steep slope of the cavern. We would need to follow that path. The spider-things used it, too. They also climbed the sides of the cavern. By stabbing their dagger legs into the granite wall, they moved adroitly along the rock. It did not matter to them if the wall sloped down at forty-five degrees or ninety, they moved with equal alacrity.
A shower of small rocks fell around me. When I looked up, I saw two of those spider-things almost directly over my head. They could have pounced on me if they had a mind to, but a mind was something they seemed to lack.
I scanned the area using heat vision. Like the Avatari soldiers, these creatures gave off no body heat. That did not mean they were avatars; real spiders do not generate body heat, either. Just then a rock the size of a grapefruit fell, narrowly missing my head.
Above me, one of those creatures had arranged itself so that its face stared straight down at me, but it paid me no attention. It slashed at the rocks around it with one of its legs, dislodging rock chips, gravel, and rocks the size of golf balls.
CHAPTER THIRTY
“That way,” Freeman said as he paused beside me on the ridge at the end of the tunnel. He pointed toward a mound on the floor of the cavern. The cavern itself was dark, but there was a cave on the mound, with light pouring out of it. I tried to measure the distance to that cave using a sonar ping. Apparently the signal returned garbled but readable, as an icon appeared on my visor warning me that it was “repairing” the test results. A moment later a virtual beacon appeared over the cave along with a measurement of 1.2 miles.
A ninety-foot drop stood between us and the floor of the cavern. To get down to the floor, we would need to follow a trail that switched back and forth along a steep slope. The ridge on which we stood jutted out over the top of the slope, so I could not see what was just below us. Once we reached the cavern floor, though, the path to the distant cave looked dangerous. We would cross more than a mile of spider-thing-infested cavern floor. As I traced the route we would take, I saw five or six spider-things cut across the path.
“I don’t suppose we can examine the cave from here?” I asked. When Freeman did not respond to my little joke, I followed up with, “Let’s go.”
Viewed through night-for-day lenses, the spider creatures looked just a shade lighter than absolute black against the nickel gray of the granite stone. Of course, seen through those lenses, everything was blue-gray, blue-white, or black with a hint of blue. Down along the floor of the cavern, the drones looked like animated patches of grass. There were thousands of them, maybe hundreds of thousands. Most of them dug within their own personal divots, but some were working so closely together that their legs became interlaced.
I reached over my shoulder and touched my backup cannon for reassurance, then started down the slope. The moment I stepped off our ledge, I found myself no more than a foot from one of the spider-things. It had carved a hole into the granite directly beneath the spot on which I had been standing. Taking a half step back, I aimed my rifle at the creature, but the busy little bastard ignored me. It rolled a two-foot boulder out of its hole, pivoted around, and crawled back the way it had come.
My Liberator’s combat reflex had already begun. Testosterone and adrenaline flowed through my veins, leaving me calm and ready for violence at the same time. I liked it more than ever before, my thoughts taking on new clarity as a nearly electric tingle ran across my skin. The danger had already gone, but I welcomed the effects as the reflex lingered.
