Probably not, but I didn’t want to risk it.
“If those things have any brains, they’ve spotted us by now,” I told Freeman. “Maybe they know we’re here, and they’re just too scared to do anything about us.”
He did not respond.
I looked back the way we had come and saw something that disturbed me. All of the spider-things in this cavern appeared to be the exact same size …all of them except one. This creature was twice the size of the others, a spider-thing the size of a small car that crawled more quickly than its fellows. I spotted it moving along the roof of the cavern. While most of the other spider-things remained fixed in their small holes, this creature crawled in a straight line along the wall of the cavern, heading in our direction.
It was still hundreds of feet away. It crawled toward us slowly but steadily, dwarfing the other spider-things around it, its sharp, front legs stepping, stabbing, and pulling.
“You didn’t happen to see the big spider on the wall?” I asked.
“I saw it,” Freeman said.
We risked attracting more attention to ourselves by running; but seeing that big creature coming after us, I sped to a jog as we worked our way down the slope along the zigzagging trail.
I rounded a bend and had to stop moving while a spider-thing strolled across the path. I looked at its forelegs. From the ground to the joint at the top of their arch, those legs were as long and wide as a grown man’s crutches. The ends of its segmented legs were flat and smooth and sharp as swords. They had a dull shine as if they were made of metal or plastic.
As I waited for the spider-thing to crawl off the path, I looked back toward the roof of the cavern. The giant spider-thing I spotted earlier was still coming in our direction. It might have gained some ground on us, but it still had not yet reached the ridge from which we had come. It scuttled across the wall, working its legs like knitting needles as it clung to the rock.
“At least they don’t spin webs,” I said.
Freeman did not answer. He stood about fifteen feet behind me fiddling with a T-shaped instrument of some kind. At the moment, I would have preferred for him to have a grenade in his left hand and a particle-beam pistol in his right, but we had come to gather scientific data.
“We better get moving,” I said. “If that thing catches up to us, we might be in trouble.” The gargantuan spider-thing might not need to catch up to us, though. As long as it remained between us and our way out of the cavern, it was in control of the situation. Freeman seldom made mistakes, but he might have made a colossal error when he switched the S.C.O.O.T.E.R. to its self-preservation autopilot too soon.
We passed dozens of regular-sized spider-things as we wound our way down to the floor of the cavern. Sometimes I came so close to them that I could have reached out and grabbed their legs, but they showed no sign of noticing me.
I hazarded another look back at the big spider-thing and saw that it had made it past the entrance to the tunnel. It moved slowly, maybe even slower than we did; but we were walking back and forth along a twisting path. The giant spider-thing crawled straight down the steep slope, gaining ground on us.
As I spared just a moment to watch its casual gait, I decided that the Avatari had not placed it in these caverns as a guard. This one was no drone. It might be the avatar of an engineer or maybe a foreman who located problems and sorted them out. It probably took care of cave-ins, explosions, floods, and the occasional two-legged stranger that meandered into its lair.
It was still a hundred feet back, but moments earlier, it had been two hundred or three hundred feet away.
“What do we do if it catches up to us?” I asked Freeman. The drones might have been on autopilot, but that did not mean their guardian would be.
“We don’t let it catch up to us,” Freeman said. His voice was absolutely calm.
A spider-thing rolling a seven-foot boulder crossed the path a few feet ahead of me. It moved the boulder so easily it might have been pushing a gigantic ball of string instead of a ten-ton rock. The spider-thing paused, tapped the boulder with its legs to change the direction it rolled, then, with a nudge, started pushing again. During the moment that it stopped, I aimed my weapon at its head and tightened my finger across the trigger. I was on edge and ready to kill.
“If any more get in your way, kill them,” Freeman told me. He did not need to tell me twice.
I reached the bottom of the slope and waited for Freeman. The cavern floor was low around the edges and bulged up toward the middle. Because of the convex curvature, I could no longer see the cave entrance that I had marked with my virtual beacon. I knew we were heading in the right direction; and, because I had marked it with a virtual beacon, a chip in my visor marked the distance—0.7 miles away. We would have reached the cave by now if we could have moved toward it in a straight line. But between us and that beacon, thousands of spider- things scratched at the granite floor. They did not seem to care about us, but we were going to need to dodge any of them between us and the cave. Traveling that 0.7 of a mile might take longer than a five-mile hike once we worked in our winding trail.
“Did they give you that meter at the Science Lab? What’s it reading?” I asked Freeman.
“I don’t know what it reads,” Freeman said. He held the T-shaped device in his right hand. Lights flashed across the broad bar on its top. “I know it’s taking air samples.”
“Can it broadcast a signal to the lab?”
“No.”
“What happens if we don’t make it out of here?” I asked.
“There’s a computer recording our results in the transport,” Freeman said.
“So if we don’t make it, they’ll get along perfectly well without us. How does it feel to be expendable?” I asked, thinking that Freeman was now just as replaceable as a bullet or a rifle, or a clone.
“I’m a mercenary; I’m worse than expendable. The people who hire us want us to die once we finish our job—that way they don’t have to pay us.”
For the first time in my life, I had to entertain the notion that there might be someone lower on the social ladder than a clone. Try as I might, I could not come up with a smart comeback, so I concentrated on reaching the beacon.
Moving along the floor of the cavern proved less dangerous than I had expected—I simply had to thread my way around the pits in which the spider-things worked. Most of the drones had dug three- or four-foot-deep pits around themselves. They moved back and forth in their little cells, clawing at the rocky floor, then sweeping the debris out of their holes. I had no idea what became of the dirt and rocks they dislodged. Presumably this entire cavern had once been a solid mass of rock and earth. They must have disintegrated it or hauled it out somewhere.
The spider-things spun and clawed and tore great shards of rock out of the ground. I had the feeling that if I fell into one of these holes, the creature inside it might tear me in half without ever noticing.
We continued up the gentle slope toward the center of the cavern, where the mound with the brightly lit cave-within-a-cave rose out of the ground like a pimple. The constant scraping and tapping of the spider-things around me caused the ground to vibrate. When I slowed to wait for Freeman, I could feel that vibration through my boots.
But I did not have time to worry about the drones or the way the ground shook beneath my feet. Maintaining a quick jog, I skirted one spider-filled divot, then the next as I headed toward the cave. I did not know how far we had traveled at this point but, according to my visor, we had approximately a quarter of a mile to go. When I looked back toward the tunnel from which we had entered the cavern, I saw that we had put a little more distance between us and the guardian spider. It had either slowed down or was hanging back to see what we would do next.
I did not have time to figure the spider-thing out. We reached the mound with the cave, a steep cone with no trails leading up its twenty-foot slope. Light shone out of the cave at the top like a search beam from a lighthouse. The silver-white beam stabbed into the darkness of the cavern like a flame from a welding torch, its glow so bright that when I looked at it, my visor switched from night-for-day to tactical view.
Loose dirt and rock shavings covered the sides of the mound; I had to scramble to keep my footing as I climbed toward the cave. When I reached the mouth itself, I played it by the book. For all I knew, the guardian spider had slowed because it had a buddy waiting for us in the cave. Crouching low to the ground, my particle-
