me. These spider-things had to have been incubated somewhere; they were no more alive than the Avatari soldiers attacking Valhalla. What I did not expect to see was the stream of mud-colored gas leaking from the bottom of these spheres.
At first I thought that gas might have been the stuff we called distilled shit gas, a substance I had only seen on two other planets—Hubble and the Mogat home world. Distilled shit gas was corrosive gas that ate through just about anything soft, including bodysuits and flesh. Sweetwater and Breeze would have known the stuff by its scientific name, “extreme-hydrogenation elemental compound distillation,” but we military types knew it for what it really was—distilled shit gas.
I could see that this stuff was not distilled shit gas, though it looked like a close cousin. The substance was so heavy it almost qualified as a liquid. The way it leaked out of the spheres and streamed along the floor of the cave, it looked more like spent sludgy motor oil. Fumes from the gas caused visible ripples in the air in the cave.
Freeman stood near the stream of sludgy gas, waving his sensor over it.
“What is that shit?” I asked.
“I don’t know, but you wouldn’t want to breathe it,” Freeman said. “It’s eating right through the ground.”
I looked back at the mouth of the cave, wondering what we would do if an entire colony of spider-things attacked us. That probably would not happen, but I suspected there might be more of the big ones hiding out there.
“You might want to move in farther,” Freeman said.
“What?” Then I saw that he had placed charges around the mouth of the cave. He gave me a moment to move to safety, then he set off the charges. The cave shook. The noise was so loud that I heard it through my helmet. Freeman, a master at demolitions, had set the charges so that the percussion of the explosion faced away from us; but when the dust cleared, a solid wall of boulders and debris blocked the entrance.
“I needed more time,” Freeman said, as if explaining the obvious.
“Great, now you have all the specking time in the world. We’re trapped in here,” I said.
“If there are any more of the guardians out there, you will be able to spot them when they dig through that wall,” Freeman said.
“Damn it, Freeman, you just buried us alive.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
Freeman’s pyrotechnic display reduced the front of the cave to a wall of rocks and boulders. I went to the wall and tried to push a large boulder aside. It did not budge. I tried another. It moved easily enough, so I pushed this way, then pulled that way. After about five minutes’ work, I dislodged the rock from its cradle and rolled it to the floor. Other rocks shifted as that one rolled down the pile, and, for a moment, I feared that the wall of rocks might cave in.
I waited for the rocks to settle, then reached into the hole I had created and touched a long slab of granite. Even through my gloves, I could feel the vibration, something, maybe many somethings, was scratching at the rock on the other side.
One of the larger boulders shook and rolled down the mound. “The Avatari Search and Rescue squad is here,” I said. Touching a rock and feeling the strong vibration, I added, “This wall isn’t going to keep them out long.”
“You’re a Marine, shoot them,” Freeman said. “You know the distilled shit gas on the Mogats’ planet; this stuff is worse. If we stay here too long, the fumes will eat our armor.”
At the mouth of the cave, a coffin-sized slab of granite slid out from the pile. Smaller rocks, some as small as grenades and some as large as combat helmets, rolled off the pile. The creatures on the other side of that wall did not care if they pulled the rocks away or pushed them in on us.
“Better hurry it up,” I told Freeman.
A moment passed, and he said, “I’ve got what I need.” He clipped the meter to his belt and brought out his particle-beam pistol.
The digging on the other side of the cave-in got louder. More rocks fell. Something hit the pile with so much force that it caused a slab of granite to shatter. As the pieces fell, I saw the foot-long point of a spider-thing’s foreleg sticking through. The leg vanished in an avalanche of dust and rubble.
“Can those spiders go invisible?” Freeman asked.
“They camouflage themselves,” I said.
The digging got louder. It took form. The amorphous tapping and rumbling solidified into the sound of knife- blade legs scratching and stabbing into stone. Rocks the size of car tires spilled from the pile that had once filled the front of the cave. All too soon that wall of debris stopped a full foot from the ceiling. Five feet of questing spider leg came slashing through that gap.
“Don’t shoot them yet,” I said, stating the obvious. “We need them to make the hole bigger.” I could feel my heart thumping in my chest and the sound of my breath echoing in my helmet. The steam from my breath created a small patch of fog on the inside of my visor. It was nothing bad, though, nothing that would block my vision. Somewhere in my nervous system, the combat reflex began.
We backed toward the spheres, keeping our guns aimed at the mouth of the cave and a wary eye out to make sure we did not step in the gas. I would take my chances against a whole herd of spider-things before I would step in that. And then there were those spheres …Between the gas, the spheres, and the giant spider-things, this mission was heading south in a hurry.
I knelt, using a boulder as cover, and waited for the guardians to dig through. Freeman did not bother crouching or looking for cover. He stood erect, his particle-beam pistol raised and ready to fight.
A three-foot-round boulder wiggled, then dropped out of place from the top of the cave-in. It bowled down the slope and crashed into a wall. Dust flew, then the first bladelike leg quested through the hole. It slashed at the air, hooked a large tray of rock, and dragged it out of the way. The hole at the top was now large enough for us to wiggle through, though it would have been a tight fit for Freeman.
A section of rocks exploded in toward us, two-hundred-pound rocks flying through as if they were beach balls. I easily could have crawled through the gap the rocks left, but, fortunately, the spider-thing that made it did not fit. Its legs speared through the hole, flailing slowly in the air.
I had a clear shot right then but held my fire. Freeman followed my lead, aiming his gun and waiting.
Another spider-thing bashed a second gap through the rocks.
“Not yet,” I whispered to Freeman. “Let them do the work for us.” The guardian digging the second hole hooked a slab and dragged it back through the hole, causing the top of the pile to sift down one side. “Just a little more …a little more, then we shoot.”
Another spider-thing began a second hole, forcing its forelegs through the gap it had created. With those powerful hind legs pushing, it might have broken all the way through had I not killed it. I sprang to my feet firing my cannon as I dashed for the entrance. The green, glittering beam dissolved the legs, and I fired at the head behind them and kept firing until the head disappeared and the weight of the boulders finally crushed whatever was left.
Another spider-thing tried to crawl over the now-wide-open gap at the crest, but I got there first. I aimed over the back of a rock and fired, disintegrating legs and heads and bodies. Amazingly agile for his size, Freeman darted into a gap in the rocks below me. He fired several shots at a guardian spider, then jumped through the gap and appeared on the other side. Lying on the top of the cave-in, I swung my legs out over the other side of the rubble and slid down to join him. We had destroyed three guardian spiders, and the shells of their bodies lay around us like wreckage from a plane crash.
Now that I had left the well-lit harbor of the cave, with its spheres and gas, my visor switched to night-for-day
