Days later, we’d settled into routine patrols, crisscrossing the planet in search of what wasn’t there. Gradually, boredom and frustration clawed at the ragged edges of our resolve. Then it happened! A native!
“Set your E’s on minimum V-stun rounds, ladies. Repeat, v-min.” Snow Leopard was already harassing us-he never let up. I was in the aircar, slipping the comtop helmet over my head. We were at last closing on a native! We’d been called in to pick up the search from the air for the native that Alpha squad had spotted in the forest while on foot patrol. He had gone to ground in a tangle of shrubbery. Redhawk spotted a nearby clearing and swooped down for a hot decar.
We hit the ground running in armor, but it was a short pursuit. He had disappeared into a very narrow tunnel leading down into the earth at a sharp angle. It was just the right size for a Scaler-our name for the scale-clad natives. They were smaller than us, but we could all see that a Legion soldier could fit in there as well-without armor.
Merlin launched a trio of microprobes and they showed a well-worn passageway extending a long, sinuous distance. It didn’t get any wider for a long time, so blasting a larger entrance was out.
I slipped my comtop on and activated the tacmap on my translucent faceplate. The comtop was a scaled-down version of the A-suit helmet. It provided light armor head protection and communication when we weren’t in our A-suits. We hurriedly changed into A-vests, litesuits and comtops.
“Stun rounds!” Psycho quipped. “Yes, sir! We sure wouldn’t want to hurt anybody.”
What a bloodthirsty little smartass. Psycho was a mental case. Snow Leopard spent a lot of time holding him back, but he was smart and fast.
I was not happy about the V-min, either. V rounds would stun and normally induce unconsciousness but minimum power didn’t pack much of a punch. I exited the aircar, adjusted my gloves, draped my E across my chest and yanked at the jumble of equipment strapped to my waist.
Snow Leopard looked appraisingly at the extra equipment I carried and cracked a grin, letting his guard down for a moment. “You look like a military surplus sale, Thinker.”
Dragon chimed in, “Hey, Thinker, can I borrow something if I need it down there? You know I don’t like to carry stuff.”
Psycho could be more obnoxious than Dragon. “Hey, Thinker, can you haul my gear, too?”
“Blackout, will you?” I didn’t mind. I always took as much stuff as I could carry. I knew the only way I’d really need something was to leave it behind.
The forest darkened. I glanced up at the clouds blotting out the sun. Violet shadows and a fine mist filled the air. Angel wings hovered above me. We’d named the delicate, jelly-like creatures air angels.
The entrance lay at the edge of a blackened, crumbling, dead city, choked with vegetation. Enormous tree roots snaked around the city, strangling it with glacial patience. Massive green trees rose amid the shattered stones of a fossilized past. Tiny, colorful flying creatures glided past, trailing the air angels. A stronger breeze stirred the forest. Nothing on screen.
We stood in the heart of the past. Broken stone blocks rested all around us, the tomb of a city, now part of the forest. It was officially designated Site 5543. The mist turned to pelting rain. Perfect-the tunnel will fill up with water and we’ll all drown.
We gathered around the entrance, along with a few life techies that had just arrived in another aircar. Then Squad Alpha arrived to guard the area and watch our backs. It could be a trap. We still didn’t know what we were up against or where the damned Systies were hiding. This tunnel or passageway would be a lovely spot to trap and kill a few Legion troopers.
Our camfax automatically blended with the surroundings. At that moment, we looked dark and wet. I re-ran the system checklist on my comtop. The darksight worked fine. So did the breather and the comset. We wouldn’t need the breather except for the water. Unless the tunnel caved in. Or they used gas. Or smoke.
Hardly anything to worry about.
“This could be tremendously amusing.” Coolhand had perfected his rather grim sense of humor on Planet Hell. A tall, slim youth, he came from some lost, hopeless spacer ratworld. Curly dark brown hair, friendly green eyes, a narrow, clean-cut face, tanned a pale brown. He was a musician, happiest when strumming his ionic lektra, his only real possession. In the field he was cautious, but good, so they made him a Two.
He looked up as three more aircars converged on our location from different directions-the clearing would soon run out of room. “I feel kind of sorry for this Scaler,” Coolhand said, gesturing towards the aircars. “All this attention. I think the brass are upset ‘cause they haven’t found anybody to shoot yet.”
There had been no opposition to our landing. No evidence of Systie intrusion at all. The fireworks had been for nothing, but we had no regrets, not for an instant. There is only one way to land on a new, potentially hostile, planet-successfully! And that meant kill anyone or anything that got in the way. There’s no time to quibble over philosophy, or to chat with the natives, discussing your benign intentions.
Back on Atom, during the long voyage, I’d admitted the truth to myself. I’d loved Hell. It was my darkest secret. I must be insane, I’d thought. Somehow I slipped past the psych tests. Would they send me back? Eventually, I discovered the others were just as crazy. The Legion knew exactly what it was doing. We were the scum of the Outers, the dreamers and the lost. We looked up at the stars and found the Legion gate. It was a one-way gate-no one who went in ever came out. No information ever came out, either-except what the Legion wanted to tell.
Whatever you want, you get. That’s what they told us as recruits. I didn’t believe it, of course. Nobody did. It was a complete shock, then, when we discovered it was really true. Whatever you want, you get. We could write our own ticket, and if the final stop did not turn out to be quite to our liking, we had no one to blame but ourselves.
Hunting Scalers-nonsense! The Systies were the only real objective. But we hadn’t found them, so we’d find the Scalers, and interrogate them.
“It looks scary, Thinker.” Priestess spoke on private to me. Priestess had walked into the face of death for us on Planet Hell. We all loved her, but nobody had yet touched her. I guess we didn’t want to spoil it. This way, she belonged to us all and us to her.
“That’s a ten,” I responded, pleased she had confided in me, and not somebody else. “I’d rather stay here.” She knew I did not like tunnels. The nasty, nasty, narrow tunnel made its way down to a very unpleasant-looking underwater stream.
It would be difficult. Difficult, but probably possible. Probably possible, a favorite phrase from Planet Hell, used as a prelude to many grim adventures. A wave of fear edged its way into my bloodstream as I watched the scan again on my faceplate. My legs turned to jelly.
“Tenners, let’s go.” Snow Leopard slipped into the hole, crawling in head first, followed by two Life Science techs.
We had been through a lot with Snow Leopard, and trusted his judgment. He was from Magna 4, a gigantic iceworld best described as a hostile environment. He resembled a white shadow, with blue-veined, almost translucent skin, pale pink eyes, and hair so blond it looked almost white. We knew we could trust him to do the sensible thing. He had changed since the early days in Providence. They did strange things to those that they made a One. Some members of the squad thought that he was no longer quite human, but we’d all follow him anywhere.
Into the dark, headfirst into that evil hole, squirming down at a steep angle. I was in the rear, following Priestess. Wet, muddy earth, all over my suit. The darksight on my faceplate adjusted gradually and soon everything appeared to be glowing a faint green. It was an incredibly tight fit, my comtop pressing against the tunnel ceiling. There was barely room to move my arms, barely room to breathe. I felt awkward with my weapon cradled in my arms and my equipment scraping the walls.
The dark closed in, and there was only me, crawling, and Priestess, ahead. I can do this forever, I thought. Just don’t stop; if I stop it will close in even more. My claustrophobia had amused my instructors in basic.
“Beta, Snow Leopard.” The voice crackled on the tacnet. “The probes we sent ahead have been hit, they are blind. Coolhand, Psycho, move in and let’s take that Scaler.”
I cut in, “What do you mean ‘hit’? Hit with what?”
“Don’t know.” Snow Leopard didn’t waste words on bad news.
A voice I didn’t recognize interrupted, “Keep it on v-min, guys.” Must be one of the techs getting anxious about his specimen.
I kept crawling.
Snow Leopard grunted over the comm and I heard a splash. “Damn it. All right, gang, I’m in the stream.” More splashing. “It’s a little slippery.”
I willed myself forward. Priestess’s boots were right in my face. The blood rushed to my head, my heartbeat pounded in my ears. The tunnel seemed to go on forever.
The boots disappeared and suddenly I was sliding and falling. An instant later, I landed in an icy black stream on top of an indignant Priestess. We scrambled apart and I followed her again, swimming like a snake in a sewer pipe.
“Hold it,” Snow Leopard was breathing hard. I stopped and waited. “All right, guys, it’s a little tight here. I just got through, but I had to take my helmet off. You can’t get a good grip…with your comtops on. When you get here, take your comtop off and keep your nose above the water. Push the comtop ahead of you, then pull yourself through with one arm.”
I heard a chorus of off-channel curses up ahead of me. That wasn’t what I wanted to hear either.
We moved on, water rushing past me. Suddenly the tunnel narrowed drastically. My comtop struck the limestone ceiling. Priestess’s boots thrashed in the water, glanced off my faceplate.
She cried out, gurgling, “No!” I grabbed her boots and tried to steady her.
“Priestess, are you all right? Answer!” I felt the beginning edges of panic. I triggered my flash. It lit up the water, and sent eerie liquid shadows flickering over the rocky ceiling.
“I can’t do it, Thinker!” She gasped, hyperventilating. “I can’t get through! I can’t move!!”
“Priestess, Thinker, Snow Leopard-you still with us?”
“Nothing to report,” I replied.
“Get out of there,” he ordered. “Now! We’ve all done it, even the techs. You have to take your comtops off, or you won’t have room to get a grip on the rocks and pull yourself through.”
“Priestess…” We were stopped and my claustrophobia closed in. “We’ve got to get out of here, Priestess! Have you taken off your comtop?”
“No.” She almost sobbed.
“Do it! Mouth against the ceiling! Then move out. I’ll be right behind you!” I knew if she didn’t move, we were probably both going to die. Miserably. I forced myself to unlink my comtop. Icy water poured in. I shook uncontrollably. Wrenching the comtop off, I slammed my face up to the bitter stone roof, sucking desperately for air. Only a few mils clearance, a few mils between life and death. I saw Priestess’s pale, frightened face, a fragile mushroom in a river of ink. She’d done it.
“Oh, my God.” A horrified whisper, barely audible. We both felt the cold wings of the angel of death.
Priestess kicked off into the dark, leaving me alone, numb with terror.
I took a deep breath and forced myself forward, the water swirling all around me, into the narrowest portion. Tons of rock above me, an immense presence, the tunnel almost full of icy water. Blind and deaf and shaking with fear, kissing that obscene stone, I heard the music of the stars. I felt the slimy walls. The earth held me in its teeth. My hands tore at the rocks, and now I edged forward, slowly. I forced my head between two great rocks, thrust the comtop ahead of me, and pulled myself through. I popped up into a wider portion, water streaming from my face. Air! An unfocused green glow. A limestone shaft, heading gently up.
“Thinker! Are you all right?” Priestess’s voice echoed down the shaft.
“I’m fine,” I gasped, stretched out on the rocks, exhausted. “Be right there!” Eagerly, with shaking fingers, I put my comtop back on.
We made our way out of the stream and eventually found ourselves walking upright but slightly stooped due to the low ceilings, deep within the cramped catacombs, the bowels, of the dead city. We fanned out through the corridors.
“Beta, Snow Leopard. Keep alert. Fire v-min at any movement.”
Ghostly stone doorways loomed all around us, leading to past worlds, deep inside the earth. Only the dead lived in the dark of this tomb.
Priestess and I moved in tandem. More chatter crackled on the net, the lifies moving into position, Coolhand and Psycho tracking the Scaler. My tacmod silently extended the tacmap. Doorways and corridors branched off everywhere. Priestess and I moved along a wall, scanning our surroundings carefully.
It was a silent, dead underground city, glowing a faint green through our faceplates. A phantom city carved from stone, empty doorways gaping blindly at us like the eye sockets of ancient skulls. The rot of history covered this world. We could sense it, we could see it all around us, crumbling under our boots, floating specks of the past, settling on our litesuits. The air carried the cold breath of the dead.
We turned a corner and sloshed through ankle-deep slimy water. I saw Snow Leopard up ahead, at the end of a long corridor.
He raised a hand and spoke quietly on all channels. “Hold fast!” We stood immobilized.
Priestess whispered to me on private. “Sorry about that mess back there, Thinker. I kind of panicked. I kind of thought…we were going to die.”
“Yeah. I noticed that, too.”
“Beta! On me! We’re going in.” Snow Leopard’s voice crackled in our ears. We moved up fast, crouching, our comtops scraping the rough ceiling.
A crumbling stone staircase led up to a blackened doorway. Another bleak dark corridor. The ceiling was a little higher now and we could stand upright. We moved forward cautiously at a fast walk. My tacmod showed the others up ahead. The walls flowed past us, featureless. If anything had been here, it was long gone.
The corridor ended in a vast, darkened hall, a cavern cut out of the rock. We stepped in cautiously and I triggered the darklight on my E. The sheer size of the place dwarfed us. It was like a cathedral of stone. I stopped breathing. Facing us, glowing a mysterious green, stood two massive stone figures, carved right from the face of the rock wall.
The two great sentinels, a male and a female, stood side-by-side, shoulder-to-shoulder, clutching fantastic implements. The entire chamber was evidently their crypt. Even through the mold, I could see the fine, clean features of those two incredible messengers from the long dead past. Vertical lines of spidery runes spoke to us from so long ago that we could understand nothing. In between the runes were figures-thousands of people, from far away and long ago, from ages lost to history, engaged in elaborate, mysterious activity. These must have been the ancestors of Andrion 2’s human inhabitants. There were colors, faint pale colors in the green of the darksight, and I realized that it had all once been blazing with color, brilliant, radiant color, all the way down here in the bowels of this fossilized city. This had been the pinnacle of thousands of years of development and sacrifice and learning and culture. What had happened to them?
“Thinker! Move it!” Priestess pulled at my arm. I had been transfixed for a moment, lost in the past. I tore my eyes away from them. There was another dark doorway, right in the wall, between the massive legs of the two great figures. We trotted forward, our E’s pointed up ahead. The doorway led to a long straight tunnel, plunged in eternal darkness, far beneath the earth.
“Priestess. Wait.” I raised a hand to the corridor wall. I could see it in the darksight, haloed in green. The walls, the walls-my holy God! The walls were lined with life-sized figures, ghosts from the ages, carved and painted, a long procession, males and females, faded and peeling, hundreds of them, thousands of them, along both sides of the corridor, carrying strange devices, holding up banners that had not seen the light in thousands of years. Phalanxes of brutal soldiers, troops of sweating laborers, streets full of long-haired girls dressed in sheer garments, hundreds of little children holding hands. A royal court, a golden king and a silvery queen, and princes and princesses, and torches and incense and great ships and magnificent palaces. Heavenly landscapes, forests and rivers and waterfalls and great far-off mountain ranges. All of this, following us along that corridor.
“Priestess-look at…”
“They’ve been dead a thousand years, Thinker-let’s go!” I tore myself away from the wall, and followed Priestess into the dark. All those long-dead people. I never asked for this. The world up above in the sunshine was beautiful-why would anyone live down here?
“Priestess, Thinker, take the first left,” Snow Leopard ordered. “We’re going straight.” My tacmap showed the plan. “There are several corridors branching off this one. Watch your map. It’s a real maze, and he’ll be trying to get past us. You’ll be in a blocking position there. The map still says there’s no way out.” He sounded excited, anxious to bag the Scaler.
Nobody said a thing about those great stone figures, although everybody had seen them. The Legion was very task-oriented. Lord, we are barbarians!
Another corridor loomed on the left. Priestess hesitated at the entrance, waiting for me.
Into the unknown, again, with just enough blood in my adrenalin flow to keep my systems going. We looked into each other’s eyes through our faceplates and struck fists. The Legion salute-we would return together or die.
A dead, dark tunnel of black stone, with wet rot coating the walls. We always fought the unknown in the Legion. Once we know our enemy, it is always so much easier. But dealing with the unknown is bad for the soul. The enemy might be a harried, helpless savage, or it might be a DefCorps squad, waiting in the dark to slice us into bloody pieces before we could even react.
The corridor widened. We stopped, every sense alert. Little warnings tingled in the back of my mind and my skin crawled, but Sweety was silent. A large stone chamber faced us, murky pools of black water on the floor, scraggly black vegetation growing up the walls and hanging from the roof. I did not want to go in there.
“Hold it,” I said. Priestess had already stopped. We paused at the entrance to the chamber. Ancient metal rings, coated with rust, studded the walls.
An empty chamber. “I don’t like it,” I said. “What do you suppose this is?”
“It could have been anything.”
“I don’t like it,” I repeated.
We scanned the chamber carefully. Sweety noted mold, tiny parasites, slugs, worms, and billions of airborne microorganisms. It looked all right, but it did not feel all right.
Suddenly our tacnet exploded and we could hear autovac, shattering the dark, echoing through the corridors.
Snow Leopard screamed, “Fire! Fire! Fire!…Stop! Cease Fire! Freeze!”
Priestess and I froze as well, listening to the transmissions.
“I got him!”
“Don’t move!”
“He went down!”
“Don’t move!”
“Where is he?”
“Cease fire! Cease fire.”
“He moved!”
“Tenners, cease fire!”
Priestess and I leaned against the wall, side by side, our E’s pointed into the darkened chamber.
“Sounds like they got him,” I commented.
“That’s good,” Priestess said. “Good.”
“Element, up! Lifies up! On me!” Snow Leopard ordered. Evidently they were securing the Scaler.
“Thinker, Priestess, remain in place.” Snow Leopard never stopped thinking. He didn’t need us. I let myself slide down the corridor wall to a sitting position, my muscles relaxing. Priestess did the same. I felt good, despite that awful tunnel. This empty chamber was creepy, but there was plenty of room so I could breathe. We weren’t going to be meeting the Systies after all-at least not today! It was wonderful, sitting there looking at Priestess. I felt the blood pumping through my veins. I had never been so alive.
Snow Leopard was in his element. “Careful, zap him if he moves. Medic up!”
Priestess’s arms twitched, a reflex to the call for a medic. The life team leader called his own medic, the other man on the capture team. Priestess started giggling. I put my arm around her shoulders and squeezed. I just wanted to hold her, to look into her eyes. Even with the faceplate and the mud, even with the green glow and the dark, she was youth and beauty and life. We embraced, silently, awkwardly, and I swear I could hear her heartbeat. I never wanted to leave her.
I felt a faint shudder in the floor and we tensed, the moment of tenderness evaporated. Suddenly, the chamber floor erupted before us with a tremendous crack. Rock shrapnel ricocheted wildly in all directions, peppering us with jagged flecks of stone. Dust and earth filled the air. A scream echoed in my ears, and we were airborne. I landed on my back, breathless. I raised my head. Dust swirled all around me.
A new sound consumed the room, a metallic chittering, harsh and bone-chilling. I raised my E. The dust cleared. A grotesque, massive exoseg head appeared, covered with coarse black bristles, jerking from side to side in super-fast motion, giant bulging compound eyes glittering black. Long, nasty antennae probed and snapped like great whips. A hideous wet mouth emerged, pincers open, front legs brushing the rubble aside as the creature rose up out of the hole.
“Exoseg Gigantic Soldier…” Sweety warned me.
Too late, Sweety!
I stared stupidly at the impossible apparition. My comtop shrieked with alarms and Sweety relayed information to me in a rapid-fire staccato. I could not believe how calm she sounded.
The creature seized Priestess bodily in its two front legs, raising her in the air. She screamed a nightmare scream, arms pinned, her E still strapped to her chest. The creature opened its maw. It was going to eat her headfirst!
I came out of my shock at the last possible instant. My E had been aimed at the exoseg but I had been unable to use it. Now it was all instinct. I hit the trigger just as my thumb snapped the setting from v-min to xmin. I did not even think about it. There simply was no time. I aimed for the creature’s eye, just past Priestess’s struggling form.
The explosive round burst inside the creature and shattered half its head. The flash lit up the hideous scene briefly. The giant exoseg’s two front legs jerked apart, and Priestess fell to the floor. Ricocheting shrapnel peppered my faceplate.
That bone-chilling chittering-shrieking, freezing my blood. It was still alive! Something smashed against the back of my head, and I hit the floor face-first, stunned and bleeding. My faceplate was scarred and Sweety flashed me a warning. The darksight faded quickly. I groveled in the rubble, blind and helpless.
“Priestess! Priestess!” No response. Shrapnel had penetrated the darksight layer in my faceplate, but I still had my E. An icy fury convulsed me. We will die, but I will take that thing with me. I pointed my E into the smoking darkness and activated the light.
A nightmare scene. The sudden glare of my E’s white light, a chamber full of dust, the great grotesque exoseg snapping back and forth wildly above me in convulsions, its movements faster than the eye could follow, leathery chitin, gore and foam spraying through the air like a shower of meteorites. It was only halfway out of the hole in the floor.
“…exoseg still functioning…” Sweety told me that and a great deal more, but I was not listening.
“Thinkerrrr!” Priestess was trapped underneath one of the creatures black legs, crumpled in the smoking rubble at the lip of the crater in the floor-alive! Covered with blood and gore, she lifted her arms, reaching out to me.
I raised the E and aimed carefully again at the exoseg’s shattered head. I set it on auto xmin and fired. Multiple detonations annihilated the remainder of the creature’s head and brought down much of the ceiling as well. A white-hot pain burned into my left cheek. My litesuit was riddled with hits and the whole world shook. But still the exo did not die.
Headless, it groped wildly about with the pincers on its long front legs. Green pus spattered all over me. I screamed, overcome with horror. I held the E with both hands, the stock tight against my shoulder. My flash tore loose from my suit and triggered itself, bouncing around at my feet, casting giant obscene shadows that danced from wall to ceiling to wall.
I aimed for its thorax and fired again. Glaring white-hot flashes from multiple hits illuminated the creature as though it were exploding in slow motion, splattering all over the chamber, an ugly hot sticky sickening death, gobs of green and yellow pus bursting off the walls, wet leathery chunks of exoskeleton tumbling wildly through the air, stiff spiky exoseg legs twitching in spastic death throes, a fountain of gore erupting from the abdomen, all illuminated harshly by the flash.
Movement. Priestess crawled slowly away from the exoseg. I kept my E trained on the creature’s abdomen. It slumped back into the hole and disappeared.
I jumped over debris and exo-parts and grabbed her elbow. She screamed and wrenched herself out of my grip. Then she turned back, looked at the hole in the floor and threw herself in my arms, shaking violently.
“It’s all right, it’s dead. It’s dead, and we’re alive. It’s all right.” I held her in my arms. We both shook in horror. We were alive. We would return together after all.
“I wet my pants,” she confessed weakly.
“It’s all right,” I responded hoarsely. “It’s all right.” I was not about to admit that I had done the same.