by Max Barry
There were so many that their bodies blocked the tunnel. But the flames guttered quickly, which allowed him to force his way between them. He still wasn’t sure why there had been no huk. It was all they fucking did in space. Even the one he’d killed on the ship had spat a huk at him. But here, so far, nothing. He devised two theories: They were different salamanders, a kind of soldier that didn’t huk but did like to run through tunnels like out-of-control trains, or they were reluctant to punch holes in their own burrow. It was the kind of question Gilly would have enjoyed, and been able to solve, but Gilly was still twelve hundred feet away, in the dark, so Anders guessed he would find out when he found out.
The gun displayed 72 percent charge. He was still wearing the converter; if he could find a good location, somewhere to set his back against a wall, he could put the converter to work on salamander bodies. The only problem would be transferring that charge to the gun, which would take a minute or two, during which time he couldn’t use it. That part he would have to figure out when he came to it.
They came again a minute later. He gave them a burst from the lightning gun but this time it didn’t stop them: more and more scrabbled through the burning corpses, forcing him to stop and feed a continuous stream of energy into the tunnel until the gun began to bleat in protest. When he released the trigger, flame was everywhere in great pools. The walls dripped and glowed red. He could feel the heat through his suit. He tried to advance and a salamander clambered over the top of a flaming corpse and he popped it. Behind that was another and he repeated the process and it was the only way he could advance: a step, a bark from the gun, over and over. Their numbers seemed endless. When he next glanced at the gun, its charge had dropped to 44 percent. White smoke curled continuously from its barrel. He’d carried a small hope of making it to Gilly and back without needing to recharge, but that was gone now.
Ahead of him, a salamander backed away, its movement unusually calculated, and he recognized that, the kind of shit his brothers would pull before he was old enough not to be fooled by it, and he turned and spat fire into the tunnel behind him. The air forked and ignited and cleaved three salamanders. There were more behind those. He heard: huk.
He dropped. The huk passed by and threw him into the wall. His vision flared. His suit wailed. But he didn’t let go of the lightning gun and used it to hose both directions, ahead and behind. He broiled salamanders until there were no more.
He got to his feet. The huk had torn away hunks of rock and resin and salamander and strewn them about. But the path ahead seemed clear. He checked the gun. Eighteen percent. Not good. Not good at all.
So they could huk. He didn’t know why now and not before. They could have made mincemeat out of him if they’d stayed back and done that earlier.
He unstrapped the converter. This wasn’t the cul-de-sac he’d been hoping for, but it was a lull, and he needed juice. Before he could set it to work, though, he caught a hint of movement in the tunnel behind him. Not a salamander: There was something funny about the wall. He’d passed it by without noticing, but now that the place was helpfully illuminated by flame, he could make out a dripping, like the rock was some kind of slow, gelatinous waterfall. He re-slung the converter and approached. It didn’t look like much besides a wall of goo, but he was interested in anything that might get him out of this tunnel, so he poked it. His hand went through.
He moved forward. The goo admitted him. Resin covered his suit and helmet. He felt his arm emerge into air on the other side, so he forged ahead and wiped the faceplate and saw his little white spirit guide flitting around a cavernous space.
From the floor rose a gigantic slab of smooth resin. Beside it stood another, and more, side by side in neat rows. They rose fifty feet high and were longer still, running off into the dark, farther than his spirit guide would travel. To put some distance between him and anything that might follow through the waterfall of goo, he moved into the aisle between two slabs. The sides that faced each other were divided into hundreds of compartments only a few feet across, like honeycomb. Inside each compartment was a sac made of something soft and white.
He peered at the nearest. Its surface was translucent. Beneath that, something dark and indistinct. He had a feeling he knew what it was, and it was the reason the soldiers had been reluctant to huk him until he’d passed this area by. He poked the sac with the end of the lightning gun. The dark form twitched. He pushed the barrel in farther, until the sac popped and gushed fluid. A dark, twisting shape flopped from the compartment onto the ground. He watched it in the white light. It was long, glistening orange and black, with curving pincers at each end and a segmented body. Six stubby legs. A tiny head, a mouth surrounded by pincers and wet waving hairs. Even in this form, he could recognize the salamander it would one day become. It swung toward him and made a high, thin sound: hik.
He glanced around, in case there was a mama bear. But his spirit guide found no movement in the dark.
He left it. If he could, he would deal with it later. The slab continued another two hundred feet, but it wasn’t taking him toward Gilly; he was going sideways. He saw a honeycomb compartment with no bulging sac and stopped to examine it. It was rough-hewn and empty except for a few dry white fragments. As he continued, he encountered more of these empty chambers. From ahead, wet noises.
At the end of the slabs lay a dark pool of thin brownish fluid. Around it crawled dozens of salamander larvae. There were two adults, workers, he assumed, although they were large, and their backs were grotesquely distorted, bulging with weeping blisters or cysts. He watched the larvae’s pincers grip and pull the blisters’ flesh, their round mouths press to the hole and suck.
In the pool, a faint shape bobbed to the surface. Brown fluid drained from it. A sac. A worker emerged from the gloom and stepped almost daintily into the pool to retrieve it. Using its middle legs, it pressed the sac to its belly, retreated clumsily from the pool, and made for the slabs.
All right, he thought. All right.
He dropped the converter to the floor. He turned in a circle, sweeping the rock with the little light. If there were any secret tunnels, he couldn’t see them. The chamber seemed fully enclosed. He turned back to the nearest nurse. The correct move here was probably to leave as many of them alive as he could, as a waystation for the return journey. But he couldn’t allow this place to survive. He slotted the corroded butt of the lightning gun into his shoulder and began to wash the place clean.
* * *
—
It took the converter eight minutes to process the first batch of larvae. He had to refill it twice, watching its power dial upward. Once it was pushing maximum, he unslung the gun, squatted beside the converter, and hooked the two together. This was the dangerous part, where he wouldn’t be able to fire the weapon. He crouched, waiting, listening.
The pool burped. He eyed it. Where did that go, he wondered. Or where did it start, was maybe the question.
He checked Gilly’s ping location and committed it to memory. Once he left this nursery, he suspected that he would encounter a lot of salamanders. He might not have time to check his bearings again.
Were there more nurseries? If the planet was a hive, like Jackson said, there would be, perhaps thousands of them. He would need more. Gilly was now only a thousand feet away, but Anders had lost the element of surprise, so he expected more resistance, which would consume more power. He should pay attention to any area where the soldiers were reluctant to huk.
The gun blinked green along its glowlights. He detached it from the converter and looped its strap over his head, where it belonged. The converter was still processing larvae. He waited until it was full, then packed it up.
When he reached the resin waterfall, he stuck the gun through and let it do its thing. After that, he pushed through and emerged into a smoking hellscape of flame and charred flesh. They were everywhere. They filled the tunnel, packed tig
ht, scrabbling over each other to reach him. He fired the gun in tight bursts and it was like carving a hole in the ocean, the tide rushing back the moment he released the trigger. He forged ahead, using the gun to wash clear his path. How many salamanders on this planet, he wondered. How many coming at him right now. How long in the box.
The gun was growing hot. He could do this for another few minutes, he reckoned. Gilly was close. He wasn’t sure he could make it. If he didn’t, it wasn’t the worst way to go out, he supposed. He’d come out here to kill salamanders. Anyway. No sense in overthinking it. No point in looking back. He picked up his pace until he was running.
15
[Gilly]
THE SOURCE
Sometimes Martin was still for long periods. He stayed in the exact same position, so that Gilly couldn’t even tell whether he was conscious. But when Gilly didn’t move for a while, Martin became restless and would move closer or bark at him.
“Gikky,” Martin said.
“What,” he said.
This seemed to content Martin, and he returned to his position by the wall and went still again. For a while, Gilly had been developing the theory that Martin was some kind of officer: a high-intelligence subclass whose aptitude for language was paired with a talent for coordinating hives and destroying Providences. But now this felt less plausible. He didn’t think Martin was smart enough to command troops. Also, the idea of a commander ran against everything he knew about salamander behavior. It was a human way of thinking. Salamanders weren’t coordinated. They didn’t follow orders. They were like ten million separate pieces of the same thing. Martin was just one more, soaking up everything he could learn from Gilly because that was what salamanders did.
“Gik. Kee,” Martin said.
He must have not moved for a while. “Still here,” he said wearily. He had kind of gotten used to Martin. He didn’t really hate him anymore. He understood him too well, had found too many things in common. The curve of Martin’s wide face was almost doglike. The thick white scars on his back, Gilly imagined, were from punishment, when Martin had been bullied or tortured by other salamanders.
“Martin,” he said. “Let me go.”
Martin didn’t respond.
“You know what I want. Let me go, Martin, please. I have less than two hours left on my core. I just want to sit down.”
Martin regarded him without expression.
“No one will know. I won’t tell anyone, Martin.”
Martin trotted toward him. “Gik. Kee.”
He gestured at the arm that was bonded to the wall. “Please, Martin. This one. Please.”
“Plek,” Martin said. “Plek.”
“Plek, Martin.”
Martin took a step forward and hesitated.
“Plek,” Gilly said. “Plek, plek.”
Martin’s head tilted. After a moment, Gilly detected a faint noise. A kind of thrumming, which he could feel as well as hear. Martin turned to face the tunnel entrance. The noise came again. Martin’s head swung back toward Gilly.
“Don’t look at me,” he said.
Martin trotted out of the cave. Gilly hung, listening. The sound continued, stopping occasionally, then resuming, louder and more defined. There was something mechanical about it, something very Service, very human. The wild thought leaped into his brain: rescue. Service had sent a team and they were burning their way down to him. It was ridiculous but too amazing not to imagine and he couldn’t think what else it might be. His active ping was disabled to save power, but now he brought it up and toggled it on.
After a second, his film pinged with a blue dot and the word: ANDERS.
He gasped. His heart began to bang painfully in his chest. The sounds resumed, closer than before. They had a rhythm, a kind of beat like a fast drum, drawing closer, until it became a pounding. There was silence for ten seconds, twenty, thirty, and then rock burst from the wall near where Martin sometimes rested. There was dust and a ragged hole and a suited figure climbing from it.
“Anders,” Gilly said. “Anders. Anders.” The figure came toward him. It had a helmet and a shining light and he couldn’t see who it was.
Comms, he realized. He’d disabled those, too. He toggled the subsystem and there was breathing in his ear, which he recognized at once.
“Don’t get too excited,” Anders said. “There’s no one else.”
“Anders. Anders.”
He came closer until Gilly could see his face. “Can you walk? Why are you standing like that?”
“I’m stuck to the wall.”
Anders began to inspect him. “So you are.” He checked his surroundings and saw the tunnel. “Let me know if salamanders come out of there.”
“Thank you, Anders. Thank you.” He began to cry. “I thought I was going to die.”
Anders tugged at Gilly’s shoulder. “You still might. Am I reading your core power right? You have eighty minutes?”
He nodded.
“I have a converter,” Anders said, and Gilly began to shake, because that was something he hadn’t even dared to imagine. He’d been preparing for death. “There’s a safe place to use it back there. How did you get stuck like that? We need to get you off there.”
“Yes,” he said. “Yes.”
Anders glanced back at the tunnel, slinging the lightning gun.
“Where are Jackson and Beanfield?”
“Jackson’s dead. Beanfield’s topside but in bad shape. Like I said, this is it.”
He felt stunned. “How did you . . . What about the jetpod?”
“Sunk.”
“The suits are good at depths of up to—”
Anders shook his head. “Jet’s gone, Gilly. It was busted up even before it sank.”
“But . . .” There had to be something. He couldn’t be rescued only to be trapped on the planet. It was a puzzle. He just had to figure out the solution.
Anders shook his head. “I’ll tell you when we get out of here.” He strained and grunted. “You’re really stuck there. I think I have to shoot it.”
“What? No.”
“The wall. Not you.”
“It’s a VX-10. It’s like a firehose. You can’t control where it goes.”
“If I put any more pressure on your suit, it’s going to rip.”
“It won’t.” Anders looked doubtful. “Just try.”
Anders turned the gun around and wedged the butt into Gilly’s back. “Salamanders ever come out of there?”
“Yes.”
“Seriously?”
“One of them visits me.”
“How are you not dead?”
“It’s . . . we’ve been trying to understand each other.”
Anders peered at him. “A salamander?”
He nodded.
“What are you talking about?”
“I’m telling you they use this tunnel,” Gilly said.
Anders pulled on the barrel of the lightning gun, straining for leverage. Gilly felt pressure building on his back. “Keep watching it.”
“I’m watching.”
“Unh,” Anders said. He adjusted his grip. “So what did you learn?”
“What?”
“The salamander. Could you communicate?”
Now that he was being rescued, talking with Martin seemed very foolish. He shouldn’t have done that. He shouldn’t have engaged with the alien at all. “A little. I called him Martin. He learned very quickly.”
“‘He’?” Anders said.
“I mean ‘it,’” Gilly said. “I was studying it. It’s like a worker, but different. A new class, I think. Something we’ve never seen before. If we made it back to Service, it would be critical intel.”
Anders strained against the rifle. “I don’t think Service is taking our calls, Gilly.”
“I kn
ow,” he said.
“This is the source. We saw them venting. Millions coming out of the ground. At first, we thought it was a tornado. This is where they come from. The whole planet is a hive.”
“What?” But it made sense to him immediately. One of the puzzles of salamander biology had always been that they weren’t adapted for any known planetary environment, but seemed perfectly at home in space-faring hives. But this thinking rested on the assumption that hives were something like spaceships, temporary accommodation. The truth was, the salamanders were literally at home in hives. “We have to tell Service.”
“Yeah,” Anders said. “Shame about that. Goddamn, this resin. It moves but doesn’t break.”
“If they’re venting, they must be breeding.”
“Saw it myself. They have nurseries. They’re safe for us, because the soldiers won’t enter.”
“Nurseries?”
“Slabs full of babies. In eggs.”
“Eggs?”
“Sacs,” Anders said, and began to describe a brown pool, which delivered translucent white jellies, to be cared for by nurses.
“How deep was this pool?”
“I didn’t go in. Deep, I think. From how it bubbled, seemed it was coming from a long way down.”
“So the breeders are deeper?”
“I guess.”
“Why would that be? They physically isolate the breeders? Don’t they trust the soldiers around them?” He shook his head. That couldn’t be it. “You said the soldiers stay out of the nurseries. So they do obey physical limits.”
