by Marko Kloos
“Comms are two by five, Lieutenant. Data link keeps cutting out, too.”
“We’re not that far down yet. We are at the bottom of the stairs and have eyes on the next hundred meters down here. Suggest you send a few guys down the slope and around the bend after us so we can relay data and comms off their suits. We’ll let you know if something comes our way.”
“Copy that. Advance, but be careful.”
“Captain says to be careful,” I relay to the platoon sergeant, who shakes his head and chuckles.
“I was in the business of careful, I’d be back at base folding laundry in the supply group,” he says.
Sixty or seventy meters into the tunnel, we finally see something other than darkness at the end of our low-light vision displays. The tunnel seems to terminate in a dead end up ahead, but as we draw closer, we see that it’s merely the elbow of another almost-right-angle bend in the tunnel.
“Another turn.” I annotate the image from my helmet cam for the captain, who is watching our progress from the back of one of the mules. We are running our comms through suit relays, a line-of-sight chain of SI and HD troopers stationed on the slope and in the mouth of the tunnel.
“If that thing turns a few more times like that, we’ll have to leave half the platoon behind for relay,” my platoon sergeant says.
“If the thing turns a few more times like that, we’re heading back to the surface.”
I check my tactical display, which is almost worthless down here in the dark tunnel. There’s an entire platoon lined up behind me in pairs with three-meter intervals between them, thirty-odd troopers stretched out over almost a hundred meters. As a platoon-wide firing line on an open field, we could bring three dozen weapons to bear on any charging Lanky, but down here we’ll be lucky to get clean shots with the first few pairs of troopers. The Lankies couldn’t have designed a better way to negate almost all our advantages. The further we progress into the dark tunnel, the louder the paranoid little voice in my head tells me to get out and let the Euros roll some nukes into this place instead.
“Sarge, go back down the line and bring up the rear with Third Squad,” I tell the platoon sergeant. “If shit goes down up front, I need you at the back to expedite the pullout. Tell Fourth Squad to keep their launchers hot and the winches ready. We may have to exfil in a hurry.”
“Copy that,” the platoon sergeant replies, not quite able to suppress the relief in his voice. “Don’t be gunning for a Medal of Honor today, Lieutenant.”
“I don’t have the slightest use for one of those, Sarge.” I gesture back the way we came. “Hoof it and guard the rear, or take point. Your choice.”
“Hoofing it, sir,” he says. He nods at me and turns around, then trots back the way we came. The troopers he passes look at him with thinly concealed envy. First Squad’s leader, a corporal whose face behind the shield of his helmet doesn’t look a day older than twenty, moves up to take the platoon sergeant’s slot.
“If we have movement in the tunnel up ahead, I want all three MARS launchers ready to put rounds downrange,” I tell First Squad. “They’ll come at us headfirst, so try to shoot past the cranial shield. That thing is tough as armor plating.”
There’s another straight stretch of tunnel past the bend. It pitches down into the ice a few degrees, a steady descent toward the bottom of the glacier, which may still be hundreds of meters below us as far as I know. It’s cold and quiet down here except for the crunching of our cleated boots on the uneven surface of the tunnel.
“It’s getting warmer down here,” someone behind me says.
I check the temperature readout on my display and find that the trooper is right. The outside air temperature was negative thirty degrees, but down here it’s only a few degrees below zero. The environmental system in my suit tells me that the CO2 concentration in the air has increased by almost a full percent. Lankies like their air warm and humid and loaded with carbon dioxide. Whatever they did down there, they didn’t just dig a fancy hole in the ground; they found a way to do some very localized terraforming in the most hostile environment our planet has to offer.
If a thousand of these things manage to make footfall instead of just a dozen or so, we are utterly fucked, I think, and shudder at the memory of just how close we came last year to exactly that sort of scenario.
The next tunnel segment is several hundred meters long. It curves ever so slightly to the right, and the floor still slopes downward. We are still walking on ice, not rock, and I wonder just how thick the ice sheet on this glacier can be so close to the rocky coastline.
Somewhere ahead in the darkness beyond our lights, a low rumbling noise drifts out of the deep, a sound like boulders slowly rolling down a gravel slope.
I stop and raise my hand.
“Hold,” I say over the platoon channel. “MARS launchers up front. Mind your fields of fire, everyone.”
“Squads, go four and four,” the platoon sergeant orders. “Tunnel’s wide enough. When we have contact, first rank kneels, second shoots over the first.”
Behind me, the squads reshuffle their formation as ordered. With eight rifles to bear on a Lanky at the same time, we should be able to drop it in time. There are still a good hundred meters of mostly straight tunnel in front of us, and any Lanky coming up the tunnel will have to crawl on all fours.
The rumbling noise in the tunnel ahead of us ebbs away slowly, until the dark beyond our lights is as eerily silent as before.
“Well, that was ominous,” the platoon sergeant comments dryly.
We wait, weapons aimed into the darkness, expecting to see the Lanky that made the noise to come charging up the tunnel. As scary as they are in close combat, I’d almost prefer to have one of those things to shoot at instead of sneaking around in the dark down here and jumping at every noise.
“They need to shit or get off the pot,” my platoon sergeant says, agreeing with my thoughts. “Smashed a whole base to rubble, and now they want to play hide-and-seek.”
“Be careful what you wish for, Sarge,” I say. The targeting lasers from our M-90 rifles paint green streaks on the uneven ice walls of the tunnel, but there is nothing for our ballistic computers to lock on to.
To my right, there’s a new noise, a faint scraping sound. I see nothing but tunnel wall in the cone of light from my helmet lamp, but the sound is very close. I rapidly cycle through all the sensor modes: night vision, thermal, infrared. When I reach the microwave mode, the one we call the heartbeat sensor, my heart skips a full beat or two. Something is moving behind the ice of the tunnel wall, something large and indistinct, only visible to my helmet sensor because of the vibration of the air molecules it displaces while moving. It’s huge, and it’s right next to us, much closer than it ought to be unless the tunnel wall to our right is just a few meters thick at most.
I realize what is about to happen, and I have to fight every instinct in my body to not drop my gear and run, run, run back the way we came before the trap snaps shut.
I whirl around and open the all-platoon channel.
“Back!” I yell. “Get back!”
The scraping sound to my right turns into a creaking rumble, and I know it’s already too late, that we are right in the middle of the mousetrap that’s snapping shut right now, a trap I’ve led everyone into like a careless idiot.
The troopers don’t need encouragement to follow my order, with everyone’s nerves on edge already. The MARS gunners lower their weapons and turn around to follow First Squad’s riflemen, who are already a few dozen meters back up the tunnel’s slope. To my left, long fissures appear in the wall of the tunnel with cracks that sound like rifle shots.
I make it five or six steps back up the tunnel when the wall of ice to my left explodes and fills all the space around me in the blink of an eye. There’s no more up or down or sideways. I am swept off my feet and lose my grip on the rifle, which is torn from my hands. It feels like someone just parked an entire drop ship on top of me, crushing weig
ht pushing in from all directions. Without my hardshell armor, I know I’d be pulped beef already, but even with the protection of my armor, I feel like I’m being squeezed in a giant vise. The helmet visor’s display stops working abruptly, and all I see in front of me is darkness as my helmet light goes out as well. I want to scream into the platoon circuit, tell my troops to get out, get back to the surface, but I can barely get enough air into my lungs to keep breathing. Just a few seconds have passed since I spotted the movement beyond the tunnel wall with the microwave sensor of my helmet. I don’t even have time to be scared. Instead, I just feel a wild sense of frustration, anger at myself for letting the Lankies get the better of me on our home turf. Nearby, so close that it sounds like it’s just a few meters from my head, a Lanky wails its unearthly cry, but it sounds muffled through the ice, merely painful to the eardrums instead of completely unbearable.
I try to move my arms and legs, but I am fixed to the spot by all the ice bearing down on me, and whatever breath I can force into my lungs isn’t enough to cover the new exertion, and I fade out of consciousness before I even have time to get scared again.
CHAPTER 4
UNDER THE ICE
I don’t recall waking up. I don’t even recall being unconscious. All I know is that I am on my feet again, and that the crushing weight squeezing me from all sides is gone. I take a few ambling steps before my legs give out and I sink to my knees. My whole body hurts, and there’s a stabbing pain in my chest whenever I force air into my lungs.
I cycle through the sensor modes on my helmet one by one until I am back at the green-tinged night-vision mode. I’m in the tunnel that just exploded onto us and almost crushed the life out of me. Behind me, the tunnel is filled with a huge pile of ice and rock. My display is flickering in and out of life every few seconds, and every time it goes dark momentarily, I can’t see anything in front of me at all. I try to turn on the high-powered light on the side of the helmet, but it stays dark when I toggle the control switch. My armor just took a horrible beating from the tons of ice that came down on my platoon, but the laminate hardshell saved me from being crushed like a ration box in a garbage compactor. It’s deathly quiet again. My TacLink screen is off-line, and I have no idea who is dead or alive in the huge pile of frozen rubble blocking the tunnel behind me.
It takes me a while to work up the stamina to get back to my feet again. I lost my rifle in the collapse of the tunnel wall, the only thing in my possession that can harm a Lanky. I walk over to the pile of ice and try to dig for it, but most of the pieces are too large and heavy for me to move by myself. I am alone in the dark, injured, with no contact to the rest of my platoon, and no way to defend myself if I run into a Lanky down here. There’s a pistol in my thigh holster, but the handgun’s small-caliber fléchettes are as useless against a Lanky’s tough hide as spitballs. Still, it’s the only weapon I have left other than my combat knife, so I pull the pistol from its holster and make sure I have a full magazine and a round in the chamber.
I take a deep breath. The sudden stinging pain lancing through my chest brings me to my knees again, and I cower on the ground and try to breathe in shallow breaths without losing consciousness again. Thankfully, the armor’s automated med kit still works. I can feel the stab of a needle at the base of my neck, and a few moments later, the pain in my chest fades as the pain meds enter my bloodstream.
With the way back closed off by tons of rock and ice, my only two options are to sit tight and hope for rescue, or press on and look for another way out on my own. I don’t want to wait on my knees for a Lanky to show up and finish me off. I stand up again carefully and start down the tunnel once more, pistol in hand.
Every channel on comms is silent: squad, platoon, company, even the local defense channel. I don’t even hear the static of a carrier wave. The headset in my helmet is completely dead, and I conclude that the comms unit in my suit is busted. My armor no longer fits me properly—several of the hardshell segments are dented and pushed inward, where they press against my cushioned underarmor suit uncomfortably.
I make my way down the tunnel slowly, careful to make as little noise as possible. I want to broadcast a call for help on my radio just in case the transmitter still has life in it, but I know that the Lankies can sense radiation sources, and the very last thing I want to do right now is to draw the attention of one while walking around in busted armor with only a puny sidearm for self-defense.
Another fifty meters from the spot where we got ambushed and buried, the tunnel curves to the left slightly. Beyond the bend, the floor of the tunnel, which has been at an incline since we entered it from the surface, evens out into a flat stretch. I can see rock poking through the ice of the tunnel walls and floor in various spots. I don’t know how deep I am beneath the glacier, but knowing that I probably have a million tons of ice over my head doesn’t help my anxiety levels. I’m alone in the dark with the Lankies, and I’m more afraid than I’ve ever been in my life because I am practically unarmed and have nowhere to run.
I work my way around the bend and into the flat stretch of tunnel slowly and carefully. The tunnel at the bottom gradually widens to at least three or four times the width of the sections where we descended with the platoon. Down here, the armor groups could roll two or three mules side by side with some room to spare. The size of this tunnel makes me feel puny, all alone in the dark and holding a little peashooter of a gun.
Up ahead in the darkness somewhere, that low rumbling noise starts again, closer and more ominous than before. I keep my pistol trained on the far end of the tunnel. If a Lanky shows up and spots me, I have seconds to live, but I want to be spending them emptying my magazines at it instead of cowering or screaming.
The rumbling noise fades away as it did before. I eye the tunnel walls to my right and left, but there’s no scraping sound, nothing to indicate there’s a Lanky waiting to bury me under a few tons of ice again. I move over to one side of the tunnel as quickly and quietly as I can. The tunnel walls are uneven and have bumps and protrusions, and I may be able to hide behind one of them if a Lanky decides to come this way.
The tunnel ends in a wide mouth that opens into darkness. It is easily twenty meters across and just as tall. My night vision can’t yet pierce the dark space beyond it, so I move toward it carefully even though it’s the last thing I feel like doing right now.
When I reach the tunnel mouth, I finally discover just what the Lankies have been doing with their time in the Greenland ice.
The space beyond the mouth I am standing in is roughly circular and so vast that it looks like the entrance of a cathedral. The ceiling is at least fifty meters high, and the whole space is a hundred meters across or more. A solitary structure stands in the middle of this giant room like a huge pillar. I have seen something like it many times before, albeit at a much bigger scale. It’s a smooth, white, bone-like shaft that looks like a tree stripped of its bark. The Lanky terraformers on the colonies they took over look a lot like this, only they are many hundreds of meters tall and ten times as big around. The air down here is so warm and moist that I have to keep wiping condensation off the outside of my helmet’s visor and the lens of the night-vision sensor. My environmental readout tells me the precise temperature: 33.4 degrees Celsius. The CO2 warning below the temperature readout informs me that the carbon dioxide concentration is over 10 percent, more than enough to turn me unconscious quickly if I removed my helmet or raised the visor.
Near the middle of the room, two Lankies are moving, their backs turned to me. They are near the spire in the center, one walking around the left of it, the other around the right. They don’t seem to be in a particular hurry. I crouch near a rock crevice by the mouth of the tunnel and watch the Lankies as they walk away from me and toward the far corner of this huge underground dome. My night-vision gear doesn’t reproduce colors accurately—everything is in shades of green and black—but the walls of this cavern don’t just look like plain ice to me. They have a dark she
en to them that looks almost metallic. The walls of the cavern have tall, narrow recesses that are fifteen or twenty meters tall.
I hope my suit camera is still recording to storage, I think, amazed at the sight in front of me. No human beings before me except maybe some unlucky bastards on Mars have ever seen what I am witnessing here.
Almost every one of the dozen nooks in the cavern wall holds a Lanky. The nooks are less high than the creatures inside, and the Lankies are crouched and curled up in a sort of weird upright embryonic position. Whatever the Lankies do for rest—sleep, stasis, hibernation, whatnot—the ones curled up in these crevices are doing just that. They are completely still and unmoving. As I watch, one of the awake Lankies walks over to an empty nook and starts lowering itself into it. The soldier part of my brain, the part that’s way more pissed than scared right now, starts thinking up ways to put death into those tight recesses in the ice. The overpressure from a thermobaric MARS warhead would be devastating in such tight quarters. We could probably take out all these resting Lankies with a single squad of MARS-armed fire teams. Eight rockets, two seconds, and we would rack up the fastest infantry kill streak on Lankies ever achieved on the battlefield. But I don’t have a MARS launcher, or a squad to back me up. All I have is a pistol, and I’m not sure the Lankies would even feel the tiny fléchette darts. Right now, I’d pull the trigger on a thermobaric rocket with grim pleasure, even if I knew for sure it would bring down the entire glacier on us.
The last Lanky on its feet does not go for one of the empty nooks. Instead, it keeps walking around the terraforming pillar in the center of the cavern. I move back into the rock crevice when the Lanky faces my way, but it doesn’t make any move toward the cave entrance where I’m hiding. It just keeps walking around the center of the cavern slowly, swinging its head from side to side occasionally as it goes.
Somewhere in the darkness behind me, I hear a human voice. Then there’s a little squelch on my helmet’s headset, and I hear a choppy transmission.
