by Marko Kloos
“First Platoon,” the voice sounds. “First Platoon, anyone. This is Alpha One-Three, PFC Cameron. Anyone, do you copy?” The transmission ends with a strained-sounding cough.
In the cavern in front of me, the Lanky pauses its slow and steady walk and swings its head around until it feels like it’s looking right at me. I get up and dash back into the tunnel, heart pounding.
Up ahead, there’s a fork in the tunnel I don’t remember passing earlier. In the fork to the right, I can see the flicker of a light dancing on the walls of the tunnel. Behind me, heavy footsteps announce the Lanky striding across the cavern toward me. I take the right-hand branch of the tunnel and dash toward that flickering helmet light as fast as my hurting legs will carry me. At the last moment, I remember to turn on my own helmet light so I don’t get shot by a panicked private with a twitchy trigger finger. Even with this precaution, I find myself staring at the twin muzzles of an M-80 rifle when I sprint around the tunnel bend and see the lone trooper in the middle of the tunnel thirty meters in front of me.
“Hold your fire!” I yell at the top of my lungs. For a dreadful moment, the green targeting laser from the private’s rifle flashes across my chest armor before PFC Cameron points the weapon away from me.
“Turn off your comms!” I shout at PFC Cameron, who is staring at me with wide eyes through the translucent visor of his helmet. “Turn them off! They can sense the radiation!”
Behind me, there’s a loud, low scraping sound in the tunnel. If the Lanky is following us, it’s less than a hundred meters away, and it has sealed the exit like a big ugly cork in a bottle. There’s nowhere left to run or hide.
“He’s on my six!” I shout to PFC Cameron. “Shoot the bastard when he comes around the bend.”
PFC Cameron looks like his knees are about to buckle, but he nods and aims his rifle past me into the dark tunnel. He’s carrying an M-80, the oldest of the three anti-LHO rifles in the arsenal. Two barrels, only two shots before a slow reload that’s easy to fumble under stress.
I look at the pile of ice rubble blocking the tunnel and barring our way out. The tunnel is filled almost solidly with ice chunks of all sizes, but near the top of the sloping pile, my helmet light dips into a little bit of shadow.
Behind me, something huge is coming up the tunnel, making scraping noises that sound like small earthquakes. I look up the rubble slope again and start climbing the pile. The noises in the tunnel spur me on in a way no drill instructor ever managed.
“Up here!” I yell to PFC Cameron, but he doesn’t seem to hear me. He’s staring down the tunnel, where the Lanky sounds close enough to be just behind the split in the corridor fifty meters away.
Maybe it’s too big to make the bend now, I think. Please, let it be too big to make the bend. But I already know it’s wishful thinking—they came through here before, and even if it can’t make it past the rubble, it can get to us.
“Cameron!” I shout. I’m halfway up the slope of the rubble pile by now, three meters up. Cameron’s helmet light keeps shining the other way, toward the danger.
I pause my climb and stare at the huge Lanky head that appears just at the edge of PFC Cameron’s helmet light. The way the creature is stooped, it has to be crawling on all fours. The skull with its cranial shield at the back takes up most of the space in the tunnel. As I watch, transfixed, the Lanky reaches out with a front limb and grasps a section of tunnel floor to pull itself forward. Its toothless maw is slightly open. There are no eyes in its massive skull, but I still have the feeling that the Lanky is looking right at us.
“Cameron, move!” I yell. Finally, Cameron tears his eyes away from the monstrosity working its way toward us. He looks up the rubble slope, and our eyes meet briefly. I gesture up the slope and make the “double-time” hand sign for emphasis.
Behind us, the Lanky wails.
Without my helmet’s electronics, all I have to block out the noise is the physical insulation of my helmet liner. Down here, in this confined space, the noise is so powerfully, infernally loud that it feels like an artillery shell just exploded next to us.
Below me, Private Cameron turns and aims his rifle. I can see that he’s firing one of his barrels, because I can see the enormous muzzle flash of the propellant and the recoil making the heavy weapon buck in his grip, but I can’t hear the shot at all. The round from Cameron’s rifle hits the Lanky right in the center of its skull and shatters against the cranial shield’s base in a puff of fragments.
“Shoot low!” I scream. “Aim for the torso! Aim past the head!”
I can’t even hear myself. It feels like my ears have been filled with concrete, and a high-pitched, ringing whistle is the only sound I hear.
The Lanky moves forward again with a lurch. Cameron fires his second round. I tear my attention away from the uneven fight and resume my hasty climb with greatly renewed urgency. I know that we are both as good as dead, and the only hope I have lies in the tiny space between the rubble pile and the ceiling of the tunnel.
I scale the last meter or two faster than I’ve ever climbed anything before in my life. At the top, I see that there’s maybe half a meter of air between the rubble pile and the tunnel ceiling—more in some spots, much less in others. I turn around once more and see PFC Cameron frantically trying to reload his rifle. He almost manages to get another round into the barrels when the Lanky reaches out as if to pull itself forward again. One huge four-fingered hand scoops up Cameron in an almost-casual motion and flings him backward into the darkness of the tunnel behind the Lanky. If he is screaming as the Lanky seizes him, I can’t hear it, and I’m glad for my deafness for a moment.
I climb up into the low gap at the top of the ice-rubble heap that buried my platoon and crawl into the gap as quickly as my hurting body will let me. I don’t want to waste time by looking back and counting down the seconds to my death if the Lanky catches up and digs me out of the pile. Without my armor, I would be dead right now instead of just badly hurt, but right now I wish I didn’t have it on, because the space I have found up here is claustrophobically small, and I just barely fit into it, constrained by the inflexible volume of the hardshell segments wrapping around my torso. I crawl into the crevice headfirst, pushing forward with cleated boots, meter by meter, away from the thing in the tunnel behind me.
I can’t hear the Lanky tearing into the rubble pile, but I can feel it. The ice under my body shifts suddenly, tossing me to the left half a meter and half burying me in another pile of loose ice. I struggle free and continue my frantic crawl forward. The pile gets another massive jolt from behind me. This time the movement flings me forward and into a depression in the pile. The ice chunks sweep me forward in a cold, hard, unrelenting wave. I struggle to keep myself upright, to not lose track of up and down again.
I crawl across the top of the ever-shifting rubble pile for what seems like hours. Every few minutes, I feel the jolt of whatever the Lanky is doing to the ice pile behind me. But as large and strong as they are, I’m glad to see that even a Lanky can’t just casually clear hundreds of tons of ice out of the tunnel quickly, that even these overwhelmingly powerful creatures have physical limitations. I’m sweat drenched and out of breath, but I continue my crawl, not daring to pause and maybe end up sharing PFC Cameron’s fate because I stopped to catch my breath one too many times. More than once, the gap between rubble and tunnel ceiling all but disappears, and I have to dig chunks of ice rubble out of the way, convinced every time that I am now well and truly stuck. I’ve long since stopped feeling the pain in my chest and limbs, and my hearing is still gone except for that high-pitched noise that won’t go away.
When I reach the far end of the rubble pile, the slope of the ice mound is so steep that I fall down the incline headfirst before I can stop my sudden slide. A series of bumps flips me sideways, and I roll down the rest of the way, limbs flailing. The impact with the tunnel floor at the bottom of the slope knocks what little air I have left right out of me. For a few moments, all
I can do is lie on my back in the dark and gasp for air. Then a loud, scraping rumble from the ice pile behind me forcefully reminds me that there’s a Lanky on the other side working to close the distance between us. I get to my feet again and stumble up the tunnel.
The pitch of the tunnel floor is much more steep than I remember. I have to pause and catch my breath every few dozen steps. From the way my chest is hurting every time I take a deep breath, I suspect I cracked a rib or three.
When I round the next bend in the tunnel, there are helmet lights up ahead, and surprised voices. There’s a steel cable snaking down the middle of the corridor, and I trip over it, stumble, and fall ungracefully. When I hit the ground, the pain in my side flares up again and makes me gasp for breath. Then there are voices around me, and I feel several sets of hands grabbing my arms and the drag loops on my armor.
“Careful now. Pick him up, easy. Are you okay, sir? Lieutenant?”
I shake my head and hold up my hand. Then I nod back the way I came.
“Lanky on my ass. He’s trying to dig through that ice pile. First Platoon?”
“Third and Fourth Squads made it back out. You’re all we’ve seen from First and Second, sir. What the hell happened?”
I look at the speaker, an SI NCO with staff-sergeant rank stripes on his armor.
“They ambushed us. Set a trap. Made the tunnel walls collapse.”
“Son of a bitch.” The staff sergeant gestures to a few of the SI troopers behind us and points down the tunnel.
“Get a pair of MARS launchers pointing around that bend and covering the tunnel. Possible incoming. Anything looks or sounds funny, you come running right back here. We are grabbing the lieutenant and clearing out for now.”
“I have data in my suit,” I say. “I need to get back to Company. I saw what they have on the other side.”
“Get the lieutenant out of here,” the staff sergeant says to the troopers helping me up. “If you have a Lanky on your tail, let it grab you guys first if you have to. But make sure the lieutenant gets back to the mules. Go.”
I emerge back into the daylight five minutes later with an SI trooper propping me up on each side and a whole squad shielding us to the rear. When I am out of the tunnel and back on the icy slope of the glacial river, the sky is overcast, but everything is still bright enough to hurt my eyes. I open the face shield of my helmet and breathe in the fresh Greenland winter air, even though it’s so cold that now my lungs hurt as well.
Up on the top of the slope, the military presence has at least doubled since we descended into the tunnel. Over by the command mules still lined up in a firing line of four abreast, I see the platoon sergeant of our ill-fated recon platoon, standing in the middle of a cluster of SI troopers, presumably Third and Fourth Squads. They see me and rush to assist the SI troopers propping me up on both sides. With the heating element of my suit off-line, the residual heat isn’t quite enough to keep me warm in the cold wind up here, and I start to shiver involuntarily.
“The lieutenant needs a medevac,” the corporal on my left side announces. “He’s banged up pretty badly.”
“Never mind that right now,” I say. “Sarge, I need to go see the CO and plug my suit in. My TacLink is down.”
“Make way, shitheads,” the platoon sergeant addresses the troops between us and the command mule. The crowd parts to let us through. From one of the other mules, the HD major in command and the Icelandic Eurocorps captain come trotting over to meet us at the back of the command mule.
“Pull the guys out,” I say to the major. “The Lankies have figured out how traps work. We won’t do much good down there with just infantry.”
“It’s all we have right now,” the major replies. “Can’t get armor down there, as you’ve found out.”
I pull off my helmet and toss it aside. When it hits the ground, I see dents and scrapes in the formerly smooth surface of the alloy.
“Get me a data plug, and hook this armor up to the console,” I say. “I was down past the ambush, down where they built their shelter. If the suit was recording, you’ll have another way.”
CHAPTER 5
UNFRIENDLY TRAFFIC
I’m injured, and my suit needs to be within a meter of the tactical console’s data jack, so they let me have the seat right in front of the mule’s main command console. The major and the Eurocorps captain are standing to either side of me, and there are half a dozen other officers watching from the open rear hatch of the mule. I hardlink my suit and initiate the download from the console, hoping that the central processing unit and the memory modules of my armor survived whatever smashed the TacLink transmitters and half the sensor suite.
The display above the command console pops into life and shows three separate feeds. One is the recording from my helmet cam, one shows my vital signs and environmental data, and the last is a positional marker overlaid on a map of the area. The feed begins in the drop ship right before the landing, and I scrub the timeline in fast-forward through the relatively uneventful parts. When we start descending down into the tunnel and my helmet vision turns green with the image-intensification filter, I slow the footage down to normal speed. On the small monitor above the console, the tunnel looks much more narrow than it did in reality.
The attending officers watch the next ten minutes of footage, the recording that chronicles my platoon’s descent toward disaster. I can’t quite remember how long we were in the tunnel before the trap snapped shut, but I recognize the long, straight passage of tunnel about five seconds before the footage goes all chaotic. I switch my filter to the heartbeat detector and spot movement behind the wall of the tunnel. There’s a loud cracking sound, and the view from my helmet camera pans to the right. My helmet light shines on a long, wide crack in the tunnel wall, and just before the wall explodes toward us, it seems to bow out, and the crack widens. Then the footage gets jumbled as I get pushed around and turned upside down. The Icelandic captain watching the footage next to me lets out what has to be a quiet curse in his own language.
“Son of a bitch,” I concur quietly. In just one moment, two full squads are wiped off the roster, buried under hundreds of tons of ice, and a few moments after the rumbling subsides, there’s nothing but heavy silence on the sound feed.
For the next fifteen minutes, the camera view shows only darkness. I scrub through the black screen footage at fast-forward, amazed at the time I was buried under the ice rubble. It’s a surreal experience to watch myself digging out of the ice and breaking free on the far side. The filter switches back to night vision, and the field of view starts bobbing slowly as Andrew from an hour ago starts his short trek down to the mouth of the tunnel. I remember that my helmet display was flickering on and off at the time, but the footage on the memory module of my armor is uninterrupted.
“Here it comes,” I say.
When the camera’s field of view pans over the interior of the Lanky cave, everyone in attendance reacts with gasps or muttered curses. The Icelandic captain and the HD major move their faces closer to the screen to make out more detail. I move the chair back on its sliding mount to give them some space. I don’t need to look at the footage any more closely. They watch, with fascination and repulsion on their faces, as the Lanky curls up into the recess on the cavern wall and the other one continues its slow walk around the miniature terraformers in the middle of the huge room.
Andrew from an hour ago is looking around in the cave for less than a minute before the audio feed picks up Private Cameron’s call in the tunnel. The camera view shakes and whirls around.
“Hang on. Replay that. The last twenty seconds,” the HD major says. I oblige, happy to be able to delay seeing the footage of Cameron and me trying to get away from the Lanky. I stop the stream and go back to the moment I have eyes on the Lankies and the entirety of the cavern.
“Stop it right there,” the major says. “Freeze frame, at thirty-seven minutes, fifteen seconds.”
I freeze the feed at the ordered ti
me coordinate. Past Me is looking at the central terraforming spire where it meets the ceiling, a good fifty meters above.
“Cross-check the coordinates, and compare it to the map,” the Icelandic captain says in his strongly accented English.
I let the map display take up the whole screen. If my suit was tracking true through dozens of meters of solid ice, my little blue position dot on the overlay map is smack in the middle of the frozen glacial river, almost at the point where it comes off the main glacier, half a kilometer upstream from where we are standing.
“How high do you think that cave ceiling is?” the HD major asks.
“Fifty meters, give or take ten,” I reply, and the Icelandic captain nods in agreement.
I reset the screen to quadrant view and zoom in on the location data in the lower right corner. My little blue dot is in a spot seventy-one meters below the surface of the glacial river, plus or minus half a meter.
“That spot right there,” the major says, and points at the ceiling of the cave where the terraformer spire meets it and branches out like an upside-down tree sprouting roots.
“That spot,” I repeat. “There’s only twenty meters of ice over their heads.”
“Exactly.” The major smiles grimly at the screen.
“We would need half a day to drill through that much solid ice,” the Eurocorps captain says. “And they will probably hear us and leave. Or ambush from somewhere else.”
“I’m not saying we drill through,” the major says.
“You’d have a hard time getting through twenty meters of ice even with a kinetic strike from orbit,” I say. “It may collapse the ceiling. If we’re lucky.”
“We need to turn that cave into a smoking hole in the ground, and we need to do it quickly and decisively,” the major says. “We lollygag around, they’ll just redeploy. God knows how many more tunnels they’ve prepared down there.”
