Orlov who had been quietly perched on the wall finally spoke. “You need to be quiet.”
Gomez frowned. “It’s not what I meant, Orlov. We can save you.”
“No! Quiet! Stop talking! Listen! Can’t you hear them?”
Marley craned her head. “I don’t hear anything. What?”
“I can hear them through my legs,” said Orlov. “Dozens of them. I hear their feet scuttling on the floor, the walls, the ceiling. Dozens of them, spiders, racing towards us.”
Forty-Nine
GOMEZ KEPT GLANCING between the embedded map in his VR goggles and the hallway ahead. All the while, the scraping metal feet closed in behind him. The gun in his hands was little reassurance. Not for what lay ahead.
Gomez ran as fast as he could. He viewed the map of the winding path from which they had come, which would lead them past Ragnar, where they had first battled the spiders, and to where the last of the humans had holed up. He could direct the humans, help them set up even better defenses against the inevitable attack of Rom’s army of spiders.
Get back to the survivors and prepare for the worst and pray Prime was sending help.
Beneath his labored breathing, the sound of the scuttling feet of the spiders grew stronger. He struggled to run. Everything hurt: his head, his back, his right knee. On top of that, he was starving and his mouth was parched. But he was leading them and he needed them to get to safety.
Orlov, matching his pace as she ran along the wall, cursed. “Fucking things! Too close now.”
Gomez held the point position with the others close at his heels. “Hurry! We can beat them to the passage.” But as he rounded the next corner he saw that his hopes were baseless. At the far end of the corridor, dozens of spiders charged towards them. “Fuck! Turn back!” he said. “Turn back!”
They raced back the way they came and now instead of leading them, he was at the tail end, and even though they ran as fast as they could, the sound of the spiders’ feet on the walls grew, a terrible scrabbling sound, a rising horror pursuing them.
He could imagine their hot breath on the skin of his neck. He became suddenly aware of how his clothes stuck to his sweaty skin. His feet burned inside of his boots. A waft of urine passed over him.
“Where are we going?” screamed Gomez.
“To the perimeter corridors!” said Marley. “It’s the only other way back.”
“That’s twice as long to get back.”
“What other choice? Move!”
“Faster!” yelled Gomez.
He had caught up with Finn who was suddenly limping.
“Don’t be gimping on me now, boy,” hissed Gomez.
“They’re too fast. They don’t get tired,” said Finn. “We’re screwed.”
“Keep going. We’ll figure something out.”
Gomez slowed his pace slightly so he matched stride with Finn. Gomez wasn’t going to leave him to the spiders. They had already taken Hendo and ruined Orlov. He wasn’t going to lose his entire crew on this mission.
In his VR goggles, the map overlay showed a security door ahead.
“Once … we’re through … the door,” he said between labored breaths, “damage it. Buy us time.”
“We’ll never beat them,” panted Finn. “Loading dock too far away. Spiders will get us.”
“EMP blaster?” Gomez asked. “Any hope?”
Finn spewed out his words. “Fucked.”
The others were stretching the distance between them: Marley with her biometal legs, Patch loping in her exoskeleton, and Orlov the Spider. Patch had slung Adams over her shoulder, the captain’s head bouncing on the doctor’s shoulder.
“Never should’ve… taken this mission,” said Finn.
“One objective: get out alive.”
The security door lay not far ahead, just beyond an intersection of hallways.
Marley charged through the door first and then the lumbering Patch who had to duck so she would not bang her head on the frame. Orlov stopped at the door and turned, her shouts encouraging Gomez and Finn onward. By the sound of the scuttling, the spiders remained in distant pursuit. Gomez slowed his pace to allow Finn to move slightly ahead of him so it would be easier to dart through the door.
It all looked good.
Gomez entered the intersection.
They were going to make it. He smiled.
Then a spider slammed into Gomez from the intersecting corridor and barreled him over.
The mass of metal and flesh smashed into his ribs and lifted him off his feet. He tumbled into the intersection head over heels, rolling several times before skidding to a halt on his back. His rifle flew out of his hands and slid down the hall, beyond his reach. He made to grab at it.
But before he could reach it, the spider attacked.
The spider once had been a dark-skinned Latina with uneven teeth. She hung naked in the frame, blood and clear fluid seeping where the metal had been seared into her flesh. Beneath her short spiky hair, her eyes spoke of madness.
Her metal legs were too fast and too powerful. Heavy blows rained on him. She smashed his head. Blow after blow. Blood streamed from his nose and his mouth filled with the coppery taste of his own blood. Harder and harder she hit him until he could barely move.
He was being dragged along the floor by one of his legs.
“Kill me already,” he mumbled, and then terror washed over him. She had no intention of killing him. She could have just cracked his head open. She had something else in mind. She wanted to drag him back to one of those operating rooms. She planned to pin him on a table and cut off his arms, his legs. She wanted to turn him into a spider. She would make him one of them.
Gomez kicked with his free leg. The spider’s limb was like a thick wire cable. He fumbled for his pistol but the spider slammed him into the wall and the weapon flew from his hand. He screamed in pain and rage.
Suddenly a blurred shape slammed into the spider. It was Marley. Gomez, the spider, and Marley flew as one mass. She had tangled inside the limbs of the spider, a knife flashing in Marley’s biometal fist.
The spider had no chance. Marley fought in close, where the spider could not maneuver. Marley pounded her fists into exposed flesh, sinking hand into belly, cracking knuckles against jaw, all the while jabbing and slicing and shearing, until Gomez was covered in dark, sticky blood. With a shriek, the spider collapsed and Marley rolled loose.
Gomez tried to mutter a few words of gratitude but his lips were swollen and filled with blood. Marley threw him over her shoulder and sprinted. He stared at the floor. His blood left a trail of splatter. One glance up showed a wall of spiders in close pursuit.
He and Marley were on the floor, rolling, and a door slammed hard.
Patch put a fist through the access keyboard and Finn waved a welding torch, the blue flame humming as it melted the edge of the door to the frame.
“This shit ain’t gonna work! They’re going to tear through it. Not strong enough!”
“We need time!” said Marley. “Enough time to get clear of them and back to the loading dock so we can get to Rom.”
Gomez curled on the floor, desperately trying to catch his breath. He needed a moment. All he needed was moment to catch his breath.
Then the first spider leg pierced the door.
Fifty
MARLEY CURSED. SPIDER legs pierced the wall, as easy as needles through paper. “Run!” shouted Marley. “Now! Run!”
The others were a mess. Adams stood slack armed, staring down the corridor. Orlov skittered nervously on the ceiling, the laser target of her gun tracking along the spots on the door where the spiders would most likely burst through. Gomez curled on the floor. He had finally broken. Ever since Orlov had been taken, the man had changed. And not for the better.
“Run where?” screamed Finn.
Marley scrolled through the map in her VR goggles. “Another security door a hundred yards away.” She stared past Adams. “We get through that and seal it again
.”
“They’ll come at us again,” said Finn holding the torch in both hands. The metal was turning bright red, taking too long to melt. “They’re tearing through the walls. We can’t hold them back.”
“We stay here, we die! We have to keep moving. Back to the loading dock. We’ll rally the surviving miners, fend off these spiders and commandeer a vehicle to get us to the comms complex.”
“He’ll be waiting,” said Patch. “And he’ll kill us all.”
Another spider leg ripped a hole in the wall. A face, unshaven and a sickly yellow, pressed into the gap and hissed.
Gomez shot it with Finn’s pistol. Blood sprayed everywhere and a chorus of howls erupted from the other side of the wall. “Enough! Marley’s right. Retreat! Pull back.”
“Go,” said Orlov. “You first. I’ll catch up. Been itching to try out this gun.”
“Not too long,” said Marley, already sprinting towards the next door.
Orlov laughed. “I’ll get there before you will.”
Marley reached the door first.
Marley was typing in the access code when a spider’s leg pierced right above the panel. The sharp metal talon caught Marley’s hair and yanked her into the wall. Marley tore her head away.
“Shit!” screamed Finn. “Fuckers coming for us from both directions!”
Back at the first security door, the spiders had torn the walls open enough that they could pour through. Finn shot wildly down the hall at the gathering swarm. Behind Marley, a dozen legs punctured the wall.
Time was running out.
And they had nowhere left to run.
Fifty-One
MARLEY CURSED AS her bullets painted the distant wall red.
The spiders had completely torn through the door. Orlov lay down suppressive fire from the gun on her back but it did little: the spiders simply returned fire. The wall behind Marley and the floor beneath her exploded from the flurry of bullets.
Marley and the others had no cover. With so many spiders shooting at them, it would only be moments before the shots found home and they would be slaughtered. This time the spiders did not seem interested in capturing the mercenaries and turning them into spiders. The spiders wanted to kill them.
The gun bucked in Marley’s hand. Her bullets disappeared into flesh, ricocheted off metal, buried themselves into the wall. Gomez fired from a rifle borrowed from Finn. But they did little damage. The swarm descended. Too many bullets and too few of them on Marley’s side.
Meanwhile, Finn fired through the holes that the spiders had ripped in the wall behind them. Patch tried to catch and snap off the spider legs that pierced the wall. She failed miserably. Too many legs puncturing the walls and her hands were not designed for combat. The spider’s limbs slipped back unharmed.
Adams sat on the ground, arms wrapped around his knees, gently rocking, laughing.
“It’s over,” Marley whispered beneath the screams and explosions.
“The general who knows when he can fight and when he cannot will be victorious.” Prime flickered into being. He stood close to Marley, so close that she could smell the faded scent of sandalwood. He wore the armor of a samurai, skirted, helmeted, a sword held in each hand, a fierce, sun-weathered warrior.
The battlefield changed before Marley’s eyes, the long corridor replaced by cascading tiles of the sky, a forest, and a bridge. She too changed. Her skin became armored and the gun a crossbow.
The spiders, giant, hairy-legged tarantulas, rushed at them from the far end of the wooden bridge while the ones behind her tore away the panels of a wooden gate.
“I don’t need your words,” Marley hissed. “I need weapons.”
“Is it victory you seek?” Huang Di Prime scowled from beneath his lamellar helmet. His face changed to that of an angry Buddhist deity, more beast than man.
“Surviving will do.”
The spiders, closer now, spit acid and the bridge railing exploded, the fragments ripping across Marley’s face. She winced at the burning pain.
“Then know when you cannot fight,” said the AI.
“They kill us if we give up.”
His laughter echoed off the walls of the forested canyon, rising above the sound of the rock-filled river that churned a hundred feet below the bridge.
“Surrender is not the only way to not fight.”
“Enough with the riddles, fucking machine!”
“Escape, my dear. Escape.” The general slashed a hole into the floor of the bridge and with a wink of one eye pulled his arms close to his sides and fell through the hole in the bridge into the hissing rush of the water.
The bridge, the sky, and the river below shattered into a million fragments as if the world were a mirror and had been struck with an anvil. The pieces turned end over end falling. Marley stood in the dust and blood of the hallway of the mining colony.
“Bastards closing in!” screamed Gomez. He turned to Marley. “If they capture me, put a hole in my head. Promise me that.”
“Put a hole in the floor!” Marley waved at Orlov. “Turn your missiles on the floor, right here.” She sketched an X in the debris, the spot where Huang Di Prime has slipped through.
Orlov shook her head but did as told and the floor exploded as the bullets tore into it. A quick as she fired, she only made a dent. Marley tore Finn away from the spiders at the door. They were nearly through. Marley was running out of time. She had only one chance to do this right.
“Explosives? What do you have? Can you blow a hole through the floor?!”
Finn nodded. He pulled a plastic explosive from his belt and began setting the charge. “What’s down there?”
Marley shook Patch’s arm. “What’s there? What’s underneath us?”
“Nothing,” said the doctor. “Rocks. I don’t know. Wait, maybe a mining tunnel. Abandoned tunnels run beneath the surface. But none here. None that I know.”
“Fire the charge!” screamed Marley and she hit the ground as fast as she could. It was too late. The spiders, free of the suppressive fire, raced unimpeded towards the mercenaries, scrambling across the ceiling, the legs, scraping like nails on a chalkboard.
In a moment, it would be over. The spiders would consume them. All would have been for nothing.
Then the room exploded, the floor gave way, and Marley tumbled, falling, falling.
Fifty-Two
ADAMS WOKE TO a ringing in his ears. He choked back dust, spewing and coughing. The air tasted stale. It smelled like a crypt. Through the swirl of dust, Adams peered at the light above. Dragons riding through the clouds, he thought.
Shadows moved beside him, dark figures in the near blackness. Suddenly a green light lit the space, a spot from Patch. The mechanical woman wavered to her feet, shifting rubble.
Adams stared at the hole in the ceiling. They must have fallen thirty feet from the corridor where they had been cornered. But they had fallen into the tunnels beneath into a pile of ash and dust and despite the way it tore at Adams’s lungs, it had cushioned their landing.
His companions slowly rose: Patch, Gomez, the skittering Orlov. But no Marley. Maybe she had broken her neck. Maybe he would not need to kill her now for what she had done to Penelope.
But then her figure loomed, the green light shimmering off her metal limbs. Never an easy way for Adams. A struggle from the cradle to the grave, and misfortune in between, but he had cursed her and made a silent promise to Penelope and he would not rest, he would not slip into the desolate grave until he had won his revenge.
He would not rest until he stood over that abomination watching the light of her eyes dim, fade into oblivion.
Fifty-Three
GOMEZ CROUCHED WITH the others behind an abandoned borer. The dust had lessened and the light from the hole in the ceiling created a helix, a vortex sucking towards the dark floor below. The shadows of the spiders edged the column. One of them dropped over the edge and the dust below billowed. Gomez tracked his laser target and the rifle bucked in his a
rms. One down, one shot made the spiders above hesitate.
Finn scurried back behind the borer. “Charges are set in the walls. I think it’ll do the trick.”
“Then let’s do it,” said Marley.
“We don’t know where these tunnels lead,” said Gomez. Marley had sent Finn back to blow up the walls and close off the tunnels leading to the opening. “We do this and there might not be a way back. We might be sealing ourselves in our own tomb.”
“This is the path to Rom,” said Marley.
“How do you know this? What are you not telling us?”
“Fire the charges, Finn.”
The mercenary looked to Gomez, who bit his bottom lip and nodded.
The charges set in a loose ring along a narrow part of the tunnel exploded. A wall of dust, the roar of the wind, and a searing heat rushed around the borer behind which they hid.
Gomez fell into a fit of coughing and tugged the others into a retreat deeper into the tunnel.
“That’s what I call a little explosion,” said Finn. He had pulled off his VR goggles and the mine dust left raccoon eyes. He laughed maniacally.
“I wouldn’t be laughing, little man,” said Patch. “This dust is toxic. Where do you think the cancers and sickness on this colony come from? The fluvium slowly eats away our lives.”
“Better to live today than to die tomorrow,” said Marley. She pointed the laser of her gun towards the cloud of dust. “Did it work?”
“Can’t see anything through there. But I don’t hear anything.”
“They aren’t going to come knocking,” said Patch.
“I’ll go back there and check,” said Orlov. She crouched inside of her spider chassis. Her legs flexed beneath as if she meant to spring.
“You be back quick,” said Gomez. “And any sign of them at all, you do not engage. You come right back to me.”
Orlov broke into a wry smile. “To you? Didn’t think you cared.”
Into Darkness Page 19
