“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 y
ou, 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 a
drenalin 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.
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