And he saw, he heard, more beetle creatures approach. He grabbed the flashlight off the floor and swung it around.
They were coming at him from all sides, crawling along the ground, like an ant swarm but much larger, more monstrous, and the way those shiny black carapaces were laced with metal, stuff that had been made, was somehow even more horrific. When he pointed the light at one it flinched back as if dazzled, but from every other direction they kept on approaching. And when they got close they started rearing up, and he saw soft bellies exposed, with pale grey pods clinging to greenish flesh, like blisters.
Then one of them rose up right before him. He saw a half-face silver mask just like the first he’d encountered – maybe it actually was the first, he had no way of distinguishing them one from another – and a kind of tentacle, thread-like, silvery, reached out towards him.
He tried to stay still. But when the pseudopod touched him, cold metal on warm flesh, Nikos’s nerve broke.
He ran forward, yelling, waving his flashlight, pushing through rustling bodies that tipped and scrambled to get out of his way. He didn’t get very far before he tripped over something and fell on to a hard, compacted floor. Again he dropped the flash, and he had moments of panic in the shifting shadows of the dark before he got it back, moments when he could hear them shifting and whispering and scraping all around him. He had no idea which way the wall was, and the shaft he’d emerged from. Panic rose again, choking him.
And once more one of the beetle things reached out with a squirming silvery tentacle-limb. Without thinking Nikos lashed out with the flashlight. He caught the thing on the dark side of its face, avoiding the metal mask. The black shell cracked, and a kind of pulp, green and foul-smelling, leaked out. As the beetle fell back, another made to grab its wounded companion. But in doing so it came close to Nikos, and again he swung the flashlight—
And the beetle disappeared, with a pop of air.
Nikos was astonished. It was as if the beetle had stepped, out of this big cellar, this cavern under the ground! How was that possible?
Again they closed in on him, moving more cautiously now, those strange half-faces with their single eyes following the flashlight as he swung it back and forth. He couldn’t get away, and if they rushed him he couldn’t get them all.
He tried to think.
That beetle had stepped away. You couldn’t step out of a hole in the ground. But the beetle had. If a beetle could, he could.
His Stepper box was still at his belt. He turned its big clunky switch left and right, East and West, and tried to step – but both ways he felt the strange push-back you got if you tried to step out of a cellar, or into a space occupied by something massive, like a big sequoia. It was impossible; you couldn’t step into solid earth or rock. But that beetle had stepped! There must be some way to do this.
The beetles were still closing in.
With a spasm of fear and disgust he tried again. He twisted the switch of his Stepper box until it broke off in his hand. But then he stepped, neither East nor West—
He wasn’t in a hole any more.
He was sitting on hard, smooth ground. There was a sky above him, brilliant, dazzling, and the light hurt his eyes after the darkness of the big cellar. But this sky was orange-brown, not blue, and there was no sun or moon – nothing but stars, like the clearest night, with many more stars than he’d ever seen, and some of those stars were bright, brighter than any star or planet, brighter than the moon, bright as shards of the sun.
Frozen by shock, he took a jerky breath. The air was thin and smelled of metal, of dryness.
He looked around. The ground under him was like compacted earth. He sat on a slope that stretched down to what looked like a river. On the far bank some kind of pale, translucent bubbles crowded together. They were like the blisters he’d seen on the belly of the beetle beasts, he thought, but these were bigger, the size of buildings, and they were fixed to the ground – or some were, while others seemed to be straining to rise into the air.
And beetle things crawled along paths and roads that tracked the river bank, and crossed low bridges over the water, hundreds of them in great crowds, rustling, scraping.
All this in a heartbeat, a rush of impressions.
There was a beetle right beside him. Nikos hadn’t seen it approach. That half-silvered face hovered in front of him, and a coiling pseudopod reached for his right temple. He felt overcome; he’d seen too much to take in, and couldn’t react. He didn’t resist.
He noticed one more odd thing about the shining sky: that many of the stars to his left, while bright, were tinged green, but those to his right were pure white.
Then something cold touched his head. Blackness closed in around his vision, like he was falling down another tunnel.