After a half hour or so, I start to wonder if maybe I should have tried to tell Nasha that I wasn’t going to just sit there and freeze to death after all. It would be good if she knew not to let Berto file a loss report until and unless I actually die. The Union is pretty loose about a lot of stuff, morality-wise, but some really bad things happened in the early days of bio-printed bodies and personality downloads, and at this point on most colonies you’re better off being a serial killer or a child stealer than a multiple.
I pop open a comm window, but of course I’m getting no signal here at all. Too much bedrock between me and the surface. Probably for the best. I’m pretty sure the only reason Nasha didn’t force the issue on a rescue attempt is that I gave her the impression that I was broken anyway. If she knew I was up and walking around with nothing worse than a headache and a sprained wrist, she might swing back and try to come for me, whether I wanted it or not.
I can’t have that. Nasha’s the only clearly good thing I can point to from the past nine years of my life, and if she went down because of me, I couldn’t live with myself.
I couldn’t, but I’d have to, wouldn’t I? I can’t die—not and make it stick, anyway.
In any case, I’m not sure she could find me even if she wanted to at this point. It’s like an ant farm down here, with cross-tunnels every dozen meters or so. I’ve tried to pick the ones that looked more up than down, but I don’t think I’m having a lot of success, and I have no idea what direction I’m headed.
On the plus side, though, I’m not shivering anymore. I thought at first that I was going hypothermic, but the infrared glow from the walls has been brightening steadily, and I’m pretty sure now that it’s getting warmer the deeper I go. I’m actually starting to sweat a little.
Which is okay for now, I guess—but it’s gonna suck if I actually do manage to find my way back to the surface. It was negative ten C when I broke through the crust covering the mouth of that drop shaft. Temperatures at night have been dipping to negative thirty or more, and the wind never stops. If I do find a way out, it might be a good idea to hang around inside until the sun comes back up.
* * *
I’M DAYDREAMING ABOUT Nasha the first time I hear the skittering. It’s like a bunch of little rocks tumbling down a granite face, except that it starts and stops, starts and stops. I hurry on, and I don’t look back. It’s obvious to me by now that these tunnels are not a natural formation. I don’t know what kind of burrowing animal digs three-meter-wide tunnels through solid rock, but whatever it is, I’m pretty sure I don’t want to meet one.
As I press on, the noises come more often, and closer. I find myself walking faster and faster, until I’m almost running. I’ve just passed a cross-tunnel when I realize that I can’t tell if the noises I’m hearing are coming from behind me or in front of me. I pull up short, and turn half around.
And there it is, almost close enough to touch.
It looks generally like a creeper, which I guess makes sense: segmented body, one pair of legs to a segment, hard, sharp claws for feet. The mandibles are different, though. Creepers have one pair on their front segments. This guy has two: a slightly longer pair held parallel to the ground, and a shorter pair held perpendicular to those. Just like a creeper, it has a short, dextrous pair of feeding legs inside the mandibles, and a round, toothy maw.
There are some other important differences. Creepers are pure white—evolved to blend in with the snow, maybe? It’s hard to tell from the infrared I’m getting, but I’m guessing that in the visible spectrum this thing would be brown or black.
Also, of course, creepers are maybe a meter long and weigh a few dozen kilograms, while my new friend here is as wide as I am tall, and stretches back down the tunnel as far as I can see.
Fight or flight? Neither one seems like a good bet here. I raise my hands, show it my open palms, and take a slow step back. That gets a reaction. It rears up and spreads both sets of mandibles wide. The feeding legs beckon to me. Body language. To a thing like this, my arms up and spread probably look like a threat. I drop them to my side and take another step back. It slides toward me, its front segments weaving slowly back and forth like the head of a cobra, and I’m thinking I should have listened to Nasha, should have popped my seals and let the local atmosphere do its work, thinking that being eaten by a giant centipede is really not the way I wanted to check out, when it strikes.
The mandibles snap around me, faster than I can react—between my legs, over my right shoulder, and around my waist. The creeper lifts me off the ground, and the feeding legs pin me in place. The maw is opening and closing rhythmically, less than a meter away. There are rows and rows of cold black teeth in there, one behind the other, as far down the furnace-hot gullet as I can see.
It doesn’t pull me in, though. It picks me up, and it moves.
The feeding legs are multi-jointed, and they end in nests of tentacles that could almost be fingers, tipped by two-centimeter-long claws. I struggle at first, but they hold my arms splayed and pressed back against the mandibles with a grip like a steel vise. I can kick my feet a little, but I can’t reach anything worth kicking. I’m assuming at this point that I’m on my way back to the nest. A snack for the little ones, maybe? Or a special treat for the wife? Either way, if I could reach up to pop my seals now, I’d do it. Not an option, though, so I hang there, imagining what it’s going to feel like being ground up in that churning maw.
The trip is a long one, and at one point I actually find myself dozing off. The clacking of the giant creeper’s teeth wakes me, though, and I spend the rest of the ride watching them grind against one another as the maw irises open and closed. It’s strangely fascinating. The teeth must either grow continuously or fall out and regenerate on a pretty regular basis, because they’re really doing a number on each other.
After a while, I realize that the angles at which they strike one another are optimized to keep them sharpened.
We finally stop in a chamber similar to the one I first fell into. The creeper crosses the open space, then slides its head into a smaller side tunnel. I crane my neck around. The passage looks like it dead-ends after twenty meters or so. The family larder, maybe? It sets my feet on the ground, then opens its mandibles. The feeding legs give me a gentle shove, and the head withdraws.
I’m not sure what’s happening now, but I’m pretty sure I want to be where that thing is not. I start up the tunnel. There’s something strange about the wall at the end. It takes me a few seconds to realize that my ocular is registering visible-range photons for the first time in hours.
When I get to the end of the tunnel, the wall isn’t rock. It’s hard-packed snow. I put my hand against it and shove. A section a half meter across gives way. Daylight floods in.