“I don’t have the slightest use for one of those, Sarge.” I gesture back the way we came. “Hoof it and guard the rear, or take point. Your choice.”
“Hoofing it, sir,” he says. He nods at me and turns around, then trots back the way we came. The troopers he passes look at him with thinly concealed envy. First Squad’s leader, a corporal whose face behind the shield of his helmet doesn’t look a day older than twenty, moves up to take the platoon sergeant’s slot.
“If we have movement in the tunnel up ahead, I want all three MARS launchers ready to put rounds downrange,” I tell First Squad. “They’ll come at us headfirst, so try to shoot past the cranial shield. That thing is tough as armor plating.”
There’s another straight stretch of tunnel past the bend. It pitches down into the ice a few degrees, a steady descent toward the bottom of the glacier, which may still be hundreds of meters below us as far as I know. It’s cold and quiet down here except for the crunching of our cleated boots on the uneven surface of the tunnel.
“It’s getting warmer down here,” someone behind me says.
I check the temperature readout on my display and find that the trooper is right. The outside air temperature was negative thirty degrees, but down here it’s only a few degrees below zero. The environmental system in my suit tells me that the CO2 concentration in the air has increased by almost a full percent. Lankies like their air warm and humid and loaded with carbon dioxide. Whatever they did down there, they didn’t just dig a fancy hole in the ground; they found a way to do some very localized terraforming in the most hostile environment our planet has to offer.
If a thousand of these things manage to make footfall instead of just a dozen or so, we are utterly fucked, I think, and shudder at the memory of just how close we came last year to exactly that sort of scenario.
The next tunnel segment is several hundred meters long. It curves ever so slightly to the right, and the floor still slopes downward. We are still walking on ice, not rock, and I wonder just how thick the ice sheet on this glacier can be so close to the rocky coastline.
Somewhere ahead in the darkness beyond our lights, a low rumbling noise drifts out of the deep, a sound like boulders slowly rolling down a gravel slope.
I stop and raise my hand.
“Hold,” I say over the platoon channel. “MARS launchers up front. Mind your fields of fire, everyone.”
“Squads, go four and four,” the platoon sergeant orders. “Tunnel’s wide enough. When we have contact, first rank kneels, second shoots over the first.”
Behind me, the squads reshuffle their formation as ordered. With eight rifles to bear on a Lanky at the same time, we should be able to drop it in time. There are still a good hundred meters of mostly straight tunnel in front of us, and any Lanky coming up the tunnel will have to crawl on all fours.
The rumbling noise in the tunnel ahead of us ebbs away slowly, until the dark beyond our lights is as eerily silent as before.
“Well, that was ominous,” the platoon sergeant comments dryly.
We wait, weapons aimed into the darkness, expecting to see the Lanky that made the noise to come charging up the tunnel. As scary as they are in close combat, I’d almost prefer to have one of those things to shoot at instead of sneaking around in the dark down here and jumping at every noise.
“They need to shit or get off the pot,” my platoon sergeant says, agreeing with my thoughts. “Smashed a whole base to rubble, and now they want to play hide-and-seek.”
“Be careful what you wish for, Sarge,” I say. The targeting lasers from our M-90 rifles paint green streaks on the uneven ice walls of the tunnel, but there is nothing for our ballistic computers to lock on to.
To my right, there’s a new noise, a faint scraping sound. I see nothing but tunnel wall in the cone of light from my helmet lamp, but the sound is very close. I rapidly cycle through all the sensor modes: night vision, thermal, infrared. When I reach the microwave mode, the one we call the heartbeat sensor, my heart skips a full beat or two. Something is moving behind the ice of the tunnel wall, something large and indistinct, only visible to my helmet sensor because of the vibration of the air molecules it displaces while moving. It’s huge, and it’s right next to us, much closer than it ought to be unless the tunnel wall to our right is just a few meters thick at most.
I realize what is about to happen, and I have to fight every instinct in my body to not drop my gear and run, run, run back the way we came before the trap snaps shut.
I whirl around and open the all-platoon channel.
“Back!” I yell. “Get back!”
The scraping sound to my right turns into a creaking rumble, and I know it’s already too late, that we are right in the middle of the mousetrap that’s snapping shut right now, a trap I’ve led everyone into like a careless idiot.
The troopers don’t need encouragement to follow my order, with everyone’s nerves on edge already. The MARS gunners lower their weapons and turn around to follow First Squad’s riflemen, who are already a few dozen meters back up the tunnel’s slope. To my left, long fissures appear in the wall of the tunnel with cracks that sound like rifle shots.
I make it five or six steps back up the tunnel when the wall of ice to my left explodes and fills all the space around me in the blink of an eye. There’s no more up or down or sideways. I am swept off my feet and lose my grip on the rifle, which is torn from my hands. It feels like someone just parked an entire drop ship on top of me, crushing weight pushing in from all directions. Without my hardshell armor, I know I’d be pulped beef already, but even with the protection of my armor, I feel like I’m being squeezed in a giant vise. The helmet visor’s display stops working abruptly, and all I see in front of me is darkness as my helmet light goes out as well. I want to scream into the platoon circuit, tell my troops to get out, get back to the surface, but I can barely get enough air into my lungs to keep breathing. Just a few seconds have passed since I spotted the movement beyond the tunnel wall with the microwave sensor of my helmet. I don’t even have time to be scared. Instead, I just feel a wild sense of frustration, anger at myself for letting the Lankies get the better of me on our home turf. Nearby, so close that it sounds like it’s just a few meters from my head, a Lanky wails its unearthly cry, but it sounds muffled through the ice, merely painful to the eardrums instead of completely unbearable.
I try to move my arms and legs, but I am fixed to the spot by all the ice bearing down on me, and whatever breath I can force into my lungs isn’t enough to cover the new exertion, and I fade out of consciousness before I even have time to get scared again.
CHAPTER 4
UNDER THE ICE