I don’t recall waking up. I don’t even recall being unconscious. All I know is that I am on my feet again, and that the crushing weight squeezing me from all sides is gone. I take a few ambling steps before my legs give out and I sink to my knees. My whole body hurts, and there’s a stabbing pain in my chest whenever I force air into my lungs.
I cycle through the sensor modes on my helmet one by one until I am back at the green-tinged night-vision mode. I’m in the tunnel that just exploded onto us and almost crushed the life out of me. Behind me, the tunnel is filled with a huge pile of ice and rock. My display is flickering in and out of life every few seconds, and every time it goes dark momentarily, I can’t see anything in front of me at all. I try to turn on the high-powered light on the side of the helmet, but it stays dark when I toggle the control switch. My armor just took a horrible beating from the tons of ice that came down on my platoon, but the laminate hardshell saved me from being crushed like a ration box in a garbage compactor. It’s deathly quiet again. My TacLink screen is off-line, and I have no idea who is dead or alive in the huge pile of frozen rubble blocking the tunnel behind me.
It takes me a while to work up the stamina to get back to my feet again. I lost my rifle in the collapse of the tunnel wall, the only thing in my possession that can harm a Lanky. I walk over to the pile of ice and try to dig for it, but most of the pieces are too large and heavy for me to move by myself. I am alone in the dark, injured, with no contact to the rest of my platoon, and no way to defend myself if I run into a Lanky down here. There’s a pistol in my thigh holster, but the handgun’s small-caliber fléchettes are as useless against a Lanky’s tough hide as spitballs. Still, it’s the only weapon I have left other than my combat knife, so I pull the pistol from its holster and make sure I have a full magazine and a round in the chamber.
I take a deep breath. The sudden stinging pain lancing through my chest brings me to my knees again, and I cower on the ground and try to breathe in shallow breaths without losing consciousness again. Thankfully, the armor’s automated med kit still works. I can feel the stab of a needle at the base of my neck, and a few moments later, the pain in my chest fades as the pain meds enter my bloodstream.
With the way back closed off by tons of rock and ice, my only two options are to sit tight and hope for rescue, or press on and look for another way out on my own. I don’t want to wait on my knees for a Lanky to show up and finish me off. I stand up again carefully and start down the tunnel once more, pistol in hand.
Every channel on comms is silent: squad, platoon, company, even the local defense channel. I don’t even hear the static of a carrier wave. The headset in my helmet is completely dead, and I conclude that the comms unit in my suit is busted. My armor no longer fits me properly—several of the hardshell segments are dented and pushed inward, where they press against my cushioned underarmor suit uncomfortably.
I make my way down the tunnel slowly, careful to make as little noise as possible. I want to broadcast a call for help on my radio just in case the transmitter still has life in it, but I know that the Lankies can sense radiation sources, and the very last thing I want to do right now is to draw the attention of one while walking around in busted armor with only a puny sidearm for self-defense.
Another fifty meters from the spot where we got ambushed and buried, the tunnel curves to the left slightly. Beyond the bend, the floor of the tunnel, which has been at an incline since we entered it from the surface, evens out into a flat stretch. I can see rock poking through the ice of the tunnel walls and floor in various spots. I don’t know how deep I am beneath the glacier, but knowing that I probably have a million tons of ice over my head doesn’t help my anxiety levels. I’m alone in the dark with the Lankies, and I’m more afraid than I’ve ever been in my life because I am practically unarmed and have nowhere to run.
I work my way around the bend and into the flat stretch of tunnel slowly and carefully. The tunnel at the bottom gradually widens to at least three or four times the width of the sections where we descended with the platoon. Down here, the armor groups could roll two or three mules side by side with some room to spare. The size of this tunnel makes me feel puny, all alone in the dark and holding a little peashooter of a gun.
Up ahead in the darkness somewhere, that low rumbling noise starts again, closer and more ominous than before. I keep my pistol trained on the far end of the tunnel. If a Lanky shows up and spots me, I have seconds to live, but I want to be spending them emptying my magazines at it instead of cowering or screaming.
The rumbling noise fades away as it did before. I eye the tunnel walls to my right and left, but there’s no scraping sound, nothing to indicate there’s a Lanky waiting to bury me under a few tons of ice again. I move over to one side of the tunnel as quickly and quietly as I can. The tunnel walls are uneven and have bumps and protrusions, and I may be able to hide behind one of them if a Lanky decides to come this way.
The tunnel ends in a wide mouth that opens into darkness. It is easily twenty meters across and just as tall. My night vision can’t yet pierce the dark space beyond it, so I move toward it carefully even though it’s the last thing I feel like doing right now.
When I reach the tunnel mouth, I finally discover just what the Lankies have been doing with their time in the Greenland ice.