The space beyond the mouth I am standing in is roughly circular and so vast that it looks like the entrance of a cathedral. The ceiling is at least fifty meters high, and the whole space is a hundred meters across or more. A solitary structure stands in the middle of this giant room like a huge pillar. I have seen something like it many times before, albeit at a much bigger scale. It’s a smooth, white, bone-like shaft that looks like a tree stripped of its bark. The Lanky terraformers on the colonies they took over look a lot like this, only they are many hundreds of meters tall and ten times as big around. The air down here is so warm and moist that I have to keep wiping condensation off the outside of my helmet’s visor and the lens of the night-vision sensor. My environmental readout tells me the precise temperature: 33.4 degrees Celsius. The CO2 warning below the temperature readout informs me that the carbon dioxide concentration is over 10 percent, more than enough to turn me unconscious quickly if I removed my helmet or raised the visor.
Near the middle of the room, two Lankies are moving, their backs turned to me. They are near the spire in the center, one walking around the left of it, the other around the right. They don’t seem to be in a particular hurry. I crouch near a rock crevice by the mouth of the tunnel and watch the Lankies as they walk away from me and toward the far corner of this huge underground dome. My night-vision gear doesn’t reproduce colors accurately—everything is in shades of green and black—but the walls of this cavern don’t just look like plain ice to me. They have a dark sheen to them that looks almost metallic. The walls of the cavern have tall, narrow recesses that are fifteen or twenty meters tall.
I hope my suit camera is still recording to storage, I think, amazed at the sight in front of me. No human beings before me except maybe some unlucky bastards on Mars have ever seen what I am witnessing here.
Almost every one of the dozen nooks in the cavern wall holds a Lanky. The nooks are less high than the creatures inside, and the Lankies are crouched and curled up in a sort of weird upright embryonic position. Whatever the Lankies do for rest—sleep, stasis, hibernation, whatnot—the ones curled up in these crevices are doing just that. They are completely still and unmoving. As I watch, one of the awake Lankies walks over to an empty nook and starts lowering itself into it. The soldier part of my brain, the part that’s way more pissed than scared right now, starts thinking up ways to put death into those tight recesses in the ice. The overpressure from a thermobaric MARS warhead would be devastating in such tight quarters. We could probably take out all these resting Lankies with a single squad of MARS-armed fire teams. Eight rockets, two seconds, and we would rack up the fastest infantry kill streak on Lankies ever achieved on the battlefield. But I don’t have a MARS launcher, or a squad to back me up. All I have is a pistol, and I’m not sure the Lankies would even feel the tiny fléchette darts. Right now, I’d pull the trigger on a thermobaric rocket with grim pleasure, even if I knew for sure it would bring down the entire glacier on us.
The last Lanky on its feet does not go for one of the empty nooks. Instead, it keeps walking around the terraforming pillar in the center of the cavern. I move back into the rock crevice when the Lanky faces my way, but it doesn’t make any move toward the cave entrance where I’m hiding. It just keeps walking around the center of the cavern slowly, swinging its head from side to side occasionally as it goes.
Somewhere in the darkness behind me, I hear a human voice. Then there’s a little squelch on my helmet’s headset, and I hear a choppy transmission.
“First Platoon,” the voice sounds. “First Platoon, anyone. This is Alpha One-Three, PFC Cameron. Anyone, do you copy?” The transmission ends with a strained-sounding cough.
In the cavern in front of me, the Lanky pauses its slow and steady walk and swings its head around until it feels like it’s looking right at me. I get up and dash back into the tunnel, heart pounding.
Up ahead, there’s a fork in the tunnel I don’t remember passing earlier. In the fork to the right, I can see the flicker of a light dancing on the walls of the tunnel. Behind me, heavy footsteps announce the Lanky striding across the cavern toward me. I take the right-hand branch of the tunnel and dash toward that flickering helmet light as fast as my hurting legs will carry me. At the last moment, I remember to turn on my own helmet light so I don’t get shot by a panicked private with a twitchy trigger finger. Even with this precaution, I find myself staring at the twin muzzles of an M-80 rifle when I sprint around the tunnel bend and see the lone trooper in the middle of the tunnel thirty meters in front of me.
“Hold your fire!” I yell at the top of my lungs. For a dreadful moment, the green targeting laser from the private’s rifle flashes across my chest armor before PFC Cameron points the weapon away from me.
“Turn off your comms!” I shout at PFC Cameron, who is staring at me with wide eyes through the translucent visor of his helmet. “Turn them off! They can sense the radiation!”
Behind me, there’s a loud, low scraping sound in the tunnel. If the Lanky is following us, it’s less than a hundred meters away, and it has sealed the exit like a big ugly cork in a bottle. There’s nowhere left to run or hide.
“He’s on my six!” I shout to PFC Cameron. “Shoot the bastard when he comes around the bend.”
PFC Cameron looks like his knees are about to buckle, but he nods and aims his rifle past me into the dark tunnel. He’s carrying an M-80, the oldest of the three anti-LHO rifles in the arsenal. Two barrels, only two shots before a slow reload that’s easy to fumble under stress.
I look at the pile of ice rubble blocking the tunnel and barring our way out. The tunnel is filled almost solidly with ice chunks of all sizes, but near the top of the sloping pile, my helmet light dips into a little bit of shadow.
Behind me, something huge is coming up the tunnel, making scraping noises that sound like small earthquakes. I look up the rubble slope again and start climbing the pile. The noises in the tunnel spur me on in a way no drill instructor ever managed.
“Up here!” I yell to PFC Cameron, but he doesn’t seem to hear me. He’s staring down the tunnel, where the Lanky sounds close enough to be just behind the split in the corridor fifty meters away.
Maybe it’s too big to make the bend now, I think. Please, let it be too big to make the bend. But I already know it’s wishful thinking—they came through here before, and even if it can’t make it past the rubble, it can get to us.
“Cameron!” I shout. I’m halfway up the slope of the rubble pile by now, three meters up. Cameron’s helmet light keeps shining the other way, toward the danger.
I pause my climb and stare at the huge Lanky head that appears just at the edge of PFC Cameron’s helmet light. The way the creature is stooped, it has to be crawling on all fours. The skull with its cranial shield at the back takes up most of the space in the tunnel. As I watch, transfixed, the Lanky reaches out with a front limb and grasps a section of tunnel floor to pull itself forward. Its toothless maw is slightly open. There are no eyes in its massive skull, but I still have the feeling that the Lanky is looking right at us.
“Cameron, move!” I yell. Finally, Cameron tears his eyes away from the monstrosity working its way toward us. He looks up the rubble slope, and our eyes meet briefly. I gesture up the slope and make the “double-time” hand sign for emphasis.
Behind us, the Lanky wails.