Without my helmet’s electronics, all I have to block out the noise is the physical insulation of my helmet liner. Down here, in this confined space, the noise is so powerfully, infernally loud that it feels like an artillery shell just exploded next to us.
Below me, Private Cameron turns and aims his rifle. I can see that he’s firing one of his barrels, because I can see the enormous muzzle flash of the propellant and the recoil making the heavy weapon buck in his grip, but I can’t hear the shot at all. The round from Cameron’s rifle hits the Lanky right in the center of its skull and shatters against the cranial shield’s base in a puff of fragments.
“Shoot low!” I scream. “Aim for the torso! Aim past the head!”
I can’t even hear myself. It feels like my ears have been filled with concrete, and a high-pitched, ringing whistle is the only sound I hear.
The Lanky moves forward again with a lurch. Cameron fires his second round. I tear my attention away from the uneven fight and resume my hasty climb with greatly renewed urgency. I know that we are both as good as dead, and the only hope I have lies in the tiny space between the rubble pile and the ceiling of the tunnel.
I scale the last meter or two faster than I’ve ever climbed anything before in my life. At the top, I see that there’s maybe half a meter of air between the rubble pile and the tunnel ceiling—more in some spots, much less in others. I turn around once more and see PFC Cameron frantically trying to reload his rifle. He almost manages to get another round into the barrels when the Lanky reaches out as if to pull itself forward again. One huge four-fingered hand scoops up Cameron in an almost-casual motion and flings him backward into the darkness of the tunnel behind the Lanky. If he is screaming as the Lanky seizes him, I can’t hear it, and I’m glad for my deafness for a moment.
I climb up into the low gap at the top of the ice-rubble heap that buried my platoon and crawl into the gap as quickly as my hurting body will let me. I don’t want to waste time by looking back and counting down the seconds to my death if the Lanky catches up and digs me out of the pile. Without my armor, I would be dead right now instead of just badly hurt, but right now I wish I didn’t have it on, because the space I have found up here is claustrophobically small, and I just barely fit into it, constrained by the inflexible volume of the hardshell segments wrapping around my torso. I crawl into the crevice headfirst, pushing forward with cleated boots, meter by meter, away from the thing in the tunnel behind me.
I can’t hear the Lanky tearing into the rubble pile, but I can feel it. The ice under my body shifts suddenly, tossing me to the left half a meter and half burying me in another pile of loose ice. I struggle free and continue my frantic crawl forward. The pile gets another massive jolt from behind me. This time the movement flings me forward and into a depression in the pile. The ice chunks sweep me forward in a cold, hard, unrelenting wave. I struggle to keep myself upright, to not lose track of up and down again.
I crawl across the top of the ever-shifting rubble pile for what seems like hours. Every few minutes, I feel the jolt of whatever the Lanky is doing to the ice pile behind me. But as large and strong as they are, I’m glad to see that even a Lanky can’t just casually clear hundreds of tons of ice out of the tunnel quickly, that even these overwhelmingly powerful creatures have physical limitations. I’m sweat drenched and out of breath, but I continue my crawl, not daring to pause and maybe end up sharing PFC Cameron’s fate because I stopped to catch my breath one too many times. More than once, the gap between rubble and tunnel ceiling all but disappears, and I have to dig chunks of ice rubble out of the way, convinced every time that I am now well and truly stuck. I’ve long since stopped feeling the pain in my chest and limbs, and my hearing is still gone except for that high-pitched noise that won’t go away.
When I reach the far end of the rubble pile, the slope of the ice mound is so steep that I fall down the incline headfirst before I can stop my sudden slide. A series of bumps flips me sideways, and I roll down the rest of the way, limbs flailing. The impact with the tunnel floor at the bottom of the slope knocks what little air I have left right out of me. For a few moments, all I can do is lie on my back in the dark and gasp for air. Then a loud, scraping rumble from the ice pile behind me forcefully reminds me that there’s a Lanky on the other side working to close the distance between us. I get to my feet again and stumble up the tunnel.
The pitch of the tunnel floor is much more steep than I remember. I have to pause and catch my breath every few dozen steps. From the way my chest is hurting every time I take a deep breath, I suspect I cracked a rib or three.
When I round the next bend in the tunnel, there are helmet lights up ahead, and surprised voices. There’s a steel cable snaking down the middle of the corridor, and I trip over it, stumble, and fall ungracefully. When I hit the ground, the pain in my side flares up again and makes me gasp for breath. Then there are voices around me, and I feel several sets of hands grabbing my arms and the drag loops on my armor.
“Careful now. Pick him up, easy. Are you okay, sir? Lieutenant?”
I shake my head and hold up my hand. Then I nod back the way I came.
“Lanky on my ass. He’s trying to dig through that ice pile. First Platoon?”
“Third and Fourth Squads made it back out. You’re all we’ve seen from First and Second, sir. What the hell happened?”
I look at the speaker, an SI NCO with staff-sergeant rank stripes on his armor.
“They ambushed us. Set a trap. Made the tunnel walls collapse.”
“Son of a bitch.” The staff sergeant gestures to a few of the SI troopers behind us and points down the tunnel.
“Get a pair of MARS launchers pointing around that bend and covering the tunnel. Possible incoming. Anything looks or sounds funny, you come running right back here. We are grabbing the lieutenant and clearing out for now.”
“I have data in my suit,” I say. “I need to get back to Company. I saw what they have on the other side.”
“Get the lieutenant out of here,” the staff sergeant says to the troopers helping me up. “If you have a Lanky on your tail, let it grab you guys first if you have to. But make sure the lieutenant gets back to the mules. Go.”