"Angus, get down here! I got it!"
Angus sprinted down the tunnel with a rush of adrenaline, feeling oddly like some primitive cave dweller deep into the hunt. His headlamp light bobbed madly as he neared Randy and the wiggling blanket.
They'd slashed the blanket in a dozen places, hoping to entangle the AL. The strategy had worked; two of the AL's slim, squirming legs poked through the blanket, which trapped the struggling, gleaming, spherical body. They heard whines and whirs of machinery, but the AL looked very trapped.
Excitement blazed from Randy's cherubic face. “Help me bag him! Watch out for his feet, they could be sharp!"
The two men pounced on the entangled AL, wrapped it further in the blanket, then lifted the whole package and placed it in a backpack.
"Damn thing is heavy,” Angus said as they sat down and watched the bag wriggle with the AL's futile escape efforts.
Randy nodded in agreement. “That surprised me. The way they can crawl across the ceiling I guessed them to be made from some kind of aluminum alloy, something light.” They both looked at the bag, listening to the whirring sounds emanating from within.
"Well,” Randy said. “What do we do now?"
"Oh, come on,” Angus said. “You've had a biology class before, haven't you? I think it's time we had ourselves a good old-fashioned dissection."
"Professor Reeves, wake up."
The hand on her shoulder shook gently, but insistently. Sleep danced enticingly around her head, calling to her to forget the shaking and slip back into slumber. Ignoring it, however, did not make it go away. She felt the hand's gentle strength squeeze firmly, pressing for her attention.
"Professor, wake up now. We're in danger."
She batted her groggy eyes open, feeling her body's complaint against the lack of sleep, and looked up into Connell's face. He returned her look only for an instant, then his eyes flicked down the tunnel. She immediately noticed the tension in his demeanor. She also noticed that his other hand pointed a machine gun in the direction of his gaze. The gun's barrel reflected the light from his headlamp in a thin, lethal, metallic line.
She sat up slowly, wiping the sleep from her eyes with the backs of her gloved hands. That action made her face burn and tingle with needlelike pains. She had more than a few blisters on her face and head. She hoped they didn't look as bad as the puffy, peeling, painful-looking blisters on Connell's face. The others fared little better. The KoolSuits regulated overall temperature, but the prolonged heat was taking its toll on their exposed skin.
Connell wore Mack's helmet and sat on his haunches. Mack was still asleep. Veronica suspected that Mack had suffered a concussion.
"What is it?” she asked quietly, fear already clawing its way into her mind, filling the void left by fading sleep.
"It's the silverbugs again. This time there're more of them. Their behavior is making O'Doyle nervous."
The thought of that spidery silverbug sent a shiver down her spine. She didn't like the way its spindly legs and dead, metal body could move so fast, so fluidly, with the grace of a ballet dancer. She grabbed her helmet, flicked the light on, placed it on her head and looked down the tunnel at whatever held Connell's rapt attention.
What she saw almost made her scream.
A line of silverbugs stretched down the tunnel's rocky floor, one gleaming body after another, spaced about ten feet apart. They stretched as far as her light carried, extending back toward the river. She counted at least forty in her line of sight. But it wasn't the number that chilled her blood as much as their actions.
The silverbugs bobbed in rhythm; a sickening, snap-motion of the body jerking toward the ground and then instantly popping back up. The line bobbed in unison, each silverbug moving neither forward nor back, just snapping up and down in an unnatural way that made her fight-or-flight response flare like wind-fueled fire through drought-ravaged grassland.
"What the hell are they doing?” she asked, unconsciously moving a step behind Connell.
"I don't know, but we're not sticking around to find out. You help Sanji with Mack, so I can keep my gun ready. Lybrand and I need to keep our hands free in case we have to start shooting."
Veronica's eyes never left the sickening line of convulsing machines. Sanji awoke almost instantly. Mack took more effort. The Aussie's eyes were glassy and unfocussed. Sanji dragged Mack to his feet. Veronica slipped under Mack's left arm, Sanji under his right; they kept him on his unsteady feet. Their KoolSuits brushed together with rubbery squeaking noises.
She saw Lybrand standing at the back end of the tunnel, less than twenty feet from the nearest silverbug, her gun leveled at the jerking creature. Connell and O'Doyle stood behind her, conferring over the map, eyes flicking up from the tattered paper every other second to watch the strange machines.
Veronica watched Connell fold the map, stuff it in his belt and run toward her. O'Doyle stood next to Lybrand, the two of them facing down the tunnel.
"We're moving out,” Connell said, a tinge of fear tracing his voice. “We're going to go forward a hundred yards and then take a tunnel to the right. It's a steep vertical climb, but at the end it takes a sharp descent and moves us toward the Dense Mass."
"What about the silverbugs?"
"O'Doyle doesn't want them following us, giving away our location,” Connell said. He moved down the tunnel, gun pointed ahead of him, his light showing the way like a beacon in the night. She and Sanji followed as fast as they could under Mack's heavy weight.
O'Doyle stared at the bobbing line of silverbugs that stretched far down the tunnel's length. The machines’ clicks and whirs played off the rough stone walls, filling the tunnel with an echoing din.
"You ready?” he asked Lybrand.
"Yep,” she said. He wanted to look at her, even for a second, but couldn't. His training forced him to concentrate fully on the danger before him. He reminded himself she wasn't a woman now, wasn't someone he loved. She was a soldier, ready to do her job.
"Use your sidearm,” he said, pulling his Beretta and slinging his H&K with one smooth motion. “Stay low, keep your hand on my hip so I know where you are. Look back if you have to see where we're going. I won't take my eyes off them unless we have to run, so you have to let me know what's coming behind us. Once the firing starts, we won't be able to hear anything. Pat me on the left hip to go left, the right hip to go right. Watch my actions as often as possible — if I turn to run, you'd better be three steps ahead of me and booking it. Do you understand?"
"Yes, Patrick,” Lybrand said, her voice cold and professional.
O'Doyle took a deep breath to steady himself. “Okay — let's see what happens."
He leveled his Beretta at the first silverbug and fired. The bullet ripped through the sphere with a spark and a pop. A smell like burning chocolate instantly filled the cave. The silverbug fell to the ground, two of its legs curling in while the other two twitched violently in random directions.
O'Doyle fired again less than a second after the first blast, but the swarm was already in full motion, scattering like enraged ants. The shot blew a leg off the second silverbug. The machine whirled and tried to run, but Lybrand's bullet hit it dead center. It fell to the floor, motionless and smoldering.
The rest of the silverbugs sprinted down the tunnel, their legs a madly flashing blur of faceted reflections. O'Doyle fired three more times, all misses. Just like that, the silverbugs were gone.