And the dronon should be following us, Gallen realized. The Seekers should be on our trail. He couldn’t retreat.
But sfuz and the city lay ahead. He couldn’t go forward.
When they reached a small chamber where ancient limbs thrust up from the floor, Gallen called a halt. “Zeus, spread some of this down the corridor,” he said, tossing Zeus the canister of exploding foam. Zeus took it, disappeared up the trail.
Gallen heard the hiss of foam as Zeus sprayed the floor and walls. In sixty seconds the foam would set; anything that touched it thereafter would explode in a fireball.
“Maggie, you and the bears take cover here between these branches, and break out some food. We need some rest.” He indicated the two largest partially petrified tree branches, which thrust up. From behind them, they’d have some protection.
Maggie sat and drew her heavy pistol, a conventional weapon with high-explosive charges and a silencer. No sooner had she got down than the sfuz found them.
Several dozen charged down the narrow corridor, whistling in anticipation. The sfuz boiled through the cavern opening like ants, grasping the cavern wall with their strong fingers, apparently unmindful of gravity. Some were running along the ceiling, others erupting around walls, while yet others scampered along the floor. They seemed intent on finding their prey, mindless with rage.
Gallen turned, firing his intelligent pistol as rapidly as he could, targeting individual sfuz.
Maggie didn’t have time for such niceties. She opened fire with her pistol, blasting as fast as she could squeeze the trigger, counting on the explosive force of her projectiles to rip apart anything in her path.
Maggie’s weapon worked well in close quarters. As she fired, sfuz dropped from the ceiling, raining down in bloody gobbets on their kin, their hunting cries turning to death screams.
The black creatures seemed to seethe from the walls, their horrible, long, twisted limbs writhing. They curled up on themselves as they died, sometimes kicking out savagely with long limbs. Their dark eyes gleamed, their fangs flashed in the pale light thrown by the firefight, their claws raked the air.
These were not adults, Gallen suddenly realized. These are juveniles and children, smaller than adults, but no less deadly, apparently, for they had just slaughtered a thousand dronon.
But at what cost? Gallen wondered. How many sfuz died? Gallen took to targeting the sfuz that got past Maggie. Maggie screamed, “Back me! My clip’s empty!”
Gallen’s own weapon was nearly out of missiles, and in his mind, he practiced drawing his vibro-blade, considered how he might best hold off the sfuz till Maggie could reload. He needn’t have worried.
Zeus came charging around the bend, firing his incendiary pistol. He got off three shots before Gallen shouted, “No!”
The plasma from the pistol burned like the sun, setting the ancient detritus along the walls afire. The fierce heat of the blasts was like a furnace burning Gallen’s face. Gallen raised his arm to shield himself, to cover his mouth. The smoke that erupted in the chamber was so overwhelming, Gallen feared they would all suffocate before they escaped.
The sfuz retreated. None dared enter this chamber.
Gallen looked back, wondering if he could retreat. Zeus had just mined the passage. Explosive foams were seldom used in real campaigns-they were too nondiscriminatory, and couldn’t be easily disarmed. In fact, Gallen hadn’t brought the solvents needed to disarm the foam.
They couldn’t retreat past the foam, nor could they go forward through the blaze. Yet as smoke billowed into the chamber, Gallen knew if they stayed here, they’d suffocate.
He had to close off the passage ahead-conserve the oxygen here. He reached into his weapons pouch, found a heavy grenade, and tossed it toward the corpses of the sfuz.
The grenade exploded, dirt sprayed toward him in the hot wind. The cavern shook. Detritus rained from above, filling Gallen’s eyes. He raised his hands to shield his face.
A second explosion rocked the cavern behind. Falling dirt had detonated the foam.
The ground gave way beneath him.
Maggie shrieked.
Gallen grabbed her arm, then they were tumbling, the earth opening to swallow them, an avalanche of dirt and rotted humus storming down upon them.
Chapter 36
Felph stood beside Lord Karthenor aboard the dronon vessel Acquiescence, watching the viewscreens on the dome above them, the dronon cameras displaying hellish nightmares.
In one region deep in the tangle, dronon Seekers had captured Maggie’s scent, only to find that it led down a huge shaft. A giant mistwife rose up to greet the dronon, and now hundreds of dronon engaged the monster, trying to fight their way past, with no assurance that Maggie had ever escaped the monster’s grasp.
The presence of hundreds of thousands of dronon in the tangle aroused every mistwife in the region, so that on nearly every screen, the monsters hunted through the tangle, shrieking in pain, madly swatting dronon who did not fight so bravely as they did mindlessly.
Yet, for the Felph, other screens displayed far more interesting battles. Dronon Vanquishers high in the tangle were blasting through sfuz hunting parties.
The sfuz had the element of surprise. In dozens of places, the creatures boiled out of secret holes by the thousands or dropped from above or clambered around trees.
The small sfuz were no match in single battle for Vanquishers, with their thick carapaces and heavy battle arms. The sfuz died easily enough. But there were so many, so many, and they were so fast, and they were learning.
The sfuz concentrated not on direct assaults, but upon ambushes and trickery.
Dronon warriors were marching down an apparently safe path, then suddenly dropped into a pit. Another dronon stepped into a snare, went flying against a tree, his carapace cracking open like a melon. Elsewhere, a dronon battalion came upon the bodies of scouts who’d been bludgeoned by sfuz who wielded clubs.
In many battles, when a dozen sfuz suddenly dropped from a ceiling, the dronon instinctively fired their incendiary rifles-the Vanquishers’ customary ready weapon. Yet a single shot fired in these close quarters raised choking smoke from the moldering tangle smoke that strangled the dronon in minutes. Dronon lungs were less efficient than those of a sfuz or a human.
Indeed, across every monitor, the caverns had begun boiling with dark smoke. In places, dry logs burned out of control. Everywhere on the screens, dronon were choking, dying by the tens of thousands.
Felph was astonished at the carnage, dismayed to the core of his soul. Tens of thousands of troops died in sfuz attacks, yet Felph saw cameras that focused on only a sixth of the dronon forces.
Elsewhere, others were also falling prey to the sfuz.
“My god, my god,” Karthenor swore, shaking his head in dismay, the rings of his golden mantle tinkling. “Why didn’t you warn us?”
Felph shook his head, “I suspected the sfuz had a stronghold, but I never imagined …” he answered truthfully.
There were more sfuz than he’d believed possible, perhaps millions of them. He’d envisioned a battle for the city but nothing like this.
Now he saw it had been folly to imagine that he, Gallen, or anyone, would ever reach Teeawah. Folly. Utter folly.
Yet on one monitor, he saw something intriguing. A dronon contingent marched down a broad highway unlike any he’d ever seen in the tangle, and came to ancient cliffs of sculpted yellow sandstone. The dronon cameras distorted the colors, giving everything a yellowish hue, but they could not hide the thing Felph hoped to see.
There in the cliffs were holes, thousands on thousands of clooes excavated by Qualeewoohs, each a perfect dark oval.