Larsen nodded, smiled. He was certainly glad to be on this side of the forthcoming encounter. These guys were cold-blooded killers. He thought that maybe, once the shooting started and the engagement was underway, he might quickly run back in the other direction and wait for everyone topside. The less time he spent down here the better. He’d be happy if he never saw another cave for the rest of his life.
At the back of the marching squad, Adamsen and Jansen walked side by side. At first they had talked, pleased to finally be doing something pro-active. The long journey to the base had been boring, Jansen thought, and taking the base turned out to be nothing more than waiting outside a locked door until the local mole came and let them in. Now, finally, some action.
The scrape and scuff of their boots echoed off the curved walls of the passage, their flashlights striping the dark rock, the uneven ground. They made no effort to conceal their progress. After all, what resistance could a bunch of scientists and a couple of hired guns really offer? Jansen realized that maybe putting this expedition team under control might be as boring as taking the base and his excitement waned. He turned to Adamsen to run the thought by his friend, but the tall, blond man wasn’t there.
Jansen frowned. He looked forward into the group, but everyone he expected was clear to see, except Adamsen. He glanced back, shined his light into the darkness, and no one was there either. He opened his mouth to call out his concerns when something dark flashed across his flashlight beam. Dark but shiny, the size of a large man. He had the bizarre sensation that it was a VW bug car, zooming along on its back wheels like Herbie in those crazy old films. But it had seemed to have waving limbs and glistening fangs of some kind. Surely not. He swallowed, nerves twanging taut. The squad marched on while he stood motionless, panning his light left and right. Surely he had imagined it. But where the hell was Adamsen?
“Commander!” he called out, and heard the marching boots slow, then stop. He didn’t turn to see them, but imagined them all looking back, brows furrowed.
“What is it, soldier?” Olsen’s voice seemed more distant then he had expected.
He opened his mouth to reply but the darkness right beside him came alive and something ice cold and frighteningly hard closed around his neck. He tried to scream but no sound came and then there was only pain and darkness.
Larsen’s guts turned to water as he, along with the rest of the squad, watched the soldier’s head detach from his body. His headlamp waved hectically as the head rolled across the passage floor, repeatedly shining on bright black carapaces and multi-faceted eyes. Long, curved mandibles snapped and clicked and the passage was suddenly full of giant, swarming creatures. It was like they had stumbled into a scene out of a bad B movie.
The squad erupted into action, firing into the darkness, green flashes and sparks bursting off the creatures as they advanced.
“Fall back!” Olsen ordered, and the squad backed along the passageway, deeper into the caves, firing in controlled bursts.
Larsen hurried behind them, made sure the weapons were facing away from him and all the soldiers were between him and whatever the hell those things were. He realized, as they rushed deeper into the caverns, holding the monsters back with gunfire, that they hadn’t taken the fork towards the cavern with the vines and the stream running across it. They were in uncharted territory, the snapping, glistening creatures between them and escape back to the surface, and they were being forced still deeper. He couldn’t help wondering if that’s exactly what these things, whatever the hell they were, desired.
26
Aston tried his best to swallow down anger and frustration. And, he had to admit, no little dose of fear. Everything had turned bad so quickly, it was hard to credit, but this argument was getting them nowhere. They were back in what had become casually called the green cavern, where the greenium was brightest. Where the pool with the strange door at bottom sat placid and calm on the far side from where they stood.
Reid kept demanding that they fight their way out. Now they were aware of the enemy, of its limitations, they could concentrate bright lights to hold the chitinous creatures at bay and battle back to the surface. Sol Griffin refused to accept that. The creatures could, he assured them, easily back around like they had before and trap them, hem them in. They had done it once, though the party had no way of knowing how. They could do it again. Perhaps they were able to grab the ceiling of the tunnels like cockroaches and scuttle silently above, as Jen had suggested before. Or perhaps there were cracks and passages hidden in the darkened folds of rock that the scientists hadn’t seen.
“We wait!” Sol shouted, anger tinging his loud voice more than ever.
“Wait?” Reid demanded. “For what? For a host of angels to fly down and lift us up through the rock?”
“Don’t be absurd. Until someone comes. Until a rescue is effected. Thankfully those things are clearly reluctant to come in here. I think it’s too bright for them with this much greenium glowing from the walls, and our halogens keeping it all charged. We’re safe in here, so we wait.”
“And how long will our batteries last on those lights?” Aston asked. “I have to agree with Reid. After all, who’s coming? The remaining staff at the base are hardly trained to rescue us, and they don’t have the manpower. And besides, they don’t even know right now that we need rescuing. No one does!”
“Someone will come when we don’t go back topside,” Sol insisted. “Wong knows the team has enough supplies for a maximum of three days. If we don’t return after three days, he’ll know something is up and send a rescue party.”
“Really? Is that pre-planned?” Aston asked. “Because it seems bloody unlikely to me. After all, no help came for the previous team, and they were down here long enough to die!”
“Not true,” Sol Griffin said. “We came. We’re the help.”
“Oh, really?” Aston’s anger was finding new heights. “You expect us to believe we’re a rescue mission? We’re a second effort, another team sent down here based on the assumption the first team was long dead and gone. Admit it! You expected to find bodies at best. That Jen survived is close to a miracle. We were no rescue team.”
Sol remained tight-lipped, cheeks red with barely contained rage. Aston thought perhaps the man was getting close to the end of his tether, that all his preparations, all his expectations, had been blown far out of the water. After all, who could possibly have expected this turn of events?
Maybe Sol and SynGreene had thought the previous party lost, or maybe poisoned by the greenium somehow, something basically mundane. Attacked by mantics? Stories of pale-skinned hominids? Strange red knives in the chests of centuries-old corpses? Everything they had found had to be well beyond anything Sol had planned for.
“There might be another option.” They all turned to see Jen Galicia standing behind them. Standing unassisted, Aston noticed, as she ate another ration. The food and water must be finally giving her some strength. But she was still pale as milk, trembling with the effort of remaining upright.
“What option?” he asked.
“There might be a clue in the photos I took of the shrine. I need a new battery for my camera.”
A battery was quickly sourced from Marla Ward and they fired up Jen’s camera, huddled around to look at the small screen on the back. She flicked through pictures of a shrine, a strange, smooth arch with a stack of flat stones beneath, pictographs on its curving sides. Another shot showed a small stone cairn, and behind it rows and rows of pictographs on the wall.
“It’s like someone wrote a novel,” Slater said. “With the notes Professor Murray Lee made in the journal, maybe we can decode at least some of this.”