“I feel like shit.” She blinked again, and the whites of her eyes were near totally red. But her brow creased, and she managed to focus on him. “What happened?”
There was a soft chirruping from behind him, and he spun quickly. Alex let his eyes run over the Orlando’s bay area, but could see nothing.
“Wait here.” He quickly crossed to the asteroid fragment and using his boot, pushed it over — there was nothing underneath it.
“Ah, goddamnit.”
He quickly crossed to Morag and dragged her up, holding her. “C’mon now.”
“Is it dead?” she asked groggily.
He put his arm under hers. “No, and I don’t think we can kill it that easily. But we’re leaving anyway.”
She slowly brought the gun up. “I can fix that.”
Her arm shook, and he pushed the barrel down. “Not today.”
“We need to kill it.” She straightened a little and her lips curled.
“No time now.” He walked her to the opening in the side of the craft, keeping watch on the ceiling and every corner he could. Alex knew the thing might be outside, but he planned to be moving fast.
Morag leaned against him as her legs were still wobbling. She looked up at him. “You came back… just by yourself.” She snorted. “You’re insane.”
Alex smirked. “That’s what they tell me.”
She handed him the weapon as they paused at the tear in the ship’s side. “Thank you.”
“Don’t thank me yet.” He peered outside, checking the weapon as he did so. “There’s more Morg out there, and we also need to get the hell off this mountaintop before we’re turned to ash.”
“What was that thing?” she asked, looking over his shoulder.
He glanced back, still not seeing any sign of it, but hearing the buzzing deep in his head again. He knew it was still nearby.
“I don’t think it knows itself. It’s like…” he thought for a second or two, “…like some sort of termite queen. Spreading its seed. It wants to establish a hive, a colony, starting here. It’s terraforming first, trying to make the environment into something it’s familiar with — like the world it came from. But it needs raw material.”
“Us.” Morag shook herself, sucking in a deep breath. “The hell with that.”
“This is our world. Don’t worry, retribution is coming,” Alex said resolutely.
He looked her up and down. “You okay?”
She rubbed at her shoulder, her mouth twisting. “I can travel.”
“Morag…” he gripped her arm. “We’ve got to do more than just travel. And I need to be unencumbered to clear a path and for defense.”
She nodded, but didn’t meet his eyes. “I don’t know. I can try.”
Alex took one last look around at the now dark and foreboding gloom that concealed everything. “Stay close in behind me. Don’t stop, don’t turn around, and don’t focus on anything else but the center of my back.” He stared into her eyes. “Ready?”
“As I’ll ever be.” She looked back into the bay area. “See you in hell, you ugly lump of shit.”
Alex began to jog.
She followed.
Alex kept up a steady pace, but not fast enough that he’d get too far ahead of Morag. They had to make it to the crater wall within ninety minutes, and then scale it and be over the rim in another few minutes. Nearly impossible, he knew, but the incentive was that the entire place would be an inferno minutes later.
He glanced around; added to that, he knew they were being followed. Something was keeping pace with them, staying just out of sight. “Stay in tight,” he said over his shoulder. Morag didn’t reply, and probably couldn’t as he knew her strength was nearly all used up.
The going was difficult because it was near-total dark now, and added to that as Alex ran he had to dodge around massive structures and lumps that grew toward the roof of the mist. It had changed even from when he had traveled in to rescue Morag from the Orlando — now there were new growths, walls, like coral nets that were powerfully adhesive. He saw several hard-shelled creatures hung within them, and the mesh actually dissolving the tough carapace plating on their bodies.
Pendulous, red bulbs hung from ropey branches like fruit, but instead of the sweet bounty they promised, upon approach they burst apart spraying some sort of toxin all around them, paralyzing their victims. Alex had shielded Morag from one burst, and now even his tough biological armor was pitted and smoking from the acidic rain.
They dodged around massive lumps that had things like seashells coating them that snapped tiny beaks at their legs as they went past. And once they had to duck as something the size of a small airplane flew down on leathery wings, and tried to snatch at them. It would have succeeded if Alex hadn’t fired a stream of projectiles up at the creature, sending it screaming away into the darkness.
Up here, this isn’t our world anymore. Instead, it was a snapshot of a different planet, complete with its own atmosphere, ecology and plant and animal species. This is what the biological lump from the meteorite wanted to make the entire planet like.
Alex felt the thump beneath his feet. It came again, massively heavy, followed by the grinding of rock and soil, keeping up a sliding surge as though someone were pulling a massive sled along beside them… or below them.
He stopped, waiting for Morag to catch up. She jogged toward him, and he saw how erratic her movements now were. She held out a hand grabbing his shoulder and hanging on, and then bending over to breathe hard.
She nodded to him, her face beet-red. “I’m okay.” She grinned. “I can go faster.”
Alex held her up. “Unlikely.”
He felt it again and turned slowly, feeling the grinding and pulling getting stronger, and closer. He scanned the growth around him, but his vision ended only a dozen or so feet out, and he still felt the effect of the weird thing in the shuttle exerting its influence on his mind to dampen his more acute senses. Regardless, he knew something was there, something big, and it was coming for them. He grabbed her arm and raised his gun.
“What is it?” Morag crowded in closer to him. “Can’t see a thing — it’s too dark.”
“There’s… something coming.” Alex frowned and pivoted, trying to pinpoint where the danger was coming from. He began to back up.
“Get behind me.”
Morag edged behind him as he started to walk backwards. He kept the RG3 up and pointed at the swirling wall of mist.
“Is it more of the Morg?” Her voice was small.
Alex strained, trying to reach out and feel if the deformed human beings were the danger he sensed. But it wasn’t the same, and the presence seemed to be all around him — lots of impressions, or just one very bi –
The ground exploded from beneath them.
Alex and Morag were thrown backwards as the tower of flesh surged upwards. When they landed in the slime, there was no respite, as it seemed everywhere more of the ground was breaking open, turning the land into choppy waves of breaking sludge as the gigantic worm burst to the surface.
Alex grabbed Morag, preparing to flee, but the worm was fully surfacing, already encircling and imprisoning them. This was why he couldn’t get a fix on what and where the danger was coming from. It was basically tunneling up from beneath them, everywhere, beneath them.
He looked up. “Oh, shit.” High above them and only just visible in the dark mist was a monstrous head, ringed with hundreds of teeth, each as long as his arm. Now he knew; this was what had been tracking them, what he had sensed the moment they had set foot in the crater basin. The worm was as big as an ocean liner, and Alex bet it had started out as some harmless nematode, buried deep on the mountaintop crater basin, or perhaps, more likely, was one of Orlando’s guests, now evolved to become an alpha predator of its new world.