Human?
“It’s not moving, whatever it is,” I call back. I’ve pushed through the rubbery, brittle fibers and found the thing that might have made them, and it, too, looks like it might have come out of some crazy glass-blowing shop at a county fair. There’s the eye, like a lens all right, on a tubular kind of head, transparent and blue-green, now slumped on a short neck. Behind the head and the eye is a jumble of glassy limbs about as thick as my wrist, which might have once been flexible and tough but are now shot through with cracks, dry, brittle. Looks like I could crunch them to dust with a poke of my finger.
“I doubt it’s Antag,” I say over my shoulder. “It’s not moving. Old. Ready to fall apart. Decaying—”
Something that crawled in and died in this little hidey hole. Or just stopped working. What is it I’m recognizing, acknowledging, in this sad clump of fibers?
Brom sticks his head in behind me and shines another light down the narrow tunnel. “Looks like a dead end. What is that thing, a fossil?”
“Don’t know. But… I think it didn’t come from outside. I think it belongs down here.”
“Get out and let’s go,” DJ says, voice still shaky.
I’m becoming more and more interested. I get down on my knees, very cautious, in case any of the fragments are still sharp, and examine its shoes, pads, feet—if it’s one thing, one creature, or a creature at all!—about two or three dozen of them, at the ends of a maze of triple-and-quadruple jointed legs. I grip a pad and lift it—it’s not all that light—and then, the leg above breaks and white dust rises and okay, it’s time to back out, time to find another way, this is almost certainly not where we should be going—the hidey hole is feeling pretty tight.
I exit and hold the pad under the dimming beams proffered by Brom and Ackerly. DJ moves in to inspect with us. The pad masses about half a kilo and the bottom is hard, finely grooved in a cross-hatch pattern, but not your ordinary nail-file sort of grooves—more like the rotating cutter on a big digging machine back on Earth.
“It’s a rock grinder!” DJ says, curiosity getting the better of fear. Then our eyes meet—and I recognize something in DJ’s look. Knowing, acknowledging. I turn away before he can give me a little nod, before we join a really weird club.
“Maybe it dug these new tunnels,” Brom says. “That thing’s a fucking kobold.”
“You just make that up?” DJ asks.
“No, man—kobold. Mining spirit. Like gremlins, only down in the ground.”
“Let’s go,” I say. I’m holding tight to the pad, the cutting foot. Joe has to see this. Our whole situation is out of control in more dimensions than I can track.
Because what Brom and I saw in the useless and welded-tight hangar of the eastern gate was not a long-dead fossil stuck in a hole. What I saw had the same single, shiny camera eye—but it had moved.
These tunnels are new.
Kobolds may still be hard at work.
DJ IS LOSING focus, distracted—frazzled. He’s murmuring to himself and leading us back to the eastern gate, hoping, I presume, for another branching tunnel, another shaft, something we missed. Brom is telling us all about kobolds, which he knows from a game he played as a kid on Earth. Ghostly diggers, spirits of dead miners; in the game they were horrible, flesh-eating wraiths that pickaxed you in the top of the head, caught the spurting blood in pelican-like beaks, then tore into the rest of you, bones and all, leaving nothing behind.
He’s no better than listening to DJ, and finally, Ackerly tells him to just shut it.
“Right,” Brom says. “Sorry.”
This time, I’m the one who shines his helm light to the left at just the right moment, and instead of seeing metal crystals or black basalt, I see—a wide opening. A branch to the left, pretty straight, sloping down about ten degrees.
DJ inspects this with a puzzled look. “Don’t remember any passage at this kind of angle,” he says.
“You don’t remember shit,” Ackerly reminds him.
“This one’s new, too,” Brom says, pointing to the grooves.
We begin the slight descent. The tunnel grows wider, which I appreciate. DJ insists on taking the lead, and I don’t deny him that much; he may still have a clue. The rest of us do not. He’s stopped mumbling. Ackerly and Brom are silent as well. As the saying goes, it’s quiet, too quiet.
“Will you please just whistle, DJ?” Brom asks after maybe ten minutes.
“No spit,” DJ says. “Running dry.”
All our suits could use a good, long recharge. We’ve been away from resources for hours; suits can typically run for two or three days, but ours have not been fully charged since prep before our drop. They can take all kinds of abuse and keep us alive, but staying comfortable is once again not an option.
“Where are we, anatomically?” Ackerly asks.
“Below the neck, in the chest, I think,” DJ replies.
“Anywhere near the bowels?”
“We might be below the eastern garage, down around the heart,” DJ says. Then he pulls up short, hunching his shoulders and letting out a moan. We’ve come to a round chamber, older, with rust on the walls and a damp floor. His helm light flashes up, around, and he backs off to show us what he’s found. A body.
Human.
I walk around him, and then we gather and focus our lights, which are now almost orange. The sight is ghastly. A man has been cut in half and the walls have been scored in a weird, elongated spiral, all the way down another passage to the right… into darkness.
“Lawnmower,” Brom says.
“It’s a Voor, isn’t it?” DJ asks, staring at me as I turn my light up to his face.
“Yeah,” I say. “The one they called Hendrik.”
“Here’s another,” Brom says. He’s gone about six meters down another passage, also sloping, but this time up. “What the hell?”
“Must have been a firefight,” DJ says.
Just two bodies. Both Voors, both cut to pieces while running away—by a lawnmower shot indiscriminately into the passage. Way overkill.
The evidence chills me.
“We need to get back now,” I say.
Our discoveries are not over. DJ leads us past the second body, up the ascending tunnel, and a few dozen meters beyond, in another circular chamber with four more branching tunnels, we find three more Voors—lined up against a wall and shot with bullets: back-of-the-head-shots, execution-style. No recognizing any of them. Hendrik and the other may have lit out in desperation to escape this organized carnage.
“This is bullshit!” DJ shouts.
“But was it authorized bullshit?” Brom asks. “Who the fuck’s in charge?”
Not Gamecock, I’m pretty sure of that. I’m having to revise everything I’ve thought about our situation. No additional party of Voors from the eastern gate, no reinforcements, no Antags breaking in yet—we’d probably be dead by now or see a lot more destruction if that last were the case.
Looks as if Coyle and our sisters might have scratched an evil little itch, all on their own. But why leave the southern gate? Why abandon both gates? We’d support them no matter what they did because that’s what Skyrines do.
What are Captain Coyle’s orders? What does she know that we don’t?
Does Joe know what she knows?
DJ has fled up the widest tunnel. We’re losing cohesion. Then he starts shouting, not more than twenty meters ahead. “It’s a fucking boneyard! They’re all over in here!”
Very reluctantly we join him in the biggest chamber we’ve found yet, about sixty meters across, a great, dark stone hollow surrounded by a head-high shelf of foggy-silver metal. I’m expecting to see dead Voors and Skyrines smeared all over—a hecatomb of combat mayhem.