She actually did make a note before continuing. “Anyway, in an ant colony, there are worker-creatures that go out and gather. They separate things in their tunnels into a series of chambers on different levels. In fact, the more I think about it, the structure of this entire complex reminds me of an ant colony. It’s dug down deep into the earth, and just like their bodies, it’s encased in metal. Each of these chambers are significantly separated from all the others.”

  “Cyborg ants?” Quinn said.

  “Yes. Just look at the architecture. Humans generally build quite differently. We tend to construct a series of geometrically identical chambers separated by walls, all on one flat plane. These creatures don’t think the way we do. Not at all.”

  “I guess it does make a kind of sense,” Quinn said. “They sure as hell don’t look like us.”

  “Exactly. We must assume that their mentality is just as different as their physiology. Ants…” she said. “Yes. I’m trying to remember what I know about entomology. It’s been a long time. But the separation of chambers, these long slanting tubes for passageways, even their physical appearance. Yes, I believe these cyborgs are somewhat ant-like.”

  “Intelligent ants?” I said. “That’s just wonderful.”

  Then, Ledbetter spoke up again. “They’re worse than just giant bugs. These intelligent ants have advanced technology, and they’re able to build metal skins for themselves.”

  “If this is an ant colony,” I said. “Then where is their queen?”

  They all looked at me. In fact, they stared. No one spoke for several long seconds.

  “Let’s keep searching for her,” Quinn said.

  We searched one more chamber, and lost another marine in the process. Lt. Quinn called it quits for the day after that. “You’re all getting tired. We’ll rest and look around after we’ve gotten some sleep.”

  We eyed one another, wondering about the wisdom of this move. Sure, we had air and heat now, but we didn’t have much in the way of food—and most importantly, water. That was quickly becoming our number one priority.

  “We’ve spent a solid ten hours inside this alien ant colony, or laboratory, or whatever the hell it is,” Quinn said, “so I figure we could all use some sleep. We’ll set up a watch of two men and rotate through an eight-hour rest period.”

  It was hard to sleep on the cold metal floor of the passageway, but we managed to do it. It was too cold to sleep in the freezer room, obviously, and the other chambers were all defiled by large dead alien cyborgs. We had to make do with the slanting passageways of the main tunnel that connected the entire complex together.

  It was during the fifth hour, while I was on watch, that something went wrong.

  One of the doorways, one of the few that we’d never opened, rolled up silently. The metal melted away into the ceiling without a sound.

  I whipped up my carbine, aimed at the opening and shouted for everyone to wake up. They surged to their feet with grunts, groans, and a clatter of weapons.

  A shadow was cast from inside the room. Oddly, this chamber, unlike every other one that we’d opened before, was lit inside. There was no sign of depressurization, either. Therefore, we could only surmise that the chamber beyond had air in it as well as light. The distinct lack of a puff of icy gases also indicated that it was about the same temperature as the main passageway.

  A shadow appeared. Something lumbered forward out of that passageway. It was an odd, misshapen thing. A strange humanoid that shambled out of the chamber and into the main passage.

  The figure was wearing the uniform of a Red Company marine. This was the only reason we didn’t fire at it immediately, because the creature itself was quite hideous, even terrifying.

  We aimed our rifles at it, shouted, scrambled to our feet and then backed away as it approached.

  “It’s Tench,” Ledbetter said. “It’s Corporal Tench.”

  It was true. Despite his alien demeanor and grotesquely twisted body, the uniform, face, even the stripes on his shoulders were distinctive—it had to be Corporal Tench.

  “What the hell happened to him?” Quinn stepped up, aiming his rifle at the shambling unfortunate. “Halt right there, Tench,” he said. “Where the hell have you been?”

  Tench stood there, laboring to breathe for a moment. Each wheezing effort puffed up his sides more than should have been possible. As each breath was released, his sides shrank back down again. It was kind of like watching a bullfrog in a swamp take in great lungfuls of fetid air.

  “I…” he said. “I got lost.”

  “I should say you did, man.” Quinn turned around toward Dr. Sharaf, who was unsurprisingly at the very back of the line of humans. “Doctor, is this why you gave us those injections?”

  She nodded her head solemnly. “I didn’t know the exact nature of the transformation, but I’ve heard of such things. I was given a formula, something that can slow the progress of the disease.”

  Quinn looked from her to Corporal Tench and back again. “Are you saying we’re all going to end up like that?”

  She shrugged. “Unknown.”

  “Well, that’s just wonderful. If these freaky ant-alien things don’t kill us, we’re going to turn into freaks ourselves.”

  “We could always freeze ourselves, sir,” Ledbetter suggested. “In those tubes back there—those guys look like they haven’t changed at all.”

  “Thanks for the helpful suggestion, Private. I might just shove you into one of those tubes and try it out.”

  After that comment, Ledbetter shut up in a hurry.

  “I’m sorry, sir,” Corporal Tench rasped out. “I was injured back aboard the Teklution ship—just like Ledbetter over there—but I hid the injury. After a while… I started to feel different.”

  “What do you mean, different?” Quinn demanded.

  Tench gestured toward himself vaguely. “Like a freak,” he said. “Not myself.”

  “Has your mind been affected as well as your body?” Quinn asked.

  “Yeah, somewhat,” Tench said. “When I got into that fight with the aliens, when they all rushed us from different directions, I felt an urge to charge at them physically, to take them on hand-to-hand. It was all I could do to control myself. It was a berserker rage.”

  Quinn squinted at him. He was listening, but I could tell he was taking every word with a grain of salt. “Where’d you go?”

  “By the time the fight was over, all of you were looking at the corpses. I stepped out. I went to through this door. I found one more of the aliens, but it was distracted. I managed to kill it.”

  Quinn stepped forward. He grabbed each of Corporal Tench’s arms and stretched them out. There were tears, bloody tears, through his spacesuit. “Your spacesuit’s ruined, Corporal.”

  “Yeah,” Tench said. “Like I said, I couldn’t control myself. I got close to the one in this chamber. I grappled with it. Those spines, those claws… I managed to twist its head clean off, but it tore me up some, too.”

  Corporal Tench pulled back his sleeves to show what I saw were shockingly large arms. In fact, his forearms looked as if they were twice as thick as they had been before. His fingers, his thumbs, even his wrists had swollen somewhat. Could his bones have thickened? I didn’t know.

  “The funny thing is,” he said. “I’ve been really hungry, and I’ve been eating everything I could find.”

  Dr. Sharaf finally approached. Her curiosity had outweighed her fear. She examined Tench warily. “Where could you have gotten enough food to have grown this much? Assuming your metabolism could even generate flesh like this—it’s fantastic.”

  “I did find something to eat…” he said, trailing off.

  We thought about that, and then we stepped into the chamber to look past him. Indeed, we saw what we had all feared might be the case.

  A dead cyborg was laying on the floor with its thorny body ripped open. The metal had been torn back to reveal the flesh inside. It looked like Corporal Tench had feasted upon it.

  “That is really gross, dude,” Ledbetter said.

  “I’m out of food, water—everything,” Tench said. “I decided to try to come back and rejoin Red Company.”

  We eyed him uncertainly.

  “I’m going to have to ask you to disarm yourself, Corporal,” Quinn said.

  “Yes, sir,” Tench agreed, lowering his rifle to the floor. He also pulled out his pistol and handed it by the butt to the lieutenant.

  Lt. Quinn still reached out with a hand and wriggled his fingers. Tench reluctantly took out his last weapon, his combat knife, and deposited it into Quinn’s hand.

  “We’ve got something better for you than just rations,” Quinn said.

  “What’s that, sir?”

  “An injection,” Dr. Sharaf said, shuffling forward with an orangey-brown syringe with a dripping needle, as if she’d known this moment was coming. It seemed to me that she’d loaded up a double dose this time.

  When she plunged in the needle and shot goop into Corporal Tench’s veins, he howled like an animal from our primitive past.

  Chapter 31: A Fortunate Discovery

  In the chamber where Corporal Tench had been hiding, tormented by his mutations, we made a fortunate discovery: a source of water. It made sense that the ant-like creatures, being at least partially organic, would need water to survive. We had uncovered their water supply.

  “It’s quite ingenious, really,” Dr. Sharaf explained. “Do you see these tubes here, descending from the surface? I assume they extend all the way up. They’re filtering the sparse atmosphere of Eris. It’s only about one percent of the density of Earth’s, even thinner than the atmosphere of Mars. But it’s sufficient.”

  “Enough for what, Doctor?” I asked, curious.

  “Enough to extract water from the air. Water is vital in many ways. With a simple process, you can separate oxygen, hydrogen, and of course, water itself—the essence of life.”

  “How can there be so much water on this rock?” Quinn demanded. “It’s way below freezing out there, and there’s no obvious sign of...”

  “You forget the geysers, Lieutenant,” Dr. Sharaf reminded him. “They proved deadly for a few of our comrades when we first arrived here.”

  “Oh, right,” Quinn said, recalling the incident.

  “Yes,” Dr. Sharaf continued. “Eris has a heated volcanic core and a significant amount of water deposits, likely brought here by comet strikes in its past. These deposits result in periodic geothermal explosions that shoot hot steam into the atmosphere. This system filters that steam, extracting half-frozen particles from the atmosphere far above, and supplies this installation with air, water, and heat.”

  “Huh… So, this contraption does all that, does it?” Quinn asked, tapping on the intricate loops of metal tubing.

  Sharaf lurched forward and grasped his wrist. “Please, don’t!” She was clearly concerned about the delicate nature of the device. “We’re all going to have to rely on this equipment for our survival.”

  Quinn and the rest of us backed away, not wanting to accidentally damage the contraption that provided us with air, water, and heat. The device looked alien and intricate.

  “We still need food,” Quinn pointed out.

  “Yes, obviously,” Dr. Sharaf responded. “I suspect it might be behind the last door, the one we haven’t explored yet.”

  There was indeed one final door, located at the bottom of the complex’s deepest passage. We had found it hollow upon tapping, but no one had dared to enter.

  Sensing another significant ass-kicking might be in our near future, Lt. Quinn instructed us to eat a ration for breakfast, drink deeply from our newfound water supply, and prepare for action. Surprisingly, he didn’t order us to venture down the passageway and breach the entrance. Instead, he had us set up an ambush in the chamber with the life-sustaining machine.

  “These ants,” he said, “they have to come the water room at some point to replenish their supplies or feed. Instead of hunting them, we’re going to trap them.”

  We set up a watch, and after twelve long hours, our tactics paid off. Three of the ant-like creatures—more than we’d ever faced at once—entered the room.

  One came from an unexpected direction—through a doorway we hadn’t even known existed. The other two entered through the main passageway, the same path Corporal Tench had stumbled through not long ago.

  The fighting was intense. Thankfully, Quinn had positioned us so that there was no risk of accidentally damaging the alien machine even when firing at the front entrance. However, the additional cyborg entering through the side passage posed a challenge, as it was quite close to the machine.

  In the moment of the attack, surprise and near panic took over. We aimed our laser emitters at the third creature who was flanking us.

  Quinn shouted for us to hold our fire, but his order was difficult to follow in the heat of the moment.

  Unexpectedly, Corporal Tench lost control of himself. He charged at the third cyborg and began grappling with it. The two fighters sustained terrible wounds. Tench’s thickened hide was punctured by the cyborg’s spines, while we repeatedly shot the enemy until it fell.

  Sadly, Tench was gravely injured by the time the monster went down. The other soldiers had managed to eliminate the two remaining adversaries who had entered through the main entrance without sustaining any losses. Corporal Tench was the only one critically wounded.

  “Do you think he can make it, Doc?” Quinn asked.

  Dr. Sharaf shook her head, administered a few more injections, and then solemnly walked away.

  Blood was everywhere, and Corporal Tench was dying. He tried to speak to us but couldn’t. We offered him comforting words, well-wishes, and hopeful illusions of returning to Mars and Earth. We all knew it was just empty talk, and eventually, Corporal Tench drew his last, rasping breath and died in a puddle of blood.

  “Well,” Quinn said, gazing down at the body, “at least he redeemed himself. That’s a Red Company marine right there. He saved us all in the end. Don’t forget it, boys.”

  We nodded, knowing we wouldn’t.

  We waited another day and then a third. Nothing came to find us. We began to worry that the aliens had a secondary source of sustenance, or that they were all dead. We considered sending out recon parties to scout the last chamber. But each time this was brought up, Quinn urged patience.

  On the third day, a loud scratching sound echoed from the passageway beyond the main door. We grabbed our weapons, wiped the sweat from our faces, and braced ourselves for another desperate battle. After a minute or two of tense silence, the door rolled up, revealing nothing but a dark, metallic, thorny tendril.

  “What the hell is that?” Quinn asked. “Starn, go take a look.”

  It was probably the worst order I’d ever received, but I obeyed. I approached the door and peered out, only to see something I never expected: a massive, hulking alien creature, similar to the others but significantly larger.

  It was thick and robust, unlike the others who were thin and narrow at the joints, waist, and neck. This monstrous queen alien appeared incredibly imposing.

  As the creature spotted me, it laboriously dragged itself forward, barely able to move or fit in the passageway due to its immense size. It was easily five times the mass of any other alien we’d encountered, dragging itself over across the deck like a colossal lobster. It rounded the corner and began squeezing through the doorway, only to be met with a barrage of laser fire.

  Every surviving marine unleashed hell on the alien monstrosity. It shuddered, steamed, and hissed, attempting to hook onto us with its long, spiny limbs. It failed to reach us. I suspected it had been weakened by a lack of food and water, as its minions had been unable to bring it sustenance. Driven by desperation, it had emerged from its dark lair in search of what it needed to survive.

  Due to its slow pace and immense bulk, we managed to destroy it before it could reach us. As the lifeless creature slumped to the ground, we all breathed a collective sigh of relief.

  Chapter 32: Blackwood’s Lie

  Nearly a week had passed since we’d entered this strange alien lair. We were unable to locate any more enemy ant creatures. They were all dead—if they were really alive in the first place. Regardless, the queen and all her workers had ceased to exist.

  I had to wonder how long this colony had survived here on the frozen rock that was Eris, only to succumb to Red Company in the end. Quite possibly, if they hadn’t attacked the Teklution ship and suffered losses there, we might not have been able to overcome them. But in the end, Earth’s second ship had prevailed, and this alien hive was as dead as the others Dr. Sharaf had spoken of.

  Still, that wasn’t much solace, as we were pretty much dead ourselves. We had found sources of food: mossy growths, fungus, and disgusting things that grew like bulbous fruits in the darkest corners of the tunnels. We now had air, heat, water, and food—if you could call it that. But we knew we couldn’t last forever.

  We weren’t like these ant creatures. We would go mad eventually, or more likely, long before that, we would start to transform. After all, Dr. Sharaf only had so many precious injections to keep the genetic mutations we could feel itching in our bodies at night from taking over.

  I had to wonder if this was how a werewolf would have felt, had such legends actually been true.

  As the days wore on, all of us noticed slight, minor differences in ourselves. For me, one of my arms felt unusually strong, stronger than the other. Oddly enough, it was my left arm. I was fairly certain I’d been the strongest man in Red Company since the day I joined up, but now I was more than certain.

  Experimentally, I decided to test my bulky arm one day. Wearing a double-layered glove from one of our fallen, I grabbed hold of one of the great queen’s hind legs.

  I dragged her down the passageway, so she no longer blocked the path that led to the room with food and water. The others, who later noticed my handiwork, were shocked. I didn’t tell them I’d done it with a single arm.