“What? It’s empty.”

  “Seriously? It’s got a retractable bayonet.” She hit the button for it, the blade springing forward from under the muzzle. “You don’t think that could be pretty damn handy against the gorathi?”

  “Yeah, I guess. But we’ve got knives. A bayonet is just a knife on a stick.”

  “Which means you’re stabbing with a stick, not your arm, moron. You were already clawed once, wasn’t that enough?”

  He shrugged. “I just think it’s clunky, that’s all. Besides, Bennie can fix me up if I get sliced.”

  “I wouldn’t count on me saving you again,” I said as they arrived.

  Druck smiled. “Of course, I don’t expect you to. But if the situation demands it—”

  “I might not have the energy to spare.”

  Druck made a face before turning to Quasar. “Can I have that rifle?”

  “Not a chance,” she replied. “Where’s Ixitat?”

  “Heresss.” Her voice echoed up from the tunnel.

  “Watch your head, we’re coming down,” I said. “Zar, do you mind taking point?”

  “Glad to,” she replied, stepping to the edge of the hole. She jumped in, landing feet-first behind Ixitat and turning on the rifle’s light. “Damn. They must have been digging this out for weeks.”

  “Next!” Emerald shouted gleefully, laughing as she leaped into the hole without waiting for Quasar to move. Zar saw her coming and put out one of her muscled arms, catching the other woman easily. Emerald wrapped her hands around Quasar’s neck and kissed her on the cheek. “Nice grab. Thank you.”

  “No problem,” Quasar replied, setting her down, her cheeks looking a little flushed from the unexpected peck.

  I waited for them both to advance into the tunnel slightly before following them down. Shaq came next, landing smoothly on my shoulder, while Druck brought up the rear. I couldn’t help a momentary lament that Kat and Veneel, and even Heckler hadn’t made it this far. Well, maybe not so much Heckler. He had wiped out a bus full of innocent people in the name of revenge, and that was pretty much where I drew the line.

  I expected the tunnel to be a round hole dug through the dirt as if a Boring Company drill had passed through here. Instead, it was uneven and only somewhat round, the walls covered in a hard, dark ichor that kept it stable. It reminded me a little of H.R. Giger artwork, and admittedly the gorathi did bear a vague resemblance to the xenomorphs of the Alien universe. While an individual gorathi was hardly a match for one of those bad boys, what they lacked in singular constitution and acid blood, they made up for with sheer numbers.

  The light on Quasar’s rifle illuminated the first hundred meters or so of the tunnel, losing its sharp edge as it descended deeper underground. Fortunately, there was no sign of the demons, though that scene in Aliens where the xenomorphs were hidden in the pattern of the wall immediately sprang to mind. I eyed the ichor warily, but it was too chaotically placed to hide anything.

  “This is so cool,” Emerald said. “I always wanted to go spelunking.”

  “Stay sharp,” I said. “We don’t know if this is a single tunnel or a whole network like an anthill. Just because we don’t see any gorathi right in front of us, we can’t assume we’re in the clear.”

  “Copy that,” Quasar said.

  “I love it when you talk to me like that,” Emerald gushed, glancing back at me over her shoulder and winking.

  “Let’s hope we can make it fifteen minutes without getting in deep shit,” Druck said. “That would be nice.”

  “Copy that,” I replied. “Let’s go.”

  CHAPTER 32

  We continued our trek through the gorathi tunnel beneath the ancient settlement for more than fifteen minutes without running into trouble. I couldn’t help but wonder if we’d just finally caught a break or if the suddenly smooth sailing was by design. Did the creatures know we had entered their passageway and were biding their time? Or after encountering thousands of the demons above ground, was there really not another gorathi stationed anywhere along our path? I found the latter hard to believe. But after the way we’d previously been attacked on sight, the former seemed even less likely.

  While I initially thought the tunnel might be part of a more complex network of excavated caverns and passageways—a gorathi colony of sorts—I knew now that that initial assumption was wrong. While the tunnel continued its descent, it never branched off or changed its general dimensions, moving in a nearly straight line following the slope of the hill the settlement had been built upon. It was hard to tell from inside the tunnels, but I got the feeling our depth hadn’t changed all that much despite the constant downslope. When the tunnel finally flattened out some time later, I was pretty certain we’d reached the edge of the hill.

  “How far do you think this tunnel goes?” Quasar asked. The beam from her rifle reached nearly two hundred meters and had yet to capture an end to it.

  “I have a better question,” Druck offered. “Where do you think this tunnel goes?”

  “I can top that,” Emerald said. “Why do you think this tunnel goes?”

  “That doesn’t make any sense.”

  “It absolutely does. Think about it. This tunnel is too long for the gorathi to have dug it overnight, and too new for them to have made it the last time there were settlers here. So why did they dig it? It’s almost like they knew someone was coming.”

  “Of course they knew,” I said. “Recon teams did a sweep of the planet weeks ago.”

  “Drones,” Emerald countered. “No people. Which shouldn’t have triggered them.”

  “I don’t think they have the hypernet down here,” Druck said. “The reception would suck.”

  The comment brought her to a sudden stop. “Shit.”

  “What? Is this another one of your weird performance art bits? Because you almost sounded lucid for a moment there.”

  “I’m just surprised you know the word lucid,” Quasar quipped.

  “Har har,” Druck replied.

  “Ben, wait,” Emerald said. Quasar, Ixitat, and I had kept walking despite her pause.

  “All stop,” I announced, bringing our forward movement to an end and turning around to face her. “Are you being serious or crazy right now?”

  “Mostly serious,” she replied, unable to keep herself from cracking a smile that didn’t fit her tone. She stifled a laugh, her head ticking nervously as if she had to struggle to control her sanity. “What does reception have to do with it?”

  “The way you reacted, I thought you had come up with something,” Druck said.

  “It’s a rhetorical question, at least for me. I’m asking you. Any of you. Ben? What do you think?”

  “Is this a pop quiz?”

  “A life or death pop quiz.”

  “We don’t really have time for games.”

  “Come on, it’s not that hard. Exercise the old noodle and think about it for a minute. What does reception have to do with it?”

  We lingered together in silence for long enough that I started getting angry about our delay. “Emerald, can you please just spit it out?”

  She sighed. “I can’t be the only one here who—”

  “Oh,” Quasar said, drawing the word out and her eyes widening with her realization of the point Emerald was dancing around. Her eyes flicked toward me with fear lacing them.

  “Lookie here, I think she’s got it!” Emerald cried.

  Quasar shifted her attention to Druck. “Emil, how do the producers of Kill Spree prevent us from leaving the game area?”

  “The implants on our eyes,” he replied. “As long as we’re within the broadcast signal range we…oh…damn.”

  I understood at that point too. We were underground and moving away from the settlement, which the Sanguine mothership had set up shop directly overhead. With the broadcast signal forced to reach Emerald, Quasar, Shaq, and Druck through the earth above us, its signal was no doubt degraded, its reception nowhere near as strong as if we were on the surface.

  In other words, any of their next steps could be the last one they took before they lost the signal and the failsafe triggered, burning out their optic nerves and leaving them blind.

  We were all lucky it hadn’t happened already.

  “I totally forgot about the signal meter,” Druck said. “I’ve got one bar.”

  “Me too,” Quasar said. “Since it’s always there, my brain stopped registering it.”

  “We’ve gone as far as we should go." Emerald said. “If we keep going, we risk blindness. I love you, Ben, but you aren’t worth that risk. I’m crazy, but I’m not that crazy. Besides, what good would we be to you blind?”

  “Damn, Boss. I want to find Matt. But she’s right. I’m not that crazy either. And you don't need to be leading a bunch of blind people around.”

  “Crap,” Quasar said. “What do we do now? We’ve been family since Persephon. I can't just abandon you now, Ben.”

  “Me neither,” Shaq buzzed, rubbing his head against my neck.

  “I can't let you go any farther with me.”

  “You can't stop us, either,” Quasar said.. "I’m coming with you. If I go blind, I go blind. You can pick me up on his way back with Matt. We make it out of here, maybe I can get bionics installed.”

  “I have a better idea!” Emerald exclaimed in her less sane voice.

  “She has an idea.” Druck groaned. “Let’s hear it.”

  “We all turn around, go back to the city center, find Coil, and kill him!” She did the lolligot twerking hip thing at the end.

  “How does that help us get Matt back?” Quasar asked.

  “Who?” she replied.

  “Matt,” Druck said. “You know, the reason we’re down here in the first place.”

  “Never heard of him. Is he important?”

  The scariest thing about the question was that she played it with such sincerity, not like she was hinting we should forget about Matt and move on. Did she really not remember him?

  “Important enough for me to risk blindness over,” Quasar snapped at her before glaring at Druck. “You…" She jabbed her finger at him. "...disappoint me.”

  Druck held up his hand, showing off the tattoo on the back of it. “What does that say, Zar? Soldier of fortune. Mercenary. I’m not pretending to be a hero. I’m not like Ben. Or you, I guess.”

  “I get that,” she replied. “Well, I hope you’re still alive when we get back with Matt. Both of you.” She turned to me. “We should stop wasting time standing here.”

  “I agree,” I said, looking from her to Shaq.

  “No,” he buzzed, adept at reading even my subtlest tells.

  “Sorry, bud,” I said.

  I activated my construct and pushed them both back, shoving them into Druck and Emerald and dropping them all in a tangle. Once they were on the ground, I pulled Quasar’s rifle to me. I still needed the light.

  Quasar shouted my name before thinking better of making so much noise, hissing the rest. "...you son of a bitch." She tried to get up, but I put up a wall of air between us.

  “When you go too far, you will go blind,” I said. “Once you’re blind, you’re as useful to me as you are if you stay here. I’m going to come back with Matt. When I do, we’ll still need to get off this planet. I need you intact to help me with that. Okay?”

  Quasar glowered but nodded. “Okay. Fine. But you better come back.”

  I could tell it pained Shaq to let me go off into danger without him, but he buzzed his acceptance before climbing onto Quasar’s shoulder. She had always been his second favorite.

  “He willsss,” Ixitat said. “I’ll makesss….ssssure.”

  “Go back to the factory," I said. "Make sure nothing comes into the tunnel after me.”

  Quasar sighed heavily. “Copy that."

  “Have fun!" Emerald said as if she was seeing me off on a cruise. “Have fun! Make sure you kill lots of gorathi for me! We’ll see you when you get back! We’ll miss you!” She started blowing kisses.

  I offered them a curt wave and turned to Ixitat. “You can stay behind too. It’s okay.”

  “Neversss.”

  I smiled and patted her on the side of her head. “I had to offer.” I glanced back at the others one last time. “This isn’t goodbye.”

  “Give ‘em hell, Boss,” Druck said.

  “I intend to.”

  CHAPTER 33

  It didn’t take long for me to miss Shaq, Quasar, and surprisingly even Emerald, though I was happy to have Ixitat for company. After losing Kat, I was also happy to have left the others behind.

  The tunnel continued in a nearly straight line for so long that, after hours of walking, everything started to look identical. By my best estimation, we'd covered more distance underground—at least fifteen miles—than we had above ground between Druck’s crate and the settlement. I assumed, of course, that we hadn’t somehow entered some kind of fantastical loop that kept us retracing our own footsteps over and over again.

  The one thing I was certain of was that we’d passed beyond the radio feed’s ability to transmit back to the mothership. And I was enjoying the hell out of restore. My legs remained fresh despite the length of the journey, my body as strong as if I hadn’t spent the last sixteen hours in the middle of a warzone almost constantly under attack.

  Although there didn’t appear to be any gorathi in the tunnel, Ixy and I had agreed to limit communication just in case. As a result, the hours gave me a lot of time to think. About my current situation mostly. I tried settling on an answer to the question Emerald had posed.

  Why do you think this tunnel goes?

  She had mentioned how strange it was that the gorathi had made a tunnel to a city that had been abandoned for centuries. While I had given up on the idea that the Sanguine Studios' sweep of the planet had triggered an awakening of the creatures, I was beginning to think that maybe something had indeed roused them from hibernation.

  But if the production team’s first arrival wasn’t the reason the gorathi had started digging for the city, then what was? The demons didn’t seem intelligent enough to make a decision like that on their own, but perhaps the queen held a higher intellect. Or what if the part of the Niflin myth about the Sulamat character Veneel had mentioned was true? Was that what had happened to the original settlers? Had they accidentally awakened the god with their building and suffered his wrath?

  It seemed like something out of a movie, not too far removed from the plot of The Mummy, both the Tom Cruise and Brendan Frasier versions. I wasn’t sure if I preferred hordes of demons to a horde of undead.

  “Ixy, are you getting tired?” I asked, keeping my voice low. “We can stop to rest.”

  “Finesss,” she replied, showing little signs of fatigue herself. “Yousss?”

  “I’m good. To quote a better Captain than me, I could do this all day.”

  We kept walking for nearly thirty more minutes before the tunnel finally began to ascend. Knowing we had to be approaching the end of the line, I wasn’t sure whether to speed up or slow down. Were more gorathi waiting at this end of the passage? Or perhaps something worse? Either way, I knew I had to keep moving forward, but what if erring on the side of caution cost Matt his life because I moved too slowly?

  I split the difference, quickening my steps without running up the incline. Ixitat remained beside me most of the way, but when the beam of my light shone into the open space at the end of the tunnel, defusing in near daylight, she rushed to scout ahead. The gorathi would ignore her presence. Not so much mine.

  “What did you see?” I asked when she returned a handful of seconds later.

  “Demonsss. Lotsss…Queensss,” she added after taking a breath.

  I exhaled a sharp sigh. “Shit."

  “Sorrysss.”

  “Not your fault. What are they doing?”

  “Don’t knowsss.”

  “Well, are they static like zombies who haven’t sniffed out brains in a while, or are they actually doing something?”

  “Doingsss. Grosss.”

  “I don’t know what that means.”

  She reached forward with her pedipalp, using it to switch off the light on my rifle. “Followsss.”

  I could see a few feet around us thanks to the glow of the veins in my uncovered neck and hands. “We’ll have to get pretty close to them.”

  “Yesss,” she agreed, which wasn’t very comforting.

  I stayed right behind her as we made our way to the end of the tunnel, which went straight up through eight feet of thick stone that was scored countless times by claw marks. Ixy scaled the rock before turning and lowering a forelimb to me. Grabbing on, I expected her to give me an anchor while I climbed the stone. Instead, she lifted me to the top with one leg as though I were nearly weightless. The true extent of her physical strength caught me off-guard, but I didn’t say anything.

  Not when I saw she had lifted me into the middle of my worst nightmare.

  The light from my sigils only stretched so far, but even with the limited view I could tell that thousands of the creatures surrounded us. They were all pressed tightly together, slowly undulating within a disgusting ichor that they seemed to be secreting from their skin. Within the ichor I spotted what had to be their offspring—smaller gorathi numbering in the hundreds—in various stages of development. The back of the queen was too close for comfort, climbing over the weird alien orgy and injecting her own secretion into the mess. I couldn’t see the top or sides of the cavern, but the floor immediately around the hole was too perfectly flat to believe the creatures had created it.

  Where the hell were we?

  The good news, if you could call it that, was that the gorathi were so involved with their reproduction they didn’t appear to notice my presence among them, even though some of them had their eyes open and should have been looking right at me. The queen was equally undisturbed as she leaned over and caressed one bit of ichor holding nearly twenty new demons, a few of which looked like they were about to hatch. Holding back the contents of my stomach, I leaned in closer to Ixitat to whisper.