“You have a question Master Sergeant?”

  “Are you suggesting we rappel into a nursery?” Tec asked.

  Before I could answer in the negative, Horvath said, “There is no choice in this. We must punch through and hit the ground running. Speed and violence are our answer to any questions.”

  It took a few minutes as the regiment readied itself for this. Then Tec looked at me. I nodded. He gave the go-ahead signal. Several Vomags pulled out thermal charges, dropping them down against the plug.

  “Ten seconds to detonation,” Tec said. “As soon as it blows, we drop fast. Don’t stop for anything.”

  The charges detonated, turning the plug into superheated vapor. We dropped through, our lines playing out, the heat washing over us like a physical force. My boots hit solid ground, and I was moving before my brain fully processed what I was seeing.

  The nursery chamber walls were covered in hexagonal cells, each one containing a Chirr larva in various stages of development. Some were barely formed, translucent sacs of proto-organs. Others were almost ready to emerge, their compound eyes tracking our movement through the membrane.

  And there were attendants. Not warriors, these were specialized Chirr for protecting the young. They looked like spiders made of bone and sinew, eight legs ending in surgical-precise manipulators, bodies low and wide. Their heads were mostly mouth, circular saws of teeth. Malik had been told before that they were designed to process food for the larvae.

  They came at us in a silent wave.

  My assault rifle chattered with a couple hundred others, punching holes through the first wave. They died quietly, no screams, just the wet sound of rupturing organs. But more kept coming, emerging from hidden alcoves, dropping from the ceiling, rising from pit-tunnels in the floor.

  “Grenades!” Tec called.

  The explosions ripped through the hexagonal cells, spilling unformed larvae onto the floor where they writhed and dissolved. The attendants went berserk, their protective instincts overriding everything else. They stopped trying to kill us efficiently and just threw themselves at us, using their bodies as shields for the remaining larvae.

  “Push through!” I shouted. “The exit tunnel is at two o’clock!”

  We fought our way across the chamber, boots slipping on the mucus-slick floor, stepping on half-formed Chirr that burst like water balloons full of acid. One attendant got past our fire, latching onto Private Kim’s leg. Its mouth-saws went to work, and his scream was cut short as it severed his femoral artery through the armor. He dropped, with blood pooling black in the infrared.

  “Kim’s down!”

  Strang was already dragging Kim toward the exit. The kid was pale, dying fast, but Strang wouldn’t leave him. That’s when the first warrior arrived.

  It came through the wall—literally through it, the Chirr’s acid-secreting capability letting it melt a hole and emerge in one fluid motion. This wasn’t a tunnel fighter like we’d seen before. This was a deep warrior. Its chitin was black as space, thick as tank armor. It had two arms for cutting and two for grappling. And it was huge, three meters tall even hunched for tunnel fighting.

  It hit Strang like a freight train, lifting him off his feet. Kim’s body flew. Strang had half a second to scream before the warrior’s cutting arms scissored through his torso, separating him into three distinct pieces.

  “Heavy weapons!” I roared. Screw these things.

  Lavern had a plasma cannon. As a cutter, he was a heavy weapons specialist. He fired, a blue-white bolt taking the warrior center mass. Its armor held for a moment, glowing white-hot, then exploded inward. The warrior toppled backward, its insides cooked to vapor.

  But more were coming. I could hear them in the walls, in the ceiling, and beneath our feet. The nursery’s alarm pheromones had brought every warrior in this section running.

  “Go! Go! Go!”

  We made it to the exit tunnel, but it was narrower than expected. Single file! and Lavern’s injured state made him slower. Behind us, warriors poured into the nursery, their rage at the destroyed larvae making them careless. They fought each other to get at us, creating a bottleneck that bought us seconds more.

  The tunnel angled down sharply, and suddenly, we were sliding more than running. The surface was coated in that biofilm, slick as ice. I tried to control my descent, but it was like riding a water slide made of nightmares. Behind us, I could hear the warriors following, their claws providing better purchase.

  The tunnel dumped us into another chamber, no—not a chamber. This was a vast cavern, so large it was hard to see the far walls. The floor was covered in water, or something like water, thick and oily, glowing faintly blue.

  “Where are we?” Horvath gasped.

  “The Acid Lakes,” Tec said.

  They weren’t really acid, Malik’s memories told me that. The liquid was some kind of biological soup, full of organisms that broke down anything organic that fell in. The Chirr used it as a waste processing system, dumping their dead and unusable organics here to be recycled.

  “Is it deep?” a Vomag asked.

  I picked up a piece of debris and tossed it in. It floated for a moment and then began to dissolve, the organisms swarming over it in a feeding frenzy.

  “It doesn’t matter,” I said. “We can’t go in it.”

  “Then how do we cross?” Horvath said.

  That’s when I saw walkways just below the surface. The Chirr likely used them to traverse the lakes, paths of hardened secretion resistant to the organisms. They were barely visible, just shadows under the glowing water.

  “Follow me,” I said, “but make sure to step where I step. One wrong move and you’re soup.”

  I started across, feeling for the walkway with each step. It was maybe thirty centimeters wide, slippery, and several times I felt it give slightly under my weight. Behind me, my unit followed in single file.

  We were halfway across when the raging warriors caught up.

  They burst from the tunnel we’d exited, saw us on the walkways, and must have understood our vulnerability. But they were smart. Instead of following us onto the narrow paths, they went around, using the walls of the cavern to flank us.

  “Contact left! Contact right!”

  We were exposed, no cover, balanced on narrow walkways over deadly water. The warriors opened fire with their organic weapons: spine launchers, acid sprayers, those horrible boring maggots they could shoot that would eat through armor.

  A Vomag took a spine projectile through the throat and toppled sideways into the lake. In seconds, there was nothing left but dissolving armor.

  “Keep moving!” I shouted, firing one-handed while maintaining balance.

  A warrior dropped from the ceiling directly onto our walkway. Its weight cracked the hardened path, and for a moment, I thought we were all going in. But a soldier spun round and put his plasma cannon barrel against its head. The discharge vaporized everything above its thorax, but the electromagnetic pulse from the point-blank shot fried the cannon’s systems.

  “Weapon’s dead!” the soldier shouted, discarding the useless cannon into the lake where it immediately began dissolving.

  More warriors were entering the cavern. They spread out along the walls, surrounding us. We were fish in a barrel, and they knew it.

  Then Commissar Horvath pulled out a device I’d never seen before. It looked like a small transmitter.

  “All units, this is Commissar Horvath,” he said into it. “Execute Contingency Seven.”

  Nothing happened.

  I stared at Horvath, wanting to shoot him for giving us hope.

  “Patience,” he told me.

  “What’s supposed to happen?” I asked.

  Horvath looked pissed that I’d asked.

  Then the ceiling exploded at strategic points as shaped charges detonated, bringing down tons of rock and Chirr structures. The warriors on the walls were crushed or knocked into the lake. The walkways cracked and shifted. And from the holes in the ceiling, rappel lines dropped.

  “Are they reinforcements?” Tec gasped.

  Figures dropped down the lines: automated combat drones, humanoid but clearly mechanical. They hit the walkways and opened fire on the Chirr, their weapons considerably more powerful than our standard gear.

  “Bo Taw Police combat automata,” Horvath said with satisfaction. “I had them following us at distance. Never trust Vomags to complete a mission without backup.”

  I wanted to be angry. He’d let us die when he had support available. But there wasn’t time for that now. The drones were clearing a path, and we needed to move.

  We reached the far side of the lake, entering another tunnel complex. This one seemed older than anything we’d reached so far.

  I was tired. Some of the drugs keeping my fear at bay were wearing off. I had a feeling that as bad as it had been, it was going to get a whole lot worse now that we were down this low.

  -61-

  We pushed forward, following the tunnel as it curved and descended. The air grew thicker, harder to breathe even through our filters. The temperature kept climbing.

  After an hour, it became truly hot. It was time, I knew.

  “Switch your cooling systems to active,” I ordered.

  My armor’s internal temperature regulation kicked in, a soft hum adding to the background noise. We hadn’t switched to it yet because it drained battery power too quickly.

  Soon, we reached a massive rectangular chamber, approximately three hundred meters long and half that wide. Abandoned ore processors lined the walls like metal skeletons. That told me we’d reached an ancient area that had been here before the Chirr ever descended. However, the floor was covered in a hardened Chirr resin.

  “The motion sensors are lighting up,” Tec said. “There are at least forty contacts, spreading out from the far end.”

  “Take up defensive positions,” I said. “Use the ore processors for cover.”

  We spread out, taking positions behind the old machinery. I could see the bugs coming: Chirr warriors. Each stood about two meters tall, four arms ending in claws that could punch through steel, mandibles capable of biting through armor plating. Their chitinous shells were dark brown, almost black. Thankfully, we had infrared to see them.

  “Hold your fire until they’re in the kill zone,” I said.

  They moved in typical Chirr fashion, no real tactics, just aggressive swarming. When the first wave hit our markers, we opened fire. Plasma bolts carved through their ranks, the super-heated energy effective against their natural armor. Bodies piled up, but more kept coming. That had been a given, of course.

  “Left flank!” Kumar shouted.

  A group of Chirr had circled around somehow. They hit our left side hard. Private Loo went down first, a claw punching through his chest plate. He was dead before he hit the ground. Orson tried to help, but was caught by acid spray from a Chirr warrior’s specialized gland. The acid ate through his leg armor, and his screams echoed through the chamber until Tec put a mercy shot through his helmet.

  A Vomag swung his heavy weapon around, the cannon’s whine building to a crescendo before releasing a concentrated beam that not only killed the emerging Chirr but collapsed the tunnel entrance.

  “There’s movement from above!” Lavern shouted.

  We turned our weapons upward, firing into the darkness. Chirr bodies fell like rain, some dead, others wounded and still dangerous when they hit the ground. Lavern got grabbed by a wounded warrior, its mandibles closing on his arm. His armor held long enough for me to put three shots through the creature’s head.

  The attack lasted about ten minutes, but it felt like hours. When the last Chirr fell, we’d lost thirty-two effectives.

  “Ammunition check,” Tec ordered.

  We were down to roughly forty-five percent of our ammunition. That should give you some idea how much each of us had started out with. We’d all been walking armories.

  Soon enough, we continued the descent.

  In time, we reached a strange chamber, another nursery it seemed. The eggs here were larger and darker than any I’d seen, that Malik had ever seen. Standing guard over them was something Malik had only seen in classified military reports: a Chirr Praetorian. He was three meters tall, covered in armor plating that looked like overlapping shields and had four arms that ended not in claws but in bone blades, no doubt bio-designed for combat.

  The Praetorian studied us with compound eyes that showed more intelligence than typical warriors. I had a feeling it was evaluating us, determining if we were a threat to its eggs. Behind it, I could see the passage to the next level.

  “We need another route,” Tec said.

  “There is no other route,” Horvath said.

  Then the commissar made the decision for us. He sent one of his drones forward, weapons hot. The Praetorian moved faster than something that size should be able to. It caught the drone, tearing it apart with those bone blades. Then it charged us.

  “Concentrated fire!” I shouted.

  We focused our weapons on the Praetorian, obliterating it, green gore spurting everywhere. Unfortunately, we destroyed dozens of eggs, and they released their pheromones.

  “We need to move,” I said.

  We ran, already hearing the chittering of more approaching warriors. I was sure more Praetorians were coming as well.

  We reached a large shaft, another vertical drop, maybe sixty meters down this time. We didn’t hesitate but rappelled down as fast as our equipment allowed, with acid spit from pursuing Chirr sizzling on the walls around us.

  We lost too many Vomags—my opinion, not Malik’s—but we set up a kill zone, using up another ten percent of our ammo before the horde of Praetorians finally petered out.

  We’d been running on combat stims for twenty-three hours straight when my body finally said no.

  I was walking through another tunnel when my vision doubled, tripled, and then started sliding sideways. My legs turned to rubber. I caught myself against the tunnel wall, the biofilm under my gloves feeling sticky.

  “Colonel?” Tec’s voice sounded like it was coming through water.

  I tried to answer but my tongue felt like a dead fish in my mouth. The comedown hit all at once—twenty-three hours of artificial strength, suppressed fear, and chemically enhanced reflexes demanding payment.

  Through Malik’s memories, I knew this was the cliff. Every Vomag hit it eventually. The drugs that kept us functional in hell had to be metabolized, and when they were, reality came crashing back with compound interest.

  My hands shook as I fumbled for another stim injector. Around me, I could see others doing the same. Lavern had collapsed, dry-heaving inside his helmet. Two soldiers were holding each other up, their armor clanking as they trembled.

  “Five-minute break,” Horvath announced, and I could hear the strain in his voice too. Even commissars weren’t immune to chemistry.

  I managed to inject the stim, feeling the fresh burn of chemicals hitting my bloodstream. But this time it was different, less effective. My body was building tolerance even as it was breaking down.

  The worst part was the thirty seconds between the crash and the new dose kicking in. In that window, without the drugs to suppress it, the full horror of where we were hit home. We were over a kilometer underground, surrounded by billions of hostile organisms, in tunnels that could collapse at any moment, following orders from beings who saw us as expendable assets.

  Several soldiers started laughing—a broken, hysterical sound that meant someone was about to snap. One pulled off his helmet before Tec slammed it back on his head.

  “Nobody breaks,” Tec said. “We’ve come too far to break now.”

  The fresh stims kicked in, wrapping everything back in that chemical confidence. My vision steadied. My hands stopped shaking. The existential horror faded back to manageable levels.

  But I’d seen behind the curtain. We were dead men walking, propped up by drugs, marching deeper into our own graves. The only question was whether we’d complete the mission before our bodies gave out.

  “Move out,” Horvath ordered.

  We moved, drug-fueled corpses descending toward whatever waited at the bottom of hell.

  We were all dragging at this point, but there was nothing for it, and we kept going. I was starting to wonder if any of us would ever leave the deep tunnels alive.

  -62-

  Finally, we reached the ancient target level. The metal walls surely predated the Chirr. In fact, the metal was an alloy we couldn’t identify, warm to the touch. I wondered if Chirr resins didn’t stick to it.

  “Radiation levels are spiking,” Tec said. “Whatever’s down here, it’s hot.”

  Malik’s memories told me about harsh radiation treatments. It was why so many Vomags had such ugly mugs. I didn’t want any kind of bath like that.

  Ten minutes later, we reached a massive circular hatch, three meters across.

  The hatch had a control panel beside it, cracked but still powered. While Tec worked on the manual override, the panel flickered to life, projecting a holographic recording.

  A human-type woman appeared, wearing a lab coat over civilian clothes. She looked exhausted, her hair unwashed, dark circles under her eyes. Behind her, we could see this same tunnel, but clean, well lit, with proper flooring.

  She spoke some kind of gibberish like Japanese.

  The recording flickered, jumped. When it stabilized, she looked worse with blood on her coat.

  She jabbered faster.

  There was another skip. The lab behind her was dark now, emergency lighting only.

  More talk that made no sense.

  Then the recording froze, her mouth open mid-word. Then it rewound, playing from the beginning.

  Tec managed to shut off the recording.

  Fortunately, the hatch finally lurched with a squeal of protesting metal.

  We pried it open further and passed through. The chamber was mostly empty and metal, with old consoles and cracked screens. Then I spied a black metal briefcase. Looking at it caused a pressure in my skull, a whine just below the range of hearing. Next to it, connected by cables apparently made of solid light, was some kind of power cell. The energy readings were off the charts: enough power to run a battleship for a year, compressed into something the size of a football.