I had no answer, except, “Maybe the Commonwealth wants to use it as a base for themselves after we’ve driven out the Hegemony.”
“You know what I think,” she asked, then went on without waiting for my reply, “I think it’s those double-domed scientists. They want Arachnoid specimens to study, so we get stuck with the job of trying to capture some of them.”
“But according to our briefings, the Arachnoids fight to the last one,” I said.
“Tell it to the scientists.”
“Still,” I said, thinking aloud, “the fleet could bombard the asteroid before we go in, pound it as hard as they can. It wouldn’t hurt the Arachnoids deep inside the rock, but it could knock out any of them up by the surface.”
“And make our landing easier,” Frede said.
But when I took up the question with the admiral’s chief aide, a reptilian about my own size with beautiful multicolored scales, the answer was: No preliminary bombardment. It would merely alert the Arachnoid defenders and delay our landing.
“But once we show ourselves in the Jilbert system, several light-hours away from the asteroid, won’t that alert them?” I asked.
“No preliminary bombardment,” the reptilian repeated. “The plan is set and will not be changed.”
I demanded the right to ask the admiral about it. Permission denied. I got the impression that the strategists who had planned this operation wanted to capture Bititu as intact as possible. They were perfectly willing to spend our lives in exchange for killing off the defenders without wrecking the asteroid itself.
I had other ideas.
I assigned Frede and my other officers to studying the pictures of Bititu as minutely as possible. I myself spent most of my nights going over those images, pinpointing each spot on that pitted bare rock that looked like an air-lock hatch or a gun emplacement. Then, one by one, I assigned each of those targets to one of our heavy-weapons platoons.
My plan was to knock out those surface defenses as we rode toward the asteroid in our landing vehicles. Instead of sitting inside and waiting passively until we touched down on the surface, I ordered my weapons platoons to zero in on specific targets and destroy them while we were in transit from the troopship to the asteroid.
Otherwise, I feared, the Arachnoid defenders would blast our ships out of the sky before we reached the rock.
As we neared the Jilbert system I worked the troopers harder and harder. Little sleep and less rest. We raced through the ship’s passageways every day and almost every night. When we were not physically assaulting our mock targets we were studying the imagery of Bititu, familiarizing ourselves with every crevice and hollow of its surface, picking out the precise spots where each landing vehicle would touch down on its surface.
Some of the troopers began to complain that by the time we reached our target they would be too tired to fight. I drove them harder.
“We go relativistic in six hours,” the Tsihn liaison officer told me at last. “Then two or three hours to the point where you embark for the asteroid.”
I got my troops ready. We marched to the loading docks where our landing vehicles waited, singing ancient songs of battle and blood. We got into our armored space suits, using the buddy system to check each other carefully. The suits had been anodized white at my insistence; in the dimly lit tunnels of Bititu we had to be able to see each other. No one knew what the visual range of the Arachnoids was, whether white stood out as clearly to them as it did to us, but I was determined to avoid killing ourselves with friendly fire.
I put the heavy-weapons platoons in the first of our forty landers, with the other platoons’ landers coming in behind them. I put myself in the first of the weapons platoons.
As the troops clambered aboard the landers, awkward in their heavily armored suits, Frede came up beside me, her helmet visor raised, an odd, expectant smile on her face.
“Well, we’re as ready as we can be,” she said, her voice trembling ever so slightly.
“Make certain your weapons team hits every assigned target,” I said. “Especially the air locks. Maybe those spiders can breathe vacuum, but I doubt it.”
“I never liked spiders,” she said.
“Now’s your chance to kill a few thousand of them.”
She nodded inside the space helmet, then slid the visor down and lumbered off to her landing vehicle. I clamped my visor and sealed it. I had done everything I could think of. Now it was us against them, with no mercy expected either way.
The landing vehicles were little more than armored shields with handgrips for the troops and propulsion units hung off their sterns. We pushed off the troopship, forty landers, and slid out into the darkness of space.
“Here we go,” said one of the troopers. I heard his tense, shaky voice through my helmet earphones.
“Another free ride, courtesy of the army.”
“Enjoy your trip.”
“Yeah. You gotta be born to it.”
No one laughed.
The sullen red star off in the distance gave very little light. The dark, pitted rock of Bititu seemed to float out there among the stars, a long way off. And we seemed to be hanging in the middle of the emptiness, barely moving. As I clung to the handgrips behind the forward armored shield, in the midst of the heavy-weapons platoon, I had to turn my entire body around to see the troopship we had just left. Farther in the distance hovered hundreds of battle cruisers and dreadnoughts, sleek and deadly, with enough firepower to atomize Bititu and its fanatical defenders.
We slowly, agonizingly drifted toward the asteroid. I felt naked and alone despite my armored space suit and the soldiers surrounding me. Not a sign of life from the asteroid. Not a glimmer of light. It merely hung there, growing slightly larger as we slowly approached it, a massive elongated chunk of rock, pockmarked with craters and scored with strange grooves, dark and solid and ominous.
I checked the watch set into the wrist of my suit. I had set it to count down to the instant when we would begin firing at the surface facilities. A hundred and nine seconds to go. A hundred and nine eternities.
At last I saw something glint on the asteroid’s surface. The reflection of sunlight? No, Jilbert was too faint and red to make that kind of glitter. Then another, and the front shield of one of our landers flared with the impact of a laser blast. Missiles were leaping from hidden fissures in the asteroid, blazing toward us. Our bombardment plan was instantly forgotten as we began to shoot at the missiles. They exploded in silent fireballs, each one closer to us as we drove onward toward the asteroid.
A lander was hit, bodies and fragments scattering, tumbling, flailing through the dark emptiness. Another, and then another. Dying voices screamed in my earphones.
“Fire at the surface targets!” I bellowed into my helmet microphone. “Heavy weapons, fire at the surface. All other platoons, antimissile fire.”
My well-trained troops began shooting at the targets we had picked out. But the enemy was firing missiles from spots that had looked like nothing but bare rock until a few moments earlier. A missile exploded scant meters from my lander, I could feel the heat of its flare even through the armor of my space suit. Fragments ripped into us, clunking against our armored suits. A trooper’s oxygen tank exploded in a brief deadly flare of flame, killing him instantly.
We were hitting the ground targets, I could see. Explosions peppered Bititu’s surface. Missiles were still blazing toward us, several more landers were blown away, but we were hurtling toward the surface now. We would be there in a few seconds. Smaller weapons were blasting at us now; I could feel the lander shuddering as small solid slugs racked us. A trooper was hit just next to me, space suit erupting into fountains of gushing blood that froze in the vacuum into solid red pellets.
We huddled behind the lander’s forward shield as lasers and projectiles racked the vehicle from one end to the other. Half the troops on the lander had already been killed by the time we thudded onto the asteroid’s rocky surface.
I jumped in the negligible gravity, rifle in hand, and blasted a partially open hatch set into the rock. It snapped shut. It took an effort to keep from soaring into space; I adjusted the flight pack on my back to negative and felt some semblance of weight that helped me to flatten onto my belly while laser beams and volleys of slugs zipped over my head.
My earphones were ablaze with frantic voices:
“They’re all around us!”
“I’ve got seventy-percent casualties! We’ve got to get off this rock!”
“Where’s the weapons platoon? I need backup. Now!”
I slapped a magnetic grenade on the hatch and backed away. It blew noiselessly in the vacuum, smoke dissipating almost before my eyes registered its presence.
“Get into the tunnels!” I yelled into my helmet mike. “The only troops left on the surface are going to be the dead. Get inside! Move!”
I rolled another grenade into the opening of the blasted hatch, then slid into the tunnel headfirst, spraying rifle fire into the murky shadows to clear out any defenders who might have survived the grenade.
The tunnel was barely wide enough for me to crawl through and so dark that I had to turn on my helmet light, despite the infrared sensors in my visor. I heard something slithering behind me and rolled onto my back, aiming my rifle down the length of my torso.
“It’s just me, sir!” came a trooper’s voice, and I saw a space-suited figure, as anonymous as a faceless sculpture, crawling down the tunnel behind me.
Rolling onto my stomach again, I came face-to-face with my first Arachnoid. It was black, fully a meter wide, with eight spindly legs covered with what seemed like barbs. It held an oblong object in its front two claws, something with fins and a glasslike lens pointing at me. Behind that weapon I saw a face with horizontal mandibles clicking rapidly and eight glittering eyes, no two the same size.
I ducked my head, digging my visor into the bare rock of the tunnel, and pulled the trigger of my rifle at the same time. I felt a blast of heat against the armored top of my helmet, heard a high-pitched wail and the scuttling sound of claws on rock.
When I looked up the spider was gone, but there was a patch of sticky pus-yellow goo on the tunnel floor where it had stood. I saw a side tunnel veering off from this one. Pulling a rocket grenade loose from my belt, I set it for impact and fired it down the side tunnel. It exploded almost immediately, showering me with a hail of pebbles and dust and smoke.
I crawled past the side tunnel, ordering the trooper behind me to take his buddies along it. My earphones blazed with frantic voices:
“There’s millions of ’em!”
“They’re behind us! They’re all around us!”
“We’ve gotta get out of here! There’s too many of ’em!”
There was no way out of here. We could not get back aboard the landers even if we wanted to; they had lifted off the asteroid as soon as we had disembarked.
Slithering forward on my belly, I peered deeper into the tunnel. For a few moments I saw nothing, but I realized I could hear scraping noises and eerie, whistling screeches. Somehow there was enough air in the tunnel to carry sound, or maybe the rock itself was conducting sound waves. Farther off, I could hear the crack, crack sound of lasers firing so rapidly that it became an almost continuous clatter of noise. And explosions, some of them big enough to shake the tunnel. Dust and screams and voices shouting.
“There’s more of ’em!”
“It’s like a trapdoor. Look out!”
The tunnel was widening. The light on my helmet was deep red, not much help in seeing, but Intelligence hoped that the Arachnoids’ eyes could not see that end of the visible spectrum. It occurred to me that if we could produce sensors that detected wavelengths our eyes could not see, the Arachnoids might similarly have developed technology to aid their natural senses. So I switched off the lamp and inched along the black tunnel, depending on my visor’s infrared sensors to warn me.
Something exploded somewhere behind me, too big an explosion to be one of our grenades. A cloud of dust roiled along the tunnel. Then I heard that scraping, skittering noise again and a spider popped out of another side tunnel. I blasted it in half with a bolt from my rifle. Edging to the lip of the tunnel entrance, I peered into the darkness. My visor showed the faint outline of something in there, inching slowly toward me. I waited until it became clear. Another spider. I killed it with a shot in the middle of its eye cluster.
I worked my way past the sticky remains of the Arachnoid. The tunnel was almost high enough for me to get to my hands and knees, and getting wider all the time. The Arachnoids, I realized, needed more width than height to accommodate the shape of their bodies.
“My squad’s down to six effectives. We’ve got to get out of here!”
“Keep moving toward the center of this rock,” I bellowed into my helmet mike. “Nobody’s getting off until the last spider’s killed.”
“Look out, sir!”
I rolled over and saw half a dozen Arachnoids dropping out of a hatch in the top of the tunnel, behind me. The trooper who had shouted the warning fired at them. Two of the spiders rushed at me. I shot the first one in the belly, it was that close. The second was on top of me, jamming its pistol against my chest and firing point-blank. I knocked the gun away with the butt of my rifle as the beam cracked my suit armor and burned my flesh. With a roar of pain I pressed the muzzle of my rifle against the spider’s underside and fired. The Arachnoid exploded, spattering the tunnel and me with sticky yellowish pieces.
The trooper behind me was dead, his head blown off, but there were two dead spiders beside him, and another of them twitching its legs helplessly. I finished it with a quick blast from my rifle. My suit was sealing the hole the laser beam had made, fluid edges of the perforation flowing together and quickly hardening. I could feel the medical systems inside the suit spraying a disinfecting analgesic on my burn.
But my thoughts were on the sixth of those Arachnoids. The one that was not accounted for. It must have scuttled down one of the trapdoors that lined these tunnels. Was it lurking just behind one of the hatches, waiting for me or some other unsuspecting trooper to pass it so that it could pop out again and kill more of us?
In the distance ahead of me I saw a dim light and made my way toward it. Several tunnels came together in a hollowed-out area; the walls were smeared with something fluorescent that gave off a faint, sickly greenish yellow light.
I hesitated. I could hear sounds of lasers firing and the dull thumping explosions of grenades echoing down the tunnels. This little cavern seemed to be a nexus of some sort, yet it was apparently deserted, undefended. I heard screams of pain and shouting from one of the tunnels, and then a trio of Arachnoids came scuttling backward toward the cavern. They turned around as they came into the wider area. One of them slid a claw into a crack in the tunnel floor, and a hatch-cleverly concealed to look like a natural piece of the rocky floor-slid open.
Just as the spider did that, its companions spotted me. I fired at the two of them as the third popped down the open hatch. My rifle blast blew the first Arachnoid to pieces and chopped a leg off the second. It fired back, charring the shoulder of my suit. My second shot killed it.
I realized that the spiders did not seem to be wearing any protective clothing. Maybe they could breathe vacuum, I thought, although there was definitely air of some kind in these tunnels. I had no time for investigation. The third one lobbed a grenade at me. My senses shifted into overdrive and I saw it soar slowly up from the open hatch, hit the ground once and bump along in my direction. I pushed myself backward, down the tunnel along which I had come, as the grenade went off in a shower of rocks and dust. The blast tore the rifle from my hands; flying debris peppered my armor, denting and cracking it along the shoulders and helmet. But it held. I was unhurt, though momentarily stunned.
The spider edged above the lip of the hatch to fire its laser weapon at me. But I was faster, grabbing my rifle and squeezing its trigger even as I dragged it along the ground toward me. The blast caught the Arachnoid in its eyes. It screeched and dropped out of sight.
I crawled to the edge of the hatch and saw a squirming mass of Arachnoids below, dozens of them, with their wounded companion wriggling its barbed legs in their midst. Before they could react I dropped a grenade on them and slammed the hatch shut. The explosion forced it open again.
Several troopers came crawling down tunnels into the cavern. Their armor was stained, scuffed, bloodied. One of them was missing an arm. They collapsed, exhausted, on the rocky floor.
“Officers report,” I said into my helmet mike.
One by one they called in. In several platoons the sergeants or even ordinary troopers were the ones to speak; their officers had been killed or wounded. I heard nothing from Frede until almost the end.
“Frede here. We’re down to five effectives, all of them wounded. I’m the only one still in one piece.”
Studying the locator map on my visor and the red dots that represented the positions of the reporting soldiers, I saw that we had more or less cleared out two levels of the tunnels that honeycombed the asteroid. There were at least four more levels to go. Maybe more. And I was down to about thirty percent of my original landing force.
Chapter 20
It grew eerily quiet. In the dim underground shadows, dust sifting through, the fighting had stopped for the moment. The Arachnoids seemed content to wait for us to push deeper, into the next level of tunnels.
I had the medical officer set up his aid station and told the troopers to take a quick squirt of nutrients from the nipples in their helmets. The nutrients included neural stimulators designed to counteract the effects of physical exhaustion and mental fatigue. The troopers called it “joy juice,” or “mother’s milk,” or worse.
I sent a team back to the surface to bring down all the grenades and explosives from the magazines that the landers had left. They caught a few Arachnoids out there, hiding in the wreckage of some of the crashed landers, waiting to snipe at unsuspecting humans.
“We got ’em all,” reported the sergeant who led the ammunition detail. Then he added, “I think.”
“Were they wearing any kind of protective suits?” I asked through my helmet radio.
“No, sir,” said the sergeant. “None that I could see.”
The scientists would be interested in that, I thought. I had the grenades and heavier explosives distributed among the surviving soldiers and gave them orders to blanket the tunnels with explosives before moving into them.
“Blast every hatch you see,” I told them, “and then blast whatever’s on the other side of the hatch. Check every crevice, every crack in the rock. Go slowly, make certain you’ve cleared the area around you before advancing. Now let’s move.”
It was slow, painful going. Hours dragged into days. We inched along the tunnels, probing for trapdoors and hidden nests of spiders waiting to pounce on us. I called up to the fleet and requested more explosives.
“Do you have anything that can produce a high-temperature flame?” I asked.
The Tsihn weaponry officers conferred among themselves, then called back to me that they could send down drums of chemicals which, when mixed together, burst spontaneously into flame.
“Good!” I said. “Send down all you can.”
The Tsihn hesitated. In the image on my visor I could see its tongue flicking nervously.
“These are very volatile liquids,” it said. “Very dangerous to handle.”
I laughed at it. “What do you think we’re doing down here, having a picnic?”
It did not understand my words, but my tone was clear. Within a few hours a shuttle craft took up a parking orbit a scant hundred meters off the asteroid and off-loaded dozens of large, bulky drums. A Tsihn officer came down to the second-level cavern that I had turned into my command post. It was clad in an armored space suit just like the rest of us; the only way we could tell it was not one of us was from the fact that its suit was clean and undamaged.
It explained that the liquids in the drums were hypergolic: mix them and they burst into flame hot enough to melt aluminum.
“Fine,” I said. “That’s just what we need.”
The drums were identified by Tsihn symbols. They looked like abstract pictures to me, little black blots spattered on the curved sides of the big gray drums.
“You must be very careful with these chemicals,” the Tsihn officer kept repeating. “They are very dangerous.”
“That’s just what we want,” I assured it.
The Tsihn left as quickly as it could.
We went to work on the tunnels, pouring a whole drumful of one chemical down one hatch and then tipping over its hypergolic counterpart and moving out of the way-fast!-as a river of flame burst down on the shrieking, skittering Arachnoids. One by one we cleaned out the tunnels, advancing as soon as the flames had died away, crawling through smoke so thick and oily and choking that we sealed our visors and went back onto the life-support systems in our suits.
Down level after level we crawled, through the sooty smoke, through the charred heaps of hundreds of spiders. Their flesh crackled and broke apart in brittle chunks as we crawled past them. Even sealed inside our suits we found the smell nauseating. This was no longer a battle, it was extermination, I thought. The Arachnoids don’t have a chance against the liquid fire. I could see, even in the dim light through my helmet visor, that the fire was so intense it had fused the tunnel walls into a slick, glassy surface.
But they were not finished yet. Not quite.
We had made our way down to the core of the tunnel complex, a large cavern near the heart of the asteroid, big enough for us to stand in. Five major tunnels converged here, and five rivers of flame had poured down into this cavern to turn it into a pit of hell. The floor, the walls, the domelike ceiling were blackened. There had been equipment down here; I could see the charred remains of boxes and consoles, plastic melted and dripping.
But no bodies.
I walked upright, boots crunching on the burned litter, rifle cradled in my arms. Frede and a dozen other troopers were behind me, visors down, gloved fingers on the triggers of their rifles.
“You’d think they’d make their last stand down here,” Frede said.
I shook my head inside my helmet. “Not if they’re smart. They would have figured out that the fire rivers would all converge here and-”
Four camouflaged doors in the ceiling dropped open and dozens of spiders jumped down on us, firing, screeching weird high-pitched cries. One of them landed on my shoulders, heavy enough to buckle my knees and knock the rifle out of my hands. I saw a horrific set of mandibles snapping at my visor and felt a laser burn my arm. Grabbing at the spider, I yanked it away from me and smashed it against the cavern wall. Its hard shell took the shock, several of its arms sinking their barbs into the armored sleeve of my suit, another two firing pistols into my torso.
I staggered back, still clutching the thing by one of its barbed arms, and reached for the pistol at my hip. My right arm was badly burned, but I shut off the pain signals and yanked the pistol out of its holster. The Arachnoid tried to block me with one of its arms but I clubbed the arm away and fired into its clacking, snapping mouth. The beam sawed through the creature’s head and came out the other side, splashing against the wall.
Turning as it dropped away from me, I saw another spider clinging to a trooper with several arms and flicking the detonator of a grenade with one free claw. The explosion killed both of them and knocked the rest of us to the floor of the cavern.
With my senses in overdrive I fired at two more of the Arachnoids, pulled a third off Frede’s back and blew its head off, then swept half the cavern with the beam of my pistol.