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.