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.