“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.