“Fal?” demanded Chip. “Run for my money? Run! Fal! Come on! Be reasonable. He gets exhausted picking his teeth.”
“Listen . . .” snapped one of the bats. “They’re coming. Quiet!”
There was silence. Chip’s less-than-cybershrew- or batborg-keen ears could hear nothing. Yet obviously, the others could. After a few seconds it came, at first a faint whisper, then growing and growing. Arthropod clicking. The sound of myriad upon myriad Maggot clawfeet, passing right above them. If they made any noise now, the Maggot-diggers would come through the roof. All they could do was wait, knowing that their comrades might possibly still be alive under the debris. Knowing too that, with each passing moment, the chances for any buried friends diminished.
Chapter 2: Really under enemy attack.
The tramp-scritch-tramp went on and on for hours. They were plainly right underneath a big Magh’ push.
Trapped.
Chip could do nothing but sit in the darkness, conserving his torch power pack. He thought of sun and light and air. He couldn’t help but think of the dead. Friends. Comrades-in-arms. And . . .
Dermott. Damn!
Here he was, as far as he knew the last surviving human in this hole. If he had to be honest with himself, Chip knew that they had no chance of getting out of here. It was a thought you pushed aside or you cracked up. He’d had to push aside the memory of death and the hope of survival so many times. After all, he’d been a conscript for seven months now. It felt like seven years. In this war he was a combat veteran. A conscript’s lifespan in the front lines was usually less than three weeks.
Buddies were close, and yet . . . you kept your distance. You didn’t want to get too close. Still, this time . . . he’d like to see another live human face. Dermott’s, especially, but any human would be better than none. If push came to shove, Chip would even settle for a goddamn officer. Even if the alien soft-cyber enhanced rats and bats, with all their goofy attitudes and ideas, were still more his kind of folk than those sons-of-Shareholders were, he’d still like to see a living human again. . . .
Hell, he might as well wish for one with an hourglass figure too. And a few beers. A steak as thick as both his thumbs . . . Huh. He was getting more like one of the damn rats by the day.
The air was hot and stale in this hole. But at least the noises from above had begun to change.
“They’re building.” The low bat-whisper was the first thing besides Maggot susurration and his own quiet breathing and heartbeat that Chip had heard for hours now. He recognized Bronstein’s voice easily enough. Despite the generic similarity of all the voices produced by the synthesizers, each rat and bat still managed to maintain a distinctive tone.
Chip ground his teeth. Maggot tunnels above them! Maggot tunnels could be miles wide and five hundred yards high. “Look, we’ve got to get out of here. We’re gonna run out of air and suffocate soon anyway.”
“We’d be foine if it wasn’t for the primate using two-thirds of the oxygen,” grumbled a bat. That was Behan, surly as usual. “Still, we should be able to start diggin’ out now. Those builder-digger Maggots are really stupid. When I was in that mole in Operation Zemlya, we popped out right next to them. All they did was stand around and get butchered.”
“When who starts digging?” sneered Fal. “You damn flyboys can’t dig.” The rat heaved his corpulent form upright. “Who does all the work around here, and why do we, hey, flyboy glamour-puss?”
“Work! ‘Tis ignorant of the concept you rats are!” snapped the big male bat. He called himself Eamon Jugash . . . something or other. Chip couldn’t remember. Or see the point. Bats didn’t really have decent jugs, after all.
But that was bats for you. Bats always chose mile-long pretentious names for themselves, to replace their official Society-issued numbers. What Chip principally remembered about this one was that Big Dermott had said that that particular bat was trouble. He would tell her—