The one exception was Doc. The pedant-rat eyed Nym beadily and said: “Dolt. You forget the overriding precedence of epistemology.”
Nym stared back at him. For some odd reason, Doc never irritated Nym the way he did everyone else.
“Huh?” Chip looked at him, puzzled.
Doc sniffed. “In layman’s terms—” He pointed at the roof with a stubby rat digit. “The enemy is coming.”
There was instant silence. Then someone said: “Fighters, too, from the sound of ’em. Lots of Maggot-scorps. They must have smelled us . . .”
“Out of the way.” Bronstein waddled forward, moving as clumsily as the bats always did on the ground. She carried one of the bombardier-bats’ small satchel-charges in her wing-claws. “I’ll blow the roof and we’ll run.”
“Give it,” said Pistol. “I’ll shove it up the air hole. I can move faster than you.”
“Okay. I’ll put the timer on seven seconds. When she blows, be ready to run. Chip, you take that bag over there. There’s half a platoon’s worth of spare bat-mines in it. We might need them.”
* * *
The debris was still falling when the surviving platoon members—one human, five bats, and seven rats—scrambled out of the hole.
They found themselves inside a roofed-over but plainly incomplete Magh’ tunnel. It was cathedral high and filled with a tracery of mud beams at angles that were . . . wrong to the human eye. Maggots didn’t work in straight lines or precise angles. The material resembled adobe, but the Maggot version was a lot stronger.
” ‘Ware Maggots!” In the pallid greenish light of Maggot lumifungus on the walls, Chip could see a column of the scorpion-digger Magh’ skittering closer down the passage. The bats were already flapping upwards in the high tunnel. At least they’d have a chance, now that they had flying room.
” . . . Off to Dublin in the green! Our bayonets a-gleamin’ in the sun!” shrieked Eamon, diving on the Maggot-scorp column. He wasn’t going to run . . . or fly from the enemy. The big male bat might be dead set on treating humans like shit, but he liked to fight, especially against the odds.
Well, Chip knew bats were like that. Crazy. After brewing up the cyber-enhanced rats, the genetic engineers at the New Fabian Society’s labs had tried for more heroic and idealistic helpers for mankind’s war when the bats’ soft-cyber units were downloaded. They had put Irish revolutionary songs and old “Wobbly” tunes into the bats’ vocabulary memory units.
Truth to tell, the bats were more idealistic and courageous than the rats. A lot more. But, in Chip’s opinion, they were even more off-the-wall. And they were prone to endless political theorizing and disputation.
The rats claimed it came from hanging upside down and getting too much blood to the head—not to mention abstaining from drink and having sex only once a year or so. Chip thought the problem might be simpler. The bats didn’t know if their enemies were the humans or the Maggots. (Neither did the rats, he suspected—but, ratlike, they didn’t worry much about anything beyond the next moment.)
As always, however, the Maggots solved the problem. Magh’ had no doubt at all who their enemies were—everybody else. Chip and the rats ran . . . well, like rats. There had to be some way out of here, surely?
Eventually they bolted down a twisting side tunnel, and then rushed back out again, nearly falling over each other in their haste. One of the biggest Maggots that Chip had ever seen had been coming the other way. Chip’d seen a lot of varieties . . . he thought he’d seen them all, but this was a new one. He reckoned the grunts ‘ud call this one “Maggot-mutha.”
“This way!” called Bronstein, as they boiled out of the tunnel mouth. Fluttering ahead of them, she led them into another narrow opening off the main Maggot-way. This time there was no huge Maggot in it. An explosion behind them briefly hardened their slowshields.
“That was one smart bat-move, Bronstein,” groused Chip, in the aftermath. The bat had dropped the archway of Magh’ adobe behind them with a well-placed satchel-limpet mine. Chip looked around the tiny irregular-walled chamber that was left to them. “This is a goddamn dead end! We’re trapped in here!”