by James Axler
Grant examined the opening at the far end of the cavern, allowing the sensors to judge its width. “Too small for us to fit through,” he muttered. “Looks like this is where we get out and walk.”
“Excellent,” Clem announced buoyantly. “I could do with stretching my legs.”
Grant brought the Manta around, edging it on vertical jets toward a spot against one rocky wall, away from the other docked Mantas, before bringing it to rest in the water. The water here was shallower, and Grant felt the bottom of the Manta’s hull clunk lightly against a shelf that was hidden just a few feet beneath the water’s surface. The shelf was at the perfect height to allow the Manta’s wings to rest level with the rock circle that bordered the room, as if it had been designed as a kind of docking bay for these ancient craft of Annunaki design.
As Grant eased the Manta to a resting position, Kane’s vehicle emerged from the circular pool, water streaming off its sleek lines as the red-orange light glistened off its mirror-bronzed surface.
“Docking bay,” Grant explained over the Commtact link as Kane brought his Manta out of the water, hovering in place for a few seconds.
“So I see,” Kane replied over the medium of the Commtact.
Inside his own Manta craft, hovering just a few feet above the surface of the water, Kane allowed the sensitive scanning equipment to analyze the cavern and what it could “see” beyond its walls.
“I’m picking up a nebulous reading of a lot of life-forms,” Kane stated, “but the details seem unclear.”
“It looks like a coral reef, a living habitat,” Brigid stated from behind Kane’s head, peering through the slit windows to either side of her seat. “We’re likely to find a lot of things making their homes here.”
Then, following Grant’s lead, Kane brought his Manta down on the hidden shelf that surrounded the rim of the pool, taking one last look at the area through the complex scanning equipment aboard his craft.
Once he had landed, Kane removed his helmet and opened the cockpit seal. Then he and Brigid made their way down one sloped wing of the craft and out onto the rocky border that circled the room. Already disembarked, Grant and Clem waited by the wing of their own craft while their colleagues made their way over to join them. Grant was checking the damage his vehicle had taken in the meeting with the colossal librarians, relieved to see just a few dents and scrapes. They’d been lucky.
Grant wore his favored Kevlar trenchcoat over his shadow suit, while Clem had added a padded jacket over his Cerberus jumpsuit, and he pulled the wings of the collar tight to his neck, staving off the cold of the cavern. In fact, despite being roughly twelve miles beneath the surface of the sea, the temperature in the grotto was surprisingly mild, just a little cooler than normal room temperature. Additionally, there was no breeze in the area at all, which seemed slightly peculiar for some unidentifiable reason.
The Mantas had been designed as space-faring craft, and their sensors had automatically informed their pilots that they were reentering a breathable atmosphere before opening the cockpit seals.
“At least we can breathe,” Kane said as he deeply inhaled the atmosphere through his nostrils.
“Guess the lizards didn’t like getting wet,” Grant observed sullenly as he stared around the cavern. He had never been comfortable discussing the intricacies of Annunaki society or technology.
As Brigid joined them, Grant acknowledged her with a grim nod. “Hell of a slick move back there,” Grant told her by way of thanks.
The Titian-haired woman acknowledged his thanks with a self-conscious smile before indicating the three abandoned craft within the cavern. “Someone else on the guest list?” she asked.
Clem narrowed his eyes as he looked at the docked Mantas in the pale light of the cavern. “If there is, they arrived a long time before we did,” he said. “There are barnacles on the bottoms of the hulls, see?”
The other Cerberus warriors followed Clem’s eye line, seeing the lumpy growths along the waterline of the sleek craft. The bronze metal had turned to green in ugly patches, too, and on closer examination, each craft appeared to be in a state of disrepair.
“Guess they’ve been here a while,” Kane agreed.
“Their pilots are probably long since dead, then,” Clem proposed jauntily.
“Could have been dead ten thousand years or more,” Grant said, bringing his Copperhead assault subgun out of a hidden recess in his coat, and scanning the cavern and its sole above-water entry point warily. “Still, I’d rather we keep our eyes open just in case they’re not.”
Kane powered his own weapon, the Sin Eater pistol, into his hand from its hidden wrist holster. “Annunaki live for a long time,” he reminded Clem. “Keep behind me.”
With that, Kane led the way into the entryway tunnel that led from the docking pool.
Warily, the Cerberus field team made its way from the area that they had deemed the docking bay and into a corridor that stretched off into the main area of the undersea complex. The corridor was quite narrow, too tight for all four to walk abreast, and so Kane took the lead, his Sin Eater handgun clutched ready in his right hand. Though tight, the sides of the corridor stretched quite high, towering to almost fourteen feet above them, and narrowing to an archlike point that ran along its center. It was low lit, small pods glowing an eerie blue amid the structure of the walls themselves, and the light was too erratically spaced and too dim to cast firm shadows, instead rendering everything into a vague, foggy sort of blandness. Close up, the walls and floor seemed to be made of dried coral, and Kane was struck by its uncomfortable similarity to bone.
“Feels a little like an ossuary,” Grant grumbled as he entered the corridor archway, bringing up the rear of the group. “Smells like one, too.”
Grant clutched his Copperhead assault rifle, a fiercely powerful weapon and one of his favorites when in the field, purely because of its ease of use and the sheer level of rapid destruction it could bring. The grip and trigger of the gun were placed in front of the breech in the bullpup design, allowing the weapon to be used single-handed, and an optical, image-intensified scope coupled with a laser autotargeter were mounted on top of the frame. The Copperhead possessed a 700-round-per-minute rate of fire and was equipped with an extended magazine holding thirty-five 4.85 mm steel-jacketed rounds. Besides the Copperhead subgun, Grant also wore his own Sin Eater pistol in a responsive wrist holster like Kane’s, where it could be called to his hand with the speed of thought.
Striding between the two ex-Mags, Brigid and Clem kept their wits about them, but showed more interest in the nature of the corridor itself. Clem especially was fascinated by the suggestion of sea life that he saw here. “An ossuary might not be so far from the truth,” he proposed, running a gloved hand along the wall to his left. “I rather suspect that the foundation for this structure could in fact be a skeleton.”
Kane glanced behind him for a moment, a look of irritation furrowing his brow. “It’d be one hell of a big skeleton, Clem,” he said, keeping his voice low.
“Those things we saw outside—the librarians—were creatures of exceptional magnitude,” Clem reminded Kane.
Brigid pondered the walls for a moment, keeping her pace up as she followed Kane along the eerie, softly lit corridor. “If it is a skeleton,” she said, “then it died a long, long time ago. The coral that’s grown up here looks to be several feet thick.”
Clem shrugged. “Things die all the time, Brigid,” he said.
As they continued to make their way down the corridor, their footsteps echoing softly amid the dulling sound of water, Grant spotted something from the corner of his eye. He turned, automatically bringing the Copperhead subgun around to track whatever it was that had drawn his attention.
“Everything okay, partner?” Kane called back to him, halting in his own progress. His own senses were on high alert, and something nagged at the edge of Kane’s consciousness; it felt as if he was being watched.
Grant stood stock-still fo
r a moment, his eyes narrowed as he examined the wall before him in the dim light. Its bumps and ridges were like valleys, a miniature landscape full of peaks and caves. Three feet away from where he had stopped, one of the blue lights flickered a little and then, utterly soundless, it winked out.
“Grant?” Kane asked from along the corridor.
“Fine,” Grant growled, lowering his blaster and turning away from the uneven wall.
The others began making their way along the narrow corridor, but even as Grant turned, there came a sound like needles dropping onto glass from very close to his left ear.
Grant turned, but he was almost too late to see the thing in the semidarkness. Something skittered across the surface of the coral, something no bigger than Grant’s fist and with an abundance of long, whirring legs that propelled it along at incredible speed. “Whoa!” Grant cried as, in flinch reaction, he leaped back from the wall.
His companions turned at their friend’s outburst and saw him jump sideways until he met with the wall on the other side of the narrow corridor. Grant spun then, looking left and right at the wall he had automatically propelled himself against. “There’s something alive here,” he shouted to Kane and the others.
Chapter 15
Kane raised his Sin Eater before him as he trotted back down the tight corridor to meet with Grant.
Brigid Baptiste gave Clem a reassuring look as she pulled a TP-9 from the holster she wore slung low to her hip. “Stay behind us, Clem,” she said. “You’ll be safe.”
Clem nodded agreement, keeping his distance as he followed Brigid’s slender form retreating down the corridor.
“What did you see?” Kane demanded as he pulled up beside Grant. As he spoke, another of the dull blue lights winked out behind them, casting the corridor into ever-deepening gloom.
“Only saw it for a second but it looked like some kind of spider,” Grant explained. “Lot of legs and it moved real fast.”
“How big?” Kane asked.
“About—” Grant began, then he saw another movement as something leaped from the craggy surface of the wall. “Shit!”
Whatever it was, it had jumped the gap between the wall and Kane, and the ex-Mag spun as he felt it land upon his back. “What the—?”
Without stopping to think, Grant swung the Copperhead around, jabbing with its butt at the skittering creature that was scrambling over Kane’s shoulder. The creature dropped to the floor. Grant and Kane watched, disgusted, as the hand-size creature disappeared into a nook in the uneven coral surface of the floor, its long, spindly legs disappearing from sight.
“What was it?” Brigid asked as she caught up to her partners.
“I don’t know,” Kane admitted. “We’re thinking spider maybe.”
Brigid looked from Kane to Grant, conscious of the weight of the TP-9 in her own hand and how ridiculous the three of them had to look at that moment. The TP-9 was a compact semiautomatic, a bulky handgun with the grip set just off center beneath the barrel and a covered targeting scope across the top, all finished in molded matte black. To point it at a spider was very much like using the proverbial sledgehammer to crack a nut. Feeling foolish, Brigid eased her grip on the bulky pistol, relaxing from her ready stance.
Clem joined the three Cerberus warriors an instant later. “Where did it go?” he asked.
“Little bugaboo found a hole or crevice or something,” Kane told him, toeing the ground with his boot, “just about there.”
Clem crouched down on his haunches, his dark eyes furiously scanning the lumpy ground.
“You want to be careful there, Clem,” Grant warned.
Clem looked up, and there was such a look of open fascination on his face that he seemed like a child on Christmas morning. “This could be a new form of life,” he said enthusiastically. “It’s our duty to catalog and—”
Grant shook his head. “You must be mistaking us with someone else, Bryant. We go in, we get the job done and then we get the fuck out of here. Right now I’m really looking forward to getting to point C in that list—you read me?”
Clem sighed, resigning himself to the facts at hand. “The mission comes first,” he agreed, pushing himself back to a standing position. “But it does rather go against my ethos.”
“Well,” Kane growled, “it wasn’t your ethos that got crawled on now, was it?”
Clem was about to respond when the spiderlike creature reappeared from a gap in the floor, and Grant shoved him to one side as he swung the Copperhead assault weapon to bear.
“Grant, no!” Clem shouted, but his instruction—or perhaps it had been a warning—came too late.
Grant unleashed a blast from the Copperhead, and a smattering of lethal 4.85 mm bullets peppered the ground about their feet, their explosion bright in the semidarkness of the corridor. The weird creature was instantaneously reduced to a messy pulp as one of Grant’s bullets drilled through its hard carapace. It lay there in a pool of its own fluids, a milky-colored ooze leaking from the remains of its body as its legs twitched. Although it had been mashed up by Grant’s bullet, enough of it remained that the Cerberus warriors could define its basic anatomy. It was roughly seven inches across, both length and width, in an almost perfectly circular form. The body itself was a dangling two-inch oval amid the spray of long, needle-thin legs, and milky ooze seeped from a ruined area at its back left edge as the legs finally stilled. There were eight legs in all, a neutral color like the body, the color of frosted glass. It made no noise, just continued to bubble in place as its white lifeblood seeped away into the uneven floor of the corridor, washing away in thin runnels as the liquid sought the path of least resistance.
“You were right,” Brigid said to no one in particular. “It does look like a spider. Could be a crab of some sort. What do you think, Clem?” she asked, turning to the oceanographer.
Clem’s eyes were fixed on a point just behind Brigid, a little way over her head. “Whatever it is, I think we’re about to get better acquainted, Miss Baptiste,” he said in a quiet, awestruck voice.
Brigid turned, as did Kane and Grant, automatically bringing their blasters to bear on the place Clem indicated. Up there, skittering along the walls and high arch of the roof, more of the glass-colored creatures were moving, their numbers lost to the darkness of the corridor. In the halfhearted blue light from the walls, it looked like a hundred needle-thin fingers reaching out from the walls at Grant, pointing at him in accusation.
“Clem,” Kane asked, not bothering to look behind him, “best guess here—are these things likely to be deadly?”
Although Clem had never seen the creatures until today, his expertise was sufficient to extrapolate a reasonable risk assessment in a couple of seconds. “The ocean is full of numerous things that can be poisonous—and often fatal—to human beings. I’d suggest we don’t touch their blood until we know what’s in it.”
As a hundred spiderlike creatures skittered across the walls, moving in a radial pattern toward the Cerberus heroes, Kane became aware of more movements at his sides, behind and all around him. He glanced briefly to the side and saw more of the spiny creatures emerging from crevices in the coral wall, their spindly legs reaching out as they clambered into view, even as another of the dull blue wall lights winked out. As Kane turned back to the mass of creatures at his rear, yet another of the ocean blue lights blinked out, plunging another chunk of the corridor into darkness in the direction of the docking bay.
“Let’s keep going,” Kane decided, his gun twitching this way and that as he spotted more of the ugly arachnids moving about the walls and skittering along the floor. “Baptiste, you’re on point.”
Brigid grabbed Clem by the elbow and hurried him down the corridor in the direction they had been going before Grant had stopped.
Three steps later and another of the ineffective blue lights fizzled out, leaving an increasing length of the corridor ahead of them in darkness, as was the whole of the tunnel length behind them. Clem slowed his pace
, but Brigid urged him on.
“Come on, Clem, let’s keep moving,” Brigid insisted.
Clem looked at her, and Brigid saw his eyes flash in the eerie nonlight of the narrow corridor. “I don’t relish walking into a situation blind,” he said, though it was a practical concern rather than through any suggestion of fear on his part.
Even as Clem said it, bright beams of light appeared from behind him—first one, then two, as Grant and Kane flipped on their xenon-beam flashlights. Suddenly the whole of the narrow corridor was bathed in brilliance, the xenon beams the equivalent of five thousand candles of power.
It wasn’t an improvement.
The bumpy, misshapen walls appeared to be alive with movement, the glistening, spiderlike creatures skittering across their surfaces as they reared away from the bright lights. On the floor, too, dozens of multi-legged creatures scurried for cover, clambering over the uneven floor as they vied for space. As Brigid watched, more of the creatures emerged, their pencil-thin legs wrapping around the ridges in the floor as they reared up, peering at the intruders.
“Kane…” Brigid began uncertainly.
“I see them, Baptiste,” Kane said from behind her. “Let’s hope that if we just ignore them—”
Kane didn’t get the chance to finish his sentence. One of the spiderlike monstrosities disengaged from the wall before him and flew at his face, propelled through the air by a powerful leap, its spindly legs waving before it like a snapping claw.
Kane ducked, but as he did so things took a further turn for the worse. The leaping creature seemed to throw something at Kane, either spit or secreted through some other orifice, and a thin spurt of yellow-white liquid dashed through the air, whizzing just over his head.
To one side, Grant followed the little creature with the nose of his blaster as it dropped to the floor just behind Kane, its leap propelling it past its target. Without hesitation, he blasted off another round from the Copperhead close-assault weapon, reducing the fast-moving creature to a messy pool of goo and quivering legs.