Scramblers, everywhere. A seething infestation squirming across the walls, reaching out for the intruder, leaping into the lumen of the passageway to press their counterattack.
Not against us. They had attacked one of their own. I'd seen three of its arms ripped off before it had disappeared into a writhing ball in the center of the passageway.
We fled. I turned to Bates—Did you see—but held my tongue. The deathly concentration on her face was unmistakable even across two faceplates and three meters of methane. According to HUD she'd lobotomized both grunts, bypassed all that wonderful autonomous decision-making circuitry entirely. She was running both machines herself, as manually as marionettes.
Grainy turbulent echoes appeared on the rear sonar display. The scramblers had finished with their sacrifice. Now they were coming after us. My grunt stumbled and careened against the side of the passage. Jagged shards of alien décor dug parallel gouges across my faceplate, tenderized chunks of thigh through the shielded fabric of my suit. I clenched down on a cry. It got out anyway. Some ridiculous in-suit alarm chirped indignantly an instant before a dozen rotten eggs broke open inside my helmet. I coughed. My eyes stung and watered in the reek; I could barely see Seiverts on the HUD, flashing instantly into the red.
Bates drove us on without a word.
My faceplate healed enough to shut off the alarm. My air began to clear. The scramblers had gained; by the time I could see clearly again they were only a few meters behind us. Up ahead Sascha came into view around the bend, Sascha who had no backup, whose other cores had all been shut down on Sarasti's orders. Susan had protested at first—
"If there's any opportunity to communicate—"
"There won't be," he'd said.
— so there was Sascha who was more resistant to Rorschach's influence according to some criterion I never understood, curled up in a fetal ball with her gloves clamped against her helmet and I could only hope to some dusty deity that she'd set the trap before this place had got to her. And here came the scramblers, and Bates was shouting "Sascha! Get out of the fucking way!" and braking hard, way too soon, the scrambling horde nipping at our heels like a riptide and Bates yelled "Sascha!" again and finally Sascha moved, kicked herself into gear and off the nearest wall and fled right back up the hole we'd blown in through. Bates yanked some joystick in her head and our warrior sedans slewed and shat sparks and bullets and dove out after her.
Sascha had set the trap just within the mouth of the breach. Bates armed it in passing with the slap of one gloved hand. Motion sensors were supposed to do the rest— but the enemy was close behind, and there was no room to spare.
It went off just as I was emerging into the vestibule. The cannon net shot out behind me in a glorious exploding conic, caught something, snapped back up the rabbit hole and slammed into my grunt from behind. The recoil kicked us against the top of the vestibule so hard I thought the fabric would tear. It held, and threw us back against the squirming things enmeshed in our midst.
Writhing backbones everywhere. Articulated arms, lashing like bony whips. One of them entwined my leg and squeezed like a brick python. Bates' hands waved in a frantic dance before me and that arm came apart into dismembered segments, bouncing around the enclosure.
This was all wrong. They were supposed to be in the net, they were supposed to be contained…
"Sascha! Launch!" Bates barked. Another arm separated from its body and careened into the wall, coiling and uncoiling.
The hole had flooded with aerosol foam-core as soon as we'd pulled the net. A scrambler writhed half-embedded in that matrix, caught just a split-second too late; its central mass protruded like some great round tumor writhing with monstrous worms.
"SASCHA!"
Artillery. The floor of the vestibule irised shut quick as a leg-hold trap and everything slammed against it, grunts, people, scramblers whole and in pieces. I couldn't breathe. Every thimbleful of flesh weighed a hundred kilograms. Something slapped us to one side, a giant hand batting an insect. Maybe a course correction. Maybe a collision.
But ten seconds later we were weightless again, and nothing had torn us open.
We floated like mites in a ping-pong ball, surrounded by a confusion of machinery and twitching body parts. There was little of anything that might pass for blood. What there was floated in clear, shuddering spherules. The cannon net floated like a shrink-wrapped asteroid in our midst. The things inside had wrapped their arms around themselves, around each other, curled into a shivering and unresponsive ball. Compressed methonia hissed around them, keeping them fresh for the long trip home.
"Holy shit," Sascha breathed, watching them. "The bloodsucker called it."
He hadn't called everything. He hadn't called a mob of multiarmed aliens ripping one of their own to pieces before my eyes. He hadn't seen that coming.
Or at least, he hadn't mentioned it.
I was already feeling nauseous. Bates was carefully bringing her wrists together. For a moment I could barely make out a taut dark thread of freakwire, fine as smoke, between them. Her caution was well-advised; that stuff would slice through human limbs as easily as alien ones. One of the grunts groomed its mouthparts at her shoulder, cleaning gore from its mandibles.
The freakwire vanished from my sight. Sight itself was dimming, now. The inside of this great lead balloon was going dark around me. We were coasting, purely ballistic. We had to trust that Scylla would swoop in and snatch us once we'd achieved a discreet distance from the scene of the crime. We had to trust Sarasti.
That was getting harder by the hour. But he'd been right so far. Mostly.
"How do you know?" Bates had asked when he'd first laid out the plan. He hadn't answered. Chances are he couldn't have, not to us, any more than a baseline could have explained brane theory to the inhabitants of Flatland. But Bates hadn't been asking about tactics anyway, not really. Maybe she'd been asking for a reason, for something to justify this ongoing trespass into foreign soil, the capture and slaughter of its natives.
On one level she already knew the reason, of course. We all did. We could not afford to merely react. The risks were too great; we had to preempt. Sarasti, wise beyond all of us, saw this more clearly than we. Amanda Bates knew he was right in her mind—but perhaps she didn't feel it in her gut. Perhaps, I thought as my vision failed, she was asking Sarasti to convince her.
But that wasn't all she was doing.
Imagine you are Amanda Bates.
The control you wield over your troops would give wet dreams and nightmares to generals of ages past. You can drop instantly into the sensorium of anyone under your command, experience the battlefield from any number of first-person perspectives. Your every soldier is loyal unto death, asking no questions, obeying all commands with alacrity and dedication to which mere flesh could never even aspire. You don't just respect a chain of command: you are one.
You are a little bit scared of your own power. You are a little bit scared of the things you've already done with it.
Taking orders comes as naturally as giving them. Oh, you've been known to question policy on occasion, or seek a bigger picture than may be strictly necessary for the job at hand. Your command initiative has become the stuff of legends. But you have never disobeyed a direct order. When asked for your perspective, you serve it straight up and unvarnished— until the decision is made, and the orders handed down. Then you do your job without question. Even when questions arise, you would hardly waste time asking them unless you expected an answer you could use.
Why, then, demand analytical details from a vampire?