Still, he was more afraid of what would be waiting for him in the cavern than of suffocation.
He must have slept, because he regained consciousness with cold, fresh air filling his lungs painfully. The nanotech machines had chewed through the wall of the air chamber. The young man scooted forward and pushed his eyes close to the tiny opening.
His angle of ascent had been precise. He was just outside the cavern at exactly the right place—within a few feet of the trickle of the water.
Fifteen minutes later, the opening was large enough for him to wiggle through, but first he scooped up the goo that contained the nanotech machines and applied it to the walls in a new place, redirecting the angle of ascent. A mile above them at an eighty-one-degree angle was another cavern and their next scheduled pit stop.
The young man stifled the pain. Touching the goo provided the machines with organic matter, which they chewed right off of his fingers. Leave them on too long and the machines would remove his skin as effectively as dipping them in a caustic acid.
He listened, but not for long. He was so used to the silence of the earth that the trickle of the water was loud to him. Every once in a while he heard a spatter, which startled him until he was sure it was just the stream.
When he emerged from the rock, his legs wouldn’t hold him upright, so he crawled to the trickle and filled his canteens. He groped in the pool and found his emergency pack, stowed there many months ago.
Water splashed on his neck and he almost cried out. What was dripping on him?
Then he heard the sound of water splashing against stone far above, and he remembered the layout of the cavern. Some sort of intersecting vein of hard stone formed a wall alongside the tall shaft where the trickle had eaten away the limestone. It was like a bent and arthritic finger the way it distended up into the earth. He was scheduled to intersect the apex of the shaft again in thirty-six hours.
Only after crawling back into his rock cell, and only after the detritus of the excavation began to rebury the opening into the cavern did he dare to turn on the tiny compressor.
The sound was like the muted whir of a table saw, but it filled the tiny cell in the rock and sang through the earth.
Maybe he was too far away for them to hear it this time. Maybe they never came this close to the surface …
Then he heard the answering trumpet, which shook the limestone walls. Soon there was the scratching of giant claws against the rock, coming closer. They were using the tunnels he had made himself, when he first dug in to the cavern in his earth drill. They would be here in no time. With his teeth grinding from the tension, he ran the compressor until it filled the air tanks, and seconds later the nanotech machines covered the opening into the cavern with their detritus. Still he could hear the creatures that were coming up from the deep earth to find him.
They weren’t albinos. The albinos were weak and stupid and contemptible. These things had never even shown themselves, but he heard them and he knew they were less human than the albinos.
They were getting closer. The loose pile of rock at the rear of his coffin was getting thicker, but slowly. The young man decided to increase the speed of the excavation. He wiped at the liquid smear at the front of the rock, collecting it into a smaller area, and the excavation continued in the tightest possible space. The young man slithered ahead at almost a foot a minute, dragging the air tanks along between his legs on the leather belt while the limestone walls squeezed him so close he couldn’t take a deep breath.
He started laughing when he felt the digging below him. They had come to his cavern and found the loose earth of his little tunneling operation. Whatever they were—and his mind conjured wild visions—they were far too large to use his tunnels, no matter how loose the packed stone powder fill was that he left behind him. They had to dig up to him.
They were closer than last time. They would dig, and they just might reach him. He listened to the sound of the scraping claws.
He began to shiver, despite the hundred-degree heat. He estimated the progress of his pursuers and his own speed and calculated his odds of escape.
The odds weren’t good.
He calculated the odds of suffocating himself before they reached him. Again, not good. His air wouldn’t run out in time. His mind spun out of control as he thought of some other way of ending his life before they reached him; anything was better than letting them reach him. The nanotech robots were of no use. They would feed for only a short time on his flesh before their fermentation tanks were full of organic material. It wouldn’t be enough to kill him. Was there a way to use the compressor to inject himself with high-pressure air and cause a reasonably quick death? No way he could think of with the tools he had on hand.
His only option was to make a run for it. He wriggled onto his stomach, slithered to the front and wiped together the nanotech goo into an even smaller area. The tunnel grew faster but the young man could barely move forward, the rock compressing his rib cage. His arms cried out in pain. He was forced to keep them distended ahead of him to elongate his torso and to keep from disturbing the tiny, glowing line of fluid. It contained swimming nanotech machines transporting excavated stone to the rear of the hot, bullet-shaped hollow.
The grinding from below grew more intense. Those creatures were scratching out their own tunnel as fast as they could, and closing in.
The young man knew he wouldn’t make it. There was no way he could outrun them. The air became hotter when his tube passed into a granite layer, which crumbled less. The increased hardness of the rock made no difference to the nanotech machines, but the unforgiving texture of the granite was too much for the young man. He began to feel claustrophobic again, for the first time in weeks. The madness of his situation danced wickedly in his unstable mind. He chuckled at his own helplessness, feeling both horror and relief.
Those things would finally get him. His ordeal would soon end. He would be devoured, surely. Just as the albinos chomped up the blind cavefish. That was funny. He laughed some more, then choked because he didn’t have enough room for the deep breaths that laughing required.
When he stopped laughing, the scratching of stone below him had stopped. He was no longer being pursued.
Then it hit him. The granite strata was the answer. It was nothing to the self-sharpening teeth of the nanotech machines, but maybe it had foiled the creatures that were after him.
Hours later, his route of excavation closed in on the apex of the chamber. Here he was supposed to break through again and refill the air tanks. He had to do it, or he would suffocate. The next pit stop was a long way off.
Regardless of the danger, he was too intrigued to not take the opportunity to see what had chased him for as long as he could remember.
When the machines broke through the stone, he allowed them to create a hole in the rock too small for his thumb to fit through. That was enough to let in the air of the chamber, and it was enough for him to look through.
He saw only darkness.
He smelled something animal.
The disappointment was too much to bear. He must know what these things were.
“Hello down there!”
Talking to himself had kept his voice in good shape. It was answered with a distant screech. The creatures had given up on him and were already miles away. It didn’t take them long to return to the cavern, snarling as they swarmed in from the tunnel.
They carried wadded-up balls of glowing matter. It was enough to reveal them for what they were.
What they were was unlike anything that the young man had seen before.