And Angus came in the Linus Highway. Which means he'll more than likely come out the same way. But she couldn't be sure of that — he'd kept one entrance hidden, who knew if there were more? She couldn't afford to wait for him and take the chance he had another way out. She had to get him, and get him as soon as fucking possible.
Her new plan was to head to the Dense Mass, see if the Marco/Polo picked anything up, and hopefully find a creature there. She had to find a creature, if nothing else, or she'd never return to her destiny, never return to the NSA.
Kayla moved down the Linus Highway, leaving the Little Prick's prints behind.
Randy stared, mouth agape, nearly in shock. There were so many silverbugs the walls seemed to shimmer with living platinum. Angus and Randy moved forward at an agonizingly slow pace. They watched every step to make sure they didn't tread on one of the scrambled silverbugs, a task made difficult by the vast number of spidery machines. Hundreds, perhaps even thousands, coated the deep alcove, a cluster so thick the wall writhed with their spindly legs, and the air resonated with unending clicks and whirs. Headlamps played off this wiggling platinum wall as Angus and Randy's eyes tried to focus on the mass of metallic bodies.
"What are they doing?” Randy asked in a whisper, his anger toward Angus forgotten in light of the phenomenon.
"I have no idea,” Angus said. “It's hard to tell with the scramblers on."
Randy watched the silverbugs swarm like maggots on a week-old dog carcass — there had to be a purpose to such a gathering. The scramblers, of course, negated this purpose, and the silverbugs just ambled meaninglessly on the wall. Some of them grew so confused they simply fell off and clattered heavily on the floor. They rolled on their round backs until their legs reversed themselves, allowing the silverbug to move on just as aimlessly as before.
"Do you think it's dangerous to go in there?” Randy felt the adrenaline pump as his fight-or-flight response subconsciously screamed, yet he — like Angus — never slowed his steady forward pace.
"Probably,” Angus said absently, nodding his head and moving forward. “There's got to be a reason for this swarming."
They both stopped ten feet from the alcove's end, a wall covered so deeply with silverbugs it was impossible to see the stone beneath. It reminded Randy of baby wolf spiders clinging thickly to their mother's back.
"If this is the end of the cave, what the heck are they doing?” Randy asked.
Angus turned to Randy, a solemn look on his face.
"There's only one way to find out,” he said. He held up the scrambler. “We're never going to know unless we turn it off."
Randy looked at the scrambler, feeling his pulse race even higher. He looked at Angus. They shared a moment of unspoken understanding. They both realized the silverbugs mass could swarm over them instantly. If the machines possessed any ability to hurt people, sheer numbers would probably mean a quick and painful death. Despite the threat, they both had to know what these machines were doing.
Randy nodded quickly. Angus switched off the scrambler.
The silverbugs stopped milling aimlessly for a second, every one of them suddenly holding very still, not moving a leg, not making a single noise. The drastic shift from constant noise into total silence scared Randy far worse than the horrible, swarming platinum walls. It was as if the silverbugs were thinking, recalibrating, trying to remember their purpose in the world. Then, almost as soon as they'd stopped, the deafening drone of a thousand silverbugs returned full force as the machines burst into motion. The wall writhed with activity, machines moving so fast Randy couldn't focus on a single one for more than a second. A new sound joined the familiar clicking — the rapid-fire popping, chipping sound of breaking rock.
Angus and Randy stood stock still, feeling silverbugs crawl over their feet and surround their legs. The machines ignored the humans, seemingly too bent on their task to realize interlopers stood tall in their midst.
During the flurry of activity a bare patch opened, small, but enough that they could see the rock beyond the sheet of living platinum. A silverbug wandered onto the patch, long spindly legs carrying him safely across his brethren. It lowered its wedge-shaped head to the stone. The wedge suddenly shot into the wall, breaking off a small, jagged chunk of rock the size of a marble. Tiny, whirling wires whipped from the wedge, lashing over the top of the small rock, pinning it in place. The silverbug turned away from the alcove's end and walked along the wall, carrying its small burden. It moved toward the main tunnel, turned the corner, and disappeared from sight.
Randy stood thoughtless, stunned into silence. Angus didn't move an inch, but his face showed an expression of incredulity. They stared at the scene before them, the final piece of a puzzle clicking home with the weight of a billion-ton cave-in.
"They dug the whole thing,” Angus said. “Thousands of years. There's over a thousand square miles of tunnels and caverns. Billions of tons of rock."
"One rock at a time,” Randy said, his stunned mind trying to run massive calculations of weight and mass and size. “One little rock at a time."
Angus turned the scrambler back on. The droning static screech filled the cavern — instantly the silverbug's cohesive activity eroded into a massive, meaningless wander. A mass of them fell away from the wall, domino-like, exposing the rock beneath.
A ten-inch by ten-inch panel, filled with faces. Fresh carvings of faces. Lybrand. Mack. Connell. O'Doyle. Veronica Reeves. Sanji Haak. Angus. Randy. That was the first panel. The second panel showed Angus and Randy moving through a tunnel, every last detail of their helmets and KoolSuits etched perfectly into the stone. There were more panels… blank panels. But they'd both seen carvings elsewhere in the cave, and they knew what was supposed to come next.
"Let's get the fuck out of here,” Angus said. Randy nodded violently in agreement.
The two left the alcove much faster than they'd come in.
Luckily the rocktopi made a lot of noise, otherwise Connell figured he would already be chopped into tiny pieces. Silverbugs still wandered about aimlessly, clogging the floor, making it difficult to move fast over the already-unsure footing. He'd never seen this many in one place before; they practically covered the ground and fell off the walls and ceiling like flaking paint from a dead house.
Connell chanced a glance over his shoulder.
The apple-rot/dog crap stink billowed through the tunnel like putrid breath from a dying man riddled with Black Death. The rocktopi screeched and filled the air with the rustling hiss of their rough skin on rocks and sand. They flashed angry, violent colors that lit the walls in psychotic discotheque strobes — an image of a blinking Christmas tree shoved into a shit-strewn sewer pipe flared through Connell's mind.
That the silverbugs milled without purpose encouraged him, for it meant Angus and the others were close. He didn't know if he could make it. His knee pumped pain like a geyser and his back screamed with every jolting step. For the third time in the last minute the thought of self-sacrifice blared through his mind. He could turn and fight, hopefully buying Sanji and Veronica time to get away. Veronica's hand grabbed his arm and pulled him forward, as if she heard his thoughts through a blaring stereo.
"Come on, Connell! Don't let these fuckers get us!"