“Mister Salvatore? We are proper military. Bought and paid for by the same board of directors who sent you and your colleagues up here.”
“Have you killed them all?”
“Killed who, Mister Salvatore?”
“Minhocão,” came the hissed reply.
“I don’t know what that means, sir.”
“They burrow through the ground. The drilling, it brought them to the surface.”
“What are you talking about, Mister Salvatore?”
“They will kill you! Just like they killed everyone else!” Salvatore’s voice broke into high-pitched giggles. Pierce clicked off the intercom connection and shivered.
Backing down the corridor, she turned to follow Block and Wong. Her gaze swept over the room where the bodies had been dumped. Wong had tidied up, sorting the remains from the tangled pile they were in and laying them out in orderly rows.
Pierce stopped and stared at the floor. The thick rivers of blood that flowed from the corpses had frozen in the absolute zero of open space.
The bodies should have frozen too; the liquid leaking out of the gaping wounds welding the corpses together like slabs of hamburger in a blast freezer.
Pierce walked into the room, breathing in slow, shallow breaths. Even though she was carrying her own atmosphere, she could imagine the smell and that made her nauseous.
Sinking into a crouch, Pierce picked up a soft and floppy piece of meat. A clear gel-like resin dripped from it. Anti-freeze?
The ground shuddered again. Pierce thrust her hands out to keep herself from plunging face-first into the nearest body.
“Pierce, you okay?” Block came through her comms unit.
“Five by five, Sarge.” She straightened up and checked her rifle was clean.
“That one was definitely closer,” Block said. “How is our civilian?”
“He’s fine. Scared and, well talking crazy. But he seems okay where he is for now.”
“Hold your position, we’re on—” Block’s transmission collapsed into static as the ground shuddered again with renewed violence.
“Sarge?” Pierce reached up and touched the side of her helmet to improve the audio connection. It was an instinctive gesture but a futile one. “Sarge?” The comms link remained quiet.
Pierce left the room, her rifle leading the way as she moved down the corridor. The ceiling had collapsed, filling the passage with drifts of lunar dirt and rock. Pierce pushed the dirt away until she had excavated a narrow crawl space. Her helmet and air tanks scraped against rock as she wriggled through. Her progress ground to a halt when she was barely half way. Pierce scratched at the dirt with her hands and then froze as the ground vibrated around her. The dirt cascaded down, allowing Pierce to crawl out of the narrow gap and sending her rolling down the slope on the other side.
A dark shape with glistening black skin like a whale slid past a ragged hole in the wall. The clear gel scraped off the smooth hide, the drops leaving wet tracks in the fresh dust.
“Sarge!” Pierce yelled into her comms unit. She crawled backwards, away from the thing that continued to pass uninterrupted.
“Pierce? What is your situation?” Block barked in her ear.
“There’s something alive over here,” Pierce replied.
“Another survivor?”
“Sarge, I think it’s some kind of animal. It’s alive,” she added, feeling the need to clarify the point.
“Hold position. We’re en route to you.”
Pierce could hear Block running and yelling for Korbin to move with him. She stood, straining to feel any vibration, trying to hear, even though there was no atmosphere to carry a sound. Pierce touched the dripping gel with a heavy gloved finger. It hadn’t frozen in the vacuum of space. Just like the goo on the mutilated bodies.
The ruptured wall panel revealed a circular tunnel that sloped sharply downward. Something was in there. Pierce did not imagine things. She observed and analyzed.
No indicators of life had ever been found on the moon. Nothing in the water, nothing in the thick layer of dust and rock on the moon’s surface. In the hard vacuum, nothing eroded under the influence of wind or water. Footprints from the first men to set foot on this tiny globe were still out there, unchanged in nearly one hundred years.
Pierce moved her gaze slowly, assessing and cataloguing the signs. The clear gel glistened on the tunnel walls. The shape that passed her had ground through the dry stone at a phenomenal speed and left no waste in its wake.
When the squad had landed, they passed over a field of wreckage. The scattered debris showed the violence of an explosion that had ripped open the utility domes on the surface of the mostly underground facility. Now, this far underground, something had impacted the wall, tearing a hole too large for the emergency response systems to patch. Explosive decompression had done the rest. Sudden exposure to vacuum would not have inflicted the kinds of wounds they saw on the bodies. It also would not have piled the dead up in a single room. The loss of atmosphere meant that the tunnels either reached the surface or had enough volume to suck the air right out of the sealed environment.
Pierce noted the swirling grooves cut into the rock. It looked like rifling on the interior of an antique rifle barrel.
She shivered and turned carefully in the hardsuit. Looking both ways into the bored tunnel.
“Pierce, you gotta copy?” Block’s voice crackled through heavy static.
“Go Sarge.”
“Korbin and I are closing on your position. Any change in the survivor’s condition?”
The ground shuddered again. Pierce fell face forward and scrambled to lift her head as a wall of dust exploded silently out of the tunnel next to the corridor.
“He’s secure.” Pierce hoped it was true. Pierce rolled onto her back, arms and legs waving like a pale four-limbed beetle.
The floor bulged, and the panels burst out of their frames. A gigantic black worm emerged from the dust. From the ground to the top of the head that rippled with a peristaltic convulsion, the bullet-shaped creature stood over six feet.
Pierce wiped the dust away from her helmet with one gloved hand and stared, fascinated. This thing, exploring the cold vacuum around them, was clearly alive. How it could survive in open space was beyond her understanding.
The featureless head split open in four triangular segments, revealing row upon row of inward pointing teeth. A snake-like tentacle flicked from its mouth like a whip. Four other tentacles lashed from the worm’s gullet, striking the ground, the twisted floor panels, and one slapping against Pierce’s faceplate. She squirmed backwards, trying to see through the goo-smeared visor. Any sound the worm might make would not travel in vacuum. The only noise Pierce could hear was the panicked rasp of her own breathing.
Raising her rifle, she slammed the safety into the OFF position and fired. The firing mechanism ratcheted a donut-shaped round up from the magazine. The projectile accelerated down the barrel, reaching the speed of sound in a pico-second. One-thousandth of a moment later it left the muzzle of the rifle at Mach-2. The impact on the slug-like body was silent but explosive. The ring shot tore through the alien’s flesh, exploded through the back of it, and punched into the ceiling.
The worm thrashed its bulk. Mouth parts slammed shut and then flicked open. Its tentacle tongues flailed wildly. Pierce fired again and again, moving her aiming point to different parts of the worm’s head and tearing the thing into large black chunks of steaming meat. After four rounds, the worm collapsed. The moisture rising from its body froze immediately. Only the anti-freeze gel still dripped from the jagged wounds and mouth parts.
Pierce got to her feet, alarms in her suit systems warning that she was hyperventilating. The beams of her personal lights played on the destroyed corridor. Pierce focused on controlling her breathing and waited while Block and Korbin emerged from the darkness.