Pierce heaved against the reduced weight of the man in lunar gravity, while he started working his way up the narrow pipe.
In less than a minute, Block reached up and Pierce took his hand in hers.
“Sarge, are you even trying, or am I taking your weight alone?”
“Hey fuck you, lady.” Block laughed. He jerked against Pierce’s grip and she opened her mouth to tell him to stop fucking around when his eyes met hers.
“Pierce—” Block jerked downward again. Hard enough to be ripped from Pierce’s grip.
“Block!” she yelled. The sergeant’s gloves scraped against the wall as he struggled to hold his position.
“Pierce, the fucking thing’s got my leg.”
Pierce swung her rifle around and aimed down the shaft. She couldn’t see anything beyond Block’s helmet and shoulders.
The ground vibrated and he dropped another half-meter. “Goddamn—” Block muttered. “Pierce. Get the fuck out of here. Find Wong. Find Howard and Gordinski. Gnngghh… Go! Fuck!”
Pierce strained to reach the sergeant’s hand. Like a cork popping from a bottle in reverse, he vanished into the darkness.
Her breath screeching in her ears, Pierce rolled away from the edge of the hole. The systems in her suit beeped and flashed the first warning that she was getting low on oxygen. Sobbing in terror, she crawled, pushing her rifle ahead as she went up the sloping tunnel.
“Wong? You copy?” Pierce followed the tunnel through twists and turns, dipping under smooth metallic meteorites buried deep in the regolith and climbing ridges of crystalized basalt lava.
Her suit oxygen alarm was now a steady beat, as rhythmic as her pulse and synched with her ragged breathing.
Sweat dripped into her suit, the smell of her terror growing rank in Pierce’s nostrils. She blinked furiously and kept moving.
The LUSE beacon hung in a vertical bend of the tunnel like the pendulum in a dead clock. Pierce grabbed it with both hands, almost crying with relief. She tugged on the wire cable and felt it hold. Hauling herself up, Pierce went hand over hand, letting her boots scrape against the walls as she worked her way up to the distant surface.
The rim of light in the blackness grew larger as she climbed. Pierce told herself the cascade of dust and the shaking was all in her head. The worms were not coming up behind her, digging their way through the broken rock and dust, reaching towards her boots with their tentacle tongues and grinding rows of teeth.
“Pierce? Pierce are you receiving?”
It took a moment to realize she wasn’t imagining the voice in her ear. “Wong? I’m here! The Lucy beacon. I’m coming up the line!”
“I am pleased you are safe. I will rendezvous with you in approximately forty-five seconds.”
“Okay!” Hand over hand, Pierce pulled herself upwards. The grey rocks tumbled down, bouncing off her helmet, striking her shoulders, and catching on her air tank backpack.
The edge of the pit was in reach, the wire cable sawing into the dust. Pierce reached and tried to pull herself up and out of the hole. The rim crumbled, fine lunar dust and gravel raining down on her.
“Fuck!” Pierce shook her head, clearing the worst of the regolith away from her view. A tentacle coiled around her leg. Clamping down on the dense suit material and tightening against her skin.
“Wong!” Pierce screamed. She wound her arm around the cable and tightened her grip as the worm dragged on her.
The wire dug into her sleeve and she could feel it creaking as the LUSE unit took the strain. After a moment, the tension released as the robotic vehicle slid closer to the edge. Pierce yelped as she dropped a meter deeper.
“Wong! Hurry up!” The LUSE unit moved again and a second tentacle curled around Pierce’s leg.
“Pierce! Don’t fucking move!”
“Howard?!” Pierce looked up. Two shapes crouched at the edge of the hole. One of them raised a rifle and fired. The shot gouged a furrow in the wall next to Pierce’s shoulder. She desperately twisted away, throwing herself against the other wall. Howard fired a second shot. The donut-shaped round hit the worm in its open mouth and blasted out the back of the head.
Wong seized the cable and pulled. Pierce flew upwards as the pressure was released from her legs. Wong grabbed her hand, swinging her out of the ground and landing her gently on her feet.
“It is good to see you again, Corporal Pierce.”
“You too, Wong.”
Howard was firing into the hole, a steady burst of high energy rounds. “We need to move,” Howard announced.
“I am detecting increased seismic activity,” Wong replied. “It appears further specimens are closing on our position.”
“Oh good,” Pierce muttered. “We pull out, back to the lander, now!”
“Roger that,” Howard replied.
Waves of dirt rolled across the lunar surface. Plumes of dust and dirt erupted in grey geysers, signaling multiple worms burrowing through the rock and dirt.
“Move!” Pierce yelled. She started running towards the landing pad, four hundred meters away.
A worm breached less than twenty meters from her; Pierce opened fire as she ran, her rifle counting down the shots until it buzzed the out-of-ammo alarm.
“Pierce, your oxygen alarm is sounding.” Wong ran beside her, his face set in an expression of concern.
“I can fix that at the lander. Right now, we have to keep moving!”
A silent explosion behind them rained rock and glass. Pierce kept running, Wong simply turned his head to make a visual assessment.
“Meteor shower,” he announced.
“Where’s Howard?” Pierce asked
“Close and moving on our trajectory. Satellite data indicates a severe impact event is likely to occur over the next twenty minutes.”
“How severe?” Pierce ranged the distance between herself and the lander.
“There is a reason corporate facilities are constructed under the lunar surface, Corporal,” Wong replied.
“That bad?”
“Only if you are out in the open.”
Pierce switched to a squad comms channel. “Howard! Get to the lander! We have incoming meteors!”
“Great, things were getting dull around here. Gordy, got a copy?”
The comms link crackled. A voice spoke and then dissolved into static.
“Wong, Gordinski’s alive?” Pierce felt a surge of relief. Howard and Gordy surviving was one for the good guys.
“Howard, you receiving?” Gordinski’s voice came through strong and clear.
“Gordy!? Hey! We’re receiving you,” Pierce chimed in.
“We have multiple inbound objects. The alarms are going off in here. You might want to stroll faster.”
“We are moving at maximum speed for the humans, given the conditions and mass they are carrying,” Wong replied.
“The lander is prepped for dust-off. Get your asses on board,” Gordinski said.
Like every LX-7 model orbit-to-lunar-landing vehicle, the lander was a squat box with only minimal design nods towards its ancestor aircraft. The wings were only there to provide a platform for attitude adjuster rockets. The back of the vehicle opened like a garage door, with a ramp for the on- and offloading of vehicles and personnel.
A worm breached the surface between Pierce and the lander. It dived immediately, the body spinning like a drill as it bored into the dirt. Meteors travelled so fast that they couldn’t be seen until they exploded on impact. Craters ranging from a dinner plate to a baseball diamond exploded into being. A rock hit the worm in the back. Chunks of black flesh sprayed in all directions.
“If one of those hits us—” Howard trailed off. He didn’t need to say it. Pierce knew that even a small rock would punch through an environment suit or helmet. She would be dead before the exposure to vacuum killed her.
“Where’s Block?” Gordinski asked.