“Look out!” I shouted as I grabbed for the pistol bolstered at my side. Adena ducked instinctively as the brute rushed toward her. I fired and hit him in the face. He howled and went down, the crystal spear shattering as it hit the cave floor.
There was no time for more explanations. More of the enemy were rushing at us from out of the darkness at the rear of the cave. Adena picked up a rifle and cut them down. I covered her with my pistol. The two of us stood them off for what seemed like hours, but actually was no more than a few minutes. Suddenly their attack melted away into the shadows. Four of the hulking brutes lay dead at our feet.
“They’ve found a way to get into the cave from the rear,” I said, forcing my breath and heartbeat back to normal.
“Or made one,” Adena replied. “We don’t have much time. They’ll be back.”
I felt trapped. And outsmarted. The brutes had us surrounded now; our cave was no longer a shelter — it was a confining, constricting cell of solid stone in which we were unable to move, unable to escape. The walls seemed to be closing in on me. My hands started to shake.
But it was not fear that racked me. It was anger. As I looked around at the bare stone walls of the cave, realizing that it could well become a coffin for all of us, I was seized with fury. At myself. How could I be so stupid? The chamber deep beneath the ground that Ahriman had created in the twentieth century, the dark stone womb of a temple he had built at Karakorum, the caves he had dwelled in back in the Neolithic — caves and darkness were his places, his sources of power. Why didn’t I see it before? Why did I let these poor doomed soldiers stay in this trap? I should have known better.
As I berated myself, I worked with Adena to revive the others. Swiftly she told them what had happened.
“They thought they would find us all unconscious, and easy to kill. Now they know differently. They’ll be attacking from the front and rear, any minute now.”
The sensors up at the entrance to the cave showed plainly that more animals were moving about in the darkness of the night. Adena kept the cannon pointed outward toward the open field of snow and ice.
“Orion,” she commanded, “you, Ogun and Lissa must cover the rear of the cave. Try to find where the enemy is coming from. It looks as if they can’t bring a large number of fighters through that way at the same time. If the three of you can’t hold them, call for help.”
I could not see Ogun’s face behind his visor, but I easily imagined the sour grimace on it. Lissa hauled a crate of grenades with her, towing it on a leash wound around her fist as it floated on its anti-gravity disc a few inches above the ground.
“I can give you explosive forces from mild concussion to the kiloton range,” she said, her voice sounding almost cheerful in my helmet earphones.
“It looks too confined in here for explosives,” I said as we pushed deeper into the cave’s narrowing recess.
“Yes, I’m afraid you’re right,” she answered glumly.
Leaving the bodies of the slain brutes behind us, we inspected the narrowing rock tunnel by the lights set into our helmets. It soon became too tight for the three of us to walk abreast. Ogun took the lead; I followed, with Lissa a few steps behind me.
“We checked out this area when we first came to this cave,” Ogun grumbled. “There’s no way out of…”
“What is it?”
He had stopped dead in his tracks. I looked past his shoulder and saw an opening in the cave floor in front of him.
“That wasn’t there yesterday,” Ogun muttered. He knelt on the rocky ground and picked up a few loose pebbles in his gloved hand. “This is new. They must have been digging all the time we were being attacked.”
“Why aren’t they guarding this shaft?” Lissa wondered. “Have they just abandoned it?”
I peered down into it. The light from our helmets was swallowed up in a well that seemed bottomless.
“They’ll be back,” Ogun said. “When they’re ready to attack again, they’ll come swarming up here.”
But something about the shaft bothered me. Lissa was right: if this was their avenue to attack us from the rear, why had they abandoned it?
“Let’s move back,” I said.
“Back?” Ogun’s voice sounded puzzled. “Why?”
“I can booby-trap the shaft,” Lissa suggested. “If they try to use it again they’ll blow themselves to pieces.” I couldn’t get over how happy she sounded when she talked about blasting people to death.
“It’s a fake,” I said, just as surprised as they were to hear the words coming out of my mouth. “A feint. Maybe they used this shaft earlier, but they’re probably digging a new one right now, between here and the main chamber of the cave.”
“They’ll cut us off,” Ogun said.
“And surprise the rest of the troop from the rear,” Lissa added.
I nodded, then realized they could not see it through my helmet visor. “Come on, quickly!” I said.
We scrambled back as quickly as we could toward the spot where the bodies of the dead brutes lay. Once there, with the lights and activity of the other troopers at our backs, I took off my helmet and pressed my ear to the rock wall. Sure enough, I could hear a crunching, tapping sound. Someone, somewhere, was digging.
Adena must have seen us, for she appeared at my side and asked why we were not back in the deeper recess of the cave, as she had ordered us to be. I explained: “They’re digging another entrance into the cave. They’ll attack as soon as they break through.”
She looked skeptical until I invited her to listen to them at work. Then she nodded her understanding.
“We’ll be ready for them,” she said grimly.
Waiting was the most difficult part of it. The sensors at the cave’s mouth showed the enemy’s buildup of beasts quite clearly, despite the blackness of the night. Marek attached seismic sensors to the cave walls back where we were, and their flashing lights showed every blow the brutes were striking against the rock. As they came closer to the cave, the sensors began to triangulate their location. Soon we knew where they would break through. But we had no way of knowing when.
We kept our helmets on, visors down, gripped our weapons and waited.
Nerves stretched taut. Fingers tapped on gunstocks or fiddled with equipment. I strained my eyes at the blank rock wall, trying to see through it to the enemy working so patiently, so laboriously to reach us. How they must hate us, I thought. How they must be focusing every ounce of their strength and hatred against us, sixteen men and women, alone, abandoned, trapped in a time and a place far from their own, waiting for a battle that can end only in extermination of one side or the other.
The sensor lights went blank. They’ve stopped digging, I thought. Why?
“Here they come!” came a shout from the cave’s mouth. I inadvertently turned to glance in that direction…
The wall of the cave in front of me exploded, knocking all of us back onto the ground. I rolled over, my rifle still in my hands, and saw a half-dozen of the brutes charging at us out of the smoke and rubble. They were big, powerful, their broad, red-eyed faces snarling with fury and crystal spears in their raised hands.
I fired pointblank at them. The rifle’s beam cut the first two in half, but their momentum carried them into me and they fell beside me as I rose to one knee and fired again. Ogun was firing too, but one of the brutes reached him with a crystal spear. It barely grazed his helmet, but a shower of sparks erupted and I heard Ogun scream in my earphones. His body spasmed, arched, then fell dead.
I ducked under the spear that was aimed at me and jammed the muzzle of my rifle into the brute’s midsection as I pulled the trigger. His body burst into flame, and he shrieked hideously as he bounced away from me and into the others behind him.
Lissa had recovered her wits now and was firing into the brutes who were emerging from their newly dug tunnel. I lost count of how many there were; we fired and dodged and fired again at them, killing them left and right until their bodies jammed the entryway that they had blasted out of the rock.