"Looks cramped," he grunted, touching his helmet to mine to bypass the still-jammed radio.
It was, too, though with Drymnu bodies half the size of ours, I wouldn't have expected anything else. "I think there's enough room for one of us to be inside and still have room to work," I told him, not bothering to point out we didn't have much choice in the matter. "I'll go. You and Fromm close the outer hatch once I'm in."
It took a little squeezing, but I made it. There didn't seem to be any inside controls, which was as expected; what I hadn't expected was that even as the hatch closed behind me and I unlimbered my modified cutting torch, my suit's exterior air sensors suddenly came alive.
And with the radio jammed, I was cut off from the others. I waited, heart thumping, wondering what the Drymnu had out there waiting for me.... As the pressures equalized, I threw all my weight upwards against the inner hatch.
For a second it resisted. Then, with a pop! it swung open and, getting a grip on the lip, I pulled myself out into the corridor—
To be faced by a river of meter-high figures surging directly toward me.
There was no time for thought on any rational level, and indeed I later had no recollection at all of having aimed and fired my torch. But abruptly the hallway was ablaze with light and flame... and where the blue-white fire met the dark river there was death.
I heard no screams. Possibly my suit insulated me from that sound; more likely the telepathic bodies of a hive mind had never had reason to develop any vocal apparatus. But whatever else was alien about the Drymnu, its multiple bodies were still based on carbon and oxygen, and such molecules were not built to survive the kind of heat I was focusing on them. Where the flame touched, the bodies flared and dropped and died.
It was all over in seconds, at least that first wave of the attack. A dozen of the bodies lay before and around me, still smoldering and smoking, while the others beat an orderly retreat. I looked down at the carnage just once, then turned my eyes quickly and firmly away. I was just glad I couldn't smell them.
I was still standing there, watching and waiting for the next attack, when a tap on my helmet made me start violently. "Easy, easy, it's me," a faint and frantic voice came as I spun around and nearly incinerated Waskin. "Powers is behind me in the airlock. Are there any buttons in here we have to push to cycle it?"
"No, it seems to be set on automatic," I told him. "You have everyone coming in?"
"All but Kelly. I thought we ought to leave someone with the boat."
"Good." Experimentally, I turned my radio up a bit. No good; the jamming was just as strong inside the ship as it had been outside. "Well, at least he probably won't have any better hand weapons than we do. And he ought to be even worse at hand-to-hand than he is at space warfare."
"Unfortunately, he's got all those eighteen thousand bodies to spend learning the techniques," Waskin pointed out sourly.
"Not that many—we only have to kill maybe fourteen or fifteen thousand to destroy the hive mind."
"That's not an awful lot of help," he said.
Actually, though, it was, especially considering that the more bodies we disposed of the less of the mind would actually be present. Weakness Number Three: destroying segments of the mind eventually destroys the whole? No, that wasn't quite it. But it was getting closer....
The Drymnu was able to get in two more assaults before the last four of our landing party made it through the airlock. Neither attack was particularly imaginative, and both were ultimately failures, but already the mind was showing far more grasp of elementary tactics than I cared for. The second attack was actually layered, with a torch-armed backup team hiding under cover while the main suicide squad drew us out into the corridor, and it was only the fact that we had heavily fire- and heat-proofed our suits beforehand that let us escape without burns.
But for the moment we clearly still held the advantage, and by the time all six of us were ready to begin moving down the corridor the Drymnu had pulled back out of sight.
"I don't suppose he's given up already," Fromm called as we headed cautiously out.
"More likely cooking up something nasty somewhere," Waskin shouted back.
"Let's kill the idle chatter," I called. My ears buzzed from the volume I had to use to be heard, and it occurred to me that if we kept this up we would all have severe self-inflicted deafness long before the Drymnu got us. "Keep communication helmet-to-helmet as much as possible," I told them.
Fromm leaned over and touched his helmet to mine. "Are we heading anywhere specific, or just supposed to cause as much damage as we can?"
"The latter, unless we find a particular target worth going for," I told him.
"If we analyze the Drymnu's defenses, say, and figure out that he's defending some place specific, we'll go for that. Pass the word, okay?"
Good targets or not, though, we were equipped to do a lot of incidental damage, and we did our damnedest to live up to our potential. The rooms were already deserted as we got to them, but they were full of flammable carpeting and furnishings, and we soon had a dozen fires spewing flames and smoke in our wake.
Within ten minutes the corridor was hazy with smoke—and, more significantly, with moving smoke—which meant that whatever bulkheading and rupture-control system the Drymnu was employing, it was clear that the burning section wasn't being well sealed off from the remainder of the ship. That should have meant big trouble for the alien, which in turn should have meant he would be soon throwing everything he had in an effort to stop us.
But it didn't happen. We moved farther and farther into the ship, setting fires and torching everything that looked torchable, and still the Drymnu held back.
For a while I wondered if he was simply waiting for us to run out of fuel; for a
shorter while I wondered if he had indeed given up. But the radio jamming continued, and he didn't seem to care that we were using up our fuel destroying his home, and so for lack of a better plan we just kept going.
We got up a couple of ramps, switched corridors twice, and were at a large, interior corridor when we finally found out what he had in mind.
It was just the fortune of the draw that Powers was point man as we reached that spot... just the fortune of the draw that he was the one to die. He glanced around the corner into the main corridor, started to step through—and was abruptly hurled a dozen meters sideways by a violent blast of highly compressed air. Waskin, behind him, leaned into the corridor to spray torch fire in that direction, and apparently succeeded in neutralizing the weapon. But it cost us precious seconds, and by the time we were able to move in and see what was happening to Powers, it was too late. The dark tide of bodies withdrew readily from before our flames, and we saw that Powers, still inside his reinforced suit, had nevertheless been beaten to death.
"With tools, looked like," Fromm said. Even through the muffling of the helmets his voice was clearly shaking. "They clubbed him to death with ordinary tools."
"So much for him not understanding the techniques of warfare," Waskin bit out.
"He's figured out all he really needs to know: that he's got the numbers on his side. And how to use them."
He was right. Inevitable, really; the only mystery was why it had taken the Drymnu this long to realize that. "We'd better keep moving," I shouted as we pressed our helmets together in a ring.
"Why bother?" Brimmer snarled, his voice dripping with anger and fear.