I could not tell if there was a hunting party behind me. If there was, they weren’t using flashlights—I did not see beams on the wall around me. Somehow I doubted that they were following me. More likely than not, they had run back to camp when Shannon turned out the lights.
Wanting to present the smallest possible target, I crouched as I ran. I sprinted around a bend and chanced one last look back. What I saw made me shutter. A thick tongue of vapor rolled out of the generator tunnel. Given a few hours, the vapor would flood the entire cave system. I had seen the way random laser fire had superheated the rock. The fire from Shannon’s torch was not as hot, but it was broad and steady.
“Harris, are you out of there?” Shannon asked over the interLink.
“That shit’s pouring out of that hole like a waterfall,” I answered.
“Get moving uphill,” Shannon said. “Meet me at the top.”
I had not realized how much space we had covered. The path led on and on, and the slope no longer seemed so gentle now that it was uphill. My calves burned, and my pistol felt heavy in my hands. I found myself fighting for breath, then I thought about the Mogats trapped in the dark with their air supply cut off. “Dead or captured,” I mused. For those speckers, that was one hell of a choice.
I continued up the slope, my run slowing into a jog, then a walk as I bumped my way forward. “Are you getting through that tunnel okay?” I asked Shannon.
“It’s tight,” he said. “But it seems to be getting wider.”
“I wasn’t paying attention when Scooter went through there,” I said.
“Neither was I,” Shannon said.
“I don’t know how you figured this all out,” I said. “They’re not even following me. That vapor cut them off.”
“Hang on a moment,” Shannon said. “I need to concentrate.” That was the last time we spoke. I walked around one final bend and saw the mouth to the cave. When I looked at the interLink menu in my visor, I did not see Shannon’s frequency.
“Sergeant? Sergeant Shannon!” I called again and again. I called on the platoon frequency. I tried an open frequency. I turned around and shouted his name at the top of my lungs.
“Harris, is that you?” Vince Lee asked. “What’s the matter?”
“I think Shannon is dead!” I said, wanting to go back to look for him. But I could not go back. I realized that. The vapor Shannon had unleashed had flooded the chamber behind me. It had probably flooded the tunnel around him as well. I imagined him crawling in the darkness of that narrow pass, struggling to get through a tight squeeze as he noticed the vapor creeping up behind him. Perhaps he was wedged in so tightly that he could not even turn to see the vapor until it had seeped around him. Whatever toxin that vapor held, it corroded its way through the rubber in our body suits, turning armor into a worthless exoskeleton. It ate through flesh and tissue. If I found Shannon, all I would find would be the hard stuff—the armor and bones, Everything else would be melted. God I hated Hubble.
A very comfortable cruiser landed near our platoon, and Captain McKay ordered me aboard. He wanted to introduce me to the colonels and commodores who would take credit for Tabor Shannon’s tactical genius. Dressed in immaculate uniforms, the colonels and commodores showed no interest in me, but they allowed me to watch as they mopped up the battle.
Nearly ten thousand Mogats surrendered, more than enough for Bryce Klyber’s judicial circus. Their quota met, the officers aboard the cruiser sent airborne battle drones into the caves.
The drones looked like little giant pie plates. They were about three feet long and a foot tall. Most of their housing was filled with a broad propeller shaft. They had particle-beam guns mounted on their sides. We called them “RODEs,” but their technical name was Remote Operated Defense Engines.
The officers sent ten RODEs into the cavern. The little beasts hovered about five feet over the vapor, and the officers made a game of seeing who could fly the lowest. One swabbie flew his RODE too low, and the vapor shorted it out. Everybody laughed at him. There was a jolly atmosphere inside the cruiser. I could not think. The atmosphere inside the cruiser was suffocating me. I wanted to find a way to rescue Shannon. Even if he was dead, I wanted to pull his body out. I did not want to leave him stranded in a cave filled with dead Mogats. I asked if I could leave, but Captain McKay told me I had to stay.
Most RODEs are black, but the ones the colonels and commanders used were special. They had shiny gold chassis and bright headlights. They were not made for stealth.
“The angel of death, come to claim her victims,” one of the colonels joked in a loud voice. I saw that he had a microphone. He was broadcasting his voice inside the cave.
Maybe if I got to Shannon quickly…Perhaps he was in the caves, breathing the Mogats’ generated oxygen. I asked McKay a second time if I could leave, and he told me that the officers wanted me to stay.
The officers huddled around tracking consoles, watching the scene inside the cave through their RODEs’ eyes. “Permission to go join my platoon?” I asked McKay.
“Denied,” McKay said, sounding very irritated.
From where I sat, I could see one of the officers steering his RODE. I had a clear view of the monitor that showed him the world as his RODE saw it.
It took less than ten minutes for this officer to steer his RODE past the capillary that led to the generators. Thick fog still chugged out of it like viscous liquid. The RODE’s bright headlight cut through the darkness with a beam that was straight and hard. It shined momentarily on the ridge I used for protection during the shoot-out with the Mogats. The obsidian walls sparkled in the bright beam, but the headlight was not powerful enough to penetrate the thick layer of vapor that blanketed the floor of the cavern. Whatever secrets lay hidden under that gas would remain concealed.
“I found one!” an officer on the other side of the cabin yelled. He got a giddy response from other officers, who wanted hints about how he got there so quickly.
The colonel closest to me had found a grand cavern. His drone flew laps around the outer walls of the cavern like a shark looking for prey. The officer began to search the fog for survivors, and it did not take long until he found his first.
Whatever chemicals made up the vapor were heavier than the atmosphere. The vapor was heavy; it melted flesh and circuitry. What other pleasant surprises could it hold, I wondered.
The RODE edged along the outer walls. It had a near miss as it dodged another RODE, and two officers shouted playful insults at each other.
A few Mogats had died while trying to pull themselves to safety, much the way Private Amblin had died in the trench. The colonel steered his way over to one of them for a closer look. The man’s chest, arms, and head lay flat on a rock shelf in a puddle that looked more like crude oil than blood. The gas had dissolved everything below his chest except his clothing.
The colonel circled the camera around the dead man. Vapor must have splashed against the right side of his face. The left side seemed normal enough, but the skin had dissolved from the right side, revealing patches of muscle and skull. Brown strings, maybe skin or maybe sinew, still dangled between the cheek and jaw. His left eye was gone.
Then the colonel found his first survivor—a man in torn clothes perched on a narrow lip of rock. His back was to the RODE. His arms were wrapped around a pipe for balance.
“We’ll certainly have none of that,” the colonel said in a jovial voice. On the screen I saw a particle-beam gun flash, and the man fell from his perch.
The cruiser erupted with laughter.
“Watch this,” another officer shouted. He, too, had found a survivor—a woman. He steered his RODE toward the woman in a slow hover, then shined its blinding headlight on her face. She screamed and tried to shield her eyes with her forearm, but managed to stay balanced on a narrow rock ledge. The colonel fired a shot at her feet. Trying to back away from the RODE, the woman stumbled and fell. Her face struck the ledge, and she caught herself, but her body had fallen into the pool of vapor that covered the floor. She tried to pull herself up, but the skin on her face and arms was melting.