We all froze, weapons tracking to the indicated position. In the infrared, I saw a heat signature too small to be a warrior, moving along the ceiling.

  “It’s a scout,” Tec said, “Chirr larva, probably third instar. It’s marking our position.”

  “Should I eliminate it?” Lavern asked.

  “Negative,” Tec said. “Kill a scout, and they know exactly where we are. Let it report back home. Then we’re just another patrol they need to track.”

  I understood the reasoning, as Malik’s tactical knowledge told me the Chirr wouldn’t mobilize for a single regiment until we were deeper.

  We kept moving, the scout paralleling us along the ceiling. It looked like a four-foot centipede made of knives and bad intentions, its compound eyes reflecting our lights like purple mirrors. Every few minutes, it would release a pheromone burst that would be invisible to us but clear as a scream to other Chirr.

  The tunnel branched ahead, three passages leading into darkness. According to the intel map, we needed the middle one, but Malik’s instincts were warning me.

  “Hold,” I said, raising a fist. “Master Sergeant, take an acoustic scan.”

  He pulled out a device that looked like a tuning fork attached to a tablet, pressing it against the tunnel wall. Sound waves propagated through the rock, returning data about what lay ahead.

  “The middle tunnel shows multiple chambers, consistent with the intel map,” Tec said. “But there’s something off about the density readings. Like there’s—” He paused, adjusting the scanner. “Sir, the walls are hollow for at least fifty meters.”

  “It’s an ambush tunnel,” I said, Malik supplied me with that. “The Chirr have been busy.”

  “We don’t have time for detours,” Horvath said. He must have been monitoring the comm. “Push through, Colonel.”

  “Sir,” I said, “if we enter that tunnel, we’ll be surrounded. The warriors inside those walls will—”

  “Are you questioning my orders, Colonel?”

  The liquidation device on his wrist gleamed in the tunnel lights. I could feel my unit tense. They knew what was coming—Horvath would force us into the kill zone, and half of us would die because of his mulishness.

  I remembered our conversation earlier.

  “Not questioning, sir. I’m adapting.” I keyed my comm to the unit leaders. “Use white-phosphorus charges. We’re going to flood those hollow walls before we advance.”

  It took us ten minutes to set up. We placed charges at the tunnel mouth, angled to blow inward, filling those hollow spaces with burning phosphorus that would consume oxygen and cook anything hiding inside. It was cruel, but down here, cruel kept you alive.

  Tec looked at me.

  I nodded.

  “Fire in the hole!” Tec shouted.

  The charges detonated with a muffled whump. For a moment, nothing happened. Then the screaming started as the walls erupted. Chirr warriors came pouring out of hidden passages, their bodies on fire, their chitinous shells cracking from the heat. They weren’t attacking; they were fleeing, dying, trying to escape the inferno we’d created.

  “Open fire!” Tec shouted. “Don’t let them mass!”

  Down here, we were all part of the fire teams. This wasn’t like an Earth regiment (3,000–5,000 troopers). A Vomag regiment runs at about one-tenth that.

  My assault rifle kicked against my shoulder as I pumped rounds into the burning Chirr. Their four arms ended in different tools: cutting claws, acid sprayers, manipulator tentacles, and those horrible boring spikes they used to punch through armor.

  One came straight at me, its body engulfed in white fire but still moving with terrifying purpose. I put six rounds center mass before it dropped, its death scream rattling my brain.

  “Left flank! Left flank!” Lavern screamed.

  A cluster of Chirr had flanked us through a passage we’d missed, coming up from below. They hit Private Kosk first, one of the new replacements. His scream cut off as acid ate through his helmet’s faceplate. The kid—he couldn’t have been more than seventeen—clawed at his face as it dissolved, stumbling into a tunnel wall against the sticky biofilm.

  “Kosk is down!” a Vomag called, putting a mercy round through his skull before the acid could reach his brain.

  “Form up in a defensive circle!” Tec barked.

  The flanking Chirr were juvenile soldiers—faster than full-grown warriors but less armored. Many of us switched to full auto, sweeping our assault rifles across the advance. Black ichor painted the tunnel walls as rounds found their marks, but they kept coming.

  “Grenades out!” a sergeant roared.

  Fragmentation grenades sailed into the advancing Chirr. The explosions in the confined space were deafening, my helmet’s audio dampers cutting out to protect my hearing. When the smoke cleared, the tunnel floor was carpeted with Chirr parts, many still twitching.

  “Sound off,” Tec called.

  It turned out we’d lost twelve soldiers in the first engagement. That wasn’t bad by deep tunnel standards, but we had so much farther to go.

  “Collect their tags and ammunition,” Tec ordered. He glanced at me.

  I raised a hand, spreading my fingers and thumb.

  “We move in five minutes,” Tec said.

  The middle tunnel was clear now, the walls blackened and cracked from our phosphorus attack. Dead Chirr were everywhere. The smell was indescribable.

  We pushed forward, deeper.

  The temperature kept climbing, and my armor’s cooling system was working overtime. Sweat ran down my face inside my helmet, stinging my eyes, but taking the helmet off down here was suicide. The air itself was toxic: too much ammonia, not enough oxygen, and airborne Chirr pheromones that could cause hallucinations in unprotected humans.

  I shuddered, hating the deep tunnels. Why did the High Polarions want this planet so badly anyway? The Chirr owned Fenris III. Why sacrifice men to try to dig out these intelligent insects?

  I steeled myself, knowing I was going to have to go down many levels. The problem was that it sounded like Horvath didn’t want us to return with the amplifier.

  I shook my head.

  That could wait for later. First, I had to actually reach this old tech chamber.

  -58-

  The tunnel system became more complex the farther down we went. When the Vomags controlled tunnels for a time, they collapsed most of the side passages, keeping only the main ones. That came from Malik’s memories.

  Side passages branched off every few meters—each a potential ambush point. The acoustic scanner indicated we were approaching a major chamber.

  “What’s our depth?” I asked.

  “Six hundred meters below Vomag territory,” Tec reported. “According to the intel map, we still have nine levels to go before we reach the old tech chamber.”

  We emerged into a massive chamber, although that wasn’t apparent at first. We had to use acoustic mapping to learn it was a hundred meters across and fifty high. The reason we didn’t know right away was that the entire space was filled with what I could only describe as a web made of calcified mucus. Strands as thick as my arm crisscrossed the chamber, creating a three-dimensional maze. And hanging in that web, wrapped in cocoons of the same material, were bodies, hundreds of them.

  It turned out that some were Vomags, damn it. They must have been soldiers from previous expeditions, their armor still visible through the translucent wrapping. Others were Chirr, apparently kept for later consumption. But there were also creatures I didn’t recognize, creatures with too many limbs or not enough, beings that looked like they’d been assembled from spare parts.

  I hated them. I hated this chamber.

  We had cutting torches—of course—standard equipment for tunnel operations. The hot beams sliced through the calcified strands easily enough, but each cut released a smell like burning hair mixed with sulfur. Worse, the web would vibrate with each cut, and the vibration, no doubt, traveled through the structure like a signal.

  “Move in teams,” I ordered. “One cuts, one covers. Keep your eyes up.”

  We cut a path through the web as the bodies in the cocoons seemed to watch us with dead eyes, some of them mummified, others looking fresh enough that they might have been taken yesterday. I tried not to look at their faces, but one caught my attention, a Vomag with a colonel’s insignia—probably from the 38th Regiment, which went missing several days ago.

  “Sir,” Tec said quietly, “the acoustic scanner is picking up movement. It’s all around us, but staying distant.”

  I passed that along to the unit leaders.

  We were halfway across when Lavern’s cutter hit something that wasn’t web. The beam sparked off metal, and suddenly the cocoon he’d been cutting split open. A figure fell out—and it wasn’t dead.

  It was some new kind of Chirr.

  Its eyes opened—one shot ended it before anything else began. Tec stood there, the barrel of his assault rifle smoking.

  “Double time!” I ordered. “Cut and move.”

  We pushed faster, less carefully. More cocoons split open. Multiple shots finished each.

  “I have a contact!” Lavern shouted. “Dozens of signatures—closing fast!”

  They came through the web like it wasn’t there, moving along the strands—I’d bet.

  Malik’s memories supplied the name: web runners.

  One dropped onto Private Yuen, its hooks punching through his armor like paper. He screamed as it pulled him up into the web, disappearing into the tangle. His screams continued before cutting off abruptly.

  We formed a wide circle, firing upward and outward as the web runners attacked. They were fast, using the web’s three-dimensional space to attack from every angle. Our rounds tracked them, turning the air black with ichor, but for every one we dropped, two more seemed to appear.

  “Flame units!” I shouted. “Burn the whole freaking web!”

  Vomags stepped up, their flamers sending out streams of promethium-based fire. The calcified strands burned as if they were soaked in accelerant, the fire racing through the structure.

  The web runners shrieked and fled—creating a new problem. The burning web was collapsing, massive chunks of flaming material falling around us. And the smoke was filling the chamber, making it impossible to see or breathe, even with our helmets and respirators.

  “Move, move, move!” I shouted.

  We ran through the inferno, chunks of burning web crashing down all around us. A piece the size of a groundcar missed me by inches, splattering flaming mucus across my armor. The heat was incredible, my suit’s systems flashing warnings about temperature overload.

  Lavern tripped, going down hard. A burning strand fell across his leg, and even through the armor, I could hear it sizzling. Strang and Tec grabbed him, dragging him forward as he screamed.

  The exit tunnel was just ahead, a black mouth in the chamber wall. We dove through en masse as the entire web structure collapsed behind us, sealing the chamber in a wall of fire and debris.

  “Sound off!” I gasped, trying to catch my breath. Someone had stamped out the fire on my armor.

  We’d lost over a dozen soldiers, while Lavern’s leg was partially burned. A regimental medic dosed him with analgesics so he wouldn’t feel it—for now. Everyone else was singed, exhausted, but alive.

  I swallowed hard, hating these tunnels more than ever. I was becoming seriously claustrophobic. If not for Malik’s calming memories and the drugs, I might have curled up in a fetal position and sucked on my thumb.

  Damn the High Polarions for putting men in places like this. What was their real reason for the op?

  I nodded.

  One way or another, I was killing the Burnt Polarion when I got back. He and his ilk deserved it.

  That meant I had to keep enduring this underworld horror a little longer so I could get what I needed to do the final job.

  -59-

  We’d been moving through the tunnels for endless hours when we reached the Bone Gardens that Petric had mentioned earlier. The name didn’t do it justice.

  The corridor opened into a cathedral-sized chamber, and for the first time since entering Chirr territory, we all stopped moving. Even Horvath fell silent.

  The walls were lined with human skeletons, thousands of them, arranged in patterns that spiraled up into the darkness. Each skeleton had been positioned differently: some standing at attention, others kneeling, and others too obscene to describe. The bones gleamed with an oily sheen under our helmet lights, preserved by some Chirr process that left them looking almost polished.

  We stood there, two hundred or so Vomags who’d seen every horror the deep tunnels could produce, all struck silent by this display.

  Behind me, I heard someone’s breathing go ragged over the comm. Another soldier muttered a prayer to whatever god he still believed in down here. Those who’d been talking tough just minutes ago were silent now.

  “This is from the Third Offensive,” someone whispered. “Look at the unit patches.”

  He was right. Scraps of uniforms still clung to some of the skeletons, showing regimental insignia from a campaign that had happened several years ago. It was how we’d won our present Vomag territory far above us. Thirty thousand Vomags had gone into the tunnels during that offensive. Fewer than ten percent had come back.

  “They told us the missing were KIA,” another soldier said, his voice hollow. “Said the Chirr consumed them or dissolved them in acid.”

  “They lied,” someone else said.

  I studied the displays. Some skeletons were arranged in formation, like a parade drill of the dead. Others had been posed in the middle of actions: reaching for weapons that weren’t there, cowering from invisible threats, embracing each other in death.

  “Look at the finger bones,” Lavern said, his young voice cracking. “They’re all intact.”

  He was right. Not a bone was missing, not a joint was out of place. The Chirr had reconstructed these bodies with a precision that spoke of obsession.

  Horvath cleared his throat. “We keep moving. This is just another Chirr intimidation tactic.”

  But even the commissar sounded shaken. I could see him touching the Liquidation Device on his wrist, as if reassuring himself he still had control.

  “Double time through the display,” I said. “No more stopping and no looking too close.”

  We started forward, moving through paths between the displays. They were wide enough for two soldiers abreast, forcing us to stay close to the horrors on either side.

  “Don’t look at them,” Tec said over the unit comm. “Eyes forward, maintain spacing.”

  But it was impossible not to see. Our helmet lights swept across the displays with each turn of our heads, revealing new arrangements, new horrors.

  I noticed Private Kim staring at one particular skeleton, his breathing getting rapid inside his helmet.

  “What is it, Private?” I asked.

  “That’s… that’s my brother, sir,” he said. “He was with the 452nd.”

  The skeleton he was looking at had been positioned in a running pose, frozen mid-stride. The skull had been turned backward, looking over its shoulder as if checking for pursuit.

  “Keep walking,” Tec said. “That’s not your brother anymore.”

  Kim tore his gaze away and stumbled forward. I heard him trying to control his breathing, the way they taught us in training. In for four, hold for four, out for four.

  “How long have they been collecting?” someone asked.

  “Shut up,” Tec snapped. “No talking.”

  But the damage was done. We all knew the answer. Years, maybe decades. How many “successful” operations had left men behind? How many of our celebrated victories had filled this gallery?

  As we neared the exit, I saw the final display. It was newer, maybe only a few months old. A single skeleton stood at the chamber’s exit, dressed in the tattered remains of a commissar’s uniform. The bones had been arranged in a welcoming gesture, arms spread wide, skull tilted as if laughing.

  There was a name tag still attached to the uniform: Commissar Volken.

  Horvath stopped when he saw it, his face turning pale behind his helmet’s visor. Volken had supposedly died in a tunnel collapse, crushed under tons of rock. But here he was, his bones telling a different story: one of capture, study, and careful preservation.

  “That’s not possible,” Horvath said, his voice barely a whisper. “I saw the reports. The tunnel integrity failed. There was nothing left to recover.”

  But we all knew the truth now. The Chirr had taken him, kept him, and finally displayed him here where the next commissar would have to see. It wasn’t just psychological warfare—it was a statement of ownership. These tunnels belonged to them, and everyone who entered was just future decoration for their gallery.

  “Move out,” I ordered, pushing past Horvath. “Now.”

  We exited the Bone Gardens in silence, shaken by what we’d seen.

  -60-

  After the Bone Gardens and several levels later, we learned through Horvath that the other regiments had taken forty, forty-six, fifty-one, and sixty-five percent casualties, killing at least 20,000 Chirr in the process. Then we reached a critical junction.

  “There’s thermal bloom below,” Strang said. “Something’s generating massive heat.”

  We stood over a huge, circular shaft. At fifty meters down, we discovered blockage: a mass of hardened Chirr secretion, like a plug in the shaft. But it was warm, almost hot, and there were holes in it.

  “Those are breathing holes,” Tec said.

  “It’s a nest plug.” Malik’s memories provided me with the context. It was getting easier, and that worried me. Was my identity merging or being submerged by his? I needed to leave this time as soon as possible for more reasons than one.

  “The Colonel’s right,” Tec said. “The Chirr seal vertical shafts when they’re breeding. There’s probably a nursery chamber just below.”

  Tec stared at me after saying that. I knew his game—Malik’s memories again—and decided he was right.

 

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