| |
FINGERTIPS RAN ACROSS SUE’S SHOULDERS. They tickled, tingled. Strong hands were pushing into her back, massaging the ache from her muscles. It hurt a little bit, but it was refreshing.
A warm towel was wrapped around her left leg. It burned slightly, as if she just had a wax or exfoliation. Folami had never before set her up to recuperate at the spa after a successful mission. She must have done good this time— real good.
There was a lot of touching, a lot of rubbing. The skin on her leg and back started to feel raw. “That’s enough,” she said.
Sue opened her eyes and could only see darkness. Her head felt numb and fuzzy. Heated stones were being placed along her spine. “I said stop it.”
A pulse of warm air blew past her face. She felt overheated and needed to cool off. “I need a break. I need some water.”
She flipped through her Ocu’s visions until she was able to see, her echo-vision lighting up the cavern in waves of white and blue.
There were no massaging hands, no heated stones or spa towels. She was being dragged across the cavern floor, her back being scraped across rocks that were hidden in the mud. Her leg burned badly.
She looked down her body to see a thick, branch-like thing that was slowly pulling her deeper underground. Its meaty flaps had wrapped around her left leg all the way up to her thigh. Oh fuck.
Silhouette turned onto her side to relieve her raked-raw back. Her mind was still in a haze, and so she pushed her face into the ground, using the dragging motion to rub some pain into her face. It was like a cold splash of water. She gave herself a solid slap across the cheek to punctuate the gesture.
Now alert and awake, she turned back to face the beast and scanned through her Ocu’s database for information on the creature, but there was no match. Humanity had yet to record anything about humungous carnivorous vines, apparently. Look at me, I’ve made a discovery. They can name this worm after me if I get out of here.
The fear tried to sink in again. It felt like something was attempting to control her emotions, her thoughts, but Silhouette pushed it out, focusing on the situation at hand. This thing may have eaten the doctor, but not me. Not yet, at least. I bite back. She yanked on her leg with all of her strength, but to no avail. It wouldn’t budge and it hurt like hell. Dying means failing, and that ain’t happening.
She sat up and reached for the flappy pieces of plant that were latched onto her leg. The edges of the flaps looked softer than the rest of the bark-covered worm. Silhouette dug her fingers into the green flesh, tearing into it like it was a giant, nasty fruit. She scraped and clawed, ripping out plant meat by the handful.
Her butt bounced off of a stone as she was pulled forward by the creature and it caused her to arch back in pain. She had an idea and felt around in the mud for a rock, finding a suitably sharp specimen to aid in her reaping.
Silhouette leaned forward again and stabbed the rock into a meaty flap. She ripped through the creature’s flesh over and over again until she was coated in its gooey sap. The flaps were torn to shreds until all that remained were flaccid, stringy veins.
Silhouette leaned back once more and shoved the rock into the ground like an anchor, using it to pull her leg free from the tattered maw of the creature. It continued its path down the tunnel at a steady pace, despite being damaged and having lost its prey.
She shook the rock free from her sap-covered hand. Waves of burning pain emanated from the nerves in her leg, coursing throughout her entire body.
Silhouette meditated, concentrating her thoughts onto the pain, and subdued the agony. Pain didn’t control her. It was her body— she was the one in control.
Her shadowsuit had been torn away from her left leg, or maybe it had been dissolved, and her skin was raw and bloody. The sap that covered the entire limb, and most of the rest of her body, was hardening like a pliable wax. As it did, she was able to scrape it from herself with moderate effort, but she left the hardening goo on her injured leg to act as a sealant for the wounds.
Silhouette stood and walked forward with difficulty. Putting weight on her bare, bloodied foot was painful despite her meditative focus. Though she didn’t know for sure how much damage had been done to it, the leg still worked, mostly, and she had a mission to complete, so she moved onward and followed the plant creature down the gloomy tunnel.
* * *
Each step sent pulses of hot pain up Silhouette’s leg, just as each step sent pulses of energy across the cavern for her Ocu’s vision. She tracked the slug beast for what felt like miles, but she was only speculating. It likely wasn’t that long. She was tired, hungry, and hurt. Exaggeration came easy, especially when she only had herself to talk to.
The warm wind increased in potency the farther Silhouette traveled, and the dust it carried thickened like a blizzard, clouds of it obstructing her visuals like a fog. The echo-vision was the only Ocu sight that worked this deep in the cave, but it too was now becoming ineffective, its sensors overwhelmed by the roaring grumbles and forceful winds that emanated from the cavern’s depths.
She could feel a vibration growing under her feet as she approached a large chamber that housed a nexus of dozens of tunnel pathways. Inside of the space, an enormous branch extended the length of the chamber, slithering from one tunnel to another. It was larger than the one that had grabbed her earlier, and she had no idea how far it reached.
Smaller roots clung to the ceiling of the grand room, vines that funneled through smaller holes in the walls that went who knows where.
The wind spun in the chamber like a maelstrom, but its pathing was easy for Silhouette to decipher. She climbed over the large, moving vine in the middle of the room and continued on through the tunnel across the way, following the wind to its source.
She pushed her way through the gusts, the yellow fluff caking onto the mud and sap that clung to her suit. More vines crossed her path, both large and small, but as luck would have it they were all extended to far off distances down numerous shafts, none with nearby maws to bite her with. She climbed over and ducked under the squirming roots. I wonder if anyone else has ever walked through a hot blizzard in a pitch black cave jungle with a sap cast on their partially-digested leg.
Deeper she journeyed, until her echo-vision was virtually blinded by the sheer amount of noise that was created by the wind and the deep, alien grumbling. She switched off her Ocu sight and noticed that she could see light ahead with her natural eyesight.
Silhouette clambered onward, pushing through the bramble of vines, fighting against the blowing storm. She reached for the light and found more than she had bargained for.
A grand, underground chamber opened up before her. The violence of the wind calmed as it spun throughout the space of the chamber and exited through countless vents within the vaulted room. Its expanse seemed endless, the far ends of it not visible through the whirling fluff and ever-present darkness.
But the place was not completely dark. Silhouette had followed a fiery light into this room, and now she could see that it was radiating from far below. The chamber sank into a pit where luminescent craters rose and fell with each gust of heated wind. Silhouette stepped alongside the nearest wall, minding her feet as to not slip and fall into the pit below. The ground shook in a never-ending earthquake.
It was a thing. A big, green, breathing thing. Silhouette switched to her thermal sight, which gave her a more clear image of what was in this enormous chamber with her.
It was a living mass that was bigger than she could fathom, spewing heat and steam from the craters across its being. Fleshy cones protruded from its surface that puffed out mushroom clouds of hot air and yellow fluff like ash rising from hundreds of small volcanoes.
Vines as thick as trees hung all across the chamber like a ravel of fishing nets, like a jungle of horrors. They swung, they slithered, they wriggled like worms or snakes, extending to unknown lengths, feeding or breathing or doing whatever they do across the entirety of the planet.
Thuun isn’t a planet. This creature is Thuun. They told us that it was only a fairy tale, a children’s story....
A small rope of vine had constricted around Silhouette’s good ankle. She pulled her foot loose, snapping the tentacle in two.
More vines wormed forward in her direction, sliding down the walls from above and climbing up from the pit below. This better be enough proof for the Presider. The visuals were stored in her Ocu. As long as Silhouette made it home, the Cooperation would have everything she had seen as evidence of this monster’s existence.
It was time to leave. She could do nothing to the immense creature that lived within the core of Thuun, nor did she want to. It wasn’t her mission’s objective to put an end to Thuun’s trouble. She only needed evidence.
Silhouette left through the same pathway that she had used to enter the chamber, but that may have been the wrong choice. Many of the extended vines she had passed earlier had now restricted so that their maws were now in the tunnel with her. Silhouette wasn’t sure how the plant creatures were able to detect her presence, but most of their movements were slow, predictable, and easy to avoid.
Snarls of vines untangled themselves and slithered directly toward Silhouette wherever she moved. The smaller ones snapped at her like cobras trying to land a quick bite. She dodged the first one that tried, then the second, but a third latched onto her hip. She gripped it with both hands and ripped it off her side, then kicked at the numerous thin, stringy tendrils that tried to wrap around her feet.
Silhouette ran forward as fast as she could, doing her best to ignore her injured foot. The wind was at her back, its strong pulses throwing her off balance and causing her to run headfirst into a vine that crossed the cave at eye-level. It was hard like an oak tree branch. She was dazed and had to brace herself against the wall to keep from falling over.
A tree trunk with a mouth came racing down the tunnel, faster than any plant appendage she had ever seen. It bulldozed its way down the path, its mouth flaps closing to a point, and like a train’s metal pilot it plowed through everything in its way, rending all of the other vines along the path.
Silhouette ducked into a smaller hole in the wall of the cavern, another vine’s old tunnel. She turned to see the charging tree-train race by her previous location, its wooden body blocking her escape.
This new pathway was too small for Silhouette to stand, so she had to crawl down its length. She didn’t know where she was, or where she was going, but she had escaped danger for now. There weren’t any plant appendages near her at the moment, and Thuun’s hot breath had been cut off by the massive tentacle. Without all of the commotion, her echo-vision became useful again and she used it to navigate the smaller network of passages she had found herself in. Eventually, Silhouette came to a larger cavern once more, this one much less crowded, and she followed the pulsing breaths toward the surface.
The few carnivorous plant tentacles she encountered were easy to dodge and outpace. Her body ached and she didn’t know how long it had been since she’d eaten. It felt like the caves would never end, but she could tell that she was making progress with the wind and quaking grumbles softening as she made her way uphill.
And then a familiar sound echoed through the cave, a civilized sound. Silhouette never thought she would have ever been this happy to hear gunshots. She quickened her pace and moved toward the action.
“Fucking tunnel snakes,” yelled Kapral Kapoor.
Silhouette entered a small chamber where she saw Kapoor and Dominski fending off a pair of large vines with blooming maws that undulated and squirmed as they lunged at the gunners. The Krajova duo ran around the room with lights shining from their hips and guns, avoiding the flappy bites as they pumped the beasts full of plasma.
They fired enough rounds into one of the tentacles to nearly detach the entire maw from the rest of its body, then they focused their fire onto the second. The vines retreated with the mercenaries giving chase.
“Cease fire,” shouted Silhouette.
Dominski and Kapoor turned their lights onto Silhouette as the log-like eels backed into their underground holes. Kapoor pointed her rifle at Silhouette, then lowered it as Dominski ran to the shadow’s aid.
“How badly are you hurt?” he asked. “Did you find Fukumura?”
Silhouette wouldn’t admit it, but she had forgotten all about the Doctor. It felt like she had given up that search ages ago. “She’s dead and I got just about eaten by one of those things, but I can walk. Let’s get out of here.”
“No,” said Dominski. “We couldn’t have lost Fukumura. Our search continues until I can confirm the Doctor’s status.”
“I saw it with my own eyes, Dominski. The Doctor is dead.” There was no way Silhouette was going to let them go deeper into the caves. Her mission was done and she wanted to go home.
Kapoor walked over to her Jeden’s side. Her face had been cut just below her right eye and droplet of blood ran down her cheek like a tear.
“You killed her,” said Kapoor, “didn’t you.”
“Kapoor,” said Dominski. “Stand down.”
“This bitch is deceiving you, Jeden!” She stepped to the side of Dominski and lifted her rifle once more.
Dominski slammed his left hand down on the nose of her rifle, pointing its muzzle to the ground. He balled his other hand into a fist and slugged Kapoor across the face. “You do not disobey a direct order, Kapral. You do not threaten to fire upon a member of your crew. I told you to cut it with the conspiracy bullshit.”
Kapoor squatted low to the ground and held her throbbing face with one hand.
“Rise, Kapral Kapoor,” said Dominski. She did. The punch had further ripped open the wound under her eye and smeared its dripping blood across her cheek. “Do you understand?”
Kapoor squinted as she looked through her disheveled bangs to meet Dominski’s stare. “Yes, Jeden.”
“Good. Now, Silhouette, where did you last see Fukumura? We leave no person behind.”
“Look, Dominski.” Silhouette was annoyed. She was over it. If these stupid mercenaries wanted to die then she would let them. “She was eaten— swallowed up. She is gone. If you want to see the planet-sized abomination I just barely escaped from, you can head down that tunnel over there. It will kill you. You and Kapoor will die, looking for a person who no longer exists.
“Your other option is to follow me back to the facility where we can rescue the rest of your crew by leaving this world immediately. That monster down there will kill us all if we stay, or at the very least make us go insane like those scientists back on the surface. Your choice, but I’m not going back down there with you.”
Kapoor nudged Dominski and pointed down the pathway that Silhouette had come from. Several vines were creeping their way into the room. “Sir, what’s the plan?”
Dominski turned to face the approaching tentacles and readied his weapon.
“God dammit, Dominski,” said Silhouette. “Don’t get Kapoor killed because of your misguided sense of duty. Leave with me and I’ll tell you everything that happened.”
Dominski looked over to Kapoor, who was ready to follow his command, then he turned to Silhouette. She was a mess. Her torn suit and bloodied leg were slathered in pollen, mud, and sap. She didn’t look like a shadow any longer. She was a person under that mask who was hurt and, in her own two-fisted way, was asking for help. “You look like plant barf,” he said. “Let’s get you back to base where we can regroup and put a plan together.”