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Shad pulled himself through the hole quickly before Clark rebounded his position and reached to grab Shad’s foot again. Shad dropped on the other side of the wall and struck the ground hard. The breath escaped his lungs, and for a moment, he was paralyzed with pain, groaning.
Lying on the ground, he looked up at the opening. The bright lights lit up the large room to where it almost seemed like daylight, and the orange glow seemed to be a reflection from the machine’s light against the ceiling above.
Shad was much farther from the opening on this side of the wall than he had been on the other, which presented him with another problem as well. If he needed to climb back to the hole, the walls on this side were too smooth. No rough places existed that he could use as handholds or footholds. He’d need someone to toss down a rope in order to get him out.
Clark peered through the opening and kept his nose and mouth covered with his coveralls. “Are you okay?”
“Yeah,” Shad replied, somewhat bitterly. “The fall knocked the air out of me and bruised me up a little.”
Shad stood and wiped the dust from his clothes. His ankle hurt when he attempted to place any weight on it, and his right knee was swelling.
“Think I twisted my ankle, too,” he said, turning on his visor light.
Clark looked down. “Damn, that’s a ways down. Can you hoist yourself back up?”
“No. It’s too deep. Probably over eight feet. You’ll need to get a rope so I can get out.”
Shad limped away from the wall. The ground where he stood looked like a dry riverbed, or most likely, it was a dead lava flow.
***
“Where’s the door and bridge that you mentioned?” Clark asked.
“Ahead of me. See?” Shad said.
Clark looked, but he didn’t see anything. “No. I don’t see anything.”
“There!”
“I still don’t see a door. Only rock walls.”
Shad limped forward.
“Turn around and wait,” Clark said. “Let me call the engineering office and have someone bring a rope so we can pull you back up.”
“Not until I see what’s on the other side of that door.”
“There isn’t a door, Shad.”
Shad kept limping, ignoring Clark. “This might be the discovery that we’ve needed.”
Clark might have thought Shad’s delusional state came from striking his head when he fell over the ledge, but he had mentioned the silver door before he fell. The path Shad walked was smooth and meandered a good hundred yards before disappearing around a steep mound of rocks. Even with the light shining into this hollowed out room, no door was visible. No bridge either. If the door and bridge were silver, the light should have magnified them or at least reflected off them.
The only other thing that made any sense was that the lights were playing some type of trick on Shad’s eyes. Sometimes harsh lights forced images or odd shapes, but now that Shad was on the floor out of the blinding glare, he pressed on like he was headed toward something. Perhaps the pungent air contained hallucinogenic chemicals.
Movement stirred on the floor, like tiny reddish undulating waves, rocking side to side. Clark wondered if his eyes were being deceived. He cupped his hands and shielded his eyes, blocking the harshness of the light. The movement on the floor continued.
“Shad!” Clark shouted with grave concern.
Shad didn’t answer. He kept walking forward.
“Shad! Get back here! There’s lots of moving creatures on the floor. Don’t you see them? Armies of them.”
“I don’t see anything. Stop trying to frighten me.”
The rusty red creatures crawled like stick insects. They camouflaged well into their surroundings and had they not been moving, Clark would never have noticed them.
The strange creatures moved forward, closing in around Shad. Hundreds of these things moved in a streamline toward him. Their slender legs crept in unison, like soldiers marching abreast and headed into battle. Shad had entered into an unknown enemy’s territory. By the time he finally noticed them, they had blocked his path to return. Thousands of these strange bug-like creatures crept around him. The room was like a giant hive of weird insects. They were unlike anything he’d ever seen.
Shad turned and faced Clark. His growing fear was evident on his face. One of the creatures leapt toward him, but Shad kicked it before it attached to his leg. Others approached, and Shad stomped one of them. He lifted his foot to inspect his kill, but the creature wasn’t dead.
Instead, it bounded into the air and latched onto his leg. He tried to swat it away, but instead he screamed in sudden agony. It had bitten him.
“Shad!”
“Get help!” Shad cried. None of the other insect-like creatures advanced. They simply waited. His hands frantically patted his leg. “I can’t feel my leg. I can’t move—”
Shad dropped to his knees. His eyes grew wider and still. A second later he collapsed face first into the swarm. They covered him, and there was no resistance. He didn’t scream again. Apparently the first creature had injected a paralyzing poison into his bloodstream. They inserted long beaklike projections into his body. Clark guessed that these things were drinking his blood.
Appalled, frightened, and sickened, Clark glanced around the opening to see thousands of these creatures roosting on the ceiling and all around the opening where he sat.
“Oh, shit,” he said, slowly crawling back from the ledge.
Clark flung himself off the wall and landed on the drilling machine’s tracks. He scrambled around until he reached the steps to the cab.
He hurried into the cab, shut the door tightly, and turned on the engine. He needed to block the hole before those creatures spilled into the corridor and made their way back toward the cells, housing, and offices at the higher floors.
Clark started the engine, played around with the gear sticks and shifted them, trying to roll the borer tip into the hole before the swarm discovered their path to escape. Not being familiar with the control sticks, he went in reverse, tilted to one side and back to the other. After several failed attempts, he found the proper combination with the gear sticks to move the tracks forward.
Easing the machine toward the hole, he set the round borer bit flush to the opening. He shut off the engine and inspected his progress. The bit filled the majority of the hole, but several places remained with open gaps due to the rocks that had collapsed. There wasn’t a way that he could seal the opening completely shut. The gaps were still large enough that the creatures could squeeze through.
Long slender insect legs reached through the tinier holes. In less than fifteen seconds, three of the creatures crawled out and scuttled down the rough wall.
“Dammit,” he said.
He shut off the bright lights, hoping that by doing so, it wouldn’t attract more of these insect creatures to the hole. The three insect-like beings scrambled down the wall and headed toward him. He grabbed a shovel, flung it overhead, and brought it down in one swift blow. Although he hit the creature directly, it scurried to one side, made a whiny noise, and reared back like a small cobra with forelegs. The metallic exoskeleton had protected it from excessive damage. Its large red compound eyes focused on him while it swayed back and forth.
Clark struck with the shovel again, missed, and broke the handle. The creature revealed two fangs that dripped with yellowish ooze. He immediately thought of what had happened to Shad after he was bitten. Poison beads thickened and dropped on the dry volcanic floor.
Rather than trying to kill the thing, Clark ran for help. He didn’t view the situation as cowardly because, after all, if he died, no one in the upper levels of Olympus Mons even knew these things were here. Everyone in the mines could die within hours.
He glanced back over his shoulder. He didn’t have any idea how fast those creatures could move. When he turned to see where he was running, he ran into one of the miners, knocking the man’s pick out of his hand. The pick clanged against a rock, but the miner continued swinging as if he still held it.
Clark grabbed the prisoner by the shirt and shook the man, trying to rattle him loose of the chip’s control. Otherwise the man was about to become food for those insect-like critters. The shaking did nothing to break the chip’s grip on the man’s mind. In desperation, Clark smacked the prisoner’s face hard.
After hitting the man, Clark braced himself for retaliation from the muscled prisoner, but the man never blinked from pain. Clark struck the man again and again, hoping to get some kind of reaction from the miner, but the physical abuse didn’t help, either.
Clark shook the man again. “Come on! Snap out of it!”
The prisoner pried himself free, turned, and went through the motions of mining again.
Tears heated Clark’s eyes because there wasn’t anything he could do to help this man. He was a prisoner, probably guilty of heinous crimes, but Clark’s conscious struggled to accept that he’d have to let the man die. He realized how important Shad’s job had been. Without the CAM-L and the codes to access the commands, the miners continued doing the last thing they had been commanded to do.
He reached down and grabbed the pick. One of the insects snapped its claws at the opening. Instead of running, Clark hoped he might kill the ones that had squeezed through. At least he might prevent the miners from dying before Clark got to Jonas and brought back help.
Clark ran toward the opening. When he reached the wall beneath it, he swung the pick. The metal spike drove through its brain. Its body—now nerve-operated—tumbled through the hole and fell to the floor in front of the drill machine. It hobbled and staggered. A horrid smell drifted from its dying body. Pheromones?
An unnerving clicking sound came from the hole in the wall. Their insect claws chinked together with a disturbing, haunting echo. They were coming for him.
Clark ran.
Years before he had worked with a beekeeper one summer, and he had learned a lot about how certain pheromones worked. With most bees and ants, when disturbed or crushed, they emitted a strong chemical scent that alerted their comrades that they were under attack. These chemicals when released sent the hive into an uncontrollable, aggressive frenzy, making them willing to sacrifice their lives to protect their queen. And with thousands of these creatures on the other side of the wall, they probably had a queen or perhaps even dozens of queens. For him to remain at the wall to kill more would only escalate their maddened desire to kill any human near their hive.
Running away from these Martian insects was Clark’s only choice to survive. He needed to find Jonas and warn him about what was down there. The best they could hope for was to build a wall to block the tunnel. There was the proper equipment to do that, but did they have the time before their miner encampments were invaded by the hive?