Despite being unnerved by the concept of sleeping near a troll the size of a Transformers robot, Cale found he slept decently in Grumbly Runt’s chandelier-lit cavern. He needed it, and the weariness had been put away for the time being, at least.
Barden had been a bit distant since she’d pushed back at his decision. But there was always something about making a firm call that set things in motion for Cale. It even got his blood going, a spring in his step, as he woke up and got ready for the next move.
Everyone had been briefed, they’d done inventory, the machine that was the Marines was oiled and ready.
There was some morning grumbling as tired people got moving, but the team leaders did their junior-drill-instructor routines and kicked a few feet, and the platoon spun into gear.
The last watch said that Grumbly Runt had gone back out on the mountain ledge to see off the last of the night. Some troll thing, waiting until that first deadly hint of dawn came before coming inside. The troll had urged them to go on without him.
“Let’s move out!” Cale ordered.
The warm radiance of hundreds of tallow candles gave way to a much cooler dimness as they walked on deeper inside. Cale realized a fainter light came from within the cave, a pervasive green glow. Phosphorescent lichen with writhing roots, like the end of some far-off tree, clung to the walls. Spotted mushrooms grew in the crevices and emitted their own nauseating glow.
“This so don’t look like the right way, Staff Sergeant.” Ysbarra trudged along just behind him.
“It’s not like there’s a bunch of branching tunnels or anything. This is it.”
“I’d be happier in daylight, Staff Sergeant.”
“I’d be happier eating a steak at a shitty chain restaurant, but here we are.”
The deeper they went, the brighter the green glow, lighting them up like the view through a pair of night-vision goggles. The only difference was the lack of weird retinal reflection in people’s eyes, but that just made it creepier, as everyone’s eyes looked dark and empty.
Drips echoed loudly in the darkness, matching time with Cale’s steps. The cavern opened wider, and the heights of it were lost in shadow as the glowing lichen only reached up a few meters.
Massive doors of stone coalesced out of the greenish gloom as they approached. Shadows flickered and writhed in the half-light. Cale put the stock of his rifle into his shoulder and scanned up, aiming up out of a sense of duty to all those years of field-of-fire drills.
“We not getting through that, Staff Sergeant,” someone shouted from farther down into the gloom.
Doors and corners were where the surprises came. Didn’t matter if the door was a wooden one in Fallujah or a massive stone one over here.
The thought had barely formed in his head when a phosphorescent glob of something dropped out of the gloom of the cavern’s high ceiling and struck Brust. A few meters to Cale’s left, Brust dropped to the ground as glowing goo sizzled and smoked on his chest.
Cale scooted over to where Brust, on his back, struggled with his gear.
“Spread out! Down!” Cale shouted as he swung his rifle around onto his back and started fumbling with the clasps on Brust’s gear. The phosphorescent glob had struck Brust square in the chest and was in the process of eating through the layers of Kevlar and ceramic on his upper torso.
“Jesus! Jesus, get it off get it off getitoff!” Brust shouted.
They got his Load Bearing Vest out of the way, then ripped open the Velcro seals on his body armor. Brust slithered out, trying not to touch more of the vest than he had to. By the time he was clear, the goo had eaten through the whole Kevlar-and-ceramic front panel and was about to go to work on the thin inner Kevlar layer.
Brust stood there looking down on it for a moment, oddly slender in just his helmet. Then he swept the helmet off his head and spiked it on the ground near what was rapidly becoming a puddle of ultra-modern ballistic protection.
“Fuck this!” he shouted. “Fuck the Marines, fuck the portal, fuck the monsters, fuck all this nonsense.”
“Brust—”
He whirled and pointed over at the green wall. “And fuck you, you Lovecraftian shitgibbon!”
The thing that spat at him descended out of the darkness into the half-gloom of the floor with them. Tentacles writhed and a beak-like mouth opened and snapped at them.
Cale was on the cusp of making a decision about whether to retreat, or engage the thing, or just nuke it from orbit, when Grumbly Runt strode heavily into the gloom from the direction of his cave.
“Why awake?” he asked, boulders grinding in his landslide cacophony of a voice. “You not be awake now!”
The troll clocked the thing hard with a massive fist to the beak. It squealed and scampered back up the wall into the gloom above, the yelping squeak receding for quite some time as it crawled back into deep tunnels within the mountain. Grumbly Runt stood there for a moment, looking up into the dark after it.
“Naughty,” the troll said.
Then he shook his head and moved toward the immense doors. He pushed them open, stone grinding on stone so loudly it made Cale’s teeth ache.
“You okay?” Cale asked, looking at Brust now that the Marine had calmed down a little. The man’s body armor sizzled in a little pool of bright green by his feet.
“I’ll live, Staff Sergeant.” Brust gathered up his LBV and weapon and strapped them both back on. The LBV hung loose on his lanky frame without the bulk of his body armor underneath it.
“Guardian of the Portal worries you not, now,” Runt said, standing aside from the door. Jones scrambled to get out of his way as he nearly trod on her as he backed up.
It was dark on the other side of the door. No bioluminescent lichen out there.
“Go,” the troll gestured. “Elfland on far side.”
The troll had said the way was marked with misshapen antlers that didn’t make the cut for his massive chandeliers.
Easy enough, right?
Cale waved Barden forward, and she pushed Rashad out on point. The young Marine took a moment to steady himself, looked at everyone, and then moved forward into the deeper darkness beyond the huge doors.
Jones hurried up to Cale’s side as he fell into the middle of the column.
“I got a bad feeling, Staff Sergeant,” she said.
“You said that when we were stepping off in Central Park.”
“I was right then, Staff Sergeant.”
“I know this looks like a road of shit. But it’s a road of shit toward mission accomplishment. I’m not going to throw the squad off a cliff, though. If it gets too hot or nasty or whatever, we boogie back and knock on the doors. Runt will let us back in.”
Jones looked long up at the huge doors as they passed through. They had to be stone, maybe a foot thick, with huge, iron bands holding the slabs up and binding them to great hinges.
“Yeah, Staff Sergeant,” she said. “But how do we knock on those?” The door knockers were well out of human reach, and too big for any of them to lift without a crane’s help.
Cale pondered it as they walked. Explosives might do it, maybe a couple of grenades, or one of the two 66mm light anti-tank rockets they had with them. Or both of them. Or every scrap of boom-pow they had with them. Maybe that would get Runt’s attention. If they needed to.
As he ran through the possible plans in his head, though, the last of the squad crossed the threshold and Runt swung the doors closed behind them with a titanic boom.
Rashad picked his way carefully over the rough ground, the bright xenon flashlight mounted to his M27 stabbing a cone of white light into the smothering darkness. Everyone had their lights on, as the night-vision goggles soon proved useless. The goggles worked on enhancing ambient light, and there was fuck-all for them to enhance this deep inside a mountain.
Every few hundred meters, a chasm opened up, or some rocky pillar sprouted up from the living stone. Well ahead, on point, Team Three was prowling around, checking their path, finding piles of rocks or large pots of wax that Runt had used to guide himself through the dwarven mines.
And mines they were, certainly, no rectilinear dungeon or picturesque subterranean city. Filthy, abandoned camps could be seen at the edge of their flashlights’ glow every now and then. Runic graffiti covered some walls.
Rashad figured Diaz could probably decipher it, but Team Two was too far back for him to ask.
An hour into the dark, they found a narrow bridge, which should have presented a challenge to Grumbly Runt, as big as he was. No railings, no curbs on either side, and maybe wide enough for three to walk abreast, if they were brave. Everyone stayed scrupulously in the center as they shuffled across it.
“Well, now we know the fucking Mines of Moria ain’t OSHA-compliant,” Jones said, close behind Rashad as they started down the far side of the narrow, arching bridge. Rashad didn’t point his flashlight down off the side as he went, resolutely keeping his eyes forward. He did not want to see the edge of the light disappear into the dark.
“Yeah, well, that’s the thing, ain’t it?” Orley asked. “You wouldn’t want to be crossing this thing if shit went south.”
Team Two remained on the near side in a defensive semicircle while the rest of the squad shuffled across.
“It’s a great choke point for stopping anyone with bad ideas,” Orley said.
“Iron Age armies, maybe,” Jones said. “But man, you pound the far side with a couple of M-240 machine guns and lay down some mortar fire, you can probably stroll across by the time the defenders put the pieces back together.”
“Yeah, maybe,” Orley looked back at it. “If the defenders don’t have all that stuff, too.”
Rashad thought about that Warthog going down to a Stinger missile fired by one of the attacking wood elves back at the base. Someone else on this side of the interworld portals had advanced weapons, and they really needed to stop thinking they were the only ones with modern munitions. That was “gets you dead” complacency shit.
Ass-umptions make asses out of all of you, his drill instructor used to say.
At the bottom of the bridge, Cale waved everyone impatiently on. He seemed even more tense than usual, which Rashad hadn’t thought possible.
Team Two boogied across the bridge and Barden moved Team One into the point position, relieving Team Three. Rashad prodded at the darker corners of the little paved plaza at the end of the bridge.
“Where the hell are Runt’s signposts?” Orley asked. He was on point, waving his flashlight around. “I can’t see anything.”
Barden frowned for a moment, then aimed her light up the nearest wall. Sure enough, there was an antler jammed into a fissure in the rock, drizzled on the end with melted wax.
“Look up,” she said. “Runt’s twenty meters tall.”
Orley started craning his neck as he walked.
“But watch your feet, Orley!” Barden snapped. “No bottomless chasms, got it?”
“Aye aye, Corporal.”
He moved off into the gloom, with Barden close behind him. Rashad followed, with Jones behind.
“You okay back there?” Barden asked.
“It’s getting hotter and I can’t see shit. I think my batteries are dying,” Rashad confessed.
“Stay close behind and watch my light,” she said, half-turning her head. “Is your solar charger in your daypack?”
Barden and her full load-out. “Yes, Corporal.”
“Make sure to recharge next time we’re out in the light.”
“Shit.”
That was Jones, all the way at the back. Rashad swiveled to look.
“Something’s moving toward us,” she said.
In the far distance, Barden spotted a flicker of orange flame. She frowned as it dimmed, then flared up again. The ground sloped down, which could only mean good things, at least as long as they didn’t keep going down below the level of the ground around the mountain.
“Jones? What do you see?” Barden asked.
The occasional tunnel branched off left or right, but nothing that Runt could have fit in. Above, near what must have been the top of Runt’s reach, the walls of their present path flared out and embraced a dark openness. This path must have been a central route for ore and whatever else was mined in the upper reaches, which was then sent down to smelting furnaces. That was likely what lay ahead.
Only, there were no rail lines here. Just . . . shadows of where lines had once been.
“I don’t know.” Jones pulled out a laser thermometer and waved it around.
“Picking up the furnaces ahead?” Barden asked.
“Something hot. Are you sure that what’s up there? There aren’t any people living here anymore—Runt said it was abandoned.”
“I hope so.” Barden shrugged her shoulders, as much in uncertainty as a desire to resettle the weight of her armor, vest, and pack.
Jones looked back off into the dark as she waved the thermometer around. “Furnaces don’t usually move, Corporal.”
“Move?”
“Watch . . .” Jones said, and waved the laser thermometer left, then right, the numbers dipping, climbing, then dipping again. Then she held it still, and the numbers rose and dipped on their own. When Barden looked up, the orange light off in the dark flared brighter.
Then a tongue of bright flame lanced out in a straight line, followed by the roar of fire and the press of a giant bellows.
Or—
“DRAGON!” shouted Orley from the front of the squad column.
The bright spot grew rapidly, growing clearer as the deep and constant fire within a great dragon’s open mouth. It looked, Barden thought, like some mix of a flying Godzilla and angry, giant iguana with wings. Everyone dropped low and the creature flew above them an instant later, another bright line of flame striking out to smash a finger of rock over their heads. Molten clumps dripped down the wall and lit the Marines up in a soft orange glow.
“Scatter!” Cale shouted, and everyone split left and right. Barden saw Cale hunched over Heath, who had dropped on his back to point his automatic rifle toward the distant ceiling of the cavern. It was classic dragon-overflight-immediate-action mode.
Barden dodged right, pulling Jones with her. Cale went right, Heath left as he scrambled to his feet. From overhead, a head-pounding shriek dizzied Barden and fire lashed the path they had just stood on. Barden’s face reddened with the near heat.
She and Jones ran with Cale and Diaz into one of the side tunnels and crouched. The line of fire left by the dragon continued to burn, setting up a wall of flame between them and the Marines who had gone left.
On the other side of the curtain of fire, Ysbarra stepped out of a tunnel with an opened LAW propped on her shoulder. She triggered it, and the missile leapt out of the collapsible tube and shrieked up into the dark of the cavern. She scuttled back inside just as a new blast of fire splashed the rock by her feet.
“What can we do to bring these down?” Cale shouted. “I never trusted that immediate-action shit. Diaz?”
“A black arrow in the right spot?” Diaz offered, gritting his teeth and aiming down the tunnel toward the fire.
“Didn’t the dwarves dump molten gold on that dragon in The Hobbit?” Barden asked.
“That’s not canon,” Diaz hissed. “It takes air support or surface-to-air missiles to tackle a dragon. Ysbarra’s got the best idea. I don’t know if it’s powerful enough to penetrate all that scale, though.”
A new blast of fire sent them scurrying farther back. Cale kept them moving deeper into the tunnel, as fire completely blocked the other end. They ducked left and right, following the tunnel, then taking what forks and crossing tunnels might bring them back to the central path, or down to another one.
The radio didn’t work through the rock, only when they were back out in the open. They couldn’t raise anyone else, other than in shouted fragments and echoes.
They popped out into a narrow passage, then turned and ran downslope, finding cart rails there unmelted by the dragon. They ran down them until they found a crossway. One opening led them out into a wide plaza, fronted with a tall colonnade, though it held up no roof—as here the ceiling reared high up as it had on their previous path.
“Do you see it?” Cale spun in a tight circle, aiming upward. “Anyone see it?”
Barden swung in a slow circle, keeping the others at her back, scanning right and left, up and down. Jones was at her shoulder, her M27 up, grasping both the laser thermometer and the foregrip of the automatic rifle in one hand. The dayglo-yellow instrument bleeped.
“Jones?” Barden hissed. “What’s it telling you?”
“There!” Jones and Cale shouted the words together. Bright flame blossomed under a tall, stone arch. Barden felt someone grab at her daypack to pull off the squad’s other LAW.
The dragon crawled over the ground, long neck craning about as it looked for anything moving to barbecue.
Diaz ran forward at it as he extended the rocket launcher’s telescoping tube.
“Diaz!” Cale shouted.
“I got this, Staff Sergeant,” he said without looking back.
“Fucking idiot,” Cale grumbled, but they all hustled after him. Two hundred meters from the arch, Diaz skidded down to his knees.
They were all, painfully, out in the open.
The dragon turned to regard them, the armor around its black eyes crinkling as it squinted in anger.
“Backblast area clear!” Diaz shouted, and the other three swerved off to the right of him. The rocket flared bright in the dark as it shrieked out of the tube. Angled up slightly, it flew straight, no wind or updrafts or anything in the still dark of the mine to divert it.
And it missed.
Barden’s heart skipped a beat as the missile flew high of the dragon as the beast awkwardly walked under the massive arch.
The arch’s keystone shattered, turned to gravel by the anti-tank round. The crumbled stone pattered down on the dragon’s back, followed a moment later by tons of stone. A brief belch of flame flared out, then darkness and sulfurous stench settled hard in the open plaza.
“Is it down for good?” Cale asked.
“Probably not, Staff Sergeant.” Diaz shouted far too loud, overcompensating for his own likely ringing ears.
“Let’s move, then.”
“Should we try to track everyone else down?” Barden asked. The place looked like a dungeon maze to beat the worst of Gygax’s imagination. No telling where the rest of the squad was, or how many of them had survived the dragon.
“Find a way out, first, then we can try backtracking. Everyone else knows we’re trying to get out.”
“Which way then, Staff Sergeant?”
“I don’t care, just not back the way we came. Otherwise, my sense of direction is truly fucked.”
Barden led off. She spotted the tunnel they had come through, ninety degrees around the huge square from where the dragon lay mostly buried. Leaving the thing behind them felt like a bad idea, but they had no idea if they could kill it, or if it was even safe to try.
She picked the colonnade directly opposite where they had come in and hurried through it. Jones had chalk out, and tagged the walls with directions and intel, hoping anyone who came behind used it.
Behind the columns, a series of arches led them into a wide arcade, but a false turn led them into a rough mining area, covered in the graffiti of dying dwarves who had no doubt been in the same position. They backtracked and down the other end of the arcade, which led into another wide plaza.
She took them down only three other false turns before she caught a whiff of fresh air. Within a few more steps they all sensed it and hurried on, breaking from a cautious shuffle into a trot. Dazzling daylight hit them and they burst out onto a wide balcony cut into the side of the mountain.
For a moment they panted and looked up at the sky, appreciating just being out of the dark.
In the distance, a fortress rose up against the far blue sky, towers looking as though they had been grown from the boles of great trees. Finger-like branches curled out, offering parapets on which an archer might stand to shoot down at attackers.
“That must be it. Looks wood-elfy enough,” Jones muttered.
The towers themselves stood on pyramid bases, thrusting up like great collections of roots, to push the tree-towers to the sky. The greens and browns of the towers and roots glowed in the noon sun. Below them, maybe fifty meters down the mountain slope, a road had been carved into the craggy face of the mountain, terminating somewhere off to their left, and shortly along to their right jutting out from the mountain along the spine of a great spur of stone, leading off toward the distant fortress.
The radio crackled. It was Lomicka.
Barden leaned over the balcony, cautiously, as it was crumbling. Marines below her were spilling out of a cut in the mountain and onto the road.