The first thing he did was break out his water bottle and take a hefty drink. It was lucky that, at the very least, freshwater was readily available everywhere they’d been, so far. If you didn’t mind weird chemical tastes, which Ricky did not.
Mildred griped about the water some. She was more squeamish than the rest of them. Even Doc.
Of course, it helped when drinking the water not to think too deeply about the cannie sanitary arrangements, which, given Ricky’s naturally inquisitive mind, and almost obsessive need to know how things worked, was not easy for him. But they had to have sanitary arrangements. Not just the cannie queen’s giant audience chamber but everywhere they’d been—including more than slightly unnerving glimpses into breeder dorms and feeding halls—and the passages themselves were all spotless. That was especially surprising given what they all knew
about the coamers’ taste. Clearly, cannie inbreds or not, they knew not to shit where they ate. Ricky suspected that some of the working caste had the job of clearing waste. The others all sat down around him and likewise drank in the low, small chamber, which was really more a widening of the passageway than anything else. Even Jak squatted on his haunches near Ricky. Ryan had taken on the task of prowling around, peering down the two tunnels that led to and from the place and keeping watch.
Krysty would probably upbraid him later about ignoring his own needs. He would nod and ignore her protests. The usual.
After draining his bottle and stuffing it into his pack, Ricky’s next move was to dig out the diary and keep reading. He lit his lantern to do so, immediately filling the air with pine tang. Though their oil stocks were low, Ryan had given him permission to use the lamp when absolutely necessary to read. Their leader thought what they’d learned from the diary had some prospect of upping their chances of getting out of this mess alive, and hoped that maybe even a hint to dealing with whatever they were looking for—and still hadn’t found—might yet lurk in the water-warped pages. The glow-moss here was clearly getting near exhaustion, and gave off only a feeble illumination. Not enough by which to read the precise but tiny handwriting.
“‘Our Digging Leviathan is progressing beyond our wildest expectations,’” he read aloud. “‘Its growth is remarkably rapid, even given its gene engineering, and its development remains within parameters. If anything, it almost grows too fas—’ It ends, in several more pages so soaked together I can’t even pull them apart. Probably nothing readable on them if I did, so…”
He ended with a shrug. That was the kick. While having been stuffed, somehow, into the hard-to-see crevice in a cave wall by some long-forgotten hand had preserved the diary until its chance discovery, it had done nothing to shield it from the occasional influx of the mineral-rich water whose drips had carved these caverns over endless millennia. He wondered that it had survived as intact, and legible, as it had.
“Interesting,” Krysty said.
“Huh, Krysty,” Mildred said. “You usually don’t take to science-y stuff like that.”
The tall, statuesque redhead laughed.
“You’re right,” she said. “I don’t—usually. But I do take interest in my intuition, and that twitched when you spoke the words
Digging Leviathan
.”
“Strange,” Doc said. “‘Leviathan’ appears as a sea monster in the Old Testament, and is generally used to refer to such. It would seem to accord oddly with the sobriquet, ‘digging.’”
“It gives me the creeps, too, now that you mention it,” Mildred said. The sturdy woman, like Ricky, was sitting on the cool stone floor. The others squatted on their haunches the way Jak was.
Ryan approached them. “All right,” he said with a nod to Jak. The albino sprang to his feet as eagerly as a puppy freed from its leash. “You can go poke around.”
The tall one-eyed man likewise hunkered, took out a water bottle and drank deeply. Then he turned his lone eye to Ricky.
“We’ve got a couple minutes, by my reckoning,” he said, which made Ricky smile. The fact that it was Ryan’s reckoning made it that way, regardless of what J.B.’s wrist chron said. “See if you can find something
else worth reading to us. I’ve got to say, tramping around these nuking half-lit caves gets to be wearing, after a spell.”
They had been exploring more laterally than vertically since discovering the proximity of live magma. Ryan wanted to get some idea of where the stuff was to be found, for their own safety. Ricky wasn’t sure exactly how that was a concern, given—as Ryan himself had said—that if the stuff hadn’t flooded into the cannie’s cave system yet, it wasn’t particularly likely to now. But Ryan had gut feelings, too, and he knew to trust them.
The cannies had a system of marks notched in the walls as navigation aids. Because they clearly weren’t particularly bright, except their mother, the system was simple. The companions figured it out in short order. Ricky and J.B. took notes and sketched maps in scavvied notebooks anyway. For his part Jak claimed to know his way around anyplace they’d been, and while this was even more remote from their usual environment than a ruined city was, Ricky was inclined to believe him. He also half suspected Ryan kept a pretty fair map in his own head.
Ricky skimmed over some uninteresting sections of the diary, griping about this delay or that with the program, who was subcompetent—everybody but Foxton, apparently—and repetitive whines about McComb and her rival project, and their incessant war over resources.
“Here we go,” he said finally, as Ryan ordered an end to their break and everybody got back to their feet. He paused to pull on his pack and longblaster sling, then picked up the lantern. The oil reservoir hadn’t gone down much.
“‘We have received a full alert of possible impending
global war,’” he read as he walked. “‘Totality Concept leadership informs us this is not a drill. I have ordered the evacuation of the surface facility, and all personnel have taken shelter underground.’”
He raised his head and looked around. “So where
is
this lab, exactly? It should’ve been right beneath us.”
“Nowhere we’ve been,” Ryan said. “They must not have located the office complex directly over the actual laboratory, which makes sense as a cover. They wouldn’t want to have a signpost right up in the open announcing We Are Here.”
“Maybe they did,” Mildred suggested. “But what we first came into down here was just an admin complex—desks, chairs, computers, separated by movable panels. It was a basic, late twentieth-century cube farm. All of which could’ve easily been looted, destroyed, or just thrown away later.”
“Where were the big labs the diary keeps going on about?” J.B. asked.
Ricky knew his mentor was thinking in terms of possible terrain advantage in case they had the need—or even the opportunity—to make some kind of defensive stand. A predark lab could offer all kinds of good cover, depending on what its function had been, and how well its equipment had stood up.
Mildred shrugged. “Somewhere else. Probably not far. But we got grabbed right off the bat, and carried off to Queen Crazy-Ass Bitch, before we had a chance to poke around and find them. So, as Ryan said, nowhere we’ve been.”
The passage widened. The light brightened. The glow-moss here was much fresher, and Ricky gratefully doused his lamp and stuffed another handful down his shirt.
I sure hope the radiation doesn’t make me grow a third nipple or a second head or anything, he thought.
“There’s an interruption of a couple of days,” he reported. “Then we get ‘Shocks of terrifying magnitude have at last subsided. If I were given to fits of irrationality, I would ascribe the fact that the caverns were not collapsed on our heads to a miracle. But we seem to have weathered the worst of the storm.’”
A growl from Ricky’s stomach interrupted him. It was loud enough that Jak, who had been showing no signs of interest in Ricky’s recitation, stopped prowling out front, looked at him sharply and grinned. If water was thankfully no concern, food was another issue. They had managed to bring with them an abundant supply of still-good canned food and even treasured self-heat MRE packs from the scavvy site. But those were still in limited supply, and the companions had been tramping these endless passageways fruitlessly for several days now.
So they were all on tight rations. Even Deathlands-hardened survivors like Ricky’s companions, used to scavenging whatever protein they could find to get by, had refrained so far from eating the variety of cave bugs and other vermin that proved fairly common even down this far, once you started to look for them. And the pink cave fish they saw in many of the underground streams they encountered looked too small to pay off the energy spent catching them, metabolically speaking.
Ricky took a deep breath, sighed it out through pursed lips and went on.
“He goes on for pages and pages complaining about how things are going to…pieces. He stops getting any communication from the outside world, not even over the Totality Concept’s supersecret setup.”
“Huge surprise,” Mildred said.
“Then, a few months after the war during skydark, we get ‘We have suffered repeated incidents of pilferage of stocks, primarily foodstuffs. I blame McComb and her twisted freaks. I know she’s started letting some of them off the leash, though she denies it.’”
He flipped some pages and stopped abruptly, then turned back a few pages. “Whoa,” he said. “Listen to this. ‘Awakened by a terrible tumult during my sleeping period. It appears the containment unit’s integrity was compromised by the series of severe earthquakes that followed the global thermonuclear exchange. The Digging Leviathan has escaped. It managed to batter and burrow its way through the reinforced walls into the caverns. We have no prospect of tracing it, far less the means of restoring it to captivity if we should locate it. This is a disaster of unprecedented proportion—’”
“Whitecoats,” Doc said, as if he’d just accidentally stepped on a dog turd.
“‘We can only hope against hope that the entity does not return here,’ Foxton says, ‘either by choice or by blind accident.’”
J.B. halted, blinked at Ricky, then took off his glasses and began polishing them with his handkerchief. Ryan called another brief halt.
“Reckon that giant digging thing of theirs could be the same as the thing we’re supposed to be hunting?” he asked.
Ryan grunted. “Be a triple-nuking huge coincidence if it wasn’t.”
As if on cue, a rumble shook its way through their boots and up their legs from the floor, accompanied by a deep roar like an angry volcano.
“The monster!” Ryan heard Ricky yell over the rumble and the roar. Both went on and on until it felt as if the marrow was being rattled loose from his bones.
“Or one of the magma intrusions erupting into the cave system proper,” Doc suggested.
“I’m not loving either of those alternatives!” Mildred shouted.
“Hear screaming,” Jak called back from the far side of a cluster of short, needle-tipped stalagmites.
“Other than us?” Mildred yelled.
“Lead us to it,” Ryan called. The terrible sub-basso noise and accompanying vibrations began to dwindle, and now he could hear shrieks, tiny and thin with distance, echoing up the passageway that lay before them.
Unslinging his Steyr as he ran, he led them along a passageway with a well-worn floor. The glow-moss was sparse here, and Ryan had to bend over or risk his head to a sudden impact with a stalactite. But it had clearly been carefully cleared to the specifications of the coamers, and was easy going. That was fortunate, because the slope accelerated until running would have been tricky even without obstacles.
The screams and roaring rose to crescendos, accompanied by the crashing of splintering stone. Something big was going on, and something big was causing it.
“Cannies!” Jak yelled as he approached the barely visible entrance to another sizable room. Figures broader and even shorter than the albino scout were suddenly crowding into the tunnel and rushing at them.
“Ryan—” Krysty called.
“Hold fire!”
He saw at once those weren’t cannie warriors, but workers—mostly female, but not all, carrying white-skinned, red-eyes babies as naked as they were, and all squalling up a storm. Unlike Krysty, Ryan wasn’t motivated by compassion, but by the fact they’d no doubt be needing every cartridge and every scrap of physical energy they had in one hell of a hurry. He wasn’t about to waste either on noncombatants.
“Packs on!” Ryan barked over the tumult. He left unspoken the obvious: that they might need to get out of there a lot faster than they came down.
Panicked though they were, the coamer nurses parted to go around point man Jak without touching him. Likely he looked terrifying to them, despite his skin, eyes and hair, in his camo jacket and his jeans. And the rest of his band looked even worse, such that when they reached Ryan the fleeing workers were almost rubbing the walls to both sides, almost as eager to avoid contact with these scary invaders as to get away from the bigger one below.
The bigger,
louder
one. Bouncing off the walls and ceiling, its roars and banging pounded on Ryan’s skull like hammers.
Jak, brave but no fool, knelt just shy of the widening of the way and peered inside. He had his big Magnum revolver in his hand.
“What do you see?” Ryan yelled, pounding up behind him.
“Not much,” Jak replied, not turning his head. “But big!”
Halting right behind him, Ryan looked into the chamber. It was wide with a floor flat and mostly free of stalagmites or columns, suggesting the coamers had cleared and leveled it.
Workers must be as fanatic as the warriors, in their way, he thought. The roof, spiked with stalactites as per usual, arched to about twenty feet at the highest. The glow-moss light was so faint it was hard to tell.
The floor was still strewed with hundred of infants, squalling in carefully constructed nests of what looked at a distance like scraps of vegetation, cave-moss of the nonluminous variety, and scavvied clothes scraps. A throng of nurse-workers was desperately trying to scoop them up and escape into one of the several tunnels leaving off it.