Wormhole (The Rho Agenda #3)(109)
The projectile armed itself at thirty meters, tore into its target at thirty-two, and exploded with the force of a grenade. The Graath became a fine green-yellow mist, out of which writhing gelatinous blobs and twitching limbs whipped into the cavern below.
Before her exultant yell could make it from her lungs to her lips, one of Heather’s visions stifled it in her throat. Leaning out over the railing, she looked up.
Less than ten meters up and to the right, a second gorilla-spider raced down the steel latticework toward her.
Heather spun left, running along the metal grating, her black boots making the flooring sing as she approached the near corner. Behind her she felt the gorilla-spider land on the walkway, the sound painting a clear image of its powerful eight-legged lope quickly closing the space between them.
The quick look she’d just gotten of this one had been enough. Unlike the four-armed alien fighting Mark on the cavern floor, the spider thing carried no weapons. Each of its eight legs ended in a hairy hand, each finger sporting raptor-like retractable claws. From the goo, blood, and intestinal splatter that covered its bulbous body, it must have torn apart her partner after wading through the goober munition’s web. And if it got its hands on her, the result would be no different.
With each stride, Heather watched a hundred scenarios play out in her mind. Cradling the short rifle in the crook of her right arm, she hit the end of the walkway, spun and pulled the trigger. The explosive round had no time to arm, hammering into the alien body after travelling only 3.872 meters. And although it didn’t explode, the impact lifted the black, hairy body, sending it rolling back along the walkway as if it had stepped in front of a speeding truck. Since she hadn’t been braced, the recoil flung Heather backward, her left hand just catching the rail as she tumbled backward over it, her beret spinning away like a small black Frisbee.
Seeing the spider-thing right itself, Heather kicked outward, released her grip on the rail, and dropped the twenty-two feet to the concrete floor, transferring momentum into a forward roll as she landed. As she came back to her feet, she squeezed off another round into the alien as it scurried down the steel lattice after her. No time to lase the target or thumb in extra distance. It didn’t matter. She hadn’t gained the required arming distance, and her mind told her the alien had figured it out.
As the twenty-five-millimeter round knocked the alien from the scaffolding, Heather ran toward the Cage, a massive rack-support structure that housed all the heavy cables that carried power from the matter disruptor facility to the wormhole device and stasis field generators. The workmen who had built it, Mark included, all hated it with a passion that bespoke the claustrophobia the Cage generated in those who had experienced its interior. As big as the thickly insulated cables were, most of the room was taken up with the pipes and cooling equipment required to keep them superconductive. Like everything else on this project, it had been designed with speed of construction and efficiency of operation in mind. Only enough crawl space had been left to allow workmen to wriggle along twisting paths and up narrow ladders. Mark had said there weren’t many places inside the Cage where he didn’t have surfaces pressed against both his front and back sides. And while that might have been an exaggeration, it wasn’t much of one.
Add that to the wind that howled through these passageways from the powerful fans designed to clear the heat from the cooling machines and you had something Dante would have loved to include in his description of the lower pits of hell.
Pulling the Cage schematics to the front of her memory, Heather calculated how long it would take her to make the GF2 access door, the closest to her position. Overlaying time-sequenced imagery of her and her opponent’s anticipated intercept paths, she managed to pull just a bit more speed from her adrenaline-fueled legs. She would beat spidey to the Cage, but getting the door open and getting inside before the alien ripped her apart was going to be close.
Her pursuer was adapting to each new twenty-five-millimeter impact, having compensated for the last hit in half the time the first recovery had taken. Without the explosive force provided by a fully armed round, another slug into its body wasn’t going to do it. And having lost the Glock and her extra magazines in the fall over the railing, she was down to three rounds remaining in the M25’s six-round mag.
She hit the steel gate with a downward swipe and pulled at the lever handle, sliding through and closing it behind her as the alien’s bulk hit it, denting the metal frame inward and jamming the door latch. Heather turned sideways, sliding along the access way until she reached the first junction. Squeezing into the passage on her right, she heard the squeal of tearing metal as the alien ripped the gate from its hinges and flung it into the cavern.
At the first ladder, she began climbing.
A glance through a narrow gap between equipment and cables showed the alien squeeze into the narrow space, bones flexing and dislocating like a giant hamster’s as it adapted to this new environment.
Heather climbed faster. Twenty meters up she shifted her body off the ladder and into an even tighter crawl space that forced her to lie on her back and wriggle her body forward along a shaft that scraped her back and sides. She knew what she was headed for, and although the alien had shown the capability to rapidly adapt, it was still quadruple her bulk, and the Cage would extract a price for that bulk.
Because the crawlways and chimneys between equipment were so tight that tool belts and hand-carried toolboxes were impractical, electrical tool cases had been bolted to the racks at strategic points throughout the Cage, providing engineers and technicians with an extensive set of test and repair equipment within ten meters of any point. Squeezing through a space not meant for passage, Heather took advantage of her small form to take a significant shortcut to one of these tool cases.