Chapter 9: Food Chain

“Hold,” Jade warned, the squad stopping their advance. They were making their way through another nondescript tunnel, its featureless resin walls no different from the last.

“What is it?” Bainbridge asked. “What do you smell?”

“Something about this wall smells off,” she replied, stepping closer to the curving resin. She lowered her PDW, reaching out with a lower hand to run her fingers across the uneven surface. “There’s a panel,” she added, starting to shine her flashlight around as though searching for a handle or a keypad.

“There,” Aster said, shining her beam on something that looked like a little blob of mucous.

“It’s a hidden door,” Bainbridge said. “You reckon you can open it?”

“As long as it isn’t coded to only open for specific pheromone signals or gene sequences, it should be fine,” Jade replied.

“Alright, stack up,” Simmons ordered. “Get ready to breach.”

They formed a line on the right side of the hidden door as Jade poked and prodded at the gelatinous mass, the button – or whatever it was – shifting and reacting as though it had a life of its own. It finally had an effect, and the panel slid aside to expose a room, Jade stepping out of the way as the team piled inside. They illuminated the space with their flashlight beams, Evan picking out snippets of the environment, and it soon became clear that the room was deserted.

“False alarm,” Bainbridge said, shining his beam on a stack of resin crates. “It’s just a storage alcove.”

“Why the hell would they hide this?” Collins wondered aloud, walking over to one of the crates. He examined it for a moment, then popped open the lid, something golden reflecting the light back at his visor. They were honey vials, the amber fluid contained inside translucent capsules that resembled test tubes, sealed with a little cap. Judging by their size, they must be rations. They weren’t too far off the more conventional toothpaste tube honey rations that Jade and her counterparts carried. “Why conceal an empty storage room filled with food?” he continued as he turned back to face the team. “It doesn’t make any sense.”

“Because it’s not hidden,” Bainbridge explained. “The Bugs navigate primarily by scent, so what a human would walk right past, a Bug will pick up right away. Remember – they use pheromones in the same way that we’d use signs or writing. Storage closet is probably written right on the wall – we just can’t pick it up because we don’t speak Bug.”

“You’re in an alien environment here,” Sunny added, her suit standing in the tunnel outside. “Take nothing for granted.”

“This room wasn’t full of pissed-off Drones, but the next one might be,” Bainbridge said as he turned around. “Stay alert.”

“I’m glad that the tunnels are still big enough for Sunny,” Aster said as they made their way along another winding passage. “I feel a little safer having her with us.”

“I don’t,” Bainbridge grumbled. “Warrior-sized tunnels mean that we can expect Warriors, or something that needs a similar amount of room to maneuver.”

“Are you expecting them to get narrower?” Garcia asked, sparing a worried glance at the resin tube that surrounded them.

“Warriors are just suits, like mine,” Sunny explained. “While it’s useful to be able to move them around the hive, they don’t need to be able to access every nook and cranny. Honestly, wider tunnels tell us that we’re on the right path, because it means there’s something down here deemed worthy of protecting with heavy infantry.”

“And I’d rather not go toe to toe with one of those things in close quarters,” Bainbridge muttered. “They wiped out whole squads on Kruger.”

“That’s what I’m here for,” Sunny said cheerfully, snapping one of her claws as if to demonstrate. “If you see anything bigger than a Drone, just get behind me. I’ll keep you safe, little guy.”

“That’s Lieutenant,” he sighed.

Evan waited for her to reply with some kind of pun, but she seemed to have decided that keeping quiet was better than getting a reprimand.

“I was kind of expecting them to put up more of a fight,” Brooks said as they marched along the tunnel. “They fought so hard to stop us from getting inside the mountain, but now that we’re here, it feels like they’re just letting us wander around as we please.”

“Make no mistake, they know that we’re here,” Bainbridge replied. “The hive is like a living thing in its own right, and it has an immune system that’s going to start reacting to us the deeper we get. We’re bacteria invading a blood vessel right now, and the T-cells are on their way...”

“Then call me Ebola, because I’m gonna shut this place down,” Hernandez chuckled.

“That’s a virus, not a bacteria,” Jade whispered.

“Same difference,” he replied.

“Hold on,” Jade said, raising a hand to silence him. Whatever Jade had picked up, Aster and Cardinal noticed it too, all turning their heads in the same direction.

“What is it?” Simmons asked.

“The ventilation system is carrying the scent of Drones towards us,” she replied, gesturing down the tunnel. “Coming from ahead, not far off.”

“Probably a patrol,” Bainbridge grumbled, hefting his microwave gun. “Keep behind me.”

“You had to jinx us, Brooks!” Garcia hissed.

Bainbridge knelt in the tunnel, shouldering his weapon like a rifle, aiming the bulky device at the blind corner ahead of them. The rest of the squad stood there as he waited, expecting further orders. If nothing else, he was a patient man, willing to let the Drones come to him.

“The scent is getting stronger,” Aster warned, a couple of the Marines at the front of the group raising their XMRs.

“Hold your fire,” Bainbridge said without taking his eyes off the tunnel. “And turn off your flashlights – you’re going to give us away!”

The minutes ticked by, until finally, there was movement. A squad of Drones stalked around the corner maybe ten meters ahead, their weapons at the ready, clearly aware that there were intruders present in spite of being upwind of the airflow that wafted through the passages. They reacted quickly, turning their resin rifles on the squad, but Bainbridge was already set up.

He pulled the trigger, and the air in front of the blocky device began to waver, the microwave radiation exciting the water molecules in the atmosphere to produce heat. In a mere moment, the tunnel was shimmering like a desert mirage, the unfortunate squad of Drones finding themselves in the path of the beam. They staggered, dropping their weapons, starting to jerk and twitch erratically as they cooked. The exposed flesh between their joints began to blister, what might be smoke or steam pouring from the breaks in their carapaces with an audible hiss as the water inside their bodies boiled, the intense heat starting to warp their shells like melting plastic. Only a brief burst was enough to send the entire squad toppling to the ground – maybe a couple of seconds of exposure, their twitching limbs going still.

“Holy shit,” Hernandez whispered, Jade recoiling as though she could smell the burnt flesh with her antennae. “Why don’t we get those?”

“They’re very short range, and not much use outside of tunnels,” Bainbridge replied as he rose to his feet. “You need a lot of practice and training to avoid roasting your team alive, too.”

“I could handle it,” Hernandez insisted.

“I barely trust you with sharp objects, Hernandez,” Evan said, patting him on the shoulder as he walked past him.

They stepped over the pile of dead Drones, Evan glancing down at their corpses. They were blistered, melted like candles, still steaming like they had just come out of an oven. He had seen plasma weapons have similar effects on living creatures, but those were localized, not spread across a target’s entire body. It couldn’t have hurt for more than a second, but boy, what a second...

As they made their way around the corner, he noted that everyone was making a point of staying well behind the lieutenant now.

“The platform has a lot of advantages,” Bainbridge explained, leading them around the bend. “It’s completely silent, instantly deadly to anything smaller than a Warrior, and it can hit targets through thin surfaces like doors if necessary. The only downsides are the range, and of course the potential to burn all of your friends to death if you’re careless.”

“Why doesn’t it work on Warriors?” Sunny asked, her suit’s footsteps echoing through the tunnel. “Shouldn’t it cook them just the same as a Drone?”

“It does, but the issue is that Warriors have a lot more mass,” Bainbridge replied. “Doing fatal damage to them or their Pilot generally takes longer than it takes for them to shoot back or get into slicing range, so it’s a bit of a crapshoot. It’s best used for clearing tunnels of Drones and mitigating their numerical advantage.”

They came to another junction, this one leading off in five different directions, the tunnels curving and sloping out of view to ensure that it was as disorienting as possible.

“I am liking this less and less,” Garcia muttered as he swept his rifle across the various openings.

“They’re all marked,” Jade said, walking to each tunnel mouth in turn. “Problem is, I don’t speak Kerguelan.”

“Do you not recognize any of them?” Bainbridge asked, setting another repeater as he waited for Aster and Cardinal to chime in. “I guess we’ll just have to take the path that looks like it goes down.”

“I recognize this one,” Aster said, pointing down one of the tunnels.

“Oh, yeah,” Jade added with a wave of her antennae. “Smells like honey. The Replete chamber must be down this way.”

“I’d like to avoid that if at all possible,” Bainbridge said.

“Why?” Jade asked, cocking her head curiously. “Repletes look tough, but they’re pretty harmless. I doubt they’ll attack us.”

“Because we don’t know what they might have been eating,” he replied, keeping his voice low as though he didn’t want the rest of the team to overhear their conversation.

“I’m sorry, but that’s all the information I can give you,” Aster replied with a shrug of her upper arms. “The feeding chambers should be relatively deep, close enough to important areas of the hive that other castes can reach them easily.”

“Alright,” Bainbridge sighed, setting off down the tunnel. “Just don’t say I didn’t warn you.”

Evan switched to a private channel, hurrying to match pace with Jade.

“What’s got the lieutenant so spooked?” he asked. “I thought Repletes weren’t combat forms?”

“They have some nasty blades and mandibles, but they’re not usually aggressive,” she replied. “The issue is that they have a large appetite. Their role in the hive is to break down organic matter and process it into honey to feed the rest of the population. That includes plant matter, animals – they even recycle dead Bugs so that some of those resources can be reused.”

“Yeah, I remember you telling me that they eat their dead,” Evan replied with a shiver.

“Not just their own dead,” she replied, sparing him a worried glance. “Just ... be prepared. This might be grisly.”

After following the twisting path for what felt like a couple of kilometers, they finally arrived at another chamber. Bainbridge used his camera to check that the coast was clear, then waved them on, leading them inside the domed structure.

They emerged into a room that looked just like all the rest, the translucent resin that coated the walls exposing the igneous rock beneath it, the ceiling terminating in a cluster of bioluminescent moss far above their heads.

“Are those ... Repletes?” Hernandez asked, aiming his rifle at the creatures.

They were sat at the base of the circular wall, dozens of them leaning back against the resin in a remarkably relaxed posture. The things rivaled a Pilot in stature, but where Pilots were slender, these were bloated and swollen. Sacks containing an amber fluid that must be honey bulged from their abdomens, the plates of their carapaces spreading apart to accommodate them, the translucent skin stretched taut like a balloon that had been filled to capacity. They looked like distended bellies, so full that it must have been a struggle for them to move.

As if to demonstrate, one of the creatures got up, starting to waddle over to a pile of what looked like leaves and branches that were clustered in the center of the room, its belly swinging with each step. Too heavy to walk normally, it dropped to all-fours, using a lower pair of stocky arms to support itself like a gorilla. When it reached the pile, it sat down heavily, the motion making its fluid-filled sack wobble like jello. Its upper pair of arms were far more dexterous, and they were equipped with wicked blades that extended from the wrists, the creature employing them to strip the bark from a branch like someone peeling a piece of fruit. It brought the remaining strands of green sapwood to its mouth, opening a set of saw-like mandibles, larger and sharper than any that Evan had seen save perhaps for the chelicerae of the Supermajors. With alarming efficiency, the branch was consumed like a celery stick, the Replete immediately starting on another one.

“Looks like they’re no more interested in us than the Workers were,” Foster muttered, lowering his rifle.

“No breasts,” Jade mused, examining the nearest Replete. “I guess they must regurgitate their honey.”

“They’re supposed to have breasts?” Hernandez asked, his bemusement obvious even through his opaque visor.

“That’s how our Repletes share food,” Jade explained. “They’re not actually breasts, just structures that bear an outward resemblance to them.”

“So, like ... you suck the honey right out of the nipple?” Hernandez continued.

“In more primitive times, we might have,” Jade replied as she followed Bainbridge deeper into the chamber. “Now, we’ve been introduced to food receptacles.”

“But, it’s still coming from a titty?”

“I feel like you’re fixating on one specific detail here,” Jade replied, keeping her eyes on the nearby Repletes as the Bugs watched them vacantly. She had said that they were usually docile, but that implied situations existed where they might become violent, so Evan gave them a wide berth. They were very large, clearly very powerful, and those wrist blades looked like they could probably have taken his head off with one swing.

“Hang on, hang on!” Collins said as he raised a clenched fist to signal them to stop. “I have Marine IFFs on my feed. One, two, three ... enough for a whole damned squad! We must be close to another group.”

“I thought the lieutenant said that signals couldn’t penetrate these walls?” Brooks asked.

“Wait,” Collins mumbled. “They’re all reading...”

“Leave it, Private,” Bainbridge warned. He was using a softer tone than Evan had ever heard from him, and something about that chilled his blood. “Trust me, you don’t need to see this.”

Foster followed after him, Evan sparing Jade a worried glance before joining them. His guts were churning, and he already knew what Collins was going to find. There were no corners in the round chamber, but piled against the resin wall like refuse was a small mountain of armor plates. It looked like someone’s dish after a meal at an all-you-can-eat seafood buffet, pieces of armored carapace from Kerguelan Drones heaped up on top of each other haphazardly. There were chest pieces, helmets with their many lenses still intact, along with other segments that Evan didn’t recognize. These must be the inorganic components of their dead that the Repletes couldn’t digest – synthetic armor that was layered on top of their natural shells.

Evan’s heart skipped a beat as he caught a glimpse of something more familiar. Collins noticed it too, kneeling beside the pile, the nearby Repletes looking on curiously as they lounged. The pieces of carapace clattered as Collins sifted through them, retrieving a UNN helmet, its visor melted inward by what must have been a plasma bolt. He held it in his hands for a moment, staring at it in disbelief, then dropped it to the ground as he returned to the pile with more urgency. He pulled out a shoulder pad, a piece of thigh armor with its straps still intact, a gauntlet with a built-in touchpad. The source of the IFF signatures had suddenly become obvious to everyone, the rest of the squad watching in silence.

“These Repletes are gorged,” Jade said, glancing at one of the creatures. “This was recent.”

“They fucking ate them,” Foster whispered, stooping to pick up the helmet. “They stole the bodies and fucking ate them. We can’t even give our guys a proper burial...”

“We basically destroyed all of the edible biomatter in a two-hundred-kick radius,” Bainbridge explained, his tone still uncharacteristically gentle. “Once their stores ran out, they probably became desperate. An army marches on its stomach, as they say.”

“Desperate,” Foster scoffed, tossing the helmet aside. “We’re just biomatter to them – proteins and sugars – they don’t even see us as people. Desperate implies that they’d think twice if they had a nice Caesar salad to chew on instead.”

“Foster,” Jade began, but he waved her away with an aggressive swipe of his hand.

“Don’t!” he snapped, Evan glancing between the two warily as the tension in the air became palpable. “This ain’t you,” Foster continued, his expression inscrutable behind his dark visor. “Don’t even think about apologizing on their behalf because this isn’t you. I’m sorry that I ever compared you to these fucking things.”

He wheeled around, startling Jade as he aimed his rifle at the nearest Replete, the creature peering back at him in quiet bemusement. It had no idea what was happening, no concept of tone, no experience of body language or raised voices.

“You motherfuckers!” Foster yelled, loud enough that Evan could hear it through the Marine’s sealed helmet. The sound of gunfire filled the chamber as he unloaded on the Replete, the slugs punching through the translucent film of its skin like tissue paper, the pressure of the honey inside forcing the amber fluid to leak out of the holes like water escaping a punctured balloon. The skin tore, more of the sticky fluid oozing out onto the dirt floor, the creature jerking as he riddled its body with projectiles. They blew chunks out of its carapace, cracking the resin wall behind it where they overpenetrated, green ichor joining the spilled honey. The Bug slumped over, twitching as the snarling Marine emptied the rest of his magazine into it, practically dismembering the creature before his weapon ran dry. Evan heard a couple of empty clicks as Foster pulled the trigger, then he finally relented, the air above his XMR’s barrel shimmering as the glowing coils baked it.