George Martin: Aces High

"Are you all right?" he asked his companions.

Mai nodded, but Fortunato was breathing harshly. His face was an ashen mask.

"The… space faggot was right.."he panted. "That was a bitch." His hands were shaking as he fumbled the shifter back into the backpack.

"Relax-" Brennan began, and fell silent.

Somewhere ahead in the twisting, rolling passageway was a vast sucking sound.

"Which way do we have to go?" Brennan asked quietly. Fortunato concentrated mightily. "I can sense some kind of mind up ahead." He pointed in the direction of the sucking sound. "If you could call it a mind…"

"Great," Brennan muttered. He unslung his bow. "Listen," Fortunato grabbed Mai's arm. "You could help me out…"

"No time for that," Brennan said. "Besides, Mai will need all her own energy to get through this thing. And so will L" Fortunato began to say something, but the sucking sound, which was getting louder and louder, was suddenly right upon them when a grotesque green and yellow mass of protoplasm rolled down a bend in the tubular corridor toward them. It had a score of suckers placed randomly over a globular body that nearly filled the passageway.

"Christ!" Fortunato swore. "What is that thing?"

It was plastered to the side of the corridor, scouring the wall and floor with myriad suckerlike mouths that were ringed by hundreds of foot-long cilia.

"I don't know, and I don't want to find out," Brennan said. "Let's get going."

He selected an arrow and laid it loosely on the string of his bow, and started to edge past the thing. Mai and Fortunato followed warily. The thing continued to scour away. The cilia of the mouths facing them quivered eagerly as they passed, but the creature made no move toward them.

Brennan sighed in relief.

The blue phosphorescent twilight tinged their surroundings with a sense of soft-focus unreality as they followed the passageway deeper into the Swarm Mother. The unmoving air was so thick with the scents of living things that it reminded Brennan of the jungles of Vietnam. He kept glancing around, twitching with nervousness, feeling as if he were in the crosshairs of a sniper's rifle. He couldn't shake the ominous, oppressive sensation of being watched.

They followed the undulating passageway for half an hour in tense silence, always expecting, but never actually facing, a deadly attack from the Swarm Mother's killing machines. They stopped when the corridor branched into a Y -shaped fork. Both tines of the Y seemed to be leading in the direction they needed to go.

"Which way?" Brennan asked.

Fortunato rubbed his swollen forehead tiredly.

"I can hear a thousand little twitterings. Not real minds, at least not sentient minds, but their noise is driving me crazy. The big one is still up ahead, somewhere."

Brennan glanced at Mai. She looked at him placidly, as if willing to let him make all the decisions. Brennan tossed a coin in his mind and it came up heads.

"This way," he said, taking the right fork.

They hadn't gone a hundred yards before Brennan realized that something was different in this passageway. The air smelled sweet, almost cloying. It was difficult to breathe, yet at the same time almost intoxicating. The odor grew stronger as they advanced.

"I'm not sure I like this," Brennan said. "Do we have a choice?" Mai asked. Brennan looked at her and shrugged. They went on, turned a sharp bend in the passageway, and stopped, staring at the scene before them.

The passageway widened to forty feet across. On both sides of it, hanging near the ceiling, were scores of grotesque swarmlings with shriveled limbs and huge, swollen abdomens. They were nursing from what looked like swollen nipples jutting from the walls of the passageway.

In turn, Swarm creatures of every size and description crowded around each of the hanging swarmlings, jostling for a place at one of the hollow tubes dangling from their swollen abdomens. The Swarm creatures ranged in size from tiny, insectlike entities to tentacular monstrosities that must have weighed several tons. There were hundreds of them.

"It looks like they're feeding," Fortunato whispered. Brennan nodded. "We can't go through there. We'll have to go back and try the other branch."

They started back down the passageway, and suddenly stopped when they heard a quiet buzzing, as if from a multitude of small wings, drift down toward them from the way they had come.

"Shit," Fortunato said in disbelief. "We're caught in the middle of a damn shift change."

"The first Swarm creature we ran into ignored us," Brennan said. "Maybe these will too."

They hugged the wall of the passageway-it was warm, Brennan found, and pliable to the touch-and were as quiet and unobtrusive as they could be. They waited.

A swarm of the insectoid creatures buzzed down the corridor. They were four to six inches long with segmented bodies and large, membranous wings. The first few passed them by and went straight to the feeding chamber, and Brennan thought they were safe. But then one stopped and landed on Mai. Another joined it, then another and another. She looked down at them calmly. One landed on Brennan's shoulder. He stared at it. Its mouth parts consisted of multiple mandibular arrangements. One set of mandibles began tearing at the fabric of Brennan's shirt while another stuffed fragments of cloth into its little mouth.

Brennan brushed the thing aside distastefully and stepped on it. It crunched loudly under his foot, like a cockroach, but two had already taken its place on Brennan's body. He heard Fortunato swear and knew they were crawling over him, as well.

"Let's try to move away from them," he said quietly, but that did no good. The bugs followed and landed on the three in increasing numbers.

"Run for it," Brennan called, and they took off down the corridor.

Some of the swarm continued on to the feeding chamber, but more followed them down the passageway in an angrily buzzing cloud. Brennan batted at them as he ran, knocking some out of the air. He slapped at the ones crawling on him, but there were many to take the place of those he knocked down or crushed. They landed on his face and arms and he could feel their thousand little feet crawl all over him. They seemed to be most interested in his clothes, and, more importantly, his bow and arrows. It was as if they were scavengers programmed to dispose of nonliving matter. But that didn't make them harmless. Brennan felt their sharp mandibles tear into his flesh nearly as often as not. The buzzing of their wings and the clacking sounds of their mandibles were loud in Brennan's ears. They had to get away from them.

They reached the point where the passageway divided into the Y, looking desperately for something, anything, that would enable them to shake the little scavengers. Fortunato ran down the other branch of the passageway and Brennan and Mai followed. The floor was slick with moisture. Its surface was uneven. The moisture caught in shallow pools that set off a fine spray of liquid as they slogged through them. The liquid was warm and clear, though murky. They splashed down the corridor and the swarm of insectoids seemed to pull back. Fortunato flopped down into a shallow pool that had gathered in one of the deeper hollows, and rolled around and around, dislodging and crushing the insectoids that were crawling all over him. Brennan and Mai joined him. Brennan kept his lips shut tightly, but the murky liquid drenched him from head to toe. It looked, and smelled, like tepid water with fine particles suspended in it. Brennan was not particularly eager to ingest any of it.

Brennan glanced at his companions as they crouched in the shallow pool. Their clothes looked like they had been attacked by a legion of moths, and they had numerous cuts and gouges, but no one seemed badly injured. The swarm of persistent insectoids hovered over their heads, buzzing, it seemed to Brennan somewhat angrily.