Up the cold and narrow corridors the fugitive clambered, bleeding and bruising against the walls of the alien warren that would very likely prove to be his tomb.

He had played dead after impaling his thigh on the trap which the hatchling had set for them on the top of the hill. Lying among the slain and wounded, he had listened as the hatchling tortured his fellow braves, stringing them up to form a ring of unspeakable trophies. Only sheer luck kept him from sharing their fate, that and his uncle’s advice:

“Can you hear me, Neroth?” Kryptus had whispered in wavespeech over the tribe’s secure frequencies, “Are you still alive?”

“Yes, alpha,” Neroth breathed back.

“Praise be the pattern!” his uncle exulted, “And your wounds? Are they terminal?”

“No. The trap stabbed through one of my false legs. I’ll lose the limb, but other than that my armor is fully operational.”

“Good. Stay down,” Kryptus told Neroth even as he approached to bandy words with the hatchling, “But be ready to move at my signal. They have no idea you’re still with us. With your help, dear nephew, we may yet conquer!”

Neroth had his doubts, though. He’d seen the hatchling and its ally, the crazed Gallivant, destroy wave after wave of his tribe’s fiercest warriors. He himself was only fifteen years old, almost a hatchling himself. What chance did he possibly have against a being that could conjure bone-shattering explosions with a careless wave of its hand? But duty and shame compelled Neroth to do as he was told, hanging motionless from the deadening lump of his false right leg as he waited for his chance at glory.

Kryptus did something completely unexpected then, offering the hatchling alpha status in exchange for the information stored in the being’s gilt helix. Neroth was so astounded by the move that he nearly gave himself away by gasping. What’s more, his uncle’s offer sounded completely genuine. The deal almost pushed through, with the hatchling only backing out when it became clear that the female Gallivant’s death was one of Kryptus’ conditions. When negotiations broke down and his uncle called for the final, all-out assault, Neroth realized that he would have to rise to the occasion after all.

At which point, Neroth promptly pissed himself. Thankfully the Gallivant was unconscious by that time, or else she would have undoubtedly smelled the shameful trickle than ran down his legs. Neroth had always imagined that he would one day be as valiant as Acheron the Argonaut. But now he couldn’t even bring himself to strike at an enemy whose back was turned to him. He was frozen with dread, utterly useless, a coward!

Then came Udumnu the Thundermaeve, who made cowards of everyone else, too. The warband fled at the sight of their impending destruction, but it was no use. Nothing could escape the wrath of the Hollowores and the full might of the Vitalus unleashed.

But to his shock and amazement the spawn of the Betrayers had dealt with Udumnu as well, summoning a silver-winged machine that did the impossible by striking down a living vessel of the god. Adapting to the situation with remarkable rapidity, Kryptus gave Neroth his final orders: he was to stow himself away upon the alien craft and find out where the Betrayers were hiding. Then he was to send a broadcast a message to the Vitalus so that the god could pinpoint his exact location and wreak terrible vengeance upon those who had defied Its will.

“Go forth, valiant Neroth! Go where no Leaper has gone since the War of the Spool! Your victory is certain, and your rewards shall be incalculable! Ascend, and know that the hopes of all our kindred go with you!”

And so Neroth went, strapping himself to the aft of the machine just after the hatchling carried the female Gallivant inside.

It was a miracle he had lasted so long in the pressure sack he’d woven for himself. Of course, he was an expert on making such equipment after years spent working on the rigging of the storm catchers—a pressure sack was the only way a Leaper could take a break up there between shifts.

But all the expertise in the world couldn’t prevent freak accidents. A passing micrometeor the size of a snowflake perforated his sack just as the shuttlecraft entered the gas giant’s sphere of influence. Neroth scrambled to find the leak and plug it with the last grams of his specialized storm catcher webbing, but by that time the tears had enlarged from the force of the rapidly escaping gasses and he didn’t have enough material to stitch them shut. In the end he resorted to clawing into his own carapace and applying the spewing hemolymph to fill in the gaps, the gel clotting up to seal the breach like it did for any wounds that his body accrued.

A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.

He then put his exomorph into diapause mode to conserve oxygen, but in his overwhelming relief at having forestalled a fatal decompression, he became careless and allowed his lacerated carapace to touch the clotted gel scab. Many hours later he awoke from the fugue state and found himself frozen fast to the plug, his exomorph’s vital signs dropping precipitously as his body heat radiated into outer space. One by one his symbiote’s organs failed him, until at last he was left with only the basic neural pairings in his helm. Luckily, the craft landed on the Jovian moon not long after, at which point he immediately massaged the emergency release nerves along the backplate, ejecting out from the ruined exomorph before tearing his way out of the sack. Pausing only to collect his most precious spinneret and its contents, Neroth hid himself among the heaps of refuse.

There he witnessed the enemy make contact with the clanking moon beast which called this icy moon home. The moon beast frightened Neroth more than any Hollowore ever had. So that was what the Betrayers looked like! Machine fiendishly mated with man. In his frantic eagerness to get away from the creature Neroth climbed up to the ceiling and took refuge in the tunnels above, and in a moment of carelessness kicked a loose nut free of its bolt. The tiny sound instantly drew the attention of the enemy, Neroth coming meters of being blasted by the barrage which followed. A piece of shrapnel shot through the floor all the same and lodged into the sole of his foot—Neroth had all but bitten his tongue out holding back his screams as he’d dug out the missile, slicing his fingertips open in the process.

How had the primals ever become a dominant lifeform when their innards were so soft and exposed? Why did everything have to hurt so much?

He felt his way around the tight corners, the grey optic feed from his helm grainy but serviceable—for now. It would die off without the rest of his exomorph to sustain it. When the optic feed blacked out for a moment and blinded him, Neroth felt the same rising tide of panic in his chest again, the bewildered hysteria of a boy who was nearing at his wit’s end.

No, not a boy, Neroth railed at himself. He was a brave of the Weeping Vipers! His grandmother climbed up the Spool and danced on the moon! If it weren’t for those treacherous Gallivants, he would be up there with them now, charting a course to the worlds beyond the Mantle of Silence.

Once again those flighty deceivers were up to no good. Why else had the Gallivant come all the way out here, if not to form a pact with the ultimate evil? Clearly the fate of Arachnea hung in the balance.

He could not let the folks back home down. Neroth gave the side of his head a few thumps and his night vision returned, restoring a measure of his confidence. All he had to do was stay hidden and find a way to broadcast a signal powerful enough to reach the Vitalus. It had all the helix mods and grafts necessary to retrofit its existing fleet of Hollowores. They would be spaceworthy in a matter of months, if not weeks.

Divine retribution would soon follow. And with it, a just reward for the servant who had made it all possible. He would make alpha at the very least, even genitor if he played his cards right. Hell, maybe he could even ask the Vitalus for permission to rebuild the Spool with the help of the other kindreds, right after they exterminated every last Blade-Wing and razed Cthonis to the ground.

His dreams of fire and blood were interrupted by a banging somewhere behind him. Something was coming up the shaft! He was at a junction of three passages, a tri-pronged fork in the road with a shaft above that led straight up. Beams of light were poking and prodding up the tunnel on his lefthand side. Minions of the moon beast, no doubt, sent to ferret him out of his hiding place. Who knew what kind of otherworldly beings had carved these burrows into the metal guts of this moon?

No, now wasn’t the time to give in to imagined terrors. Whatever came for him next, he would be cunning like the hatchling and let it run headfirst into his trap.

His position was the perfect ambush spot. Neroth took his spinneret and set a snare that served a dual purpose.

This wasn’t the usual high-atmo webbing mix like the one he had used for the pressure sack. It was his diadem spinneret, a graft which had become popular after the Night Weaver had used it to such deadly effect against Gallivant raiding parties. With it he spun an arm's length of diamond-hard monofilaments that could cut all but the strongest carapaces to ribbons upon contact. They had limited tensile strength, however, and were usually only laid as defensive traps—spinning them out too long was out of the question. As an added bonus, if his night vision failed again, he could still count on the vibrations on the threads to locate the enemy in pitch blackness. He set the monofilaments at roughly neck height for clean decapitations.

Then Neroth reached behind his chelicerae and massaged the gums of his upper jaw, triggering the release of his mouthpart assembly, which then fell out in one complete piece. Working with practiced familiarity Neroth took the fangs and their accompanying venom glands and held the assembly by the labium, or lower lip. Now he could wield his fangs as a punch-dagger that would deliver the killing blows.

He smeared his lacerated foot down the righthand side passage and then climbed up the vertical shaft, lodging himself in place with his back pressed against one wall and his feet upon the other. There were faint scuffling noises, the lights from the lefthand tunnel growing brighter by the minute.

“Damnit Zildiz, but I’m going as fast as I can!” Neroth heard one of them say, and recognized the voice of the hatchling, “It’s not easy lugging this door around.”

“Shut your shithole,” replied the Gallivant with some heat, “You’re giving us both away.”

We may yet conquer, Neroth thought, and felt truly optimistic for the first time that day. Now the hunters would be the hunted. Gripping his punch-dagger tight, Neroth waited for them to make the fatal misstep. Gripping his punch-dagger tight in one hand and the bundle of feeler fibers in the other, Neroth waited for them to make their fatal misstep.