The sledgehammer burst through the disc with a loud pop, and air from the new chamber fizzled as it mingled with the teardrop’s atmosphere. Gunny was worried it would turn into fog like the silane, but nothing unusual happened.

He ordered two Marines to brace Heafs so there wouldn’t be a repeat of Yank getting blasted across the room, but there’d been no need. The differential was slight. Whatever was on the other side most likely breathed the same stuff as the teardrop. If they breathed at all.

After Sticky did his checks, Gunny took a gander through the hole. The new chamber was very large, bigger than the first corridor where they’d landed the RHATS. Gunny’s eyes followed a long, straight walkway of triangular grid that disappeared into darkness, too distant for his chemlamp’s hundred-meter throw.

Three meters beneath the walkway was a vast lake of opaque black fluid, rippling in continuous motion from some unseen force. The dark fluid had an unusually low specularity. It absorbed the chemlamp’s light with almost no reflection.

In marked contrast to the dull lake below, the ceiling was a shiny, seamless mirror of silvery metal. At nine-meter intervals, the mirror material melted into gleaming uvulas of chrome that supported the walkway. Gunny felt a twinge of unease. The mirror seemed like something that had been grown, not built.

Gunny’s eyes traced the curve of the arch to where it met the surface of the lake. Where the fluid lapped against the mirror metal, it left a line of tarnish. Eyeballing the slope, Gunny tried to visualize how big the corridor would be if the arch made a complete circle.

If the new chamber was a cylinder, Gunny estimated it was almost three hundred meters in diameter. What he could see from here would only be a tiny part of it, the air pocket at the top of a gigantic sewer pipe. Thinking about it gave Gunny a shriveling feeling in his guts.

Anything could be down there.

“New room designation!” Gunny barked, transmuting his fear to volume. “Crow her open, let’s go.”

A murmur of unease rippled through the unit as they widened the hole, and the lampsman scanned the tunnel with the big beamer. Gunny wasn’t the only one puckering at the sight of that writhing lake. The T.A.R.D.S. aversion to liquid wasn’t just the showers on the Polybius. Nothing good ever came of getting wet on a whale.

“High lead, high acid,” Sticky concluded, inspecting the sampling rod. He tossed it aside. It hit the rounded surface of the teardrop with a clang and rattled its way to the center of the depression. Gunny scowled, pointing at the rod. Chucking rods was a bad habit for a stickman.

“Soz, Gunny,” Sticky offered, following the scowl. Gunny considered belting him one, but the moment had passed.

“Too acidic to cross?” Gunny asked.

“Hmm…think we OK if we pass through. Maybe problem if we get stuck out there. Still no read on the atmos. Think it’s the same stuff we got in here?”

“Might be.” Gunny nodded, tapping his armored fingertips on his trunk as he pondered.

Did the two different types of gas in the two teardrops mean different species shared the same whale? What were those nine transparent triangles the bottom of each drop for? What did the talons do? Gunny pushed the questions out of his mind. Smartthink wouldn’t get them out of here.

Keep it simple, stupid.

“Yakov! You’re on scout!”

Yakov, the ladderman, had his eyes shut tight. Gunny’s words hit him like a solid whop. Yakov’s aversion to water ran deeper than most. Often, he had to be dragged kicking and spitting to his mandatory weekly hose down. Still, he swallowed and nodded. The rotation was the rotation.

“Aye-aye, Gunny,” Yakov agreed, starting to unclip the ladder from his back.

“Ay, Gunny! Howzabout I swaps with Yakov?” Sticky offered.

“Bells, Stick, he’s gonna have to go out there, anyway,” Gunny said, shaking his head. He didn’t want to coddle Yakov. Everyone was tired of dragging his sweaty ass to the showers every week.

“Wanna get another read from the middle of the tunnel. Lemme see if acid’s more concentrated out there. Remember, my suit’s coated.”

Sticky’s suit had an extra layer of undercoating, some kind of pearlescent dip supposed to be ungodly difficult to manufacture.

Gunny suspected it was just paint and didn’t do anything, he’d seen plenty of stickmen get disintegrated in his time. But that wasn’t the kind of info he volunteered to his Marines.

Clearly, Sticky just wanted to do Yakov a solid. At the back of Gunny’s head, a voice whispered that Yakov was more expendable than Sticky, but he hated that voice.

“Yeh, swap. Double-time though. If we can’t find a way back, we’re gonna have to go through them glass needles again.”

Sticky nodded, and the relief on Yakov’s face was visible.

“Clip him in, Winchy,” Gunny ordered, and for an obstinate moment, the linesman pretended he hadn’t heard.

Gunny whopped Winchy hard enough that he clacked helmets with Bonzo. Gunny’s lip jutted in satisfaction at the unexpected BOGO.

“Chuck’s sake, Winchester. No one cares about your stupid name.”

“I ain’t Winchy!” Winchester protested, blinking until his eyes focused.

“Double-time! Chucking around will get us all deaded! Clip in or I’ll throw you in!” Gunny pointed at the swirling black fluid. Winchy was about two seconds away from finding out how deep it really went.

Winchester stammered an apology and rushed to clip his cable spool to the donut-shaped securing ring on the back of Sticky’s suit. Lefty, Heafs, and Plinko clipped into the cable, ready to brace. Gunny gave them a thumbs up for their initiative.

“Radiance preserve me,” Sticky said, making the lowercase t sign over his chest plate. Sticky was one of Chappy’s favorites.

Yakov gave Sticky an appreciative clap on his right pauldron. They watched the back of Sticky’s helmet as he climbed out onto the walkway. His herald was a silver spiderweb radiating from a bundle of sticks wreathed in golden flames. Sticky took each step gingerly, testing to see if it would hold his weight.

“She’s solid! Feels like she can hold the whole platoon,” Sticky called back.

Gunny gave the thumbs up. If you had to say something nice about whales, at least they were built tough. When Gunny was on the sections of the Polybius that hadn’t been tard-proofed, he felt like things would bust apart if he breathed on them.

The thought stuck in Gunny as he watched Sticky doing all the scout routines in double-time. Why was it that Gunny felt more comfortable on this alien hulk than in a human ship? Right this moment, with a ninety-five percent chance they would all die, he would rather be here than on the Polybius.

Gunny had served on four different ships, The Morovinni, The Escolier, the Gant, and The Polybius. So far, the Polybius was the best of them, but Gunny had never felt welcome on any naval vessel. There was always that tinge of exasperation when the brass spoke with him, like it was such a chucking tribulation to have his unit aboard. That was another Chappy word. His featured carpenter was always caught up in some jit.

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Gunny couldn’t sympathize. He much preferred the stories about the sand people wandering around, looking for their promised land and chucking anything that moved.

Sticky had made it halfway out into the corridor. He waved his sampling rod around on one of the uvula platforms. Gunny shook the daydreams away. Something bugged him, but he couldn’t quite place it.

“ACID’S GOOD!” Sticky announced.

Immediately, Gunny realized what bothered him.

“DON’T DROP IT!” Gunny bellowed, but the rod was already in the air, carelessly discarded. The sampling rod plunged into the black fluid and disappeared.

“Whoops! Sorry, Gunny!” Sticky said, raising the palms of his gauntlets in apology. Gunny held a fist to his temple in frustration.

Shoulda belted him when I had the chance. There was nothing else to be done, so Gunny made the whirling get-on-with-it sign. Sticky turned back towards the distant end of the corridor to continue scouting.

Then he vanished. An arc of darkness shot across the walkway and swallowed Sticky and his light. Winchester’s spool whirred to life. The line played out as Sticky was dragged below.

“STICKY!” Gunny shouted, his voice bouncing uselessly off the mirrored sides of the tunnel. “Pull him back!” Gunny ordered.

The four Marines in the line squad pulled hard, trying to reel Sticky in, but they were losing. Whatever pulled Sticky in was stronger than the four of them put together.

“CAN’T!” Lefty bleated, a frantic note in his voice. The line squad was getting pulled towards the breach. If they held on, they were going to get pulled in, too.

“PLATOON! GRAB ON!” Gunny shouted, rushing forward to grab Winchester.

In moments, the entire platoon mobbed Winchester, tugging him with all their might. The whole platoon was not enough, the mass was getting dragged towards the rent in the disc.

“PULL, YOU PIGGERS! SAVE STICKY!” Gunny roared. “EVERYONE! ON THREE! ONE! TWO! THREE!”

As one, the platoon heaved on the line with all of their strength. Together, they halted the slide, and they felt momentum shift in their direction. A red vignette formed at the edge of Gunny’s vision. He shut his eyes and bore down with everything he had.

PING!

The line snapped, and the whole unit flew backward, landing in a confused scrum. Gunny was on his feet first, drawing his pistol. Whatever got Sticky was strong.

“Riflemen! Lampsman!” Gunny shouted.

The four riflemen took up firing positions at the breach with their shredders. Two took a knee, and two stood overhead on either side. Between them, Aziz, the lampsman, searched the mirrored tunnel with his big beamer.

There was nothing left of Sticky but a dark patch on the walkway, beaded with black droplets. For several moments, the platoon breathed heavy, ready for something monstrous to come roaring down the pipe at them. But there was nothing.

“Seal it,” Gunny ordered, his voice heavy.

At once, two Marines covered the breach with vacsheet and quickseal. Losing the unit’s stickman was another entry in the “THINGS NOT TO DO” binder. Gunny’s brow was furrowed. The calculations were getting dire.

“Shoulda been me,” Yakov said, his face twisted up with grief.

“Sack up or it will be,” Gunny said, pitiless. Shoulda hit him!

Now, Sticky was gone. Gunny had a furious desire to order an attack, just start hucking jit into the muck until whatever that thing was revealed itself, and then burn it down. His palms itched for Bennie.

But ordering an attack would likely wipe the platoon. Gunny told himself if they couldn’t find another way, air low, they could come back and fight. Member was hunched over the snapped line, taking a sample of the black fluid.

“Bonzo, Member, c’mere. Trunk up.”

The three Marines formed a triangle huddle, each trunking to his left so they could conference without shouting through their helmets.

“I’m thinking we gotta retreat through the needle room,” Gunny said, hating the idea even as he said it.

“We’re only four rooms in. I don’t think we got enough, Gunny. We’ll be Reminded,” Member said, grimacing.

“Rather be Reminded than ruptured,” Bonzo said, and Gunny chuffed in agreement.

“We can try the other disc in the first room, maybe find something in there. I figure we may lose one or two to the needles, but whatever’s got Sticky could skull us all.”

“Agreed. Chuckin’ thing almost dragged the whole platoon down. Surprised Winchy didn’t give up the spool,” Bonzo said.

“He’s stubborn as bells. OK, here’s my problem with goin’ back. We’re gonna get all fogged if we go through the shaft again. It’ll smeg up our visors. Can you fly back if your visor’s fouled?”

“Pft, naw. Was too tricky getting in. If I can’t see, we all die.”

“Think Deuce can fly us back?” Gunny angled. Deuce was the back-up pilot. He sat in the cockpit of the RHATS, probably wishing he was with the unit.

Gunny had been stuck in that hotseat before. It was agonizing to know the others were in the whale, having fun, getting in fights, and doing jit that could easily get the whole works blown to bits, the RHATS included. But somebody had to do it.

“Fifty-fifty he craters us trying to get out of the whale. It was a tight squeeze, Gunny.”

“I shoulda left you on sentry then.”

Bonzo shrugged. There were a lot of things they should have done.

“Got an idear, Gunny,” Member chimed in. “Why don’t we just stick some vacsheet to our helmets when we go through? Then we just peel it off on the other side. If it gets skeeted up, no problemo.”

“That’s chuckin’ genius, Member. OK, let’s backtrack. Maybe we’ll get lucky and nobody gets speared.”

They de-trunked, and Gunny went for another look at the sealed-over entrance to the shaft full of tubes. The whole interior of the makeshift airlock was crusted with snowy residue. Muted blue light from the sparks still flickered through intermittently.

“Peel that open, careful not to get the fog on your visor. Be ready to seal it back if it’s spitting fog,” Gunny ordered Plinko, who was closest. Plinko’s bushy eyebrows bobbed as he processed the order.

“Aye-aye, Gunny,” he said. The vacsheet peeled away, but the buildup remained, a glassy bubble so thick it was nearly opaque.

“She’s froze up, Gunny,” Plinko complained.

“Crow it.”

Plinko laid into the bubble with his crowbar, but his strikes just bounced off.

“Tough jit.”

“Hammerman,” Gunny called. “That’s you, Heafs,” he clarified when nothing happened.

“Oh! Right, soz, Gunny. I forgot.”

Heafs wound up and cracked the bubble as hard as he could. His first swing did nothing, and the second one glanced off. But Heafs didn’t relent. It took fifteen strikes to crack the bubble, and then the next three shattered it into shards. A little huff of the plastic fog swirled around, frosting the hammer. More blue light flickered.

“Oh, you double-pigger,” Gunny groaned.

The shaft looked like it had frozen over completely. The fog had hardened into a glassy material that felt completely solid when Gunny hammered a fist against it. Half a meter in, he could see the points of three glass tubes, frozen like bugs in amber. Past that, it got too distorted to make anything out.

“Hit it, Heafs,” Gunny ordered.

Twenty strikes later, Heafs’ face was plum-red. He’d gotten nothing but a few crusty white scratches in the surface.

“It’s tough, Gunny! Solid as a rock.”

“Get a torch on it,” Gunny said. “Filthy!”

Filthy was already crowding Heafs, eager for a chance to break out his torches.They all puckered as he sparked up but there was no explosion. He tried everything in his arsenal, acetylene, tri-gas, pure oxy. None of it worked. The torches only left a charred residue that wiped right off.

“This is some serious jit,” Gunny said.

He was going to order Member to take a sample, but the mission recorder was already hunched over with a tag bag. If only they had some of that vorpal wire.

“OK, let’s pop the other disc,” Gunny said, feeling time beating down on them. He glanced at his clock and his dosimeter. “Hit the other disc,” he ordered Heafs, who was stared vacantly at the hammer in his hands. “Bonzo, stand aside.”

“Wait, Gunny,” Bonzo cautioned. “She’s hot.”

“How hot?” Gunny asked, already marching over.

“Too hot. No tellin’ exactly. Sticky had the uh…thermos-meter.”

Gunny blinked. Was that what it was called? He set his gauntlet over the disc, then yanked it back and whipped it in the air. Hotter than they could take. Potentially, there was a fire on the other side.

“Was it that hot before?” Gunny asked.

“Nope!” Plinko replied. He’d been the one who cased it.

“Chuckaduck. Might be a fire. No telling what’s broke in this chucked-up whale.”

Gunny turned to face the platoon, grinning. He was going to get his fight after all.

“MARINES! AIR CHECK!”

“Seventy-five minutes, Gunny,” Bonzo announced from behind him, eying the gauge on his tanks. All around, each Marine reported another. No one was below seventy. Gunny was usually the lowest because he shouted more. His eyes fell on Sipper, no one had got to him yet.

“What’s Sipper got?”

“Sixty,” Plinko announced, frowning hard.

“Gunny! Offering up my tanks now so they stretch further!” Sipper said, sounding too chuckin’ chipper as he offered to sacrifice himself.

“Denied. Boys, we’re sealed off. Gotta go through that sewer, try to find another way back to the RHATS. Whatever got Sticky, we kill it or it kills us. Strap up, we’re going in hot. Riflemen at the fore and van!”

Esess, Yancy, Clamps, and Gobbo hoisted their shredders, itching to fight. All around the room, Marines drew their sidearms.

Bonzo’s were the flashiest. He had a pair of thirteen-millimeter Schlack Compensators. Lt. Jeanie had electroplated them firetruck red and trimmed the accents in rose gold.

Bonzo went akimbo, his right pistol loaded with Plutonium ArPen Slugs, the left with Weasel-Popper HiEx rounds.

“Finally,” Bonzo said, smiling with all his teeth.