Gunny spotted the trouble right away.

“MEMBER!” Gunny shouted. “HEADS UP!”

Member clapped the rutter shut and wheeled towards the sound of Gunny’s voice. A glass strand had wormed out from the tangle of tubes lining the walls and snaked across the air above the sight line of the platoon.

Gunny didn’t like the look of the strand. The tube ended in a three-faced triangular point, and it moved with intent, questing towards the insignia on the back of Member’s helmet.

Member’s helmet herald was an elephant’s skull with thick art nouveau outlines all done in sepia hues. Beneath the skull was a golden arc of gothic letters that read: Memento Mori.

There was a spellbound look in the mission recorder’s eyes as they focused on the strand. Member was mesmerized by the serpentine motion. The tendril reared like a viper, the faces of its point peeling back three ways, like a banana. In the distance, they heard whistling.

“MEMBER! DUCK!” Gunny bellowed, seeing the mission recorder was muddled. Member hit the deck, clanging against the triangular grid. The glass tube followed him, still pointed at his helmet.

“Oh, jit!” Member cried, twisting to get out of the way. The pitch of the whistle increased. They were about to find out very soon if they were under the silane combustion threshold.

“Grab that chucker, squeeze it shut!” Gunny ordered.

Yank let his hammer drop. It dangled from the tether on his wrist. He lurched forward and grabbed the tube, trying to squeeze it shut. The strand writhed in his gauntlet, whipping its point back and forth as Yank struggled to hold on.

“Too strong, Gunny!” Yank shouted. Gunny could see his face reddening through his visor. Somehow, the fragile looking tube was stronger than the hammerman.

“Point it away from us! At the disc!”

“Aye-aye, Gunny!”

They could see Yank straining with all of his might to keep the tube pointed away from Member. Other Marines moved to help, but they were too slow. As the whistling sound increased, the tube broke Yank’s grip and struck like a cobra, too fast to follow.

The strand lifted Yank off his feet. His legs kicked as he dangled a foot above the grid. Yank gripped the tube in both hands, trying to pull it out of him, but he had nothing to brace against.

The strand punched through Yank’s visor as neatly as a hypodermic needle and penetrated his skull. Blood spattered the inside of his visor as the tube protruded from between his eyes. The whistle became a scream, and the blue light shot through the tube and flared brilliantly as it made contact with the Marine. Yank’s scream joined the whistle, and then both faded away.

Lefty tried to pull Yank free, but he was locked in. Yank had stopped struggling, but his eyes were still moving, darting towards Gunny.

“Yank! Status!” Gunny bellowed. There was a tube jammed between Yank’s eyes and silane spilling into his helmet, but Gunny had seen T.A.R.D.S. survive worse. Blood was pouring into Yank’s eyes, he was blinking them, straining to see his sergeant. His mouth gulped open.

“Guh-guh-guh-Gunny!” Yank stuttered.

“Hang on, Yank!” Gunny shouted. Three Marines tried to pull Yank free, but he was stuck fast. The strand’s three petals had unfolded inside his skull.

“I can see everything!” Yank gasped, and then he choked on silane.

His eyes rolled up, and he convulsed. The whites of his eyes suddenly burned blue, and then he was too bright to look at.

The other Marines instinctively clicked down their visor shades to block the blinding light. Blue flames spilled from the hole in Yank’s helmet, building into a howling column of cerulean that melted his faceplate and rose three meters high before sputtering out.

The glass tube retracted from his skull. The point was black with charred blood. Yank was dumped onto the grate, burned beyond recognition. It was a bad way to go.

Miraculously, the silane didn’t ignite. Everything around Yank’s body was dusted with white, snowy material. His suit was oddly deflated. When they when they turned it over, there was only his powder-coated skull inside, a triangular hole punched through his heavy brow. The weird blue flame had burned up Yank’s flesh but left his skeleton.

“Jit-eating geist,” Gunny spat.

The shaft walls were writhing and alive now. Three more strands had moved between the platoon and the breach they’d come in through. Gunny had to get his Marines out of the shaft as fast as he could.

“HEAFS! You’re Hammerman! Sticky, you’re on crow! Get us out!”

Yank’s arm hung limply through the grid. The sledge-hammer dangled at the end of its tether. Heafs undid the clip and reeled up the sledge, then he dashed for the door, nearly tripping over a strand that shot between his legs.

With five desperate strikes, Heafs punched through the disc, then he was blasted back by a rush of gas, which became a glittering white fog when it mixed with the silane. Marines crowded towards the disc as the fog billowed around them. Gunny could only hope the mixture wasn’t corrosive. Sticky was going wild with a crowbar, frantically widening the hole.

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The tubes wanted Member. Three flared points stalked him. Member tried to dash towards the disc, but he missed a step, and his boot went through the grid. The strands were poised to attack, but the moment they struck, Bickles leapt in front of Member and took the hits.

Gunny rushed forward and yanked member free of the Grid, dragging him towards the disc. Bickles hung in the air, lanced by three strands at once. The whistling grew louder. Three sparks hit Bickles simultaneously, and he exploded in a tricolored column of witchfire, blue, red, and violet.

“MEMBER OUT FIRST!” Gunny ordered, shoving Member towards the disc.

The Marines picked Member up and stuffed him horizontally through the hole. As the mission recorder escaped, the strands became frantic, lashing out wildly at anything that moved. Bonzo was jettisoned through the breach next. Marines clubbed at the strands with the butts of their rifles, trying to buy others time to escape.

Gunny was the last one out. The widest Marine in the unit, Sipper, had gotten stuck in the breach ahead of him. Sipper tried to leap through feet-first and got stuck. He flailed his arms as marines tried to tug him through from the other side, it attracted the strands. A strand shot past Gunny and darted at the trapped marine, lancing through his forearm.

A spark whistled in the distance. Before it could unfold its fronds in Sipper’s arm, Gunny rushed forward and slammed into him. Sipper popped through the breach, and the bloody strand pulled free from his arm.

Gunny hastened to escape. His helmet rang like a bell as a strand hit him from behind, but he didn’t die. The whop plate had saved him.

Bless the COM who invented those! Gunny dove though the breach, millimeters ahead of a darting tube. He crashed into some featured Marine who peeped in at him, holding out a hand.

“Out of the way, chucker!” Gunny bellowed, scrambling to get distance from the lashing tubes. Several marines had shredders pointed at the breach, but the strands didn’t venture past the threshold.

He had to triage Sipper right away. The wound wasn’t bad, but there was silane in Sipper’s suit, and he was choking to death. Gunny cranked his first tank to full blast to blow out the silane, watching Sipper’s face as it turned from sickly blueberry to healthy baboon butt red. When Sipper could breathe again, Gunny hit his puncture with suitseal foam.

“Ya with us, Sipper?” Gunny asked, shaking him by the shoulders.

“How bad, Gunny?” Sipper rasped, his voice wrecked.

“Bones is broke. Gotta do your jackin’ with your left one, Sips.”

“You heard him, Lefty,” Sipper joked, clamping his other hand on the wound to keep pressure on it like Gunny showed him.

“Chuck off, rabbit,” Lefty shouted from across the teardrop.

Gunny let out a huff of relief. He didn’t have to really worry about a Marine until they stopped clowning around. Suitseal foam was packed full of coagulants and meds, so Sipper wouldn’t bleed out. But he had lost most of his first tank purging his suit. His air would run out first.

Gunny looked back at the breach. The tubes were still there, closing their trifold mouths and jabbing forward with their points. They looked hungry. Looking past them, he could see the whole shaft was alive with writhing strands. Sparks dropped three at a time in arpeggiated notes that came much faster than before. The fog was getting thick, and the sparks looked like lightning flickering in a thunderstorm.

“Guess we woke it up,” Gunny said, raising his voice to be heard over the sound of the thrumming of the hidden machinery underfoot.

This was another teardrop-shaped room, almost an exact copy of the first chamber. Whatever this one dumped out wasn’t silane. Everything the mist touched was frosted with glassy powder. Marines brushed it off in thin, crackling layers.

Sticky and Heafs were pretty well dusted with it. Fortunately, their visors hadn’t been fouled too badly. Sticky already a rod out to test the new air.

“No reading, Gunny!”

That raised an eyebrow. Gunny tried to remember if the rods had ever turned up nothing before.

“It’s all frosted up,” Sticky complained, trying to scrape the material off the sampling rod with his gauntlet.

“PLATOON! AGAINST THAT DISC, GO!” Gunny ordered and, at once, there was a bustle hustling to square up with their backs against the far disc.

“Why we standing here, Gunny?” Heafs asked.

“If that jit gets on your visor, it’ll blind you,” Gunny said, scowling.

Gunny hated smudges on his visor. He kept his crystal clear. The idea of trying to find a way out of the whale through a haze of weird, un-melting ice made his shoulders hunch. Whatever reservoir was feeding this room sputtered out, and the thrumming underfoot ceased.

Gunny peered back at the shaft. It had become a nightmarish maelstrom of flashing lightning and writhing tendrils lashing in a swirling fog. Gas was sucked into the breach with a mournful howl, and pebbly static hissed beneath it, like waves freezing as they lapped against a shore.

“Holy bells, we ain’t getting back through that,” Gunny said. “Seal it off, careful not to get poked.”

Heafs and Lefty locked off the breach with quickseal and vacsheet. Gunny hoped the sentry Marines in the first teardrop were smart enough to do the same. More than that, he hoped Sambone didn’t decide it was time to deploy the Bop Gun.

He could perfectly picture the Marine scowling at the weird fog and lights howling in the shaft, looking down at the bazooka in his hands, and beginning to grin.

Gunny put the thought out of his mind. Sambone was gonna do it or he wasn’t. For all Gunny knew, both sentries had been lanced and skeletonized by the blue witchfire. He turned to address the surviving Marines.

“OK, boys. First priority, we gotta get back to the RHATS. We’re on double-time now. If a Marine gets got, take his tanks,” Gunny ordered.

Gunny felt fear stealing its way into his voice, and he forced it down. The other Marines didn’t know how bad this was. The COM had a whole binder full of statistics with “THINGS NOT TO DO” printed on the front in thick black letters. Gunny had to memorize them all. One of the worst of them was getting isolated from the RHATS. Immediately, the chance of survival dropped to five percent. Five chucking percent.

“We need a natural twenty, boys,” Gunny said, and the platoon nodded solemnly.

“Lefty, which disc?” Gunny asked.

Lefty shut his eyes and thought hard. His nose twitched as he concentrated.

“Both bad,” Lefty decided.

Gunny reached for the BCS on his belt, taking it out of its special pouch. He held the Binary Choice Selector up and every eye in the platoon watched him activate it. It glittered in the chemlight on the way down.

“Tails,” Gunny said, catching the BCS and flipping it onto his gauntlet. “We go left.”

He put the coin back in its pouch, and Heafs wailed on the door. What he lacked in sledge expertise, he made up in desperation.