Providence - Max Barry Page 0,102

to one knee. Thirty feet was not enough, clearly. Not nearly enough. He pointed his little spirit guide down the center of the tunnel and saw something else there, a bowl of worms at the bottom of a well, and he sighted the gun, shifted the mode from auto to ranged, squeezed the trigger. The tunnel filled with light. There were salamanders in a heaving mass. The VX-10 was not ideal for this kind of thing, losing a lot of power over distance, but it was a confined space, a very, very confined space, and it barked and scoured the rock with light and flame. More were coming already, squeezing through the flames and bodies like they couldn’t wait to greet him, like it was the day before launch and there wasn’t a person alive who didn’t want to stop and shake his hand or grab a picture, and a little pop here and there was no longer enough, it seemed, despite his best intentions to preserve charge, so he held down the trigger for a full second, two, three, and made them split and char until he was certain they were dead.

There were so many that their bodies blocked the tunnel. But the flames guttered quickly, which allowed him to force his way between them. He still wasn’t sure why there had been no huk. It was all they fucking did in space. Even the one he’d killed on the ship had spat a huk at him. But here, so far, nothing. He devised two theories: They were different salamanders, a kind of soldier that didn’t huk but did like to run through tunnels like out-of-control trains, or they were reluctant to punch holes in their own burrow. It was the kind of question Gilly would have enjoyed, and been able to solve, but Gilly was still twelve hundred feet away, in the dark, so Anders guessed he would find out when he found out.

The gun displayed 72 percent charge. He was still wearing the converter; if he could find a good location, somewhere to set his back against a wall, he could put the converter to work on salamander bodies. The only problem would be transferring that charge to the gun, which would take a minute or two, during which time he couldn’t use it. That part he would have to figure out when he came to it.

They came again a minute later. He gave them a burst from the lightning gun but this time it didn’t stop them: more and more scrabbled through the burning corpses, forcing him to stop and feed a continuous stream of energy into the tunnel until the gun began to bleat in protest. When he released the trigger, flame was everywhere in great pools. The walls dripped and glowed red. He could feel the heat through his suit. He tried to advance and a salamander clambered over the top of a flaming corpse and he popped it. Behind that was another and he repeated the process and it was the only way he could advance: a step, a bark from the gun, over and over. Their numbers seemed endless. When he next glanced at the gun, its charge had dropped to 44 percent. White smoke curled continuously from its barrel. He’d carried a small hope of making it to Gilly and back without needing to recharge, but that was gone now.

Ahead of him, a salamander backed away, its movement unusually calculated, and he recognized that, the kind of shit his brothers would pull before he was old enough not to be fooled by it, and he turned and spat fire into the tunnel behind him. The air forked and ignited and cleaved three salamanders. There were more behind those. He heard: huk.

He dropped. The huk passed by and threw him into the wall. His vision flared. His suit wailed. But he didn’t let go of the lightning gun and used it to hose both directions, ahead and behind. He broiled salamanders until there were no more.

He got to his feet. The huk had torn away hunks of rock and resin and salamander and strewn them about. But the path ahead seemed clear. He checked the gun. Eighteen percent. Not good. Not good at all.

So they could huk. He didn’t know why now and not before. They could have made mincemeat out