***Reporting only minor errors in code…I have already fixed these…Base, I’m still not sure how well this will work…***
“Doc, launch now…launch immediately!”
A faint mist issued from his shoulder capsule and soon filled the interior of the net. Like a match lit to a burlap sack, the Mobility Obstruction Barrier soon began dissolving along a seam above Winger’s head. He waited until the seam had cooled down, then punched his way out of the bag, poking his head cautiously out to look around.
They were in a narrow low-ceilinged cavern with walls smoldering from nearby magma channels. The air inside was hot and steamy.
He let Doc do his work on the other MOBnets and helped each trooper claw their way out of their sacks, each one heaving in huge gulps of scalding hot but still fresh air.
“Okay, Doc, belay the MOBnets and get to work on these walls.” Winger watched the swarm maneuver itself into contact with the rock face and begin burning into the craggy folds and crevices of the stone, igniting a white-hot ball like a miniature sun slowly melting its way into the rock. In spite of himself, Winger felt a moment of pride, having hacked out a quick and dirty configuration for a bot that resisted like a stubborn five-year old when told to clean up his room.
“Doc, you’re amazing…just keep burning and slamming atoms like that. With any luck, we’ll have a navigable tunnel in several hours.”
“Yeah,” said Barnes “and then we can blow this place and get back to our own time.”
Singh did a quick recon and survey of their surroundings. “The cave entrance is sealed with those boulders, Major,” he reported. “We could probably move them but I’m sure that would be noticed. The other direction goes deeper into the bowels of this big volcano and the air and walls are too hot to touch. There are tremors too…we may not be too far from a magma channel. We can’t go that way…if the magma punches through the walls—“
He didn’t have to describe what would happen then.
Lucy Hiroshi waved at the gathering steam clouds that were making their prison almost unbearable. She coughed. “I sure hope Doc hurries up. I don’t think we can take much more of this steam bath.”
The tunneling took nearly six hours. By the time Doc reported back by commlink that solid-phase transition zones had been detected ahead—the rock density was dropping off and an outer surface was coming up—the nanotroopers were lying all over the floor of their cave cell, heaving in scalding hot air thick with carbon dioxide and sulfur fumes, gasping and languid in the steaming humidity of the cave.
“Come on,” Winger ordered. “Let’s go…Taj, you first, then you Mite. We’ll sandwich Lucy in the middle and I’ll bring up the rear. Move your asses, troopers!”
One after another, they scrambled head first into the still sizzling glassy tunnel that Doc had burned through the rock layers of the cave. It was like crawling through an endless coffin, head to toe, each trooper bumping his face right into the boots of the one before.
Barnes snorted once she was inside. “Just another day in the Corps…another beautiful day in the neighborhood…anyone for a song? How about ninety-nine ANAD capsules on the wall….”
For many minutes, Winger and his squad grunted and panting, trying to contort themselves into Doc’s tunnel. With effort and a lot of shoving, Winger was able to force Barnes up into the shaft.
“What kind of clearance do you have?”
Barnes bit her lip. She was not going to succumb to claustrophobia now.
“Maybe a centimeter around my head. It’s a tight fit.”
“Can you see anything above you?”
“The soles of Taj’s boots…and a wall of rock screened off by bots. It’s like the wall is bubbling and heaving. But I can reach out and touch it with my fingers. Above me, it’s black as night. Can’t see a thing.”
“It’s probably going to be a bumpy ride. Close your eyes and think of something more pleasant—“
“Yeah…like what? Like you naked on the beach.”
“Right. Just get going. It’s a long way to the outside surface.”
Amen to that, she thought. Maybe a little prayer would help too. She took a deep breath, counted to three and willed herself into motion.
Then she started to climb upward, smacking the side of her head on the hard rock walls.
She continued her painstaking ascent for what seemed like hours, maybe days. She soon lost all track of time and space.
Only the labored sound of her breathing—her eyes were getting pretty fogged up—and the bang and crunch of her head and shoulders scraping along the tunnel walls gave her any sense of motion.
She tried slowing down to see if it had any effect on the scraping but it didn’t.
Guess I’m going to be a battered old billiard ball when I get topside, she told herself. She wondered how long that would take. She would have given anything to know where she was, how close to the surface they were. This was worse than that swamp and being underwater. Pitch black, in a narrow tube the size of a coffin, with no idea where she was or where she was going.
It was enough to drive a girl to drink.
How long she had passed out, she didn’t know. But her mouth was bone dry and her shoulders, neck and legs throbbed from the incessant banging and battering.
Maybe I’m not going anywhere, she thought. But that couldn’t be. How else to explain the ache at the soles of her feet—the climbing, kicking clawing and scraping had made her feet and hands go numb hours ago. They had never been designed for extended action like this.
At least, Doc’s tunnel seemed navigable, if a bit snug. She wondered where Wings was. He had climbed in right after her. Or was he still inside the cave, trapped and suffocating, maybe dead?
She didn’t want to think about that at all.
Suddenly she felt like she was being accelerated forward. With a sudden surge, she pulled herself upward, through loose soil…then light…blindingly bright light and before she realized what had happened, she was at the surface, wallowing in deep dust and steaming flakes of ash.
That’s when she heard Lucy Hiroshi’s cry behind her, from somewhere still deep in the tunnel.
A bone-jarring rumble shook the entire mountain. Behind Barnes, a searing wave of heat billowed out of Doc’s tunnel.
“The tunnel…it’s collapsing!” she yelled, scrambling to get away from the blast.
“Magma!” cried Taj Singh. “It breached the tunnel—“
“Lucy--!” Winger yelled.
But there was nothing they could do. A magma tube had violently intruded on the escape tunnel and Hiroshi was trapped.
“Come on!” Winger shouted. Sick with worry over Hiroshi, he commanded the Doc II master bot back into containment, which took a few seconds. The small swarm had been hovering over the tunnel opening when they emerged. When the port on his shoulder capsule slammed shut, he added, “Let’s get out of here—!”
The remaining three troopers were soon caught in a dirt slide and fell cartwheeling down the side of the mountain. They slid hundreds of meters, battered and bruised and scalded by steam and hot, nearly liquid rock, until their slide was halted by a ledge further down. They rested a moment, got their breath, then resumed a more controlled descent, by turns sliding, crawling, rolling and tripping the rest of the way.
They made the ground intact, not without cuts and bruises.
Winger didn’t have to remind them that Kipwezi could blow at any moment.
“Head for the village,” he decided. “There’s nothing we can do for Lucy now.”
They ran for several minutes, slashing and kicking and clawing their way through the huge leafy plants until they were hundreds of meters from the base of the mountain, near the forest itself. Barnes collapsed in a pile at the foot of a wiry pandanus tree, entangling herself in its vines, heaving in great gulps of air. The rest sank to the dirt in exhaustion, staring back at the flanks of Kipwezi, n
ow covered with blood-red rivers of lava.
“What…now…?” coughed Barnes, spitting up dust and ash, which flowed all around them in sizzling clouds of flakes.
Winger found his throat parched so dry he could barely talk. A fine patina of volcanic dust had coated everything, entombing the troopers in a gray residue.
“Yuck!” said Singh, flailing the ash away from his arms and face. He spat and coughed more dust.
Winger was about to suggest they continue on toward the village when a chime sounded in the back of his head. It was Doc, on the coupler link.