The mission was turning into a grueling manhunt—or rather, alien hunt—through the bewildering streets and alleys of the alien city, sometimes climbing up through immense arcing roads and sometimes digging down into the depths of the city as they went practically underground in their pursuit. And, unfortunately, Bermont’s own prediction that they were simply going to have to get down and dirty was proving to be altogether too accurate, and the constant pursuit of the devilish bastards was starting to wear on both him and his people.

A light nerve-tingle alarm went off. Bermont let his empty magazine drop to the ground automatically and fell back as others moved ahead of him to take up the slack. Slapping the new one in took a few seconds before he was moving forward again, his foot crunching the spent clip into the ground as he brought his weapon back up to his shoulder and looked for another target.

“Another empty tunnel,” Savoy said, his voice calm despite the beads of sweat that had formed on his forehead.

The silence was deafening, as the saying went, and the lieutenant found himself almost wishing for something to happen. Anything would be good, a dark part of his mind whispered.

A dark and stupid part, of course.

Savoy knew that it was just the tension speaking, demanding some form of release, but the voice was seductive, just the same, and it took all of his intellect and trained reflexes to shove it down and maintain his current operational stance. He knew that wishing for action was as useless as it was stupid. For one thing, no one ever answered wishes. And for another, the demon Murphy just might answer this one. So he forced his mind into the job and moved as silently as he could onto the next tunnel.

He paused at the tunnel wall beside the branching point, taking a breath as he gathered his thoughts for a moment and looked around. He wasn’t certain what they were doing, this bunch, whether there was a plan for the tunnels or even if maybe the crash had scrambled what passed for brains and they were just acting at random.

This time, there was a soft scratching that reached his armor’s sensors and Savoy froze, his mind blanking as he looked into the pits of hell. At the end of this tunnel, there were dozens, fifty or more, of the alien things—he couldn’t tell. They were crawling over each other, scraping at the walls and gathering up the material that fell. Savoy watched as the horde seemed to actually eat the rocks, ingesting the minerals and even going so far as to apparently carry certain bits to one or another of their group and feed it to each other.

“Oh man,” he muttered, knowing that his helmet would insulate all sound. “This is something else. I think…It might be nest building? Computer, flag this data to be relayed to the research labs on the Odyssey immediately…Xeno-Biology Department.”