“For me, too,” Uret announced.

Colian: “Same here.”

“What’s it doing?” Dellian wondered out loud. In response to his misgiving, the cohort stopped moving and began to scan around. Even on his ordinary visual splash, the light level was noticeably lower. Now down forty percent, his databud reported.

Dellian fired his suit jets, moving himself toward the cohort. All six of them started to close into a protective formation around him. Then the tik-drones began reporting that the structure of the alien cells was changing, the strands shrinking, growing denser. Through his helmet sensors, Dellian saw the darkening walls were starting to contract. Undulations began, moving slowly toward him. The appearance of a giant gullet swallowing was inescapable.

The cohort quickly surrounded Dellian, their limbs lincing to provide a solid cage with him at the center. Energy beams fired into the fuzzy mass of alien cells. The outermost layers were fried instantly, shriveling and steaming. But more of the stuff was advancing toward them like a sluggish tsunami, carrying a tide of dead cells and congealing liquid ahead of the still living tissue. Even the coherent X-ray beams could only penetrate the dead matter so far. The sticky fluid bleeding from the charred strands was absorbing the energy, forming a hot barrier ahead of the living surface. In less than a minute, the cavity was completely full, engulfing him and the cohort. Pressure began to increase rapidly, as did the temperature. It was proving impossible to dissipate the cohort’s energy barrage.

Dellian clenched his hands, and the cohort switched off their beam weapons. Sensors located slim tendrils worming their way through the seething liquid toward the cohort. Power blades slashed at them, cutting through effortlessly. But the fluid was becoming more viscous, hampering movement. And still the tendrils kept coming, multiplying like a burgeoning root system.

The tactical feed connecting him to the rest of the squad cut out. “Signal Lost” splashed across his lens. “Shit.” That shouldn’t have happened; they were using entangled comms. He didn’t waste time running diagnostics.

When he tried a swimming motion, the armor’s actuators strained against the pressure to move his limbs. Low-level joint-seal warnings splashed up. He fired the suit thrusters, but all that did was send thin streams of phosphorescent bubbles out into the darkness.

The cohort immediately started to move, using their gravitonic drives to tow him along, heading toward the rock wall that lined the passageway. It was tough going. The new tendrils were insidious, coming at them almost like a solid wave. Dellian had given up trying to move his own limbs. Now he was starting to worry about the pressure seals; they’d never been designed for this kind of environment. Being immobilized was also starting to conjure up black phantoms in his mind. Bizarrely, for all the force being exerted on the armor, he was still in zero gee, which was somehow helping the sense of isolation.