Progress was slowing drastically as the tendrils grew thicker. The forward cohort started firing X-ray lasers to break them up; they’d become too thick for the power blades to cope with. Medical monitors showed Dellian’s heart rate increasing. The claustrophobia was getting to him. His plan was to detonate grenades against the rock; that was where the thickest nutrient arteries were supplying the cells. If he could cut those, he might be able to disable more of the passageway and claw his way out of this clot.

One of the cohort stopped moving, every limb overwhelmed by the tendrils, and still they kept coming, wrapping it deeper and deeper in layers of alien cells. And tendrils were gaining on a second cohort.

Deep inside Dellian’s neck one of his new glands discharged a mild tranquilizer into his bloodstream. It was odd. He knew he should be panicking, but he wasn’t. Instead he ordered the cohort to fire a grenade. It barely moved ten centimeters from the launch tube nozzle. Tendrils began to coil around it.

Dellian triggered it. His armor was easily tough enough to withstand the blast, but the pressure waves shook him about violently. “Saints shitting,” he groaned. Some of the suit seal warnings were now turning amber. His gland pulsed out another discharge. It didn’t seem to make any difference. The explosion had died away, but his limbs were still shaking. Body temperature was up, except his skin now felt like ice.

“Calm!” he ordered himself. “For fuck’s sake, keep calm!” His voice sounded thin and pathetic. What would Yirella do? A question that brought about a dangerously wild giggle. Not get into this shit to start with.

It was looking bad. The cohort had come to a halt; their gravitonic drives weren’t strong enough to push any farther through the churning knot of tendrils.

Can’t use grenades again.

Energy weapons are heating the fluid.

Power blades beaten.

Come on, think!

The suit sensors showed him tendrils starting to wrap around his legs. He’d be cocooned in minutes, probably less. He didn’t have the power to tear the strands free.

Power!

He yelled out the old yeargroup games war cry. It was shockingly loud in the helmet, ratcheting up the claustrophobia another couple of degrees, and now there was the very real prospect of drowning in alien gunk if the seals were breached. It took him thirty seconds to issue instructions to the cohort, rerouting the electrical output of their aneutronic fusion chambers, taking safety systems offline, cranking the output to redline.

“Go,” he commanded.

The combined power of the twenty-seven generators discharged through the cohort’s shells. Everything went black. Dellian had no displays, no suit functions. He couldn’t even sense the cohort, which spiked his fear.

Black panic really hit then. He began to struggle. The suit held him tight. He screamed.

“Hang on,” Tilliana’s smooth voice instructed through the unnerving darkness. “We’re getting you out.”