Chapter Text

The pod doors opened to darkness, pierced only by the pod’s spotlights. I cautiously peeked out and shot a flare at the ceiling. There were no glyphids to be seen. Or heard. I disembarked the drop pod, followed by my team. A hatch opened in the side of the drop pod, and Molly was slowly being lowered to the ground.

The cave wasn’t large, about average for a landing zone. Roughly circular, with four columns supporting the ceiling. The terrain was a familiar woody brown, with some minerals glinting in the walls. There were no bugs crawling or flying anywhere, and even the characteristic thorny red vines were suspiciously absent.

“Strange.” Mikeal the gunner harrumphed. “Not a single crawly bastard to shoot.”

Skully the driller, characteristically short for words, grunted in agreement. “Weird”

“You complaining?” Piped up Khris the engineer, ever practical. “Let’s just clear these minerals and head out.” He shot a platform which attached to the wall with a “PAMPF”.

I grappled up to the nitra vein, dutifully collecting the precious minerals. But secretly, I also found it strange. Normally we would expect to be greeted by a small host of enemies upon landing. Sometimes there were more bugs, sometimes less. But never just an empty cave.

Skully, having scanned the surrounding terrain, called out “This way!” and began drilling into the next tunnel. I finished collecting the gold in the room, and grappled down to deposit it in Molly before following my team into the deep.

We made our way through the tunnels, depending on temporary throwable flares for light. The vines were very present in the tunnels, sometimes retracting fearfully at the swing of a pickaxe, sometimes relenting only to Skully’s drills. After several minutes of hacking and slashing the tunnel opened up into a massive cavern, red vines twisting away into the darkness.

Khris threw a flare, which spiraled away below maybe twenty meters before coming to a stop. “Konor, light please?”

“Hm? Oh, right.” I pulled out my flare gun and fired into the ceiling again. The light revealed a mostly empty cavern, with a roughly flat floor, and some shelves and crannies in the walls. Red vines curled their way around here and there, but not in the numbers we expected. And the strangest thing by far was the lack of wildlife.

“Still nuttin’ to shoot.” Mikeal said, pulling out a zipline which whistled down and anchored to the cavern floor. “I don’t like it.” He hooked onto the zipline and began descending.
Khris latched on to the zipline behind him. “There’s a reason we haven’t found any bugs yet. Must be something in this cave that’s keepin’ ‘em away. Y’know what they say, there’s always a bigger fish.”

“I don’t like fish. I can’t catch ‘em on fire if they’s always swimmin’ around.” Skully said, following Kris down the zipline.

I looked back at the tunnel with suspicion. “For once, I agree with you, Skully.” I grappled down to the floor. Suspicion and caution were healthy things to have in the caves, and only rarely did they prove to be unwarranted. I didn’t trust these caves and what they hid in the darkness, and this mission was no different.

I didn’t have much time to think about it though, as I was soon busy grappling from platform to platform gathering minerals. Nitra, gold, bismor, and jadiz were strangely abundant, in an almost constant flow from the rock to my bucket and into Molly. Between keeping up with flares, mining minerals, and finding M.U.L.E. legs, I was kept busy. But strangely, the Mini M.U.L.E.’s themselves were nowhere to be found.

After several minutes of searching, Mikeal called out “Look over here! I found the drop pod!” We all gathered round, and lo and behold, the drop pod stood. It had landed in a pit maybe 10 meters deep and 40 wide (of course it did).

“Hm.” Skully grunted, pointing. “Behind it.” We walked around the edge of the pit to see a large tunnel in the wall - larger than was natural. The floor in front of the tunnel was marred and dented in a circular pattern. Like something very heavy had lay down, spun, and returned to the tunnel.

“Drilldozer tracks. What on Hoxxes is a drilldozer doing here? There’s no heartstone nearby.” Khris said, for once suspicious. “Konor, get closer, but be careful.”

I nodded, and grappled my way down to the pit floor. I drew my rifle on the place, expecting a swarm to erupt from the walls. But nothing happened. I carefully made my way around the pod. On the side facing the tunnel, a panel of the pod had been ripped off - violently. A chunk of the machinery inside seemed to be missing.

I called up to my team. “All clear - Khris, you’re going to want to see this.”

I heard a zipline whistle and thud into the floor of the pit, and the team started to descend, followed by the ever-loyal Molly. I turned to face the tunnel itself and tossed a flare. Khris was right, this was a drilldozer tunnel, completely straight, heading down at a steep angle. But something seemed off about it. “Skully,” I said as the team reached the bottom, “whaddaya think about this tunnel?”

“Hm.” Skully grunted. “Big. Too big.”

“He’s right.” Khris observed. “This is several meters too wide for a drilldozer hole. Something else must’ve made it.”

“Like what?” Mikeal scoffed. “Those are clearly Dotty tracks. It’s shaped like a Dotty hole. What else could it be?”

Khris shrugged. “Hell if I know. Maybe R&D have come up with a bigger one.”

“Nu-uh.” Skully shook his head. “Company don’t make a drill that big.”

I piped up. “Maybe it’s a new drill?” but Skully shook his head again.

“The tracks.” He pointed at the ground. “Too deep for Dotty. Too heavy. Makes ground unstable.”

“R&D would’ve made the tracks wider to better balance the weight.” Khris said, nodding.

“Well then what was it?” I asked.

“I don’t know.” Khris shrugged. I looked to Skully, who also shrugged.

“Well that’s very helpful.” I scoffed. “So we have a heavy, modified dozer on the loose, making tunnels and destabilizing caves, with a drill strong enough to puncture a drop pod. Great.”

“What?” Khris looked and saw the hole in the pod, from which hung a twisted scrap of metal. Khris approached the damaged area. “The beacon’s gone.”

“Why is that on the outside waiting to be stolen?” I demanded. “R&D needs to put that in the middle.”

“Because we go in the middle, dummy.” Mikeal snapped. “What else is missing, Khris?”

Khris was now poking his head inside the wrecked pod. “A lot of power wiring and pneumatic hoses. And a bunch of the small transmitters used to communicate with M.U.L.E.’s and B.O.S.C.O.E.’s. R&D could maybe fix it, but it’s beyond any field repair. And- what the hell is that?” Khris backed out of the wreckage holding a piece of metal about the length of his forearm. It was a wrench, emblazoned with the Deep Rock logo. The handle was worn, and wrapped in glyphid hide. Patches of paint were mixed with stains from oil and fuel.

“Well that’s not rival tech.” I said.

“We already know it’s not the rivals. They don’t use Dotty treads.” Mikeal said, his voice growing rough with irritation, and maybe anger. “Someone’s betrayed the company.”

“Lemme see.” Skully grunted, holding out his hand. He held the wrench in one hand and his pickaxe in the other. He tapped the wrench with the pickaxe, then shook his head. “Old. Old metal.” He said, gesturing with the wrench. “Scratches easy.”

“That’s crazy.” Khris said. “R&D haven’t come out with new pickaxe metal since…Karl’s…time.”

“Y’think Karl could be alive?” I asked

“No way.” Mikeal said. “Karl wouldn’t sabotage his fellow dwarf like this.”

Khris pressed a button on Molly. “Mission Control, this is team #15379, Reporting on sabotaged drop pod, come in.”

Mission Control’s voice wormed its way into our headsets. “This is Mission Control, I hear you loud and clear. What’s the situation?”

Khris began talking. “The Mini M.U.L.E.’s are missing, along with most of their legs. The drop pod’s outer paneling has been breached, and the beacon is missing, along with a bunch of cables and hoses. We won’t be able to get it running again.”

“Copy that, 15379. Do you need extraction?” Mission Control crackled.

“Negative. We found a possible cause. The panel seems to have been torn off by a drilldozer. There’s a dozer tunnel leading to the pod. The tracks suggest the thing came here, tore off the panel, turned around, and left the way it came.”

“A rogue drilldozer?” Mission Control sounded skeptical. “Are you sure?”

“We’re not completely sure it’s a drilldozer.” Khris amended. “The tunnel is too wide for a standard Dotty, and the tracks are too deep - it’s too heavy. We thought maybe R&D developed a new kind of dozer?”

“They might be working on something, the secret-keeping goblins.” Mission Control muttered. “But if anything had been deployed to the planet, I would know about it.”

“Could it be heavier cuz of some kind of crawly?” Mikeal piped up. “Could it be like the parasites on those old Bet-C bots?”

“R&D has several safeguards to stop those things from getting into our drilldozers.” Mission Control responded. “The thing explodes and fries its own circuitry after every hearthstone. There’s no charge for a charge leech to feed on.”

“The wrench” Skully grunted.

“Oh yeah, we found a company wrench.” I said. “But it’s an old one, like really old.”

“Explain.”

“Tritilyte.” Skully grunted.

“It’s made of the old tritilyte alloy.” Khris elaborated. “Our new instrium pickaxes scratch it easily.”

“Tritilyte wrenches haven’t been standard-issue for a very long time.” Mission Control mused. “I have much to report on this incident. Prepare for extraction.”

“Wait.” Mikeal blurted. “We don’t need extraction yet.”

“You’re disobeying?” Mission Control said. We were all silent for a tense moment.

“We haven’t found anything to shoot in here. Not even a stabber vine.” Mikeal continued. “If there’s someone with a beefy dozer, stolen mini M.U.L.E.’s, and company tools down here sabotaging our drop pods, then they’re a traitor to the company and need to be dealt with.”

Mission Control was silent for a moment.

“There is a convenient tunnel to follow.” Khris noted. “And we have enough nitra for a couple resupplies.”

“We’ll do it quick.” I added. “How hard can it be to track a drilldozer?”

“Tracks.” Skully grunted. “Not hard at all.”

Mission Control was silent for a moment. “What direction does the tunnel go?”

“Bearing 174.586, down at about 30 degrees.” Mikeal said, using his zipline gun to measure.

Mission Control was silent for another moment. “Alright team. I’ll grant you clearance to pursue the traitor. But you must be extremely careful. You’ll be heading into an area of the hollow bough called the Dead Patch. No team has returned from the Dead Patch alive. We don’t even know why that is - our scanners and comms don’t reach that far down.”

“You don’t need to worry ‘bout us,” Mikeal said. “We’re dwarves!”

“Alright.” Mission Control responded. “Your mission objectives have been updated. Locate whatever made this tunnel, disable it, locate whoever built the thing, and bring them back - alive if you can.”

“Yes, sir!” Khris said. “Team #15379 out.”

“Let’s find this snake-eyed traitor, and shove that wrench up his arse!” Mikeal shouted. I launched a flare down the tunnel, and together we strode into the unknown.

Chapter Text

I pulled a flare out of its growing tube on my hip, feeling the rubbery exterior dissolve on contact with the air, and watched as the interior chemicals ignite with a piercing blue glow and a soft sizzling hiss. I tossed it down the tunnel, watching it bounce and tumble, illuminating a pitifully small area. I sighed as I continued the seemingly endless hike down the tunnel. I could already hear the soft gurgle as the flare tube began regrowing the flare. Khris tossed up a red flare, which somehow lit up less area than the one I’d just thrown. Mikeal and Skully threw their flares in turn, before it rotated back to me again.

“This sucks.” I complained. “I can’t hardly see nuttin’.”

“Don’t you dare use your flare gun.” Khris said. “You only got so many of ‘em, and we’re too deep to call resupplies.”

“He knows that,” Mikeal said, defending me for once. “You’ve told him a million times by now.” He fiddled with the projectile of his coil gun. “And I ‘on’t think none of us can blame ‘im for being nervous about this.”

“Too dark,” Skully nodded. “Even for caves.” He was right. It was unnaturally dark. In the natural caves of Hoxxes IV, there was usually something that glowed. Even if it was hostile, it still let us know what to shoot. But here in the too-big-for-a Drilldozer tunnel, there were no plants or glyphids to light our way. Just the endless abyss ahead, which eagerly gobbled up our pitiful chem-grown flares with some help from the aggressively sloped floor. 

The only source of comfort was the light from Molly, whose headlight bobbed up and down as she trotted along. We had taken all the supplies we could and strapped them to her with the seatbelts from the drop pod. All her deposit slots were stuffed, and over a dozen different ammunition types were strapped to her sides and top. 

“I’d hardly call this a cave.” Khris scoffed. “We’ve been walking for close to an hour. We

passed the three kilometer (roughly 2 miles) mark a couple minutes ago, and in all that time, we haven’t run into any natural caverns. Not one. Not even on terrain scanners.”

“So… no oil shale?” I asked as yet another of my flares bounced its way down the tunnel. “How is that possible? That’s too far for a dozer, and there wasn’t any oil shale in the caverns we landed in. I checked.”

“Precisely.” Khris nodded as his flare chased mine. “Everything we learn about this bigger dozer leads me to think that it’s not a dozer at all. And yet nothing else I can think of uses treads like that.”

“New name.” Skully tossed his flare with a grunt. “Megadozer.”

“Oh, I like that.” Mikeal mused, bouncing his flare off his boot.

We walked in silence for several minutes, continuously lighting our way with chem-flares. The only sound was our footsteps and the dutiful trotting of Molly, whose pathfinding had led her to follow us on the ceiling of the tunnel for some reason.

“Well, let’s go over it all, then.” Khris said, counting on his fingers. “This thing is big enough to dig this tunnel, has enough fuel to dig for this long, yet still using the standard dozer tread base.”

“It’s not controlled by a bug,” I added. “And it’s heavier than a dozer.”

“And,” Mikeal said, “it’s scary enough to scare away all the bugs.”

“Maybe armed.” Skully said.

“That might explain why the bugs ran away,” Khris mused.

“Grrr-RUF” Skully made a noise like a barking hound, striking fear into me. We all fell silent and froze in place. I didn’t even dare breathe. 

“Where?” Khris said softly.

Skully was one of the oldest graybeards still serving with the company, and like many drillers, had developed a sixth sense called Rocktalk. He was so in tune to the vibrations of the earth that he could detect and predict instability. That bark always meant the same thing; an impending tremor, possibly a collapse. 

“Crevice.” Skully slowly pulled out his pointer tool, tracing a narrow triangle on the floor which crossed the tunnel just a meter or two ahead of us. I pulled out my tablet.

The terrain scanner showed a massive cavern maybe ten or twenty meters below us. The scanner didn’t reach far down enough to see the bottom, but I could see some stabber vines just waiting to puncture an unlucky dwarf. 

“Back.” Skully said, waving us away from the threat. The three of us carefully retreated back up the tunnel a half dozen paces as Skully felt the ground with his hand, searching for the right spot to strike to safely cause a tremor. After locating his target, he raised his pickaxe. With a shout, he slammed his tool into the earth, which started to crack just beneath him. The entire tunnel started to shake. His feet pounded as he sprinted back towards us but his foot caught on a hole and he fell. I lunged to grab him, using my grappling hook to anchor both of us. 

The whole tunnel shook, and after a few moments of being pelted with loose stone and dirt, I stood up and dusted myself off. A half-meter gap had opened in the tunnel floor, just where Skully had said. 

“ ‘tanks.” Skully said, wiping off his goggles. I nodded and caught my breath as Khris stepped forward to examine the hole. 

“Terrain scanner still isn’t picking up the bottom.” Khris put away his tablet and dropped a flare down. I walked up and put my hand on his shoulder as we watched it fall. It was a solid 30 seconds before we heard it hit anything.

“Bloody hell that’s deep.” Mikeal said. 

“Over 100 meters straight down.” Khris confirmed. “We’d need a drop pod to get in and out safely.”

“We don’t need no drop pod.” I pointed my grapple gun and prepared to jump down.

Mikeal grabbed my shoulders and pulled me from the edge. “You’re not going anywhere.”

“Oh, come on, I’ll be in and out.” I shook him off. “What’s the problem with looking?”

“The problem is we have a mission to complete: finding the Megadozer.”

“The space rig’s scanners can’t get down this far, any mapping of these caves will surely be rewarded.” Khris piped up. “Just get in, do a scan and get out, alright?”

“Sure, in and out.” I looked down into the crevasse again. “I’ll be back before you know it.”

Mikeal opened his mouth to protest, but ended up saying “Be careful, Konnor.”

I nodded and tossed a flare at an angle, hoping to hit a wall. The flare lit up a small ledge. Not much, but enough for me to grapple to. I dropped into the void, firing my grapple gun midair to attach myself to the ledge. Waiting for my grappler to recharge, I took out my terrain scanner and mapped the cave. The dim green glow of the screen lit my face as I watched the cavern take shape on the scanner. The bulbous roots that were characteristic of the Hollow Bough snaked across the walls the whole way down. There were several spots where mineral veins had grown, but they were all replaced with sharp, irregular little niches, like someone had mined them out with a pickaxe.

My shield exploded in a cascade of blue sparks. I’d been hit. Hard. I tried to stand, but something had impaled my foot, pinning it to the rock.

“AAaargh!! Help!” I yelled, blindly firing my flare gun into the wall. Its phosphorous core burned white hot, almost blinding after so much darkness. In front of me was a massive collection of stabber vines, no less than a dozen. The first one to strike was retracting from my foot, but three more were already preparing to strike. I grit my teeth and forced my foot to take my weight as I leapt from my ledge into thin air, the blades of the stabber vine passing just inches behind me. 

I landed on a soft cushion of plascrete, once again thankful of Khris’s expert marksmanship. I had fallen maybe twenty meters. I turned to face the threat again, this time with a weapon in my hand. Another claw was already getting into position, I slotted it into the sights of my rifle and pulled the trigger until it emptied with a satisfying PING!  

The offending tendril popped into a disgusting shower of fluids and fell away, but there were more where that came from. I pulled out my grapple gun and shot back up to my original ledge as more blades impacted into the wall behind me. 

“PING IT YOU MORON!!!” Mikeal screamed above me. I whipped out my pointer and pinged the enormous plant. The instant I did so, a white hot streak of steel burned through the cave ceiling, striking the base of the stabber vine cluster with an ear ringing screech. The plant died instantly, blades clattering against the walls of the cave as it fell into the void. 

I lowered my weapon and sat there for a moment, breathing heavily. A quick touch to my headset confirmed that the phosphorous core of my flare still had 75 seconds left. The whole fight had taken less than 15 seconds. After a moment, I picked myself up and grappled back to the team. Light from the flare leaked through the crevice, giving them all a creepy underlit appearance.

“Good shot.” I gestured to Khris, who nodded to me. Mikeal was holding his pistol away from his body - the coils were still hot. I nodded to him, and he nodded back.

“Glad I brought this thing,” he said. “You find anything worth it in there?”

“Nope.” I shook my head. “All the mineral veins were gone. I think they were mined with a pickaxe.” I pulled out my terrain scanner and synced it with the others, who all pulled out their tablets to study the shape of the cave. 

“Good eye.” Khris said, pointing to his screen. “These scars here are definitely the result of mining. No bug digs like that.”

“So it’s for sure a dwarf then.” I said. “Should I go back in and look for other signs?”

“Mmm.” Mikeal grunted. “I don’t know about that. I’m not sure we should leave the tracks.”

“Like they’re going anywhere.” I pointed out. “We haven’t seen any caverns or anything, not even with how far the flares roll down.”

“Whatever we do,” Khris butted in. “We’re staying together. No resupplies means no stupid mistakes.”

“Dirt tastes funny.” Skully said. I turned to realize he hadn’t gotten up since he triggered the controlled tremor. He licked his lips and spat out a bit of dirt into his palm. “Too crunchy.”

“What do you mean it's too crunchy?” Khris asked, kneeling beside him. We were all used to Skully’s geovore tendencies at this point. And frankly, if you didn’t listen to a rocktalker, you were just asking for a C4 “prank”. 

“It crunches.” Skully said, biting down hard on another small rock. He held it up to Khris as it…started to grow back?

Khris was confused too. “What?” he picked up a rock and rolled it between his fingers. “He’s right.” Khris said. “Normal rocks crack and crumble. They don’t return to shape like this. It’s almost like-”

“Plascrete.” Skully said, nodding. “Plascrete mixed with dirt. Veeeery sneaky.”

“Is the whole tunnel plascrete?” I asked.

“I don’t know. Skully?” Khris prompted the driller, who started crawling around the perimeter of the crevice, tapping the ground with his pickaxe.

“More importantly, why would someone use this much plascrete?” Mikeal asked. 

“I don’t know. Without access to resupplies, even abandoned ones, it would be a massive waste of resources.” Khris puzzled.

“It’s gotta be to stabilize the tunnel, right?” I asked. “You guys said the Megadozer is too big for its britches. This is the first time it’s broken through to a cave in how long? And even this one was sealed when we found it.”

“Whole tunnel.” Skully reported. He had crawled several yards down the tunnel. “Two stripes. Right on tread marks.” He traced two lines on the floor with his laser pointer. 

“It’s gotta be a stabilizer then?” I asked.

Khris nodded. “More than that, the plascrete must be integrated into the megadozer and sprays automatically. Otherwise there’d be splotches of it everywhere, not these smooth lines.”

“Definitely a dwarf.” Mikeal growled. 

“Well, maybe.” Khris stipulated. “It’s for sure not a bug, but it could be the Teiflings.”

“You need to read the territory reports more.” Mikeal rebutted. “The rivals are just doing shallow prospecting. They don’t go even half as deep as our deepest standard missions, and we’re way past that now.”

“Can the rivals make plascrete?” I wondered. “Or is that a company patent?”

“Plascrete isn’t patented, but its formula is a closely guarded secret.” Khris said. “Patent lawyers are all pointy-eared leaf lovers, Management don’t trust ‘em.”

“We go down.” Skully was laying on his stomach, peering down into the cavern. “See sumptin’.”

“What is it?” I pulled out my rifle and clicked the sharpshooter button. The center of my HUD distorted, zooming in on where I was aiming.

“Red light.” Skully said. “Weren’t there before.”

“That’s Khris’s flare.” Mikeal said. “We dropped it earlier, while you were eating plascrete.”

“No, my flare went out a good fifteen, twenty seconds ago.” Khris corrected. “See anything Konnor?”

“I see it,” I said, squinting down my ironsights. “But it’s no chem flare.”

“Is it a crawly?” Mikeal asked, but I shook my head.

“Nope.”

“Details, Konnor.” Khris chided.

“Hang on, I’m figurin’ it out.” I waved him off.

The light was puzzling, because its source was hidden from view. It certainly wasn’t Khris’s flare. It wasn’t the right color. Too orangey. Among bugs, only dreadnoughts and trawlers have this color. But it was casting light and shadows on the cave floor - too powerful to be either of those. And the way it was flickering…

“It’s… an open flame of some kind.” I said, continuing to study the strange light. “A hot geyser?”

“No.” Skully stated, sniffing the air.

“Is it dwarfmade, then?” Mikeal prodded.

I ignored him and kept studying the shadows being cast on the cave floor, looking for any more clues. There. A round spot of orange light glided over the cave floor, momentarily obliterating one of the shadows.

“There’s a sentry down there.” I nodded towards Khris. “Like yours. I saw the orange spotlight.”

“An active sentry? Are you sure?” Khris asked. He pulled out some gizmo and began fiddling with it.

“Yup.” I said. “Wait. Scratch that. Many sentries.” Now that I was looking for them, I could see the orange spots traveling all over the cave. “At least half a dozen, maybe more.”

“t’s-a much hotter trail than these tracks.” Mikeal said, turning to Khris. “We should go down there.”

I looked up at the sound of Molly whining in protest. Mikeal had used his pickaxe to pry her up and tilt her on her side. Khris was doing something to her underbelly, and after a moment he stepped back and Mikeal lowered her to the ground again. She made a disgruntled beeping grumble as she settled back into the ground.

“Whatcha got there?” I asked. 

“One of those breadcrumb beacons that Molly leaves behind on her way to extraction.” Khris said, stabbing the beacon into the ground. “I’m reprogramming it to broadcast its own position, our team number, the date, and the direction we’re going.” He plugged his little gizmo into the thing and began tinkering. “If anyone comes after us, they’ll see this and know where we went.”

“You really think mission control would send a rescue team for us? To the dead patch?” I asked. 

“This ain’t no ordinary team.” Mikeal pointed out. “And we ain’t on no ordinary mission. The company’s tech has been compromised. Management’s gonna wanna know what we found.”

“Well, they’re gonna need to find us alive. I'm stretching the limit of this breadcrumb’s memory as is. I can’t include any of the evidence we’ve found.” Khris said, pocketing his gizmo. The breadcrumb’s holographic arrow sprang up, flashing green, and he adjusted the device to point it towards the crevice. 

“Gives ‘em more reason to find us.” Mikeal said. “Skully, let’s go.” The driller started, and got up. He took a look at his terrain scanner and started drilling into the wall at a downwards angle. The last of my flare’s core burned out as we followed him, single file, down towards the source of the mysterious light.

Chapter Text

A driller’s tunnel was always a bit claustrophobic for me. There was no room to maneuver, and barely any room to shoot. If a big bug chased us down a tunnel, then the entire team was at the mercy of the driller’s navigational skills. And if he happened to run out of fuel in a situation like that, well then you were really screwed. 

After a longer time than I’d like, Skully turned to breach into the cavern. Between the drill smoke and Mikeal’s breath, I was practically gasping for air. But it was better than grappling down through Karl knows how many Stabber Hydras. 

I trusted Skully though. He might have a couple screws loose, but he would never do anything that would fail a mission. He and Mikeal often coordinated to prank me by powering up a shield around me right as a satchel charge went off in my face. They often claimed ‘No harm no foul’. But this mission was too serious even for those ‘tame’ shenanigans. 

We stepped out of the tunnel into the enormous cavern. We were standing on one of those bulbous roots that wind their way across the walls in this biome. As we started making our way down to the cavern floor, I couldn’t help but gasp in awe of what we had discovered. 

It was a refinery. Or it had been at one point. The whole thing had seen better days. The central storage pod was gone, and in its place were several large-diameter hoses running to the far side of the facility. The paint was totally scuffed, and there were discarded toolboxes and oil rags everywhere. But it was still functional, and running like a madhouse, belching fire and pumping pistons. Surrounded by vigilant turrets, it proudly rattled its defiance at the surrounding cavern’s gloomy hostility.

As we approached, I barely heard a distant chattering. A sound which, though it barely touched my ears, set me on high alert. I reached forward to put a hand on Mikeal’s shoulder. 

“Wait,” I whisper-shouted. “I hear something.” I pulled out my rifle and powered up the scope again. I zoomed into the refinery. There. On the far side of it. 

“Glyphids.” I said. “Maybe a dozen grunts. On the other side of it.”

Mikeal chuckled and hefted his autocannon. “Finally. My trigger finger’s was gettin’ itchy!” He started to jog towards the refinery. I grappled ahead of him, eager for some kills of my own. But before either of us could get around the thing for a clear shot, Khris’s voice rang in our headsets.

“ Hold your fire, both of you! ” He shouted. “The turrets ain’t firing at the bugs. I wanna know why. Don’t kill anything.”

I landed at the foot of one of the facility’s ramps. The thing was even louder up close, and shook with a worrying rattle. As I looked, a nut worked its way loose and clattered against the drill as it fell to the ground. 

“Uhh, Khris?” I called into my headset. “This thing is shaking itself apart.” Suddenly, the engine began screaming with an ear-piercing whine. The top of the smokestack burst into flame, a blazing white-hot inferno. 

“Karl’s beard.” Khris cursed in my ear. “ Cover up the air vents! ”

“What? Why?”

“ It’s a diesel runaway! JUST DO IT! ” There was true panic in his voice. 

I scrambled to the air vent furthest from the team. I grabbed a random glyphic web and stuffed it in the vent. I pickaxed some loose dirt and threw that in too. The dirt got stuck in the web and clogged it even further. The engine’s roaring began to slow down.

On the other side of the ramp, I hear Mikeal swing his pickaxe with a shout. He dented the vent’s grate and pushed, folding the entire duct in on itself. He wedged his pickaxe beside the vent and pushed sideways, folding the duct shut. The engine slowed down to a clanking grumble, but it didn’t fall silent until Khris’s plascrete slammed into the final vent and clogged it up good.

I took a couple breaths as the engine grumbled to a halt. As the flame died out completely, I fired a flare into the ceiling, its pure white light a stark contrast to the sooty fire.

I turned around to see a puzzling sight. It was a…contraption of some kind. It seemed like a…tanker M.U.L.E.? It was an abomination, with a couple dozen legs supporting it. Someone had taken a huge tank and welded several Mini M.U.L.E.s to its underside, resulting in a disturbing centipede appearance. 

But even stranger was the crew of workers tending to it. There were glyphids, mostly grunts, scuttling all over and around the thing. Some were tending to the hoses connecting it to the refinery, others were inspecting the legs, there was even a web spitter attaching something to its back. I pulled out my laser pointer to confirm my suspicions. On the little screen appeared the word “Steephen”. They were all tamed bugs. 

They hadn’t seemed to notice me, so I carefully turned back around to head over to my team. I must have looked pretty spooked.

“What happened? What’s over there?” Mikeal asked me as I came around the corner. 

I shook myself. “A crew of bugs working on…something. I don’t even know what.”

“A crew?” Khris asked.

“Like ten of them,” I amended. “They’re all tamed. But we can deal with that in a second. Khris, what the hell was that?”

“A diesel runaway.” Khris said. “It’s when a diesel engine starts burning stuff that it shouldn’t- like its own oil. It causes a runaway reaction that usually leads to catastrophic breakdown. The only way to stop it is to deprive the system of oxygen.”

Skully sniffed the smoke. “No vents on other refineries though.”

Khris nodded. “This is an old refinery, back when they were powered by diesel and fueled themselves with the raw morkite they harvested. The new ones run on a small fission core, just like the drop pods and everything else.”

“Wait, that’s not right. What about the times we had to restart a pod with fuel?” Mikeal argued.

“Those are fuel cells , not fuel. There’s no liquid flowing, just electricity. All the nuclear fuel is already in the drop pod, it just takes a lot of energy to kickstart the fission reactor…”

Quickly bored, I walked back around to the tanker. I hadn’t noticed it before, but behind the strange contraption was another Megadozer tunnel. The bugs were still working on disconnecting the hoses, but now that the threat was over, they moved with less energy. Bugs and their behavior were my specialty, and these bugs were behaving like none I'd ever seen. 

I turned on my hud to better analyze them. Sure enough, they all had that distinctive faint blue glow that Steeve’s normally had. As I approached, a glyphid grunt came up to me, wagging its abdomen. I kneeled down to look more closely, and noticed…it had metal shoes on its front two legs. Interesting little metal sleeves that covered the lower half of the claw. Tools for diggin, no doubt. And as I moved my way up the leg, I noticed a small box strapped to it with a bit of kevlar, just below the joint connecting it to the thorax. It was very small, and had a little blinking red indicator light. That in itself was pretty standard. I myself had one as a part of my glyphid tamer kit. It stopped friendly fire from turrets and other bots, and also stopped overzealous dwarves from trying to sneak them home on the drop pod. 

But the name “Steephen” was very intriguing in the context of bug beacon history. All the bug beacons I had ever laid eyes on had the name “Steeve”. It was the modern name, and had been in use for a couple centuries now. The original, ancient Deep Rock Galactic dwarves were fans of the classics, and the first bug beacons had the name “Steephanos”, from some even more ancient nation on the homeworld. But the workers had quickly started nicknaming their bugs. The official use of “Steephen” only survived for around a half dozen decades or so- the blink of an eye in dwarf terms - before being shortened even further to “Steeve”. Which meant that this beacon was made during Karl’s prime years. 

That time period tracked with all the other evidence, but the real puzzle was how this beacon was still powered. The red light still blinked, and the turrets still held their fire. But any battery of that time would’ve gone dead long ago.

I continued inspecting the device, and found a small steel cord leading away from the box, through a couple of pulley rings, and attached to the rearmost leg. I leaned in to put my ear to the box, and the glyphid made a small noise in protest. I pinched the cord and gave a little tug, and heard the whirring of gears in the box. I straightened up, satisfied with myself. I was no engineer, but I knew a dynamo when I heard one. It was genius, really. The string was pulled in and out of a spool in the box as the bug moved around naturally, and the dwarf-made springs keeping it taught could last forever. It was basically unlimited free energy, so long as the bug lived. 

I turned my attention back to the shoes. They looked hand-forged, with individual hammer blows mottling its surface. I turned to ask Khris’ opinion on it, but he was standing on Mikeal’s shoulders, busily sticking his head up into some orifice of the refinery. 

“Hey Skully, come check this out.” I called instead. The older dwarf approached me with his usual unnerving stare. 

“These bugs have digging shoes.” I gestured. “What does the many metal memorizer have to say?” I joked.

He kneeled beside me and inspected the metal. After a quick pickaxe scratch, he grunted and said “Mythril.”

I hadn’t seen anything made of mythril in my entire time at the company. “What? Are you sure?”

“Mhmm.” he grunted. “Scratches easier than tritilyte.” He ran his hand along the hammered surface. “Mythril’s toughest thing you can forge. Tritlyte’s too tough to hammer. Instrium too. Need machines.” He released the leg, and the glyphid wandered back to the weird mule.

“And this thing?” I stood and gestured to the many-legged contraption.

Skully shrugged. “I dunno. Ask Khris.”

I nodded. “Thought so.”

“Hey Khris!” I called over. “When you’re done with that refinery’s colonoscopy, come take a look at this.”

I got a muffled yell in response.

“Let’s go check out those pickaxe scars.” I suggested to Skully. “Maybe you can sniff out what this guy’s pickaxe is made out of.”

“ ‘kay.” We started walking to the wall where some nitra had been.

As we passed our stacked teammates, Mikeal called out “What happened to sticking together?”

“Oh take the stick out Mikeal.” I threw over my shoulder. “We won’t leave line of sight.” He grumbled in response.

We stepped up onto one of the large roots and approached the mineral scar. There were still some glints of nitra on the edges of it, but it was largely picked clean. Skully put a hand to the rock and leaned in close. After a sniff or two, he let out a “whoooa” and started to work. 

I turned around to study the cave. I knew better than to watch a geovore on the hunt. I peered into the darkness, trying to ignore the snuffling, scraping, and slurping going on behind me. I checked the remaining time on my flare, and shot another into the ceiling. I flicked on my scope and looked up towards where the cavern intercepted the Megadozer tunnel. I saw a couple more of those weird overgrown stabber vines waving in the dark. They were the only living enemies we had encountered this entire mission, and it seemed they were only here because they couldn’t run away. What was in these caves that made everything that crawled, rolled, or flew run away?

In the distance I saw Khris finally extricate himself from the refinery. His voice came over the team radio. 

“Skully, I need to know what metal this is. Can you come on down?”

I put two fingers to my headset. “He’s busy lick- I mean looking for signs of a pickaxe.”

“Instrium.” Skully finally turned around after another moment, with crumbs of earth still on his face. “Modern pickaxe.”

I relayed his findings into the radio as we both moved to return to the refinery. Even from this distance, I could almost hear Khris ‘hrmm’ to himself as started scratching his mustache.

He came back on the radio. “Our target has been down here for a while, yet still has access to modern equipment somehow. This refinery has been maintained, too. Several of these parts are not original to this machine.”

“Like the metal is different?” I asked into my headset, which was a mistake.

Khris began his rant. “Like the fuel system is straight-up an oil shale liquefier canister system from a drilldozer, only upgraded with a dozen extra canister slots. The lubrication pump is from a modern refinery, several small internal motors are cannibalized from Mini M.U.L.E. legs, and all the power cables are ripped out of a rock cracker pod. All the internal transmitters are made of fragments of Hack-C nodes, the swivel joints for these hose connections are straight out of a minehead spotlight, and there are nuts, bolts, bearings, and rods from practically every machine the company has ever made dating back to Karl’s time. This thing is a freakish frankenstein of a machine. Half of R&D would have a stroke to see their babies cobbled together like this, and the other half would be proud that these parts still work.” 

“It’s amazing, a positively astounding collection.” He finished. “I’d love to shake the hand of the dwarf who built it.”

“And what do you think about that weird M.U.L.E. the bugs were working on?” I asked.

“I’ll take a look in a minute.” Khris did away with the radio as we came back into earshot. “Skully, what do you think of this?”

Skully took the bolt that Khris handed to him. After a quick bite he nodded. “Instrium.”

“Fascinating.” Khris turned to put the bolt back into the machine. “Let’s see this M.U.L.E. you mentioned.”

We all walked back around to where the bugs were working. They had disconnected the hoses…somehow…and were coiling them on hooks designed for the purpose hanging off the refinery. 

Khris let out a low whistle as he saw the strange contraption. “Well, that’s something else.” He put a hand to the large tank that made up the robot’s body. “This is hand welded. Now how in Karl’s name did he get his hands on the welding gasses?”

I jerked a thumb over my shoulder. “Well, that’s a chemical refinery, right?”

Khris waved me off. “Yea, but that’s only set up for fuels.”

Mikeal grunted. “Well, it stands to reason that this isn’t the only refinery he’s gotten his hands on.”

Khris was engrossed in the machine. “Sure, sure.” He inspected the hose connectors. “Huh. A quick-connect system. This looks hand machined.”

“Must be so the bugs can work it.” I said. 

Khris nodded. “That tracks. But how is it powered?”

We all followed him towards the front of the thing, where a large hunk of machinery had been attached.

“Huh.” He said. “That’s a rock cracker pod. Like the whole pod. And it’s supplying power to cargo crate batteries. And that’s- oh no.”

He reverently held his cap to his chest and gently caressed two small lights, one red and one green, attached to a small box on top of the machinery. “Bosco…what has he done to you?” The machine responded to his touch with a horribly familiar cheerful beep sound. 

My eyes bugged as I looked closer. “Karl’s beard…” It was a Bosco, all right. Or what was left of one. The arms had been removed, and the little boosters he used to fly. It was just his head, bolted to the carriage of the rockcracker. 

Khris pulled out a screwdriver and opened a small panel on the side of the head. After a moment of silent poking and prodding, he replaced it. He took a long breath and nodded to us. “He’s alright.” His voice cracked. We all breathed out a sigh of relief. 

He continued. “Whoever did this was no monster. All the connections were severed in the connecting wires, the circuit boards are untouched. All the new connections are soldered, not crimped, and all his sensors and transmitters are there.” He put a tender hand to the machine. “He’s in no pain, and probably can’t even tell he’s been maimed like this. From what I can tell, he should be perfectly happy in this body.”

Personifying equipment was frowned upon by Management, but it was one of the only things keeping you sane down here. The loss of any robot, much less the torturing of one, was something that turned all our stomachs to stone. I felt a pit in my stomach knit itself back together.

“Name’s Tillie.” Skully said, pointing to a spot on the machine. I looked closer and noticed a small hand-embossed plate bolted to the side of the rockcracker. It said “Tillie, the Tanker Millipede” with some small decorations around it. 

“Tillie it is, then.” Khris patted her side. “A fine name, for a fine lady.”

“The question remains…” I said. “How did someone, anyone, get this collection of company machinery down here?”

Mikeal hrmm’d. “We know the Megadozer can go up to the company’s normal mission depth. The real question is why haven’t we detected it before. Is there any way to cloak from the space rig’s sensors?”

Khris thought for a moment. “No techy way, if that’s what you’re asking. Metal dozers or other large equipment would immediately come up, and any sort of field to block it would stick out like a sore thumb.”

Now it was Mikeal’s turn to scratch his beard. “How often does the space rig do that kind of deep scan?”

“Only about every month or so.” Khris said. “It’s a lot of data all at once, and it takes a while to crunch all the numbers to calculate the best mining sites. Actionable data comes in a trickle, enough to send all our crews on missions until the next scan. Almost 20% of the data doesn’t get used, and is just deleted during the next cycle.”

I scoffed. “Seems like a waste.”

“Well, at that point, the data is old, and the caves could have shifted, so it’s not too much of a loss.” Khris explained. “But we do additional penetrating scans on past mission sites where we leave equipment behind, particularly ommoran or potential salvage sites. The drilldozers are a bit too dangerous to leave unattended, even with the self-destruct function, and management at least makes sure the drop pod is in one piece before sending a rescue team.”

“How often for those scans then?” Mikeal asked.

“Oh, at least once every hour or so.” Khris said. “Since it’s scanning a much smaller area, and it’s only looking for the large metal machines, it can pretty quickly determine whether it’s there or not. Those scans stop for a couple days when they do the monthly ones though.”

“So, in order for our mystery Megadozer dwarf to make excursions to old mission sites and get these parts, he would have to know where the missions happen and when the monthly scans happen.” Mikeal’s face darkened like he’d just drank a sour pint of Oily Oaf ™ . “Our man has up-to-date info.”

There was a moment of silence as the thought sank in. 

“So…someone in th’company…” Skully started.

“Is in cahoots with the traitor.” Mikeal nodded. “It wouldn’t be a miner, we don’t have access to the data. But someone up there is feeding this guy information.”

“Do you think it’s Mission Control?” I asked. “Or management?”

“It doesn’t matter.” Mikeal waved me off. “He’s slipped up by messing with the drop pod beacons.”

Tillie got up with a “bweep-bweeeo” and started trekking down the Megadozer tunnel, making a sound like a dozen mule legs skittering together. 

Mikeal started following her. “And it’s our job to make him regret it.”

I cracked open another chem flare as the rest of us steeled our faces and followed him even deeper into the planet.

Chapter Text

This Megadozer tunnel was, thankfully, much less sloped than the one we first discovered. This one wasn’t straight either, it curved left and right, up and down. At the apex of every curve, we pulled out our terrain scanners and found large yawning chasms the megadozer had avoided. They were almost frighteningly frequent, much more so than in normal mission areas, at least according to Skully.

Now that Skully had mentioned it, I could feel the difference in the normal rock and the two stripes of plascrete that marked where the treads of the dozer ran. There was also plascrete on the walls and ceiling now, forming a grid that kept the tunnel together. There were a couple crevices where the megadozer had cracked into a neighboring cavern, but they were all patched up with plascrete, just like the crevice we found in the other tunnel. 

I couldn’t tell visually what was plascrete versus rock, but Skully said that it made him feel more at ease, as though we were walking along in a protective shark cage.

Tillie skittered ahead of us with an adorable noise, and with small spotlights in every direction, it was quite the endearing little robot. Well, not little. I was probably the largest robot I had ever worked with, second only to Dotty. But I associated the name with being adorable, and so it was.

Khris and Mikeal kept talking about how cool it was that Tillie seemed to be hand-welded together, theorizing how our mystery dwarf could have gotten the welding gasses to make such a thing. 

“No no, the reaction with croppa wouldn’t produce nearly enough oxidizer,” Khris was saying. “And it takes too much energy besides. He must be capturing it through some sort of reaction with Jadiz-”

Skully’s warning “GrrRUFF” sounded an instant too late, as an enormous glyphid claw came bursting through the right wall of the tunnel with the force of a landslide. It continued into the floor of the tunnel in one smooth arc, impacting the several-feet-thick shelf of rock and shattering it like so many eggshells.

I lunged to grab the belt of the nearest dwarf - Mikeal - and grappled to what little solid rock remained even as the chasm yawned open beneath me. Khris and Skully both fell into the hole, screaming. 

Mikeal’s trained instincts tossed a flare in the chaos, and I watched it fall, trying to get my bearings. The crevice had opened up a tall, cylindrical cave, maybe 50 meters down and 20 across. I didn’t have much time to look down, however, as the monster that caused the collapse turned its awful, eyeless blind gaze upon us. Its size alone made it a dreadnought, and its armor was the smooth color of basalt. Its body was a citadel, its arms were each fortresses in their own right. It was enormous - bigger than a refinery - bigger than a drop pod! 

It slammed its arms into the ground with a taunting “REE-EE-EE”, and the walls of the cavern erupted, loosing dirt and chunks of rock. Dozens, hundreds of glyphids of every variety poured from the stone, as if the very earth had been given life by the dreadnought’s call. This thing was a force of nature - a God of Hoxxes IV. 

Mikeal grabbed me back, snapping me out of it. “Get me down there - NOW!”

I released his belt, and reached behind my back for my shotgun. I swung it down and locked the under-barrel attachment into a socket in the toe of my left boot - which was attached to my armor’s exoskeleton. I released the grapple gun with my right hand, and we fell. In midair, Mikeal spun to face me, wrapping his arms and legs around me to help center his mass. After a few seconds of free-falling terror, I double-pulled the trigger of the shotgun, sending a blast of kinetic energy downwards enough to arrest the fall of two dwarves. The force of the blast was distributed across my armor’s exoskeleton, but Mikeal’s extra weight wasn’t quite centered and we landed in a heap of limbs and armor plating.

Mikeal released me and ordered “Get the others up ‘an moving!”

I scrambled off him, detaching my weapon from my boot and reloading it without even thinking. Next to us, Khris clawed his way out of a pile of plascrete, which had puffed up to five times its original volume as it absorbed the impact of his fall. 

I turned instead to Skully, who was downed and laying in an awful heap. I knelt next to him, grabbing a revive canteen from my hip and popping the lid. I held it to his lips, he came back to consciousness enough to grab it from me. With his other hand he pointed to his leg. I pulled out my electric screwdriver from my repair kit and locked it into a socket just below his knee. As the motor spun, a series of mechanical linkages opened up the armor paneling, letting me see the injury. 

His leg was broken, pretty badly. I turned enough to make eye contact, apologized, and set the bone with a quick jerk.

Skully tossed his head back in pain, but remained silent. Now that the bones were in the right place, I reversed the direction of my tool and closed up the armor, tightening it to keep the bones in place. Then I put the electric tool to another socket at his ankle - tightening that down too until the joint immobilized with a *clunk*. The armor plating was designed to become an emergency splint - Skully’s armor’s exoskeleton would take weight off his leg just as mine had taken the force from the shotgun blast. 

Skully handed me back my canteen as I hauled him to his feet. I turned back to Mikeal, who was just standing up from helping erect Khris’s sentry guns. The guns were already firing at full speed, swinging from one target to the next with mechanical efficiency. Khris himself was also firing, his rifle acquiring targets as fast as it could identify them. Glyphid carcasses started tumbling down the walls, but not enough of them. It wasn’t nearly enough.

Mikeal unslung his autocannon, and began firing indiscriminately at the swarm. His shells whistled overhead in graceful arcs, delivering devastating explosions on impact.

His voice came over the team’s radio channel, just audible over the din of battle. “Konnor! Get us to a wall! Skully! Frozen Dinner!”

Years of Pavlov training snapped Skully to attention, despite his injury. His creepy eyes focused on me, but for once I was grateful for it. This wasn’t the crazed, unpredictable yet dependable Skully I knew. This Skully was a tool, a controlled weapon to be fired at my command. I waved a cryo grenade, and his eyes locked onto it, hands fumbling for his drill holsters.

“Skully! Dinnertime!” I shouted, and threw the grenade at the nearest wall. A crowd of unlucky bugs was caught in the blast, the intense burst of liquid nitrogen freezing them instantly. 

As soon as the nitrogen dissipated, Skully let out an inhuman howl, and charged forward, revving up both his drills. He began carving a path through them, smashing heads and tearing limbs, delivering unto them the most horrifying death a bug could receive. He started shoveling chunks of frozen glyphid into his mouth, each bite helping to heal his injury. 

I followed him, taking out flanking enemies, ranged glyphids, and generally covered his advance. I watched the ‘team status’ corner of my hud as the number for Skully’s health began to increase to normal levels. 

Once they were within tolerances I shouted “Skully! Bunker!”, and pinged the wall with my pointer tool. Skully hesitated only long enough to smash one more glyphid head like shards of glass, before engaging his drills with the terrain and burrowing in.

I knew better than to follow him in initially, and instead turned my shotgun onto the horde, firing hot lead into the face of anything closer than ten meters. Each blast felled two or three bugs, but another four or five would quickly arrive to take their place. There were so many it seemed as though the walls themselves were crawling down towards us - from every direction. We were losing ground - and fast. 

At an order from Mikeal, Khris put down his rifle long enough to top off his sentry guns, before moving with the burly gunner as he backed towards me. Khris threw something at the ground, and a small cloud of hijacked Tiefling Shredder drones took flight around us, tearing into the bugs with a terrifying buzz.

The sound of a detonating satchel charge came from Skully’s tunnel, and Mikeal shouted “Bunker’s up! Go go go!” Khris hurried in first, his sentry guns folding in on themselves and flying after him. Mikeal kept up the fire as I gripped his shoulders and backed him in. Once we were in the tunnel, the bugs could only get at us from one direction, and the autocannon alone was enough to keep them at bay. I hurried us into the tunnel as quickly as I could without interrupting his fire, and after a couple moments we stepped into the bunker’s main room.

The emergency bunker was simple by design and quick to set up. A driller burrowed into the wall in a straight line until his drills overheated, then placed a satchel charge on the ceiling. After backing up a safe distance and detonating it, it created a small spherical room which could only be attacked from one direction, and was just big enough to fire over each other’s shoulders safely. 

You could enhance this with platforms for sentry guns in the back, which Khris had already done, or by drilling a side room to call a resupply, provided the engineer sealed up the hole in the ceiling with his platforms. But there was one other addition that was crucial to the effectiveness of a bunker. A back exit out in case a bug crawled in that was too big to be taken down in the tunnel.

I hauled Mikeal out of the way as a hail of projectiles from both sentry guns, Kris’s rifle, and Skully’s plasma pistol shot past our shoulders. Mikeal laid there for a moment and nodded to me, before starting the cumbersome process of reloading his autocannon. I stepped into my place in the firing line, decided my shotgun’s ammo was too useful as a mobility tool, and shouldered my rifle to add my firepower to the fray. 

After a moment, Mikeal ordered “Skully! Fire in the hole!”

Skully traded his plasma pistol for his flamethrower, and began coating the tunnel with raging-hot sticky kerosene hellfire. 

Once the tunnel was sufficiently coated, Mikeal ordered “Cease Fire!”

We all held our fire, even the sentry guns fell silent with a press to the remote clipped to Khris’s chest. In the strangely sudden calm, I opened my mouth to question Mikeal’s orders, but after a moment, I understood why. From the tunnel came the noise of trotting metal legs, heralding the most beautiful sight I had ever seen. Through the fire and piling glyphid corpses came Molly, strapped to the nines with enough ammo to refill our pockets twice over. She came, obedient and dutiful as ever, to plop herself down in a small niche Skully had dug for the purpose. Her *Bweep-Bweeeo* noise almost brought a tear to my eye.

But it didn’t last long. “Resume fire!” Mikeal ordered, and the hellish noise of battle came roaring back. Between Skully’s fire and Khris’s sentry guns, my own damage output was greatly outshined, and I found myself able to think for a minute. At a hand signal from the gunner, I scooted back towards Mikeal, who had started firing occasional explosive rounds into the tunnel. 

“Tell me that thing isn’t what I thought it was.” He asked me off-radio. 

That was the moment I wished the hardest for Mikeal to be wrong. And that’s saying something. But he wasn’t. I just shook my head.

“Thought so.” He cursed under his breath. Switching the radio back on, he called, “Skully! Get us a back exit!” He got up and took the driller’s place, his explosive rounds standing in for liquid hellfire as the driller turned to study his terrain scanner and make the best exit tunnel. Skully quickly found the route he was looking for and started to work at the back of the bunker, but I knew it was futile. 

That ‘thing’ Mikeal had referred to was the dreadnought that had collapsed the megadozer tunnel and summoned this swarm. There was only one thing it could be. A fully grown Adult Hiveguard Dreadnought. The dreadnoughts fought by most mining crews were half-fledged, weak, ugly little things, whose growth cycle in their cocoons had been interrupted. And even so, those were the biggest, toughest bugs the company dared face. A juvenile Hiveguard was already tough, almost invincible. Certain tricks, like manipulating its emotional state by killing its subordinates, could cause its abdomen to open, revealing its vulnerable internals. But an adult Hiveguard was over twice the size, and had no such weakness. Its armor was impenetrable - no weapon could crack it. The presence of even a single adult dreadnought was enough to stop the company from deploying mining crews to an area. No amount of gold or morkite was worth the risk those things posed. 

It was only a matter of time before the thing managed to clamber its way down here and start excavating our little bunker. It could summon bugs to outrun us, and it couldn’t be killed by anything we had. There was even an account of a drop pod landing on one, and the damn bug caught it. There was nothing, absolutely nothing that could save us.

NO. I sat up and pulled out my tablet, opening the Miner’s Manual. There had to be something. Some weakness in the armor. I pulled up the detailed anatomy diagram from the one adult hiveguard the company had dissected - at the cost of 6 whole miner teams. 

The vertical split in the rear of the abdomen armor was the downfall of these things as a juvenile, so it stood to reason that the armor would be thinnest in that spot. Yes. That slit was sealed with a relatively thin piece. No way to pry it open though… But wait. With the right blast force focused in the right spot, you could open up a hole large enough to pry the shell open with a pickaxe. Khris’s PGL launcher has the right overclock for that - and my grappling hook has the speed to get me in quickly. 

It would have to be a very precise angle, and the pickaxe would have to withstand incredible forces with such little leverage, and we would have to stop it from summoning another swarm somehow… but it just might work. 

Skully returned to relieve Mikeal of his blasting duty, and I took him aside to explain my plan. I saw a glimmer of hope in his eyes.

“It’s better than nothing.” He said, reloading his autocannon once again. “Have Khris run the numbers. We have a bit of breathing room right now, and I’m not betting on us getting two shots at this.”

I nodded, and carefully made my way across the bunker, ducking under firing lines and around sentries until I reached Khris near the mouth of the exit tunnel. I explained my idea to him, pointing at the diagram on my tablet. His eyes got wide, and he took the tablet from my hands, bringing his own out to compare. His hands started flying across them, pulling up calculators and some kind of coding environment. His swiss-army gizmo somehow joined the fray, connecting the two tablets to achieve some benefit I didn’t understand. I started to object, but he waved me off.

“You’ll get it back, don’t worry.” He didn’t even look up. “Time is of the essence!”

After a moment, he turned back to me, a gleam in his eyes. He started detailing the plan, what weapons we would need at what angles. Mikeal came to join us, and together we started to flesh out the plan. Skully was more than capable of holding the tunnel on his own, supported by the sentry guns. He listened to the plan well enough through the radio.

“Well,” Mikeal said, standing up. “It’s our best shot. Konnor, how much time do we have?”

“Can’t be much. Let me hear.” I said.

“Cease fire!” Mikeal ordered. Skully obeyed.

I strained my ears to listen. Over the sound of a few final glyphids dying in the fire, I heard it. The sound of the dreadnought digging. 

“It’s digging! We have twenty seconds, maybe less!” I called. 

The whole team was galvanized to urgency. Skully and myself took up positions on either side of the tunnel. Mikeal took a shooting position in the rear, along with Khris, who recalled his sentries.

After a couple seconds of excruciating waiting, the first arm came crashing through the wall of the bunker, not even a meter from me. I raised my pickaxe with a shout, power surging through my exoskeleton as I brought it down in a deadly arc. The attack did almost nothing, just prying loose a small chunk about the size of my fist. But it was enough.

Mikeal’s zipline whistled over my shoulder and burrowed home into the armor of the stony dreadnought. The line snapped taught, hopefully trapping the bug in the bunker.

Mikeal shouted “GO!” I scrambled to the exit tunnel, calling Molly after me as the dreadnought’s second arm came crashing down. Skully swung his pickaxe with a shout, then backed away as a second zipline burrowed into the armor. Realizing the trap, the dreadnought opened its horrible trifurcated jaws. In a heartbeat, it would release that terrible noise, and call another swarm of bugs upon us. 

And then it would be over. There was no way we could withstand another swarm, not with our bunker busted like this. The bugs would pour in, biting and clawing and tearing us limb from limb. If we were lucky, the dreadnought would crush us itself for a quick death. If we weren’t, we would die over the course of several minutes, slowly torn apart piecemeal until we succumbed to blood loss.

The hyper propellant grenade launcher shell impacted in the center of the beast’s jaws. Each hyper prop shell contained enough energy to destabilize the orbit of a small space station, and released that energy all at once in a space no bigger than my hand. It was a purpose-built dreadnought killer. 

The grenade could not have landed in a better spot. It released all its energy right in the center of the beast’s most delicate and complex joints. The shockwave of the blast bounced around the enclosed space, almost knocking me off my feet and leaving my ears ringing. The dreadnought bucked backwards, releasing a slurred screech of pain. The mandibles twitched, trying to form together to create the proper noise, but its exoskeleton was shattered, each jaw only hung limply from the soft fleshy attachments beneath. After reeling for a moment, the beast turned forward and released a fireball into the bunker.

Mikeal shoved me into the tunnel as my shield flared up around me like a shroud of blue mist. Jerked into action, I rushed forward, the team close behind me. Navigating by chem-flare, we followed the tunnel’s curve into a dead end. The back exits of bunkers were kept sealed to keep the bugs from flanking us. With a shout, I swung my pickaxe and burst through the final rock and into the main cavern, flooding the room with the platinum white light from my flare gun. 

Bug corpses lay in small piles all around the room, with a positive mountain of them stuffed into the mouth of the bunker’s tunnel to my left. The dreadnought had literally shoved aside the corpses in order to get to us, and more carcasses were strewn about the room behind it. 

But now we were behind it. The dreadnought thrashed in the bunker, trying to turn around to get to us. But the ziplines held fast. It was stuck. Part one of the plan was complete. 

Khris quickly ran past me to get in position behind the thing, and began lining up the shot. This had to be precise. The dreadnought was struggling too much, thrashing from side to side. 

“I can’t get the right angle!” Khris said. I racked my brain, trying to think of a way to keep the monster still. 

I didn’t have to think for long. The monster, realizing that thrashing wasn’t working, suddenly twisted counterclockwise, putting all of its strength into pulling against the zipline embedded in its right arm. In doing so, it slowed its movement, coming almost to a complete stop for a moment.

It was all Khris needed. With a hollow *thoomp*, another shell went sailing towards the titan’s abdomen. It exploded directly on target with a sickening *crack*. Moments later the smoke cleared, and I saw the crack in the armor, a small sliver that glowed pinkish-orange from within.

Seeing my opportunity, I rushed forward, grappling to the wall just above the beast to propel myself faster. I let out a desperate battle cry, pickaxe overhead, eyes totally focused on my target. 

The zipline snapped, and the beast whirled around with unprecedented speed. Its left rear leg rushed to meet me, crashing through what little was left of my shield and impacting my shoulder with a nauseating *crunch*. I was knocked aside in mid-air, pickaxe dashed from my hand as I crumpled against the wall of the cavern. I slid awkwardly to the floor, the world around me reduced to a blinding swirl of pain and noise.

I was just aware enough to hear Mikeal’s shield generator land in the dirt beside me, rejuvenating my shield and surrounding me with a sphere of pale green light. A revive canteen was held to my lips, and I drank deeply, feeling the mixture of stimulants and painkillers start to work their magic on my injury. I opened my eyes to see Mikeal kneeling over me. 

I took the canteen from him with my good hand and managed to croak “My shoulder.” Mikeal immediately brought out his powered screwdriver and started locking up the relevant joints of my exoskeleton, arranging my bones together as best he could. 

Even through the painkillers, the process was excruciating. If I hadn’t worked with Mikeal before, I would’ve accused him of being inefficient, and drawing out the process for several minutes. But I knew it really only took about a dozen seconds. Once my arm was locked up good in a sling, Mikeal took back his canteen and helped me to my feet. 

Khris and Skully managed to join us in the shield, the hiveguard fully loose and hot on their heels. Their personal shields merged with the large one temporarily as they passed through, like a eukaryotic cell’s membrane would during active transport of nutrients. Man I was out of it. 

The hiveguard’s claw slammed down just outside the shield, and after a furious screech, its other arm landed with a thud on the translucent green barrier. The shield crackled, a million strands of interwoven plasma pushing, burning, and shocking the offending claw. But even as the creature’s armor began to heat up and glow, the Dreadnought simply pushed forward with a bone-rattling wail.

We were cornered. I couldn’t grapple away, I couldn’t properly aim my weapon, I couldn’t do anything but watch as the massive creature pushed forward, inching towards us. I closed my eyes, preparing for the end.

From somewhere high above us, a burning streak of angry steel screeched across the cavern, its burning white-hot light visible even through my eyelids. The dreadnought howled in pain as the projectile burst clean through its abdomen, burning a hole through one side and out the other. The creature retreated from the shield bubble as another shot impaled it with a *crack*, pink-orange fluid pouring from the wounds. It turned towards the source of the attack, screaming its defiance.

Khris saw his opportunity, and lunged forward, sticking the barrel of his PGL into one of the new holes in the monster’s abdomen. He fired, triggering an explosion inside the armor, sending pink-orange fluid spewing out of every orifice, even its mouth. The Titan, with a final jerking spasm, fell over dead in a pile of stony limbs.

The shield bubble fell away, and I looked up at our rescuer. Up in the Megadozer tunnel, standing backlit in Tillie’s floodlights, was the unmistakable silhouette of a dwarf. His voice was deep and smooth, and boomed through the cavern, to deliver us the three most beautiful words I had ever heard spoken. The stranger raised his pickaxe above his head, and shouted;

“ROCK AND STONE!!”