Free Assault on Sunrise (The Extra Trilogy) by Michael Shea

through the earth.…
    We aimed our headlamps on the floor, the roof, the walls. Rock and dirt.
    For an instant it hit me as wildly funny. We were like a bunch of archeologists in a cartoon on a dead-end dig. Five baffled folks in bug-masks, no Tut’s Tomb in sight. A somber group, all scanning a perfect dead end.
    I called up-shaft.
    “Nothing visible. I guess we just blow it, be on the safe side.”
    “Wait,” said Japh. “Turn your head back the way you just turned it—slow now.”
    And as I faced again up-shaft, I saw it too. A hint of a regular pattern in the chopped stone directly over our heads as my beam swept it. There were—here, there … everywhere—little rounded nodes nested among the crude planes of the broken rock.
    “You see them?” Japh asked.
    “Shit!” Chops hissed. “The rock’s full of ’em!”
    We beamed them at close range: smooth tapered hemispheres, about the size of a fist. They looked like the narrow ends of big eggs.
    “String it faster guys!” Japh called.
    “Stop,” said Ricky. “Turn your light away from the wall.”
    When we put the wall back into shadow, we realized that it had started glowing softly here and there. Each one of the nodes was showing a faint blue luminescence of its own.
    “Were they doing that before?” asked Chops, the answer in his voice.
    “We would’ve seen it,” I said. What now? I called up-shaft. “Fuck stringing it! Spool the rest down here and get it wired. Fast!”
    They came down in a little landslide of boots and dirt. All fifteen of us now in this last few yards of the shaft, working away, our noise-level low but still sounding to me like a riot down in that tubular grave.
    We weren’t a minute into it when we heard a sharp little splinter of sound. Like cracking rock, I thought.
    “They’re working free!” said Japh. And we saw the nodes swell, then contract, then swell again larger than before. Again that sound of crackling rock. You could see fissures sprouting through the stone around them.
    “I think you better hurry it up,” I yelled to the dynamiters. “String and fuse and drop it! We’ll blow it where it lies!”
    Stone snapped like pistol shot. Several of the dynamiters bellowed almost simultaneously: “LET’S GO! TAKE OFF! GET THE FUCK OUTTA HERE!”
    And I saw all the nodes like a constellation seem to focus. Like one big compound eye comprehending us all.
    The fifteen of us launched ourselves upslope as one, fifteen pairs of male legs now demonstrating their superior endowments of stride-length and driving force. The echoes of our feet sounded like a stampede, like something was chasing us up from the bowels of the earth.
    Up the steep stretch, then pumping wildly we climbed the easier grade. I kept glancing back, throwing my beam behind us, but nothing was following, not yet.… How long did they need to switch fully on? How fast were they?
    The upper shaft guys had finished—they were running ahead of us. We neared the mouths of the branch tunnels, saw those crews pouring out too. All of us running now, running for the high, far mouth of the mine, and—now visible—the star-hung night sky.
    I was last out. Before I had quite reached the shaft mouth—not quite in the clear but too scared to wait any longer—I screeched, “BLOW IT!”
    And was so instantly obeyed that the whole sky seemed to collapse around my ears, and a hurricane of dust sprayed my back as I leapt out into the open air, and when my feet touched earth again, it was like landing on a gigantic trampoline, the blast’s convulsion of the mountainside launching me into a longer and higher arc through the air.
    I lay there, seriously bruised in the dusty grass, as the aftershocks kept rocking me. The whole branching shaft groaned and settled, the mountain shuddered and repossessed the void dug out of it so long ago.

 
    XI
    THE CHOOSERS OF THE SLAIN
     
    Wagner’s “Ride of the Valkyries” trumpeted in Val Margolian’s headset as he lay in