Link for all the extra chapters available here: Engines of Arachnea on Royal Road

As he ran, Rene’s mind relived the utter savagery of that moment that lingered so fresh in his mind.

The very stone came alive with the enemy. Thick screens of vine were torn violently aside to reveal sally ports gnawed into the soft rock face. From each one spewed forth a dozen Amits, creatures nearly a meter and a half tall, with broad sets of shoulders and hips supporting four short, powerful limbs. An extra pair of shriveled arms emerged from the chest cavity. These served the purpose of fine motor control, while the rest were solely for digging and killing. Their necks and torsos were armored in segmented chitin, atop which rested huge oblate skulls that gleamed like dull pearls. The albino beasts flexed their curved mandibles and charged, armored heads lowered, each towering brute swinging a crude maul or axe head of chiseled flint.

“First rank, fire!”

The men discharged a furious volley. The beasts staggered, but only a handful were struck in the vital mark. Mouths consisting of a dozen moving parts rustled in screams of wordless rage. That was another unnerving thing about the Amits: they fought and died in utter silence.

They were closing fast. First rank withdrew and began reloading in a panic. A boulder came crashing down from the heights and dashed the brains out from a man to Rene’s left. He blinked as a fragment of bone grazed his cheek.

“Second rank, ready!”

The Amits reached for them, a terrible hunger in their lidless, milk-white eyes. Right before the moment of contact, the second line stepped forward and discharged the special-issue ammunition.

Clouds of orange smoke erupted from each muzzle. The Amit reared back, their sensitive olfactory organs assaulted by acrid vapors. They milled about in confusion, lashing out blindly in every direction. With cries of desperate bravery, the men unsheathed their bayonets and threw themselves at their foes.

There were few things that could permanently kill an Amit. Bullets and blades pierced them well enough, provided one avoided the armor, but such was their physiology that major organ damage was often negated by redundant systems. They had two brains for primary motor functions and three chambered organs for the distribution of vitae, and the destruction of one wouldn’t cripple them for certain. The only instantly fatal wound was to sever a thick bundle of nerves located near the base of their gargantuan heads, right behind the mouth.

Of course, getting there alive was the trick; one still had to account for the mandibles.

In teams of threes they singled out individuals and went to work. Rene and Lethway took the flanks, taking turns to dart in under the wild swings to stab the pair of cortexes at either side of the body. The beast snapped its jaws sideways, distracted, and Jensen seized that moment to step in close and bury his hatchet in the center of its face. The first blow rebounded off the thick cranium with a gonglike sound, but the second bit deep. The Amit went limp and collapsed, yellow blood frothing down its jowls.

Jensen yelled with triumph and reached down to retrieve his weapon. He took hold of the haft and began to yank it free. The Amit’s eyes flickered open, glittering with baleful light. It spasmed, and a clear fluid fountained up at Jensen, drenching his arm to the elbow. He screamed in agony; in a matter of moments the acid ate through his sealant suit and peeled his flesh raw.

Rene ducked as a stone the size of a cart wheel flew past. All around them on every hillock and cliff face, more and more Amit clambered to meet them, mandibles spread wide in anticipation. Worse still, the clever ones had begun to circle around behind them. If they managed to bottle up the defile they would be trapped and killed to a man.

Deschane had reached the same conclusion. He bellowed:

“First rank! First rank, about face and fire at will!”

What was left of them rushed to comply. Most of the first rank had managed to load their own noxious cartridges in time, and a second cloud of sulphurous compounds scattered the Amit at their rear.

“Disperse and overlap! Make for the outpost!”

Rene and the rest of the men fought through under a hail of hurled projectiles, stumbling over the broken bodies littering the ground, mauled beyond recognition, bisected, Amits shot and stabbed and hacked into twitching heaps of meat, human skulls split by axe heads and dripping cranial fluid. T. He saw one man caught out by a pair of beasts who took an arm and a leg each and pulled him shrieking into the dark mouth of a tunnel. Several other unfortunates shared his grisly fate, disappeared beneath the earth with loud wails.

_______________________________________________________

They fled, but not in wild terror. Rather, they each found a partner and took off in separate directions. The eyesight of an Amit was good only for a few dozen meters, beyond which they had to operate by scent and sound. Arguably this fact did not help much, as these senses were highly tuned and superior to vision for the purposes of tracking and killing, but it was not impossible to confuse them.

And so Rene now ran alone. Like the others he had picked a direction and taken off as fast as his legs could carry him. In his haste he had forgotten to attach himself to a partner. He was beginning to regret it. His pursuer was gaining on him, how he could not say. He darted a quick glance behind him, then looked back in time to narrowly duck a low branch that swiped at his face.

It was coming at an oblique angle to his path, and in a moment it would close the distance and take him from behind with the terrible strength of its jaws.

But not if he had anything to say about it. Rene reached out, seized the narrow trunk of a sapling and swung himself around. With his other hand he drew his pistol and aimed.

The Amit stumbled, flopped onto the ground, and began to swear.

“Why, you absolute bastard!”

“Lethway?”

“Watch where you’re pointing that thing, you imbecile!”

Rene laughed with hysterical relief.

“Don’t see why you’re so pleased,” Lethway said, getting up and spitting out saliva thick with clotted blood, “Bastards almost got me.” Lethway was nursing a shallow, jagged cut at his side from an axe. His sealant suit was torn open, twists of rubber lining peeping through.

“They may yet still. Were you the one on the whistle?”

“No. That was Damus. He was too slow. You got a whistle on you?”

“Yes. How many minutes has it been?”

“Damned if I know. Figure we intersect now?”

“Aye.”

Rene blew on the whistle, and the two of them began to run. On either side of them, other pair answered with a whistle of their own, and they came crashing into view from the side. They nodded to one another as they passed. Their paths began to wind and crisscross as the men ran in extended, overlapping figures of eight.

The aim of dispersion was to create a messy trail of scents for the Amit to follow, winding patterns that ended as suddenly as they began, the aromas of some individuals mingling with that of others. The maneuver would buy them time and split the attention of the horde.

The Amits, confounded for the moment, passed quickly out of their hearing, milling about the undergrowth in confusion. Rene and Lethway ran until their lungs gave out, then settled into a measured jog.

“We’ll head south for a bit, until morning comes tomorrow.” Rene was saying, “We’ll find a nice tall hill, do a bit of scouting, see what the roundheads are up to. Maybe find some of the others. Then we’ll head south west and find the river. Wash our scent off, follow it east to the outpost.”

They stopped abruptly, listened hard. From far off they heard a long, plaintive wail as the Amit caught themselves a straggler.

If they had needed motivation not to break off their breakneck flight, they had it now. They heard him being butchered for quite some time before his cries faded away into silence.

“Better him than us,” Lethway spat bitterly, “Can you still run?”
“I can now,” Rene said, and together they crashed on through the green hell that had swallowed their friends.