The ambush came not from the crater rims above, but from the frozen stone beneath their boots.
Arthur was seventy meters into the floor of an unnamed dark rock depression. Just then, the gray regolith beneath Grimm suddenly melted.
In empty pocket, soil didn’t bubble with mud. It collapsed into a dry, swirling vortex of crushed rock. A cavernous underground chamber opened beneath the surface. A geyser of black dust erupted eighty feet into the air, silently blocking out the sun as a huge, segmented monstrosity surged from the bedrock.
It was thirty-eight meters long. A horrifying cross between a deep-sea bobbit worm and an armored scolopendra centipede. Its body was wrapped in thick, overlapping plates of stone-hard lunar dark rock, cemented together with dark, rubbery bio-resin. Its head was a nightmare of nested, high-pressure jaws lined with thousands of serrated stone-glass teeth that spun like heavy-duty rock-crushing augers.
Arthur’s Monocle Taxonomy Loupe locked onto the titan’s neck plates:
“Hard-shelled Lunar Burrower!” Arthur called out over the tactical link. His boots left the ground in a controlled, four-meter backward leap that used the low gravity to clear the collapsing sinkhole. “Its jaws are rated at twenty-eight thousand PSI! Don’t let it drag you into the sub-crustal tunnels! Grimm, anchor its head!”
