Following the underground tunnel carved by the dead Burrower-Behemoth, Arthur and his squad dropped into the dark beneath the lunar crust.
Here, two hundred and eighty meters below the dark rock plains of Mare Tranquillitatis, the searing heat of the solar day vanished, replaced by the permanent, bone-chilling cold of the deep lunar mantle. The tunnel walls were smooth, melted into glass-like anorthosite tubes by the burrower’s acidic secretions, snaking downward at a twenty-degree angle toward the southern rim of Crater Copernicus.
Arthur kept his Mag-Carbine leveled, the weapon’s tactical flashlight casting a narrow, halogen beam through the pitch-black hall.
Beside him, Vesper prowled with silent elegance. The lynx’s snow-white fur seemed to catch the faint surrounding aether of the lunar rock. It cast a soft, eerie-glowing silver halo around her paws. Her claws clicked rhythmically as she tested the hardness of the dark rock floor. Her whiskers shook with the subtle magnetic hum of machinery hidden behind the stone walls.
“Hold,” Arthur whispered through the squad link.
Fifty meters ahead, the natural stone tunnel ended suddenly against an unnatural barrier.
A massive, circular blast door—twelve inches of heavy dark metal-steel stamped with the faded blue eagle crest of the Vanguard Federation Lunar Command—was embedded in the dark rock face. The door was buckling inward, its heavy locking bolts groaning under the relentless pressure of a thick, throbbing mat of black bio-mycelium that had covered the threshold like a cancerous growth.
