The dying scorpion was more dangerous than a living one.
Deprived of her stinger, the Hard-shelled Bone-Scorpion Empress went into a blind, wild convulsion. Her leftover eight ambulatory limbs—each three meters of jagged, stone-hardened bone-hard shell ending in hooked black talons—scratched and plunged into the trench walls with the rhythm of a self-running pile driver. Boulders of fractured dark rock tore free from the low roof wall, tumbling into the mud as the massive arachnid tried to drag her bulk forward.
Her front pedipalps lashed across the open ground. The left pincer clipped a three-inch steel trench rail. It snapped the hardened steel with a sharp report like rifle fire.
“Arthur, fall back to the backup bunker!” Instructor Valerie Koslov’s voice crackled through the tactical comm-channel, distorted by heavy static. “The third battery is loaded! We’re zeroing the mortars on your map points!”
“Negative, Teacher,” Arthur replied, his voice calm, clipped, and devoid of tremor. “If you fire high-explosive ordnance into this trench section, the dark rock will collapse the command loggia beneath us. The cadets are trapped in the lower drift. Stand down the battery.”
“Vance, that’s an eighteen-meter sovereign rift beast!” Valerie barked. “You don’t have the moving yield to crack her back shell!”
