Aces High

"Which way?" Bre

Fortunato rubbed his swollen forehead tiredly.

"I can hear a thousand little twitterings. Not real minds, at least not sentient minds, but their noise is driving me crazy. The big one is still up ahead, somewhere."

Bre

"This way," he said, taking the right fork.

They hadn't gone a hundred yards before Bre

"I'm not sure I like this," Bre

The passageway widened to forty feet across. On both sides of it, hanging near the ceiling, were scores of grotesque swarmlings with shriveled limbs and huge, swollen abdomens. They were nursing from what looked like swollen nipples jutting from the walls of the passageway.

In turn, Swarm creatures of every size and description crowded around each of the hanging swarmlings, jostling for a place at one of the hollow tubes dangling from their swollen abdomens. The Swarm creatures ranged in size from tiny, insectlike entities to tentacular monstrosities that must have weighed several tons. There were hundreds of them.

"It looks like they're feeding," Fortunato whispered. Bre

They started back down the passageway, and suddenly stopped when they heard a quiet buzzing, as if from a multitude of small wings, drift down toward them from the way they had come.

"Shit," Fortunato said in disbelief. "We're caught in the middle of a damn shift change."

"The first Swarm creature we ran into ignored us," Bre

They hugged the wall of the passageway-it was warm, Bre

A swarm of the insectoid creatures buzzed down the corridor. They were four to six inches long with segmented bodies and large, membranous wings. The first few passed them by and went straight to the feeding chamber, and Bre

Bre

"Let's try to move away from them," he said quietly, but that did no good. The bugs followed and landed on the three in increasing numbers.

"Run for it," Bre

Some of the swarm continued on to the feeding chamber, but more followed them down the passageway in an angrily buzzing cloud. Bre

They reached the point where the passageway divided into the Y, looking desperately for something, anything, that would enable them to shake the little scavengers. Fortunato ran down the other branch of the passageway and Bre

Bre

"How do we get rid of them?" he asked, irritated himself. "I may have enough left to send those little mothers somewhere," Fortunato ground out.

"I don't know-" Bre

The surface below their feet fell away as a sphincter opened. All the liquid in the passageway gushed downward and they went with it. Bre

There was more liquid in the passageway than he had realized. They were caught in a rushing vortex with no air to breathe and no light to see by. Bre

They splashed down into a large chamber, totally submerged in a pool of liquid the size of an Olympic swimming pool. Bre

"What the hell is this?" Fortunato asked.

Bre

"At least those bugs are gone," Fortunato said. He struck out for the side of the chamber, and Bre

They scrabbled up the slope, going slowly and cautiously because the surface was wet and slippery. They finally flung themselves down, panting, for a moment's rest. Bre

"Which way now?"

Fortunato took a moment to orient himself, and then pointed. "There."

They went on through the belly of the beast. It was a nightmarish trek through a strange realm of organic monstrosities. The passageway they followed opened up into vast halls where menlike creatures mewling in half-formed idiocy hung by umbilical cords from pulsating ceilings, led through galleries where sacks of undifferentiated biomass quivered like loathsome jellies while awaiting sculpting by the will of the Swarm Mother, passed by chambers where monsters of a hundred alien forms were being manufactured for what purpose the Swarm Mother alone knew. Some of these last were developed enough to be aware of the interlopers, but they were all still attached to the body of the Mother by protoplasmic umbilical cords. They snapped and snarled and hissed as Bre