Deathstalker 02 - Deathstalker Rebellion

heard from Golgotha starport; they're still too busy putting themselves back together to be able to offer us any help. The good news is that the six starcruisers who went chasing off after the Hadenman ship apparently lost contact with it. They're on their way back. Should be here in just under an hour."
    "Well, that's something, I suppose." Silence turned to Frost. "Your call, Investigator. Do we go in?"
    "Into a possible trap, possibly crammed with murderous aliens? Of course, Captain. Nothing to be gained standing around here."
    "I had a feeling you were going to say that. All right, lead the way. Marines,
    stay close behind us. Be ready to fire at a moment's notice, but exercise caution. There's always the chance we might find the missing personnel from Gehenna Base in here somewhere. I'd like to get them out of here alive if at all possible. Lead on, Investigator."
    Frost stepped carefully into the tunnel and moved in step by step. Silence and the marines moved after her. The cables making up the tunnel's inner walls were smoother, thinner, but just as unyielding to the touch. Their white color had thin blue traces in it, like veins. Silence increased the magnification of what he was seeing, and the wall seemed to leap toward him. The cables were pulsing slightly in a regular rhythm. He stepped the view back to normal and touched the wall with the tips of his steel fingers. The built-in sensors detected no warmth of life, only a faint stickiness. The walls were rounded, like the floor and the ceiling, as though he and his team were walking through the bowels of some enormous beast. And maybe they were at that. Silence glanced back over his shoulder, to see how the marines were coping, and only then realized that the tunnel had closed itself off behind them. The cables had fitted together again, thick and impenetrable. Silence quickly alerted the others and then spun around to see for themselves. Frost was all for going back and blasting it with her disrupters, but Silence stopped her.
    "Let's follow the tunnel first. See where it leads. We can always come back and blast it later. Dauntless, have you followed what's happened here?" There was nothing but quiet in his ears. "Hello, Dauntless? Do you hear me?" He listened hard, but all he could hear was his own harsh breathing. "Investigator, see if you can raise them."
    Frost tried, and then the marines, to no avail. Frost growled something under her breath and then turned to Silence. "It's not the suits. All the diagnostics
    check out. Something's blocking the signal. We're on our own, Captain."
    "Not for the first time. Press on, Investigator. I don't think the occupants of this ship let us in just to hold us here. I think… they're expecting us."
    Frost sniffed loudly and led the way on. And as they penetrated farther into the ship, the cables continued to open before them, creating more tunnel, and closing off behind them, to prevent turning back, so that Silence and his people moved constantly in a traveling pocket within the webbing.
    The cables varied even more in size now, and there were other changes, too. The corpse-white cables swirled around and over each other, tangled together beyond sense or meaning, some little more than a finger's width. The floor was no different, and more than ever Silence felt like he was walking on a spider's web, sending out rhythmic signals of where he was and where he was going. The impression grew stronger as all the strands grew increasingly sticky to the touch. It got harder to pull their boots free from the floor, and soon only the power of the hard suits' servomechanisms kept them going. Strange lights pulsed within the rounded tunnel walls, come and gone so quickly it was difficult to decide what color they might have been. Sometimes Silence thought they weren't any color he'd ever seen before. But still there was no sign of any construction or device, or any sign at all of whatever crewed the alien ship.
    The tunnel puckered in suddenly from all sides, so that the away team had to crawl through on their hands and knees, one after the other. And on the other side they rose to their feet as they found themselves in a great, egg-shaped chamber, with a high ceiling and smooth polished walls. Dark shapes and oddities budded out from the floor and walls, carefully formed but enigmatic in meaning.
    Frost snapped out a warning not to touch them, which Silence for one found
    completely superfluous. He wouldn't have touched