Running for your life, Max had discovered, was significantly less dignified than the phrase implied.
He ran.
Not in the blind panicked way of someone whose brain had vacated the premises and left the legs in charge — Max Spade's brain did not vacate premises, it was constitutionally incapable of vacating premises, it was the kind of brain that would be running threat assessments during its own funeral.
He ran with full commitment and full intelligence simultaneously, which was harder than either one alone and considerably more necessary.
His body covered ground at a rate that would have been impossible the day before. The Strand evolution had done something to his legs that he hadn't fully catalogued yet — a combination of improved muscle fiber response and better energy efficiency that translated to a speed that felt, from the inside, like running and looked, from the outside, like something that had decided walking was an unnecessary intermediate step.
The roots were obstacles he read two strides ahead and cleared — vaulted, ducked under, angled around — without breaking the rhythm.
Behind him, the centipede maintained.
Ten meters of golden chitin did not tire. It did not lose interest. It did not experience the philosophical uncertainty that occasionally slowed human pursuit. It had forty legs and an evolutionary history built entirely around catching things that didn't want to be caught, and the sound of those legs — that sequential weight-displacement percussion — stayed at a consistent distance behind him that he would have found impressive if he wasn't finding it deeply alarming instead.
He pulled the shotgun from his shoulder without slowing. Aimed behind him. Fired.
The buckshot hit the carapace and scattered off it the way gravel scattered off a road. He heard the impact and then heard the pellets going in eight different irrelevant directions and he filed the result immediately.
He fired the second round. Same result. Different directions.
'Buckshot-proof at this grade,' he thought, holstering the shotgun without breaking stride. 'Standard rounds are for things that standard rounds can stop. This is not that thing. Enchanted rounds are a limited resource. I have ten. I am not spending them on a test I just ran twice and failed twice. Explosives require geometric advantage. Currently running in a straight line being chased is not geometric advantage.'
He ran harder.
-----
The forest thought it was helping. It wasn't.
The trees got denser ahead, which was useful because tighter spacing meant the centipede's ten-meter body had to navigate angles it wasn't designed for while he moved through the gaps with the efficiency of something considerably shorter and less wide.
He angled left around a root system the size of a car. The centipede's path took it wide. He gained eight meters, which he immediately spent turning right through a gap between two trunks close enough that the centipede's body width became a genuine structural problem.
Eight meters gained. Direction sacrificed.
'I'm not running toward anything,' he noted internally, maintaining his pace with the mechanical consistency of someone who had identified running as the current occupation and intended to be professional about it. 'I'm running away from something. Those are different problems. Running toward something ends when you arrive. Running away from something ends when you — I'll finish that thought later.'
He found out what he was running into approximately thirty seconds later.
The vibration from his left arrived as sound first — low, resonant, coming from the ground rather than the air, the kind of frequency that suggested mass rather than volume. He angled right without stopping to investigate, the way you moved away from sounds you didn't recognize on planets that had just told you their ground-level survival rating was Critical. He cleared the source by twenty meters and glanced left as he passed.
Something the size and approximate shape of a rhinoceros was using the forest floor as camouflage. Not hiding behind anything — being the forest floor, its skin a perfect replication of the dark damp ground and root texture, visible only because it was moving and the ground was not.
It was already turning toward where he had been.
'Camouflage,' he thought, with the tone of a man updating a list. 'The planet has camouflage predators. Excellent. Very reasonable feature for an environment to have.'
He kept running.
The second problem was visual — a section of forest floor ahead that pulsed with a slow deep blue, bioluminescent and deliberate, and every creature in his visible range had made a collective and unanimous decision to give it thirty meters of respectful distance. He had no data on what it was. He didn't need data on what it was. The behavioral consensus of the local wildlife constituted sufficient evidence that the appropriate response was the arc he was already taking.
The centipede behind him did not take the arc. The centipede, operating on a motivational clarity that Max could only describe as committed, went straight through the bioluminescent section.
The sound it made on the other side was ambiguous. It might have been pain. It might have been rage. The practical effect was identical either way — he gained distance as the centipede navigated whatever the blue section had done to it, and he lost directional coherence as his arc deposited him in a part of the forest he had no map for.
'Fourteen minutes on this planet,' he catalogued. 'One golden centipede with justifiable grievances. One camouflage ambush predator that I have elected not to pursue a relationship with. One bioluminescent ground hazard of unspecified function. Currently running in an unnamed direction toward an unspecified destination.' A pause. 'I have had better Tuesdays.'
The third problem was immediate.
He rounded a dense cluster of trees and the clearing opened before him and the thing in it was large. Not centipede-large — wider, lower, with the heavy lateral build of something that didn't move fast but didn't need to because most things in its vicinity made the sensible choice not to require it to. Multiple appendages. A posture communicating the specific displeasure of something interrupted mid-comfort.
He did not stop to take inventory. His body made the decision at the same moment his brain confirmed it — hard left, committed, through the gap between the tree line and the clearing's edge. The thing in the clearing produced a sound that communicated its position on this development clearly and at volume.
It did not follow.
Territorial. Not predatory. He filed this under the single piece of good fortune he had encountered since arriving and kept running.
The centipede was still behind him. Closer than before. The bioluminescent section had inconvenienced it but had not resolved it.
-----
11 minutes after arrival on the surface of Vorga, the ground made its own decision about the arrangement.
One footfall. One surface that presented itself as identical to every surface he had crossed in the previous eleven minutes. One moment of full weight commitment followed by the ground's complete failure to honor the implied agreement between solid surfaces and the people who stepped on them.
He fell through.
The crust collapsed inward behind him. The light from the forest disappeared above as the hole partially sealed with the debris of its own breaking. He fell in darkness.
Five seconds.
Five seconds of freefall in complete darkness was, he could confirm from direct experience, considerably longer than five seconds in any other context. He was aware of every subdivision of it — the initial drop, the adjustment of his body into the most defensible falling configuration, the calculation running simultaneously that the depth suggested a significant cavity below the surface, the unhelpful but accurate observation that he had no information about what was at the bottom.
He hit an egg.
He knew what it was before he finished breaking through it. The resistance was the same — that structured outer shell giving way to warm viscous interior. The smell was identical. The copper and the biological and the gel closing around him up to his thighs were a precise repeat of the experience forty feet above him, with the modification that this was underground, in darkness lit only by the faint bioluminescent glow of the fluid itself, and the eggs here were different — flatter, more numerous, arranged in careful rows across a chamber floor that was considerably larger than he could see the edges of.
He sat in the broken shell and took one second.
Then he stood up and discovered the webbing.
It was everywhere. Woven between the eggs in dense thick strands the diameter of rope, connecting them in a grid that covered the chamber floor and adhered to everything it contacted with the specific totality of a material that had been designed for adhesion rather than arriving at it accidentally. His right arm: webbed at the jacket and forearm. His left arm: webbed at the elbow. His backpack: three separate contact points. His legs from the knee down: embedded in the shell.
He pulled. The webbing stretched. It did not release.
He pulled harder. The broken egg shifted. The webbing held.
He was stuck in the dark, underground, covered in egg fluid, in a nesting chamber whose walls he couldn't see the edges of, with hundreds of intact eggs arranged around him in every direction.
He looked at this situation with the honest assessment it deserved.
'Underground nesting chamber,' he thought. 'Web architecture. Eggs flatter and more numerous than the surface eggs, which means different species, which means I have found a second nesting ground on a planet that apparently uses its entire forest floor as nesting infrastructure.' He looked at the webbing on his arm. 'Arachnid is the reasonable conclusion. The question is size.'
He reached for the dagger. The dagger was accessible — right side of the pack, grip clear of the webbing, "thank you past self for that specific packing decision". He began cutting.
The webbing resisted the blade with more integrity than it had any right to. He worked the dagger in short precise strokes, cutting individual strands, not trying to clear large sections at once because large sections at once was how you exhausted the blade and your patience simultaneously.
He had freed his right arm and was working on the left when the sound arrived.
From deep in the chamber. From a direction that was not the hole above him — a separate passage entirely, somewhere in the darkness beyond the egg rows. High. Sharp. Not the centipede's frequency. Something different.
The specific pitch of something that had sensed damage to its offspring.
Then movement. Fast, heavy, coming from the dark.
'Of course,' Max thought, cutting faster. 'Of course there's a spider. What kind of planet would this be without a spider.'
The movement got louder.