Mack 'n' Me: The Wolves of Alpha 9

a chance.”
And that was all it took. I didn’t know how loyal these guys were to their boss, or why, but they were as loyal as Hell to each other. The ant had followed us around, so we moved back to the other side, the one I’d first come out on...the one away from his men... the one that put a river of honey at our backs.
Of course, that didn’t seem to bother that guy. He eyed the vat.
“Gonna need a lever,” he said, and I pointed to the stun stick still attached to his belt.
Damn thing was useless for anything else, anyway.
As he reached for it, I looked around for something I could use, but the cavern floor was clean, bare stone, and I was out of luck. I backed up to the edge of the vat, and set my back against it pushing up. It didn’t shift. He tried wedging the stick underneath, but there was nowhere for it to stick. In the end, he did what I was doing, and we both pushed back, together.
At first the vat remained as still as still could be, and then I heard a grunt, and the glass-like ring as a combat boot hit the other side, and the whole thing shifted a little.
“Mika, stay there, but lean a little out.”
The guardsman didn’t speak above a low mutter, but I figured they had some kind of fancy comms system inside their heads, or along their jaws. His colleague would hear him just fine. It would be the same if Case or I were speaking.
“You mean we’re not?” Case tried to sound a little hurt, and failed.
I didn’t have an answer for her, no energy to even try and match the comment with some smart-ass of my own. It was a right bitch just not backing off from the little bit of progress we’d made.
“Little more,” the guard said, and wedged the baton in the tiny gap we’d made between the base of the vat and the floor.
I shuffled lower so I was further under the curve, and looked at him.
“One...”
He began counting with me.
“Two...”
“Three!” and we both did our best to straighten our knees and lift the weight at our backs.
Just when we were about to give up, the vat jerked, as though some kind of pressure had been applied to the other side. We pushed harder, but it wasn’t quite enough, and the ants weren’t wasting any time. They crossed the floor of the cavern in a blur of legs, their antennae cocked towards us.
For a moment, I hoped at least one of them would run right into us, maybe even bump the vat in their hurry, but that didn’t happen. Two kept heading for us, and one split off and went around the other side of the vat. It had just vanished from sight, when the vat jerked like a counterweight was swinging on the other side, and I hoped it was from two big dudes weighed down by combat armor swinging from the edge, and not one big dude in combat armor being ripped off the side by a giant ant.
The Stars knew the ones standing in front of me looked plenty mad at what we were doing.
“And down,” said the guardsman beside me, and, catching a vague idea of what he was thinking, I dropped the vat when he did.
We were gonna try and use its own momentum to put it over. I just hoped it didn’t rock so far this way that it squashed us instead. It didn’t, and we threw our backs against it as it rocked back the other way. It wasn’t much, just a few inches off the ground, but it was more than we’d had when we started.
Our sudden movement forward as it tilted over us, drove the incoming ants back a couple of cautious paces. They hesitated as we reversed and slammed back into the underside of the vat. As we pushed, they moved in, again. This time, we had no choice, we’d got the vat rocking the other way, but we needed to move, or we wouldn’t be able to do it again.
I dived one way, and the guardsman dove the other, sliding under snatching jaws without much room to spare. Both ants turned to go after us, their heavy bodies slamming into the side of the vat as it tilted, and succeeding where we had failed.
There were two startled shouts from the other side, but I ignored them. I’d slid under the closest ant’s nippers, and scrambled to my feet as soon as I was clear of its legs, but the damn things was fast, and I’d bolted away from the tunnels leading off from the cavern, not thinking of where I was going.
I was also not thinking of what kind of a mess an entire vat of ant honey might do when it was tipped over, or how fast it might spread. Before I knew it, I’d run across the front of the spill, catching just a glimpse of the tide of gold before it hit me and swept me into the canal at the cavern’s edge.
“Where are you?” Mack asked, as I struggled to keep my head above the honey.
On the upside, the ant wasn’t chasing me anymore. It didn’t look happy, as it scuttled back and forth on the edge of the canal, but it wasn’t coming after me. Gutless wonder.
It was a relief to realize that the honey in the canal was warmer, and a bit more fluid than the stuff in the vat. It was easier to tread water, so to speak, and keep my head out of it. I looked around for the guards, but didn’t see them, and figured they were either being rounded up in the cavern, or had been swept down the canal ahead of, or behind, me.
Either way, I had more important things to worry about—like, for instance, where, in all the Stars, this canal went to. It spilled