The grub clamped its jaws down on the side of his foot, taking a chunk out of his loafers and scraping the skin from the top of his foot. Scrumtumbler yelped in pain and, without thinking about it, drove his heel down onto its back.

In his panic, Scrumtumbler stomped hard enough to blast the creature’s innards out its mouth, spraying him with putrid ichor and ropy strands of insectoid guts.

“Thank goodness for lab coats,” he muttered to himself. He began to wipe the largest chunks off of his stained and splattered coat but then froze at the sound of something else in the darkness. It was that crackling and snapping sound. The popping might have been a fire burning wet wood, but whatever it was emitted neither light nor heat.

Scrumtumbler held his makeshift electric torch up to try to get a better view of his surroundings. Behind him was the sheer wall of the pit, its sides flaking with iron deposits. Beside him was the small subterranean stream. It was cloudy and white—sulfuric acid, Scrumtumbler realized. Somewhere upstream, this underground water must flow over a volcanic sulfur deposit, picking up the chemical and mixing it into this stinking concoction. To drink would mean death.

Peering beyond that, he saw a dozen other grubs crawling blindly along the floor. And beyond them was a pulsating mound of a great many bulbous things stacked in a slimy gelatin. The snapping sound happened again, and he saw one of the bulbous things burst open and disgorge a wriggling grub amid a sticky cascade of slime.

Eggs. Hundreds upon hundreds of eggs. He was to be the hatchlings’ first meal.

In that moment, his greatest regret was that his theories would die with him and his name would be forgotten.

The Mad Scientist

Scrumtumbler heard the scratching approach of the thing in the darkness, and the rippling echoes of more crackling noises from the direction it had come.

He knew his stun rifle was broken, but he squeezed the trigger anyway, hoping it would at least generate enough of a discharge to allow him to see where he was and what was coming towards him.

Nothing happened. He sat down, cradled the gun in his lap, and groped for the wire box. Fumblingly, he removed the clasp and ran his fingers down the wires. It felt like a mess inside. At least one vacuum tube had been shattered and several wires were dangling free of their contacts.

Scrumtumbler jerked his leg back as something touched his toe. It was no gentle tap: this was the forceful grasp of something unseen and desperate, and Scrumtumbler’s mind supplied images of a pale, clasping hand or a probing tentacle.

He scrambled backwards, crab-like on his hands and heels, until he bumped into a wall. Then he worked furiously in the dark, hissing quietly when he cut his fingers on the shards of a tube but not allowing himself to slow down. Science will be my light and my flame, he recited the membership oath of the Order of Prometheus as he worked. Knowledge will lead mankind to a brighter future.

This time when he pulled the trigger, a small arc of electricity sprang to life at the tip of his rifle, shedding just enough light for him to see his feet. He shuddered when he realized what had been pursuing him: a bulbous white grub, like the ones he had seen the molemen leading about in the caverns above. This one, however, was smaller. A hatchling, no doubt.

The Rugged Explorer

Sergeant Schmidtt and his cackling cronies sat in the stands above, kept safe by the arena walls and ready to gun Jack down if he did not fight to their satisfaction. Jack didn’t want to fight, but he didn’t want to be gunned down, either.

He surveyed his opponents. There was Trotsky, the titan who must have been nine feet tall. His shins were cut and bleeding from the first arena bout of the day, and he now sat with his massive back leaning against the wall, a child’s expression of misery on his guileless face. Even if he was injured, Jack wasn’t eager to start in with a man whose hands were the size of bear-traps.

Then there was the panther-woman. She had claws and fangs, but she was still a woman, and that meant Jack couldn’t fight her. He would rather die than hit a woman.

That left the Spartan. Jack eyed the strange figure in the helmet and saw that this warrior was much leaner than Jack had first assumed. The thick wolf-pelt cloak, the concealing helmet, and shapeless, bulky armor had all made the Spartan appear larger. Now that Jack had a chance for a closer look he could see that this warrior’s legs and the arms were muscular, but very lean and free of hair.

He must be a youth, Jack realized. But that’s one dangerous boy. He had seen the Spartan crack the carapace of a gargantuan scorpion using little more than a pair of sticks. This, too, would be a tough fight, but it seemed the only option.

Jack threw away his sharpened sticks and assumed a boxer’s stance, gesturing a challenge to the Spartan with open hands. “Come on,” Jack called. “If it weren’t for me, you wouldn’t even have those sticks. Do the honorable thing and throw them away.”

The Nazis roared their approval; evidently they were much happier seeing the prospect of a long, brutal fistfight than a short, decisive armed duel. Or maybe they were hoping the Spartan would gut Jack for daring to throw away his weapon.

The Spartan answered in a strange language. Jack had no idea what was meant, but a warrior’s honor needed no translation: the Spartan dropped the sticks and hunched down into a low stance, arms out front, fingers spread wide.

A wrestler’s stance, Jack thought as the two circled each other. Dammit, this is going to be even tougher than I thought.

The Spartan lunged in, attempting to seize Jack’s legs. But Jack had battled wrestlers before, and he was ready. He sprawled backwards, keeping his legs out of reach while he brought his fists down on the back of his opponent’s head. Against the helmet, he couldn’t do much more than scuff his knuckles, but he hoped it would at least make a hell of a ringing sound inside. As he felt the Spartan back off, he grabbed the red mane of hair that ran down the helmet and yank it up and away.

The chinstrap came free and the helmet rolled away into the arena sand. Black hair spilled across the Spartan’s lean, muscular shoulders. Jack pressed in, drawing back his fist while seizing his opponent by her throat.

Her.

Jack froze, his fist cocked back, unable to land the blow. The helmet, the thick cloak—it had hidden her female physique so completely that Jack had not recognized what he was up against.

This was no Spartan. This was an Amazon.

The smilodon slashed past the bars of its cage too quickly for von Wartenburg to avoid. Its thick claws struck his chest and pulled away, taking long ribbons of black leather with them. He stumbled a little as he stepped out of the cat’s reach, three deep gashes bleeding freely from his shoulder. Yet his chest was unharmed. Maia caught a glimpse of something under the torn mess of his shirt, something golden—no, not gold, she appraised. It was too red to be gold– this was bronze armor, marked with ceremonial designs she was too far away to read.

The smilodon roared, and von Wartenburg stood back to watch it, seemingly unperturbed as red blood saturated what was left of his sleeve and dripped from his fingers.

“STILL,” he pronounced the words in the mystical Atlantean language. Without even a whimper, the creature sat like a well-trained dog.

Grimacing only slightly, von Wartenburg lifted the ebony skull in his bloody left hand while he ripped the remaining shreds of his sleeve away with his right. Then he strode to the slave who had first dropped the chain. The wretch trembled at the commandant’s approach and tried to seek shelter among his peers, but the others backed away from him.

“You failed in your duties,” von Wartenburg said in Atlantean. This time it was not a command, but the words acted upon Maia’s mind as if she had known them since birth.

The commandant raised the skull to face the slave and began chanting softly. These words, too, Maia did not know, but they sounded vile and cruel and they seemed to chill the air like a piercing wind on a starless night.

At first, Maia thought it was a trick of the light that made the slave’s cheeks seem to pull inward. But in the moments that followed, the transformation accelerated and he seemed to starve to death before her eyes. His limbs withered, fell from his head, and his eyes clouded. He sagged as he stood, unable to hold himself up any longer and yet still powerless to look away.

By the time he collapsed to the floor, he was little more than a skeleton shrouded in dry skin. His chest shuddered in one final attempt to draw breath, and then he was still.

Von Wartenburg wiped the blood from his shoulder to reveal that the bleeding gashes had disappeared. His skin was whole and unbroken, without so much as a scratch to mark the smilodon’s attack.

Maia grasped the bars of his cage. Using the lost Aztec language, she called to him. “A curse upon the hand that takes my treasure!”

“This hand does not suffer curses,” he answered in Aramaic. “This hand deals them.”

The Fortune Hunter

Maia gripped the bars of her cage and looked around at the trapped beasts surrounding her. Their cages, like hers, were hanging from the ceiling by thick chains. She could see gigantic snakes slithering, reptiles rising to stand on four legs or on two. Something that looked like a gargantuan hyena cackled menacingly, and a centipede the size of a python tramped circles around the inside of its enclosure. The noise was intolerable. The smell was even worse.

She estimated that any single member of this menagerie (herself excluded) would go for a pretty penny to zoos or universities back in America. Instead, they were probably all intended for delivery to Hitler, free of charge, for some crazy breeding program. Such a waste, she thought. I’d trade the ebony skull for a chance to put any one of these monsters up for public auction.

“Hey, von Wartenburg,” she called to her captor, speaking in German. “Why’d you string me up here with all these beasts?”

“I would have thought that would be obvious,” he answered in crisp English. “An animal should be kept with animals.”

“You owe me that skull, you know,” she said in French. “How much is it worth?”

He looked at his prize, the ebony skull that she had retrieved from the god-queen’s altar. “It is worth more than you will ever know,” he said, this time in Ancient Greek.

Maia could read a little Ancient Greek, but she had never learned it as a spoken language. She slapped the bars of her cage in frustration at not knowing what he had said.

A team of five slaves were hoisting another cage up to the ceiling, their muscles straining to heft its savage contents. Maia recognized this one: it was a smilodon, a saber-toothed cat. It was supposed to be as extinct as everything else in the room, but there was no mistaking those glistening teeth. Maia had once pulled a half a dozen smilodon skulls out of a muddy hillside in Alaska in a single afternoon, but it turned out they weren’t worth much to the local curators. Supply and demand. But a live specimen—that was different.

The beast threw its tawny body against the bars, sending its cage swinging through the air like a pendulum. One of the slaves lost his grip and fell backwards to the ground. His peers struggled to keep hold of the chain, but their combined weight was little more than the giant cat’s, and each swing of the cage lifted their feet from the ground.

“Do not drop it,” Von Wartenburg instructed them. He walked calmly closer and peered up at the creature, a quarter ton of teeth, stripes, and sinewy rage.

The smilodon launched itself at the bars again, and this time the slaves could not hold on. Two more of them dropped free, sprawling on the floor, while the remaining two clung fast to the chain and were whipped into the air as the cage slammed down. Von Wartenburg opened his mouth, no doubt to issue one of his mystical commands to the creature, but his syllables were lost in the commotion, and the smilodon lashed out at him through its bars.

Von Wartenburg stepped back, but not quickly enough.

Then she caught sight of something flapping in the air next to the fist that held her wrist. It was his flight control device.

Another elbow slammed into her helmet, but as it did, her left hand was already in motion. She dropped her own flight control, letting it dangle by the short cord wound through her jacket while she reached over to seize his. She cranked the throttle to maximum.

He shot away from her in a bright red flash, flailing for his flight control as he went. It would only take a moment for him to recover, but she was quicker: one burst from her pack put her on the same trajectory. She stretched her arm out in front of her, peered down the sights of her pistol, and pulled the trigger as quickly as she could.

Two, three, four shots. Even with two good eyes, it would take a miracle to hit his fuel tank.

Seven, eight, nine shots. She was about to give it up as hopeless when the rocket-truppen exploded, an instant bonfire against a black backdrop.

Kate was battered and bruised, and she had one bullet left. The buzzing in her helmet was a constant now: her fuel tank was nearly dry. When it was empty, she would fall like a rock. And there was still one more fighter plane.

She aimed herself directly towards him, stretching her pistol out in front to aim as carefully as she could. Her red hair licked at the edges of her helmet’s visor. Somehow it had come loose and now it streamed out behind her, a flaming red trail to match that from the rocket pack.

The Messerschmitt pilot saw her coming. He might have had her right in his sights, but he didn’t fire. He bobbed its wings three times—the aviator’s signal for surrender—and wheeled back towards his base.

A minute later, Kate’s rocket pack sputtered on the last drops of its fuel as she passed through the side door of the S-1. Clem and Dr. Scott exploded into applause as she set down in the cabin. Even Reggie took his hands off the stick long enough to clap.

“How did you do it?” Dr. Scott gasped. “How did you drive off an entire squadron?”

Kate whipped off the helmet, allowing her red hair to cascade down over her shoulders.

“Let’s just put it this way,” she said. “They just got aced by Kate Boone: Daredevil Pilot!”

The flying wing’s turrets riddling her captured Messerschmitt with bullets. The controls shuddered violently in her hands for a moment, and then even more violently as the engine burst into bright flames and dark smoke.

“I only wanted to borrow your airplane,” she said as if the Nazis could hear her. “If you want it back so badly, I’m happy to return it.”

Kate nosed the plane upwards and slightly to starboard, and then she bounced herself out of the cockpit, happy to leave the confinement behind in favor of the open skies.

She zipped away on her rocket plume while the gun turrets hammered at the Messerschmitt. The fighter plane shed more flames and more scrap metal. One wing tore free. A fuel cell exploded. But the airplane’s momentum carried it forward, right into the flying wing. It crashed through with a fierce red flash and a collision so loud that Kate felt it in her stomach more than hear it with her ears. With the speed of gravity, the scattered fragments of the fighter plane and the two jagged halves of the flying wing plummeted down to be swallowed by the storm clouds below.

A faint buzzing sounded in Kate’s ear, alerting her that her fuel was nearly spent. Whatever she did next, she would have to do it fast. She had lost her Tommy gun, so she drew her trusty Mauser pistol. It wasn’t the best weapon for a dogfight, but it was better than nothing.

She allowed herself to freefall while she scanned the night for her enemies. The final rocket-truppen was spiraling in place, watching his mother ship go down. Kate opened her throttle for one quick burst, intending to get in close enough to make her pistol worth using. Not for the first time that night, the poor depth perception of her single good eye made her misjudge the distance and put on too much speed. He spun to face her just as they slammed together.

The impact knocked the breath out of both of them, but the Nazi was quicker to recover. He held her right wrist tight with one hand as he brought his other fist up into her ribs. She wheezed and the world went red, and then he slammed an elbow into her helmet and her red world became white.

The two tumbled through the air, and her vision was filled with his mask’s bug-eyes and bulbous nose. With him gripping her wrist, she couldn’t twist her pistol in at him, and when she attempted to bring her knee up into his groin he turned his hips to deflect the blow. He was lean, but he still outweighed her by at least 30 pounds, and he knew how to fight in close quarters. Kate realized she would never be able to win this mid-air grapple, nor could she break his grip to get away.

Kate watched her opponents converge on her from every direction. Two fighter planes and a rocket trooper against just one of her.

This isn’t a fair fight, she thought. They need more planes.

With the Mescherschmidtt barreling down on her, Kate simply cut her engines, praying that she would be harder to see without burning rocket exhaust venting behind her.

The ploy worked: the fighter rushed over her, tracer rounds searching in vain for a target. As soon as he had sailed past, she launched herself back up and forward, landing so that her boots slammed down on either side of the cockpit screen.

Earlier that night she had wished she could have seen the pilot’s face after she pulled a fancy maneuver. Now, she had her wish: he was right there, close enough to see the whites of his astonished eyes through the lenses of his goggles.

Kate slammed the butt of her empty Thompson down onto the cockpit screen. Glass exploded outward and was instantly whipped away by the wind. As she pried the screen’s frame away from its housing, the pilot reached for his pistol, but the confining seat prevented his draw. Kate’s hands darted in at him and, with a quick flip of her wrist, she undid the buckles on his chest and at his waist. She yanked him up by the scruff of his flight suit, where the slipstream grabbed him and pulled him away into the night.

Not bothering to watch his parachute open, she dropped into the cockpit and seized the controls. It was cramped for a woman wearing a rocket pack, forcing her to hunch forward and hook the front of the seat with the backs of her calves to keep herself in place. It was uncomfortable, but the position allowed her to reach the stick and the throttle, just in time to pull the plane out of its dive.  The Messerchmidtt was quick and responsive, its nose coming up eagerly under her control. There, in front of her, she could see the remaining rocket-truppen, his thruster cutting a red scar across the sky.

She thumbed the trigger and felt the fifty caliber machineguns vibrate the frame of the plane, but he was hard to hit. Tight turns. Steep ascents. Sharp drops. Still, she stuck to his tail as if she were glued to it, sending controlled bursts after him whenever his silhouette passed the crosshairs.

A flash of lightning in a cloud below revealed the rocket-truppen’s gambit. He had deliberately led her back towards his mother ship. He had probably also radioed ahead, because they began shooting at her captured plane the moment she was in range.

Kate veered upwards into a steep loop, blasting almost vertically into the air. The straps of the pack felt like they were about to yank free and take her arms and legs with them, but she decided a few bruises were a small price to pay for flaunting gravity so dramatically.

The rocket-truppen angled up after her, but they could not climb as quickly nor turn as sharply. By the completion of their loop, she had come all the way around and then some, and now she had them at twelve o’clock dead ahead.

The Nazis veered in different directions. Smart move; Kate could only follow one of them now, leaving the other free to come after her. She would just have to deal with the first one quickly.

As she aimed, she reflexively squinted with her bad eye even though she couldn’t see through it anyway. When she had him lined up in her sights, she pulled the trigger and her Thompson jerked in her hands and spat forth white fire. Beyond that, her bullets disappeared into the darkness. She wished for tracers, but at least she didn’t have to worry too much about depth and distance as she kept her target dead ahead.

She spent the rest of her clip in focused bursts and was rewarded by a cloud of golden fire and black smoke engulfing the rocket-truppen. She had ignited his fuel tank. These rocket packs—her own included—were obviously prone to explosion. They were, after all, designed by Professor Scrumtumbler.

Kate ejected the empty ammunition drum and let it fall away below her. She was reaching for her next clip when machinegun fire blazed down on her from above. One bullet pierced her flight jacket and grazed her arm. It was not a serious injury, but it was startling and a bit painful, and it knocked the spare magazine drum out of her hand.

Her ammo lost to the clouds, she blasted to the left just as the rocket-truppen swooped in from the same direction so that he overshot her and sped past. However, before she could turn and give chase, the thunder of a heavy engine beat down on her. One of the Messerschmitts, prowling the night like a massive shark, had sighted her and was moving in for the kill. She darted to the right and then straight up just in time to avoid a collision. The fighter spun as it passed beneath her. In its wake, the turbulence of the plane’s propwash flung her around like a rag doll. Her rocket pack might make her nimble, but she was now a fly-weight in a heavyweight bout.

Kate nudged just enough boost from her rocket to check her fall. As soon as she did, she saw the second Messerschmitt barreling down at her. The first fighter was wheeling around for another pass, and the rocket-truppen was zipping back in from her flank.

The skies were getting awfully crowded.