HEATSEEKER, by Tim Curran1
The screaming brought them.
They came running through the narrow passages in their green terrain suits—Wells, Sarrasin, and Gill—kicking up clouds of pink Martian dust. Screaming wasn’t something you heard much in the immense, dead desolation of Mars, but once you heard it, you would never forget it.
Bouncing through winding corridors in low gravity, trying to stay on their feet, they climbed over hoses and bumped their helmets on pipes and tripped over heaps of rubble. This was the reality of subsurface mining on an alien world: weird gravity and crowding.
The screaming echoed through their headsets, shrill and deranged, the agonized sound of an animal being tortured to death. By the time they reached #4 Compressor Shack, it had stopped.
And the silence tha
