World of Fire (Dev Harmer 01) by James Lovegrove

pointed a decisive finger. “Down there.”
    “Okay.”
    They set off, but hadn’t gone more than ten steps when a scroach came hurtling along the tunnel towards them. Both men pressed themselves against the wall to let it pass.
    “That one was certainly shifting,” Dev said.
    “They can manage forty kph at full tilt. Faster than most people can sprint.”
    “But I mean, why is it going that fast in the opposite direction if we’re supposed to be running away from the moleworm?”
    “That is a good point.”
    More scroaches charged towards them, hissing wildly, pincers waving. Dev thought of a shoal of fish fleeing a hungry dolphin.
    “Yeah, I vote we follow them,” he said. “I trust their instinct for self-preservation over your machine.”
    “Yes,” said Trundell, “I’m thinking that too.”
    They about-faced and charged after the scroaches, Trundell in front. The beeps from the tracking device were at half-second intervals and getting faster. The whole tunnel was shaking.
    “Aargh! This is killing my thighs,” the scientist panted, slowing down. “And my back.”
    Dev himself was not enjoying having to run bent over. “Would you rather get caught by the moleworm?”
    Trundell somehow found the energy to increase his pace again. That was just as well, because otherwise Dev might have shoved him aside, barged past and left him for dust.
    They still weren’t going fast enough. The beeps were issuing from the tracking device as quickly as darts from a kinetic energy repeater gun, urgently insisting that the creature Dev and Trundell were trying to escape from was right on their very heels.
    The ground behind Dev erupted.
    Two sets of shovel-like claws broke through solid rock as though it was peanut brittle.
    They swiftly dug out a hole large enough to admit a fleshy, many-tentacled thing that Dev mistook at first for some kind of large sea anemone. He realised almost immediately that it was in fact a nose, its tip bristling with prehensile feelers.
    The feelers writhed as more and more of the beast emerged. Now a skinny, glistening snout. Now a circular, sphincter-like mouth, fringed with needle-thin teeth. Now two small primordial eyes, white as blisters.
    With astonishing speed, the claws widened the hole, until the moleworm was able to slither its whole self through. It squirmed out into the open – long-bodied, hairless, loathsome.
    It had four legs, all at the front, just behind the head. The two rear legs were a little longer than the two stumpy forelegs, meaning the clawed extremities at the ends – footlike hands, handlike feet – were all positioned next to one another.
    The rest of the creature was tapering and serpentine, a cable of sinewy muscle that started as thick as a cow’s girth and narrowed to the diameter of a man’s arm. A combination of abdomen and tail, this section of the moleworm coiled and thrashed with an eagerness that spoke of soon-to-be-sated hunger. Predator had located prey.
    Trundell was rooted to the spot, eyes bulging in terror.
    Dev was only slightly less appalled, but he had the presence of mind to grab the xeno-entomologist by the scruff of the neck and bundle him along the tunnel, away from the moleworm.
    The creature lolloped after them in pursuit, its puckered mouth opening and shutting, emitting ropey drool.
    Dev noted that the moleworm seemed clumsy and hamstrung as it ran. Its limbs were not well co-ordinated and its tail added drag to its progress. The impression he had got from the tracking device was that it was much fleeter of foot than this. He and Trundell were managing to put distance between them and it.
    It was, he deduced, a born burrower. Its physiology was designed for carving a passage through rock and earth. Out in the open, even in the relatively tight squeeze of this tunnel, it wasn’t anywhere near as efficient at propelling itself along.
    Dev thought for a moment that he and Trundell were going to be able to outrun the moleworm after