I like these things, though it has technically ceased to be random.
Also, sorry if this is too long, as I don't have word count and forgot about the limit, and sorry that it took a little longer than 15 minutes. And the ending is aweful because I felt it had to go somewhere.
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The roadways out past the Cut were clouded with dust and stone. Winds howling in over the desert, churned by the vast thermal generation of the sand, coiled into whirlwinds, wily-willies and sandstorms. Banks of dust and shale and parched botanica rolled over the world like waves.
The woman dropped the kickstand on her bike and let it idle. The filters were beginning to choke and she had to strain with one leg to keep balance. She looked out through the face plate down the gradual slope that vanished into burnt umber, then black.
'Like bees,' she thought. 'Or snow.' She had never seen snow outside of a theatre, and her memories took-on a harch cast when linked with this.
She decided to make camp. In her saddle bags were a few things, mostly useful, amongst them a tent. She took it out and stapled it to the compacted earth, pulling the dun awning over the bike and curling next to it. Inside the small chamber, six feet to a side, the air was close and musty and dust still swirled. The walls reverberated as the sandstorm tried to tear the tent away.
She twisted at her helmet and it came off. Cropped premature grey and a face that, given time and care, would be beautiful. Her arm screeched and she removed the cover and oiled the joints.
Some time later, when the storm had died in intensity and might restrict itself to skinning beasts alive, the woman woke up.
The was a sharp, cracking sound.
She snapped her helmet on and reached for her pistol. The worn old combustion-affair was loaded with shatter rounds. Unzipping the airlock and passing through the antechamber, she stuck her head out into the storm.
There was nothing to be seen. Absolute darkness. But in the darkness the cracking sounded again.
She waited.
Several quick snaps, a click, all faint yet audible beneath the scream of the wind. She flicked her thermal filter on and got nothing. The dust was too hot. She bipassed ultra-sound, found the electromagnetoscope hopelessly-distorted, and in the endsettled on waiting.
A crack opened in the wall of sand and through it there moved a chain of figures, dark silhouettes clicking and screeching, an endless troupe of hexapods swinging madibled heads from side to side.
Curiosity bloomed. She set her inertial compass and followed after them. Her chitinous exoskeleton withstood the grinding atmosphere but her legs had trouble supporting her. She made her way through the desert, questing after the ants. Her feet sunk through the malleable earth and she began to sweat.
The ants vanished. The woman, incautious, stumbled and fell down into the pit. She tumbled behind a boulder and looked around her at the sand-strewn mouth of a tunnel leading into the darkness. She switched to low-light and watched the last of the ants vanish around a bend. She rose and followed, eyes open, chemoreceptors in forewarning of ambush.
Around the bend was a chamber, walls smooth and grey like concrete and ridged with pathways and empty sockets gaping, awaiting lights. She praised her luck and continued into the tunnel, searching for a side passage. Narrow chutes opened on every side and the faint traces of chemical trails were evident everywhere.
She turned a corner and walked up a ramp. Away on every side opened-up a chamber larger than any cathedral, a roof of square plates undulating and held-up by iron girders. Here or there a plate had broken and spilled a mountain of sand into the the chamber. In the distance the excreted cement of the ants had consumed a web of girders, and dozens of workers went to and fro bearing scraps of flesh and vegetation to their queen. In the depressions where the rails had once run, hexagonal cells held pupa squirming under translucent wax lids, nymphs tending them and bearing new eggs to their wombs. And through it all crawled fungi, trimemd and tended and consumed, occupying vast patches of the walls and floor and ceiling.
Looking around, desperate, ecstatic at her find, the woman crept the length of the platform, tore-down a cracked and useless sign, and ran. Several nymphs, espying her, began to screeched and chitter. A number of soldiers, ludicrous jaws gaping, squirted acid at her and tried to sever her in two. She shot one in the space behind the head and split another's abdomen with the edge of her arm. The joint creaked as she hefted the sign and sprinted. She did not stop as she retraced her steps and tossed a beacon ramdomly into a crevice. Climbing up out of the pit with her treasure in hand, she knew that she would definitely be coming back.
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