“I’m going to dissect it,” she said, poking at the bizarrely colored arthropod.

“Can you wait on your extracurricular activities until we find out what happened to the miners on this hellhole?” the sergeant barked. He was wearing so many little pieces of electronic equipment on his body armor that he looked like a cyborg. Three other men examined the equipment and computers between the windowless concrete walls of the hydroponics lab. There were not any plants to be found.

“The bones were picked clean,” a grunt announced. ”They were still wearing their clothes and even their boots. I poured out a boot and it was just a pile of bones. Not a bit of flesh on any of them. Nothing rotting, it’s like they’ve been here a thousand years. They didn’t even stink.”

“I don’t like being underground,” another grunt remarked, observing the cracks in the corner of the concrete walls. The paint had peeled off and flakes piled up in the corners of the floor.

“They’ve dug pretty deep,” another grunt remarked.

“You guys go find out what happened to the miners and I’ll see what this little guy has inside,” the scientist said. She looked over at the jumpy grunts and added, “This isn’t like any arthropod from Earth.” She watched the little worm like critter with dozens of legs squirm underneath the probe she held it down onto an examination tray with. She pulled out a scalpel and sliced open a body segment in the center of the turned over creature. It made a scream that even surprised the scientist.

“What the fuck was that?” the Sarge shouted.

“It made a noise, don’t worry about it,” she said, slicing off its head. Greenish goo oozed out and it was quieted forever. She was peeling open that center body segment when she felt something touch her hair. She brushed it off and felt a pain in her hand. She looked at her hand and found another greenish millipede with its jaws dug into the side of her hand. She was perplexed but didn’t really react otherwise.

A grunt watched several other critter fall from the ceiling onto her shoulder. He looked up and saw a column of them crawling upside down on the ceiling from a crack in the concrete. They clustered right above her head and dropped down. There must have been a couple dozen making their way to the drop off point. Before he could even say anything, a few more dropped onto her shoulder and one wiggled down the back of her shirt. She screamed.

The grunt knocked the worm-like creatures off her hair and shoulders and she tore off her shirt to get the one out from underneath her clothes. The soldier squished the thing under his boot. That was just before the other grunts started pointed and shouted that there were worms coming out of every crack of the walls.

“What the hell?” the Sarge muttered as he saw a wave of creepy crawlers charging down the hallway towards them. He slammed the door but they crawled right underneath. They were a lot quicker than that slow millipedes of Earth, crawling up the body armor of the soldiers and squeezing in between the pads looking for something to bite into. The soldiers tried to slap the small critters off of each other in a panic but there must have been hundreds in the room already. The Sarge pushed over a table in front of the door, but they immediately climbed over as he swatted at them with the butt of his rifle. They creatures swarmed on top on him, hundreds then thousands. The terrified soldiers and scientist backed against the wall, but there was no refuge for them there as more arthropods crawled up the wall and bit at them. The Sarge stood up, buried in the bugs and was quickly devoured. It was like all the muscles on his body just disappeared and his artificial exoskeleton just collapsed into a pile.

A grunt fired some blasts into the pile of bugs, but it just splattered a few all over the walls. The critters were coming at them like floodwater, crawling over each other forming waves. There were already thousands after the surviving humans and their screams, while they were overwhelmed and buried and devoured, did not dissuade the hunger of the alien arthropods.