Action!
Something moved, down there in the windy dark. No: something grabbed, and pulled, yanking the drone back and forth as its thrusters automatically fired. Those thrusters were designed to clear a space quickly, but Tobias couldn’t pull the drone away. The thing that had grabbed it wasn’t very strong, but it clutched with awful determination.
Tobias shuddered under that horrible grip. Tactile data didn’t come through the drone link, but he could feel the corruption and decay coming through, and trying to drag him down. For one awful moment Tobias was frozen, the nauseating sensory information overwhelming his consciousness — and then he screamed and fired the hopper’s own emergency boost system with a shout that was half scream. Another scream followed as he overrode the thrust safety interlocks with a spastic mental effort which left blood streaming from his nose. That was as irrelevant as the dangers of a full gee’s worth of sudden acceleration on a lunar-adapted body. What mattered was to go.