by B. V. Larson
“I know. But a lot of what I find in museums doesn’t look like art to me, either. To a Worm mind, maybe this is priceless. Maybe that big Worm was the librarian, and the others were on a field trip from school.”
Kwon gave a halting, honking laugh. I didn’t bother to argue my point further with him. Few of my men seemed to be troubled by the fact we were invading the city of another biotic species and wrecking the place. The Worms were just too different, I supposed. For most people, they engendered no sympathy.
“Enough dawdling. Let’s move out. Wounded get to ride in the drill-tanks. No faking. Kwon, get my team moving. Put anyone who breaks more stuff in here on point.”
My last order got a response from the men. No one wanted to be on point. Kwon, shouting and slamming his great hands together to make booming noises, got everyone moving again. We found a tunnel out of this place and set a drill-tank to digging right through the wall of it. I aimed it as straight as I could. No more fooling around, we were going to bore our way to the central chamber—whatever it was—and get this mission finished. A few of the frescoes and reliefs broke as the drill-tank fired up. I gritted my teeth and felt slightly sick about it. What would a pack of humans at the Smithsonian look like to an army of Worms? Would they be capable of respect and mercy? I couldn’t be sure, but I figured any beings that valued art must have some kind of higher aspirations.
-52-
Once we broke through the relatively thin walls of the art chamber and plowed deeply into the dirt beyond, the drill-tanks began to speed up. I was surprised to see they were soon moving at a slow walking-pace. At this speed, we could reach our goal in few hours.
I had a new sensor officer assigned by now—a non-com corporal named Jensen. “Jensen, get over here,” I shouted.
“Sir!” he yelled and trotted up, dragging the unfortunate Lieutenant Chen’s array behind him. It was gouged and heavily-stained, but was still operable. Jensen bounced the unit over every hard rib of dirt on the tunnel floor.
“Take it easy with that thing. Treat it like a rifle.”
“Sorry, sir,” he said, standing nervously beside me.
I watched him fidget for a second or two. I wondered if he thought I’d somehow given Chen an assignment which had led to her gruesome death. He could be right. Maybe these Worms, especially the big ones, didn’t like our actively pinging sensor arrays. Maybe it made big Worms grumpy to get hit with sonar echoes. Well, that was just too bad.
“Don’t piss yourself, marine,” I said. “You’ve got a sweet gig here. All you have to do is switch that thing on and feed me the density readings while we follow this tank to Hell. You are my sensor-operator until you’re dead, or I find someone better.”
“Thank you, uh, sir…” Jensen said. With diffident fingers, he worked the sensor array’s interface. He set it for a thirty yard range—unreasonably short for most purposes, but enough to answer my question.
I snorted as I watched him dial down the range even further. I knew why he did it. He suspected that the active pinging of the sensor unit was what had drawn that big Worm and caused it to eat Chen. Maybe he didn’t relish the idea of ending up inside the next big one’s belly.
“Well?” I asked.
“This is very soft stuff, sir,” he said. “It’s softer than normal dirt back home. It’s not even dirt, really. It’s more like—sawdust. Full of cellulose and resins. It is structurally sound, however. It doesn’t seem to crush down easily, or we would sink in it. Another point is the heat we are using to make our own tunnels, we are melting the material and making it stiffer.”
“All right,” I said, considering his information. “You’re going to walk right behind the lead drill-tank from now on. Keep that thing dialed up another notch or two for range. I want to know if there are any cavities around us, any openings. They should be easy to spot now, with thin walls and even thinner stuff on the other side. Make sure you don’t let the roof collapse on us, or let us sink through the floor into some water reservoir.”
“Right. Yes, sir,” Jensen said. “Ah, how far out do I have to scan, sir?”
“Thirty yards. Every direction. And don’t let me catch you dialing it down any closer, either.”
“No sir,” said the Corporal. He made a spinning motion with his finger on a blue screen. The device pinged with greater enthusiasm. Jensen himself looked slightly green to me. I bet he was thinking about Chen again. Who knew? Maybe that sensor unit sounded like a mating call to a Worm. Jensen began trailing the drill-tank with the sensor bumping behind him. He reminded me of a golfer with a wheeled golf bag, lost in the rough. I smiled inside my hood, behind my goggles. This had to be worst rough any golfer had ever experienced.
Our system worked for quite awhile, making relatively rapid progress. We avoided neighboring tunnels whenever we detected them by changing course. We went up, down, left, right—any direction to keep away from existing tunnels. But always, we drove closer to our goal, the heart of the great mountain.
As we passed through the soft interior I picked up handfuls of the crumbling stuff. We didn’t have a full lab with us, so I couldn’t do a chemical analysis. After looking at it and experimenting, I had to agree with Jensen. The material was not the normal contents one expected when venturing into a mountainside. If I squeezed the earth in my hand, it compressed somewhat. It looked like dirt, but fluffed up dirt, the kind you get when you freshly plow a field and don’t wet it down afterward.
“Kwon, come up here,” I said waving to my Sergeant. He never seemed to be far from my side. I wasn’t sure if that was because he wanted to protect me, or if he thought I frequently needed help. I didn’t bother to ask which it was.
“Sir?”
“What do you make of this? You grew up on some kind of farm, didn’t you?”
“We cut down trees and bred koi, sir.”
“Yeah, a fish-farmer. I’ve worked with soil for years myself. What do you make of this stuff?”
I placed a handful of crumbling dirt into his glove. The lump of earth looked small in his big paw. He squeezed it and let it sift through his fingers. He seemed to take my instructions very seriously.
“Seems like dirt to me, sir,” he said.
“Just normal dirt?”
“Nah. It’s Helios dirt. Not the same. Its half Worm-shit, sir. Good, fertile dirt.”
I nodded. “Yeah, that’s what I figured. Have you noticed that there aren’t many rocks down here? Don’t you think we should run into a boulder now and then?”
Kwon looked around at the walls. Our drill-tanks made a different ribbed pattern in the walls of the tunnel than the Worms themselves did. The laser drills left the walls hot and steaming, with shiny melted glass patches.
“No rocks?” Kwon asked.
“Not really, no. Nothing big.”
“That is strange. I’ve dug into caves, into mountains. There are always rocks, sir. Big ones.”
“Yeah,” I said. “I think I know why.”
Kwon turned his hood to look at me.
“We aren’t in a mountain, Kwon, not really. This is an artificial mound. A hive, or a nest. Kind of like a termite mound. They get pretty big in Africa, you know.”
“Eighty thousand feet?” Kwon asked dubiously.
“No. But these are really big bugs. And they are sophisticated—intelligent. I think this isn’t a hollowed out mountain at all. I think they built this whole thing. The outer shell is tough, extremely tough and resilient. The mountain’s skin is a half-mile thick layer as hard as steel. The Macros bombed them, hit them hard, but couldn’t blast down this far. That’s why they brought us in. To root the Worms out. Don’t you see?”
Kwon scooped up a second handful of earth and crumbled it. “You could be right. The inside of big anthills look like this. The dirt they stack up is broken down into crumbs. It gets soft like—like a mound coffee crystals.”
I snorted. “I didn’t know you were a poet, Kwon.”
“A what?”
“Why did you join up, Kwon?” I asked him suddenly. Men in Star Force rarely talked about their old lives. As in the French Foreign Legion of centuries past, it was considered rude to ask. The stories, when they were told, were never happy ones.
“Me?” he asked, surprised I would take an interest. “I joined up to fight the Nanos.”
“The Nanos? Not the Macros?”
“Yeah,” he said. “The Nanos killed my sister, see. One of those ships picked her up like a tick and squished her, dumping her out again a minute later. She fell right through the roof of a smokehouse on the farm. I wasn’t there, I was in the army at the time. But when I heard about Star Force recruiting to fight the aliens, I joined up.”
“Then you found out we were fighting the wrong aliens, right?” I asked.
“Yeah. Funny, huh?”
“Hilarious,” I said. “If it’s any consolation, I don’t like the Nanos either—or at least I don’t like whoever sent the Nano ships out. I call those guys the Blues.”
“Are they blue, sir?” Kwon asked.
“No,” I said shaking my head. “The only color I’m sure they are not, is blue.”
“Okay….”
“But maybe Sergeant, if we live long enough, we’ll get our chance to explain our feelings to the guys behind the scenes—whatever color they turn out to be. Maybe we’ll get to see what color they are on the inside, too.”
“I look forward to that, Colonel.”
We made it pretty far before the Worms caught on. I wondered if they had laid in ambush for hours, suspecting we would show up at any moment, walking along one of their big, roomy tunnels. No doubt, they had a dozen traps set up, and were busy arranging deadfalls and cave-ins. But at some point, some bright Worm commander must have noticed that we were coming, that we weren’t following their twisting, looping passageways. We were off the track and digging our own way in.
The first sign they’d figured it out came from my men at the rear of the column. I saw, rather than heard, the first evidence. Flashes of light bloomed up from far behind me. At this distance, the autoshades were slow to react to laser fire. Magenta afterimages splotched my vision. But the glassy walls of the tunnel had reflected it back up to me.
One of the odd things about laser-fire, as compared to ballistic weaponry, was how quiet it was. The weapon itself did little more than hum when it went off, unlike a gunpowder weapon, which boomed. Sometimes, depending on what the beam hit, the target exploded with a considerable sound, but that was the exception. My marines made most of the noise in battle, rather than the beamers themselves. Often, combat was fought in relative silence except for a few shouts and the screams of the wounded. I suspected that even ancient battles, when men hacked at each other with swords, had been louder.
Everyone stopped and craned their hooded heads around. We saw the green flashes, and now my autoshades were working, dimming the view of everything around me. The dimming effect was an odd one, making me feel as if I sank into deep water—or maybe a lake of ink.
“Rearguard company, report,” I said into my com-link.
“Enemy sighted, sir!” came back a young tanker Captain’s response. Roku, I thought his name was.
“Are they advancing?”
“Negative, sir. We saw them pop out of the tunnel walls way behind us, and we took some shots at them. They seem to have retreated, sir.”
“How many?” I asked.
“No more than three confirmed,” Roku said. “Request permission to pursue. They might be scouts and thus give away our position.”
I was impressed by Captain Roku’s brave offer. “No, don’t pursue. They’ve found us. It was bound to happen. I’m not going to lose any men in their tunnels. They will have to fight in our tunnel, now.”
“Orders, sir?”
“I want your platoon to hold your position for five minutes, then withdraw to catch up with the rest of us. Burn any Worm-noses you see poking through. And watch the walls for more breakthroughs.”
I hailed the drill-tank pilots next and ordered one of them to reverse and babysit Roku’s group. I also ordered a second drill-tank to come up and join the first one at the point of our column. I wanted two of them to drill forward from now on, side-by-side. We would make a wider avenue for our people, allowing the drill-tanks to maneuver. With a wider passage, my marines wouldn’t be strung out into such a long, vulnerable column.
We were about three miles from the marked heart of the mountain when Corporal Jensen waved for my attention. I could tell from the urgency of his gestures, something was wrong. I grunted and hustled over to look over his shoulder.
He was tapping at his sensor screen dubiously. “Sir,” Jensen said. He appeared worried, as always. “Sir, there’s nothing up ahead.”
“That’s good, isn’t it?” I asked.
“No sir, I mean there’s nothing. We’re drilling into some kind of void. Some kind of big, empty space.”
I pressed the com-link override, broadcasting to everyone. “Column halt!” I roared.
But it was already too late.
-53-
It was the loose soil that got us into trouble. Anyone who’s ever tried to dig a hole on the beach knows the story: the sandy walls cave in on the sides of the hole, filling the bottom. We’d been drilling along, making our tunnel and hardening up the walls with the heat of our lasers. We were creating a tube-like structure of stiffer material as we went through the mountain. But when we reached an end-point, a spot where the light dirt had somewhere to go when we drove into it, the dirt fell away from our tunnel in a rapid, sloughing motion. Our tunnel and its glassy walls were exposed to open space. The ceiling cracked and earth poured in. The dirt below us shifted too, and sent us down into the void we’d reached. The dirt above came down after it, pelting us. Within seconds after I’d called the halt, my forward team found itself helplessly sliding down into a pile of soft earth, tumbling at a forty-five degree angle a hundred feet or more downward.
I went down with the rest of them, trying to bodysurf and failing at it. I went under, and dirt buried me. I reached up with my hands as I realized I was being buried alive, trying to keep them up and visible. I wondered, as the dirt first roared, then finally pattered over my head, if my suit would keep me alive for days, and if I would ever be found and dug out. Something heavy hit my hand, cracking my fingers. I winced, hoping another drill-tank hadn’t just rolled over my hand. I wiggled my fingers experimentally, they hurt, but I thought they were all responding to my brain’s commands.
I tried to operate my com-link with my chin, but it didn’t work. I had no way of trouble-shooting it. Maybe the unit had been ripped loose during the fall. Life-giving air still hissed out of the rebreather into my suit, however.
Something grabbed my fingers after I’d spent about a minute down there. Something that pinched horribly, pulling them out of their sockets. I would have pulled them back under the ground, if I could. The pinch stopped, for a blessed moment. I felt the walls pressing in on me, suffocating me with the weight. Many people who died in avalanches died because the pressure compressed their lungs and would not allow them to breathe, even if there was an air pocket available. Here on Helios, with the nearly double gravity to contend with, the earth weighed a lot and my lungs labored to suck in each gulp of air.
There was a fluttering sensation around my upraised glove. Was that a Worm? Were they rooting around up there, looking for good morsels amongst my men? The sensation of movement around my exposed hand increased, and for a moment, I wished I’d never put it up there, like a flag on a sand castle.
Another crushing grip closed over my hand. Wrenching force was applied. I felt my shoulder give first. It slipped out of the socket, and I screamed in my enclosed suit, the sound of my cries was muffled inside my crumpled hood. It sounded as
if I were screaming underwater.
I squeezed whatever had me and held on. I was hauled out of the dirt like a carrot, dribbling brown earth everywhere. When I was half-exposed the horrible ripping sensation stopped. My arm flopped down at my side. I used my other hand to smear dirt from my goggles.
I was still buried up to my waist. Standing over me was Kwon. He had both hands on his rifle now. He was twisting this way and that, shouting something. My com-link still didn’t work, and I couldn’t make out what he was talking about.
Then the autoshades triggered as light-weight beamers flared around me. The men were firing at something. Painfully, I extracted myself from my early grave and got to my feet.
Kwon looked me over. He reached toward my head with those thick, ungentle fingers. I flinched, but let him do it. He fumbled with something near my ear. I heard a click, and suddenly my head filled with sound. My com-link had become disconnected in the fall.
“—we’ve got at least thirty down, Sergeant,” I heard someone say.
“Worms north and east. They are staying in the growths.”
“—sniping at us!”
I looked around, staggering, holding my wrenched shoulder. I tried to take stock of things. Men were everywhere on the slope, nearly a hundred of them. There wasn’t much cover, but we were in a depression of sorts, and if the Worms were to the north and east, they didn’t have a good firing position on us. My own men, I realized, were up on the rim of the mound formed by the landslide. They were the ones firing back at the snipers. Others worked to scrape out a trench for cover.
We were near the bottom of a fantastically large cavern. The ceiling appeared to be a thousand feet up in the gloomy distance. The floor of the cavern was covered with growths, things that looked like rubbery, slimy crystalline formations. I could tell by their flower-like structures were living growths, not some kind of mineral deposit. They reminded me of large fans of coral. It was as if I looked out into a drained undersea grotto.
