by B. V. Larson
In the end, the objections stopped coming and my staff did what I wanted. We deployed our hovertanks between the base and the massive mountain that loomed in the dark nearby. I knew Sandra was waiting like a spider for me in my office, so I didn’t go near it. I sent for food and drink, and received a tuna fish sandwich that wasn’t made with tuna fish. I swilled it down with a squeeze bottle of water. At least the water was cold and tasted fresh, despite the fact it was heavily recycled. Nanites made great filtering agents.
The hovertank scouts didn’t take long to pinpoint the enemy. In less than an hour, we had a fix on them.
“They are about a mile down, sir,” said the Navigator. He’d been recruited as our underground tracker in this environment. “But they are coming up now, toward the surface.”
“Let’s do a little projecting,” I said. “Show me where they should be in another three hours.”
The Navigator created a cone of probable outcomes. The top of the cone struck several of the existing, shallow tunnels that we’d mapped, the ones the Worms had used to attack us the first time.
“Here,” I said, tapping at an area on the upper edge of the cone. “They’ll come out here.”
“That leads dead center toward the camp,” Major Robinson said. “They don’t really have to be so direct.”
“I’m not seeing a lot of subtlety so far with these Worm folks. We’ll meet them at this tunnel junction.”
Everyone blinked at me. “Meet them, sir?” Major Robinson asked.
“What did you think this was all about, Major? We’re going to have to go down there and stop them from lighting off this nuke and destroying our new base and all our shiny steel bricks.”
“Is that really necessary, sir?”
“What else do you suggest?” I asked.
“We could collapse the tunnel on them with our own explosives from above.”
“That’s like trying to drown a catfish. They are Worms, man. They will dig their way out.”
“We could at least try….”
“No. I’m not fooling around with a thermonuclear mine.”
“What if they set if off in our faces?”
“Then we won’t need a funeral, because we’ll already be buried,” I snapped. I was getting edgy, and all these petty worries didn’t help things. Certainly, we might fail. I knew that. We all did. But that was all the more reason for fast, aggressive action. We didn’t have anywhere on this world to fall back to. We didn’t have a country of our own. We had to hit them, and keep hitting them, until we won or they did.
I realized, staring at the screen, that the Macros were the smart ones in all this. Here we were, two biotic species fighting to the death while they waited quietly above the fray in orbit. What did they care if we won or lost? They could come back next year with another of our legions, or with someone else’s.
The more I thought about it, the more my hate for the Macros grew-which was saying something, because I’d never liked them to begin with.
Over the next hour, I decided to lead the expedition myself into the tunnels. When I told Major Robinson, he looked miffed. I knew he wanted to lead the expedition. We’d often talked about his need for field experience with Star Force troops and equipment. Not sending him was tantamount to a slap in the face. It suggested I didn’t trust him to do the job. And I didn’t. The stakes on this one were just too high. The Worms had to lose this fight, quickly and decisively. I didn’t want them to think about sending in forces from different directions at us the next time-if there was going to be a next time. I shuddered to think what we would have to do if we had multiple angles of attack incoming right now. There would be no defensive action possible other than trying to lift our five hundred bricks and run, and we couldn’t outrun them in that case, not even on the surface.
“I want you right here, running this big board. You are good at the big picture, Major,” I said, blowing praise at him in hopes it would stick.
“Better than you, sir?” he asked.
“Don’t push, Major.”
“Sorry sir. How many of our troops do you plan on taking on this safari?”
I glanced at him sharply. “Do we have a problem, Major?”
“I just want to set up the duty roster, Colonel.”
“I’ll take three companies. There are three spots the Worms can breach into, allowing them the use of their existing tunnels to speed up their approach. I’ll lead the middle group, where I think these unsubtle invertebrates are most likely to come up.”
Major Robinson studied his portion of the big table, tapping at it and making swirling motions with his fingers to alter the orders for three companies of marines. “Anything else?”
“Yeah. We’ll go in silent and dark. We’ll have suit lights and receivers on, but I want the transmitters switched off. I don’t want the Worms to know what they are digging into.”
Robinson continued to slap at the table. I could tell he was irritated.
“Major, come to my office for a chat, will you?” I asked.
“Certainly, sir,” he said, straightening and walking past me. He never met my eyes as he did it. He didn’t look surprised.
I followed him to my office. Sandra greeted us like a girl exploding out of a cake. Fortunately, she was fully dressed. She popped up out of her seat, lips formed into a wild greeting. She stopped short, seeing Robinson was with me.
“Sandra, could you excuse us for a second?” I asked.
Sandra nodded and slid by me, running her fingers across my chest as she did it. I marveled, watching her slink by. She could turn me on with the slightest touch. She had a gift for it.
I turned back to Robinson, who watched me smugly.
“Shouldn’t you be heading out, sir?” he said.
“What’s your problem, Robinson?”
“No problem, sir. Sorry if I-stepped on your cape, so to speak.”
I stiffened. “Superman wears a cape, Major, not me.”
“Exactly, sir.”
I glared at him for several seconds. “You really want to do this, Robinson? This will be your first field combat assignment.”
“Not so, sir. I fought in North Africa-”
“Cut the crap, man!” I barked. “We aren’t talking about a bunch of half-starved militia with Kalashnikovs, here. We are talking about fifteen to twenty foot long Worms in a dark tunnel. Worms with bad attitudes.”
Robinson shrugged and headed for the door.
“You aren’t dismissed yet, Major.”
“Request permission to return to duty, sir,” he said, standing there, still not looking at me.
I frowned, sucked in a huge breath, then let it out. “You take the men down. But don’t screw the pooch, Major.”
He looked at me in honest surprise. “I didn’t think you’d give it to me.”
“So, the spoiled brat routine was all a show?”
“No sir. I’ll take the mission.”
“Get out of here. And make sure you come back.”
I watched him trot to the airlock, a changed man. He hadn’t fought the Macros. He hadn’t fought the Worms-not up close and personally. He was excited and happy. I stared after him like a worried father. I felt like I’d just given a teenager the keys to my Ferrari.
— 46-
I went back to the command post and leaned on the screens. I told myself there were plenty of good reasons to send Major Robinson. For one, I needed the time to work on new programming for our factories. We’d just set them up and they were churning out fresh nanites to make thicker, wider pads underneath our base to keep the Worms at bay. I knew there were a dozen other, better uses for the factories, which were in many ways our most powerful asset. One plan was to keep producing nanites, enough to weave a tough net of soil deep beneath the baked surface of Helios. I didn’t have much hope for that one. The Worms could break through any such net, given time. Besides, the underground net would have to be huge. If they began using nuclear mines, they didn’t have to get
very close to wipe us out.
I had a better idea. I needed a new type of vehicle. One designed to tunnel into the heart of an eighty thousand foot high mountain. The trouble was, I couldn’t be sure the enemy was going to give me the time I needed to design and build these new machines. The Worms clearly had an agenda of their own, and they weren’t out of ideas yet.
I watched via base cameras as Robinson gathered his three companies and equipped them sparsely for light, fast maneuvers. When dawn broke with alarming suddenness, sending the surface temperatures upward ten degrees in ten minutes, he led his troops out of our base of steel bricks and marched them toward the black, hulking mountains. His three companies didn’t have to go far to enter the Worm tunnels. The nearest mouth was only fifty feet from the camp perimeter.
Each of the three targeted tunnels quickly swallowed an entire company of my marines. I watched them go, flicking my fingers one against another. I cracked my knuckles. Each one individually. Captain Sarin winced at the popping sounds, but I kept going until two joints on every finger had clicked. After that, I noticed the men had vanished as if I’d already buried them. Oddly, I felt better.
“Pull in the hovertanks,” I ordered. “We’ll let the enemy think we are withdrawing to await another assault here in our base. Leave only two out there. Turn off the active pinging, have the last two sit and listen passively. Tell them to be quiet, too. I’m sure these bastard Worms have good hearing.”
After that, we waited. There were no transmissions coming from the three companies of marines. We didn’t want the Worms to know they were there, waiting in ambush.
“The Worms are still coming, sir,” Captain Sarin murmured.
I smiled at her. “Don’t worry, they can’t hear us in here.”
“Sorry, sir,” she said.
“How long have we got?”
“Robinson and his men will be in position in eight minutes.”
I looked toward the door. Beyond it was the corridor, my office, and Sandra. I didn’t really have time to go in there and tell her I’d sent Robinson rather than risking my own skin this time. I pulled up an app and sent her a private text.
I sent Robinson.
A moment later, the answer came with a tiny ding. I know, babe.
Frowning, I checked my person for a new bell. I found it in my suit. She had planted a little transmitter in my back pocket while she had patched me up after the last fight. I flicked it off and put it back in my pocket. I eyed the thing, shaking my head.
You’ve become sneaky.
The app dinged again. I always was.
“Sir, something’s happening,” said Captain Sarin. “The contact is turning. They are coming up toward tunnel three.”
Robinson himself was waiting in tunnel two, the central tunnel. His company formed a cool green glow of massed contacts, waiting underground for the digging machines to arrive. I studied the screen.
“Should we alert Robinson, sir?”
I shook my head. “To get a signal down there we’d have to beam it directly to them, which would tip our hand-or send down a nanite strand, which would take too long. Dammit, I wish we’d waited to see for sure where they were going. We could have put all our assets into ambush at the right spot.”
It was hard, waiting out the next few minutes. “If they set that thing off right where they are, what will be the estimated damages?” I asked. I had to ask. It was my job-but I didn’t really want to hear the answer.
“The company in tunnel three will be lost. No chance of survival. Company in the central tunnel will probably die as well, due to shocks and cave-ins. Company one and the base itself should be fine-that’s assuming the charge is the same size as the mines we met flying into the system.”
“How long until the Worms reach our men waiting in tunnel three?”
“About seventeen minutes, sir.”
“Captain Sarin, you are in operational control. I’m going to lead two more companies down tunnel three.”
She looked shocked. “Why, sir?”
“To make sure the Worms don’t have time to set off their bomb.”
“But sir, in that case we’ll lose three companies instead of one.”
I was buttoning up, sealing nanite lines and pulling my hood into place. I spoke through the hood to answer her, which muffled my speech. “Those calculations only hold if the enemy bomb is a small one. If it’s bigger, we have to stop it or we all die. I’m not going to take that risk.”
I left them then and slammed my way out of the airlock. I wondered as I ran to form up two companies behind me how long it would take Sandra to figure out I’d gone down into the tunnels afterward. I figured she probably already knew. She was a smart girl.
The jog to the camp perimeter turned into a dead run once we were outside the limits of the camp. Kwon himself had answered the call for fresh, ready troops. He caught up with me before I reached the tunnel entrance, puffing in his suit.
“Crazy moves, sir,” he said.
“What’s crazy?”
“You love fighting the Worms, don’t you?”
“Oh, that part. No, I don’t. I would hate losing to them, though.”
We dove into the darkness then. It swallowed us up. The first dozen steps were taken in almost drunken staggers along the ribbed, crumbling tunnel floor. Compared to the blazing red sky outside, the tunnels were intensely dark. The ceiling wasn’t high enough to stand upright, either. I had to run in a crouch, bent at the waist. My powerpack scraped the ceiling of the Worm tunnel, causing loose rock and sand to sift down onto my back. A choking cloud of dust arose as we went deeper, sliding down mini-dirtfalls of loose soil. I knew, if I hadn’t been wearing the suit with its filters and recyclers, I’d be choking and coughing by now.
We went down a hundred yards, jogged forward another two hundred, then slid downward, spiraling further still into the depths. At the end of the next slide, huge boots crashed into my back and rammed me into a tunnel wall.
“I’m so glad they regrew your lost foot to its full size again, Sergeant,” I said.
“Sorry sir. They were too big when I was seven.”
I nodded and climbed back up again and ran farther into the tunnels. Behind me, Kwon came on, puffing like a bear in a plastic suit. A hundred men followed him, then a hundred more after that.
I paused when we reached the last downward junction. “The Worms should have come up by now. I don’t hear anything.”
“We got here first, Colonel,” Kwon said.
I blinked inside the blackness of my suit. Cool air whispered across my body, drying sweat and making my eyelids itch. One of the worst things about these suits was the impossibility of scratching one’s face through them. I wondered vaguely if I could script a bead of nanites to do some scratching for the comfort of my men in full environment suits.
“I don’t like it. Kwon, send a squad forward.”
There was a brief spate of shouting and arm-waving. Soon, troops ran past me.
“Keep a sharp eye,” I told them.
The squad leader nodded to me, and then vanished into the blackness ahead. I looked back up the tunnel, where my men thronged the tunnel in a long line. Suddenly, I thought this entire venture had been a very bad idea. This was Worm territory. This was their home ground. They could walk through these walls like ghosts, while we were strung out and blinded.
A sound came from the tunnel ahead. It was an odd sound. It was something like-crackling bones. An image was conjured in my head of my squad crushed to jelly, every bone in their bodies broken all at once. I crouched and unslung my rifle, waiting and peering into the dark, listening. Around me, a dozen men did the same. The eerie sound was not repeated.
We got a signal, however. “Gone sir…” came crackling words. “I… all of them….”
I lost the transmission. Kwon lifted his com-link to respond, but I slapped his hand down. “We’re maintaining radio silence.”
“If they are listening and heard that tra
nsmission, they already know we are here now, sir,” Kwon said reasonably.
I heaved a sigh and lifted my own com-link. “Report your location and your unit.”
Nothing came back. I looked ahead, deeper down the tunnel into the darkness. There was no sign of the squad I’d sent down there behind their confident gunnery sergeant, nor of Robinson’s Company Three, which we’d sent earlier. There was nobody home.
I stood up. “Everyone retreat. Pull back out of this hole.”
They tried. They did it in unison, and with relief and speed. But it was already too late. Probably, if I’d given the order the moment we arrived, it would have been too late. The Worms had no intention of letting us out of their trap.
The floor collapsed under my troops. The middle of the tunnel gave way and fell, taking about a hundred of my men down with it. The hard, ribbed tunnel surface sunk about a foot, then paused for a fraction of a second before yawning open. An abyss was formed. A drop of unknown depth. Men fell scrabbling and sliding down into the dark. Bolts of energy flashed, burning the ceiling, the walls, the feet of fellow troopers. Fifty yards back I could see the remainder of my troops, crouching in the same tunnel we did, cut off from us. A wild melee began down below in the collapsed section. I couldn’t see it, but I could hear it.
“Suit lights on!” I roared.
We couldn’t see much more with the lights on. Dust roiled up. I caught a glimpse of a silver suit, of a beamer flashing. I saw the hump of a Worm’s back. They were about thirty feet down. They had dug out the tunnel under us and ambushed us, even as we lay in wait to ambush them.
“Damn the dust. Don’t shoot unless you have a clear target.”
A few beams spat out from the men who still crouched in the upper tunnel, but only a few. Below us, men fought in the loose earth. Knives flashed. We heard screams and roars of rage. Worm-guns chattered, their streams of explosives popping with orange fire.
